Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2) Page 4

  A plainclothes Lebanese security guard wearing a low-slung Western-style pistol belt sat on a folding chair to the left of the granite steps. He nodded a silent greeting to Lukash as the latter tossed his bags onto the backseat of Pirelli’s four-door Chevrolet sedan.

  Lukash noticed the extra thickness of Lexan bonded to the inside of the car’s windows and felt the added weight of the door when he slammed it shut. On the streets of a city like Beirut, the Chevrolet would be as conspicuous as Pirelli’s drip-dry seersucker suit and brogue shoes. But regulations dictated that the chief of station’s car had to be bulletproofed. And since no foreign supplier was cleared for bulletproofing automobiles to Agency specifications, the CIA’s senior spy in Lebanon would have to drive to his secret meetings in an enormous Chevy sedan.

  “Beirut’s not quite the place you left, is it, Walt?” Pirelli observed sympathetically when they had turned east onto the Corniche. “Take a good look. These people had everything going for them before the fighting. Now all they do is sit around and blame us and the French and the Russians for what they’ve done to each other.”

  “So what made you come back?” Lukash asked. “I thought you’d had enough of the Arabs and wanted to get back to the subcontinent.”

  “I did. When my tour in Beirut ended, Headquarters offered me the chief’s slot in Bombay. Then two years later it was chief of Colombo Station. When they asked if I’d go back to Beirut, I wasn’t at all sure. In many ways it seemed as if I had just left. But when I talked to people around the division, they all said it was an opportunity not to be passed up. ‘Lebanon is ready to heat up again; take it,’ they all told me.

  “I don’t know yet whether they’re right or wrong, but for what it’s worth, the ambassador seems to agree. He says it’s a matter of months before Lebanon hits the front pages again. And Twombley thinks so, too. He told me last night that the new director spent a half hour grilling him on Lebanon before he left. So what I’m telling you is this: recruit us a couple of topflight Phalange agents while you’re here, Walt, and you could find yourself riding the crest of a very big wave. What is your rank these days anyway, GS-12?”

  Lukash nodded. “The list just came out last month.”

  “Well, if you can turn in the kind of performance here that you had in Amman, there’s every reason to believe that your 13 won’t be far away.”

  “Good thing I’m not superstitious,” Lukash added with an uneasy grin.

  Pirelli swerved to avoid a cluster of potholes before the darkened hulk that was once the Phoenicia Hotel, then he turned south onto rue Fakhreddine.

  Lukash gazed up at the twin towers and at once recalled a dinner party in the Phoenicia’s twelfth-floor nightclub two nights before he left Lebanon in 1975. It had been well past ten o’clock, and the Egyptian orchestra had just begun to work up toward the feverish intensity that usually had to be reached before the first belly dancer would consent to appear on stage. He recalled the mustachioed waiters wearing Ali Baba pantaloons, curly-toed slippers, and elaborately embroidered tunics right out of the Arabian Nights. He remembered the combined aroma of garlic, cardamom, lemon, and mint surrounding the twenty-dish mezzé that Claudette Hammouche and her husband had insisted upon for the occasion. And seated beside Lukash with her slender arm resting lazily on his shoulder, he saw...His breath caught in his throat. How long had it been since he had been able to conjure up her face?

  “Yup, recruitments are what this business is all about,” Pirelli said with complete self-assurance, as if he were lecturing a newly minted career trainee. “That’s about all they look for through the rank of GS-13. Above that level other things count, too, but a really big recruitment will always get you a promotion, no matter how high your rank. What I’m saying is, don’t fret over the fact that you’re not running a base or a station yet, Walt. Bagging agents is still the name of the game at your level. That’s why I brought you here. The Phalangists have given us a wide-open shot to pick off a few of their officers, and we need a proven recruiter to go in there and sign them up.”

