two days while her father kept saying, “It’s coming. Just you wait. It’s coming.”
And her mother shouting at him, “What’s coming, Frank? What’s the big miracle? Is Jesus gonna come strolling toward us across Anchor Bay? Because if he is and if the angels are coming with him, tell ’em to bring us some heaters, because me and the kids are freezing to death.”
“Do you see the water tower, Emma. It’s mathematics. Don’t you get it? The universe is mathematics. Computers are mathematics. Everything is math. And look where it sits. Right by the water.”
“What has math got to do with it? What are you talking about?”
“I measured it. It’s thirty-seven miles exactly from our front door to the water tower. This is where the miracle is going to happen. Thirty-seven.”
“What has thirty-seven miles got to do with anything?”
“It’s a prime number, Emma. It was in the computer code. And water is life. Moses struck the rock for water. Christ turned water into wine at Cana. Look at it. It’s coming. This is where it’s going to happen. Don’t you see?”
“It’s a damn water tower, Frank!”
Until finally they drove back to Dearborn, her father not saying anything, just driving like he wanted to kill someone, her mother yelling, “Slow down, Frank! Do you want to kill us?” and her big sister, Maggie, next to her, crying and screaming, “Stop, Daddy! Stop! Stop!” And when she got ready to go to school the next day, her mother telling her, “Don’t say anything about your father, understand?”
It wasn’t till later that she realized that whatever strange thing had taken her father over had taken them over too when she heard her parents arguing with each other at the top of their lungs in the middle of the night. Maggie told her to stay in bed, but she tiptoed out of their room and saw them in the kitchen, the walls and floor smeared with food and broken plates and her mother screaming:
“Three weeks! They said you haven’t been at work in three weeks without telling anyone! Of course they fired you! What the hell did you expect them to do? Give you a promotion?”
“I was busy. You’ll see, Emma. It’ll be good. They’ll be begging for me to come back. Don’t you see? It’s all about the miracle. That’s where everyone gets it wrong. They don’t understand. Remember those license plate numbers on the cars we passed coming back from New Baltimore? They were a code. I just have to figure out the numbers,” her father said.
“What are you talking about? Does anybody know what you’re talking about? What are we going to do? How are we going to live?”
“For God’s sakes, Emma. You think they can run those servers without me? Trust me, they’ll call me back any time now. They’ll be begging for me to come back.”
“Oh God, oh God, oh God! What are we going to do?”
And now she’d been fired. Just like her father.
Saul Berenson, Middle East Division chief, NCS, was expecting her in his office on the fourth floor. She took a deep breath, knocked and went in.
Saul, big rumpled bearded teddy bear of a man, was working on his computer. Rabbi Saul, as she sometimes thought of him. He’d been the one who’d first recruited her for the CIA, on a cold March day in her senior year at the Career Center at Princeton.
The office was the usual messy disorder that only Saul could find his way through. As always, a stuffed Winnie the Pooh sat slumped on a shelf next to two photographs: one of Saul with the first President Bush, the one they’d named the building after; the second of Saul with CIA director James Woolsey and President Clinton.
Saul looked up from the computer as she sat down.
“You found someplace?” he asked, tilting his glasses so he could see her better.
“A one-bedroom in Reston,” she said.
“Convenient?”
“It’s not far from the Dulles Toll Road. Is that what we’re going to talk about?”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You saw the information from Julia. You need to send me back to Beirut.”
“Not gonna happen, Carrie. I don’t think you realize how many people you’ve pissed off or how high it goes.”
“I escaped a Hezbollah trap, Saul. Would you have preferred that they captured me, paraded me on al-Jazeera as a CIA spy? Because the way I’ve been treated, I’m beginning to think that’s what you and Davis wanted.”
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s not that simple,” he said, scratching his beard. “It’s never that simple.”
“You’re wrong. It’s exactly that simple. I was set up—and now Beirut Station’s security is compromised and you’ve got a dick for a station chief who only wants to kill the messenger.”
Saul took off his glasses. Without them, his eyes were softer, less focused.
“You’re not making this easy, Carrie,” he said. He wiped his glasses on his shirt and put them back on.
“Did I ever?” she said.
“No.” He smiled wryly. “I’ll give you that. You were a pain in the ass right from the beginning.”
“So why did you hire me? I’m not the only woman in America who speaks Arabic,” she said, leaning back in her chair and looking at his Winnie the Pooh in its red “Pooh” shirt. He had once told her Pooh was a perfect metaphor for the human condition. All it took was a single letter change to describe our obsession; just change “honey” to “money.”
“Look, Carrie, a CIA station chief is like the captain of a ship. It’s one of the last pure dictatorships on earth. If he doesn’t think he can trust you, your judgment, there isn’t a lot I can do.”
She sat straight up in her chair, tense, knees tightly together, as if it were a job interview. “You’re his boss. Fire him, not me.” Please, she thought. Please Saul. Please believe me. Saul was the only one she could trust, the only one who believed in her. If he turned against her, she had nothing; was nothing.
“I can’t,” he said. “Think about it. My job’s like being the admiral of a fleet. If I start firing captains for using their judgment, they’ll be second-guessing themselves all over the place. They’ll be of no use to me or anyone else. I have to look at the bigger picture.”
“Bullshit!” she said, standing up, thinking, why couldn’t he understand? It was Saul. He was supposed to be on her side. “This is total bullshit. This isn’t about morale or security or some other bullshit. This is politics. And it stinks.” She stared at him. “When did you become one of them, Saul? The people who are ready to sell this country out in the interest of their own pathetic careers?”
Saul slammed his hand hard on the desk, making her jump.
