“It’s not far from the Dulles Toll Road. Is that what we’re going to talk about?”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You saw the information from Julia. You need to send me back to Beirut.”
“Not gonna happen, Carrie. I don’t think you realize how many people you’ve pissed off or how high it goes.”
“I escaped a Hezbollah trap, Saul. Would you have preferred that they captured me, paraded me on al-Jazeera as a CIA spy? Because the way I’ve been treated, I’m beginning to think that’s what you and Davis wanted.”
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s not that simple,” he said, scratching his beard. “It’s never that simple.”
“You’re wrong. It’s exactly that simple. I was set up-and now Beirut Station’s security is compromised and you’ve got a dick for a station chief who only wants to kill the messenger.”
Saul took off his glasses. Without them, his eyes were softer, less focused.
“You’re not making this easy, Carrie,” he said. He wiped his glasses on his shirt and put them back on.
“Did I ever?” she said.
“No.” He smiled wryly. “I’ll give you that. You were a pain in the ass right from the beginning.”
“So why did you hire me? I’m not the only woman in America who speaks Arabic,” she said, leaning back in her chair and looking at his Winnie the Pooh in its red “Pooh” shirt. He had once told her Pooh was a perfect metaphor for the human condition. All it took was a single letter change to describe our obsession; just change “honey” to “money.”
“Look, Carrie, a CIA station chief is like the captain of a ship. It’s one of the last pure dictatorships on earth. If he doesn’t think he can trust you, your judgment, there isn’t a lot I can do.”
She sat straight up in her chair, tense, knees tightly together, as if it were a job interview. “You’re his boss. Fire him, not me.” Please, she thought. Please Saul. Please believe me. Saul was the only one she could trust, the only one who believed in her. If he turned against her, she had nothing; was nothing.
“I can’t,” he said. “Think about it. My job’s like being the admiral of a fleet. If I start firing captains for using their judgment, they’ll be second-guessing themselves all over the place. They’ll be of no use to me or anyone else. I have to look at the bigger picture.”
“Bullshit!” she said, standing up, thinking, why couldn’t he understand? It was Saul. He was supposed to be on her side. “This is total bullshit. This isn’t about morale or security or some other bullshit. This is politics. And it stinks.” She stared at him. “When did you become one of them, Saul? The people who are ready to sell this country out in the interest of their own pathetic careers?”
Saul slammed his hand hard on the desk, making her jump.
“Don’t you dare talk to me that way! You know me better than that. If that’s the way you spoke to Fielding, it’s no wonder he threw your sorry ass out of Beirut. And you know the worst part, Carrie? You know the worst? The intel you just brought back from your little jaybird, Julia, is so critical that I was trying to think of a way to send you back to Beirut before you walked in here.”
Wonderful, thank you, she thought, relief flooding through her. Saul still believed in her. He knew she was right. He was on her side. It was just a matter of trying to find a way to maneuver the bureaucracy. All she had to do was show him she was still Carrie; she still knew how to mix it up with anyone, including him.
“Are you taking it to the Director? Are we going to act on it?”
“I’ve sent it upstairs,” he said, glancing at the ceiling. “But it’s not up to me. We get threats like this every day.”
“Her stuff has always been grade A. You know it. Remember what she gave us on the Hariri assassination? This is actionable, Saul.”
“Is it? Is it really? Your Julia gave us no particulars. Nothing. An attack soon. We don’t know where. We don’t know how. We don’t know when. We don’t know the target. We don’t even know if it’s Hezbollah or maybe somebody who just passed it along to Hezbollah to distract us from something else. What the hell are we supposed to do with it?”
“So that’s it? We just pass it along and hope for the best? That’s how we protect the country these days?”
“Don’t give me crap, Carrie. I told both Estes and the deputy director that we had a very high degree of confidence this is actionable intel. The ball’s in their court. I’ve also alerted Fielding in Beirut to keep digging.”
“Fielding,” she said disgustedly. She got up and walked over to the window and looked out over the green lawn and the back parking lot. “We have a security crisis in Beirut. What about Achilles?”
“Fielding says you led them to it.” He clicked his mouse till he found what he was looking for on his computer and read out loud: “ ‘Mathison displayed amateurish tradecraft in resorting in desperation to an unknown, unvetted female Lebanese contact, who-if this case officer is to be believed-out of the presumed goodness of her heart gave her car to a complete stranger. Then, after leaving the car in highly public parking venue, Mathison failed to lose her presumed pursuers, leading them directly to the safe house location on Rue Adonis, which in turn led to the elimination of this safe house and the total breach of security at that location and compromise of our operations.’ ”
Saul looked at her over his glasses.
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
He couldn’t believe that about her, she thought. Not Saul.
“Tell Fielding to wipe his ass with it,” Carrie snapped. “I was clean. I was clean in Hamra and I was sure as hell clean on foot in Ras Beirut. There was no one there, inside or out. Then all of a sudden they’re breaking in like they’ve known about the location all along. Someone set me up.”
“Who?” Saul said, raising a hand. “Where do you start?”
“Nightingale for openers,” Carrie said, leaning forward on his desk with both hands like a runner getting set. “Dima too. Let me go back, Saul. I’ll nail them both. And I’ll find the leak.”
He shook his head.
“Impossible. Look, Carrie, even if I believed you’re right and assumed that Fielding is a hundred percent wrong, I can’t.”
“Why not? What’s he got on you?” This wasn’t like Saul, she thought.
“He’s connected, okay?” Saul said disgustedly. “He and David Estes, director of the Counterterrorism Center, are both protégés of Bill Walden.”
“The DCIA?”
“The big man himself. It’s the old-boy network right down the line. And Walden has political ambitions. He’s no one to mess with. You? You’re just a female officer in a compromising situation. For the people upstairs, that’s not a hard decision. Not to mention, we’ve reorganized for the four millionth time. Nowadays, I’ve got a dotted line reporting to Estes. It’s not so simple.”
“What do we do?”
Saul nodded. “Fielding put it on you and for the time being, I have to leave it there. You try to fight this, and I won’t be able to help you. That’s how it is,” he said, raising his hands.
“So I’m supposed to be the good little girl. Shut up, bend over and let ’em do whatever they want?”
“And live to fight another day.” Saul nodded. “Look, for what it’s worth, I agree with you about one thing. This whole thing with Nightingale smells fishy as hell. At a minimum, Fielding should’ve sent you in there with a support team. I’m not going to let you sit around wasted.” He got up and came around the desk; the two of them were side by side, leaning back on it. He believed her. He was still behind her, she thought, breathing a sigh of relief.
“So?” she said.
“Do you remember what I told you when I pulled you early from your training at the Farm? My beautiful golden girl with a brain like Stephen Hawking.” He smiled. “Do you remember what I said?”
“About how I could learn the rest of tradecraft in the field-and the pond?”
“That you were too big a fish for this pond. We needed you in the ocean.”
“But that sometimes the only way to swim with the sharks is to be a shark. I remember. What do you want me to do?”