Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (10 page)

CHAPTER 12

Amtrak Acela Express, New Jersey

The Amtrak Acela Express, Washington to New York, four days later. Through the window, she watched the flatlands of New Jersey rushing by as they headed for Penn Station in Manhattan. Saul Berenson sat in the seat next to her, working on his laptop computer. Carrie was lost in thought, her mind wandering somewhere between Beirut and David Estes. Every time she thought of him, she had fantasies of the two of them naked.

She liked the bigness of him, on top of her and inside her. He’d been a football player in college and he still had that athleticism that was part of the sex. She liked the feel of him and the contrast of their skins against each other, black and white, like piano keys. It made her think of great jazz chords. Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell—and memories of Princeton and the night she learned who she was.

Her junior year.
The year of Near East studies and learning Arabic and John, her professor-lover. They had spent the night at his apartment, smoking weed and listening to his jazz CDs and having sex in every position they could twist themselves into. In the morning, breakfast was espresso, potato chips, chocolate chip cookies and Billie Holiday.

“I was a kid,” he told her. “This was the sixties in upstate New York, right? Vietnam. Rock ’n’ roll. The Stones. Creedence Clearwater. I was a lonely kid, up late at night listening to the radio in my room. They were playing Billie Holiday. This song, “Strange Fruit,” which I swear, Carrie, says more about being black in America than all the books and documentaries you’ll ever see, and I realized it was all in the music. All you had to do was listen.”

Only she wasn’t listening because it had already started. She was feeling light, like she was made of helium and if something didn’t hold her down, she would float straight up into the sky and never come down.

That night, he was supposed to take her to a party, but he didn’t show. Pissed, she went alone. Everybody was drinking and dancing and she was downing tequila and feeling like nothing could hurt her. They were talking about
The X-Files,
the TV show, and Dolly, a sheep that had been cloned from another sheep.

A good-looking Ivy guy in a preppy sweater who made sure she knew in the first three seconds that he belonged to the Colonial, one of Princeton’s elite Eating Clubs, asked her if she thought people would be cloned and she just opened like a grenade exploding. Talking about how infinite repetition is impossible so cloning would inevitably degenerate and how it all started with Charlie Parker and jazz and you could see it in Islamic art in mosque mosaics. Talking nonstop, feeling beautiful and charming and to hell with John and not noticing how Colonial Club and all the other people were edging away from her. Until she saw two girls talking to each other and looking at her and their look wasn’t like wow, she was finally the pretty girl who was charming and funny, but what the hell is going on with her, mingled with a touch of pity, and she just got up and ran back to the dorm as fast as she could.

Back in her room, she ripped off all her clothes, everything. Sitting stark naked on her bed, she started writing furiously in a notebook. Page after page, as fast as she could. It was about the music and how the laws that underpinned the universe were a musical score. By the time she was finished, nearly seven hours later, it was morning and she had a forty-five-page manifesto she’d titled “How I Reinvented Music,” explaining the connections between jazz notes and Jackson Pollock and mathematics and quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Because it was all connected. Like John, that shit, had said
:
“All you had to do was listen.”

And when she was done, she grabbed her jacket and the notebook and, still naked except for the jacket, ran out into the hallway and down the stairs and into the street. She ran barefoot in the snow, nearly knocking over a small Hispanic-looking man with glasses she’d never seen before. But he was obviously a professor. She grabbed his coat, thrusting her manifesto at him.

“You have to read this, publish it. It’ll change the world. Everything is music, but the old way is hopeless. It’s a dead end. I’ve reinvented it. Don’t you see? It’s all connected. This is the mind of God
,
damn it,” she said.

“Are you all right
,
miss? Are you from Butler?” the little man said, looking around. There were students who had stopped to watch.

“You have to read this, now! It’s the most important document in the world. Look!” she said, showing him the first page.

“Does anybody know this young woman?” the professor asked. Nobody moved or said anything.

“She’s naked,” a girl said.

