Andrew Kaplan: Carrie's run

“You know how it is at Princeton on a dark winter morning, five A.M ., before anyone else is up? Coming out of 1915 Hall in my sweats, because I was never the glamour girl. I was the serious girl, the one who didn’t flirt with the boys but who maybe was going to do something. I would start my run without touching the stopwatch. The campus silent, no one anywhere, the air so cold it hurt to breathe. Running all the way to Nassau Street, shops shuttered, streetlights reflected on the icy pavement. Then right on Washington, back on campus, past Woodrow Wilson and Frist to Weaver Track.

“I would stop, my breath coming out in clouds, the sky breaking gray, then click the stopwatch and run the fifteen hundred as if my life depended on it, trying to remember the pacing, but I swear, Saul, there were times, even when it was killing me in the final two hundred, I thought I could run forever.”

“What do you want, Carrie? What the hell do you really want?”

“I don’t know. To be that girl again. To feel the cleanness-is that a word? He’s hiding something, Saul. I swear to God.”

“Everybody’s hiding something. We’re human.”

“No, something bad. Something that’s going to really hurt us. We can’t let it happen again.”

“Let’s be clear, you’re not just risking your life and both our careers; it’s national security, the Agency itself. You sure you want to do this?”

“I just realized something. I’ll never be that girl again, will I?”

“I’m not sure you ever were.”

2006

BEFORE BRODY

Ashrafieh, Beirut, Lebanon

Nightingale was late.

Sitting in the darkened movie theater, second seat, fourth row from the back, Carrie Mathison tried to decide whether to abort. It was supposed to be an initial contact only. “Passing ships,” Saul Berenson, her boss and mentor, had called it during training back at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility in Virginia. Get a close-up look at one Taha al-Douni, to whom they’d assigned the code name “Nightingale,” let him get a quick look at her for the next time, whisper the time and location for the next meet and leave. Strictly by the book.

If the contact was late, Company protocol was to wait fifteen to twenty minutes, then abort and reschedule only if the contact provided a damn good reason why they hadn’t shown. An everyday excuse such as Middle Eastern time, which could be anything from a half hour to a half day late, or the regular Friday-evening traffic mash-up on Boulevard Fouad Chehab during the cinq á sept, the hours between five and seven P.M. when businessmen met their mistresses in discreet little Hamra-district apartments wouldn’t cut it.

Except Carrie wanted this one. According to her source, Dima, a pretty Lebanese party girl from March 14, a Maronite Christian political group, whom you could find every night at the rooftop bar at Le Gray in the Central District, al-Douni had two things that made him someone the CIA would die to get their hands on: one, he was GSD, an officer in the General Security Directorate, the brutal Syrian secret intelligence agency, which gave him a direct pipeline into the Assad regime in Damascus; and two, he needed money. A foxy Egyptian girlfriend with expensive tastes was bleeding him dry, Dima said.

She checked her watch again. Twenty-nine minutes. Where the hell was he? She looked around the theater. It was more than three-quarters full. Since the movie started, no one had come in. On the screen, Harry Potter, Ron and Hermione were in Mad-eye Moody’s class, watching him put an Imperius curse on a lethal-looking flying insect.

Her nerves felt taut as a violin string, though that didn’t mean anything. She couldn’t always trust her feelings, because there were times when she thought her nervous electrical system had been put together by the same idiots who built the Washington, DC, power grid. Bipolar disorder, the doctors called it. A psychiatric mood disorder characterized by episodes of hypomania alternating with depressive episodes, as a psychiatrist once recommended by the student health center back at Princeton, had described it. Her sister, Maggie, had a better definition for it: “Mood swings that cycle from ‘I’m the smartest, prettiest, most fantastic girl in the universe’ to ‘I want to kill myself.’ ” Even so, everything about this contact felt wrong.

She couldn’t wait any longer, she told herself. On the screen, Hermione was screaming at Moody, begging him to stop a curse that was torturing the poor insect to death. Perfect timing; lots of noise and special effects. No one would notice her, she decided, getting up and making her way out to the theater lobby.

She stepped outside to the street, feeling conspicuous, exposed. To a certain extent, it was always that way for a Western woman in the Middle East. You stood out. The only way to disguise yourself would be to wear a full-body-covering abaya and veil, and hope no one got close enough to get a good look. But with her slender build, long straight blond hair and all-American face, Carrie couldn’t fool anyone except at a distance, and in any case, that wouldn’t work in North Beirut, where women wore everything from hijabs to skintight designer jeans, and sometimes both at the same time.

It had grown dark while she had been in the theater. Traffic was heavy on Avenue Michel Bustros, the headlights of the cars and the lighted windows in tall office and apartment buildings making a mosaic of lights and shadows. She scanned the street looking for watchers. Broken contacts were always potentially dangerous. And then her heart almost stopped.

Nightingale was seated at a café table across the street looking right at her. Totally wrong. He couldn’t have misunderstood the instructions passed to him by Dima at Le Gray last night. Was he crazy? And then he made it worse. He beckoned her with a hand gesture that in America means “go away” but in the Middle East means “come here.” Instantly the pattern resolved itself, like one of those kaleidoscopes that you shake and suddenly all the pieces fall into place. It was an ambush. Al-Douni was supposed to be GSD. A seasoned intelligence professional. He couldn’t be doing something so amateurish.

Whether it was GSD or Hezbollah, they weren’t above killing a CIA agent or, better yet, taking one hostage for their own purposes. For them, grabbing an attractive blond female CIA spy would be like hitting the lottery. In her mind, she could already visualize the media circus as they paraded her before the camera, denouncing yet more American interference in the Middle East while they kept her locked in a closet for years, torturing and raping her because after all, she was a spy, not to mention that many men in the Middle East believed Western women were all sluts anyway. Nightingale motioned to her again and as he did so, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted two Arab men getting out of a van on her side of the street and moving toward her.

It was a snatch. She had to decide instantly; in a few seconds she would be a prisoner. She turned and walked back into the theater.

“I forgot something,” she mumbled in Arabic, showing her billet to the ticket taker. She walked down the aisle, squinting to readjust her eyes to the dark. On the screen, Dumbledore was announcing that Hogwarts was to host the Triwizard Tournmanet as Carrie stepped out the side emergency exit into an alley. They would be coming in after her, she thought, heading back to the avenue. She peeked out from the side of the building. Nightingale was no longer at the café. The two men must have entered the theater.