Carrie's run

CHAPTER 19

Halba, Lebanon

The house was an old-fashioned stone building on a hill looking out toward the town of Bebnine and the sea. Asking around at the salon tagmil, the local hair salon, the one place in the Middle East where it was an advantage to be a woman because you could find out everything about everybody, Carrie learned that Dima’s parents were deceased. But she found an uncle of the Hamdan family and soon she was sitting in the parlor with an older woman, Khala Majida, Aunt Majida, sipping iced tea, Lebanese-style, made with rose water and pine nuts. They sat on a sofa facing the balcony, the French doors open to the sun. Carrie, in jeans and a sweater, wore her hijab. She told Aunt Majida she was a friend of Dima’s from America. She didn’t tell her Dima was dead; the FBI was still keeping the attackers’ identities from the media.

“Did she tell you her father, Hamid Ali Hamdan, was with al-Murabitun?” the aunt said in Arabic.

“She told me,” Carrie lied. The Murabitun was the most powerful of the Sunni militias during the long Lebanese civil war. None of this had been in Dima’s file and she had never revealed any of this to Carrie or anyone else.

“He fought side by side with Ibrahim Kulaylat. The Israelis killed him in ’82, to Allah we belong, and may those sons of apes and pigs rot in hell. Dima was an infant. It was hard for her, a girl without a father,” Aunt Majida said.

“Of course,” Carrie murmured, looking around. It seemed inconceivable that sophisticated, party-girl Dima, the girl who knew everyone who was anyone in Christian North Beirut, came from this conservative Sunni Muslim setting.

“And no money. And then her mother got the cancer.” The aunt shook her head.

“How did she survive?”

“Her grandmother. And me. We helped, but then she went to Beirut and we didn’t see her after that.”

“How did she come to leave Halba?”

“You know the famous actress Rana? The one who’s on the television?”

“Rana Saadi?” Carrie said, her mind racing. It wasn’t just the magazine photo!

“That’s the one. Rana’s father and poor Hamid Ali, to Allah we belong, were friends in al-Murabitun. Rana came from Tripoli and took her to Beirut. They were going to become models there. I warned her against it. There are many Christians and unbelievers in Beirut. Much that is haram, I told her. But she said, ‘I have nothing but my looks, Khala. It’s the only chance I have. And I’ll be with my father’s friend’s daughter.’ ”

“Why would Rana take her?”

“Ikram. A debt of honor. Hamid Ali had saved Rana’s father’s life in the civil war.”

“Min fathleki, excuse me, I understand her father, to Allah we belong, was a hero, but Dima didn’t strike me as political-or religious. Not to say she wasn’t a good Muslim girl, but you know what I mean,” Carrie said.

The aunt looked at her sharply. “She knew who her father was and who she was, alhamdulillah,” Aunt Majida said. Thank God.

“Of course, Allahu akbar,” Carrie murmured. God is great.

“Allahu akbar,” the aunt said sternly.

So Dima was a Sunni Muslim who had moved a long way from her roots, Carrie thought on the way back to Beirut in Virgil’s Peugeot. She was driving south on the coast road. To her left were fields and clusters of houses and on her right, beyond the houses, the sea. Well, haven’t we all? A point Saul had made when she spoke with him on an encrypted cell phone call last night.

“Beirut Station’s blown. This place is a shambles,” she told him.

“How bad is it?” Saul asked, his voice a bit blurry from the encryption.

“Listen, if a fashion photographer in Gemmayzeh knows Fielding is CIA, everybody knows. That’s how bad.”

“And Dima?”

“She comes from Halba. That little tidbit wasn’t in her 201,” Carrie said.

Saul caught it right away. She loved that about him. “Is it possible she’s Sunni?” he said.

“I’m checking it out. Kind of leaves us nowhere in figuring out how New York happened. A Sunni op set up by Shiites? And according to Fielding, Dima was supposed to be March 14, which is Christian. Makes no sense. Not in Lebanon.”

“There’s something else going on. We’re not seeing it,” he said. “What about this other woman, Rana?”

“She’s from the north too. Tripoli. Also probably Sunni. She and Dima knew each other. Their fathers did too. Interesting, huh?”

“What does it tell you?” he said.

“Maybe Rana is part of it.”

“Obviously. What else?”

“They were outsiders. Both of them.”

“Aren’t we all?” he said, reminding her of their conversation just before she left.

Saul had come over to drive her the short distance from her apartment in Reston to Dulles International for the flight to Beirut.

“Keep clear of Beirut Station, especially Fielding,” he warned her. “Otherwise you’ll never find out what’s going on.”

“What if we run into each other? Beirut’s a small town sometimes.”

“Tell him you’re on a Special Access op.” Special Access operations were the CIA’s highest-level operations that could only be authorized directly by the director of the CIA and were on a strict need-to-know basis, including those with top secret clearance, even station chiefs. “If he makes a fuss, refer him to me or to David. Remember, no one from Beirut Station is to even know you’re in Lebanon.”

“Except Virgil.”