  Lukash looked askance at the station chief. “Hold on a second, Ed. I thought my job was to make sure the Phalangists are happy with the support we give them and to get them to pass more information to us. When the ambassador talked about reporting against the Phalange, I didn’t get the idea he meant me to put the arm on them. If I pitch some Phalangist I’ve been in liaison with and he puts up a fuss to his bosses, what’s to prevent Washington’s whole grand scheme from flushing down the toilet?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Pirelli answered impatiently. “I know what the ambassador said. But you don’t work for him, Walt. You work for Headquarters. And what Headquarters wants is a high-level recruitment inside Phalange intelligence. The cooperation between us and the Phalange that the ambassador talked about may or may not pan out. Whether it does or not, the policy makers will judge the Agency on one thing: having access to the Phalange’s secrets. Unless we turn you loose to make recruitments, putting you inside Phalange intelligence is like having the key to an empty room.”

  “You know I’ve always been ready to do whatever Headquarters wants,” Lukash answered slowly. “If recruitments are what they want, I’ll do my best. After all, the worst the Phalange can do is toss my butt out of the country, right?”

  Pirelli narrowed his eyes, as if unsure how to answer. “Don’t worry about what they might or might not do. I visit the chief of Phalange intelligence at least once a week, and we’ve got his communications covered like white on rice. Believe me, if he suspects you of anything, I’ll know.”

  The Chevrolet’s headlights cut through the gloom as the sedan climbed the long hill toward the entrance of the crosstown Fouad Chehab flyover. Then, instead of turning at the underpass that marked the start of the flyover, Pirelli stepped on the gas. Lukash opened his mouth to question the move when he noticed the head-high earthworks blocking both sides of the underpass. Only then did he remember reading a year or two earlier that the flyover had acquired the nickname “Death Alley” for its popularity with snipers and that authorities on both sides of the Green Line had closed it to prevent foolhardy commuters from risking their lives to shave a half hour from their daily crosstown commute.

  Pirelli continued south across Avenue de l’Independance and toward the Corniche el Mazraa. “By the way, in case Prosser hasn’t already told you, he will be your inside contact. Did you know each other very well when you were in Saudi together?” Pirelli asked with studied casualness.

  “Not very well. But we did work together on an operation a few weeks before I left the kingdom. Connie helped me out of a tight spot, and we both caught some flak for it. But that’s history. I’m sure we’ll do fine together.”

  “I hope so. Prosser hasn’t been here long enough for me to get a very clear picture of him. He writes well and is a damned quick study. Works like a mule, too. But I’m not quite sure yet if he has the predatory instinct that makes for a good agent recruiter. Keep an eye on him and tell me what you think.”

  The Chevy turned left onto a brightly lit avenue that Lukash recognized as the Corniche el Mazraa and the two men fell back into silence.

  Chapter 2

  In his dream, Lukash stood alone in the center of a sand-swept blacktop lane flanked on both sides by high, dun-colored walls. The road curved gradually to the left across flat terrain, and he realized that he could not be seen by anyone located fifty meters to his front or rear. Apart from the road and the walls and the cloudless sky, nothing else was within his view but an ancient battleship-gray Land Rover and a rust-eaten white Mercedes sedan parked head-to-head across the full width of the asphalt and blocking the way.

  Lukash stepped toward the barrier with painful slowness, as if he were wading through waist-high water against a powerful current. He stooped to lower his center of gravity yet was scarcely able to put one foot ahead of the other. Just beyond the makeshift barrier, a Fiat and a Renault waited at the curb. Still farther, a dark
four-door Volvo stopped ten meters short of the barricade while a black-hooded militiaman a few paces away trained his Kalashnikov assault rifle on the Volvo’s driver.

  Suddenly the Land Rover’s rear door flew open, and Lukash saw a group of five Lebanese civilians herded at gunpoint from the Volvo toward the Rover. Muffled shouts issued from the militiamen’s loose-fitting hoods, but nothing Lukash heard was intelligible.

  At the back of the group, a slender woman of about twenty-five in a sleeveless flowered sundress stood in profile to Lukash. From a distance he studied her familiar Mediterranean profile, small-boned ballerina’s figure, and lustrous chestnut hair tied at the nape of her neck. But now her cheeks were ashen, her jaw firmly set. He could see the terror in her eyes. Her hands rested on the shoulders of a child no more than four or five years of age, evidently her daughter, who reached up and grasped her mother’s wrists.

