Andrew Kaplan: Homeland: Carrie’s Run

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 Tournament 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.

She ran out onto the avenue, making a turn around the corner and down a narrow street away from the traffic. How many were there? she wondered, cursing herself for wearing high heels. Part of her cover. Unless she was in an abaya, no self-respecting woman in Beirut would be caught dead in flats. There wouldn’t be just the two men, she thought, stopping to pull off her heels. Not if they were serious.

The street was dark, shaded with trees. Not many people around, not that having people around would stop them. The two Arab men from the van came around the corner. One of them pulled something out of his jacket. It looked like a pistol with an attached sound suppressor. She started to run. They had underestimated her, she thought. She had been a runner. She could outrun them.

Just then she heard a sharp ping and felt something sting her leg. She glanced down and back and saw a white scar on the sidewalk from a bullet. They were shooting at her. She dodged left, then right and touched her leg, feeling a tear in her jeans and a smear. Blood. A bit of sidewalk must have ricocheted and hit her, she thought, running for her life, the concrete hard on her bare feet. Turning the corner, she raced down an empty street. She had to do something and fast. On her left was a large gated house behind a wrought-iron fence; on the other side of the street, a Greek Orthodox church with a domed roof, spotlighted white in the darkness.

She raced to the side door of the church and yanked on the handle. It was locked. Looking behind her, her heart pounding, she could see the two Arab men running. They both had pistols with silencers now and were getting closer. Ahead at the corner, a Mercedes sedan screeched to a halt. Four men piled out. Shit! she thought, running as hard as she could for the main door to the church. She yanked it open and ran inside.

There were perhaps a dozen people, nearly all women dressed in black, in the church. They were walking around, lighting candles and kissing icons or just standing facing the altar with its arches and gold-backed icons. A bearded young man, a priest in a black robe, came down the aisle toward her.

“Christ is in our midst,” he said in Arabic.

“Of course he is, Father. I need help. Is there a back way out?” she replied in Arabic.

Instinctively, he glanced to the side toward his shoulder. She ran that way, just as the main door burst open and the four men from the Mercedes ran in, two of them holding automatic rifles. A woman screamed and everyone began to scatter. Except the priest, who walked toward the men.