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?
Why? Who for? GSD? Hezbollah? Somebody else? And after the Achilles break-in, why didn’t Beirut Station go into fire-drill mode? And key files from Damascus Station were redacted? And what did this have to do with an attack? There were too many pieces missing, she thought, turning off her computer and her desk light.
She went back to her apartment in Reston and changed clothes. What am I going to do about my meds? she wondered. Walla, she missed the pharmacy in Beirut, the one on Rue Nakhle in Zarif across from the Doctors Hospital. She could go in there, wave a prescription at them that she’d gotten from an old Lebanese doctor who’d write one for anything so long as you paid him cash in dollars or euros. She could get any drug in the universe there, no questions asked. In the Middle East, her Joe, Julia, had told her, “There are rules and then there are necessities. Allah understands everything. There’s always a way.”
She’d have to go see her sister. Not looking forward to that little conversation, she thought. Maggie was a physician, with a practice in West End, and a house in Seminary Hill in Alexandria, Virginia. The problem was, she couldn’t see a psychiatrist who could write her a prescription. The minute it was on the record, if anyone checked, she, Carrie, could lose her security clearance. Her career at the CIA would be over. It had to be done without a prescription. Off the record. She could call Maggie and go over tomorrow, she decided. Tonight, she needed to get out.
She picked out a silky red top revealing a bit of cleavage and a short black skirt and matching jacket that always made her feel sexy. It was while she was changing clothes and putting on her makeup, Coltrane and Miles Davis on the CD doing “Round Midnight,” the greatest track ever, the one that spoke of night and New York and sex and loneliness and longing and everything there was, that she started to fly.
It began with her looking in the mirror and thinking she looked good, with the makeup and eyelashes, and realizing that she was at her peak. Nature was working to make her as attractive as she would ever be in her life, because nature wanted procreation, and studying herself, she realized she was beautiful, that if she wanted, she could have any man, a hundred men, a thousand. The thought of it, of getting any man anytime, that they were powerless, that she could decide, was like an aphrodisiac. All she had to do was let them get close to her and they would follow like sheep. Nature.
Oh God, the music. Davis and Coltrane. It couldn’t get any better. She felt warm and happy and invincible. She would solve what had happened in Beirut. She would find out about Dima and get Nightingale. She would stop the terror attack and Fielding would have to eat it. Saul would be proud. She was sure of it, her body tingling.
The music went inside you right down your spine. Running out of the house, getting into the car, she drove Reston Parkway to VA 267, then into town across the Key Bridge and into Georgetown; Lester Young’s “She’s Funny That Way” on the CD player, and she felt better, sexier, more irresistible than she’d ever felt in her life.
Now, sitting next to Lawyer Dave at the bar, she leaned forward so he could get a peek at her boobs. Tiny, but the perfect size for a man’s hand to cup, and God knew the guys didn’t seem to care. They would paw at you, the idiots not knowing that if they just touched them the right way, squeezing gently but firmly with just the right amount of pressure, taking their time, they could have any woman they wanted.
“So what do you do?” he was asking.
“Why do you give a shit about what I do?” she said. “Let’s be honest. All you really want to do is have sex with me, right? I mean, stop me if I’m wrong here, because ten-to-one you’re married. Taking the ring off doesn’t fool that many girls except the stupid ones—and even they figure it out eventually, right, Lawyer Dave? So let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Do you want to take me out of here and screw my brains out or don’t you?”
He stared at her, stunned, cautious.
“You’re wearing a ring too,” he said.
“Damn right, I’m taken. Don’t fall in love with me. Don’t even fall in like with me. Don’t get obsessed with me. There’s no future, no romance, no bullshit. There’s just tonight. Take it or leave it. You don’t want to, you want to think about your sweet little wife and kiddies back at the other end of your commute, get off that bar stool and free it up for someone a little more honest about what he really wants in this screwed-up world,” she said.
“You’re really something,” he said.
“You have no idea.”
He put down his beer and stood up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Your place.”
“Uh-uh. You don’t get to find out where I live.” She shook her head and downed the rest of her margarita. “Besides, hotshot. You trying to tell me you can afford a Rolex and you can’t afford condoms and a hotel room?”
