The Company We Keep (26 page)

Balabakk, Lebanon:
DAYNA

T
hinking it might be good to get out of town for a few days, Bob suggests a drive to Balabakk, the site of an ancient Phoenician city and possibly the best ruins in the world.

As we’re sitting in the car rental office waiting for our vehicle, I ask Bob if Balabakk is safe. It is where Hizballah first organized in the early eighties, and it sits in the middle of Lebanon’s lawless Biqa’ Valley.

“These days Balabakk’s safer than New York City,” he says.

As soon as we cross over the Shuf mountains, we fall behind a convoy of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Strangely, they’re running on their treads, rather than carried on transporters, tearing up the asphalt. Shtawrah, the biggest town between Beirut and Balabakk, is eerily quiet. Most of the stores are closed and there are few cars on the street.

“Is it a holiday?” I ask Bob.

“It feels like it.”

Halfway to Balabakk, we come to a Lebanese army checkpoint. In the fields on either side are tanks, their crews digging defensive berms. Bob says it must be some sort of military exercise.

When our turn comes at the checkpoint, a soldier walks up to Bob’s window, notices we’re foreigners, and asks where we’re going. When Bob says Balabakk, the soldier doesn’t say anything. Bob asks if there’s a problem. Instead of answering, the soldier tells Bob to open the trunk so he can inspect it. Another soldier gets down on his knees to study the undercarriage. Finally they wave us on our way.

Balabakk, normally a place where people live life in the street, is deserted. We rack our brains wondering what could be going on. Laughing, we joke that we’ll certainly have the ruins to ourselves.

The Palmyra Hotel, one of the most storied hotels in the Middle East—a place where Agatha Christie, Charles de Gaulle, and Jacques Cousteau once stayed—is tonight as deserted as the rest of Balabakk. In fact, we’re the only guests. A bent old man, well into his seventies, comes out to take our suitcases. To spare him, we carry them ourselves. On the way up to our room Bob asks him what’s going on. “
Alhamdillah, fi huduh,
” he says. Thank God, it’s all quiet.

He shows us into the “best room in the Palmyra,” as he puts it. Suspicious, I turn the tap on in the sink. The water’s cold. I turn around, and the old man’s standing there looking at me. “Would madam like a bath?”

Ten minutes later a relay of two young boys brings up buckets of steaming water from the kitchen. Just as they’re filling up the bath, the electricity goes off. One of the boys comes back with a bag of candles that he lights and places around the room, giving the place the feel of a Gothic cathedral.

By the time we come downstairs for dinner, the hotel lobby is arctic cold. The only light in the dining room is from the fireplace, where there’s a great blazing fire. Dinner is a simple Lebanese
mezze
with roasted chicken and a bottle of local wine, a Kasara.

Just as the old man walks in with a platter of chicken, we hear
a boom and then two more. The man stops and listens. It’s quiet again, and he puts down the platter.

“Is there some problem?” Bob asks before he can get away.

“Thanks be to God, all is quiet.”

We go back to our dinners, and then there’s a rapid series of explosions, followed by exchanges of machine-gun fire. The fighting is in the distance, but we quickly finish dinner and go back upstairs. Artillery booms last half the night.

Not until morning, listening to the radio, do we learn that there has been a battle outside Balabakk between the Lebanese army and a breakaway faction of Hizballah.

Thanks be to God, I think, that the hotel is still standing. And us too.

Beirut, Lebanon:
BOB

S
heikh Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad Al Thani, a prince of the Qatari royal family, now will meet me at only one place, a little restaurant in the mountains above Beirut. It’s always quiet during the day, the sheikh knowing he’ll be left alone to smoke his
sheesha
. A waterpipe.

As usual, the sheikh’s late and flies down the steps to the terrace, almost tripping over his
dishdash
—a cloud-white cotton robe that goes down to the ankles. He looks like a square-rigger in a stiff wind. His driver, holding the sheikh’s briefcase, follows in his wake.

As soon as the sheikh gets his tea and the waiter starts his
sheesha
, enveloping him in smoke, he sighs and tells me he’s discovered that he has a problem he has no idea how to solve.

“I’ve lost a piece of property in the United States,” he says.

“What do you mean, lost it?”

“I paid more than ten million for it.”

The sheikh takes a deep puff from the
sheesha
, sending a cloud
of smoke drifting across the silvery topaz sea behind him. “I will visit the United States after I solve my main problem and then fix it.”

Like everyone else in the Middle East, I know what the sheikh’s “main problem” is. He’s a wanted man, tried and convicted for trying to overthrow his cousin the emir of Qatar in February 1996. He was Qatar’s chief of police at the time. When the coup fizzled, the sheikh fled to Damascus, certain that Syria would refuse to extradite him back to Qatar. He’s able to visit Lebanon because Syria has the final say when it comes to Lebanon’s foreign policy, including who’s extradited and who’s not.

