Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“Don’t move. Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said, edging toward the bathroom door.

“Of course. You’re already nervous. Why wouldn’t you be? I don’t want you to shoot me by accident.”

She risked a quick glance at the bathroom. There was a man’s naked body in the bathtub. Its head and hands had been cut off, the head sitting neatly atop the hands at the foot of the tub. The whirring sound she had heard was an electric carving knife, still plugged in to the bathroom shaving outlet. Feeling nauseous, she sensed motion behind her and whirled back, ready to fire. Bilal had moved slightly, but only to wipe his bloodstained hands on the bedspread.

“Don’t move!” she snapped. “Who was he?”

“Daleel Ismail. He always fancied me. You understand. You’re an attractive woman. People like us, we can’t help it if men fancy us. Poor Daleel. He thought he was finally going to do me. That’s the thing about life. You can never be sure if you’re going to be the one doing the screwing or getting screwed,” he said.

“Why’d you kill him?” she asked.

“Can’t you guess? Listen, can I take this plastic off?” He tugged at the garbage bag he was wearing. “It’s hot and the idea of dying while wearing this is disgusting. Unless you’ll let me continue what I was doing? No?” he said, looking at her. “Well, I’m taking it off then.”

He pulled the plastic covering over his head and tossed it onto the bed.

“We don’t have to stand here. Shall we have a drink and talk about it like the civilized murderers we are?” he said, walking to the bedroom door and into the main room. “I know you don’t trust me. You can watch as I wash my hands. The human body really is a messy thing, isn’t it? Amazing that we manage to idealize and sexually fantasize about it as much as we do.”

She followed him to the bar, where she held the Beretta on him while he washed his hands in the bar’s sink. He dried his hands on a towel.

“What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Tequila if you’ve got it. If not, Scotch,” she said.

“Scotch. Highland Park,” he said, checking the bottles behind the bar. He poured them both glasses and gestured for her to join him on twin ultramodern armchairs in the main room.

“What are we drinking to?” she asked.

“To us both still being alive-for the moment,” he said, and drank. She did too.

“This Daleel whatever-his-name-is, why’d you kill him?”

“He looked like me. Same size, height, musculature. People sometimes mistook him for me. I don’t know why he couldn’t understand my not wanting to do him. It would have been too much like masturbation.”

Suddenly, she understood.

“You were faking your own death. That’s why the head and hands. To make it hard to identify the body. They would assume it was you. What were you going to do with the head and hands? Dump them in the Mediterranean?”

“You see, you are a clever girl. All right if I smoke?” he said, reaching for a cigarette in an ivory-inlaid box on the glass coffee table. “I know what ridiculous Puritans you Americans are about these things. It’s okay to be a murderer, but one mustn’t smoke.” He lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled.

“What about DNA? They’d find out it wasn’t you.”

“Seriously?” He looked at her as if she’d suggested that a caveman program a computer. “This is the Levant, not Manhattan. There’s no database, no science. The purpose of police work here is to destroy your political enemies, not solve crime.”

“Where were you going?” she asked.

“Actually, it was a ridiculous choice. Death or living in New Zealand. Those two are virtually indistinguishable.”

“Who were you running from? Us?”

“There really is no limit to American arrogance, is there? Why be afraid of you? Become infamous with Americans and the worst that can happen is you get your own reality TV show. Can’t you figure it out? You don’t look stupid; still, people can fool you.” He exhaled a stream of smoke at her.

“What about Davis Fielding? You were lovers?”

“He called me. Can you imagine? All those years, using Rana to pretend he was straight, and him thinking he was running her, when in fact, between Rana and I, we milked him for every piece of intelligence in the Middle East. He called to say good-bye, the sentimental idiot. He was as bad a spy as he was a lover.”

Looking at him, with his oddly boyish face and white-blond hair, she suddenly understood.

“Abu Nazir. That’s why you killed Fielding. He’s shutting things down. That’s why you’re running,” she said.

“So,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke at her. “Not entirely stupid. So what’s it to be-Carrie, isn’t it?” He smiled nastily, sending a bolt of fear through her at the thought that he knew her real identity. She was seeing the real man. Worse, whatever he was going to do, he had made his mind up. She needed to get her people in here now. “You see, I did get everything out of Fielding. So, Carrie, are you going to let me get back to what I was doing and let me disappear? Or are you going to do something ridiculous, like putting me in a cell with those imbecile jihadis at Guantánamo Bay?”

“Neither. You’re going to work for us now,” she said, and, looking around, spoke into the air: “You know, flowers would do wonders for this place.”

Bilal sat up straight. “Who am I to spy on? Abu Nazir?” he asked.

She just stared at him. The sounds of Saunders and Chandler running in were combined with the sight of Boyce rappelling down onto the balcony.

“ Ya Allah , you don’t know Abu Nazir at all, do you?” he said.

Reaching under the seat cushion of his chair, he pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol. Before she could react or say or do anything, he raised it and fired a bullet into his head.

Amman, Jordan

“The Roman Theater was built, as you might guess, in Roman times during the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, in years 138 to 161 of the Common Era. In those days, the city of Amman was being called ‘Philadelphia.’ So you see, the city in America gets his name from our city, Amman,” the tour guide, a curly-haired young Jordanian in Oakley sunglasses, told the half dozen tourists clustered around him. They were standing in the highest row of an ancient semicircular stone amphitheater gouged into the side of a hill in the middle of bustling downtown Amman.

Seated by herself in a row about halfway down, Carrie watched as one of the tourists, a bearded American wearing sunglasses and a trilby hat against the hot sun, which would’ve looked ridiculous on anyone else but on him seemed exactly right, detached himself from the little group and made his way down the stone aisle to where she was sitting.

“What do they say about mad dogs and Englishmen?” Saul said, sitting next to her.

“Why’d he do it, Saul?” she asked. “Fielding. What was the big deal about being gay? I mean, who gives a shit? And why’d he go to such lengths to hide it? A phony mistress, an expensive one, who opened him to moles, blackmail? It makes no sense.”

“You’re too young. Davis Fielding went back to the old KGB days, the Cold War, when gays were considered serious security risks. Remember, those Brits from Cambridge who turned out to be KGB spies-Philby, Burgess, Maclean-were all gay. The stuff of John le Carré novels. Back then, the prevailing view was that gays were more susceptible to being blackmailed. There was even a big court case about it. Bottom line, in those days you couldn’t be in the CIA if you were gay. It would have been the end of his career. Fielding knew that.”