Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

She sat on the sofa. From where she was, she could see the tall office buildings, some of their windows still lit up at night, even though it was late.

“Look, David, I’m attracted to you. I want to have sex with you. Maybe I’d like even more. But we’re not just people, we’re coworkers in a business where everyone around us is a spy. It’s not like we’re going to be able to keep this secret. So what are you proposing?”

He sat in the chair opposite, leaning toward her, his hands on his knees.

“I’m not sure. I want you. And it’s not just sex. I don’t know where this is going. Do you?”

“I do.” She nodded. “And it doesn’t have a happy ending. Not for me. Not for you either. It won’t work. I’m not the housewife type. Trust me, you wouldn’t like me. I’m a CIA case officer with a lot of unanswered questions. It’s time we cleared the air, you and me.”

He took a deep breath and sat back.

“Maybe I’d better have another drink,” he said.

“Both of us,” she said.

He got up, went over to the minibar and came back with mini bottles of Grey Goose. He poured them into glasses with ice and gave her one.

“What are we drinking to?” he said.

“The truth.”

“Well, I did my master’s at Harvard. ‘ Veritas ,’ ” he said, and they drank. “Let’s have it.”

“Before we get to us, I have to tell you, there’s so much shit going on I don’t even know where to start,” she said. “Beginning with Beirut.”

“Beirut.” He nodded. “What about it?”

“Dammit, David, you’re smart as hell. You didn’t believe Fielding’s bullshit any more than Saul did, yet you exiled me from NCS. What was that about? And then I discover redacted material in our files from both Beirut Station and Damascus Station. But to make matters worse, Fielding had eleven phone numbers, three of which had months of calls deleted from NSA files. And you know what day they were deleted?”

“Was it around the same time you left Beirut?”

She looked at him sharply. “How’d you know?”

“I didn’t,” he said, looking into her eyes. “But I suspected something. This is bad. Really bad.”

“Why? Who could have done something like that?”

“Not just who. The more important question is, why?” he said.

“Do you believe me?” she whispered, putting her hand on his knee.

“Yes,” he said, putting his hand over hers. “Shit.” He grimaced and looked away.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. But Fielding and the director himself, Bill Walden, go back a long way.”

“Better to slap me on the wrist. Was that it?”

“But keep you in the game. Saul believes in you, Carrie. With me it was more complicated.”

“Because you’re attracted to me?” she said.

He looked away. For a moment, neither of them spoke. They sat there, the view of the skyline between them.

“There’s something else,” she said.

“What?”

“The girl, Dima. She was Fielding’s originally, but I ran her.”

“What about her?”

“Let’s forget the anomaly about Sunni versus Shiite, al-Qaeda versus Hezbollah, two groups who should never come together. Let’s forget about the Syrians and the Iranians and all that coming after Abbasiyah, because none of that makes any sense. Even putting that aside, I knew her better than Fielding ever did. I’ve been with her when she was so drunk she couldn’t stand up. She was fun and sexy, but like every woman alive, she knew she had a sell-by date. She was desperate, do you understand? But for a man. If she ever got her hands on someone rich enough and at least not physically repulsive enough to make her ill, she told me she’d suck his brains out through his dick. So you tell me. What turns her into a red-hot jihadi ? It doesn’t compute.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said in agreement. “You want to go back to Beirut?”

“I have to,” she said. “It’s where the answers are.”

“What about us?”

“It’s impossible. We’re impossible. One of us would have to quit the Company. I won’t and”-she took his hand-“you shouldn’t, David.”

“You shouldn’t either,” he said, making a face.

“So here we are. Two orphans in the storm.”

“You didn’t kill my marriage, Carrie. I did. The job did. I did.”

“ Veritas ,” she said, and drank the vodka.

“So here we are.” He looked around the room. “Nice room.”

“Perfect for cheating wives and husbands,” she nodded.

“It wasn’t just sex, you know. Not for me. Flattering, that an attractive young woman like you would find me. .” He hesitated. “I felt alive for the first time in years. Hell of a thing, isn’t it?”

“Me too.” She came over, wriggled onto his lap and kissed him.

Verdun, Beirut, Lebanon

“I knew you’d be back. Never doubted it for a second. Wait a minute, there,” Virgil said, disabling the security alarm. He inserted his Peterson universal key into the door lock, tapped and opened the door. He inched it open a crack, inspected for any secondary alarms and, holding a handheld RF scanner before him like a candle, entered the apartment.

They were on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise on Leonardo da Vinci in the trendy Verdun section of Beirut. The apartment belonged to Rana Saadi, a Lebanese actress and model known in the Middle East for her role in a movie about the love lives of women working in a Beirut beauty salon. Fielding called her cell phone at least twice a week according to the COMINT intercepts on the flash drive Jimbo had given Carrie. Yet, they never went anywhere together, although according to Virgil, they sometimes showed up at the same social function or party.

She followed Virgil into the apartment. Holding his finger to his lips, he began checking for hidden cameras and bugs, using the scanner and studying light fixtures and land phones and removing the plastic plates over electrical outlets. While he checked the rooms, Carrie, her hands in latex gloves, checked the drawers and desk in the bedroom, going through Rana’s expensive Huit and Aubade lingerie and, in the closet, her clothes and shoes, being careful to put each thing she touched back in exactly the same position.

“It’s clear,” he whispered. “But don’t talk,” he mouthed.

She nodded. She felt with her fingertips along the closet’s top shelf and found a photo album. Noting its exact position, she carefully lifted it up and brought it down. She sat on the floor and opened it, while Virgil went about the apartment installing electronic listening devices and hidden cameras. Every room from every angle was to be covered. In CIA parlance, it was a “360 black-bag job.”

She pored through the photo album. Mostly pictures of Rana throughout her career, starting as a teenage model on up to her roles on television and in movies. In the pages she went from a thin gawky teenager with long chestnut hair posing with a puppy to a sexy black-haired bombshell in a low-cut dress on the cover of Spécial magazine and in promo stills from her films.

Then a picture stopped her cold.

It was a photo of Rana in a magazine ad for Aishti, an upscale women’s clothing chain. She was with two other models in what looked like the ABC mall, all of them looking impossibly stylish and slim. One of them was Dima. There was no credit on the front of the photograph, but it was a studio print, the photo pasted on the page. She carefully separated the edge of the print from the page and lifted it up to see the back. A name had been stamped on it: François Abou Murad, Rue Gouraud. She knew where that was, in the Gemmayzeh section of the Ashrafieh district. She pressed it back down and took a photo of the print with her cell phone.