Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (4 page)

She nodded and as she walked into the supermarket, she heard the loudspeaker from a nearby mosque with the call for the noon Dhuhr prayer and it tore at her in a way she didn’t expect. She was going to miss Beirut.

Taking a basket, she walked over to the dry-goods section. Julia, also in an
abaya
and veil, was examining a box of Poppins, a popular Lebanese breakfast cereal. Carrie put a Poppins box in her basket too.

“So good to see you,” Carrie said in Arabic. “And how is your husband and family?”

“Good,
alhamdulillah
”—
thank God
—Fatima said, pulling her aside, her eyes darting around. “What’s happened?” she whispered. Carrie had left her a one-word note,
ya’ut
,
the Arabic word for “ruby,” their code for an emergency contact, under a potted urn in the Muslim cemetery near Boulevard Bayhoum. Julia’s husband monitored all her calls and e-mails; the dead drop was the only way to communicate with her.

“I’m being pulled from Beirut. Another assignment,” Carrie whispered as they pretended to shop together.

“Why?”

“I can’t say.” She took Julia’s hand. They walked hand-in-hand like children. “I’ll miss you. I wish I could take you with me.”

“I wish too,” Fatima said, looking away. “You go to real America, but for me it’s like the movies. A made-up place.”

“I’ll come back, I swear.”

“What will happen to me?”

“They’ll assign you to someone else. Not me.” Julia’s eyes welled up. She shook her head and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “They’ll be okay. I promise,” Carrie said.

“No they won’t. I won’t talk to anyone else. They’ll have to send you back.”

“You have to listen,” Carrie said. “They won’t do that.”

“Then,
inshallah
”—
God willing
—“they’ll never get another word from me.”

“If there’s an emergency, use the cemetery. I’ll have someone monitor the dead drop,” she whispered.

“There is something I have to tell you.” She looked around to make sure they weren’t overheard and pulled Carrie close. “There’s going to be an attack against America. A big one.”

“How do you know?”

Fatima’s eyes darted around like a trapped animal’s. She took a few steps and motioned for Carrie to follow. She glanced around the corner of the aisle to make sure there was no one near.

“I overheard Abbas talking on his special cell phone. The one he only uses when it is important,” she whispered.

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know. But the way he stood and listened, someone of importance.”

“What about the attack?” Carrie whispered. “Any details? Time? Place? Method?”

“I don’t think they told him. I’m not even sure it’s Hezbollah. But it’s soon.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know. But he said ‘
khaliban zhada
,
’ you understand?”

“I understand,” Carrie said.
Very soon.
She leaned close to Fatima’s ear. “Any idea how big or where?”

She shook her head. “But when he heard, Abbas said something.
Allahu akbar.
”
God is great
,
Carrie translated automatically. “We say this all the time.” She shrugged. “But it was the way he said it. I can’t explain, but it scared me. I wish I could help you more. Something very bad is going to happen.”

“This helps a lot. Truly. Are you okay?”

“No.” She looked around again. “I can’t stay. Someone might see us.”

“I know.
Shokran.
”
Thank you.
Carrie squeezed her hand. “I have to go too. Be careful.”

“Carrie,” Fatima said. “You’re my only friend. Think of me. Otherwise, I think I’m lost forever.”

A horn honked outside. Virgil. Carrie took Fatima’s hand and put it to her own cheek.

“Me too,” she said.

CHAPTER 3

Langley, Virginia

After four years in Beirut, plus time in Iraq, it felt strange driving the woodsy George Washington Memorial Parkway, handing the badge she’d gotten out of her safe-deposit box to the guard at the gate like an everyday commuter. Coming into the George Bush headquarters building, she was struck by how many people she didn’t know. No one gave her a second glance in the elevator. In a skirt, blouse, jacket and makeup for the office, she felt like she was wearing a disguise. I don’t belong here, she thought. Maybe I never did.

