“Listen,” Carrie said, grabbing Maggie’s arms. “Don’t you get it? I can’t do it. Just give me the damn pills and let me get back to work. You don’t understand. I have to get back. It’s important.”
“Here’s three weeks’ worth of samples,” Maggie said, handing them to her in a plastic bag. “It’ll help stabilize you and hold you over, but that’s it. I mean it, Carrie. I can’t keep doing this. It’ll ruin both of us. I want you to seriously consider going into therapy. A psychiatrist can prescribe enough of this for you to walk to the moon on.”
“Shhhh! Be quiet,” Carrie said, turning up the car radio. She’d heard something.
“ . . . reports that five U.S. servicemen from the Five Hundred and Second Infantry Regiment stationed at a checkpoint outside the city of Abbasiyah, south of Baghdad in the so-called Iraqi Triangle of Death, entered the home of a local Iraqi family, where they are charged by Iraqi authorities with raping a fourteen-year-old girl, then killing her and her entire family and setting the bodies on fire. The soldiers being accused claim that the attack was done by Sunni militants. U.S. military and Coalition government spokesmen have stated that the incident is under investigation. A spokesman for General Casey, commander of the Multi-National Force–Iraq, stated, ‘We will get to the bottom of this deplorable act,’ ” the announcer said.
Carrie turned the radio down.
“Shit, this is going to blow things up. I’ve got to go. Thanks for this, Maggie,” she said, indicating the pills. “Thanks for coming to get me. I’ll come see the girls as soon as I can. I promise.”
“Is this Iraq thing something you’re involved in?” Maggie asked.
Carrie looked at her.
“We do . . . everything. People don’t have a clue. I’ll call,” she said, getting out of the car.
“What about Dad?” Maggie asked. Carrie squinted at her in the sun. “You have to talk to him sometime.”
“Good old Mag, you never give up. I will. Sometime,” she said.
She got back to Langley just in time for an all-hands meeting called by David Estes for everyone in the Counterterrorism Center unit. He told them that they could expect a significant rise in terrorism against Americans both within and outside Iraq as a result of what had happened in Abbasiyah.
“So, just when you think we couldn’t possibly come up with anything that could make us even more unpopular with the Arab street or make the Iraqi population hate us even more, some asshole grunts in Iraq have managed to come up with the best recruiting ad for al-Qaeda since they decided to fly into buildings in lower Manhattan!” Estes snapped angrily. “American targets in the Middle East and Europe are of particular concern.
“And I would remind everyone that we have a threat, from an unsubstantiated but previously credible source, of a major attack on American soil,” he added, not looking at Carrie as he said it. “All of you start combing through every piece of intel we’ve got from anywhere in the Middle East and South Asia. I mean everything. Any threats, no matter how iffy, should be brought directly to me immediately.
“We’re going to have to deploy additional resources to Baghdad Station. Saul, you’ll handle it,” he said to Saul, who nodded. “There’s going to be a ton of fallout. The media is going to have a field day with this and I’ve already told the DCIA we can expect a significant increase in U.S. casualties, both military and civilian, both inside and outside the Green Zone, but I want more-detailed projections. I need to let the Joint Chiefs and the White House know what they’re in for.
“In addition, I want a complete analysis of all Sunni activity in the Triangle of Death zone, from IA, but also from you, Saul, on my desk by seventeen hundred today. If somebody farts anywhere from Baghdad to al-Hillah, I want to know about it. Those of you not being reassigned to support Baghdad Station will have to pick up the extra slack from the people we’re pulling away. Now get to work. We’re wasting time,” Estes said, dismissing them.
An hour later, Carrie caught Saul in the corridor on his way to the elevator. She’d been waiting for him.
“Not now, Carrie. I’ve got a meeting on the seventh floor,” he told her, meaning with the top directors in the CIA.
“Nightingale met with Ahmed Haidar. Fielding must’ve known about it but never said a word,” she said.
He stood there, blinking behind his glasses like an owl in the daytime.
“How do you know?”
“There was a photo. NSA picked it up from an Israeli satellite stream. In a café. I couldn’t tell where. Possibly Cairo or Amman.”
“What does that tell you?”
“GSD and Hezbollah are in bed. Maybe the Hariri assassination. Maybe something coming up, like Julia said, using something juicy like Abbasiyah to cover it up. You tell me, Saul. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I hired you. What do you want?”
“I need Fort Meade. Who can I talk to there?” The National Security Agency was headquartered at the Fort Meade, Maryland, army base.
“Out of the question. We have established procedures for this kind of thing and they don’t include you charging off on your own like a bull in a china shop. You’re already on thin ice.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go deal with this latest screw-up. What the hell did they expect?” he said, stabbing his finger at the elevator button half a dozen times. “You send young men over in multiple deployments, half of them from National Guard units, lousy civilians, many of them with post-traumatic stress, dealing with headless corpses, IEDs on every street corner, allies you can’t turn your back on and millions of women you can look at but can’t touch. What did they think was going to happen? Christ!” he said, and entered the elevator. “You don’t go near Fort Meade. I mean it,” he added as the elevator door closed.
Bullshit, she thought to herself. There wasn’t enough to go on without the NSA. She’d find someone.
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. Wh
at’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.
Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Page 6