“This is a picture of the apartment building where he lives,” said Rogers. The photo showed a modern building, with clothes hanging from some of the balconies and children in the courtyard.
“Where is it?” asked Hoffman.
“West Beirut,” said Rogers. “Off the Corniche Mazraa, near the Palestinian camps.”
“But I thought you told me this guy was a Christian,” said Hoffman.
“He is,” said Rogers.
“Well, then, why in the Sam J. Hill is he living in the middle of a bunch of Palestinians?”
“Because he’s a Palestinian.”
“Now listen, Rogers. Don’t fuck with me. I’m warning you.”
“I’m not,” said Rogers.
“Well, then, what is he? A Christian or a Palestinian?”
“He’s both. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s a Christian Palestinian. His family is from Bethlehem.”
“Oh,” said Hoffman.
“His real name is Youssef Kizib. He studied electrical engineering at Cairo University ten years ago and he was the best student in his class, by far. His teachers still remember him. He was the student who could build anything. He was working on his doctorate when he got in trouble with the Moukharabat in Egypt. They thought he was working with one of the Palestinian underground groups. He fled to Lebanon in 1964 and has been here ever since, except for occasional trips to Cannes, where he lives like a pasha.”
“Attractive fellow,” said Hoffman.
“Now here’s the interesting part,” said Rogers. He handed Hoffman another grainy, telephoto-lens picture. It showed the Bombmaker in a dimly-lit room. Standing near him were Amin Shartouni and several other young Lebanese.
“This is the Bombmaker with his Lebanese Christian pupils,” said Rogers. “We tracked them to the place where they do their training in the mountains. This picture shows him giving his final lesson.”
“What’s that?” asked Hoffman.
“How to make bombs that are hidden in the lining of a suitcase, that will explode when an airplane reaches a certain altitude.”
“Why in heaven’s name do the Lebanese Christians need to know that?” asked Hoffman.
“They probably don’t,” answered Rogers. “But it’s part of the curriculum.”
“Asshole,” said Hoffman, looking again at the heavyset face with the stubbly beard.
“Guess where this next picture was taken?” said Rogers as he handed Hoffman another photograph. This one showed the gray exterior of a modern office building on a hill overlooking Lebanon. In the foreground of the picture was a short man dressed in an army uniform.
“I give up,” said Hoffman without looking at the picture.
“It’s the headquarters of army intelligence, formerly known as the Deuxième Bureau. The man in the foreground is a Lebanese Army major who happens to be a cousin of the president.”
“The Squirrel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So what?” said Hoffman.
Rogers handed him the next picture. It showed the same Lebanese intelligence officer sitting in a café talking with the Bombmaker, Youssef Kizib.
“We photographed them together a week ago. Then we began to look around. It seems that Kizib maintains regular contact with several members of army intelligence. They know exactly what he’s up to with the Lebanese Christians and, in fact, they seem to have given him their blessing. That’s how he gets some of his explosives.”
“Now let me get this straight,” said Hoffman. “We’ve got a Palestinian who’s training a bunch of Lebanese Christians to kill other Palestinians, with the blessing of the Lebanese Army.”
“More or less,” said Rogers. “But the best is yet to come.”
Rogers handed another black-and-white photo to Hoffman. This one showed the Bombmaker walking down a narrow street, framed by rough cinderblock buildings.
“This was taken in Tal Zaatar refugee camp,” said Rogers. “Our man is paying a secret visit to another set of his friends. Guess who they are?”
“In Tal Zaatar, they must be Palestinians,” said Hoffman.
“Correct,” answered Rogers. “He’s visiting one of the men who handles logistics for Fatah. We think he went there on behalf of his friends in East Beirut to buy rocket-propelled grenades—RPGs—for one of the Christian militias. This was just four days ago, so we’re still checking out some of the details. But as near as we can reconstruct the deal, the Fatah man agreed to sell Kizib one hundred RPGs, at eight hundred Lebanese pounds each. All out of Fatah’s stores of ammunition.”