She’d been up all night, unable to sleep. When she closed her eyes to try to sleep she saw her father, Frank Mathison. Not as he was now, but how he was when she was a child back in Michigan. He’d lost his job at Ford Motor Company when she was six. She remembered her mother coming into her sister’s and her room to sleep with them, the three of them huddled under the covers while her father paced the house all night, saying nonstop that there was a miracle coming; he had seen the sign in computer code.

She remembered her father driving them up to New Baltimore on Lake St. Clair when she was in first grade in the middle of December, talking about the miracle and how they were to be witnesses, and sitting there on a dock near the water tower, away from the center of the town decorated for Christmas, all of them shivering, freezing cold, looking out at the gray waters of the lake for two days while her father kept saying, “It’s coming. Just you wait. It’s coming.”

And her mother shouting at him, “What’s coming, Frank? What’s the big miracle? Is Jesus gonna come strolling toward us across Anchor Bay? Because if he is and if the angels are coming with him, tell ’em to bring us some heaters, because me and the kids are freezing to death.”

“Do you see the water tower, Emma. It’s mathematics. Don’t you get it? The universe is mathematics. Computers are mathematics. Everything is math. And look where it sits. Right by the water.”

“What has math got to do with it? What are you talking about?”

“I measured it. It’s thirty-seven miles exactly from our front door to the water tower. This is where the miracle is going to happen. Thirty-seven.”

“What has thirty-seven miles got to do with anything?”

“It’s a prime number, Emma. It was in the computer code. And water is life. Moses struck the rock for water. Christ turned water into wine at Cana. Look at it. It’s coming. This is where it’s going to happen. Don’t you see?”

“It’s a damn water tower, Frank!”

Until finally they drove back to Dearborn, her father not saying anything, just driving like he wanted to kill someone, her mother yelling, “Slow down, Frank! Do you want to kill us?” and her big sister, Maggie, next to her, crying and screaming, “Stop, Daddy! Stop! Stop!” And when she got ready to go to school the next day, her mother telling her, “Don’t say anything about your father, understand?”

It wasn’t till later that she realized that whatever strange thing had taken her father over had taken them over too when she heard her parents arguing with each other at the top of their lungs in the middle of the night. Maggie told her to stay in bed
,
but she tiptoed out of their room and saw them in the kitchen, the walls and floor smeared with food and broken plates and her mother screaming:

“Three weeks! They said you haven’t been at work in three weeks without telling anyone! Of course they fired you! What the hell did you expect them to do? Give you a promotion?”

“I was busy. You’ll see, Emma. It’ll be good. They’ll be begging for me to come back. Don’t you see? It’s all about the miracle. That’s where everyone gets it wrong. They don’t understand. Remember those license plate numbers on the cars we passed coming back from New Baltimore? They were a code. I just have to figure out the numbers,” her father said.

“What are you talking about? Does anybody know what you’re talking about? What are we going to do? How are we going to live?”

“For God’s sakes, Emma. You think they can run those servers without me? Trust m
e
, they’ll call me back any time now. They’ll be begging for me to come back.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God! What are we going to do?”

And now she’d been fired. Just like her father.

Saul Berenson, Middle East Division chief, NCS, was expecting her in his office on the fourth floor. She took a deep breath, knocked and went in.

Saul, big rumpled bearded teddy bear of a man, was working on his computer. Rabbi Saul, as she sometimes thought of him. He’d been the one who’d first recruited her for the CIA, on a cold March day in her senior year at the Career Center at Princeton.

The office was the usual messy disorder that only Saul could find his way through. As always, a stuffed Winnie the Pooh sat slumped on a shelf next to two photographs: one of Saul with the first President Bush, the one they’d named the building after; the second of Saul with CIA director James Woolsey and President Clinton.

Saul looked up from the computer as she sat down.

“You found someplace?” he asked, tilting his glasses so he could see her better.

“A one-bedroom in Reston,” she said.

