Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel (6 page)

“So what do you do?” he was asking.

“Why do you give a shit about what I do?” she said. “Let’s be honest. All you really want to do is have sex with me, right? I mean, stop me if I’m wrong here, because ten-to-one you’re married. Taking the ring off doesn’t fool that many girls except the stupid ones—and even they figure it out eventually, right, Lawyer Dave? So let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Do you want to take me out of here and screw my brains out or don’t you?”

He stared at her, stunned, cautious.

“You’re wearing a ring too,” he said.

“Damn right, I’m taken. Don’t fall in love with me. Don’t even fall in like with me. Don’t get obsessed with me. There’s no future, no romance, no bullshit. There’s just tonight. Take it or leave it. You don’t want to, you want to think about your sweet little wife and kiddies back at the other end of your commute, get off that bar stool and free it up for someone a little more honest about what he really wants in this screwed-up world,” she said.

“You’re really something,” he said.

“You have no idea.”

He put down his beer and stood up.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?”

“Your place.”

“Uh-uh. You don’t get to find out where I live.” She shook her head and downed the rest of her margarita. “Besides, hotshot. You trying to tell me you can afford a Rolex and you can’t afford condoms and a hotel room?”

He held her jacket for her and put on his coat. They went outside. The night was clear and cool and windy; the two-story buildings along M Street stretched as far as could be seen. He put his arm around her as they walked to his car. A Lincoln. Bullshit lawyer’s car, she thought, getting in.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Ritz-Carlton’s not too far.” The radio was tuned to hip-hop. He’s trying to be cool, she thought. “Put on jazz. WPFW, 89.3.” He tweaked the radio button till she heard the sound of Brubeck and Paul Desmond. “The two Daves,” she said out loud. “You and Dave Brubeck.”

He grimaced. Thinking of money, she thought. How’s he going to explain it on the credit card at his firm or to his wife?

“How about the Latham, just down M Street?” he said.

“A room at the Latham sounds perfect. They should advertise. ‘Come to the Latham. We won’t tell if you don’t,’ ” she said, leaning over and kissing his crotch, nearly causing him to swerve into oncoming traffic. “Careful, cowboy. We don’t want an accident now.” She exhaled, her breath warm on his pants, her lips feeling him rock-hard under the fabric, then looked up.

The neon lights from the bars and shuttered stores and from the street and traffic lights made patterns on the windows. The patterns merged with the jazz. Nonrepresentational, but a repetitious pattern, like Islamic art. It means something. Something important—then, Oh no! she thought, massaging his crotch, realizing she was starting to lose it.

Bipolar disorder. She’d won the genetic lottery; she’d gotten it from her father. The same thing that had caused him to lose his job and eventually forced them to move from Michigan to Maryland. Not now, she thought. Please not now.

“Take it easy,” he said. She sat up and let him call on his cell to reserve the room. Soon, they were walking through the arched entryway into the hotel lobby. They stopped at the desk, went into the elevator and a minute later, they were in the room, tearing off each other’s clothes. Kissing, tongues fencing inside each other’s mouths and then on the bed.

He reached over to his pants on the floor beside the bed to put on a condom, and as he turned out the light, something about the wallpaper pattern struck her. It was like a grid, only in the darkness, this guy Dave’s outline was like a space. Oh no, she thought. Her bipolar. Get control, Carrie. A space in a grid like the space where Dima was missing. They were all connected, Dima and Nightingale and Ahmed Haidar of Hezbollah in that empty space. It was a grid. And it was the wrong color. The wallpaper was gray, but it should be blue. She needed it to be blue. That’s all she could think of. Spaces in a blue grid, only the color was wrong.

“So beautiful,” Dave said, nuzzling at her breasts, his fingers between her legs, stroking and probing inside her. She smelled his breath. It smelled of beer and, suddenly, something bad, something from the space in the grid. She jerked her head back, almost gagging. He rubbed against her, then took his penis in his hand and guided it inside her. She gasped at the first sensation of him sliding in and looked at the wall. The wallpaper was grid that was moving—and the wrong color.

“Stop! Stop!” she cried, pushing him away.

He pressed in harder. Pumping, moving in and out.

“Stop it! Get off me! Get off me now or so help me, you’ll be sorry, you son of a bitch!”

He stopped. Pulled out.

“What the hell is this? What kind of a tease are you?” he snapped.

“I’m sorry. I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. It’s because, don’t you see, it isn’t the sex. I want the sex. I want you inside me, but I can’t and I don’t know why. It’s my meds. Something I took. It’s the grid. There’s a space. It’s the wrong color. I can’t look at it.”

“Turn over,” he said, pushing at her hips to turn her on her stomach. “We’ll do it that way. You don’t have to look.”

“I can’t, dammit! Don’t you understand? I don’t have to see it to see it! We can’t do this. You have to get out. I’m just a crazy lady, okay? A crazy blonde you met in a bar. A crazy blonde whore in a bar. That’s all I am. I’m so sorry, Dave or whatever your name is. I’m so sorry. Please, there’s something wrong with me. I wanted you. I did, but I can’t do it.” The wallpaper was a moving pattern, geometrically repeating into infinity like the inside of a mosque. “I can’t. Not this way.”