“No one else. You can’t come to Langley for help either. You’re on your own.”

“Story of my life,” she said.

Saying it, she remembered the little white house on Farragut Avenue in Kensington and how none of their neighbors spoke to them after her father bought a big RV trailer and parked it in the driveway, and when the neighbors asked where he was going, her father told them it was so he could take the family to the Great Lakes to see the miracle. And how she and Maggie had no friends because playdates at their house were unimaginable and they couldn’t go to other kids’ houses either because their father might call. Her mother was of no help and her sister, Maggie, only wanted out. Theirs was a house of silence, each of them hiding from the others as if madness was contagious like the flu.

“Sometimes I think you prefer it alone,” Saul said.

“I’ve always been an outsider.”

“All of us. This is a business for outsiders,” he said.

“You too?”

“Are you kidding? Can you even begin to imagine what it was like growing up as the only Orthodox Jewish kid in tiny white-bread Calliope, Indiana? In the fifties and early sixties? My parents were Holocaust survivors. It made them ultra-Orthodox. They clung to God as if to the side of a cliff. My father owned the local drugstore. But there was no one like us in that town. We were like Martians in that place.

“I couldn’t participate in anything like Christmas pageants at school. Anything goyish or that even smacked of what they considered idolatry. I had to fight with my parents just to say the Pledge of Allegiance because there was a metal eagle at the top of the flagpole. I couldn’t even play Little League even though I loved baseball, because they began the games with a prayer that mentioned Jesus. We’re all outsiders, Carrie. The reason we do this is because this is the only profession that’ll let us in.”

She was driving south, approaching Byblos, the town where the word “bible” came from, when she got the call from Virgil. Ahead, she could see Byblos’s old city, crowded along the Mediterranean coast, and in clusters on the hills white houses, churches and a mosque.

“We got a hit,” Virgil said.

“I’m listening.”

“She made a call on that cell phone, our little actress. I tracked who it went to via the No Such database. Your pal Jimbo. You do collect admirers, Sweet Pea.” Virgil called the NSA “No Such” because for a long time the joke in Washington had been that the acronym for the super-secret National Security Agency stood for “No Such Agency.” “Sweet Pea,” his sarcastic nickname for her, rhymed with “Sweet C,” for “Sweet Caroline,” the Neil Diamond song.

“Cut the crap, Vee. Who was it?”

“An old friend of yours. A certain singing little birdie?”

Oh my God! Nightingale, she thought excitedly. Taha al-Douni. It closed the circle: Dima-Nightingale-Rana. And don’t forget the third woman in the photo, she reminded herself. Marielle.

“What’d they say?”

“I’ll tell you tonight. The usual place? Twenty fifteen?” That meant he didn’t want to speak about it over a cell phone connection. The usual place was the circular Khalil Gibran Garden, opposite the UN House in the Hamra district. Subtracting forty-five minutes from 2015 hours meant to meet him at 1930 hours. Seven thirty P.M.

“Okay, bye.”

“Ma’al salaama,” he said mockingly, and ended the call.

Driving along the coast, the sun shining on the sea, she had never felt better, almost as if she were gliding unmoving on the air like a hawk. Although she couldn’t see all the pieces in the puzzle, she could sense them falling into place. Everything was perfect. A feeling of well-being enveloped her, like slipping into a warm bathtub. She was closing in on what had happened and who was behind it. They were just out of sight, behind a curtain that rose behind Beirut like the mountains. It was all coming together. Like sex at that moment when it starts to build and you’re not there yet, but you can feel it coming and it’s getting better and better.

She drove past farm fields on the coastal highway that divided Byblos’s old city from the more modern part of town, thinking maybe she should take some time off. Do a little sightseeing. See the Crusader castle or the Roman ruins or maybe stop off at one of the seaside hotels. Wouldn’t that be good? Go out on the beach, let her bare feet feel the sand. Sit in a beach lounge and have a waiter bring her a margarita and watch the seabirds fly and dip toward the water as they spotted a fish and-

Pay attention! she thought, sitting up and focusing on the road. When was the last time she’d had her pill? Was she really feeling this way or was it one of her flights coming on?

Shit!

Focus, Carrie. It’s the bipolar doing the thinking, not you, she told herself. Think. Rana, who was both Fielding’s girlfriend and Dima’s friend, had called Nightingale. It was like closing an electrical circuit. She needed to be sharp now. She couldn’t drift. That bullshit about the beach. It’s the missing clozapine that’s talking. Time to get more at the pharmacy on Rue Nakhle. She needed to get back to Beirut before they closed. She had to get her meds. And she had to pay attention. The last time she’d dealt with Nightingale he’d nearly kidnapped or killed her. He wasn’t someone she could take on without having her wits about her.

And then there was the third woman in the photograph. Another mystery. She checked her watch.

If she stepped on it, she just had time to get back to Beirut, get to the Rue Nakhle pharmacy, then meet Virgil. And find Marielle Hilal, the third woman in the photograph. She shook her head to clear it and, going around a slow-moving car, pressed her foot down on the accelerator.