Bride of a Bygone War (10 page)

“Certainly,” Prosser assured him. “Just get me Muna’s marriage certificate and any other documents she has that show her husband’s full name and any biographic details about him. If we can come up with a full name and Social Security number, we’ll soon know whatever there is to know about him. If he’s dead, Muna may even be entitled to what’s left of his estate—pension benefits, life insurance proceeds, and any savings he may have had. And if he’s alive—well, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. For all we know, the bastard could still be out there somewhere selling freezers and refrigerators.”

César smiled, but his eyes remained as hard as flint. “Charles, I tell you from my heart, sometimes I think it is better for all of us if we find he is dead. If he lives, so long as he remains in the United States, it is something that I could accept. But, Charles, if he lives and ever dares come to Lebanon, by God’s Holy Word, I...” César broke off suddenly, looked away, and seemed spellbound by the odd play of light and shadow cast by the Venetian blinds against the wall. “If he comes back, Charles, I will squeeze his throat until his eyes fall out of his head.”

Chapter 5

By the time Lukash started from his apartment toward Place Sassine, the sun had been up for two hours and the morning chill had long since left the air. The pushcart vendors, having staked out their positions on the sunny side of rue Furn el Hayek, were doing a brisk business in pirated music cassettes, smuggled German beer, and local oranges and lemons. Lukash stopped at a white-tiled coffee bar on the far side of the square, downed the shotglass-size cup of muddy Arab coffee in two gulps, and continued along rue Sioufi as it began its gradual descent down the eastern slope of Jebel Achrafiyé toward the Beirut River.

Lukash saw the beige Chevy Caprice coming up the hill and resisted an urge to consult his watch. He had set his watch by the BBC World Service before going to bed and was certain it could not now be many seconds past the stroke of nine o’clock. Pirelli had always been compulsively punctual. When a man has spent the better part of twenty years meeting agents on street corners, stairways, trains, buses, and elevators, it should hardly come as a surprise that punctuality might rise to the level of an obsession. Lukash stepped off the curb as the station chief’s Chevrolet slowed down opposite him.

“Hop in,” Pirelli greeted him as soon as the passenger door opened. “Too bad the militias chose your first night in town to break the cease-fire. Were you able to catch any sleep at all?”

“Slept like the dead,” Lukash answered with an easygoing smile. “It took me a little while to tune out the bigger blasts, but not as long as I might have expected.”

“Good for you. Most people need a couple of weeks to adjust to the sound effects.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to say I’m adjusted,” Lukash conceded. “Now that I’ve had a decent rest, tonight will probably be quiet along the Green Line and I’ll be kept awake by the ticking of my watch.”

Lukash noted that they had already reversed direction and were heading west on Avenue de l’Independance, back toward Place Sassine.

“By the way, you might want to make note of the route we’re taking to Phalange intelligence,” Pirelli said. “Tomorrow you’ll be on your own. The guards at the main gate already have your license plate number and a description of your car. And today you’ll be issued an ID card to get in and out of the place. Obviously, you don’t ever want to let that card get out of your hands except when you’re inside a Phalange installation. And for God’s sake, if you ever have reason to go back across the Green Line to West Beirut, leave it behind. It would be like wearing a narc badge to a Hell’s Angels convention.”

Pirelli turned right at the square and began the descent down rue Furn el-Hayek toward the Lebanese foreign ministry. Lukash knew Phalange intelligence headquarters was located in the Qarantina district somewhere in the vicinity of the port, but he was soon lost as they began winding their way downhill through the web of cobbled streets to the base of the hill on which Achrafiyé’s residential neighborhoods had been built.

“You mentioned yesterday that you took Twombley to see the chief of Phalange intelligence. What did he and Colonel Faris have to say to each other?” Lukash inquired as the slope of the hill began to level off.

