Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (7 page)

CHAPTER 6

Fort Meade, Maryland

Driving up I-295 in Maryland, she thought if she took 495 instead of continuing north, she could stop in Kensington, where she’d grown up after her family had moved from Michigan because her dad got a job in Bethesda.

Holy Trinity High, she remembered. All girls, all Catholic. Nuns, field hockey and short plaid skirts. “The masturbation center of the universe,” Maggie called it. Before her bipolar disorder, which didn’t hit her till her sophomore year in college, she was the ultimate little overachiever: Class president. Second place in the state fifteen-hundred-meter championships. Valedictorian on a solid Ivy trajectory; Princeton and Columbia talking scholarships. And her mother growing bleaker by the minute.

“It’s the state championship, Mom. I’d like you to come.”

“Talk to your father, Carrie. I know he wants to go.”

“You know I can’t do that. There are college scouts there. He’ll ruin it for me. He always ruins it for me.”

“You go, Carrie. You’ll be fine.”

“What’s the matter, Mom? Afraid I might win?”

“Why do you say that? I do hope you win. Not that it matters.”

“Because I might actually amount to something? Is that what you’re afraid of? That one of us might actually escape from this lunatic asylum and it won’t be you?”

“You’re such a little fool, Carrie. The game is rigged. Even winners don’t win.”

Man oh man, she thought. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up even crazier than I already am. She turned off the highway and went on to the sentry gate. From the gate she could see the big rectangular black glass building, the National Security Agency headquarters, a.k.a. the Black House.

It took a half hour for them to vet her identity, give her a visitor’s badge and lead her to an empty conference room with a long mahogany table. A thin man in shirtsleeves and a bow tie, looking like a throwback to the fifties, came in.

“Jerry Bishop,” he said, sitting across from her. “This is an occasion. We usually don’t get folks from McLean making the 295 trek. What’s the occasion? Abbasiyah?”

“Well, if you had something on that that was interesting, or any new al-Qaeda ops, you could make me a superstar. I wouldn’t argue.” She smiled at him, wafting just the vaguest whiff of seduction at him, like perfume.

“We’re not seeing any real increase in traffic, apart from the usual
jihadi
Web crap. Poisoning the New York City water supply, attacking refineries, chemical plants in the U.S., and that perennial favorite: flying a private plane loaded with explosives into the Capitol building, although why anyone would think that getting rid of some congressmen would cause any harm to America is beyond me.” He grinned. “Other than that, a bit of a surge in cell phone traffic with some Salafi tribesmen in El Arish in Sinai. Maybe something for the Israelis.” He shrugged. “That’s about it.”

“There are tourist resorts in southern Sinai. You’d get all kinds of tourists: Israelis, Americans, Europeans, scuba divers. And the Egyptian government doesn’t have much control there. Might be something.”

“It might. I’ll give it to you.” He nodded. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

She took photographs of Taha al-Douni, a.k.a. Nightingale; Ahmed Haidar; Dima; and Davis Fielding out of her laptop case and put them on the table. Touching each one, she identified each of them in turn.

“These three are from Beirut,” she said, indicating Nightingale, Dima and Davis Fielding. Tapping the Haidar photograph, she added, “This one we got from you guys from an Israeli satellite download stream.”

“What do you want?”

“Everything you’ve got on all four of these guys. Cell phone conversations, e-mails, tweets, surveillance, Hallmark cards from their grandmothers. Anything.”

He snorted a quick laugh. “Look, you realize we deal in quantity, not quality, right? We pull in everything. Public, private, cell phones, a text from Abu What’s-his-name to his mother. We decrypt, we translate, we run algorithms to try to separate out some of the more obvious garbage. Then we send it to you CIA types. Also to DIA, NSC, FBI, the whole alphabet soup. That’s it. You’re the ones who are supposed to put the pieces together.”

“I’ll narrow it for you. Focus just on these people and except for al-Douni and Haidar, just on Beirut.”

He looked at her speculatively.

“You work for Estes, right?”

“I report directly to David Estes. For what it’s worth, Saul Berenson, Middle East chief, National Clandestine Service, also knows I’m here,” she lied.

He picked up Fielding’s photograph, then looked directly at her. “We don’t usually decrypt a CIA station chief’s stuff. What’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“But something’s going down in Beirut? Is that it?”

“I can’t tell you that either. But you do the math. Do you think I’d be talking like this to you now if we didn’t have a problem?”

“But you don’t want me to tell anyone?”

“You can’t. It would compromise what we’re doing.”