“Convenient?”

“It’s not far from the Dulles Toll Road. Is that what we’re going to talk about?”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“You saw the information from Julia. You need to send me back to Beirut.”

“Not gonna happen, Carrie. I don’t think you realize how many people you’ve pissed off or how high it goes.”

“I escaped a Hezbollah trap, Saul. Would you have preferred that they captured me, paraded me on al-Jazeera as a CIA spy? Because the way I’ve been treated, I’m beginning to think that’s what you and Davis wanted.”

“Don’t be an idiot. It’s not that simple,” he said, scratching his beard. “It’s never that simple.”

“You’re wrong. It’s exactly that simple. I was set up—and now Beirut Station’s security is compromised and you’ve got a dick for a station chief who only wants to kill the messenger.”

Saul took off his glasses. Without them, his eyes were softer, less focused.

“You’re not making this easy, Carrie,” he said. He wiped his glasses on his shirt and put them back on.

“Did I ever?” she said.

“No.” He smiled wryly. “I’ll give you that. You were a pain in the ass right from the beginning.”

“So why did you hire me? I’m not the only woman in America who speaks Arabic,” she said, leaning back in her chair and looking at his Winnie the Pooh in its red “Pooh” shirt. He had once told her Pooh was a perfect metaphor for the human condition. All it took was a single letter change to describe our obsession; just change “honey” to “money.”

“Look, Carrie, a CIA station chief is like the captain of a ship. It’s one of the last pure dictatorships on earth. If he doesn’t think he can trust you, your judgment, there isn’t a lot I can do.”

She sat straight up in her chair, tense, knees tightly together, as if it were a job interview. “You’re his boss. Fire him, not me.” Please, she thought. Please Saul. Please believe me. Saul was the only one she could trust, the only one who believed in her. If he turned against her, she had nothing; was nothing.

“I can’t,” he said. “Think about it. My job’s like being the admiral of a fleet. If I start firing captains for using their judgment, they’ll be second-guessing themselves all over the place. They’ll be of no use to me or anyone else. I have to look at the bigger picture.”

“Bullshit!” she said, standing up, thinking, why couldn’t he understand? It was Saul. He was supposed to be on her side. “This is total bullshit. This isn’t about morale or security or some other bullshit. This is politics. And it stinks.” She stared at him. “When did you become one of them, Saul? The people who are ready to sell this country out in the interest of their own pathetic careers?”

Saul slammed his hand hard on the desk, making her jump.

“Don’t you dare talk to me that way! You know me better than that. If that’s the way you spoke to Fielding, it’s no wonder he threw your sorry ass out of Beirut. And you know the worst part, Carrie? You know the worst? The intel you just brought back from your little jaybird, Julia, is so critical that I was trying to think of a way to send you back to Beirut before you walked in here.”

Wonderful, thank you, she thought, relief flooding through her. Saul still believed in her. He knew she was right. He was on her side. It was just a matter of trying to find a way to maneuver the bureaucracy. All she had to do was show him she was still Carrie; she still knew how to mix it up with anyone, including him.

“Are you taking it to the Director? Are we going to act on it?”

“I’ve sent it upstairs,” he said, glancing at the ceiling. “But it’s not up to me. We get threats like this every day.”

“Her stuff has always been grade A. You know it. Remember what she gave us on the Hariri assassination? This is actionable, Saul.”

“Is it? Is it really? Your Julia gave us no particulars. Nothing. An attack soon. We don’t know where. We don’t know how. We don’t know when. We don’t know the target. We don’t even know if it’s Hezbollah or maybe somebody who just passed it along to Hezbollah to distract us from something else. What the hell are we supposed to do with it?”

“So that’s it? We just pass it along and hope for the best? That’s how we protect the country these days?”

“Don’t give me crap, Carrie. I told both Estes and the deputy director that we had a very high degree of confidence this is actionable intel. The ball’s in their court. I’ve also alerted Fielding in Beirut to keep digging.”

