enough, my job,” she said.
Her new boss was a tall, odd-looking long-haired man of Russian descent, with arms and legs disproportionately larger than his torso, as if his body had been assembled from cast-off odds and ends of other people somehow welded together like one of the Watts Towers. Someone said he’d been wounded in Bosnia, but no one would speak about it. His name was Yerushenko. Alan Yerushenko.
“I don’t know why they moved you over from NCS and I don’t care,” Yerushenko told her, looking at her through tinted glasses. “We may not be the glamour boys of the business like on the other side of the house, but don’t think what we do is not important. And I’ll expect a daily report of your progress.”
The hell with you, she thought.
“What’s with Yerushenko?” she asked Joanne.
“He’s a stickler, but it could be worse. He’s not entirely an idiot. Just mostly.” She grinned.
Yerushenko put her on Iraq data analysis from NCS core collectors, CIA officers who collected data from case officers and forwarded the intel to Langley for analysis and evaluation. “You have to assign probabilities for credibility and accuracy,” he told her. “The rule of thumb is that most are barely credible and the rest are even worse.”
She started to work on reports on AQI, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Their leader was a mysterious figure who used the nom de guerre Abu Nazir. She’d first heard about him while following up on a lead in Baghdad last year. But he was like a ghost; there was hardly anything real on him. There was little known about him personally too, although he was suspected of being in Anbar Province, where he had cowed local tribal leaders by cutting off the heads of everyone who got in his way. Sometimes, they were left stuck on poles along the roads like gruesome signposts. There was also mention of an equally ruthless lieutenant of his, about whom even less was known, code-named Abu Ubaida.
But she couldn’t concentrate. She felt humiliated, sick to her stomach. Why had they done this to her? Why had Saul abandoned her? And why didn’t they listen? There was an attack planned against America that might happen in a few days or weeks and nobody seemed to care. She went to the ladies’ room, into a stall, and closed the door. Sitting on the lid, her face in her hands, it was all she could do to keep from screaming at the top of her lungs.
What was happening? Her skin was tingling. Prickling, like when your foot falls asleep. It’s stress. An emotional jolt of hormones, she told herself. The stress was sideswiping her meds, knocking out the circuits. She rubbed the skin on her arms to try to make it stop tingling. It didn’t work. Then she understood. She’d been running low on clozapine, so she had started taking them every other day. Her bipolar was kicking in. She was going into a depressive episode.
She looked around the stall like a trapped animal. She had to get home.
CHAPTER 8
Reston, Virginia
For a week and a half, she’d managed to drag herself to work, to get dressed, to put on makeup, to pretend she gave a shit. She had stopped taking the few meds she had left from Maggie altogether. It felt like she’d fallen into a black hole, abandoned, exiled. She read reports about AQI but had to reread everything three or four times. It was impossible to concentrate.
The bastards, she thought. All this time she’d thought Saul was like the father she’d never had, or more like the wise, funny Jewish uncle everybody wished they had. And Estes. She’d thought he appreciated what she did, how hard she worked, how good she was at her job.
But even when she brought them actionable intel, they not only did nothing, they punished her. They destroyed her career. It was over, she thought, and spent more and more time in the ladies’ room at work. She had nothing. She was nothing.
She stopped going to work. She knew she needed to try to find out about the pending attack Julia had told her about, but she couldn’t make herself do anything.
Sitting on the floor in a corner of her bedroom, the apartment in Reston completely dark and silent. She hadn’t eaten in how many days? Two? Three? Some part of her brain told her, This is not you. This is the disease, but she couldn’t make herself care. What difference did it make?
She had to pee but couldn’t make herself get up to go to the bathroom. When was the last time she had gone? What did it matter? She was alone in the darkness. A failure. Like her father.
Her father.
Thanksgiving. Her freshman year at Princeton. Her sister, Maggie, was a senior at NYU in New York. She’d called Carrie to let her know she was having Thanksgiving in Connecticut with her boyfriend Todd’s family.
“Dad’s alone. You have to go, Carrie,” Maggie said.
“Why me? You need to come too. He needs us.” Thinking, It’s Thanksgiving. Maybe Mom will finally call. She was married to him all those years. Didn’t that count for something? And what about her and Maggie? What did they do wrong? If she didn’t want to call Frank, she could have at least called her or Maggie. She knew Maggie’s phone number at her apartment in Morningside Heights. And she knew Carrie was at Butler at Princeton. If she wanted to, she could have gotten hold of them. Their father, Frank, need never have known. Oh God, was her entire family crazy?
Her father called two days before Thanksgiving.
“Your sister’s not coming,” he said.
“I know, Dad. It’s her boyfriend. I think it’s getting serious, her and Todd. But I’m coming. I’ll be there Wednesday. I’m looking forward to seeing you,” she lied, thinking it was going to be deadly in that house, just the two of them.
“You don’t have to come, Caroline. I know you have things you’d rather …” His voice trailed off.
“Dad, don’t be silly. It’s Thanksgiving. Look, you buy the turkey. I’ll be there Wednesday afternoon. I’ll cook it. I’ll do the whole thing, okay?”
“It’s all right. Maybe it’s better you don’t come,” he said.
“Dad, please! Don’t do this. I said I’ll be home. I’ll be home.”
“You were always a good girl, Carrie. Your sister too. She wasn’t as smart or as pretty as you, but a good girl too. We should have done better by you. I’m sorry.”
“Dad! Don’t talk like that. I’ll see you Wednesday.”
“I know. Good-bye, Carrie,” he said, and hung up, leaving her staring at the phone in her hand.
She thought about calling Maggie and insisting, then decided against it. Maggie was with Todd. Let it be. But he sounded strange. Like he was down. She calculated. There was a midterm on Tuesday morning, but after that, nothing as the college started to close down for the holiday. She could surprise him. Leave Tuesday right after the exam and get home by Tuesday afternoon.
That Tuesday, she caught a Greyhound bus in Mount Laurel and connected to Silver Spring. She got to Kensington
