The Mercenary

by Dan Hampton

  So the Sandman believed in details. And he was still alive and still free.

  Eventually passing into the eastern edge of the Shemeisani District, he stood on the curb in front of the Regency Palace Hotel. A white Metro cab appeared, heading south, and he crossed the street to hail it.

  “Al Bouseeri Street. At the bend in the road,” he said in English, and hopped in the back on the driver’s side. The vehicle stank of burnt meat and sweat.

  “Yayssur,” the cabbie answered in thick English. As they moved away from the curb, the mercenary looked back. No one dashed across the thoroughfare to hail a cab.

  Almost exactly two hours after leaving the Intercontinental, he walked casually into the lobby of the Levant Investment Bank. Like most premier banks, it had a concierge who catered to corporate financiers and other big money.

  This one caught sight of the tall, well-dressed man striding purposely toward him and straightened up behind the polished walnut desk.

  “Good morning, sir,” He smiled as only an Arab can when ingratiating himself. “How may I be of assistance?” He asked in good English.

  “W’a salaam alaykum,” the mercenary replied, and the concierge broke into a huge smile.

  “Alaykum w’a salaam. Ah, yes sir.” The concierge was Egyptian himself and continued in the same dialect. “What may I do for you today?”

  The Sandman pulled a slim calfskin wallet from his breast pocket and opened his passport on the man’s desk. He dropped a small gold key beside it.

  “I need to access my box and then to your Executive Club please.”

  “But certainly,” the man replied and glanced at the proffered identification card. “You are Lebanese, sidi?”

  “Yes,” the mercenary replied. “North of Beirut.”

  The man clucked sympathetically. “Such a horrible civil war for so long. I hope things are improving now. It is such a violent world, is it not?”

  “It certainly is.”

  The concierge didn’t pick up on the mild sarcasm in the voice or notice the eyes carefully watching his face. He tapped a few keys, then did a double take at the computer screen. A small white icon showed next to the man’s name. A White Pearl Club customer. He knew of it, of course, but had never met one of the exclusive group of men—they were all men—who paid for that level of privacy and discretion.

  “Mister Jean Elias Karam,” he looked up and got a nod. “Sir, it is a pleasure!” Another nod. “The director of Customer Relations has noted that he is to be called anytime you are present in the bank.”

  The concierge reached for the phone but the Sandman stopped him. “No. Please don’t trouble him, Mister . . .”

  “Haddad, sir.”

  “Mister Haddad. I won’t be staying today but will surely greet the director when I return on Thursday.”

  “But of course, sir,” the concierge fairly gushed with politeness but the Sandman noticed that he’d discreetly flashed the passport beneath an electronic scanner on the desk. “If you will please follow me to the vault?”

  Jean Elias Karam. A Lebanese national born in the Maronite enclave of Shikka, north of Beirut, and it was an identity that suited him well. Many Lebanese were physically larger than other Arabs and had European features. Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese were recovering from occupation and there was some sympathy for them in the larger Arab world. This generally meant exaggerated politeness and few questions. The Lebanese were also famous merchants and bankers, so movement within financial circles attracted no attention.

  He had no fear about Jean Karam. He had no fear because the passport was not a forgery. It, and several others he possessed, were quite real. False passports were too easy to detect. The days of stealing passports and altering them were over in the security-obsessive, computer-dominated modern world. Magnetic strips, biometrics and a worldwide law-enforcement database made forgeries entirely too risky.

  Even more sophisticated methods, such as using social security numbers and national identity numbers of prisoners or deceased individuals were also perilous.

  Several years ago, after his initial disappearance, the Sandman moved to the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis and purchased a moderate villa. Six months later, following a successful contract, he’d quietly made an “economic contribution” of $225,000 to the tiny island and was granted a passport under the name submitted on the contribution. It was all perfectly legal, Caribbean style.

  Within a year, after completing several other contracts, he was ready to move on. With a clean police record from St. Kitts, professionally altered under another name, he’d applied for a second passport under the new name with the Irish government. Ireland, like several others, did not require a national identity card and would also permit the purchase of citizenship. Ireland also did not use biometrics.

  The Sandman was able to procure several other passports utilizing the same method. In all cases, the passports issued were genuine—only the supporting documentation had been altered. In each case, citizenship had been legally purchased under an assumed name, and supported by flawless paperwork. Once entered into the issuing nation’s system, the person became authentic—the computer said so. In each case a country had been chosen that permitted economic citizenship, had fairly porous borders, and did not require national identity cards.

  Lebanon was one of these.

  And Jean Elias Karam was a citizen.

  Both men walked around the desk and entered a hallway off the main lobby. Like the rest of the bank it was slightly overdone. A bit too much marble, too much polished wood paneling and entirely too much gold trim. Middle Easterners had few reservations about flaunting wealth and did so at every opportunity. Though well accustomed to it, he felt more comfortable with the understated style found in European banks.

