Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (17 page)

CHAPTER 22

Bashoura, Beirut, Lebanon

Carrie watched Rana open her eyes. They were in a basement storage room of the safe house building near the Bashoura Cemetery that Beirut Station had code-named Iroquois. The room was empty, lit by a single lightbulb; its walls were soundproofed and the door locked. The actress had been tied to a chair with plastic ties. The only other furniture was the chair that Carrie sat in, a stool and a wooden bench on which they’d put a bucket of water and a towel. On a stool next to her, Carrie had put her Glock 26 with a sound suppressor attached.

“You can scream your head off, no one will hear,” Carrie told her in Arabic.

“Not my style,” Rana said. “Not unless they pay me. I did a great scream in a horror movie once.
Evil Cannibal Streets
. As opposed to
Good Cannibal Streets
,
I suppose. Do you want to hear?”

“I don’t care about your credits. This isn’t an audition,” Carrie said.

“Do you want money? I’m not rich,” Rana said.

“You’re famous.”

“Not the same thing.”

“It’s not money. Let’s talk about Taha al-Douni.”

“Who?”

Carrie looked down at the floor, then up at Rana.

“I need you to tell me the truth. If you do, you’ll be back to your old life in a few hours. If not, you’ll never leave this room,” she said.

For a long moment, neither spoke. Rana looked around, as if seeking a way out.

“What is this about?” she asked, only a slight tremor in her voice betraying her nervousness. She’s an actress, Carrie reminded herself. She lies for a living. Like the rest of us.

“Listen, there’s already a lot you don’t have to tell us. We know about you. And about Dima and Marielle and that you’re Davis Fielding’s, the CIA station chief in Beirut’s, little whore. We’ll get to that in a minute.” She could see that Rana was shocked by what she had said, that she knew all that.

Interrogation 101, she thought. Let the subject think you know about him and what he’s doing and he’ll assume you know more than you are letting on. Amazing the things he’ll let slip because he thinks you already know them. “You met with Taha al-Douni in Baalbek. What was the meeting about?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rana said.

“Yes, you do.” Carrie frowned and took out the video camera and showed her the playback of her and Nightingale talking in the ruins. “
Min fathleki
,
let’s not make this unpleasant. Actually, even before we get to that, I’ve a better question. What’s a nice Sunni Muslim girl from Tripoli doing with a Shiite spy for the GSD and Hezbollah?”

Rana stared at her, wide-eyed.

“Who are you? What do you want from me?” she whispered.

“The truth. The Christian Bible says it’ll set you free. In this case, that’s the literal truth. But if you lie to me”—she looked at the bench and the bucket of water—“trust me, you won’t like it.”

“How do you know about me? About Tripoli? Was it Dima, that bitch? She couldn’t keep her mouth closed any more than she could keep her legs together.”

“Did you really imagine you could be the mistress of a CIA station chief and meet with Syrian spies and not attract attention?” Carrie said. “Who are you working for?”

“Don’t you know?” Rana moistened her lips. Dark hair, dark eyes. An attractive woman, Carrie thought. One who thought that her looks would always get her out of a tough spot. “God, I would kill for a cigarette.”

“Later.” Carrie frowned. “You’re going to have to start answering my questions or it’s not going to go well for you. Who are you working for? Hezbollah?”

Rana shook her head, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips. “
Kos emek
Hezbollah,” she said, using the worst Arabic vulgarity. “Neither Hezbollah nor the Syrians.”

“Who then? Al-Douni is GSD.”

“Who told you that? Dima? Are you CIA? Do you have her? Has she been talking?”

Carrie thought for a moment, deciding. Was Rana was trying to play her? They’d see who played whom.

“Dima’s dead. Right now, your chances don’t look so good either,” she said. That got her. She could see Rana go pale. She shook her head, her famous brown hair tossing back and forth. “Last chance. Then the men come. They’re dying to jump in. Work on a good-looking woman like you. Something we women know,” Carrie said, crossing her legs. “Beauty is such a fragile thing, isn’t it? Who are you and al-Douni working for?”

