Homeland: Carrie’s Run

“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.

“A couple of weeks maybe. Julia’s husband said soon. His exact words were ‘khaliban zhada.’ Very soon.”

CHAPTER 4

Georgetown, Washington, DC

It was the song that brought it back. Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One.” 1998. Her junior year at Princeton. The year of Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, and her first big sexual relationship—beyond fumbling when your parents and sister weren’t home and getting your thighs sticky wet in high school—an almost-crush on John, her tall, unbelievably bright poly sci professor, who introduced her to tequila shots, oral sex and jazz music.

“When I was a kid it was all Madonna, Mariah, Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men. The closest to jazz was my dad once in a while maybe listening to a little Dave Brubeck.”

“You’re joking, right? You don’t know jazz? Miles Davis, Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Louis Armstrong? The greatest music ever invented or that ever will be. The one truly original thing we Americans gave the world, and you don’t know? In a way, I envy you.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got a whole new continent to explore, better than anything you can imagine.”

“Better than sex?”

“That’s the beauty of it, gorgeous. We can do both at the same time.”

Nineteen ninety-eight: the last time she ever ran the fifteen hundred. A long time ago, she thought.

She was sitting in a pub on M Street in Georgetown, downing her third Patrón Silver margarita, when the Shania video came on the TV perched behind the bar.

“Remember this? Nineteen ninety-eight. I was in college,” she said, indicating the song to Dave, the guy nursing a Heineken on the bar stool next to her. He was a curly-haired early-forties DOJ attorney in an off-the-rack suit and a Rolex watch that he made sure you caught a glimpse of, his finger brushing her forearm as though neither of them knew it was there or what he was thinking. There was a white band of skin on his ring finger where he’d taken off his wedding ring, so he was either divorced or out trolling, she thought.

“I was a law intern. For me it was Puff Daddy. Been around the world, uh-huh, uh-huh,” he half-sang, moving his shoulders in a manner that was midway between hopeless and semisexy. He wasn’t terrible looking. She hadn’t decided whether to let him get her into bed or not.

She had to force herself not to think about work. That was why she had gone out. Her inquiries were going nowhere. If anything, instead of finding answers, the questions were multiplying and getting more troubling.

For three days straight, she’d been working the computer. Going nonstop. Sleeping at her desk, living on crackers from the vending machine. She went over everything the Counterterrorism Center had on contacts between the Syrian GSD and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Reported contacts. Sightings. Cell phone and e-mail records. Most of it pure data, the everyday sludge of intelligence work. Saul had once compared it to mining for diamonds. “You have to go through tons of debris to every once in a while spot something that glitters. Something that might actually be useful.”

Interestingly, some of the best of it was intel that she herself had supplied, obtained from her source, Julia.

Other than the lead from Dima, there wasn’t much on Nightingale, a.k.a. Taha al-Douni. A graduate of Damascus University in mechanical engineering, he’d first attracted attention from Moscow Station, nine years ago, trying to do business with the big Russian arms company Rosoboronexport. She studied the surveillance photo. It had been taken on a wide snowy street in Moscow, lots of traffic, maybe Tverskaya Street, she thought. Although he was younger, thinner and in an overcoat and big floppy-eared fur hat, it was Nightingale all right, the man who had beckoned to her from the café across the street in Beirut.

No information on where he lived, wife, kids, his work in the GSD. Talk to me, Nightingale, she thought. Where do you work? How high up are you? Where do you fit between the GSD and Hezbollah? Who do you care about? Who do you put your dick in? But combing through everything at CTC, there was just the Moscow surveillance.

And nothing on a possible major terrorist attack on the U.S. What Julia had told her was a lone indicator, completely unsubstantiated. Otherwise nothing. No wonder no one had gotten back to her on it.

And then on the third day, late, she found something. A single photo the NSA had lifted from an Israeli spy satellite download stream, showing Nightingale sitting at a shisha café table. There was a partial tile wall sign in Arabic. She magnified it on the computer screen, then popped it into Photoshop to try to clarify the writing on the sign. It looked like the image could have been taken in either Amman or Cairo, she thought. In a souk, maybe.

Much more important than where the photo was taken was the man Nightingale was sitting with. She didn’t need the identification the Israelis had attached to tell her who it was. It was someone that everyone at Beirut Station, including her, had had in their sights for a long time but almost never actually sighted: Ahmed Haidar, a member of al-Majlis al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council, their inner circle.

So Nightingale, a.k.a. al-Douni, was real. Dima had at least given them solid intel. A bona fide link between the GSD and Hezbollah. She wished she were back in Beirut so she could talk to Julia about Nightingale. Had her husband, Abbas, ever met him? Did he know anything about him? Was he involved in the Hariri assassination?

