Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“No. I’m sorry,” she said. What else was there to say? It had to have hit him hard, the first time they’d ever had a shot at both of them together. “On the other matter, I’m sending an Aardwolf.” An Aardwolf was a Flash Critical report, the most critically urgent, highest-priority type of communication within the CIA. In theory, when Aardwolf came in, the director of the CIA was supposed to get it within one hour of its receipt at Langley.

“I’ll alert Beanstalk,” Saul said. If he was pissed at her failure in Ramadi, he wasn’t showing it. Beanstalk was Perry Dreyer, CIA Baghdad station chief. He had given her Dempsey and she had killed him. She wouldn’t have blamed him if Dreyer wouldn’t give her the time of day now, although if anyone had a clue about how things really were in Iraq and what she’d had to deal with in Ramadi, not the official bullshit the administration was putting out, it would be Perry. “Listen, are you sure it’s actionable?”

So Saul was doubting her, she thought. It was a fair question, though. She was basing her intel entirely on Romeo, who had been not only a double, but a duplicitous al-Qaeda son of a bitch. Except-she’d seen Romeo with his kids. He loved them and he had to know that if the Marines smothered them with help and money, it would get back to Abu Ubaida and Abu Nazir in a New York minute. Romeo also knew that if the assassination attempts hadn’t happened within a week, she’d have known he was lying and would have acted. The intel he’d given her had to be good. The fact that they’d beheaded Romeo and killed Dempsey proved Abu Ubaida knew that Romeo had passed along actionable intel.

Sometime during the long night, before she and her team got to the porcelain factory, Romeo, tortured by Abu Ubaida, had given it up. If Romeo had been feeding her false intel, they’d have roughed him up but would have kept him alive to feed her more garbage and maybe lure her into another trap.

A slim reed, but all she had.

“It’s highly actionable. Get everything ready. I’ll be in Golf Zulu”-GZ, the Green Zone, Baghdad-“as soon as I can,” she said, and hung up.

She said good-bye to Virgil at the hospital and, using her cell phone, tried texting Warzer, hoping he had caught a helicopter ride to Camp Victory, adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and had managed to make it back to the Green Zone.

“how is v?” Warzer texted back, asking about Virgil.

“good. r u back? we shd meet,” she texted.

“im back. meet clk twr my district fajr -2.” Thank God, she thought, feeling the first sense of relief in days. Warzer had made it safely back to Baghdad.

She remembered his telling her that he and his family lived in Adhamiya, a Sunni district on the east bank of the Tigris. She would have to find out where the clock tower was, probably near a mosque or a main square. Fajr was the dawn prayer for Muslims and the minus two was a little piece of misdirection that meant plus two hours, so they would meet about eight A.M.

She boarded the helicopter a half hour later, munching a Subway sandwich she’d bought from a mini-mall of American fast-food stores like Subway, Burger King and Pizza Hut on base. For most of the servicemen and women living and working behind the blast walls and fortifications of the big American base, it was as if they had never left home; they had no connection to the Middle East at all.

Walking out to the helicopter, she could smell the smoke and see black columns rising from burn pits, where, someone had told her, they burned the base’s garbage. It was almost dusk, the helicopter casting a long shadow across the tarmac. Being at this bustling American base made Ramadi feel unreal, like a different universe.

The helicopter lifted off and flew low over Highway 1, south to Baghdad. Traffic on the highway was light as night approached. It was far too dangerous to be on the road after dark. As they flew over the outskirts of the city, she spotted something she hadn’t paid attention to on the ground. From the air, Baghdad was the palm tree capital of the universe, the setting sun turning the Tigris River to reddish gold.

Adhamiya, Baghdad, Iraq

Perry Dreyer was waiting for her in his office at the Convention Center. The sign on the door read “U.S. Refugee Aid Service” and was a few doors down from the USAID office where she had first met Dempsey.

Carrie waited at the reception desk while an American woman in her thirties in a neat skirt and white blouse checked out her dirty Marine utility uniform with a big rust-colored stain on the shirt from Virgil’s wound, her unwashed face, tangled hair and backpack slung over her shoulder. Go to hell, Carrie thought. You think you’re in Iraq, try Ramadi instead of the Green Zone, honey.

The woman picked up the phone, said, “Yes,” then, “Come with me,” and got up and led Carrie through a big modern office filled with CIA personnel at computers into a large private office, where Dreyer, an intense, curly-haired man in slacks and a plaid shirt and wearing steel-rimmed glasses, seated behind a glass-topped desk, gestured for her to sit.

“How’s Virgil?” he asked.

“Good. The bullet hit the fibular artery in his leg, but they were able to stop the bleeding. They’re fixing it and as soon as he’s stabilized, he’ll go to Ramstein, then home.”

He nodded, his eyes on the bloodstains on her shirt. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“No bullet holes in you? Everything good?”

“No, everything is not good. Dempsey is dead, Virgil’s out and we lost Romeo. So no, I’m not ‘good,’ but I’m operational, if that’s what you mean.”

“Whoa,” he said, holding up his hand. “Take it easy, Carrie. You’re shooting at the wrong guy. Saul didn’t have to sell you to me. I wanted you here. And I was right. What you’ve accomplished in just a few days back in-country is little short of miraculous. So ease up. And call me Perry.”

She slumped in her chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Since I screwed up on Dempsey, I’ve been ready to kill somebody. It just landed on you.”

“Dempsey was a casualty. We’ve taken a lot here-and something tells me we’re about to take a lot more. You’re going to do an Aardwolf?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll give you a computer with a secure JWICS link.” He pronounced it “Jay-wicks.” The Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS, was the CIA’s computer network, designed for highly secure, encrypted top secret communications. “Maybe it’ll finally wake up those idiots in Washington. What about the assassination attempts and the planned attacks? What do you need from me?”

“This new Shiite guy, al-Waliki, the new prime minister.”

“What about him?”

“Secretary Bryce is the appetizer; he’s the real target. AQI gets him, they’ve got their civil war. I need to meet with him. We have to protect him.”

Dreyer grimaced. “Not so easy. This belongs to State. They’re very proprietary. Our fearless leader, Ambassador Benson, has issued orders. No one meets with Waliki but him.”

She looked at him incredulously. “You’re joking, right? We’ve got Marines having to live in their own shit in Ramadi, IEDs and headless bodies from Baghdad to Syria, this whole damn country’s about to explode and this guy’s playing bureaucracy games?”

“He’s afraid.” He frowned. “The Kurds are ready to start their own country, the Sunnis want a war and the Iranians are making moves with Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiites to come in and pick up the pieces. Benson’s the president’s boy. We can’t go around him.”

My God, she thought. Was it possible that Dempsey and Dima and Rana and even Fielding had died for nothing? To have America lose the war and have so many die because of bureaucracy?