“You’re shitting me,” said Hoffman. “A Palestinian from Fatah is selling grenades to the Christians to use in killing Palestinians!”
“You got it,” said Rogers.
“Humor me,” said Hoffman. “Explain to me why the Bombmaker is doing these odious things.”
“For money,” said Rogers. “And fun.”
There was silence.
Rogers had a mental picture of the arsenals that were being assembled in basements and warehouses across town. Homemade cluster bombs for residential neighborhoods; RPGs to shoot across the boundaries of East and West Beirut; car bombs for mosques and churches; sniper’s rifles to attack innocent civilians who happened to be the wrong religion; pistols with silencers to remove obstinate politicians; and the militias training in secret while the scoundrels who ran the country tried to squeeze the last piastre of graft from the dying system. And in the middle of it all, at the eye of the hurricane that was destroying Lebanon, stood a small group of professionals like the Bombmaker, who saluted all flags but sailed under none, who disdained ideology and sold their services to whoever was willing to pay the price.
“The question,” said Rogers, “is what we do about it.”
“That is indeed the question,” said Hoffman. “And I fortuitously have the answer.”
“Which is?”
“That we do nothing about it.”
Rogers looked at him, dumbfounded.
“You can’t mean that,” said Rogers.
“Wanna bet?”
“But for God’s sake, Frank,” said Rogers, his usually calm voice becoming insistent. “We should do something before things get out of control.”
“Like what?”
“Simple things. A media program to bolster moderate political opinion. Security assistance for what’s left of the Deuxième Bureau. Contacts between Palestinian and Christian leaders. Recruit more people who can keep tabs on the gangs of thugs out there. Anything. But we should do something.”
“My boy,” said Hoffman. “Forgive me for saying this, but that’s a very American response. You see a problem on the horizon. Ergo, you want to solve it. I understand completely. I share your concerns. But forget it! Uncle Sam isn’t going to solve the problems of this fucked-up little country! So let’s not waste our time trying.”
“But this is serious!” said Rogers. “A friendly country is falling apart. Surely there is something we can do?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact there is,” said Hoffman. “We can stay the fuck out of the way! We can do our best to see that when this little papier-maché democracy falls apart, as few Americans as possible get hurt.”
Rogers looked away glumly.
“We aren’t the Salvation Army,” Hoffman continued. “Some of our colleagues tend to forget that sometimes. Like a few years ago, when people got sentimental ideas about saving democracy in another little turd of a country. Remember where?”
Rogers didn’t answer.
“I’ll give you a hint,” said Hoffman. “The capital is Saigon.”
“What about the Bombmaker?” asked Rogers quietly. “Isn’t there something we can do about him?”
“You tell me,” said Hoffman. “What can we do about him?”
There was a long silence. The words were on Rogers’s lips: Kill him. Deprive the demented bastard of his ability to build any more bombs. Just kill him. But he couldn’t say it, and he knew in tha
t moment that Hoffman was right. There was nothing that they could do except stay out of the way.
“Saving the world isn’t our job,” Hoffman said gently to the younger man. “We aren’t priests and we aren’t assassins.”
Rogers thought of a Lebanese proverb he had heard from a Druse friend. It was becoming a kind of Lebanese national prayer, and perhaps it was Rogers’s prayer as well. The proverb said: Kiss the hand you cannot bite, but call upon God to break it.
Rogers was sitting at home one night late that summer, reading a book. There was a knock at the door, then the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor, then the sound of footsteps running away down the stairs and out the door of the apartment building.
Jane was closest to the door. She had risen from her chair to answer the knock but Rogers stopped her and went himself. He looked carefully through the peephole but saw nothing. Curious, he unbolted the door to make sure nobody was there.
“Oh my God,” muttered Rogers.
He closed the door and told Jane to go into the nursery immediately with the children and stay there. He placed a quick call to the security officer at the embassy. Then he went back to the front door.
