Carrie screeched down the road, shaking her head violently and muttering 'Fucking neutralised?!', to herself. Stopping at the lights and taking care not to stall this time, she suddenly became aware of herself as the guy in the passenger seat of the car pulled level with hers shot her a screwy look. As if she was mentally ill or something. She hadn't actually meant to blow up at Saul at the slightest provocation but she had found that she couldn't contain it. Part of it was her horror at lying to him like that, it had made her panic, the grounding that her solid relationship with him provided suddenly no longer there. She knew that he didn't deserve it and she knew that he had barely even got started with the questions. She would have lie more to him, lie harder. She felt nauseous. She switched on some music and blew out a long, long breath.
She left her car on the other side of the Langley campus, nearer to the building where she had visited Saul earlier this morning. She didn't want to see the auditorium again. Ordinarily she would have used the sight of the outrage to galvanise her, to give her the extra impetus to go after the perpetrators and shut them down. There was nothing ordinary about her reaction to this whole thing though. Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket and she ignored it. The place was spookily deserted but she got security to unlock an empty office a few doors down from the one she had found Saul in, childishly not wanting to take the room next to his since they were fighting.
She flopped down in the chair, slapped her laptop down on the desk in front of her and put her head in her hands. Interrupted again by her cell, she reached down and switched it off without even glancing at the caller display. She just wanted Brody. She hated not knowing where he was. Carrie logged on and started scanning the regular news sites for coverage of the incident and of the 'CIA bomber, Congressman Nicholas Brody'. She moved on to chat rooms, social media, those sites either side of the political divide that she routinely monitored. Forums on the edges of the internet and the periphery of reason itself. All of human imagination, human ingenuity, bias and insight was represented. So was the inhumanity that only human beings were capable of, seeping out of the lurid soup of zeros and ones. Some of the stuff she read was plain inaccurate, some was clearly invented and some was built of this vilest poison. Her eyes stung. All she seemed to do was cry these days.
One of the news sites linked to Brody's 'astonishing suicide video in full'. Suicide video. She was glad that the assumption he was dead had taken root. Carrie had seen the video a hundred times, she knew it word for word. She had watched it back constantly when Saul first returned from Beirut, Brody's speech becoming like a mantra that ran uninterrupted in her head, reinforcing the blossoming realisation, then the calm assertion and finally the concrete surety that she had been right all along. She wasn't just a basket case. It had saved her and it had come just in time, as she had just been facing up to the notion that perhaps she didn't know herself deep down, she wasn't conscious of her own limits after all. Carrie had been fundamentally shaken to think that for all her prescience, her startling hunches and her 'insight bordering on witchcraft' (as Quinn had kindly put it), she could still be so vastly, supremely wrong and so massively bested by her condition. For the first time she had begun to accept that it was bigger than her. Until now, it had won a few bouts but Carrie had come out on top overall, slight contusions but wits intact. She was scared for the future if this shift between her and it really had occurred. But the video evidence rescued her, it had redeemed her and devastated her all at the same time.
Carrie clicked the mouse but kept her finger depressed knowing the video wouldn't buffer until she released it. Did she really want to watch it again? Should she really be doing this right now? She couldn't help it, she just wanted to see his face. Except it wasn't really his face. Not how she knew it. It was hard and stony and serious. It had been all those things on the fire road where she had left him, but there he had the softness and placidity she knew too. The video showed a soldier's face contemplating his advance into a battle that he wouldn't come back from. He stood bolt upright, uniform pristine. She would liken him to a robot except there was too much intensity in the way he spoke his words. Explaining why his side was the right side. She didn't want to hear his twisted logic all over again, so she muted her laptop. She just watched the black and white footage intently, like she had watched him for all those many hours when he was a freshly released POW. She was comforted by the familiarity of it, of just having him there on the screen in front of her, no matter what he was up to. She watched his mouth moving, saw his eyes flash when he emphasised a point. They were the same eyes she had seen up close, the pair that had fixed her dead or drawn her in depending on his mood, whether they were friends or foes. She remembered the way they creased when he was amused, playing dumb and asking her what she wanted when he knew full well what she wanted, as she slid over to him on the jetty by the lake only a few days ago. They were the same pair, pinked-rimmed from smoke and dust and without a trace of malice, that had implored her to believe him in Saul's office. At those memories, the tears started again. Why was she doing this to herself? She tried to get a grip, zoning in on Brody's dancing mouth, recognising the exact point in his monologue he had reached and joining in, whispering his misguided words in unison with him, dubbing his video with her own voice.
Carrie faltered, she had messed up on the script. She had been spouting a line about Walden while Brody had moved on to something else. Ever the pedant, she ran back the video and switched the sound back on to join in at the appropriate juncture and get it right this time. Something was awry. She looked at the time bar under the video. One minute twenty two, it said. Carrie clearly remembered staring at the time bar before and having the figures 1:47 stare back at her, reflecting on the fact that 1:47, 107 seconds of video, had been all it took to reverse the judgment on her sanity, to get her her job and her life back.
Twenty five missing seconds. This was the astonishing video in full. Where were they? It struck Carrie that the more pertinent question was 'What were they?'. She sprang up from the desk, casting around for something, tools, equipment supplies. She grabbed her bag. Saul's post-its. Perfect.
Quinn knocked softly on the door and stepped into the office, holding a can of Dr. Pepper. He wasn't sure that a carbonated drink would be good for the stomach trouble he was experiencing today but he felt he needed the sugar.
"Carrie, you're still here? I saw the light on. Where's Saul? What are you doing all the way down the hall. Are you okay? You look kind of...um...?". He knew that was too many questions.
"Go ahead. Say it. Make my fucking day!", snapped Carrie, impatient because he had interrupted her train of thought.
Quinn raised his eyebrows and lifted his hands to his chest in an unconscious 'whoah there' gesture. He saw that her cheeks were wet, shining as the tracks caught the light, although she didn't seem to be crying anymore.
"Sorry. I'm just busy, is all. There is so much to be done.", Carrie said, now standing in the middle of the room, edging backwards. It was preferable not to be still for a second, not to lose momentum.
"Okay, so if there's nothing I can help with...I was looking for Saul, I said I'd meet him back here.", Quinn said cautiously.
"How the hell should I know where he is?", shrugged Carrie with a scowl. She took hold of a marker pen and swept it horizontally across the whiteboard on the far wall of the office with all the spite of a woman slashing at the throat of her enemy with a barber's razor.
Quinn wondered what the hell had gone on this morning in the time he had been gone. He wondered if Carrie had found out about his orders to assassinate Brody. While she hadn't exactly welcomed him with open arms, her ire seemed to be directed more at Saul, so he guessed not. Maybe a posting in Yemen wouldn't be so bad, he thought, less hostile. Assuming correctly that he had been dismissed, he turned to leave and as he did so he caught sight of Brody's face frozen on Carrie's laptop.
Just before he had closed the door behind him she called him back. "Quinn. When you're done drinking, are you going to toss that can in the recycling?".
Quinn looked at her, baffled. "Um, yes ma'am.", he said. She really was crazy.
"And do you recycle as a matter of course?", she asked, businesslike.
"Sure.", he lied, "It would be a waste not to, right?". He was sure that was the correct answer but he was exaggerating if not lying, it was one of the things he had resolved to do once John had been born. Saving the planet for your first born to inherit would be something that a lot of people must promise but rarely stick to, he mused. It wasn't the only promise he had broken with regard to his son, he reminded himself. "And this matters because...?", he asked her, exasperated.
"No reason.", said Carrie, already turned back to her whiteboard.