  At the end of the hallway they stopped before a vault which Mr. Haddad opened with his electronic swipe card. The heavy door swung inward, and the Sandman found himself in a cool, low-ceiling room with beige marble floors. The walls were honeycombed with brass-fronted safety deposit boxes of various sizes. The only marking on each box face was a four-digit number.

  The concierge paused politely and the mercenary walked to the end of the room and turned right to box 4813. Both he and Mr. Haddad inserted their keys and the lock clicked.

  “Please sir, if there is anything else you require or when you wish to leave just ring the call button on the wall.”

  The Sandman shook his hand and nodded. The concierge bowed again and left. Alone, he opened the box, removed the inner tray and placed it on a convenience table near the wall. There were four sealed courier pouches inside the tray. He opened them one by one to check the contents. Satisfied, he transferred two of them to his attaché case and replaced the tray in the wall box. He then locked both the box and attaché case and walked back to the entrance.

  A bare thirty seconds after pressing the button, the big door swung open and a smiling Mr. Haddad once again led him back into the lobby.

  “Now sir . . . you mentioned the Executive Club? I have taken the liberty and opened Parlor Three for you. Everything is in readiness. You are familiar with the club elevators? Good. Again sir, if there is anything you require . . .”

  The Sandman shook his head. “Thank you, but no. Your service was perfect, as always, Mister Haddad. I will be sure to pass my compliments to the director later this week.” He had no intention of returning on Thursday but it did n
o harm for the concierge to think so.

  That said, the mercenary crossed the polished floor to the gleaming, brass-fronted elevator. There was no card or passkey as it was operated solely from the concierge station. Exiting on the fourteenth and top floor of the bank, the mercenary walked through an alcove expensively paneled in dark walnut with heavy brass carriage lamps on each wall.

  To the right of each lamp on each wall was a six-foot-wide door. They were heavy and also finished in dark wood. There were no markings save for a brass plaque with a number etched onto it. Number Three was on the left wall of the alcove. He pushed the doors open and stepped inside.

  The parlor was fairly small, about twenty feet square, and dominated by an enormous mahogany desk. Two floor-to-ceiling windows flanked it and lit up the rather dark interior. Like the alcove, it was finished in hunter greens, oiled wood, and brass fixtures—British club chic.

  The Sandman crossed the floor and sat at the desk. It contained everything the modern businessman might require. Powerful computer, high-speed Internet access, scanner, and a bank of telephones—all secure and capable of encryption. There was also a fax machine, shredder, and a copier tucked discreetly into a small closet. A full bar was built into the wall beside the closet and there were several bowls of fresh fruit on the counter.

  Clicking on the international standard ‘e’ symbol, the Sandman typed in an address and sat back. On the other side of the world, a computer in the British Virgin Islands responded. The mercenary managed his affairs from anywhere in the world through one of a dozen email forwarding services and was virtually untraceable. These transactions were generally financial and never directly referenced actual events. They were simply referred to by contract numbers that he himself randomly assigned.

  There were only two or three organizations capable of breaking the encryption algorithm and, if even they did, the messages were numbers, financial amounts, or benign plain text. On the several occasions contractual matters had been discussed, he’d immediately closed the anonymous account and opened a replacement. In any event, he never used an account for more than sixty days.

  There was nothing at the first address, so he accessed another and reached for an apple.

  Inbox (2)

  The first message was a deposit receipt from a holding account with the Royal Bank of Scotland.

  Per his standing instructions, £1,832,460 had posted that morning at 0941 Greenwich Mean Time and had been immediately rewired to a numbered account with Audi Bank in Beirut. Islamic banks were among the very few remaining financial institutions that had not sold their secrecy to the United States and the European Union. Nor would they.

  He frowned. That was only 3.5 million dollars, and less than half of what he was owed. The mercenary took a bite and opened the second email.

  BALANCE TO YOU FOR DELIVERY. LOCATION YOUR CHOICE.

  KSH ENDS.

  So.

  The Chinese would either pay up or attempt to recover the DTC while eliminating him. Probably the latter, he smiled. But that was nothing new. He’d have to think about that.

  There was one further email account to check, but first he reached for the plain buff-colored envelope given him by the bank concierge. It was addressed through the bank to Mr. Jean Elias Karam and had been postmarked ten days earlier. The return address was a box number within the Jordan Kuwait Bank here in Amman. There was no name but he knew who had sent the envelope. The heavy sheet of expensive linen paper inside contained a single line of numbers.

  451389706

  He got up, walked to the ornate tea service, and poured a cup. Standing at the window, the mercenary watched the busy street below and thought about the numbers. He had several “fixers” in different areas. Two men and a woman who had extensive connections among foreign governments, international business cartels and various militaries. They had the quiet reputations and discreet behavior much valued by the world’s movers and shakers. They were the people others came to with a problem and lots of money to spend on a solution. They were people who knew men who solved problems. Men like himself. Rama Buradi was just such a fixer.