He stood up and started to pull on his clothes.

“You’re crazy, you know that? I’m sorry I met you, stupid crazy bitch.”

“Go to hell!” she shouted back. “Go back to your wife. Tell her you were working late at the office, you lying cheat!” she screamed. “Better yet, do her and pretend it’s me. That way you can have both of us!”

He smacked her hard across the cheek.

“Shut up. You want to get us arrested? I’m leaving. Here.” He threw down a twenty-dollar bill. “Call a cab,” he said, pulling on his coat. He checked his pockets to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind.

“Crazy bitch,” he muttered, opening the door and closing it behind him. As he did so, Carrie stumbled like a drunk to the bathroom sink and threw up.

CHAPTER 5

Alexandria, Virginia

“When did it start?” her older sister, Maggie, asked.

They were sitting in Maggie’s SUV near the Van Dorn Metro station, not far from the Landmark Mall in Alexandria. They’d met there instead of Maggie’s office or her house so no one would see them. Maggie was the only person in her family who knew she worked for the CIA.

“Last night,” Carrie said. “I could feel it coming a little earlier, but it really started last night. The margaritas probably didn’t help,” she added.

“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“I was working. Something important.”

“Nonstop? No sleep? Little food, either Chinese or maybe just a few crackers?”

“Well, I was at my desk. I was digging into something. I didn’t want to stop.”

“Come on, Carrie. You know perfectly well that all of those are prodromal symptoms of a manic onset for you. You’re my sister and I love you,” she said, brushing Carrie’s hair from her eyes, “but I wish you would let me get you some treatment. You could live a normal life. You really could.”

“Mag, we’ve been through this. The minute I get treatment, whether it’s you or a shrink, or there’s record of a prescription, I lose my security clearance. My job is over. And since, as we both know, or at least you’ve told me often enough, I don’t have a personal life, that doesn’t leave me with anything else.”

Maggie looked at her, squinting slightly against the sun on the car window. The weather was fair, unusually warm for March. People going to their cars had their jackets open or even no jackets.

“Maybe you should do something else. This isn’t a life. We worry about you. Dad, me, the kids.”

“Don’t start on that. And I wouldn’t mention Dad. He’s hardly the one to talk about ‘normal.’ ”

“How does the lithium feel?”

“I hate it. It makes me stupid, logy. It’s like I’m looking at the world through a thick window. A thick, dirty, fifty-IQ-points-lower window. Did I mention thick? I’m like a zombie. I hate it.”

“At least you’re coherent. When I saw you last night, you weren’t. God, Carrie, you can’t go on like this.”

“You know I was fine in—where I was. I was able to get all the meds I wanted. Clozapine works just fine. I can function. I’m a normal person. You’d be surprised. I’m actually good at what I do. Just get me a big supply of clozapine and I’ll be Aunt Carrie and everyone’ll be happy. The kids’ll love it.” Maggie had two small daughters, Ruby, seven, and Josie, five.

“If you think self-medicating, getting all the meds you want, is good practice, you’re crazier than you think.”

Carrie put her hand on her sister’s arm. “I know. I know you’re right. Look, I know you don’t like or understand what I do, but it’s important. Believe me, you and your children sleep safer in bed at night because of what I do. You’ve got to help me. There’s no one else. Otherwise, I’m up the creek.”

“Have you any idea what a risk I’m taking? I could lose my license. Bad enough I’m prescribing for Dad. But at least he’s in therapy. I coordinate with his psychiatrist. Between the therapy and me watching him, he’s been good for two years now. You should spend some time with him. I know he’d like it. You wouldn’t know there was a problem.”

“Tell that to Mom,” Carrie said.

Neither of them spoke. That was a family black hole. The wound that didn’t heal. Their mother, Emma, had disappeared.

“If I can’t meet your father, what about your mother?” her lover at Princeton, John, the professor, had asked her one night in bed.

“I don’t know where she is.”

“What do you mean you don’t know where she is? Is she dead?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s the one thing I do know. I do understand.”

“Well
,
explain it to me and then there’ll be two of us
,
” he’d said.

“She left. Just like that. One day she said she was going to CVS. The drugstore. She’d be right back. We never saw her again.”

“Did your family look for her? The police? Did she ever try to make contact?”

“Yes. Yes. And no.”

“Wow! No wonder you don’t talk about your family.”

“That was the day I left for Princeton. She just disappeared and off I went. Just me and a suitcase and my happy childhood memories. Don’t you see? She was free. I was her youngest. The baby. And I was leaving. I could take care of myself. Now do you get an inkling of how screwed up I am? I’m the cute blond undergraduate you want to have sex with
,
but tell the truth
,
John. Am I really the girl you want to be with?”

“At least let me get you tested,” Maggie said. “Clozapine has potential side effects that are not good. Hypoglycemia. Agranulocytosis. You understand? Lowered white blood cell count can be really serious. At least let me do that.”

“Listen,” Carrie said, grabbing Maggie’s arms. “Don’t you get it? I can’t do it. Just give me the damn pills and let me get back to work. You don’t understand. I have to get back. It’s important.”