Rana shook her head. Carrie decided to try a little more truth.

“Is al-Douni a double agent? The only way I can help you is if you’ll let me. All you have to do is nod.”

Almost unwillingly, Rana nodded.

Carrie’s mind raced. If al-Douni was a double, who was he doubling for? Who was running him? Dima’s boyfriend, Mohammed Siddiqi? The Iraqi pretending to be a Qatari, according to Marielle. Or was Rana just telling her what she thought Carrie wanted to hear?

“Who’s he really working for?”

“I’m not sure. But he was the one who introduced Dima to her boyfriend, the Qatari,” Rana said.

“Mohammed Siddiqi? I heard he wasn’t a real Qatari,” Carrie said.

“You’ve been talking to Marielle.” Rana frowned. “
Inshallah
,
give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Carrie went to the door, went out and came back with a lit Marlboro cigarette. She put it between Rana’s lips. She’d find out now if Rana had really decided to cooperate.

“Okay,” Rana said, taking a drag and exhaling a stream of smoke. “You’re right. I work for Taha. I mean al-Douni. I recruited Dima too, though she pretended to be a Maronite for March 14. As you obviously know, we’re both from the north, both Sunni, both daughters of fathers in the Murabitun.”

“Taha al-Douni recruited you to become Davis Fielding’s mistress?”

“I’m not his mistress,” she said, taking a deep drag and letting Carrie take the cigarette from between her lips so she could exhale.

“What do you mean? You’re not saying you don’t have sex? You’re a beautiful woman. Famous even.”

“It’s not that simple. At first we did, but now I’m mostly just for show. We meet at parties, diplomatic receptions, things like that.” She shrugged.

“But you spy on him?”

Rana nodded.

“Does he know?”

“I don’t know what he knows.” She shrugged. “Lately, with the arrival of Dima’s Mohammed, the emphasis shifted.”

“From what to what?”

“From anything we could get on CIA activities in Lebanon and Syria to Iraq. They want to know about what the Americans know and don’t know and what their plans in Iraq are.”

“Is Mohammed, Dima’s boyfriend, running al-Douni?”

She snorted with derision. “That
ibn el himar
?”
Son of a donkey.
“He’s a courier, a delivery boy. A nobody.”

“Dima was afraid of him?”

She nodded. “The bastard abused her, the pig. She was terrified of him. All he had to do was look at her.”

That’s what Marielle said, Carrie thought. So that’s how they got Dima, the Sunni party girl, to become a terrorist. If Nightingale wasn’t running the show and Mohammed was just a messenger boy, whose op was it? And what was their interest in American intel about Iraq? The answer was obvious.

“Does Mohammed work for al-Qaeda? Is he in contact with Abu Nazir?”

“I don’t know. No one talks to Abu Nazir. No one knows who his contacts are. Taha once spoke about Abu Nazir’s deputy, Abu Ubaida.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was Abu Nazir’s executioner.”

CHAPTER 23

Le Hippodrome, Beirut, Lebanon

They set up in the trees behind the grandstand at the Hippodrome racetrack, the sunset casting the shadow of the grandstand across the track and the trees. There were seven of them: her, Virgil, Ziad and four men of the Forces Libanaises he had brought with him. They were well armed, all four with M4 carbines; one of them had an M4 with an M203 grenade launcher attached.

Carrie didn’t like using the FLs, but there wasn’t much choice. Things were moving too fast. She believed Saul was on his way to Beirut, but he wouldn’t get there in time and there wasn’t time to put an SOG, a CIA Special Operations Group team, in place.

There were a hundred reasons not to use the FLs. They weren’t trained, they weren’t under her control, they were sectarian to their core and they would be dealing with their Shiite enemies. A total wild-card scenario.