  A half Arab from the Basra marshes in southern Iraq, Buradi had made his first fortune as a smuggler. With two modified power boats he brought in electronics, alcohol, and recreational drugs for the ruling elite of Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait. The silk carpets and artifacts he received fetched huge returns in the underground markets of Europe and America. When the Iran-Iraq war erupted, Buradi switched to gunrunning for hard currency. Raw opium from Afghanistan came through Iran to be traded for the American arms that Tehran preferred. The opium was then sold to processing plants in the Sudan and Somalia for the Russian equipment favored by Iraq. Baghdad’s gold and hard currency went straight into banks beyond the Middle East and was used, in part, to buy more weapons.

  The CIA knew all about his operations and allowed him to continue as a surrogate. His operation helped their larger plans in several important ways. The Taliban grew into an effective anti-Russian fighting force by the funding gained from Afghan opium. Arms flowing into Iraq kept the war going, killed Iranians and gave America a useful strategic ally in Saddam Hussein.

  But the first Gulf War had drastically altered the landscape of the Middle East. The House of Saud, the spiritual and secular guardians of Islam’s most holy sites, openly admitted it needed the protection of a western, infidel coalition. For the first time in several generations western troops were openly stationed in the region, not just Egypt or Jordan, but on the holy dirt of Arabia. The United States, in particular, emerged as the visible power for all others to contend with, and the opportunities were enormous.

  Iraq was increasingly isolated and Saddam became increasingly desperate. Buradi had run the American blockade for a brief period in the mid-nineties, bringing luxuries to the Iraqi elite. French champagne, Belgian chocolates, and eastern European prostitutes got top dollar in Baghdad. Like everyone else, Buradi had assumed that the Americans would lose the will to continue their armed embargo and eventually go away. But when they didn’t, he was glad he hadn’t trafficked in the anti-aircraft weapons, yellowcake, or biological agents Saddam had been frantic to acquire.

  So he’d quietly entered the information business. The Americans were desperate for real-time intelligence and paid dearly for it. Anyone with eyes and a functional brain could see that another war was inevitable, so Buradi set himself up to profit from it. Returning to Basra, the smuggler used his network of family and friends to gather information on the Iraqi defenses around the city.

  Renewing his contacts with the CIA, Rama Buradi sold the position of the Hammurabi Division Headquarters to the Americans and British. It was not where they’d believed and planned for. Fearing American bombs and remembering the lessons from the First Gulf War, General Mahmoud al-Tikriti had located his staff in a nondescript suburb of the city that was impossible to identify from the air but easily recognizable to a local on the ground. Buradi also provided personal information about key Guards officers who might defect if the situation was favorable.

  And Basra fell. In the weeks that followed the American advance up the Tigris River, Ramadi provided information on Iraqi supply lines, weapons caches and, most importantly, morale. Whole units surrendered once certain officers had a way to communicate with the Americans.

  Which led to an equally profitable sideline. Buradi also provided a way out of Iraq for those willing and able to pay. Of course, the
way out for most was a slit throat, and more than a hundred men, women, and children ended up as decomposing corpses in the Shatt al Arab marshes.

  The Sandman finished the tea and turned from the window. Buradi was a coldhearted bastard but could be absolutely counted on for one thing. Money. As long as he smelled money he was reliable. Not that the mercenary trusted him, but they understood each other, and Buradi would never sell out his golden goose. Unless, of course, another goose came along with more gold. That, the Sandman knew, was always worth remembering.

  Walking to his attaché case, the Sandman removed a copy of the Eyewitness Travel Guide of Jordan. Placing it on the desk, he looked at the row of numbers again.

  451389706

  The first and last pair meant nothing, so he lined through them. The next three numbers, plus the postmark date, would tell him which page was being used. The postmark was for the seventh, so he opened the book to page 145. The page showed a frontal view of the Temple of Hercules on the Jabal al Qala, also called the Citadel, in downtown Amman.

  It was a good location. Lots of tourists. Western tourists who flocked to the site because of its biblical significance. There were many places to observe without being seen and unlimited escape routes into the neighborhood warrens surrounding the hill.

  The next digit, a nine, was added to the postmark date and gave the time of the meeting: 1600. Four in the afternoon, local time. The last digit in the sequence denoted the day, or days, that Rama Buradi would be at the temple at four P.M.

  Seven. Any day ending with a seven. The Sandman smiled and lit a match from the book on the desk. Today was the seventeenth so there would be no delay. He ran the paper through the shredder, then opened the basket and retrieved the pieces. Dropping them into an ashtray, he burned them. Placing the travel book in the attaché case, he then opened the last email account.