Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (27 page)

Someone, an insurgent coming out of nowhere, ran by the doorway, then came back and fired an AKM at them. As Carrie hit the ground, Crimson turned, aimed and fired back in a single fluid motion, killing him instantly, grunting as he did so.

“You okay?” she asked. She couldn’t believe how Crimson had done it. He had an incredible natural athleticism and was amazingly fast and graceful for such a big man.

“Bullet. Hit my vest,” he said, meaning his Kevlar vest, not pausing. He charged out the door, whirled and fired at someone else in the hallway. She didn’t follow. She’d only be in his way; he’d come back for her, she decided, keeping her Beretta ready in case someone else came through the doorway.

She crawled to the wall beside the shattered window and, getting up on her knees, peeked out above the broken shards of window glass at the checkpoint below. It seemed like there was shooting coming from everywhere. An Abrams tank by the checkpoint was blackened and burning; next to it was the shattered chassis of what might have been a car or truck. Car bomb. That must have been the explosion they’d heard at the Convention Center, she thought numbly.

A pair of Abrams tanks, their machine guns blazing, followed by scores of American infantrymen, were moving forward slowly from the checkpoint. A group of the
mujahideen
appeared to have taken cover in a grassy, parklike area on Haifa, north of the Yafa Street intersection, blasting away from behind bushes and trees, although there was also shooting coming from a handful of buildings on both sides of the street, including from the hospital itself, farther down to the right of her.

Behind the
mujahideen
in the park, blocking their escape, were two Bradley APCs, one coming down Haifa Street from behind the
mujahideen
,
the other on Yafa, closing in from al-Jumariyah Bridge, trapping the
mujahideen
in the park from all sides. Both Bradleys were firing their guns nonstop. Suddenly, a bullet cracked through the wall right next to her and she dove back down to the floor.

Idiot, she told herself. You want to get killed? She looked around. The rest of the team had presumably gone out of the ward and farther down the hallway, where she could hear the sound of shooting. She stepped out into the hallway and someone grabbed her from behind, his arm around her throat. She cried out and tried to twist her arm so her Beretta was pointing back at him and felt him twist the pistol out of her hand. He was too strong for her.

He dragged her backward toward the stairs, half choking her. Struggling to get free, she jabbed him with her elbow. He grunted as she felt it connect but tightened his hold on her. She couldn’t see his face—his sleeve was white; he was wearing a doctor’s smock—but she could smell him. A sour smell of sweat and fear. As he pulled her back toward the stairs, she saw Crimson come out of a doorway, heading back looking for her.

“Help!” she cried out. Whoever was holding her put the Beretta to her head.

“
Eskoot!
” he hissed.
Shut up.

Crimson snapped into a kneeling shooting position with his M4. “Let her go!” he shouted.

“Drop it or I kill her!” the man shouted back. “Put it down now or she’s dead!”

Crimson aimed his M4, utterly still.

“Crimson! Take the shot! I trust you!” Carrie shouted.

“I’m warning—” the man holding her started to say.

Crimson fired. Carrie literally felt the bullet pass her cheek and an instant later, the man’s arm fell away. He dropped to the floor; she was free. She bent over and took her Beretta from the dead
mujahideen
in a doctor’s smock, who lay on his side, staring at nothing, a bullet hole in his forehead.

“Thanks—” she started to say to Crimson.

“Stay with me, damn it, ma’am. Captain Mullins’ll kill me if anything happens to you,” he said, and, grabbing her hand, pulled her to follow him.

They ran toward the rest of A Team Bravo. They were coming out of an operating room, shaking their heads. She and Crimson went toward them, but one of the soldiers stopped her.

“You don’t want to see, ma’am. They were just little kids. Two nurses and kids. All dead,” he said. “Believe me, that’s a sight that’ll stay with you.”

“Come on, you sons a bitches,” Master Sergeant Travis shouted from the stairway. “We got two more floors.”

“Have you seen Abu Ubaida?” Carrie called out.

“We killed eight
hajis
. You can check them later,” Travis said.

She followed Travis and the team to the top floor, where a firefight was going on. A team member fired his grenade launcher through an open doorway and the explosion was followed by a rush of team members racing into the ward, their MP5 submachine guns blazing. The sound of shooting was deafening. Travis and a Sergeant Colfax held back. Travis pointed with his submachine gun to a doorway marked “Roof” in Arabic and English. They opened the door and went up a metal stairway to a roof door.