  Lukash tried to advance more quickly toward the barricade, but his legs would not respond. He attempted to shout a warning, but no voice came forth. The hooded militiamen and their captives behaved as if he did not exist, as if no act of his could possibly affect what would happen. Yet he knew that unless he intervened, the woman and child were lost.

  * * *

  An artillery shell exploded at close range, perhaps as little as a block away from Lukash’s East Beirut apartment, and reverberated the length of Avenue de l’Independance. Lukash sat erect and swung his feet onto the floor. With no light illuminating the room but the moon shining through the half-open French doors to the balcony, he found it difficult to remember where he was. The heavy floor-length curtains drawn back on either side of the glass doors swung in unison like gigantic pendulums set in motion by the shock of the blast.

  Lukash reached for the lamp beside his bed. It took him two or three seconds to recognize the chrome-and-glass coffee table where his half-empty tumbler of duty-free Glenfiddich now rested, the pair of cordovan leather armchairs over which he had draped his jacket and sweater, and beside them the black lacquer étagère with its bare shelves. All the furniture appeared European, most of it of modern Scandinavian design.

  Lukash dimly recalled Ed Pirelli’s account of how the flat’s owner, a middle-age men’s fashion importer, was leaning over the sink to shave one morning when a stray .50-caliber armor-piercing slug slammed through two solid hardwood doors and lodged itself in his upper thigh. A few centimeters to the left, and it would have hit the femoral artery; a few to the right, and it might have converted him from a baritone to a contralto. The importer had put the flat up for lease the next day.

  On their arrival at the flat, Pirelli had taken Lukash onto the veranda to point out how many stray bullets had hit the western side of the building, the one facing the port and the Green Line. A dozen or more spent rounds lay at their feet like dead insects, misshapen from their fatal collisions with the building’s stone facing. Because the flat comprised no less than four bedrooms and three full baths, the practical solution was to close off the westernmost rooms and live on the sheltered eastern side of the flat.

  Lukash switched off the light once again, stretched out on his back, and cradled his head in his folded palms. Somewhere to the west, beyond the port, another explosion sent out shock waves in his direction. What on earth am I doing here? he asked himself as his ears followed the trailing hiss of the echo. Nobody had twisted his arm when the idea had first been broached. He could have said no and Headquarters might have found someone else.

  Perhaps it had been the flattery. Lukash recalled the back-channel message that had said he was everyone’s first choice for the job. Perhaps the implied promise of full pay for less than a full measure of work had also factored into his decision. The message had implied that the two-month TDY would be almost a vacation. Two or three hours at Phalange headquarters each day, a car meeting near the Green Line with his inside contact, an hour or two spent at the typewriter, and the greater part of his work would be finished. He could spend the rest of the day skiing at Farayya or swimming or boating at Kaslik, for it was the time of year when the winter snows had not yet melted in the mountains but the sun was already approaching summer strength at the shore. An hour and a half of driving was all that separated the two extremes. And his evenings, of course, would be free to allow him to enjoy Beirut’s celebrated nightlife.

  An irregular series of muffled pops interrupted his reverie. They sounded like grenades or mortar rounds landing in the next neighborhood. Then the crackle of small arms fire arose from no place in particular and before long seemed to be all around him. He tried to separate out each constituent sound, but soon his concentration lapsed and he drifted back into sleep.

  In his dreams Lukash found himself back on the sand-swept lane between the dun-colored walls, watching mother and child step toward the gaping rear door of the Land Rover. The woman turned, as if startled by the presence of someone behind her, and focused a reproachful glare upon him. Lukash started, opened his eyes, and took a deep breath. He felt the same sense of impotence, of utter inconsequentiality, that he had felt outside the Sabra refugee camp on the way north from the airport. He thought he had known what to do then, but he no longer felt quite so confident.

  He rose a second time and strode across the room to the coffee table. Beside his tumbler of whiskey was the black pigskin shaving kit. He upended it and poured its contents onto the table. Taking up a steel nail file, he slipped it between the leather bottom of the kit and its leather sides and worked it around until he heard a click and the bottom swung open.

