Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“It has nothing to do with you,” Yerushenko said. “The math added up. A female double agent connected to GSD and, possibly, Hezbollah, who may have been a part of an attack or possible kidnapping of a CIA C.O., one who happens to work for me now-and by the way, I don’t take anyone else’s evaluation as gospel; I can judge my people for myself, thank you-and all of a sudden, this double agent who apparently went to ground after the attempt on you now suddenly reappears and is coming to the States right after Abbasiyah. Books herself into the Waldorf just before a fancy shindig with the Vice-President of the United States. I’d be derelict if I didn’t take it seriously.”

She set herself and the others in the department to checking every single male-“Trust me, with Dima, it’s always going to be men,” she told them-from any Middle Eastern country who had either come to the U.S. in the last two months or was scheduled to arrive before the fund-raiser. There were thousands. They got the full lists from the U.S. Department of State and Customs and Border Protection and began going through them.

“What we’re looking for is a connection,” she told her OCSA coworkers. “Anyone flying from Beirut or who’s been in Beirut but may be flying from somewhere else. Anyone with any connection to the Syrian GSD or Damascus. Anyone who might have any kind of a connection to Nightingale or Dima of any kind, any kind of communications or who’s been in the same city as either Nightingale or Dima at the same time. Any link, even indirect, of any kind.”

With only a few days left before the fund-raiser, they worked in shifts around the clock. Eating cafeteria food and making midnight raids on the vending machines, Joanne dragging her in for company while she sneaked a quick cigarette in the ladies’ room.

After three days, they’d narrowed it down to four possibles: Mohamed Hegazy, an Egyptian doctor visiting a brother in Manhattan; Ziad Ghaddar, a Lebanese businessman staying at the Best Western near JFK; Bassam al-Shakran, a Jordanian pharmaceutical salesman who had been to both Baghdad and Beirut within the last two months, had arrived three days ago from Amman and was staying with a cousin in Brooklyn; and Abdel Yassin, a Jordanian college student, also from Amman, coming in on a student visa for Brooklyn College.

“If you had to pick one, who would it be?” Saul asked her on the third day. They were with Yerushenko in his office, the entire wall covered with notes, papers, photos and screen captures with colored marker lines connecting them like a web created by an insane spider.

“The two Jordanians,” she said, tapping their photos on the wall. “The salesman’s cousin lives in Gravesend.” She indicated the neighborhood in Brooklyn on a map of New York City. “The other one’s going to Brooklyn College, which is in the Midwood-Flatbush area. They’re not that far apart. I asked Joanne to check and see what the cousin does.”

“And?” Yerushenko asked.

“You’re going to love this. He has a fitness equipment company. Treadmills, weight machines, that kind of thing. They sell and service.”

“Does the Waldorf have a fitness center?” Saul asked.

She nodded. The two men looked at each other.

“Don’t tell me,” Yerushenko said. “The Waldorf is one of his customers.”

“Head of the class,” she said. “They have access to the hotel.”

They studied the connections on the wall. There were two line links, mostly because they were both from Amman, between the two Jordanians. Only the salesman had been in Beirut, but that had been three times that they knew about. The last one was just two weeks ago, according to NSA cell phone intercepts.

“Anything else on the Jordanians?” Saul asked.

“This,” she said, pointing to a screen capture of a newspaper article in Arabic with a photograph of a young man with a single marker line to al-Shakran’s DS-160 photo. “It’s an obituary. Al-Shakran’s brother. Killed in Iraq.”

“Damn,” Saul breathed. “Were American troops involved?”

“Don’t know. The article doesn’t say and Amman Station hasn’t had time to get back to me yet with anything on the brother. We have to assume it’s a possibility.”

“And a motive.” Saul grimaced.

“So how are they going to do it?” Yerushenko asked. “Explosives?”

“Possible. Guns more likely.” Saul shrugged. “Assault rifles would be best.”

“Where would they get them? New York has pretty strict laws,” Yerushenko said.

“Anywhere,” Carrie said. “Vermont is not that far and it has the most liberal gun laws in the country. But it’s not that hard really. Ten-to-one, they’ve already got everything they need now.”

“What about the security at the fund-raiser? Secret Service for the veep. Metal detectors in the ballroom. They’d have to know they need to deal with it.”

“Once they’re inside the hotel, the venue’s nothing. They could just shoot their way in. With assault rifles you can kill a bunch of people before even the Secret Service could start to react,” she said.

“The Secret Service will kill them,” Yerushenko said.

Saul and Carrie smiled.

“Sure. But they don’t care. And it only takes getting off one or two good shots at the start to get the Veep. Anybody else they kill is just icing on the cake,” Saul said.

“What about CTC and David Estes?” she asked.

Saul looked at her curiously. “Whatever you said did the trick. He’s a hundred percent behind us. He’s even got the director on board.”

She glanced past Saul at the window as they pulled into the Trenton station. She watched people get off the train and crowds on the platform surging on. People living their lives with no idea what was coming at them unless they could stop it.

“Who’s meeting us?” she asked.

“Captain Koslowski, NYPD Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau. He said he’ll either be at Penn Station or he’ll have someone waiting for us.”

“Not the FBI?”

“Can’t keep them out. But I want New York to handle this as much as possible,” he said.

Carrie nodded. She wanted to tell Saul about her conversation last night with Virgil but decided against it. She’d only had a few quick hours with David at the Hilton in Tysons Corner before she left at six A.M. to get ready to leave for New York.

“My wife is leaving me,” he’d told her. “She didn’t even ask me about you or ask me to stop seeing you. She just said I can go back to my whore. She’s done.”

“Where does that leave us?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What about you?”

“I don’t know either,” she said.

When she got back to Reston to pack, she’d contacted Virgil in Beirut to see if he’d come up with anything on Dima or Nightingale since she’d left, but he told her there’d been nothing. In any case, Fielding had him doing a black-bag job on some Bahraini diplomat throwing money around Ras Beirut like it was confetti.

“If you’re interested in the sex life of Bahrainis away from home, I’ve got plenty of footage,” he told her.

“Send it to Fielding. Give him something he understands,” she’d responded.

“Yeah, well the line between porn and tradecraft is getting pretty thin around here,” Virgil groused, ending the call.

So Beirut had nothing. How was that possible? Where had Dima been all this time? It couldn’t have been in Beirut. Dima wasn’t the sort of girl who went unnoticed, especially in Beirut, where everyone notices everything. And who was she working for? March 14, the Maronite Christian faction? Hezbollah? The Syrians? The Iranians? After Abbasiyah, everyone assumed that if there was an attack, it would be the Sunnis. Al-Qaeda. But maybe it was the Iranians planning to blame it on the Sunnis.