Travis tried the door. It was locked. He took out a hand grenade and motioned to Crimson, the biggest man there. Crimson nodded, set himself and launched a kick that sent the door flying open, with Travis tossing a grenade through the opening the second Crimson kicked it.

They all moved down a step or two on the staircase as the grenade exploded outside on the roof. Travis and the team immediately rushed out onto the roof, where a hail of AKM gunfire greeted them. Carrie hung back in the stairwell, Crimson half in the doorway, blocking her view as he fired. Someone fired or tossed a grenade and the explosion echoed in the stairwell. She heard the stutter of another AKM opening up and heard someone cry out, “I’m hit!”

Crimson aimed and fired a burst from his M4, then another and another.

All at once, the shooting stopped, though she could still hear sporadic gunfire and the single boom of a cannon in the distance. Was that one of the tanks? she wondered. Suddenly, Captain Mullins and two of his men rushed past her and out onto the roof. They spread out on the roof, firing as they moved.

Someone said, “Oh shit.”

Captain Mullins called out, “Where’s that woman? Outlaw? Get her now!”

Crimson looked at her and motioned for her to come out onto the roof. She stepped outside, the bright sunlight forcing her to squint. One of the team members was putting a bandage on Travis’s arm. The bodies of two
mujahideen
were over by an air-conditioning unit and another body in a white doctor’s coat lay faceup near the parapet. But that wasn’t why Mullins wanted her.

An Arab man in a doctor’s white jacket was standing on the parapet at the edge of the roof, holding a toddler wearing just a diaper in one hand and a hand grenade in the other.

“Is that him?” Mullins asked, keeping his MP5 aimed at the man on the parapet. “Abu Ubaida?”

It was the fourth time she had seen him. First in the photo with Dima she’d gotten from Marielle in Beirut, the second time in the
souk
,
the third time in the video from Romeo’s house. The thrill of recognition was unmistakable. It was Abu Ubaida.

“It’s him,” she said. “Absolutely.”

“You! American
sahera
,
” Abu Ubaida said, staring at her and calling her a witch. So he recognized her too. “From the
souk
.”

“Me,” she said.

“I’m leaving,” he told them in English. “Anyone tries to stop me, the baby dies. Shoot me, I drop this grenade and she dies.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Mullins said. The weapons of almost a dozen American soldiers with him on the roof were aimed at Abu Ubaida.

“Then she dies,” Abu Ubaida said, pressing the grenade against the girl’s body as she squirmed in his grip.

“Let her go,” Mullins said. “That’s the only way this ends.”

“If you want to kill her, it’s on your soul. I am ready to die,” Abu Ubaida said.

“You won’t go to Jannah,” Carrie said, speaking of the Muslim heaven.

“I will. It is
jihad
,
” he said.

“Not like this. This Allah will not forgive,” she said, watching him intently. Whatever he was going to do, she could see in his eyes he had decided. But before she could cry out or do anything, he dropped the toddler and tossed the grenade directly at Carrie, and before anyone could do anything, he shouted, “
Allahu akbar!
”—
God is great!
—and jumped off the roof.

The hand grenade came directly at her and Captain Mullins. As it bounced on the roof less than a meter in front of them, Crimson, moving with incredible speed, jumped in front of her and, unbelievably, kicked it like a football. A split second after leaving his foot, the grenade exploded.

The explosion ripped Crimson’s leg off at the knee, metal fragments whizzing right at them. She thought she was dead, but Crimson’s massive body with its Kevlar vest shielded her even as he crashed like a tree. Captain Mullins and two of his men were hit multiple times by flying shrapnel from the grenade. Part of Mullins’s cheek was ripped open, but Carrie was untouched. The toddler sat on the roof by the parapet, screaming loudly, also apparently unharmed.

One of the other soldiers raced over to Crimson, who lay on the roof, and began working to tie off his leg, bright blood spurting rhythmically from the stump. Crimson’s foot, with his combat boot still on it, lay on the roof a few feet away. Captain Mullins, bleeding, also came over as the other soldiers spread out to secure the roof.

