LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 3

       Langley, Virginia

      After four years in Beirut, plus time in Iraq, it felt strange driving the woodsy George Washington Memorial Parkway, handing the badge she’d gotten out of her safe-deposit box to the guard at the gate like an everyday commuter. Coming into the George Bush headquarters building, she was struck by how many people she didn’t know. No one gave her a second glance in the elevator. In a skirt, blouse, jacket and makeup for the office, she felt like she was wearing a disguise. I don’t belong here, she thought. Maybe I never did.

      She’d been up all night, unable to sleep. When she closed her eyes to try to sleep she saw her father, Frank Mathison. Not as he was now, but how he was when she was a child back in Michigan. He’d lost his job at Ford Motor Company when she was six. She remembered her mother coming into her sister’s and her room to sleep with them, the three of them huddled under the covers while her father paced the house all night, saying nonstop that there was a miracle coming; he had seen the sign in computer code.

       She remembered her father driving them up to New Baltimore on Lake St. Clair when she was in first grade in the middle of December, talking about the miracle and how they were to be witnesses, and sitting there on a dock near the water tower, away from the center of the town decorated for Christmas, all of them shivering, freezing cold, looking out at the gray waters of the lake for 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

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