Andrew Kaplan: Carrie's run

They’d blown the safe house door. Ears ringing, she smashed the glass in the balcony door with the Glock, then put her hand through the jagged hole and opened the door.

Putting her shoes back on to avoid stepping on broken glass, she ran to the apartment’s front door, unlocked it and raced out into the corridor and down the stairs to the ground floor. Another few seconds and she was out the service door to an alley in back. She went cautiously down the alley to a side street. It looked clear. No watchers from the Mercedes around the corner. Taking off her heels again, she ran as hard as she could, her slender figure disappearing into the darkness.

Central District, Beirut, Lebanon

“What went wrong? And don’t bullshit me. You’re on very thin ice, Carrie,” Davis Fielding said, rubbing his hands together as though he were cold. They were in his office in the old-fashioned building on Rue Maarad, near Nejmeh Square, with its iconic clock tower, where Beirut Station maintained a cover company, Middle East Maritime Insurance SA, a cover so solid they actually sold policies.

“You tell me. Nightingale was your idea. Dima was your agent. I just inherited her,” Carrie answered, rubbing her eyes. She felt tired, grimy in the same clothes she had worn the previous day, having only slept a few hours on Virgil’s living room couch after a night spent going all over Beirut, looking for Dima.

“Don’t pull that shit on me,” Fielding growled. “She was your bird. You ran her. You brought Nightingale to me and I okayed an approach. That’s all. Toe in the water. Nothing more. Next thing I know, you’re being chased all the hell over Beirut by so-called assassins and leading them right to our safe house door! You’ve jeopardized our position here, which, as you know, is damn delicate,” he said, tapping the desk with his index finger.

“I didn’t lead them anywhere,” Carrie said, thinking, Why doesn’t he see it? He should have been patting her on the back for escaping. How could he be so thick? “I got away. I was clean. I ditched a car at the Crowne Plaza and walked away a hundred percent clean, but just to be sure I spent an hour in the mall, walking around blocks, reversing, you name it. There was nothing. Not mobile, not on foot, not electronic, not with a telescope from twenty miles away. You better face up to it, Davis. We have a security breach.”

“The hell we do. You screwed it up and now you’re running for cover. I warned you, Mathison. We play Beirut Rules here. Now, let’s go over it again. First of all, where’s Dima?”

“You tell me. After the fiasco at the contact and again at the safe house, I spent half the night looking for her. Instead of yelling at me, how about considering that she might be a double? Maybe she set me up. Because if not, when did you become so trusting?”

“We don’t even know that you were set up. Maybe you panicked because Nightingale got the contact location wrong. Maybe he was on Lebanese time. Maybe he was drunk. Shit, Carrie. This was supposed to be a fly-by, that’s all. Get a look at him; let him get a look at your tits and set up the next one. You panicked. Admit it,” Fielding said, face red as Santa Claus, but his eyes cold and blue as ice.

“Not true. You weren’t there. I was. He motioned to me,” she said, showing him. “He’s supposed to be a senior intelligence officer and he motions to a contact he’s never met to come right over like we’re housewives in the park? Are you kidding?”

“Maybe that’s how they do it in the GSD. Maybe he thought you got it wrong. You’re a woman, for crying out loud. No man in the Middle East is going to take you seriously. Based on last night, they’re probably right.”

She could feel her heart pounding. What was going on here? There’d been a serious screw-up that nearly led to her capture or death. He should have been supporting her; not ripping her a new one. “There were two men in a van and four in a Mercedes. They tried to kidnap me, dammit! They shot at me. Here.” She showed him the scab on her leg where the piece of sidewalk had hit her.

“Yes-and then you led them right to the safe house, which for all I know was the object of the exercise for them in the first place!” Fielding snapped. “This is going in your 201,” he added, referring to the CIA’s personnel file on each employee. “Don’t think it isn’t.”

Carrie stood up.

“Listen, Davis,” she said, trying to control herself. “There’s something bigger going on here. Has it occurred to you to wonder why they wanted a CIA case officer when if Nightingale was a double, they could have fed us garbage for years and we’d have eaten it like pigs at a trough? Ask yourself why.”

“Sit down,” Fielding snapped. “Where do you think you’re going? I’m not done with you.”

She sat. Inside, she was shaking with anger. She could have ripped his eyeballs out, she was so furious. She was that strong, that powerful. Oh God, was she going on one of her flights? She could feel control slipping; she was almost on the verge of killing him. Control yourself, Carrie. You can do it.

“Dima set the contact up. We need to consider her,” she said carefully, trying to hold it in.

“What about her cell phone?”

She shook her head. “Nothing in the dead drop either.” For emergency contacts with Dima, she used the hollow of a tree in Sanayeh Park. When she’d gone there in the middle of the night after trawling the clubs, the hollow was empty. She had left a chalk mark on a branch, indicating that Dima should contact her ASAP, but she had a bad feeling about hearing from her.

“Where else did you look?”

“Le Gray, Whiskey, the Palais, her place-and you don’t have to say it; I was careful-everywhere. No one’s seen her. I picked the lock in her apartment. She hadn’t been home. It looked like she hadn’t been there for a couple of days.”

“So she’s shacked up with the latest hunk from Riyadh with cash in his pocket, so what?”

“Or she’s being tortured or is already dead. There’s been a security breach, Davis. You can’t ignore the possibility.”

“So you say,” he said, biting his lip. “What else?”

“There was no one in the safe house,” she said. “What was that about?”

“Budget. Bean counters in Washington.” He shrugged. “They’re running the universe. We had to cut back. So according to you, you were clean. They chased you. You got away. No one followed you to Achilles? What about this older woman you got the car from?” He steepled his index fingers, his blue eyes lasering into her. “She gives her car to a complete stranger. Why would she do that?”

She swallowed. “She was a decent person. Woman to woman. She could see I was in trouble.” She could see I was desperate, she thought.

“Or maybe she was one of theirs and told them where to find you. Either that, or they persuaded her,” he said, making a gesture like pulling out a fingernail.

Is he crazy? she wondered. Where does he come up with this crap?

“She had no idea where I was going. I told her I’d leave the car at the Crowne Plaza and I did. She knew nothing about the Achilles location.”

“No, but like everyone in Beirut, she knew the Crowne was on Rue Hamra, so where you were going couldn’t be far. All they had to do was blanket the area. Fifty watchers in the Friday-night crowd and you didn’t even spot one.” He shook his head disgustedly. “The only amateur in this whole ridiculous fiasco is sitting right across from me.”

“I don’t believe this. I manage to escape a deadly Hezbollah trap and it’s my fault?” she said, standing again. She felt sick to her stomach. What was happening? Was he firing her? “What are you saying? Would you rather I’d died or been captured?”