Carrie knew she should stay and help, especially Crimson, but she couldn’t. Her only thought was of Abu Ubaida. She had to see what had happened. She turned and ran back to the metal staircase, thinking to herself, What kind of a shit am I? He saved my life, twice—and all I care about is the mission? But she couldn’t help herself, racing down the stairs to the ground floor and out the door to Haifa Street, knowing that she would think about what she was doing at this moment for years to come, in the long sleepless nights when the clozapine wasn’t working. Abu Ubaida was lying on the sidewalk some fifty meters away, the white doctor’s jacket he’d been wearing dark with blood in the bright sunlight.

She walked over, her insides trembling. Except for the blood pooling at the back of his head, the man on the sidewalk looked exactly as he had in the
souk
in Ramadi. His eyes stared vacantly up at the sky and she didn’t have to bend down to check his pulse to see that he was dead.

Feeling as if someone other than her was controlling her movements, she aimed her Beretta pistol at Abu Ubaida’s face. This is for Ryan Dempsey, you son of a bitch, she thought, and ignoring the fact that he was already dead, squeezed the trigger.

CHAPTER 36

Central District, Beirut, Lebanon

Flying over the peaks of Mount Lebanon, approaching Beirut, the city spread out below her all the way to the Mediterranean, a distant blue in the afternoon sun. She hadn’t intended to come to Beirut. In fact, she’d been specifically ordered by Perry Dreyer and Saul to get her “ass back to Langley ASAP.”

She had gone back to the U.S. Refugee Aid Service, the CIA cover office at the Convention Center, escorted by Master Sergeant Travis, who made sure she was safe every step of the way, insisting on going with her right up to the door of the office before saying good-bye.

“Please thank Crimson for me. I’m sorry I had to leave. He saved my life today. Twice,” she told him.

“I’ll tell him. You did good today, ma’am.”

“Not really. I’m lousy at taking orders. And I was scared to death,” she said.

“So?” He shrugged and, giving her a little wave, left.

She went inside the CIA offices and called Saul via JWICS-based Skype with the code word “Home Run,” indicating Abu Ubaida was dead, no matter that it was four in the morning in McLean.

“You’re positive he’s dead? No question?” he said, and despite the excitement, yawned.

“One hundred percent,” she said. “It’s him. It’s over,” she said, suddenly sleepy herself. She hadn’t slept all last night and it was starting to hit her. Also, the adrenaline that was part of the battle was seeping away and she felt spacey. She needed her pills.

“Unbelievable. Truly, Carrie. That’s really something. How do you feel?”

“I don’t know. Numb. I haven’t slept. Maybe I’ll feel it tomorrow.”

“Of course. What about al-Waliki and Benson?” he asked.

“Why? Did Benson give the director an earful?” She tensed, imagining Benson demanding her head on a silver platter.

“Matter of fact, he was saying nice things about you. Says you acted appropriately, probably saved their lives. In fact, it made him feel part of the battle. He can’t wait to tell his war stories in the Oval Office. Actually had someone take a photo of him with the combat fatigues and the M4 you gave him.”

“No shit?” she murmured.

“We understand Secretary Bryce is fine. She’s supposed to meet with Benson and al-Waliki later today. They were setting the agenda when you broke up their meeting,” Saul said.

“Yeah. After her plane landed, they kept her in a secure bunker in Camp Victory while they made sure all was quiet in al-Amiriyah.”

“Listen, Carrie. David wants to debrief you himself. So do I. We need you back in Langley ASAP.”

A pang went through her. Was this like before with Fielding? An excuse to put her back in Intelligence Analysis?

“I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?” she asked.

“On the contrary, both Dreyer and David are writing letters of commendation for your 201 file. Congratulations. Hurry back, there’s lots to talk about—and we do need a full debrief,” he said.

“Saul, there are still loose ends. Beirut for one. Abu Nazir’s still out there, possibly in Haditha. And there’s something else. Something Abu Ubaida said when he was interrogating Romeo—sorry, Walid Karim, that I can’t get out of my head.”

“Be back in my office tomorrow. We’ll go over it all then. And, Carrie . . .”

“Yes?”

“Helluva job. Really. I can’t wait to talk to you in person. There’s a lot to go over, even though Perry says he needs you there,” he said. A warmth shot through her like tequila. Saul was happy with her. She could lap up his praise like a junkie forever.

She’d booked her flight back to Washington, but on a sudden impulse, while waiting in Amman for her connecting flight to JFK and from there to Dulles, she’d changed her ticket and flown to Beirut.