There was only one reason to use them. Nightingale/al-Douni never went anywhere without armed Hezbollah guards, so she needed some kind of muscle. Saul had agreed, reluctantly, during their texting interaction earlier that day.

She had gone to an Internet café on Rue Makhoul in Hamra, near the American University, getting onto a computer against the wall next to a teenage Arab boy gaming with online friends. As previously agreed, to keep what she was doing separate from normal channels that Davis Fielding would have access to, she and Saul communicated via a chat room for teenagers so heavily trafficked, there was little chance of their conversation being hacked. The volume was simply too great for even powerful intelligence-agency search-engine algorithms to find an individual conversation.

The way they’d set the chat up, Carrie was supposedly a high school senior from Bloomington, Illinois, named Bradley, and Saul was a girl named Tiffany from nearby Normal Community High School. She sent him her report and the photo of Mohammed Siddiqi as attachments.

“hey qt pie. u got every1 in nesa going loco,” Saul typed. NESA was the CIA’s Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, an elite group that included the Agency’s best Middle East experts.

“ctc?” she typed back. Was David Estes’s Counterterrorism Center unit also involved?

“24/7. im jealous. u got all the girls attention.” About time Langley paid attention, she grumped to herself.

“do u no the real ms? who she is dating?” That was the big question. The one she absolutely had to know. Who was Mohammed Siddiqi really? What did the Company know about him? And who was he working for?

“not yet,” Saul typed back. “but yr fmr bff, allie, is working on it like its her sats.” So her former best friend forever, “allie,” Alan Yerushenko, and her colleagues at the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis were working on it nonstop too.

“mary L thinks she’s baggy, not cutter.” Hoping he would catch that she meant Marielle thought Siddiqi was an Iraqi from Baghdad, “baggy,” and not from Qatar, which Saul pronounced “Cutter.” That plus the fact Nightingale wanted Rana to get intel on Iraq was pointing everything that had happened in Beirut and New York like a compass needle right at Abu Nazir.

“shes looking at a boo n friends,” Saul typed back, showing he got it. They were looking at “a boo n,” Abu Nazir.

“r u coming to c me?” she responded.

“c u soon. what about our lil birdie?” So Saul was on his way to Beirut. Thank God. The little birdie was Nightingale.

“big date 2nite. ok use fls?”

There was a pause so long, she wasn’t sure Saul was still there. And she had to remember the time difference, she thought, checking her watch. It was 2:47
P.M
. in Beirut, before 8:00
A.M
. in Langley.

“only if u have 2. Be crful,” he sent. He obviously didn’t like it. Well, she wasn’t crazy about it herself. All this dancing around, she thought, because Fielding was having an affair with a double agent he wasn’t even screwing.

“bye,” she replied, and logged off.

Which had led her and Virgil and Ziad here to the Hippodrome and the meet she’d had Rana set with Nightingale in the grandstand of the race track. Races were only run once a week, on Sundays, so today, Thursday, and at this hour, the grandstand would be empty. Hopefully, it would make Nightingale confident about coming and would give her FLs a clear field of fire if things went south.

“Where will they be coming from?” she asked in Arabic.

“There.” Ziad pointed. “From Avenue Abdallah El Yafi into the parking area. I can put two men in the trees near the French embassy compound to take care of whoever is with the car.”

Carrie turned to the two men he indicated. The other two were already in position in the stables, from which they could get to the grandstand within thirty seconds.

“You understand, we need this man, Taha al-Douni, alive? Even if they start shooting. Dead he’s of no use to us.”

“He’s a
hatha neek
Hezbollah piece of
khara
,
” one of them cursed.

“This is no good.” She turned to Virgil. These crazy guys would just start shooting. “We need to abort.”

“Too late,” he said, pointing. “There’s Rana’s BMW.” She saw the blue sedan stopped at the gate. The Hippodrome was closed, but Rana had bribed the gatekeeper in advance so they could meet here.