The sheikh works the lock of his briefcase like he’s trying to open it, but then gives up. “I can’t remember whether my land’s in Maine or Colorado. I was very, very busy in those days, and I never had the chance to see it. The deed’s in Doha. Heaven knows where. Do you think you can help?”

“You should have someone search the property records in both states.”

He wiggles his tea glass in the air without looking back at the waiter. “I don’t know whose name the property’s in. My property manager bought it, and now I can’t find him.”

I wonder how the sheikh ever managed to organize a coup, even in an Arab Gulf sheikhdom as small as Qatar.

The more I get to know the sheikh, the more I’m interested in whether he’s thinking about another coup. I haven’t lost my fascination for political upheaval, and anyhow it would be an invaluable piece of information. A successful coup in Qatar—unlikely as it is—could have serious consequences for the Gulf, even ripple across the Middle East. The knowledge might even put me back in the good graces of Carlos.

But it’s not a question I can just come out and ask the sheikh.
At our next meeting I steer the conversation, in a very general way, to the Qatari royal family. Most people like to talk about their families.

The sheikh throws up his hands. “It’s all the fault of my sonofabitch cousin.”

I know who he’s talking about—not Qatar’s emir, but rather its powerful foreign minister, another Qatari prince. Many Qataris consider the foreign minister the de facto leader of their country. The foreign minister is the man behind Al Jazeera, the influential Arab TV network, as well as much of the political reform in Qatar. Because the foreign minister opened informal relations with Israel, he’s the darling of the Clinton White House.

“He’s from the shit part of my family,” the sheikh says. “We allowed that snake in the royal nursery although he had no right to be there. We understood how he was worming his way into the emir’s affections only after the emir cut us out, all of us.

“Mind you, I was blind like the rest. Even when we were boys, I did not understand what it meant when this evil man flattered my cousin, became his intimate. And then he put the worm in his ear, against me and anyone else with good sense. If only my country would be rid of that evil man.”

This is an unforeseen opening I can’t pass up. “Didn’t you try?”

“A few troops, and it’s easily done. I know how to do it.”

“What do you need?”

“Landing craft.”

That night I call a friend who has a line to surplus Ukrainian military landing craft. He faxes me some paper on them.

The next evening the sheikh only glances at the faxes and pushes them aside. “It’s that bastard the foreign minister. If he were only gone, the emir would see the light.”

“But what do the generals think about the foreign minister? I’d imagine they’re unhappy with him just as you are.”

The sheikh doesn’t answer. He points down at the coast, at
Junieh, an old port north of Beirut. It’s dusk now, and the lights are just coming on.

“You won’t believe what happened to me there. I went to a nightclub in Junieh the other night. I danced with a half-dozen girls, but met one I particularly liked. She was lovely, twenty maybe. We danced until two, and then I took her to an apartment I have in Beirut. Just before dawn she woke me up and asked if I’d drive her home. She didn’t say where she lived, but I agreed.

“It alarmed me when we went past Cocadil and into Bir Hasan (the Shia southern suburbs controlled by Hizballah). She pointed to a street off the airport road. I realized too late we were in Bir al-Abid. When I turned to say something to her, she was slipping on an
abaya
(a black head covering and ankle-length robe worn by conservative Iranian women). I dropped her off in front of an apartment with Hizballah banners flying over it and paid her a hundred dollars. I’ll tell you, that sobered me up—sharing my bed with Hizballah.”

Hizballah is out of the kidnapping business, but their reputation lives on.

I wait until our next meeting to bring up the generals again, but the sheikh ignores me and starts telling a story about the minister of religious affairs. At first I don’t pay any attention. So many of the sheikh’s stories drive off a cliff that they’re not worth following to the end. But when he starts telling me how he tapped the telephone of the minister of religious affairs, who kept calling a man named Khalid Sheikh Hamad, I listen.

At first I don’t know exactly who the sheikh’s talking about. But as he goes on I realize it’s Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, or KSM, an al Qaeda field commander. Two years before, the Department of Justice had issued an arrest warrant for KSM indicting him for planning to blow up twelve civilian airliners. The FBI sent agents
to Doha to arrest him, but he disappeared by the time they got there.

I mention the vanishing act to the sheikh.

“Yes, the minister of religious affairs protected him so he wouldn’t fall into the hands of the FBI.”

“What do you mean?”

“He hid him in the minister’s beach chalet until the FBI went away. The foreign minister told him to.”

“How do you know this?”

“The foreign minister knows everything. I told you. He is the one who protected Khalid Sheikh Hamad.”

“You can prove this?”

“I have the transcripts of the phone calls. They’re with me in Damascus.”

The truth is, I can’t really trust the sheikh. He’d say anything to dirty the name of the foreign minister. But I agree to go to Damascus to take a look at the transcripts.