“And barefoot,” a male student added.

“What are you talking about?” Carrie shouted. “Don’t you understand? What Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk did for music was free it from the dead hand of European bullshit. They got a glimpse of the underlying mathematics. This is the damn universe you’re holding!”

“I’m Professor Sanchez. Some of you help me,” the professor said to the students. “Let’s get her to McCosh.”

They took her, still babbling nonstop, to the Student Health Center, where they gave her carbamazepine, which didn’t do anything except make her throw up. Then they sedated her big-time, wiping the rest of the day and almost two weeks from her memory forever.

Afterward, lithium in a private hospital brought her back. Time had gone by. She was at home in Maryland.

“You flew,” her father said to her. “I’m sorry, Caroline. Maybe now you understand. Sometimes I think it’s the best and worst thing in the world.”

“I got it from you, you son of a bitch,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see you or feel that way again.”

“What makes you think you have a choice?” he said.

A few days after she came back to Princeton, John called her.

“What happened? I heard you had a breakdown,” he said. “I want to see you.”

“Go away. I don’t want to see you.”

“What’s going on? Let me come over.”

“No. Don’t call again. Please.”

“Why? At least tell me. You owe me that at least.”

“That girl, the nice-looking girl you can have sex with and feel how smart you are, forget her. She’s gone.”

“Carrie, talk to me. What’s happened? Is it your family?”

“In a way. Genetics. Look, John. You’ve got your routine down pat. You’ll find another cute undergraduate girl to impress the shit out of. Tell your stories about Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker to. Do us both a favor. Forget about me.”

“I think I’m in love with you.”

“Bullshit! You loved how I made you feel about yourself. It was all about you, a kind of masturbation, not me.”

“You had fun too, didn’t you?” he snapped. “Admit it.”

“Yes, I did. Now leave me alone. I mean it,” she said, and hung up.

Back in her
cubicle, she started with a single realization that hadn’t left her: Dima wouldn’t be alone. So the question was, who was coming with her and how did they plan to take out the Veep and the people at the fund-raiser?

First she got Joanne to help her, but that wasn’t enough. They were running out of time. The attack could come any day. She marched into Yerushenko’s office.

“What is it?” he said, looking up.

She told him. All of it. Dima and Nightingale in Beirut. Julia’s warning. The missing files. Dima coming to the Waldorf under the cover name of Jihan Miradi and the fund-raiser for the veep and the others. They talked for two hours and when they finished, he mobilized his entire department and allowed her to use his office to start sticking up photos and notes on a big whiteboard.

“You surprised me,” she told him. “I thought after the way I was transferred and everything, you wouldn’t support me.”

“It has nothing to do with you,” Yerushenko said. “The math added up. A female double agent connected to GSD and, possibly, Hezbollah, who may have been a part of an attack or possible kidnapping of a CIA C.O., one who happens to work for me now—and by the way, I don’t take anyone else’s evaluation as gospel; I can judge my people for myself, thank you—and all of a sudden, this double agent who apparently went to ground after the attempt on you now suddenly reappears and is coming to the States right after Abbasiyah. Books herself into the Waldorf just before a fancy shindig with the Vice-President of the United States. I’d be derelict if I didn’t take it seriously.”

She set herself and the others in the department to checking every single male—“Trust me, with Dima, it’s always going to be men,” she told them—from any Middle Eastern country who had either come to the U.S. in the last two months or was scheduled to arrive before the fund-raiser. There were thousands. They got the full lists from the U.S. Department of State and Customs and Border Protection and began going through them.

“What we’re looking for is a connection,” she told her OCSA coworkers. “Anyone flying from Beirut or who’s been in Beirut but may be flying from somewhere else. Anyone with any connection to the Syrian GSD or Damascus. Anyone who might have any kind of a connection to Nightingale or Dima of any kind, any kind of communications or who’s been in the same city as either Nightingale or Dima at the same time. Any link, even indirect, of any kind.”