“Wait,” he breathed. “Are you suggesting we have a mole in Beirut Station?”

“I’m not saying anything of the kind,” she snapped. “Don’t read into this. I’m asking you to keep this inquiry secret. That’s what you and I do every day, Jerry. It’s our job. That’s all.”

“How do you want it? An e-mail via JWICS?” he said, referring to the government’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the special computer network designed for highly secure encrypted top secret communications, the highest secrecy level in the U.S. government.

“No. On this,” she said, taking an external hard drive and handing it to him along with the photographs.

“Jesus, you really do want to keep this thing quiet. C’mon,” he said, and led her down the hallway to the elevator and down to one of a number of subterranean levels.

They walked down a windowless corridor and through a sequence of locked offices, all with heavy security-camera surveillance, some opening to a badge swipe, some requiring a badge and a keypad code entry, the last one requiring a badge, keypad and hand-vein print to open. Inside was a room with a vast wall of monitors showing satellite images from locales around the world. Prominent among them was a bank of screens showing live feeds from key street locations in Iraq.

The room was also filled with analysts in cubicles working at computers. Bishop led her to a group of analysts at a partitioned section near the wall.

“Some folks from the Middle East section,” he said. “You may not know them, but you’ve seen their work.”

“Hi,” Carrie said. One of the male analysts, a tousle-haired, freckle-faced redhead with a trim beard, gave her a once-over, then went back to his screen. He was in a wheelchair. Bishop told his people what she was looking for. He handed out the photographs to four of them and gave them instructions.

“Do you want to come sit next to me while I look it up?” the redhead in the wheelchair, who’d been given Fielding’s photograph, said.

“Sure, if it’ll get me what I want,” Carrie said.

“Makes two of us,” the redhead said, and grinned. He was attractive, in a preppy way, she thought.

“I’d like to see how this works. Do you mind?” Carrie said to Bishop, and sat next to the redhead. She couldn’t help noticing his pencil-thin legs in skinny jeans.

“I’m James. James Abdel-Shawafi. Call me Jimbo,” the redhead said.

“You don’t look Arabic,” Carrie said.

“Egyptian father. Irish-American mother.” He grinned.

“
Hal tatakalam Arabiya?
” Asking him if he spoke Arabic.

“
Aiwa, dekubah,
” he said.
Yes, of course.
“Where do you want to start? Phone messages? E-mails?”

“You read my mind. Phones,” she said, showing him a list of Fielding’s numbers at the embassy, the secure scrambled phone, his cell phone, etc. She had five numbers in all.

“Don’t need that. Watch,” Jimbo said, bringing up a database and querying it for Fielding. The query brought up eleven phone numbers. She sat up straight. Most CIA personnel had one or two private cell phones, but this was surprising.

“How far back do you want to go?” he asked.

“Years. But let’s just start with the last three months.”

“No problem, but there’ll be a lot,” he said, typing in the query operators and pressing Enter.

They waited a bit. Then a string of database statements and numbers and dates and times filled the screen. Jimbo stared at it.

“Jesus. Can’t be,” he said, shaking his head.

“What?”

“Look,” he said, pointing at the screen. “See the gap?”

“Show me.”

He highlighted a part of the screen.

“According to this, your Mr. Fielding made no calls on these three cell phones for approximately the past five months.”

“Maybe he didn’t need them. He had eight other phones.”

“No, there was limited but active usage on these three till this past October. See? This is bullshit,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He glanced at her. “I’ve got DBA admin privileges.” He opened another window and typed a DBA_SOURCE database string. “This gives me access to the entire database. I mean everything. This is the whole universe.”

They waited and the screen filled with similar results to what they had seen before.

“This is impossible,” he muttered. He entered a series of computer shell commands. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed.

“What is it?”

“It’s been deleted. See there?” he said, pointing at what was to her an incomprehensible string of characters.

“Is that something that happens? Deletion from an NSA database?” she asked.

He looked at her. “I’ve never seen it before. Ever,” he said.

“When was it deleted?”

He studied the screen.

“That’s odd too. Two weeks ago, he said.

It rang a bell. She thought for a moment, then it hit her. The same day she left Beirut. Rule Two, she thought, remembering something Saul Berenson had said back in her training days at the Farm. “There are only two rules,” he’d told them. “One: This business can kill you. So never ever trust a source—or anyone else. And two: There are no, I repeat, no coincidences.” She looked at Jimbo.

“Who can authorize something like that?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He leaned closer and whispered to her. “It has to be at the highest level.”

