“Have you any idea what a risk I’m taking? I could lose my license. Bad enough I’m prescribing for Dad. But at least he’s in therapy. I coordinate with his psychiatrist. Between the therapy and me watching him, he’s been good for two years now. You should spend some time with him. I know he’d like it. You wouldn’t know there was a problem.”
“Tell that to Mom,” Carrie said.
Neither of them spoke. That was a family black hole. The wound that didn’t heal. Their mother, Emma, had disappeared.
“If I can’t meet your father, what about your mother?” her lover at Princeton, John, the professor, had asked her one night in bed.
“I don’t know where she is.”
“What do you mean you don’t know where she is? Is she dead?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s the one thing I do know. I do understand.”
“Well, explain it to me and then there’ll be two of us,” he’d said.
“She left. Just like that. One day she said she was going to CVS. The drugstore. She’d be right back. We never saw her again.”
“Did your family look for her? The police? Did she ever try to make contact?”
“Yes. Yes. And no.”
“Wow! No wonder you don’t talk about your family.”
“That was the day I left for Princeton. She just disappeared and off I went. Just me and a suitcase and my happy childhood memories. Don’t you see? She was free. I was her youngest. The baby. And I was leaving. I could take care of myself. Now do you get an inkling of how screwed up I am? I’m the cute blond undergraduate you want to have sex with, but tell the truth, John. Am I really the girl you want to be with?”
“At least let me get you tested,” Maggie said. “Clozapine has potential side effects that are not good. Hypoglycemia. Agranulocytosis. You understand? Lowered white blood cell count can be really serious. At least let me do that.”
“Listen,” Carrie said, grabbing Maggie’s arms. “Don’t you get it? I can’t do it. Just give me the damn pills and let me get back to work. You don’t understand. I have to get back. It’s important.”
“Here’s three weeks’ worth of samples,” Maggie said, handing them to her in a plastic bag. “It’ll help stabilize you and hold you over, but that’s it. I mean it, Carrie. I can’t keep doing this. It’ll ruin both of us. I want you to seriously consider going into therapy. A psychiatrist can prescribe enough of this for you to walk to the moon on.”
“Shhhh! Be quiet,” Carrie said, turning up the car radio. She’d heard something.
“… reports that five U.S. servicemen from the Five Hundred and Second Infantry Regiment stationed at a checkpoint outside the city of Abbasiyah, south of Baghdad in the so-called Iraqi Triangle of Death, entered the home of a local Iraqi family, where they are charged by Iraqi authorities with raping a fourteen-year-old girl, then killing her and her entire family and setting the bodies on fire. The soldiers being accused claim that the attack was done by Sunni militants. U.S. military and Coalition government spokesmen have stated that the incident is under investigation. A spokesman for General Casey, commander of the Multi-National Force–Iraq, stated, ‘We will get to the bottom of this deplorable act,’” the announcer said.
Carrie turned the radio down.
“Shit, this is going to blow things up. I’ve got to go. Thanks for this, Maggie,” she said, indicating the pills. “Thanks for coming to get me. I’ll come see the girls as soon as I can. I promise.”
“Is this Iraq thing something you’re involved in?” Maggie asked.
Carrie looked at her.
“We do … everything. People don’t have a clue. I’ll call,” she said, getting out of the car.
“What about Dad?” Maggie asked. Carrie squinted at her in the sun. “You have to talk to him sometime.”
“Good old Mag, you never give up. I will. Sometime,” she said.
She got back to Langley just in time for an all-hands meeting called by David Estes for everyone in the Counterterrorism Center unit. He told them that they could expect a significant rise in terrorism against Americans both within and outside Iraq as a result of what had happened in Abbasiyah.
“So, just when you think we couldn’t possibly come up with anything that could make us even more unpopular with the Arab street or make the Iraqi population hate us even more, some asshole grunts in Iraq have managed to come up with the best recruiting ad for al-Qaeda since they decided to fly into buildings in lower Manhattan!” Estes snapped angrily. “American targets in the Middle East and Europe are of particular concern.
“And I would remind everyone that we have a threat, from an unsubstantiated but previously credible source, of a major attack on American soil,” he added, not looking at Carrie as he said it. “All of you start combing through every piece of intel we’ve got from anywhere in the Middle East and South Asia. I mean everything. Any threats, no matter how iffy, should be brought directly to me immediately.
“We’re going to have to deploy additional resources to Baghdad Station. Saul, you’ll handle it,” he said to Saul, who nodded. “There’s going to be a ton of fallout. The media is going to have a field day with this and I’ve already told the DCIA we can expect a significant increase in U.S. casualties, both military and civilian, both inside and outside the Green Zone, but I want more-detailed projections. I need to let the Joint Chiefs and the White House know what they’re in for.
“In addition, I want a complete analysis of all Sunni activity in the Triangle of Death zone, from IA, but also from you, Saul, on my desk by seventeen hundred today. If somebody farts anywhere from Baghdad to al-Hillah, I want to know about it. Those of you not being reassigned to support Baghdad Station will have to pick up the extra slack from the people we’re pulling away. Now get to work. We’re wasting time,” Estes said, dismissing them.
An hour later, Carrie caught Saul in the corridor on his way to the elevator. She’d been waiting for him.
“Not now, Carrie. I’ve got a meeting on the seventh floor,” he told her, meaning with the top directors in the CIA.
“Nightingale met with Ahmed Haidar. Fielding must’ve known about it but never said a word,” she said.
He stood there, blinking behind his glasses like an owl in the daytime.
“How do you know?”
“There was a photo. NSA picked it up from an Israeli satellite stream. In a café. I couldn’t tell where. Possibly Cairo or Amman.”
“What does that tell you?”
“GSD and Hezbollah are in bed. Maybe the Hariri assassination. Maybe something coming up, like Julia said, using something juicy like Abbasiyah to cover it up. You tell me, Saul. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I hired you. What do you want?”
“I need Fort Meade. Who can I talk to there?” The National Security Agency was headquartered at the Fort Meade, Maryland, army base.
“Out of the question. We have established procedures for