LITMIR.BIZ

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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 them kidnap or kill her. Since she’d started running for her life on Avenue Michel Bustros, she hadn’t really stopped.

      “Oddly 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

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