CHAPTER 7

George Bush Center for Intelligence, Langley, Virginia

Going through the files on Dima she’d brought back on the hard drive from the NSA, Carrie saw that Dima’s last cell phone call had been to a hair salon in Ras Beirut at 3:47
P.M
. the day she disappeared. After that, nothing. She started to backtrack, looking to identify every cell phone contact. Was the hair salon a cutout or did she just want to get her hair blown out? A call from Estes interrupted her.

“Come up to my office. Now,” Estes said, and rang off.

Good. Finally, she thought, wondering whether it was about the e-mail she’d sent him on the Sawarka, a Salafist Bedouin tribe in northern Sinai, and the possibility of a terrorist strike against tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh and Dahab. Stuff she’d gotten from the Black House. She was thinking about that and Dima as she headed up to Estes’s office. Why hadn’t she surfaced—or at least some news about her? If a body had been found, she was sure Virgil would’ve contacted her.

When she knocked on the door and saw Saul, looking worried, in the office with Estes, she realized it was something else.

Estes didn’t smile, just gestured for her to sit. Saul, seated on another chair, didn’t look at her. Oh boy, she thought.

The afternoon sun was bright on the window behind him, its reflection nearly obscuring the view of the courtyard between the George Bush Center and the old headquarters building, a few staffers sitting outside in shirtsleeves. Strange weather, she thought, her mind suddenly noticing everything. Something is about to happen. She could feel her crazy electrical circuits firing.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Estes said. “Are you completely out of your mind?”

“Thinking about what? What are we talking about?” she said.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t go to the NSA. On your own. Without authorization. Do you have any idea how many procedures you broke?” Estes snapped.

“I told you not to, Carrie,” Saul said softly.

“How’d you find out?” she asked Estes.

“I had a very nice e-mail from some midlevel manager named Jerry Bishop over there. He appreciated you coming over, bridging the interagency-rivalry thing and all that. Just letting me know—nicely—that it happened despite the rules. Thinks it’s a good idea. We should do more of it. The only thing missing was a suggestion that we toast marshmallows around the old campfire together. Except I don’t want to do more of it, Carrie. We are consumers of theirs, nothing more. And we don’t have the time or resources to sort through their shit as it is. I can’t have it. More importantly”—he gestured vaguely at the ceiling—“neither can our masters upstairs.”

“Even when it’s productive? I came up with something. The tribesmen in Sinai. You said you wanted everything. I sent you an e-mail,” she said to Estes, afraid to look over at Saul.

“Terrific. Tribesmen in Sinai. I’ll alert Lawrence of Arabia. What the hell were you thinking, Carrie? Do you have any idea where we are in terms of budget? Do you know that the Senate is dying to cut our balls off if they see a spark of redundancy—and here you go, traipsing up to Fort Meade, violating understandings it’s taken us years to come up with.” He shook his head. “Beirut Station said you were out of control, but Saul convinced me otherwise. I can’t have this.”

“What about the Sawarka?” she said. It was on the tip of her tongue to raise the missing NSA database records and the redacted CTC material, but something told her not to. Just stick to the
jihadis
.

“Saul gave a heads-up to the Egyptian SSI. They said they’d look into it. Also the Israelis. That’s not the issue.”

“Then you tell me what the issue is, David,” she said, standing up to confront him. “Because I got pulled from Beirut in the middle of an op, where we’ve got a female agent who’s disappeared off the face of the earth after Hezbollah and the GSD made a move against one of your case officers, me”—she tapped her chest—“and not only has nobody even looked at it, but nobody’s had the brains to ask the question ‘Why?’ Plus I gave you actionable intel from a highly credible source on a possible major terrorist attack on the U.S. and so far nobody seems to give a shit except me. So you tell me what the damn issue is.”

This time she did look at Saul and he looked green, like he was sick to his stomach.

“Sit down. I mean it,” Estes said, biting off the words.

She sat. He took a breath, then another.

“Look, Carrie. We’re not the military here. We don’t just give orders. Our people are expected to act independently, to think for themselves. Management-wise, it’s like herding cats. But that’s the price you pay for good people who dig things up in places no one would expect that can save an entire nation. So we give you a lot of leeway, but this crossed the line.

“You went outside the Agency completely on your own. You were way beyond the parameters of ‘need to know,’ which is why we only allow authorized interagency contacts through normal channels. The NSA’s job is to provide us with data. Period. They don’t have the intelligence-analysis experts to turn raw data into useful intel. We do. Most of the people on this entire campus do nothing else but analyze data. If we get the NSA into our business, then Congress has the right to ask what the hell they’re paying us for. And if you want me to do something about this so-called actionable intel about an attack, you better damn well give me something to work with.