Now, flying over Beirut, she could pick out the landmarks. The Marina Tower, the Habtoor, the Phoenicia Hotel, the Crowne Plaza. It’s funny, she thought. Everything that had happened had all started here with the aborted meet with Nightingale in Ashrafieh. It was like a single run, a kind of marathon that just hadn’t stopped. In a way, coming back to Beirut was like coming full circle, because this was where it began for her. Not just that night in Ashrafieh, but when she had gone back to Princeton after her first bipolar breakdown, the one that nearly ended her college career and anything resembling a future life.

Two things had saved her life, she thought. Clozapine and Beirut. The two were connected.

Summer. Her junior
year at Princeton. She had gone back to class and spent all her time studying. She no longer ran, was off the track team. No more five
A.M
. runs. Her boyfriend, John, was also history. She was on lithium and sometimes Prozac as well. They kept adjusting her doses. But she hated it. She felt, she told her sister, Maggie, as if the lithium took away twenty IQ points.

Everything was harder. And it felt, she told the doctor at McCosh, the student health center, like she was seeing everything through a thick glass. As if she couldn’t touch it. Nothing seemed real anymore. Also, she had periods where she was excessively thirsty or she’d lose her appetite completely. She’d go two, three, four days at a time not eating, doing nothing but drinking water. She hardly ever thought about sex anymore. All she did was go from class to class, back to the dorm, thinking, I can’t do this. I can’t live like this.

What saved her was when one of her professors mentioned a summer program for Near East Studies students
:
the Overseas Political Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. At first her father wasn’t going to pay for it, even after she told him she needed it for her senior thesis.

“What happens if you have a breakdown there?” he asked.

“What happens if I have a breakdown here? Who’s going to help me? You, Dad?” Not saying, Remember Thanksgiving? because they both knew what she was talking about and that what had happened with him might happen with her too. What she didn’t tell him or anyone was that she was barely hanging on, that she wasn’t far off from suicide. Not far at all.

“I need this,” she told him. And when even that didn’t work, she added
,
“You drove Mom away. You want to drive me away too, Dad?” Until he finally agreed to pay for it.

And then, coming into Beirut, surrounded by this amazing city and ancient ruins, meeting students from all over the Middle East, walking on Rue Bliss with the other kids, eating
shawarma
and
manaeesh
, clubbing on Rue Monot, and when she was almost out of lithium, she made the great discovery. She went to an Arab doctor in Zarif, a small, clever-looking man who looked at her when she told him about the way lithium made her feel and said, “What about clozapine?”

Just being able to tell someone, finally, how it felt. And it worked. She was almost like the old Carrie, before the breakdown. When she went back to see him as a follow-up and to get a prescription refill, he was leaving on vacation. She asked, “What if I can’t get a prescription from another doctor?” and he told her, “This is the Levant
,
mademoiselle. For money, you can get anything.”

That summer in Beirut, where the pieces all came together for her. The ancient Roman ruins and Islamic mosaic art and listening to jazz late at night and the musicality and poetry of everyday Arabic, the Corniche and the beach clubs, the scent of fresh-baked
sfouf
and baklava, the call of the
muezzins
from the mosques, the clubs and the hot Arab boys who looked at her like they could eat her for breakfast, and she knew that whatever happened in her life, the Middle East would be part of it.

Now, descending to
Beirut–Rafic Hariri airport, she wondered if the pieces would come together for her again in Beirut. This never-ending run she had been on since the night of the aborted RDV with Nightingale in Ashrafieh. Because she didn’t believe that asshole Fielding had killed himself. And if he hadn’t, it meant someone had killed him. Someone still out there. And that like her, an operation was still running.

She took a taxi from the airport. Riding in traffic on El Assad Road past the golf course, the driver, a Christian, telling her about the preparations for Easter in town and how his wife’s mother made the best
maamoul
—little Easter cakes made with walnuts and dates and topped with icing, that time of year—in the city. She had him drop her off near the clock tower in Nejmeh Square and walked the few blocks to the CIA’s cover office, where she was to meet with Ray Saunders, the new Beirut station chief.

Walking past the crowded outdoor tables of the street café under the old arched portico, she couldn’t help remembering the last time she’d been here, to see Davis Fielding, who’d basically told her that her career was over. It seemed a lifetime ago.