With only a few days left before the fund-raiser, they worked in shifts around the clock. Eating cafeteria food and making midnight raids on the vending machines, Joanne dragging her in for company while she sneaked a quick cigarette in the ladies’ room.

After three days, they’d narrowed it down to four possibles: Mohamed Hegazy, an Egyptian doctor visiting a brother in Manhattan; Ziad Ghaddar, a Lebanese businessman staying at the Best Western near JFK; Bassam al-Shakran, a Jordanian pharmaceutical salesman who had been to both Baghdad and Beirut within the last two months, had arrived three days ago from Amman and was staying with a cousin in Brooklyn; and Abdel Yassin, a Jordanian college student, also from Amman, coming in on a student visa for Brooklyn College.

“If you had to pick one, who would it be?” Saul asked her on the third day. They were with Yerushenko in his office, the entire wall covered with notes, papers, photos and screen captures with colored marker lines connecting them like a web created by an insane spider.

“The two Jordanians,” she said, tapping their photos on the wall. “The salesman’s cousin lives in Gravesend.” She indicated the neighborhood in Brooklyn on a map of New York City. “The other one’s going to Brooklyn College, which is in the Midwood-Flatbush area. They’re not that far apart. I asked Joanne to check and see what the cousin does.”

“And?” Yerushenko asked.

“You’re going to love this. He has a fitness equipment company. Treadmills, weight machines, that kind of thing. They sell and service.”

“Does the Waldorf have a fitness center?” Saul asked.

She nodded. The two men looked at each other.

“Don’t tell me,” Yerushenko said. “The Waldorf is one of his customers.”

“Head of the class,” she said. “They have access to the hotel.”

They studied the connections on the wall. There were two line links, mostly because they were both from Amman, between the two Jordanians. Only the salesman had been in Beirut, but that had been three times that they knew about. The last one was just two weeks ago, according to NSA cell phone intercepts.

“Anything else on the Jordanians?” Saul asked.

“This,” she said, pointing to a screen capture of a newspaper article in Arabic with a photograph of a young man with a single marker line to al-Shakran’s DS-160 photo. “It’s an obituary. Al-Shakran’s brother. Killed in Iraq.”

“Damn,” Saul breathed. “Were American troops involved?”

“Don’t know. The article doesn’t say and Amman Station hasn’t had time to get back to me yet with anything on the brother. We have to assume it’s a possibility.”

“And a motive.” Saul grimaced.

“So how are they going to do it?” Yerushenko asked. “Explosives?”

“Possible. Guns more likely.” Saul shrugged. “Assault rifles would be best.”

“Where would they get them? New York has pretty strict laws,” Yerushenko said.

“Anywhere,” Carrie said. “Vermont is not that far and it has the most liberal gun laws in the country. But it’s not that hard really. Ten-to-one, they’ve already got everything they need now.”

“What about the security at the fund-raiser? Secret Service for the veep. Metal detectors in the ballroom. They’d have to know they need to deal with it.”

“Once they’re inside the hotel, the venue’s nothing. They could just shoot their way in. With assault rifles you can kill a bunch of people before even the Secret Service could start to react,” she said.

“The Secret Service will kill them,” Yerushenko said.

Saul and Carrie smiled.

“Sure. But they don’t care. And it only takes getting off one or two good shots at the start to get the Veep. Anybody else they kill is just icing on the cake,” Saul said.

“What about CTC and David Estes?” she asked.

Saul looked at her curiously. “Whatever you said did the trick. He’s a hundred percent behind us. He’s even got the director on board.”

She glanced past
Saul at the window as they pulled into the Trenton station. She watched people get off the train and crowds on the platform surging on. People living their lives with no idea what was coming at them unless they could stop it.

“Who’s meeting us?” she asked.

“Captain Koslowski, NYPD Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau. He said he’ll either be at Penn Station or he’ll have someone waiting for us.”

“Not the FBI?”