Carrie's run

CHAPTER 22

Bashoura, Beirut, Lebanon

Carrie watched Rana open her eyes. They were in a basement storage room of the safe house building near the Bashoura Cemetery that Beirut Station had code-named Iroquois. The room was empty, lit by a single lightbulb; its walls were soundproofed and the door locked. The actress had been tied to a chair with plastic ties. The only other furniture was the chair that Carrie sat in, a stool and a wooden bench on which they’d put a bucket of water and a towel. On a stool next to her, Carrie had put her Glock 26 with a sound suppressor attached.

“You can scream your head off, no one will hear,” Carrie told her in Arabic.

“Not my style,” Rana said. “Not unless they pay me. I did a great scream in a horror movie once. Evil Cannibal Streets. As opposed to Good Cannibal Streets, I suppose. Do you want to hear?”

“I don’t care about your credits. This isn’t an audition,” Carrie said.

“Do you want money? I’m not rich,” Rana said.

“You’re famous.”

“Not the same thing.”

“It’s not money. Let’s talk about Taha al-Douni.”

“Who?”

Carrie looked down at the floor, then up at Rana.

“I need you to tell me the truth. If you do, you’ll be back to your old life in a few hours. If not, you’ll never leave this room,” she said.

For a long moment, neither spoke. Rana looked around, as if seeking a way out.

“What is this about?” she asked, only a slight tremor in her voice betraying her nervousness. She’s an actress, Carrie reminded herself. She lies for a living. Like the rest of us.

“Listen, there’s already a lot you don’t have to tell us. We know about you. And about Dima and Marielle and that you’re Davis Fielding’s, the CIA station chief in Beirut’s, little whore. We’ll get to that in a minute.” She could see that Rana was shocked by what she had said, that she knew all that.

Interrogation 101, she thought. Let the subject think you know about him and what he’s doing and he’ll assume you know more than you are letting on. Amazing the things he’ll let slip because he thinks you already know them. “You met with Taha al-Douni in Baalbek. What was the meeting about?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rana said.

“Yes, you do.” Carrie frowned and took out the video camera and showed her the playback of her and Nightingale talking in the ruins. “Min fathleki, let’s not make this unpleasant. Actually, even before we get to that, I’ve a better question. What’s a nice Sunni Muslim girl from Tripoli doing with a Shiite spy for the GSD and Hezbollah?”

Rana stared at her, wide-eyed.

“Who are you? What do you want from me?” she whispered.

“The truth. The Christian Bible says it’ll set you free. In this case, that’s the literal truth. But if you lie to me”-she looked at the bench and the bucket of water-“trust me, you won’t like it.”

“How do you know about me? About Tripoli? Was it Dima, that bitch? She couldn’t keep her mouth closed any more than she could keep her legs together.”

“Did you really imagine you could be the mistress of a CIA station chief and meet with Syrian spies and not attract attention?” Carrie said. “Who are you working for?”

“Don’t you know?” Rana moistened her lips. Dark hair, dark eyes. An attractive woman, Carrie thought. One who thought that her looks would always get her out of a tough spot. “God, I would kill for a cigarette.”

“Later.” Carrie frowned. “You’re going to have to start answering my questions or it’s not going to go well for you. Who are you working for? Hezbollah?”

Rana shook her head, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips. “Kos emek Hezbollah,” she said, using the worst Arabic vulgarity. “Neither Hezbollah nor the Syrians.”

“Who then? Al-Douni is GSD.”

“Who told you that? Dima? Are you CIA? Do you have her? Has she been talking?”

Carrie thought for a moment, deciding. Was Rana was trying to play her? They’d see who played whom.

“Dima’s dead. Right now, your chances don’t look so good either,” she said. That got her. She could see Rana go pale. She shook her head, her famous brown hair tossing back and forth. “Last chance. Then the men come. They’re dying to jump in. Work on a good-looking woman like you. Something we women know,” Carrie said, crossing her legs. “Beauty is such a fragile thing, isn’t it? Who are you and al-Douni working for?”

Rana shook her head. Carrie decided to try a little more truth.

“Is al-Douni a double agent? The only way I can help you is if you’ll let me. All you have to do is nod.”

Almost unwillingly, Rana nodded.

Carrie’s mind raced. If al-Douni was a double, who was he doubling for? Who was running him? Dima’s boyfriend, Mohammed Siddiqi? The Iraqi pretending to be a Qatari, according to Marielle. Or was Rana just telling her what she thought Carrie wanted to hear?

“Who’s he really working for?”

“I’m not sure. But he was the one who introduced Dima to her boyfriend, the Qatari,” Rana said.

“Mohammed Siddiqi? I heard he wasn’t a real Qatari,” Carrie said.

“You’ve been talking to Marielle.” Rana frowned. “Inshallah, give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Carrie went to the door, went out and came back with a lit Marlboro cigarette. She put it between Rana’s lips. She’d find out now if Rana had really decided to cooperate.

“Okay,” Rana said, taking a drag and exhaling a stream of smoke. “You’re right. I work for Taha. I mean al-Douni. I recruited Dima too, though she pretended to be a Maronite for March 14. As you obviously know, we’re both from the north, both Sunni, both daughters of fathers in the Murabitun.”

“Taha al-Douni recruited you to become Davis Fielding’s mistress?”

“I’m not his mistress,” she said, taking a deep drag and letting Carrie take the cigarette from between her lips so she could exhale.

“What do you mean? You’re not saying you don’t have sex? You’re a beautiful woman. Famous even.”

“It’s not that simple. At first we did, but now I’m mostly just for show. We meet at parties, diplomatic receptions, things like that.” She shrugged.

“But you spy on him?”

Rana nodded.

“Does he know?”

“I don’t know what he knows.” She shrugged. “Lately, with the arrival of Dima’s Mohammed, the emphasis shifted.”

“From what to what?”

“From anything we could get on CIA activities in Lebanon and Syria to Iraq. They want to know about what the Americans know and don’t know and what their plans in Iraq are.”

“Is Mohammed, Dima’s boyfriend, running al-Douni?”

She snorted with derision. “That ibn el himar?” Son of a donkey. “He’s a courier, a delivery boy. A nobody.”

“Dima was afraid of him?”

She nodded. “The bastard abused her, the pig. She was terrified of him. All he had to do was look at her.”

That’s what Marielle said, Carrie thought. So that’s how they got Dima, the Sunni party girl, to become a terrorist. If Nightingale wasn’t running the show and Mohammed was just a messenger boy, whose op was it? And what was their interest in American intel about Iraq? The answer was obvious.

“Does Mohammed work for al-Qaeda? Is he in contact with Abu Nazir?”

“I don’t know. No one talks to Abu Nazir. No one knows who his contacts are. Taha once spoke about Abu Nazir’s deputy, Abu Ubaida.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was Abu Nazir’s executioner.”