  A small manila envelope and a blue-jacketed U.S. tourist passport fell onto the glass table. Setting the passport aside, he pried open the envelope’s metal clasp and carefully emptied its contents into his hand. First to fall out was a slim gold wedding band engraved on the inside with the initials, M.R.K. and W.F.C., and a date, 3-15-76. He slipped the ring onto his finger, slowly removed it, and then set it aside.

  Then he slipped from the envelope a delicate gold chain, handmade in the traditional style of the Arab goldsmiths of Aleppo. He stretched it out to full length between his hands and laid it out on the glass tabletop.

  Finally he removed a glossy black-and-white photo of the type sold by itinerant photographers in Lebanese nightclubs. It showed a jubilant party of six gathered around a circular table. How long had it been since he’d last looked at the photo? Three years? Four? The resemblance between the woman beside him in the photo and the woman he had seen in his dream was uncanny. Now that he was back in Beirut, the memories were returning. If he were going to stay here much longer, there would be no avoiding them.

  Lukash gently scooped up the ring and the chain, dropped them into the envelope, and did the same for the photo after one last penetrating look. Then he returned the envelope and passport to their cavity in the false bottom of the shaving kit, pressed the bottom shut, and replaced the razor, toothbrush, soap dish, and other toiletries.

  At last he returned to bed, thrust the memories out of his mind, and fell back into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 3

  A Lebanese army officer in an old-fashioned leather tank driver’s helmet and goggles peered out the hatch of a parked Panhard armored car and followed Conrad Prosser with his eyes as Prosser’s Renault climbed through the pine forest toward the gate of the American ambassador’s residence. The steep mountain road from the Damascus Highway to Yarzé was always heavily patrolled, not so much for the ambassador’s benefit as for that of his nearest neighbor, the Lebanese minister of defense.

  Prosser downshifted when he saw the stretch of parked cars that lined the road outside the residence gate. Nearly all of them were chauffeur-driven Mercedes and BMW town cars with liveried drivers who passed their idleness by playing cards with one another on the polished hoods of their splendid driving machines. In the fading glow of the setting sun, Prosser scanned the diplomatic license plates and made mental notes of the numerical country codes he recognized and those he did not. First was t
he Egyptian ambassador’s black Mercedes, just behind it the French chargé d’affaires’s cigar-shaped Citroën, and three spaces farther along was the Argentinean ambassador’s silver Jaguar. It was rather a high-toned crowd for an evening of Dixieland jazz, he thought.

  As soon as Prosser reached the gate, a uniformed guard popped out from the whitewashed sentry box and pulled open the rivet-studded sheet-metal gate. He returned Prosser’s nod of acknowledgment with a ragged salute and wasted no time in closing the gate as soon as the Renault was inside.

  Prosser parked in the staff lot, tucked well out of sight behind the residence, then backtracked along the service road to the building’s monumental white marble façade, terraced gardens, and sweeping panorama of the Bay of Beirut to the north and west. Noting that the receiving line had already dispersed, he shut the front door quietly behind him and advanced through the entry hall. All at once a low, rhythmic chant, accompanied by the steady beat of tom-toms and the clacking of wood on wood, reached his ears from the sitting room ahead. Dixieland jazz it was not.

  “Conrad, you’re just in time. They started only moments ago.”

  It was Muriel Benson, Ambassador Ravenel’s secretary, looking surprisingly elegant in a sleeveless black cocktail frock that flattered her ample but shapely figure. Tonight was Muriel’s night to play hostess, as the ambassador’s wife was away on her quarterly shopping excursion to Florence and Rome. Muriel was playing the role for all it was worth.

  “Come along quickly, now, and I’ll find you a seat. You won’t believe these people, Conrad, really you won’t. Yesterday the ambassador was nearly apoplectic when Damascus cabled that the jazz quartet was canceling, and all we could get for tonight was the Great Plains Indian Dancers. Imagine Red Indian dancers, here, of all places! I thought the ambassador was going to drive across the border and personally wring the information officer’s neck. But you should listen to him now. ‘Everybody has Dixieland bands these days,’ is what I heard him tell the minister of defense a few moments ago. ‘The French have them. Even the Russians have their pale imitation, but only America has honest-to-God Red Indians!’”