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Andrew Kaplan

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

CHAPTER 1

Ashrafieh, Beirut, Lebanon

Nightingale was late.

Sitting in the darkened movie theater, second seat, fourth row from the back, Carrie Mathison tried to decide whether to abort. It was supposed to be an initial contact only. “Passing ships,” Saul Berenson, her boss and mentor, had called it during training back at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility in Virginia. Get a close-up look at one Taha al-Douni, to whom they’d assigned the code name “Nightingale,” let him get a quick look at her for the next time, whisper the time and location for the next meet and leave. Strictly by the book.

If the contact was late, Company protocol was to wait fifteen to twenty minutes, then abort and reschedule only if the contact provided a damn good reason why they hadn’t shown. An everyday excuse such as Middle Eastern time, which could be anything from a half hour to a half day late, or the regular Friday-evening traffic mash-up on Boulevard Fouad Chehab during the cinq á sept, the hours between five and seven P. M. when businessmen met their mistresses in discreet little Hamra-district apartments wouldn’t cut it.

Except Carrie wanted this one. According to her source, Dima, a pretty Lebanese party girl from March 14, a Maronite Christian political group, whom you could find every night at the rooftop bar at Le Gray in the Central District, al-Douni had two things that made him someone the CIA would die to get their hands on: one, he was GSD, an officer in the General Security Directorate, the brutal Syrian secret intelligence agency, which gave him a direct pipeline into the Assad regime in Damascus; and two, he needed money. A foxy Egyptian girlfriend with expensive tastes was bleeding him dry, Dima said.