It hadn't gone well.
Quinn got back into his car and slumped in the seat. Dar Adal was disgusted with him. Quinn was disgusted with himself. He was fucking black ops, he had a resplendent record up until now. He had been considered one of the best amongst those in the know, and there weren't that many who knew, so that had made Quinn even more of a rarity. He was asked if he had discovered any new intelligence that rendered the completion of his mission as per orders impossible, some reason why the assassination of Brody was suddenly ill-advised. Or had he just thought that Carrie and the Congressman were cute together? Quinn had tried to explain his reasons for not pulling the trigger. It didn't wash.
Dar Adal had reminded him that he was a soldier, not a CIA Analyst. His job was not to analyse, judge or even opine. His job was to maintain his cover until the order was given, get the job done cleanly and get the hell out. Same as ever. He accused Quinn of having gotten too cosy at Langley. Of having 'made friends'. Of having wilfully disobeyed orders. Of having thought he knew better than his superiors. Of arrogance.
Dar Adal knew Saul Berenson of old. Apparently he and Saul already had beaks and wings when the dinosaurs were still slithering out of the primordial soup trying to shed their gills. He said that Saul was once a force to be reckoned with but that he had gone soft, effete, landed up where he belonged, behind a desk playing politics and babysitting his intelligence officers while others with stronger stomachs rolled up their sleeves and got the real work done. Despite the denigration, Quinn noted that there seemed to be a grudging respect between the two old-timers. He suspected that this dressing down was in part due to the embarrassment caused by Saul knowing that Quinn was one of Dar Adal's and that Quinn had fucked up so spectacularly. The 200-plus bodies in the morgue had not been directly referenced. They didn't need to be.
He asked Quinn if he had taken a lead from Berenson and suddenly found a heart, developed a conscience. He said that if he had, he was no longer of any use in the real world. The real world. Is that what this was? The real world was quite a lonely place, where you had to be prepared to do some pretty terrible things in order to keep the average Joe secure in his cosseted version of events. That took steel, which Quinn used to pride himself on having in spades. He had only recently started to question it, and that hadn't worked out too well. A good marksman knew how to subdue his own heartbeat in order to prevent it meddling with his aim. Quinn figured that he might not like it sometimes but the real world, as Dar Adal had termed it, was all he now knew.
Quinn wondered if he wanted out, after all. Maybe it was time to stop living in the shadows? He could get himself his own place, stop sleeping with one eye open in his sleeping bag on top of the bed. He could try getting under the sheets at night, accumulate some stuff, leave it around the place instead of having his life packed inside his duffle bag, ready to receive the call to bail at any second. He could buy himself a kick-ass car, take a vacation, blow some of that cash sat wasting in the bank because he never got the opportunity to spend it. Maybe he could build some bridges with Julia, start to see John more regularly, be a real father to him. Make his mother proud, take care of her in the time she had left. Maybe he could settle down, start dating again, see the same girl on more than two occasions for a change...nah, he thought, he liked that bit. The truth was, Quinn wouldn't know where to start with any of those things. He wondered whether the whole black-ops-covert-assassin thing wasn't in fact a cover, an excuse so that he didn't have to deal with his own life.
The things he had seen, the deeds he had committed, the orders he had carried out, meant that Quinn would only ever sleep with one eye open, he would never rest easy with a mere deadlock on his door. Dar Adal knew it, because he was that way too.
Quinn had awaited the verdict but it never came. Dar Adal maybe hadn't even decided himself yet. He figured he would probably get a call in the middle of the night, telling him to catch a flight some place. Afghanistan, Iran, Kashmir. Oh man, he hoped it wasn't going to be Yemen. He could be posted abroad for some time, it all depended how mad Dar Adal was. For now he had sent him back to Saul, possibly the worst punishment of all, having to walk past the bomb site daily, having to see the mark his intervention, or non-intervention, had left on Saul, on Carrie. Having to see that motherfucker's suicide tape on the news 24/7.
He took a deep breath and looked at himself in the rear view mirror. Until he got that call he would do what he could to help.