“Furthermore, while you’re busy playing in your sandbox with Sinai and Beirut, you are not paying attention to al-Qaeda, especially in Iraq, which is what I needed you to concentrate on and the only reason you’re still here.”

“I’m looking at Iraq too. I—”

“Cut the crap, Carrie. We don’t have time for this. What just happened in Abbasiyah is a gift to the bad guys. I can’t have you off doing whatever the hell you want. It doesn’t work that way.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’ve notified HR. I’m removing you from CTC. In fact, not just from CTC, from the National Clandestine Service. You’re done here. Saul?” he said, looking at Berenson.

Carrie felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She wanted to throw up. This couldn’t be happening. Didn’t they see what was going on? Missing files, a possible terrorist attack, and she was the only one who’d spotted it and now they were getting rid of her?

“Carrie, you’re a great talent. Your language skills, your instincts,” Saul said, leaning forward, hands clasped, almost as if he were praying. “But you forced our hand. You’re being reassigned.”

Relief flooded her. It was bad, but she wasn’t being fired.

“I thought I’m out of NCS,” she said.

“You are,” Saul said, glancing at Estes, “being transferred to the Intelligence Analysis Division. The Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis.”

“Effective immediately,” Estes said. “No more fieldwork, Mathison. You’re done.”

“Who did you
piss off?” her workmate in the next cubicle, Joanne Dayton, said. Blond, blue-eyed, a little overweight and pretty enough to have been a cheerleader in high school, but according to Joanne, she’d been a doper, not one of the cool kids. “Otherwise, I’d’ve never ended up here,” she’d whispered, rolling her eyes.

“David Estes,” Carrie said.

“Really?” Joanne said, looking at her with greater interest. “I’m surprised you’re still working here.” She moved closer. Just girls. “What’d you do?”

What did I do? Carrie thought. She hadn’t let them kidnap or kill her. Since she’d started running for her life on Avenue Michel Bustros, she hadn’t really stopped.

“Oddly enough, my job,” she said.

Her new boss was a tall, odd-looking long-haired man of Russian descent, with arms and legs disproportionately larger than his torso, as if his body had been assembled from cast-off odds and ends of other people somehow welded together like one of the Watts Towers. Someone said he’d been wounded in Bosnia, but no one would speak about it. His name was Yerushenko. Alan Yerushenko.

“I don’t know why they moved you over from NCS and I don’t care,” Yerushenko told her, looking at her through tinted glasses. “We may not be the glamour boys of the business like on the other side of the house, but don’t think what we do is not important. And I’ll expect a daily report of your progress.”

The hell with you, she thought.

“What’s with Yerushenko?” she asked Joanne.

“He’s a stickler, but it could be worse. He’s not entirely an idiot. Just mostly.” She grinned.

Yerushenko put her on Iraq data analysis from NCS core collectors, CIA officers who collected data from case officers and forwarded the intel to Langley for analysis and evaluation. “You have to assign probabilities for credibility and accuracy,” he told her. “The rule of thumb is that most are barely credible and the rest are even worse.”

She started to work on reports on AQI, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Their leader was a mysterious figure who used the nom de guerre Abu Nazir. She’d first heard about him while following up on a lead in Baghdad last year. But he was like a ghost; there was hardly anything real on him. There was little known about him personally too, although he was suspected of being in Anbar Province, where he had cowed local tribal leaders by cutting off the heads of everyone who got in his way. Sometimes, they were left stuck on poles along the roads like gruesome signposts. There was also mention of an equally ruthless lieutenant of his, about whom even less was known, code-named Abu Ubaida.

But she couldn’t concentrate. She felt humiliated, sick to her stomach. Why had they done this to her? Why had Saul abandoned her? And why didn’t they listen? There was an attack planned against America that might happen in a few days or weeks and nobody seemed to care. She went to the ladies’ room, into a stall, and closed the door. Sitting on the lid, her face in her hands, it was all she could do to keep from screaming at the top of her lungs.

What was happening? Her skin was tingling. Prickling, like when your foot falls asleep. It’s stress. An emotional jolt of hormones, she told herself. The stress was sideswiping her meds, knocking out the circuits. She rubbed the skin on her arms to try to make it stop tingling. It didn’t work. Then she understood. She’d been running low on clozapine, so she had started taking them every other day. Her bipolar was kicking in. She was going into a depressive episode.

She looked around the stall like a trapped animal. She had to get home.