He held her jacket for her and put on his coat. They went outside. The night was clear and cool and windy; the two-story buildings along M Street stretched as far as could be seen. He put his arm around her as they walked to his car. A Lincoln. Bullshit lawyer’s car, she thought, getting in.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Ritz-Carlt
on’s not too far.” The radio was tuned to hip-hop. He’s trying to be cool, she thought. “Put on jazz. WPFW, 89.3.” He tweaked the radio button till she heard the sound of Brubeck and Paul Desmond. “The two Daves,” she said out loud. “You and Dave Brubeck.”
He grimaced. Thinking of money, she thought. How’s he going to explain it on the credit card at his firm or to his wife?
“How about the Latham, just down M Street?” he said.
“A room at the Latham sounds perfect. They should advertise. ‘Come to the Latham. We won’t tell if you don’t,’ ” she said, leaning over and kissing his crotch, nearly causing him to swerve into oncoming traffic. “Careful, cowboy. We don’t want an accident now.” She exhaled, her breath warm on his pants, her lips feeling him rock-hard under the fabric, then looked up.
The neon lights from the bars and shuttered stores and from the street and traffic lights made patterns on the windows. The patterns merged with the jazz. Nonrepresentational, but a repetitious pattern, like Islamic art. It means something. Something important—then, Oh no! she thought, massaging his crotch, realizing she was starting to lose it.
Bipolar disorder. She’d won the genetic lottery; she’d gotten it from her father. The same thing that had caused him to lose his job and eventually forced them to move from Michigan to Maryland. Not now, she thought. Please not now.
“Take it easy,” he said. She sat up and let him call on his cell to reserve the room. Soon, they were walking through the arched entryway into the hotel lobby. They stopped at the desk, went into the elevator and a minute later, they were in the room, tearing off each other’s clothes. Kissing, tongues fencing inside each other’s mouths and then on the bed.
He reached over to his pants on the floor beside the bed to put on a condom, and as he turned out the light, something about the wallpaper pattern struck her. It was like a grid, only in the darkness, this guy Dave’s outline was like a space. Oh no, she thought. Her bipolar. Get control, Carrie. A space in a grid like the space where Dima was missing. They were all connected, Dima and Nightingale and Ahmed Haidar of Hezbollah in that empty space. It was a grid. And it was the wrong color. The wallpaper was gray, but it should be blue. She needed it to be blue. That’s all she could think of. Spaces in a blue grid, only the color was wrong.
“So beautiful,” Dave said, nuzzling at her breasts, his fingers between her legs, stroking and probing inside her. She smelled his breath. It smelled of beer and, suddenly, something bad, something from the space in the grid. She jerked her head back, almost gagging. He rubbed against her, then took his penis in his hand and guided it inside her. She gasped at the first sensation of him sliding in and looked at the wall. The wallpaper was grid that was moving—and the wrong color.
“Stop! Stop!” she cried, pushing him away.
He pressed in harder. Pumping, moving in and out.
“Stop it! Get off me! Get off me now or so help me, you’ll be sorry, you son of a bitch!”
He stopped. Pulled out.
“What the hell is this? What kind of a tease are you?” he snapped.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. It’s because, don’t you see, it isn’t the sex. I want the sex. I want you inside me, but I can’t and I don’t know why. It’s my meds. Something I took. It’s the grid. There’s a space. It’s the wrong color. I can’t look at it.”
“Turn over,” he said, pushing at her hips to turn her on her stomach. “We’ll do it that way. You don’t have to look.”
“I can’t, dammit! Don’t you understand? I don’t have to see it to see it! We can’t do this. You have to get out. I’m just a crazy lady, okay? A crazy blonde you met in a bar. A crazy blonde whore in a bar. That’s all I am. I’m so sorry, Dave or whatever your name is. I’m so sorry. Please, there’s something wrong with me. I wanted you. I did, but I can’t do it.” The wallpaper was a moving pattern, geometrically repeating into infinity like the inside of a mosque. “I can’t. Not this way.”
He stood up and started to pull on his clothes.
“You’re crazy, you know that? I’m sorry I met you, stupid crazy bitch.”
“Go to hell!” she shouted back. “Go back to your wife. Tell her you were working late at the office, you lying cheat!” she screamed. “Better yet, do her and pretend it’s me. That way you can have both of us!”
He smacked her hard across the cheek.
“Shut up. You want to get us arrested? I’m leaving. Here.” He threw down a twenty-dollar bill. “Call a cab,” he said, pulling on his coat. He checked his pockets to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind.
