Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“Were you ever together with them? Did anybody ever take any photos?” she asked.

“He didn’t want pictures. One time Dima asked me to take a snapshot of the two of them on the Corniche and before I could do anything, he took the camera out of my hand and smashed it.”

“So there are no photos at all?”

Marielle hesitated, then shook her head no. She’s lying, Carrie thought.

“There is a photo, isn’t there?” she asked, her heart beating wildly. It was as if her hearing was ultra-acute. She could hear the beating of her heart and Marielle’s heart and the music and conversations outside and thought, Oh God, it’s the meds. Please, not now. Everything is hanging by a thread.

Marielle didn’t answer. She looked away.

“ Min fathleki .” Please. “Don’t let Dima’s death be for nothing. It matters more than you can imagine,” Carrie pleaded. Some instinct-she prayed it wasn’t her damned bipolar-told her what Marielle said now would change everything. Like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus-kicking back to her Catholic childhood-his world trembling, waiting for what his night visitor would say next.

Marielle’s eyes searched hers as if she could see into her soul, then she opened her purse, took out her cell phone and, after a minute, found what she was looking for.

“I took this when he wasn’t looking. I don’t know why,” she said, then bit her lip. “No, that’s not true. I thought he might kill her and I might need it for the police.”

She showed Carrie the photo on her cell phone. It was a snapshot of Dima, in tight shorts and a tee, on the Corniche, looking tense, her arm around a lean coppery-skinned man with curly hair and a three-day stubble squinting slightly in the sun, facing three-quarters to the camera. Carrie could hardly believe it, a sensation close to orgasm thrilling through her. I’ve got you, you bastard! she thought wildly.

“I need that picture,” she said. “If you need money, help. .” She left it open.

Neither of them spoke. They could hear the beat of the music and the sounds of the crowd from outside the room like the sound of the ocean in a seashell.

“Give me an e-mail address and I’ll send it,” Marielle said, suddenly nervous. “Anything else? I risked coming here to meet you in a public place. I have to go.”

Carrie touched her arm. “What about Rana? Did she know him?”

Marielle stepped back, her face hard to see in the dim light coming from behind her. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know.”

“But she knows the Syrian, Taha al-Douni?”

“Rana’s famous. Either she knows everybody or they know her or pretend they do. Ask her,” she said with a shrug.

“It’s dangerous for her too, isn’t it?” Carrie asked.

“It’s Beirut,” she said. “We live on a bridge over an abyss made of explosives and lies.”

Baalbek, Lebanon

The lobby of the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek was filled with palms, antiquities and dusty furniture left over from the French colonial era. It smelled of mold and could have been lifted intact from an Agatha Christie novel, but the hotel’s upper rooms had an incredible view of the Roman ruins. After they checked in, Virgil and Ziad set up the equipment and the guns in a room that opened to a balcony that overlooked the columns of the Temple of Jupiter towering over the Beqaa plain.

Driving up the mountain road in a rented Honda Odyssey, they had few illusions about where they were. The road and town were festooned with yellow Hezbollah flags hanging from every building and lamppost. Since they were GPS-tracking Rana’s cell phone, they didn’t have to follow closely, so she had no way of suspecting they were following her. The only question, as Virgil put it, was firepower.

How many men was Nightingale bringing with him?

From inside the room, they scanned the ruins with binoculars, making sure no glint of the sun on the lenses gave them away.

“Do you see her?” Carrie asked.

“Not yet,” Virgil said, moving the binoculars inch by inch in a back-and-forth sweep. “There she is, by the Temple of Bacchus. On the left. See her?”

Carrie trained her binoculars on the virtually intact temple. The ruins were staggering; it was the biggest, best-preserved complex of Roman ruins in the Middle East, possibly anywhere. They dated from when Baalbek was known as Heliopolis and served as an important temple center for worship of the Roman gods Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus, the first two of which had been merged with the local deities Baal and Astarte. The temple complex was organized around the Grand Court, a vast rectangular space where Carrie spotted Rana, talking to someone beside a column near the steps to the Temple of Bacchus.

“I see her. Who’s she talking to?” Carrie said.

“Can’t see from here. But he’s brought armed men with him,” Virgil said, nudging her arm. “Over there, by that big stone at an angle and over by the Temple of Venus.”

She saw them. A man with what looked like an AK-47 on top of a giant stone lying sideways at an angle, another on the steps to the Grand Court and two more by the Temple of Venus.

“I see four,” Carrie said.

“What the hell,” Virgil muttered. “How’d they get into the museum complex with guns?”

“They’re Hezbollah. How do you think?” Ziad said.

“Can we hear what they’re saying?” she asked Ziad, who had unpacked a suitcase and set up a parabolic microphone dish with multichannel equalizers aimed through the open balcony door at Rana.

“Maybe.” Ziad shrugged. “They’re about four hundred meters from us. I’ve adjusted the equalizers for conversation at that distance. It’s fifty-fifty.” He handed her the earphones and set up the video camera to record what they were watching.

Carrie listened intently. She heard a woman, Rana, talking in Arabic, saying something-the words were unclear-about “him,” whoever that was, telling her they’d have to be more circumspect after (something unclear) about New York. Someone, a man, was saying (something unclear) about “focus on Anbar.”

She sat up straight. That couldn’t be right. What the hell would an actress screwing an American CIA station chief in Beirut have to do with Anbar province in Iraq? Why would Hezbollah care? They had nothing to do with Iraq. But Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor, did, she thought. Still, that couldn’t be right. Both Rana and Dima were Sunnis from the North pretending to be Christians. Why would they be feeding intel to Hezbollah or the Syrian GSD, which was Alawite?

At that moment, the man stepped away from the column. She focused the binoculars on him.

“Is that Nightingale?” Virgil asked her.

Although at this distance identification was iffy, she was almost certain it was Nightingale.

“It’s him. Fielding’s girlfriend is a nasty little mole,” she said.

“Man oh man! He’s a station chief. He’s got the keys to the kingdom. What has he given her?” Virgil breathed.

No, Carrie thought. The question wasn’t what he’d given, but to whom he had given it. Who was he really working for? And suddenly, she had it.

What if Nightingale was a double?

Then the question became, who was actually running him? The Iranians via Syria and Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda in Iraq? There was only one way to find out. They had to take Rana, she thought, straining to hear through the headphones.

“Anything on Iraq is [the words were broken up] top priority, do you understand? If you can get to his laptop computer,” she heard Nightingale say.

“It isn’t easy,” Rana said. “What about Dima?”

“We’ve heard only that the action failed. We have to assume the worst. And your other friend, Marielle?” She and Marielle had both been right, she thought. They were after her too. He said something more, but she couldn’t catch it. Through the binoculars, she could see they were walking farther away, behind some stones. Shit, she thought.