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 this kind of thing and they don’t include you charging off on your own like a bull in a china shop. You’re already on thin ice.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go deal with this latest screw-up. What the hell did they expect?” he said, stabbing his finger at the elevator button half a dozen times. “You send young men over in multiple deployments, half of them from National Guard units, lousy civilians, many of them with post-traumatic stress, dealing with headless corpses, IEDs on every street corner, allies you can’t turn your back on and millions of women you can look at but can’t touch. What did they think was going to happen? Christ!” he said, and entered the elevator. “You don’t go near Fort Meade. I mean it,” he added as the elevator door closed.
Bullshit, she thought to herself. There wasn’t enough to go on without the NSA. She’d find someone.
CHAPTER 6
Fort Meade, Maryland
Driving up I-295 in Maryland, she thought if she took 495 instead of continuing north, she could stop in Kensington, where she’d grown up after her family had moved from Michigan because her dad got a job in Bethesda.
Holy Trinity High, she remembered. All girls, all Catholic. Nuns, field hockey and short plaid skirts. “The masturbation center of the universe,” Maggie called it. Before her bipolar disorder, which didn’t hit her till her sophomore year in college, she was the ultimate little overachiever: Class president. Second place in the state fifteen-hundred-meter championships. Valedictorian on a solid Ivy trajectory; Princeton and Columbia talking scholarships. And her mother growing bleaker by the minute.
“It’s the state championship, Mom. I’d like you to come.”
“Talk to your father, Carrie. I know he wants to go.”
“You know I can’t do that. There are college scouts there. He’ll ruin it for me. He always ruins it for me.”
“You go, Carrie. You’ll be fine.”
“What’s the matter, Mom? Afraid I might win?”
“Why do you say that? I do hope you win. Not that it matters.”
“Because I might actually amount to something? Is that what you’re afraid of? That one of us might actually escape from this lunatic asylum and it won’t be you?”
“You’re such a little fool, Carrie. The game is rigged. Even winners don’t win.”
Man oh man, she thought. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up even crazier than I already am. She turned off the highway and went on to the sentry gate. From the gate she could see the big rectangular black glass building, the National Security Agency headquarters, a.k.a. the Black House.
It took a half hour for them to vet her identity, give her a visitor’s badge and lead her to an empty conference room with a long mahogany table. A thin man in shirtsleeves and a bow tie, looking like a throwback to the fifties, came in.
“Jerry Bishop,” he said, sitting across from her. “This is an occasion. We usually don’t get folks from McLean making the 295 trek. What’s the occasion? Abbasiyah?”
“Well, if you had something on that that was interesting, or any new al-Qaeda ops, you could make me a superstar. I wouldn’t argue.” She smiled at him, wafting just the vaguest whiff of seduction at him, like perfume.
“We’re not seeing any real increase in traffic, apart from the usual jihadi Web crap. Poisoning the New York City water supply, attacking refineries, chemical plants in the U.S., and that perennial favorite: flying a private plane loaded with explosives into the Capitol building, although why anyone would think that getting rid of some congressmen would cause any harm to America is beyond me.” He grinned. “Other than that, a bit of a surge in cell phone traffic with some Salafi tribesmen in El Arish in Sinai. Maybe something for the Israelis.” He shrugged. “That’s about it.”
“There are tourist resorts in southern Sinai. You’d get all kinds of tourists: Israelis, Americans, Europeans, scuba divers. And the Egyptian government doesn’t have much control there. Might be something.”
“It might. I’ll give it to you.” He nodded. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
She took photographs of Taha al-Douni, a.k.a. Nightingale; Ahmed Haidar; Dima; and Davis Fielding out of her laptop case and put them on the table. Touching each one, she identified each of them in turn.
“These three are from Beirut,” she said, indicating Nightingale, Dima and Davis Fielding. Tapping the Haidar photograph, she added, “This one we got from you guys from an Israeli satellite download stream.”
“What do you want?”
“Everything you’ve got on all four of these guys. Cell phone conversations, e-mails, tweets, surveillance, Hallmark cards from their grandmothers. Anything.”
He snorted a quick laugh. “Look, you realize we deal in quantity, not quality, right? We pull in everything. Public, private, cell phones, a text from Abu What’s-his-name to his mother. We decrypt, we translate, we run algorithms to try to separate out some of the more obvious garbage. Then we send it to you CIA types. Also to DIA, NSC, FBI, the whole alphabet soup. That’s it. You’re the ones who are supposed to put the pieces together.”
“I’ll narrow it for you. Focus just on these people and except for al-Douni and Haidar, just on Beirut.”
He looked at her speculatively.
“You work for Estes, right?”
“I report directly to David Estes. For what it’s worth, Saul Berenson, Middle East chief,