“Crazy bitch,” he muttered, opening the door and closing it behind him. As he did so, Carrie stumbled like a drunk to the bathroom sink and threw up.
CHAPTER 5
Alexandria, Virginia
“When did it start?” her older sister, Maggie, asked.
They were sitting in Maggie’s SUV near the Van Dorn Metro station, not far from the Landmark Mall in Alexandria. They’d met there instead of Maggie’s office or her house so no one would see them. Maggie was the only person in her family who knew she worked for the CIA.
“Last night,” Carrie said. “I could feel it coming a little earlier, but it really started last night. The margaritas probably didn’t help,” she added.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“I was working. Something important.”
“Nonstop? No sleep? Little food, either Chinese or maybe just a few crackers?”
“Well, I was at my desk. I was digging into something. I didn’t want to stop.”
“Come on, Carrie. You know perfectly well that all of those are prodromal symptoms of a manic onset for you. You’re my sister and I love you,” she said, brushing Carrie’s hair from her eyes, “but I wish you would let me get you some treatment. You could live a normal life. You really could.”
“Mag, we’ve been through this. The minute I get treatment, whether it’s you or a shrink, or there’s record of a prescription, I lose my security clearance. My job is over. And since, as we both know, or at least you’ve told me often enough, I don’t have a personal life, that doesn’t leave me with anything else.”
Maggie looked at her, squinting slightly against the sun on the car window. The weather was fair, unusually warm for March. People going to their cars had their jackets open or even no jackets.
“Maybe you should do something else. This isn’t a life. We worry about you. Dad, me, the kids.”
“Don’t start on that. And I wouldn’t mention Dad. He’s hardly the one to talk about ‘normal.’ ”
“How does the lithium feel?”
“I hate it. It makes me stupid, logy. It’s like I’m looking at the world through a thick window. A thick, dirty, fifty-IQ-points-lower window. Did I mention thick? I’m like a zombie. I hate it.”
“At least you’re coherent. When I saw you last night, you weren’t. God, Carrie, you can’t go on like this.”
“You know I was fine in—where I was. I was able to get all the meds I wanted. Clozapine works just fine. I can function. I’m a normal person. You’d be surprised. I’m actually good at what I do. Just get me a big supply of clozapine and I’ll be Aunt Carrie and everyone’ll be happy. The kids’ll love it.” Maggie had two small daughters, Ruby, seven, and Josie, five.
“If you think self-medicating, getting all the meds you want, is good practice, you’re crazier than you think.”
Carrie put her hand on her sister’s arm. “I know. I know you’re right. Look, I know you don’t like or understand what I do, but it’s important. Believe me, you and your children sleep safer in bed at night because of what I do. You’ve got to help me. There’s no one else. Otherwise, I’m up the creek.”
“Have you any idea what a risk I’m taking? I could lose my license. Bad enough I’m prescribing for Dad. But at least he’s in therapy. I coordinate with his psychiatrist. Between the t
herapy and me watching him, he’s been good for two years now. You should spend some time with him. I know he’d like it. You wouldn’t know there was a problem.”
“Tell that to Mom,” Carrie said.
Neither of them spoke. That was a family black hole. The wound that didn’t heal. Their mother, Emma, had disappeared.
“If I can’t meet your father, what about your mother?” her lover at Princeton, John, the professor, had asked her one night in bed.
“I don’t know where she is.”
“What do you mean you don’t know where she is? Is she dead?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s the one thing I do know. I do understand.”
“Well, explain it to me and then there’ll be two of us,” he’d said.
“She left. Just like that. One day she said she was going to CVS. The drugstore. She’d be right back. We never saw her again.”
“Did your family look for her? The police? Did she ever try to make contact?”
“Yes. Yes. And no.”
“Wow! No wonder you don’t talk about your family.”
“That was the day I left for Princeton. She just disappeared and off I went. Just me and a suitcase and my happy childhood memories. Don’t you see? She was free. I was her youngest. The baby. And I was leaving. I could take care of myself. Now do you get an inkling of how screwed up I am? I’m the cute blond undergraduate you want to have sex with, but tell the truth, John. Am I really the girl you want to be with?”
“At least let me get you tested,” Maggie said. “Clozapine has potential side effects that are not good. Hypoglycemia. Agranulocytosis. You understand? Lowered white blood cell count can be really serious. At least let me do that.”
Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 5