Andrew Kaplan: Carrie's run

“So good to see you,” Carrie said in Arabic. “And how is your husband and family?”

“Good, alhamdulillah ”- thank God -Fatima said, pulling her aside, her eyes darting around. “What’s happened?” she whispered. Carrie had left her a one-word note, ya’ut , the Arabic word for “ruby,” their code for an emergency contact, under a potted urn in the Muslim cemetery near Boulevard Bayhoum. Julia’s husband monitored all her calls and e-mails; the dead drop was the only way to communicate with her.

“I’m being pulled from Beirut. Another assignment,” Carrie whispered as they pretended to shop together.

“Why?”

“I can’t say.” She took Julia’s hand. They walked hand-in-hand like children. “I’ll miss you. I wish I could take you with me.”

“I wish too,” Fatima said, looking away. “You go to real America, but for me it’s like the movies. A made-up place.”

“I’ll come back, I swear.”

“What will happen to me?”

“They’ll assign you to someone else. Not me.” Julia’s eyes welled up. She shook her head and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “They’ll be okay. I promise,” Carrie said.

“No they won’t. I won’t talk to anyone else. They’ll have to send you back.”

“You have to listen,” Carrie said. “They won’t do that.”

“Then, inshallah ”- God willing -“they’ll never get another word from me.”

“If there’s an emergency, use the cemetery. I’ll have someone monitor the dead drop,” she whispered.

“There is something I have to tell you.” She looked around to make sure they weren’t overheard and pulled Carrie close. “There’s going to be an attack against America. A big one.”

“How do you know?”

Fatima’s eyes darted around like a trapped animal’s. She took a few steps and motioned for Carrie to follow. She glanced around the corner of the aisle to make sure there was no one near.

“I overheard Abbas talking on his special cell phone. The one he only uses when it is important,” she whispered.

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know. But the way he stood and listened, someone of importance.”

“What about the attack?” Carrie whispered. “Any details? Time? Place? Method?”

“I don’t think they told him. I’m not even sure it’s Hezbollah. But it’s soon.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know. But he said ‘ khaliban zhada ,’ you understand?”

“I understand,” Carrie said. Very soon. She leaned close to Fatima’s ear. “Any idea how big or where?”

She shook her head. “But when he heard, Abbas said something. Allahu akbar. ” God is great , Carrie translated automatically. “We say this all the time.” She shrugged. “But it was the way he said it. I can’t explain, but it scared me. I wish I could help you more. Something very bad is going to happen.”

“This helps a lot. Truly. Are you okay?”

“No.” She looked around again. “I can’t stay. Someone might see us.”

“I know. Shokran. ” Thank you. Carrie squeezed her hand. “I have to go too. Be careful.”

“Carrie,” Fatima said. “You’re my only friend. Think of me. Otherwise, I think I’m lost forever.”

A horn honked outside. Virgil. Carrie took Fatima’s hand and put it to her own cheek.

“Me too,” she said.

Langley, Virginia

After four years in Beirut, plus time in Iraq, it felt strange driving the woodsy George Washington Memorial Parkway, handing the badge she’d gotten out of her safe-deposit box to the guard at the gate like an everyday commuter. Coming into the George Bush headquarters building, she was struck by how many people she didn’t know. No one gave her a second glance in the elevator. In a skirt, blouse, jacket and makeup for the office, she felt like she was wearing a disguise. I don’t belong here, she thought. Maybe I never did.

She’d been up all night, unable to sleep. When she closed her eyes to try to sleep she saw her father, Frank Mathison. Not as he was now, but how he was when she was a child back in Michigan. He’d lost his job at Ford Motor Company when she was six. She remembered her mother coming into her sister’s and her room to sleep with them, the three of them huddled under the covers while her father paced the house all night, saying nonstop that there was a miracle coming; he had seen the sign in computer code.

She remembered her father driving them up to New Baltimore on Lake St. Clair when she was in first grade in the middle of December, talking about the miracle and how they were to be witnesses, and sitting there on a dock near the water tower, away from the center of the town decorated for Christmas, all of them shivering, freezing cold, looking out at the gray waters of the lake for two days while her father kept saying, “It’s coming. Just you wait. It’s coming.”

And her mother shouting at him, “What’s coming, Frank? What’s the big miracle? Is Jesus gonna come strolling toward us across Anchor Bay? Because if he is and if the angels are coming with him, tell ’em to bring us some heaters, because me and the kids are freezing to death.”

“Do you see the water tower, Emma. It’s mathematics. Don’t you get it? The universe is mathematics. Computers are mathematics. Everything is math. And look where it sits. Right by the water.”

“What has math got to do with it? What are you talking about?”

“I measured it. It’s thirty-seven miles exactly from our front door to the water tower. This is where the miracle is going to happen. Thirty-seven.”

“What has thirty-seven miles got to do with anything?”

“It’s a prime number, Emma. It was in the computer code. And water is life. Moses struck the rock for water. Christ turned water into wine at Cana. Look at it. It’s coming. This is where it’s going to happen. Don’t you see?”

“It’s a damn water tower, Frank!”

Until finally they drove back to Dearborn, her father not saying anything, just driving like he wanted to kill someone, her mother yelling, “Slow down, Frank! Do you want to kill us?” and her big sister, Maggie, next to her, crying and screaming, “Stop, Daddy! Stop! Stop!” And when she got ready to go to school the next day, her mother telling her, “Don’t say anything about your father, understand?”

It wasn’t till later that she realized that whatever strange thing had taken her father over had taken them over too when she heard her parents arguing with each other at the top of their lungs in the middle of the night. Maggie told her to stay in bed, but she tiptoed out of their room and saw them in the kitchen, the walls and floor smeared with food and broken plates and her mother screaming:

“Three weeks! They said you haven’t been at work in three weeks without telling anyone! Of course they fired you! What the hell did you expect them to do? Give you a promotion?”

“I was busy. You’ll see, Emma. It’ll be good. They’ll be begging for me to come back. Don’t you see? It’s all about the miracle. That’s where everyone gets it wrong. They don’t understand. Remember those license plate numbers on the cars we passed coming back from New Baltimore? They were a code. I just have to figure out the numbers,” her father said.

“What are you talking about? Does anybody know what you’re talking about? What are we going to do? How are we going to live?”

“For God’s sakes, Emma. You think they can run those servers without me? Trust m e , they’ll call me back any time now. They’ll be begging for me to come back.”