There on the floor of the landing was the body of Amin Shartouni. The face was horribly distorted, caught in what seemed a final scream of anguish. Dried blood covered his mouth and chin and was crusted on his shirt. There was something on the floor next to the corpse. In the dim light of the hallway, Rogers could barely see it at first. It looked like a piece of meat, rough and red. He bent down and looked at it carefully and then felt a surge of nausea.
It was the boy’s tongue, which had been cut from his mouth and left as a warning.
The war of the bombs began a few months later, when a series of explosions rocked Beirut. The bombers hit a wide range of targets, from a pharmacy owned by the leader of the right-wing Phalange Party, to the offices of a leftist, pro-Iraqi newspaper.
What frightened the Lebanese was that the attacks were so random and anonymous. The Palestinians seemed the most likely perpetrators, since they had an interest in destabilizing Lebanon. But there were other theories. Some blamed the Jordanians, who wanted to force Lebanon to crack down against the fedayeen just as the king had done. Others blamed the Israelis, who also wanted to push the Lebanese to take a tougher stand. But the ominous fact was that nobody knew for sure who had done it and nobody was ever brought to justice. The bombings created a feeling of instability throughout Lebanon, a sense that something frightening was happening in the shadows.
30
Damascus; June 1971
Yakov Levi’s last run was to Syria. They told him to service four dead drops: one in Aleppo, one in a remote village south of Homs, two in Damascus. It was the assignment that members of the Mossad station in Beirut dreaded most. Levi had been hoping—praying—that his tour in Beirut would end before he had to do it again. But he was unlucky.
Shuval, the station chief, took Levi out to dinner the night before he left for Syria. They drove in separate cars to Chtaura, halfway to the border, and ate at a Lebanese restaurant there. It was the chief’s way of holding Levi’s hand as long as he could before letting him go. They talked in French through the dinner. Shuval laughed and told jokes about the life Levi would be leading in a few months, when he went back home. The girls on the beach. The loud talk and laughter in the streets. All the sights and sounds and fellowship of that other place, which the chief never named.
The organization had promised Levi the moon. When he got back to Tel Aviv, he would be a senior deputy in the section they called Tzomet—Junction—that handled the collection and analysis of intelligence. His specialty would be analyzing information about the Palestinian guerrilla groups. With a nice raise in pay, and a down payment for a new apartment in Herzliya. How did that sound? Didn’t that make it all a little more bearable? What they were really saying was: Hang on. Keep it together for a few more months and you can put your Maalox away in the drawer. We’re bringing you home.
Levi picked at his food in the restaurant in Chtaura. He pushed the humous back and forth on his plate with the pita bread. He cut his kibbeh into smaller and smaller pieces, but ate only the pine nuts and the spiced-lamb filling. He looked awful. Tired, frayed nerves. And he hadn’t even started the run yet.
The station chief embraced Levi when the dinner was over.
“See you in a week,” he said.
“Insha ‘Allah,” said Levi, not really meaning it as a joke. If it pleases Allah.
The chief drove back to Beirut. Levi went to his room in a small tourist hotel in Chtaura and slept fitfully. He rose at dawn to the sound of two taxi drivers arguing over a fare. They were screaming at each other so loudly and angrily that Levi worried, as he shaved, that one of them might start shooting. A policeman arrived and the fight ended. Levi breakfasted and headed for the border.
Levi reached the border before 9:00 A.M. Syrian customs officers dressed in khaki uniforms were questioning drivers and searching their cars. They weren’t the problem. The dangerous ones were the security officers at passport control.
Levi went through his final checklist as he braked the car near the checkpoint. He was Jacques Beaulieu, totally and completely. He saw the images of his cover identity in his mind as if he was looking at snapshots. His imaginary parents, brothers and sisters, friends from Marseilles. He knew what each of them looked like. Hair color, eye color, height, and weight. It was a game he played, like a blind man inventing the shapes and colors of his world.
