Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

As Shada opened the door, four mujahideen with automatic weapons, she assumed AQI, burst in past her, followed by Abu Ubaida himself. She recognized him from the souk .

“It is late, my brother,” Romeo started to say, but Abu Ubaida cut him off.

“You have to come now. He wants to see you,” Abu Ubaida said.

“But my family-I promised them I’d stay home tonight,” Romeo said, gesturing at Shada and his mother, who came into the room.

“Are you sure you want them involved in this, Walid? He has questions, brother. So do I,” Abu Ubaida said as the four men hustled Romeo out of the house. On the video, Carrie could clearly hear the sound of car doors slamming and someone driving away as the two women just stood there, staring at the door. Virgil stopped the video.

“He’s blown, isn’t he?” Virgil said.

“Yes, but did you hear what Abu Ubaida said?” she said.

“That was him, wasn’t it?”

“Hell yes, it was him. Do you realize what this means? He said, ‘He wants to see you.’ There’s only one person who can give Abu Ubaida orders: Abu Nazir himself! We’ve got ’em both! Both in the same place at the same time! We call in a drone and we can eliminate both of them, once and for all! Virgil, you’re a genius!” she said, and hugged him. “Does he still have the cell phone we gave him?”

Virgil nodded. “So far,” he said.

“So we can track him?”

“Have a look,” he said, opening another window on his laptop and showing her a pulsing dot superimposed on a Google satellite image of Ramadi. It appeared to be on Highway 10 in al-Ta’mim District in the western part of the city, south of the canal.

“Do we know where that is?” she asked.

“I asked one of the policemen. He says his best guess is that it’s the porcelain factory. He says it’s ruined now because of the fighting, but it used to make sinks, toilet bowls, stuff like that.”

“We’ve got them,” she breathed. “We need to call in a strike.”

Virgil frowned. “Unless it’s a trap,” he said.

It was like a slap in the face. Of course, what was she thinking?

“What time was the video showing them coming and getting Romeo?” she asked.

“A little after midnight.”

She looked at her watch. It was just after eight A.M. So Romeo had been with Abu Ubaida and also, possibly, Abu Nazir for seven to eight hours. Or maybe not. She had to admit there was also the possibility that Abu Ubaida had split from Abu Nazir and that his comments to Romeo had been a ploy. Abu Ubaida had to have found the cell phone she had given Romeo. That cell phone was still on and Abu Ubaida had to assume it was being tracked.

No question, the probability was huge that Virgil was right. It was a trap. They might have been torturing Romeo this very second, if he wasn’t dead already. They wouldn’t have to torture him much for him to tell them everything he knew about Zahaba, the blond Arabic-speaking female CIA agent and her Iraqi sidekick. She felt queasy. It would make her al-Qaeda’s number one target in all of Iraq. Not to mention, Romeo was her asset, her responsibility. She’d put him into this situation.

Unless Abu Ubaida still trusted Romeo. In which case, there was a chance that Abu Ubaida had been telling the truth to Romeo and they could still kill both Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir today. Although she had to admit, the way that Abu Ubaida had spoken to Romeo certainly didn’t sound like he trusted him. What was it Romeo had said to her about Abu Ubaida in the teahouse? He doesn’t trust anyone. Anyone he doesn’t trust, he kills.

So which was it? Time to decide, Carrie.

If she called in a drone strike, Romeo would die too, along with whoever was with him in the porcelain factory. If it meant getting Abu Ubaida and maybe Abu Nazir, stopping the assassinations and a civil war that could mean tens of thousands of lives, it was worth it. Romeo was collateral damage.

But if it was a trap, it meant they knew they had to stop her. Tracking works both ways; the thought stopped her dead. Had they been tracking her?

“Even if it is a trap, we need to get to the Marine commander and have him order up an attack on the factory,” she told Virgil, motioning for him to follow. As she headed for the stairs, she saw Warzer coming up, his face twisted.

“Carrie,” he said. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“IED. On Highway 11 outside Fallujah. Dempsey’s dead.”

Al-Ta’mim, Ramadi, Iraq

It was the young Marine, Lance Corporal Martinez, who spotted it. A thin metal tube almost completely hidden under some debris in the middle of the street, just sticking out of the pavement.

“Probably pressure trigger,” he said. He had stopped their armored Humvee just two feet short of it. Another half second and they would have gone over it, and that would have been the end of her. They were all living on borrowed time, Carrie thought, wiping her forehead with her sleeve. The temperature was already in the high nineties. She wore an oversized Marine utility uniform with a desert camouflage pattern, her abaya and personal things in a backpack she kept next to her on the seat.

They were trying to make their way to the Government Center, where the regional Iraqi Provisional Government, protected by the 3/8 Marines-Third Battalion, Eighth Regiment-were headquartered in Ramadi. She had thought Ramadi was the deadliest place on the planet, but this part of the city was like something out of a World War II documentary. Not a single building was left intact; nothing was functioning, and nothing moved on the streets except a lone skeletal cat walking atop a pile of garbage. Everywhere she looked, there were shattered buildings, the rusting hulks of destroyed vehicles, debris and rotting garbage.

Martinez backed the vehicle up a few feet, then carefully drove around the metal tube, and they continued down the empty street. Virgil and Warzer, in the backseats, scanned the ruined buildings and rubble for snipers, while Carrie, in the front passenger seat, tried to hold it together, her hands trembling.

She had killed Dempsey, she kept thinking. The whole operation was crazy, but with the battle ramping up in Ramadi, Abu Ubaida about to move on Baghdad and all her doubts about Romeo, who was at the least a double agent, sending him down Highway 11 had to have been a suicide mission. If she had been tracking Romeo to get to Abu Ubaida, it was also possible Abu Ubaida might have been doing the same, using Romeo to track her and her team.

Except what else could she do? A pair of assassinations that would launch a civil war was about to start. Romeo wouldn’t have lied about it because if it didn’t happen, she would have destroyed him and his family just by having the Marines be nice and help them.

There was no choice. She had to get the intel to Langley. Nothing else mattered. Dempsey had been a Marine. He would understand that, she told herself. Only now Abu Ubaida and maybe Abu Nazir were within striking distance of their goal-and Dempsey was dead.

“Where? What happened?” she had asked Warzer, so stunned she could barely breathe.

“According to the Iraqi security force, it was just a few kilometers before the bridge into Fallujah. That empty stretch of Highway 11 between the Duban Canal and Lake Habbaniya. Something on the road made Dempsey slow down and when he did, they detonated an IED. They said it left a crater four meters deep in the highway. I don’t think there was much left.” Warzer grimaced.

Oh God, oh God, she thought. And then the question she couldn’t help asking.

“Any idea if it was random, or were they waiting for him?”