And then there was another unanswered question: Where was Dima? The link between Nightingale and Ahmed Haidar made that even more critical. This was insane. And there was piss-all from Beirut Station. Just a cryptic note from Fielding to Saul that he had followed up and no one had seen Dima since the break-in at Achilles. And nothing about a terrorist attack in the United States. If he was doing any further follow-up, he didn’t say. Asshole, she thought.

She began tearing through every record from Damascus Station on the GSD. Every reference. Like Saul said, most of it was garbage.

Then she came across something interesting. In the 1990s, a senior CIA case officer, Dar Adal, had run a mole, Nabeel Abdul-Amir, code-named Pineapple, who was supposedly midlevel GSD. Adal had supposedly confirmed the mole’s bona fides. Pineapple was Alawite, Ba’athist, and related to the Assad clan. For more than forty years, the Assads—the father, Hafez al-Assad, and son, Bashar—members of the small minority Alawite Shiite Muslim sect and the pan-Arab nationalistic Ba’athist party, had ruthlessly ruled Syria. Pineapple, a distant cousin, also Alawite and Ba’athist, seemed a perfect choice for a mole. Too perfect, maybe, she mused.

Adal had fed Pineapple tidbits about Israel’s negotiating position on the Golan Heights from a supposed Israeli mole with whom he would have clandestine meetings in Cyprus but who was actually a Hebrew-speaking New York Jew, all in order to get Pineapple promoted within the GSD. When Pineapple tried to expand his Israeli contacts on his own and was about to expose the CIA operation to the Israeli Shin Bet, Adal had apparently—here the record was redacted and got pretty murky—arranged to feed Pineapple to either the Mossad or an outside contractor, who assassinated him, along with his mistress and her child. The three bodies were found on a boat tied to a slip in the Limassol Marina in Cyprus.

Carrie sat up straight, staring at nothing. Who redacted all this? she wondered. How and why? This was old intel. What was going on?

If it came to that, why was there so little on the GSD? Damascus Station was apparently pretty useless, but Fielding had been running Beirut Station for a long time. At least since the early 1990s. Yet, everyone knew the GSD was linked to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Rafik Hariri assassination last year and the Israeli photograph of Nightingale with Ahmed Haidar proved it. What the hell was going on at Beirut Station? It didn’t add up.

It was late, well after eight P.M. As she worked on the file, Estes, the big African-American who was the director of the Counterterrorism Center, came out of his office and headed toward the elevator, spotted her light still on and came over to her cubicle.

“What are you working on?” he said.

“Syrian GSD. After the nineties, we don’t seem to have a lot.”

“I thought you were working on AQAP.” Estes frowned. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which mostly meant Yemen, was supposed to be her official assignment for CTC since coming back to Langley. “Is there a link?”

“Not sure,” she said, heart beating. She wasn’t supposed to be doing this. “Just vague stuff.”

“Not likely. Syrian Alawites and AQAP? They’re on opposite sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide. You’re not still on Beirut, are you, Carrie?” he said.

Christ, he’s quick, she thought. There was a split that divided the Muslim world between Sunnis and Shiites that went back centuries over who was supposed to be the Prophet Muhammad’s successor. Shiites believed that only Ali, the fourth caliph, and his heirs were legitimate successors to the Prophet. Syrian Alawites were a branch of Shiites, hardly likely to ally themselves with al-Qaeda, extremist Salafist Sunni Muslims. Estes, a Stanford undergrad and Harvard MBA, had picked up on it instantly. She had to keep that in mind. She was slipping, she thought. Running out of meds since coming back from Beirut. It had been a day since she’d taken a clozapine pill and she could feel herself getting ragged around the edges. Keep it together, Carrie, she told herself.

“Sometimes the lines cross. When it’s in their interest,” she said.

He thought for a moment. “That’s true.”

“What about the possible attack on the U.S.? Hear anything?”

“We’ve found nothing to corroborate what your bird said, Carrie. You’ve got to give us more.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him, Send me back to Beirut, but she didn’t say it.

“I’m still looking.”

“I know. Let me know if you find something,” he said, continuing on toward the elevator.

She watched him walk away. She liked the bigness of him, the color of his skin, the grace in his movement despite his size. For a second she fantasized about what sex with him would be like. Slow, strong, intense; she squeezed her thighs together. Her reaction caught her by surprise. This was getting crazy. Masturbation wasn’t going to do it. Maybe it was time she had a man. Real sex. But simple. No complications.

Forget Pineapple, she told herself. Forget Nightingale and Dima for a second. Get away and let the subconscious brain work on the problem. There was a connection she was missing. Nightingale and Ahmed Haidar and the Hezbollah Central Council and suddenly, Nightingale wants to kill or capture a CIA girl?