Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

She spotted Nightingale through the gap in the seats. He was accompanied by three of his Hezbollah guards. The son of a bitch really never went anywhere unprotected. She’d had no choice but to bring the extra firepower.

“Salaam. We just met. This better be good,” she heard him say to Rana.

“Judge for yourself. I was with the American yesterday when I came back from Baalbek,” she said.

“In his bed?”

“Of course. When he was asleep, I got to his computer. Here are the files,” she said, handing him a flash drive that Carrie had given her.

“Is that all?”

She shook her head. “There’s more. It’s about the Americans doing something in Iraq.”

“Tell me,” he demanded.

“Mohammed Siddiqi. They’ve learned about him. They know he’s Iraqi, not Qatari,” Rana said.

Carrie strained to hear; every syllable was critical.

“ Khara ,” Nightingale cursed. “What else?”

“They know about you too. They think-” she started to say, but never finished because at that instant, the two FLs from the passageway emerged, one of them firing at Nightingale’s men. One of the Hezbollah guards toppled face-forward; the second swiveled and returned fire.

Oh God, no, Carrie thought. Before she could say or do anything, Nightingale had pulled a pistol from his jacket. Don’t! Not Rana! her mind screamed. Don’t!

“You whore!” he shouted, firing the gun point-blank into Rana’s face.

Suddenly, there was an explosion from the parking area. The grenade launcher, Carrie thought, cringing as she half-stood and shouted in Arabic: “Don’t kill him!”

Near her, Virgil and Ziad rose up, firing their M4s into the darkness, streaked with flashes of gunfire.

Basta Tahta, Beirut, Lebanon

She and Virgil split up by the French embassy next to the racetrack to ensure one of them would make it back. Taking buses and Services back and forth across the northern part of the city to make sure she was clean, she headed for Iroquois, the safe-house apartment on Avenue Independence in the Basta Tahta quarter. When she knocked on the apartment door using the code, three knocks, then two, Davis Fielding opened it, a Beretta pistol pointed at her.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Fielding said.

“Have you got any tequila? I need a drink,” she said.

“Just vodka. Belvedere,” he said, gesturing at a cupboard.

She went over and poured herself a glass of vodka and took a gulp, then flopped into an armchair. It didn’t feel like there was anyone else in the apartment, which surprised her. Fielding rarely went anywhere without a couple of CIA operations personnel with him. And he never went to the safe house except for interrogations. So why was he here? she wondered.

Fielding sat on a sofa, framed by a curtain that completely covered the window behind him. He was still holding the gun, she noticed.

“Planning on shooting me, Davis?” she asked.

“Might not be the worst idea in the world. How many did you kill this time, Mathison?” he said, making a face.

“That’s right, Davis,” she said, taking another drink, feeling it burn going down and thinking, Thank God for the alcohol, at this moment not caring how it reacted with her meds. “People die. Tonight it was your girlfriend, Rana. Nightingale shot her in the face. She’s not pretty anymore. Cheers,” she said, and took another sip.

The blood drained from his face. She could see how shocked he was. His hand clenched the pistol so tightly his knuckles turned white. She wondered if he really was going to shoot her.

“This time you’re finished. Saul’s little pinup girl,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Before I’m done with you, you’ll be in a federal prison.” He stood up and began pacing as he talked. “I’ve been onto you all along. Did you really think you could come to my station, my city, and me not know about it? You stupid amateur. I was matching wits in Moscow with the real professionals, the KGB, while you were still crapping in your diapers.”

“Missed a few beats since then though, haven’t you?” she said. “Like how your prize pigeon, Dima Hamdan, came to New York to kill the Vice-President of the United States and blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, and not a peep out of Beirut Station. Or that she was Sunni, not Christian. Or that your mistress was a double agent for Nightingale, who was himself doubling for both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda in Iraq, and nothing, not one word, from the great Davis Fielding, King of Beirut, just a great big pile of nothing!”

He stopped pacing and stared at her, his mouth working like he was trying to swallow but couldn’t.

“We looked for Dima. She disappeared,” he said.

“Is that so?” she said. “She filed a DS-160 using the cover name Jihan Miradi, right through your own lousy embassy, and you didn’t catch it. Not to mention that your mistress was passing on everything you touched via Nightingale to Abu Nazir in Iraq. So the only question is, are you totally incompetent or a traitor, you son of a bitch?”

He looked at the pistol in his hand like it was some kind of alien object he had never seen before. His finger, she noticed, was on the trigger.

“Rana wasn’t my girlfriend,” he said finally. “I barely knew her.”

“Bullshit!” she snapped. “You telephoned her multiple times a week for months. Then you had the messages deleted from Company files and the NSA database. It was done the same day you ordered me out of Beirut-and by the way, I’d really like to know how you managed that little trick.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Sure you do, Davis. You didn’t think anybody would ever find out, did you? Well guess what, asshole? I know. And I’m not the only one.”

He looked at her strangely, with a sick little smile. She wondered if he was mentally stable. Funny, coming from me, she thought.

“You think you know something, Mathison, but you don’t. There are things going on; you don’t have a clue,” he said, straightening. “Tell me about your latest screwup. How did Rana die?”

“We were going to snatch Nightingale. He was both a double and a bridge agent between Hezbollah and, we think, al-Qaeda in Iraq. He’s linked with Abu Ubaida and possibly Abu Nazir. We especially wanted to know about Dima’s boyfriend, Mohammed Siddiqi, who, by the way, you also never mentioned to anyone back at Langley and who may have been the link. Only the Forces Libanaises jumped the gun. Nightingale shot her.”

He looked bleakly at the window curtain, as if he could see through it. It made the room feel closed, like a prison cell.

“Poor Rana,” he said, letting the gun hang by his side. He went back to the sofa and sat down. “She was such a beautiful woman. Smart. When you were with her, people noticed you.”

“She was your mistress?”

“She was a contact. We may have had sex a few times, but. .” He hesitated.

“What’s the matter, Davis? She wouldn’t let you have any? Or was it you who couldn’t get it up?”

He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

“You really are a bitch, aren’t you?”

“But not a traitor,” she said, looking around. “There’s nobody here. Just between us girls, you didn’t have a clue what she was? Who she was working for?”

He almost imperceptibly shook his head. “What about Nightingale?” he asked.

“He’s dead too. Damned FLs. Two of his Hezbollah guards got away. We had one wounded FL.”

“So you got nothing?”

“Not exactly,” she said, taking a cell phone out of her pocket. “This is Nightingale’s.”

He held out his free hand. “Let me see it,” he said.