“Oh, the usual slogans,” Pirelli answered airily. “You’ve worked liaison before, Walt, so you know the drill when a visiting honcho makes an appearance. Twombley started out waxing poetic about how glorious life had been for him in Beirut as a junior officer before the Palestinians and the Syrians ruined the neighborhood. Then he dusted off his old war stories about how Camille Chamoun botched the 1958 Lebanese Crisis. Of course, Faris wolfed it all down as readily as those honey-soaked Lebanese pastries he always keeps in his office. Twombley even managed to dredge up a story about meeting Faris’s father ten or twelve years ago at a wedding. That one alone probably bought enough goodwill to justify the cost of Twombley’s airfare.”

“How about Faris himself? What is he like to work with?”

“Oh, he’s decent enough,” Pirelli continued. “He ran an insurance agency most of his life, so, generally speaking, he knows how to get on with people. But he’s strictly amateur hour when it comes to the intelligence business. His primary qualification for the job is that he married Bashir Gemayel’s aunt. I’ve heard it said that Bashir would have fired Faris long ago, except that Shaykh Pierre rather likes having Faris around to look over his son’s shoulder for him.”

“I didn’t think the old man still had that kind of influence with Bashir,” Lukash observed.

“He probably doesn’t anymore, and Faris knows it. One of these days, Bashir will find an excuse to replace him with a younger man who owes his loyalty to nobody but Bashir and is smarter, more ambitious, and more ruthless than Faris. So keep your eyes open and try to stay on good terms with the younger officers you meet.”

“What would happen if Bashir fired Faris tomorrow?” Lukash probed. “Any chance that Bashir would cancel the expanded liaison program and send me packing?”

“No way,” Pirelli responded emphatically. “Bashir’s already given the ambassador the green light for you to start work, so I doubt he’d back out at this point. But you have to remember that the biggest booster by far of having an Agency officer inside Phalange intelligence has been Faris himself. It’s probably part of a last-ditch effort to hold on to his job.”

The Chevy turned left onto Avenue Charles Helou and headed toward the port. The avenue had once been a major artery from the largely Christian eastern suburbs into the heart of Beirut’s commercial district, and its broad median strip was still lined with two evenly spaced rows of palm trees. But most of the palms had been destroyed by fire, shelling, and lack of water during the Events, and only stumps remained the closer the two men approached to the port. What had once been an immaculately landscaped median, with carefully tended flowerbeds rivaling those found along the French Riviera, was now a barren strip of parched clay where only a few dust-caked palms and prickly pear cactuses eked out their survival.

Lukash was so absorbed in observing how far the neighborhood had deteriorated since the outbreak of civil war that he failed to notice the chief of station clench his jaw and cast a sidelong glance at him.
 

When Pirelli spoke again, a note of unease appeared in his voice. “Walt, in case we don’t have another chance to talk in private for a while, there’s one more thing we ought to discuss. Twombley tells me that the counterintelligence staff and the Office of Security have raised some questions about a certain lady friend of yours. A woman named Lorraine Ellis. Irish national, good-looking, early thirties. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

Lukash nodded once in acknowledgment. His eyes focused on Pirelli for a long moment, then he looked out over the Mediterranean as the station chief continued.

“A visiting fireman from Headquarters ran across this Ellis woman not long ago in Amman and ran a name trace on her. According to her Headquarters file, she’s the wife of a Syrian national who was ringleader of the plot to assassinate King Khalid a couple of years back. While her husband was off planning the operation, she was shacking up with one of our Arab agents. Anyway, the Saudis got wind of the plan somehow and made a couple of low-level arrests, but Ellis and her slimeball pal managed to get out of the country. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

Lukash nodded again.

“Then you must realize how the rest of the story must look to folks at Headquarters: a couple of months after she flees Saudi Arabia, Ellis turns up in Jordan as an air hostess for Royal Jordanian Airlines. By the time traces come back, she has already joined the American Club, befriended at least three station employees, including the station chief’s secretary and ops support assistant, and is shacking up with a certain Arabic-speaking case officer. Am I right or not?” Pirelli turned to Lukash with a look of avuncular concern. “You’ve got to admit, Walt, if you were riding a counterintelligence desk back at Headquarters, you’d be just a little suspicious, eh?”