She went inside and up the stairs, pressed the doorbell, said who she was into the intercom and was buzzed in. A young American man in a plaid shirt had her wait in a small reception area till Saunders came out and greeted her. Saunders was a tall, thin, intense-looking man in his forties with long sideburns that gave him a vaguely Eastern European look.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said, leading her to Fielding’s old office overlooking Rue Maarad. “Frankly, I was surprised to get your call. So was Saul.”

“Is he pissed I didn’t come straight back to Langley?” she asked.

“He said he couldn’t stop you from coming here if he tried,” he said, and gestured for her to sit down. “By the way, congrats. I heard about Abu Ubaida. Nice work.”

“I don’t know what to say. My being here might be a wild goose chase.”

“When I told him, Saul said you had a bug up your ass about Davis Fielding’s death. Is that what this is about?”

“You know it is,” she said. “Doesn’t it concern you? If Fielding didn’t commit suicide, then whatever reason or operation was the cause is still running. For all you know, you could be a target.”

“I’m curious. From what I heard, you and Fielding weren’t exactly a love match. Why are you so concerned about his death?” he asked, studying her with frank interest.

“Look, Fielding was a dick and no loss to anyone. He was going back to face the career equivalent of a firing squad at Langley and I’ll bet you’re scrambling right now to clean up his mess and figure out how badly Beirut Station’s been compromised.”

“Sounds like a pretty good reason to commit suicide to me,” Saunders said quietly.

“Yeah, but you’re not Davis. He wasn’t principled enough for that. Someone killed him—and I have to believe it has something to do with the actress, Rana Saadi, and Nightingale. That was my op and that means there is a loose end.”

He studied her, not saying anything. From outside, a car horn honked, starting a chorus of honking from other cars. The Beirut
cinq á sept
traffic, she thought mechanically.

“That’s what I think too. We found something, but I’ve been working with a handicap,” he said.

“What?”

“I didn’t know him. You did.” He motioned to her to move her chair around to his side of the desk.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“This,” he said, indicating his computer screen. It was a hidden-camera video of this very office. Carrie automatically looked up at the joint where the wall met the ceiling where the camera had to be located, but it was too small and well hidden in the molding. The screen showed Davis Fielding sitting at his desk, his back to the camera. Suddenly, he was on the floor, a Glock pistol in his limp hand, a pool of blood spilling from his head.

“There’s a three-minute-forty-seven-second gap,” Saunders said. “The dead man didn’t do it.”

“Can you freeze it?” Carrie asked.

“Why? Do you see something?”

She peered intently at the image of Fielding lying on the floor.

“There’s something wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, but as Saul would say, something’s definitely not kosher.”

“It’s not the angle he’s lying at. We had a forensics expert calculate that the body would fall in that position.”

“Is that all you’ve got?” she asked.

He shook his head. “We’ve got gaps in security cameras in the reception room, the staircase, the front and back entrances to the building. Longer, but all for the same period and on the same night Fielding was killed. Somebody didn’t want us to see him.”

“How do you know it’s a him?”

“Because he missed one,” Saunders said, switching the view on the screen. It showed a view from a roof security camera looking down at Rue Maarad beyond the overhang of the portico. “The roof camera’s digital recording disc was on a separate circuit. Watch. We’ve been able to extrapolate from the time gap. This is about forty seconds after the gap ended.”

On the screen, a man in a coverall appeared out from under the portico, crossing the street and walking away toward Nejmeh Square. She could only see his back.

“Not much to go on. Assuming that’s our killer,” she said.

“We found something else. This is from four days earlier, after one
A.M
.”

Another video, same view, appeared on the screen. A man in a similar coverall was caught walking toward the building briefly before he disappeared under the portico. To Carrie’s eye, it looked like there was a company patch or logo on the front.

“Go back. What’s that coverall say?”

Saunders rewound and froze the image, which, given the darkness and distance, was too fuzzy to get a clear glimpse of either the man’s face or the company name.

“Can’t you digitally enhance the image?”

“We did,” he said, opening another window and zeroing in on the patch. Although still indistinct, the patch read “Sadeco Conciergerie” in French and Arabic.

“Looks like a janitorial service. I’m sure you checked the company,” she said.

“Of course. It’s our janitorial service all right, but he’s not our regular janitor and according to Sadeco, no such person has ever worked there. We black-bagged their offices one night. Went through all their personnel files. They were telling the truth. Whoever he was, he wasn’t one of theirs.”