Andrew Kaplan: Carrie's run

I’m home, she thought. All my life I’ve been looking for a place to belong, never felt at home anywhere. Growing up with her father and mother had been like living in a foreign country-how else could her mother have left like that without saying a word? — and incredibly, home had turned out to be here. Iraq. The Middle East. In the middle of a war. As their convoy drove under overpasses, gunners swiveling in unison like dancers to cover them against anyone who might drop a grenade or IED onto one of their vehicles, past Iraqis in cars who had stopped on the shoulder to let their convoy pass by, staring at them unblinking, she realized it was the risk, the game, that she was addicted to.

As if bipolar wasn’t bad enough, she had to be an adrenaline junkie too. Or was it something else? she wondered as they made the turn onto the Qadisaya Expressway, thick with traffic. They drove past palm trees and buildings, some pockmarked with holes from rockets and bullets. It’s like crossing a finish line; something is ending or beginning, she thought.

Ever since that night in Ashrafieh when Nightingale had tried to ambush her, she’d been on a run, like when she was at Princeton. The longest run ever. Only now it was over. When she was running NCAA, she’d imagined she could run forever. Now she knew better.

Take a breath, Carrie, she told herself. Time for a new run. This time the rabbit she was chasing was Abu Nazir, as the convoy drove through the checkpoint into the Green Zone, past the parade ground and the Unknown Soldier Monument, back to Yafa Street and the al-Rasheed Hotel.

Abu Nazir. What was there about him? Something truly frightening. Men would rather die than face him. Bilal Mohamad was no jihadi religious nut and no pushover either. He was truly evil. She had felt her skin crawl just being in his presence. How was it Davis Fielding hadn’t spotted it? Or was Fielding so blinded by the sex? Maybe it was like Saul had said: his head was stuck in the ground. But Bilal had wanted to live. He had been calmly chopping up a gay friend of his so that Abu Nazir would believe him dead when she walked in. Yet when confronted with the chance to stay alive, even Bilal had preferred to kill himself rather than face Abu Nazir.

Well, Abu Nazir, the next dance is you and me, she thought grimly.

Walking into the hotel’s marble lobby, she was greeted by Warzer, carrying a big bouquet of roses.

“ Marhaban! Welcome, Carrie. It’s good to have you back,” Warzer said, handing her the roses.

“ Shokran , Warzer.” She smelled the roses. “Won’t your wife be jealous?”

“She would be, if I were foolish enough to tell her. How is Virgil?”

“Virgil is well. He’s hoping to come back.”

She left her rolling suitcase with the hotel porter and the two of them went outside and crossed over to the Convention Center grounds. Security had improved since she’d been there last; the Convention Center was ringed by concentric layers of protection. In addition to personnel, surveillance cameras and sensors were everywhere, she noted.

She and Warzer presented their credentials to the U.S. MPs at their sandbagged emplacement, again to Blackwater guards and at a third checkpoint manned by Iraqi ISF soldiers at the front entrance.

“How are things, truly?” she asked Warzer as they walked down the open hallway.

“Things are hanging by a thread, Carrie. The Iranians and the Mahdi Army are smuggling in arms and explosives. The Kurds are going their own way. The Americans are caught in the middle-and once Saddam’s trial is over and he is executed. .”

“Is that a foregone conclusion?”

“Absolutely. He will be hung. Very soon now.”

“Then what?”

“That depends on Abu Nazir-and also you, Carrie.” He smiled.

They were at the door of the “U.S. Refugee Aid Service.” They went inside the reception area and she told the female CIA staffer to let Perry Dreyer know she was there and to get her a vase for her roses, which she handed to the staffer. The woman got up and left, then came back and said to follow her.

They walked into a large bullpen of a room where CIA operatives sat at computers or worked on telephones, the space busy with activity. On the wall, someone had posted framed photographs of Ambassador Robert Benson and Prime Minister Wael al-Waliki in their combat utility uniforms. There was one of the station chief, Perry Dreyer, and on a wall by themselves, the photographs of two United States Marines, labeled “U.S. Marines Missing in Action, presumed captured by AQI, Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

The first photograph was of an African-American, “U.S. Marine Scout Sniper Thomas Walker. Captured outside Haditha, Anbar Province, May 19, 2003.” Three years. A hell of a long time to be held by al-Qaeda, if he was still alive, poor bastard. Probably not a chance in hell he was alive. Haditha, she mused. The last known location of Abu Nazir. Where she was headed next.

The second photograph was labeled “U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, Captured outside Haditha, Anbar Province, May 19, 2003.” They’d been taken together. She studied the photograph carefully.

It was an interesting face, she thought.