“Here’s three weeks’ worth of samples,” Maggie said, handing them to her in a plastic bag. “It’ll help stabilize you and hold you over, but that’s it. I mean it, Carrie. I can’t keep doing this. It’ll ruin both of us. I want you to seriously consider going into therapy. A psychiatrist can prescribe enough of this for you to walk to the moon on.”

“Shhhh! Be quiet,” Carrie said, turning up the car radio. She’d heard something.

“ . . . reports that five U.S. servicemen from the Five Hundred and Second Infantry Regiment stationed at a checkpoint outside the city of Abbasiyah, south of Baghdad in the so-called Iraqi Triangle of Death, entered the home of a local Iraqi family, where they are charged by Iraqi authorities with raping a fourteen-year-old girl, then killing her and her entire family and setting the bodies on fire. The soldiers being accused claim that the attack was done by Sunni militants. U.S. military and Coalition government spokesmen have stated that the incident is under investigation. A spokesman for General Casey, commander of the Multi-National Force–Iraq, stated, ‘We will get to the bottom of this deplorable act,’ ” the announcer said.

Carrie turned the radio down.

“Shit, this is going to blow things up. I’ve got to go. Thanks for this, Maggie,” she said, indicating the pills. “Thanks for coming to get me. I’ll come see the girls as soon as I can. I promise.”

“Is this Iraq thing something you’re involved in?” Maggie asked.

Carrie looked at her.

“We do . . . everything. People don’t have a clue. I’ll call,” she said, getting out of the car.

“What about Dad?” Maggie asked. Carrie squinted at her in the sun. “You have to talk to him sometime.”

“Good old Mag, you never give up. I will. Sometime,” she said.

She got back
to Langley just in time for an all-hands meeting called by David Estes for everyone in the Counterterrorism Center unit. He told them that they could expect a significant rise in terrorism against Americans both within and outside Iraq as a result of what had happened in Abbasiyah.

“So, just when you think we couldn’t possibly come up with anything that could make us even more unpopular with the Arab street or make the Iraqi population hate us even more, some asshole grunts in Iraq have managed to come up with the best recruiting ad for al-Qaeda since they decided to fly into buildings in lower Manhattan!” Estes snapped angrily. “American targets in the Middle East and Europe are of particular concern.

“And I would remind everyone that we have a threat, from an unsubstantiated but previously credible source, of a major attack on American soil,” he added, not looking at Carrie as he said it. “All of you start combing through every piece of intel we’ve got from anywhere in the Middle East and South Asia. I mean everything. Any threats, no matter how iffy, should be brought directly to me immediately.

“We’re going to have to deploy additional resources to Baghdad Station. Saul, you’ll handle it,” he said to Saul, who nodded. “There’s going to be a ton of fallout. The media is going to have a field day with this and I’ve already told the DCIA we can expect a significant increase in U.S. casualties, both military and civilian, both inside and outside the Green Zone, but I want more-detailed projections. I need to let the Joint Chiefs and the White House know what they’re in for.

“In addition, I want a complete analysis of all Sunni activity in the Triangle of Death zone, from IA, but also from you, Saul, on my desk by seventeen hundred today. If somebody farts anywhere from Baghdad to al-Hillah, I want to know about it. Those of you not being reassigned to support Baghdad Station will have to pick up the extra slack from the people we’re pulling away. Now get to work. We’re wasting time,” Estes said, dismissing them.

An hour later, Carrie caught Saul in the corridor on his way to the elevator. She’d been waiting for him.

“Not now, Carrie. I’ve got a meeting on the seventh floor,” he told her, meaning with the top directors in the CIA.

“Nightingale met with Ahmed Haidar. Fielding must’ve known about it but never said a word,” she said.

He stood there, blinking behind his glasses like an owl in the daytime.

“How do you know?”

“There was a photo. NSA picked it up from an Israeli satellite stream. In a café. I couldn’t tell where. Possibly Cairo or Amman.”

“What does that tell you?”

“GSD and Hezbollah are in bed. Maybe the Hariri assassination. Maybe something coming up, like Julia said, using something juicy like Abbasiyah to cover it up. You tell me, Saul. What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I hired you. What do you want?”

“I need Fort Meade. Who can I talk to there?” The National Security Agency was headquartered at the Fort Meade, Maryland, army base.

“Out of the question. We have established procedures for this kind of thing and they don’t include you charging off on your own like a bull in a china shop. You’re already on thin ice.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go deal with this latest screw-up. What the hell did they expect?” he said, stabbing his finger at the elevator button half a dozen times. “You send young men over in multiple deployments, half of them from National Guard units, lousy civilians, many of them with post-traumatic stress, dealing with headless corpses, IEDs on every street corner, allies you can’t turn your back on and millions of women you can look at but can’t touch. What did they think was going to happen? Christ!” he said, and entered the elevator. “You don’t go near Fort Meade. I mean it,” he added as the elevator door closed.

Bullshit, she thought to herself. There wasn’t enough to go on without the NSA. She’d find someone.