Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“What do we do?”

Saul nodded. “Fielding put it on you and for the time being, I have to leave it there. You try to fight this, and I won’t be able to help you. That’s how it is,” he said, raising his hands.

“So I’m supposed to be the good little girl. Shut up, bend over and let ’em do whatever they want?”

“And live to fight another day.” Saul nodded. “Look, for what it’s worth, I agree with you about one thing. This whole thing with Nightingale smells fishy as hell. At a minimum, Fielding should’ve sent you in there with a support team. I’m not going to let you sit around wasted.” He got up and came around the desk; the two of them were side by side, leaning back on it. He believed her. He was still behind her, she thought, breathing a sigh of relief.

“So?” she said.

“Do you remember what I told you when I pulled you early from your training at the Farm? My beautiful golden girl with a brain like Stephen Hawking.” He smiled. “Do you remember what I said?”

“About how I could learn the rest of tradecraft in the field-and the pond?”

“That you were too big a fish for this pond. We needed you in the ocean.”

“But that sometimes the only way to swim with the sharks is to be a shark. I remember. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get Nightingale. And find out about this attack. But we’re going to do it here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ll be liaising between us, the Middle East Division and the Counterterrorism Center. They’re unofficially absorbing Alec Station.” Alec Station was CIA-speak for the only CIA station assigned not a locale but a specific target: the al-Qaeda terrorist network. “You’ll report to Estes.” He leaned close and she could smell his aftershave. Polo, Ralph Lauren. “But you’ll work for me.”

“So now we’re spying on ourselves?”

“Who better? It’s what we do,” he said.

“What about Julia’s intel? There’s an attack coming, Saul. Something big, and we both know it.”

He took a breath and exhaled.

“How much time have we got?” he asked.

“A couple of weeks maybe. Julia’s husband said soon. His exact words were ‘ khaliban zhada .’ Very soon.”

Georgetown, Washington, DC

It was the song that brought it back. Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One.” 1998. Her junior year at Princeton. The year of Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love , and her first big sexual relationship-beyond fumbling when your parents and sister weren’t home and getting your thighs sticky wet in high school-an almost-crush on John, her tall, unbelievably bright poly sci professor, who introduced her to tequila shots, oral sex and jazz music.

“When I was a kid it was all Madonna, Mariah, Luther Vandross, Boyz II Men. The closest to jazz was my dad once in a while maybe listening to a little Dave Brubeck.”

“You’re joking, right? You don’t know jazz? Miles Davis, Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Louis Armstrong? The greatest music ever invented or that ever will be. The one truly original thing we Americans gave the world, and you don’t know? In a way, I envy you.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got a whole new continent to explore, better than anything you can imagine.”

“Better than sex?”

“That’s the beauty of it, gorgeous. We can do both at the same time.”

Nineteen ninety-eight: the last time she ever ran the fifteen hundred. A long time ago, she thought.

She was sitting in a pub on M Street in Georgetown, downing her third Patrón Silver margarita, when the Shania video came on the TV perched behind the bar.

“Remember this? Nineteen ninety-eight. I was in college,” she said, indicating the song to Dave, the guy nursing a Heineken on the bar stool next to her. He was a curly-haired early-forties DOJ attorney in an off-the-rack suit and a Rolex watch that he made sure you caught a glimpse of, his finger brushing her forearm as though neither of them knew it was there or what he was thinking. There was a white band of skin on his ring finger where he’d taken off his wedding ring, so he was either divorced or out trolling, she thought.

“I was a law intern. For me it was Puff Daddy. Been around the world, uh-huh, uh-huh ,” he half-sang, moving his shoulders in a manner that was midway between hopeless and semisexy. He wasn’t terrible looking. She hadn’t decided whether to let him get her into bed or not.

She had to force herself not to think about work. That was why she had gone out. Her inquiries were going nowhere. If anything, instead of finding answers, the questions were multiplying and getting more troubling.

For three days straight, she’d been working the computer. Going nonstop. Sleeping at her desk, living on crackers from the vending machine. She went over everything the Counterterrorism Center had on contacts between the Syrian GSD and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Reported contacts. Sightings. Cell phone and e-mail records. Most of it pure data, the everyday sludge of intelligence work. Saul had once compared it to mining for diamonds. “You have to go through tons of debris to every once in a while spot something that glitters. Something that might actually be useful.”

Interestingly, some of the best of it was intel that she herself had supplied, obtained from her source, Julia.

Other than the lead from Dima, there wasn’t much on Nightingale, a.k.a. Taha al-Douni. A graduate of Damascus University in mechanical engineering, he’d first attracted attention from Moscow Station, nine years ago, trying to do business with the big Russian arms company Rosoboronexport. She studied the surveillance photo. It had been taken on a wide snowy street in Moscow, lots of traffic, maybe Tverskaya Street, she thought. Although he was younger, thinner and in an overcoat and big floppy-eared fur hat, it was Nightingale all right, the man who had beckoned to her from the café across the street in Beirut.

No information on where he lived, wife, kids, his work in the GSD. Talk to me, Nightingale, she thought. Where do you work? How high up are you? Where do you fit between the GSD and Hezbollah? Who do you care about? Who do you put your dick in? But combing through everything at CTC, there was just the Moscow surveillance.

And nothing on a possible major terrorist attack on the U.S. What Julia had told her was a lone indicator, completely unsubstantiated. Otherwise nothing. No wonder no one had gotten back to her on it.

And then on the third day, late, she found something. A single photo the NSA had lifted from an Israeli spy satellite download stream, showing Nightingale sitting at a shisha café table. There was a partial tile wall sign in Arabic. She magnified it on the computer screen, then popped it into Photoshop to try to clarify the writing on the sign. It looked like the image could have been taken in either Amman or Cairo, she thought. In a souk , maybe.

Much more important than where the photo was taken was the man Nightingale was sitting with. She didn’t need the identification the Israelis had attached to tell her who it was. It was someone that everyone at Beirut Station, including her, had had in their sights for a long time but almost never actually sighted: Ahmed Haidar, a member of al-Majlis al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council, their inner circle.

So Nightingale, a.k.a. al-Douni, was real. Dima had at least given them solid intel. A bona fide link between the GSD and Hezbollah. She wished she were back in Beirut so she could talk to Julia about Nightingale. Had her husband, Abbas, ever met him? Did he know anything about him? Was he involved in the Hariri assassination?