Levi’s commercial cover was easier, because it was all real. The man carrying the passport in the name of Jacques Beaulieu traded goods throughout the Mediterranean, there were hundreds of people who could attest to it. He was coming to Syria to negotiate a contract for exporting agricultural products. It was true, he had the papers in his briefcase, the contract typed and ready to sign. He was a trader. That’s all he was. Who could prove otherwise? His identity fit as smoothly and tightly as a silk glove.
Levi parked his Citroen sedan. He got out and walked to the passport-control office at the border. He stood in the shortest line. In a minute—too quick—he was standing at the window. His knees felt weak when he looked at the passport-control officer. He steadied himself by remembering the snapshots of his fictitious father and mother.
“Papers!” growled the Syrian officer. He was unshaven and had a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Levi handed the Syrian officer his French passport and his Lebanese residency card. In theory, the residency card allowed him to come and go in Syria at will. That was one of the benefits of the Baath Party’s claim to sovereignty over Greater Syria. They didn’t recognize, officially, the existence of a separate nation of Lebanon. But that was only in theory.
The border guard looked at Levi suspiciously. Don’t panic, Levi told himself. They always do that. The guard was looking in a thick book covered with Arabic writing. Shit! Why the delay? What was he looking for? Was Levi on a watch list? The security man looked at Levi again through hooded eyes. Despite himself, despite all his preparation, Levi was trembling. He bit his lip hard and put his hands in his pockets so the guard couldn’t see them shaking. I’m not going to make it, Levi told himself. This is one trip too many. I’m a dead man.
The guard was writing something down in a book. Levi looked away. Shit. Shit! Here it comes.
But Levi was wrong. The guard was handing him back his papers and waving him on. The man behind him in line was pushing toward the window. Levi apologized in French. Pardon, pardon. He returned to his Citroën and drove it to the customs-inspection line. The hard part was over, he told himself. The customs men were cheap thugs. Sometimes they wanted a bribe. But they didn’t want to kill Levi.
Levi got through easily, letting the customs man “confiscate” a carton of French cigarettes. He always carried extra cartons, more than he needed, as a distraction for wayward policemen. And then he was off. Levi relaxed in the overstuffed seat of
the Citroen, feeling the sweat from his armpits drip down his sides. He had survived another hour in his eternity of fear.
Levi drove east toward Damascus, then north on the main highway to Aleppo. He was a French businessman, on a business trip. He smoked cigarettes, one after another, and turned his car radio on loud. It was a Syrian station, playing a ballad by Fayrouz about how the Arabs would someday recapture Jerusalem. “The gates of Jerusalem will not remain closed to us,” sang Fayrouz. “We will rebuild you with our own hands. Jerusalem, we salute you.” Levi knew the tune. He sang along.
Levi had a momentary fright, outside Homs, when he flipped the radio dial and caught the sound of a Hebrew voice on Israeli radio. It was a jingle for a new bank. It was a catchy tune, and Levi found himself singing it in Hebrew. That’s what made him panic. In that idle moment of singing, his true identity had ruptured through the fine membrane of his cover. He willed himself to forget the tune, forget the words, forget the Hebrew language itself, for another few days.
He stopped for lunch in Hama, in a small outdoor café by the River Orontes. He sat by the stream, eating a veal cutlet, looking at the old waterwheels that lined the banks. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a military officer, dressed in the camouflage uniform of the internal security forces, examining his car. It’s normal, he told himself. They check all cars with foreign tags. It’s routine. The officer took out a pad and wrote something. Probably the license number. The officer continued walking and stopped at another car with Lebanese tags, this one a Mercedes. He wrote down the license numbers of that one, too. That was the peculiar advantage of operating in a police state, Levi decided. They were watching you always, it was true. But they were watching everyone else, too.
Levi reached Aleppo that night and checked into the Hotel Hovsepian. It was a fine old pile of a hotel, built by a distinguished Armenian family that had come to Aleppo in the late nineteenth century. Levi sat in the bar and swapped stories with the owner, not telling too much about himself—that would seem odd—but revealing just enough to embellish his cover when the Sûreté stopped by that night to inquire about the names on the hotel guest list.
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