“Let them suspect whatever they like,” Lukash answered calmly. “Yes, Lorraine lived with me for a while in Jordan. I made no attempt to conceal it; every expat in Amman knows Lorraine. But that’s over now. Lorraine is in Amman and I’m in Beirut. If Headquarters doesn’t believe I’ve severed ties with her, they can call me back to the States and ask me in person. A round-trip ticket to Washington and a few days of leave would suit me just fine.”

“Don’t get huffy now, Walt. All Twombley wants from you is a short cable addressed to the Office of Security detailing your relationship with this Ellis woman. They want to know where she comes from, how you met her, who her friends are, what she might have learned about your work—you know, all the details that the security screws think they have a God-given right to ask. And when you finish with it, I suggest you write Lorraine Ellis a nice letter saying you’re being transferred to Madagascar or Zanzibar and expect to be out of touch for a few years. If you do as you’re told, Twombley assures me that he’ll make the whole episode go away. That’s all he wants from you, Walt; just help him out a bit.” Pirelli gazed into Lukash’s eyes as if to transmit the division chief’s will along the chain of command.

“I’ll think it over,” Lukash answered.

“All right, you do that. Take a day or two. But don’t wait too long. You have a good reputation in the division, Walt. You always put the government first, do what has to be done, and ask no questions. Headquarters likes that in a young officer. So don’t go raising any doubts about your attitude at this stage in the game, all right?”

The Chevy turned off the main road and Lukash spotted the walled Phalange intelligence compound two blocks away, its high, black sheet-steel gate flanked by a pair of armored personnel carriers whose sides bore the stenciled green cedar-tree emblem of the Phalange. Pirelli stopped the car at the gate while the gatekeeper rolled back the sliding steel barrier.

As soon as they entered, a bearded sentry waved at them from a concrete cubicle just inside the gate and directed them to a vacant parking spot opposite an unremarkable two-story stucco building that resembled a suburban middle school more than the headquarters of an intelligence organization engaged in a brutal civil war.

Inside the reception area, a balding duty officer in a khaki safari suit stood with arms akimbo between two lanky teenage Egyptian tea boys dressed in olive drab fatigues several sizes too large. Pirelli greeted the Lebanese with a handshake, from which the latter withdrew his hand and touched his heart as if he were wiping his fingers on his shirt after some noxious contact. Only a fawning smile that lingered on the man’s face indicated that the gesture was one of respect rather than contempt.

“
Le directeur, s’il vous plait
,” Pirelli announced in heavily accented French. His four-month conversational French course in Washington had been intended to get him through just such formulaic exchanges as this, and little more. As an afterthought, Pirelli pointed to Lukash and added, “
Je vous presente mon confrère, Monsieur Lukash
.”

The Lebanese extended his hand to Lukash, who took it and asked in Arabic for the man’s name. The Lebanese had already replied before he realized that Lukash had not spoken in French. He did a double take worthy of Larry, Curly, or Moe. The sound of the foreigner’s distinctive Arabic accent also appeared to amuse the two Egyptians, the taller of whom, a dark-skinned Nubian whose bright eyes sparkled with intelligence, inquired boldly where Lukash came from.

“America.”

“But you talk like an Arab, siidi. Where did you learn to speak our language?”

“Right here. My teacher was a Lebanese.”

The Egyptians conferred in low voices, grinning like schoolchildren. “Say the word for tomato,” the taller of the two asked playfully.

“
Banadura
.”

The two Egyptians burst into laughter while the Lebanese desk officer stood red-faced before them.

“
Filistini!
” the taller Egyptian exclaimed, pointing at Lukash as if he were a freak.

“Don’t pay any attention to the boys,” the Lebanese reception officer insisted. “They have never before heard a European speak with a Palestinian accent. The only Palestinian voices they hear are those of the prisoners.” He turned to the larger boy and addressed him affectionately but firmly. “No more nonsense, now. Muhammad, take the foreigners to Major Elie’s office and tell him they are here to see Colonel Faris. Then ask them if they want any tea. Quickly, now. I have other work for you when you come back.”