“Fielding,” she said disgustedly. She got up and walked over to the window and looked out over the green lawn and the back parking lot. “We have a security crisis in Beirut. What about Achilles?”

“Fielding says you led them to it.” He clicked his mouse till he found what he was looking for on his computer and read out loud: “ ‘Mathison displayed amateurish tradecraft in resorting in desperation to an unknown, unvetted female Lebanese contact, who—if this case officer is to be believed—out of the presumed goodness of her heart gave her car to a complete stranger. Then, after leaving the car in highly public parking venue, Mathison failed to lose her presumed pursuers, leading them directly to the safe house location on Rue Adonis, which in turn led to the elimination of this safe house and the total breach of security at that location and compromise of our operations.’ ”

Saul looked at her over his glasses.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

He couldn’t believe that about her, she thought. Not Saul.

“Tell Fielding to wipe his ass with it,” Carrie snapped. “I was clean. I was clean in Hamra and I was sure as hell clean on foot in Ras Beirut. There was no one there, inside or out. Then all of a sudden they’re breaking in like they’ve known about the location all along. Someone set me up.”

“Who?” Saul said, raising a hand. “Where do you start?”

“Nightingale for openers,” Carrie said, leaning forward on his desk with both hands like a runner getting set. “Dima too. Let me go back, Saul. I’ll nail them both. And I’ll find the leak.”

He shook his head.

“Impossible. Look, Carrie, even if I believed you’re right and assumed that Fielding is a hundred percent wrong, I can’t.”

“Why not? What’s he got on you?” This wasn’t like Saul, she thought.

“He’s connected, okay?” Saul said disgustedly. “He and David Estes, director of the Counterterrorism Center, are both protégés of Bill Walden.”

“The DCIA?”

“The big man himself. It’s the old-boy network right down the line. And Walden has political ambitions. He’s no one to mess with. You? You’re just a female officer in a compromising situation. For the people upstairs, that’s not a hard decision. Not to mention, we’ve reorganized for the four millionth time. Nowadays, I’ve got a dotted line reporting to Estes. It’s not so simple.”

“What do we do?”

Saul nodded. “Fielding put it on you and for the time being, I have to leave it there. You try to fight this, and I won’t be able to help you. That’s how it is,” he said, raising his hands.

“So I’m supposed to be the good little girl. Shut up, bend over and let ’em do whatever they want?”

“And live to fight another day.” Saul nodded. “Look, for what it’s worth, I agree with you about one thing. This whole thing with Nightingale smells fishy as hell. At a minimum, Fielding should’ve sent you in there with a support team. I’m not going to let you sit around wasted.” He got up and came around the desk; the two of them were side by side, leaning back on it. He believed her. He was still behind her, she thought, breathing a sigh of relief.

“So?” she said.

“Do you remember what I told you when I pulled you early from your training at the Farm? My beautiful golden girl with a brain like Stephen Hawking.” He smiled. “Do you remember what I said?”

“About how I could learn the rest of tradecraft in the field—and the pond?”

“That you were too big a fish for this pond. We needed you in the ocean.”

“But that sometimes the only way to swim with the sharks is to be a shark. I remember. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get Nightingale. And find out about this attack. But we’re going to do it here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ll be liaising between us, the Middle East Division and the Counterterrorism Center. They’re unofficially absorbing Alec Station.” Alec Station was CIA-speak for the only CIA station assigned not a locale but a specific target: the al-Qaeda terrorist network. “You’ll report to Estes.” He leaned close and she could smell his aftershave. Polo, Ralph Lauren. “But you’ll work for me.”

“So now we’re spying on ourselves?”

“Who better? It’s what we do,” he said.

“What about Julia’s intel? There’s an attack coming, Saul. Something big, and we both know it.”

He took a breath and exhaled.

“How much time have we got?” he asked.