Estes interrupted her.
“Come up to my office. Now,” Estes said, and rang off.
Good. Finally, she thought, wondering whether it was about the e-mail she’d sent him on the Sawarka, a Salafist Bedouin tribe in northern Sinai, and the possibility of a terrorist strike against tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh and Dahab. Stuff she’d gotten from the Black House. She was thinking about that and Dima as she headed up to Estes’s office. Why hadn’t she surfaced—or at least some news about her? If a body had been found, she was sure Virgil would’ve contacted her.
When she knocked on the door and saw Saul, looking worried, in the office with Estes, she realized it was something else.
Estes didn’t smile, just gestured for her to sit. Saul, seated on another chair, didn’t look at her. Oh boy, she thought.
The afternoon sun was bright on the window behind him, its reflection nearly obscuring the view of the courtyard between the George Bush Center and the old headquarters building, a few staffers sitting outside in shirtsleeves. Strange weather, she thought, her mind suddenly noticing everything. Something is about to happen. She could feel her crazy electrical circuits firing.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Estes said. “Are you completely out of your mind?”
“Thinking about what? What are we talking about?” she said.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t go to the NSA. On your own. Without authorization. Do you have any idea how many procedures you broke?” Estes snapped.
“I told you not to, Carrie,” Saul said softly.
“How’d you find out?” she asked Estes.
“I had a very nice e-mail from some midlevel manager named Jerry Bishop over there. He appreciated you coming over, bridging the interagency-rivalry thing and all that. Just letting me know—nicely—that it happened despite the rules. Thinks it’s a good idea. We should do more of it. The only thing missing was a suggestion that we toast marshmallows around the old campfire together. Except I don’t want to do more of it, Carrie. We are consumers of theirs, nothing more. And we don’t have the time or resources to sort through their shit as it is. I can’t have it. More importantly”—he gestured vaguely at the ceiling—“neither can our masters upstairs.”
“Even when it’s productive? I came up with something. The tribesmen in Sinai. You said you wanted everything. I sent you an e-mail,” she said to Estes, afraid to look over at Saul.
“Terrific. Tribesmen in Sinai. I’ll alert Lawrence of Arabia. What the hell were you thinking, Carrie? Do you have any idea where we are in terms of budget? Do you know that the Senate is dying to cut our balls off if they see a spark of redundancy—and here you go, traipsing up to Fort Meade, violating understandings it’s taken us years to come up with.” He shook his head. “Beirut Station said you were out of control, but Saul convinced me otherwise. I can’t have this.”
“What about the Sawarka?” she said. It was on the tip of her tongue to raise the missing NSA database records and the redacted CTC material, but something told her not to. Just stick to the jihadis.
“Saul gave a heads-up to the Egyptian SSI. They said they’d look into it. Also the Israelis. That’s not the issue.”
“Then you tell me what the issue is, David,” she said, standing up to confront him. “Because I got pulled from Beirut in the middle of an op, where we’ve got a female agent who’s disappeared off the face of the earth after Hezbollah and the GSD made a move against one of your case officers, me”—she tapped her chest—“and not only has nobody even looked at it, but nobody’s had the brains to ask the question ‘Why?’ Plus I gave you actionable intel from a highly credible source on a possible major terrorist attack on the U.S. and so far nobody seems to give a shit except me. So you tell me what the damn issue is.”
This time she did look at Saul and he looked green, like he was sick to his stomach.
“Sit down. I mean it,” Estes said, biting off the words.
She sat. He took a breath, then another.
“Look, Carrie. We’re not the military here. We don’t just give orders. Our people are expected to act independently, to think for themselves. Management-wise, it’s like herding cats. But that’s the price you pay for good people who dig things up in places no one would expect that can save an entire nation. So we give you a lot of leeway, but this crossed the line.
“You went outside the Agency completely on your own. You were way beyond the parameters of ‘need to know,’ which is why we only allow authorized interagency contacts through normal channels. The NSA’s job is to provide us with data. Period. They don’t have the intelligence-analysis experts to turn raw data into useful intel. We do. Most of the people on this entire campus do nothing else but analyze data. If we get the NSA into our business, then Congress has the right to ask what the hell they’re paying us for. And if you want me to do something about this so-called actionable intel about an attack, you better damn well give me something to work with.
“Furthermore, while you’re busy playing in your sandbox with Sinai and Beirut, you are not paying attention to al-Qaeda, especially in Iraq, which is what I needed you to concentrate on and the only reason you’re still here.”
“I’m looking at Iraq too. I—”
“Cut the crap, Carrie. We don’t have time for this. What just happened in Abbasiyah is a gift to the bad guys. I can’t have you off doing whatever the hell you want. It doesn’t work that way.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I’ve notified HR. I’m removing you from CTC. In fact, not just from CTC, from the National Clandestine Service. You’re done here. Saul?” he said, looking at Berenson.
Carrie felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She wanted to throw up. This couldn’t be happening. Didn’t they see what was going on? Missing files, a possible terrorist attack, and she was the only one who’d spotted it and now they were getting rid of her?
“Carrie, you’re a great talent. Your language skills, your instincts,” Saul said, leaning forward, hands clasped, almost as if he were praying. “But you forced our hand. You’re being reassigned.”
Relief flooded her. It was bad, but she wasn’t being fired.
“I thought I’m out of NCS,” she said.
“You are,” Saul said, glancing at Estes, “being transferred to the Intelligence Analysis Division. The Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis.”
“Effective immediately,” Estes said. “No more fieldwork, Mathison. You’re done.”
“Who did you piss off?” her workmate in the next cubicle, Joanne Dayton, said. Blond, blue-eyed, a little overweight and pretty enough to have been a cheerleader in high school, but according to Joanne, she’d been a doper, not one of the cool kids. “Otherwise, I’d’ve never ended up here,” she’d whispered, rolling her eyes.
“David Estes,” Carrie said.
“Really?” Joanne said, looking at her with greater interest. “I’m surprised you’re still working here.” She moved closer. Just girls. “What’d you do?”
What did I do? Carrie thought. She hadn’t let