Carrie raised her binoculars and saw it was Rana, alone, in the BMW. She watched it drive into the parking area, then turned to the two FL men.

“If shooting starts, take out the SUVs so they can’t leave. Take out the guards for the SUVs. But don’t kill anyone else, understood?” she said.

“Okay,
la mashkilah
.” He shrugged.
No problem.

She didn’t believe him, watching as the two men moved through the trees toward the parking area.

“Let’s go,” Virgil said, his eyes scanning the grandstand. He started to jog toward it, his M4 held ready. Carrie and Ziad followed, every cell in her body screaming that this was all wrong.

She had told Rana she would be running her until further notice. There would be money and she was to say nothing to either Davis Fielding or al-Douni or anyone else, and she might not be seeing Fielding much anymore.

Her first instruction to Rana had been to set up the meet with Nightingale/al-Douni by telling him she had urgent intel on American actions against al-Qaeda in Iraq. As expected, al-Douni had agreed immediately. As Carrie listened in on Rana’s call, he was the one who set the RDV at the Hippodrome.

“What are you really after?” Rana had asked her.

“For you to feed al-Douni what I want him to know, not what he wants to know,” Carrie said. “And find out where it goes after he gets it.”

“You mean, who is he really working for? You don’t believe it’s the Syrians?” Rana said.

“He’s working more than one side.”

“Aren’t we all? This is Beirut,” Rana said.

The way she said it, that fatalism, reminded Carrie of Marielle as she ran into the grandstand and hid, lying flat behind the seats, in the fourth row. The other two FLs were waiting, hidden in the jockeys’ restroom near the passageway from the stables to the track. Were they all like that? Doomed? Was that Beirut?

Through the gap between the seats, she saw Rana walk toward the paddock to wait by the railing. The sun was setting over the racetrack, the sky pink and gold, really lovely, she thought, the shadows lengthening, making it harder to see. In a little while, it would be dark.

A few minutes later, her cell phone buzzed. A signal from the FLs near the parking area. Nightingale had arrived.

Carrie waited, every nerve ending screaming as if an electrical current was surging through them. Any second now, Nightingale would be coming up to Rana. It was critical that she hear what he said before they moved. Whatever happened, they shouldn’t move too soon. They had wired Rana and set it to a receiver connected with Carrie’s earbud.

She spotted Nightingale through the gap in the seats. He was accompanied by three of his Hezbollah guards. The son of a bitch really never went anywhere unprotected. She’d had no choice but to bring the extra firepower.

“Salaam. We just met. This better be good,” she heard him say to Rana.

“Judge for yourself. I was with the American yesterday when I came back from Baalbek,” she said.

“In his bed?”

“Of course. When he was asleep, I got to his computer. Here are the files,” she said, handing him a flash drive that Carrie had given her.

“Is that all?”

She shook her head. “There’s more. It’s about the Americans doing something in Iraq.”

“Tell me,” he demanded.

“Mohammed Siddiqi. They’ve learned about him. They know he’s Iraqi, not Qatari,” Rana said.

Carrie strained to hear; every syllable was critical.

“
Khara
,
” Nightingale cursed. “What else?”

“They know about you too. They think—” she started to say, but never finished because at that instant, the two FLs from the passageway emerged, one of them firing at Nightingale’s men. One of the Hezbollah guards toppled face-forward; the second swiveled and returned fire.

Oh God, no, Carrie thought. Before she could say or do anything, Nightingale had pulled a pistol from his jacket. Don’t! Not Rana! her mind screamed. Don’t!

“You whore!” he shouted, firing the gun point-blank into Rana’s face.

Suddenly, there was an explosion from the parking area. The grenade launcher, Carrie thought, cringing as she half-stood and shouted in Arabic: “Don’t kill him!”

Near her, Virgil and Ziad rose up, firing their M4s into the darkness, streaked with flashes of gunfire.