Carrie's run

“You know how it is at Princeton on a dark winter morning, five A.M., before anyone else is up? Coming out of 1915 Hall in my sweats, because I was never the glamour girl. I was the serious girl, the one who didn’t flirt with the boys but who maybe was going to do something. I would start my run without touching the stopwatch. The campus silent, no one anywhere, the air so cold it hurt to breathe. Running all the way to Nassau Street, shops shuttered, streetlights reflected on the icy pavement. Then right on Washington, back on campus, past Woodrow Wilson and Frist to Weaver Track.

“I would stop, my breath coming out in clouds, the sky breaking gray, then click the stopwatch and run the fifteen hundred as if my life depended on it, trying to remember the pacing, but I swear, Saul, there were times, even when it was killing me in the final two hundred, I thought I could run forever.”

“What do you want, Carrie? What the hell do you really want?”

“I don’t know. To be that girl again. To feel the cleanness-is that a word? He’s hiding something, Saul. I swear to God.”

“Everybody’s hiding something. We’re human.”

“No, something bad. Something that’s going to really hurt us. We can’t let it happen again.”

“Let’s be clear, you’re not just risking your life and both our careers; it’s national security, the Agency itself. You sure you want to do this?”

“I just realized something. I’ll never be that girl again, will I?”

“I’m not sure you ever were.”

2006

BEFORE BRODY