Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

The Palestinian slowly unbuttoned the flap of his shirt pocket and withdrew a laminated plastic card for the soldier’s inspection. He held it just inside the window so that the Syrian had to reach in to take it.

  The Syrian’s eyes opened wide as he read the card; then he saluted and handed it back with extreme deference. “You may go, Colonel; please forgive me,” he offered apologetically.

  Abu Ramzi returned a perfunctory nod and put the car into gear. The crisis was over as quickly as it had begun, just as in the safe house lobby the week before. And once again Prosser had been able to do nothing but look on while his agent rescued both of them from possible ruin.

  “Nicely done, Abu Ramzi. Tell me, though, what would you have told the sentry if he had insisted on seeing my papers?”

  “I would have said that you were a Western journalist who is friendly to the Palestinian Revolution and told him to be quiet about it. It is as we agreed, no?”

  “And what if he had refused to take no for an answer? Do you remember the second level of the cover story we talked about?”

  “If he had refused, habibi, this would have been my cover story.” He pulled his Beretta from his belt and brandished it in the dim light. “They were only two men.”

  “And if they had been three, or four, or ten? A spy cannot shoot his way out of a difficult situation without exposing himself. Let’s be better prepared next time.”

  The Palestinian gave a weary look but did not speak. He drove past the Riviera Hotel and continued for several blocks before Prosser broke the silence.

  “There is still much left to discuss, but it’s getting a bit crowded out here. Let’s finish up and meet again next week. Can you come a week from tonight?”

  “Next Monday?” the Palestinian muttered to himself. “No. I will be in Sidon performing an inspection on Monday and Tuesday.”

  “How about Wednesday, then? The same place as tonight?”

  “Yes, that is possible.” He took a white envelope from the cargo pocket on the thigh of his fatigue trousers and presented it to Prosser. “Here are my answers to your questions from the last time.”

  Prosser accepted the envelope and exchanged it for two stacks of Lebanese banknotes and a receipt, which Abu Ramzi signed and returned.

  “Where shall I drop you?” Abu Ramzi asked, amiable once again after pocketing his ten thousand Lebanese lira.

  “Turn right past the American embassy and head west again on rue Bliss. If we go back along the Corniche, I’m afraid we may run into another roadblock. The Corniche seems to be swarming with them lately. What do you suppose they’re looking for?”

  “Uncontrolled elements,” he replied with the trace of a smile.

  “If that’s so, don’t you find it odd that so many of these uncontrolled elements remain on the loose here while a third of the Syrian army is out searching for them? Why don’t they ever seem to catch any?”

  “Oh, but the Syrians do catch them,” Abu Ramzi assured him. “They have caught many—of that I am sure.”

  “Then why haven’t I read about it?”

  “Because they are soon brought back under control,” Abu Ramzi answered with an all-knowing smile. “To continue their work, bombing and killing just as before—for the Syrians. Believe me, Wally, if you look long and hard enough, you will find that the Syrians are behind everything here.”

  * * *

  Prosser left the Mercedes a few dozen meters from the Minara lighthouse and started up rue Ardati toward home. The moment he turned the corner by the Saudi embassy compound, he knew that something was wrong. Less than a block ahead, a cluster of people dressed in pajamas and dressing gowns milled about on the corner opposite the Concorde Hotel and stared anxiously down rue Maislin toward the Hala Building. The pulsating glow of rotating red flashers illuminated the dark stone walls flanking the narrow street. When he stepped off the curb to get past the crowd, a khaki-uniformed Lebanese gendarme emerged from behind a parked car to block his path.

  “Forbidden,” the gendarme announced. “Interdit.”

  “But my apartment is in the Hala Building. I must go there,” Prosser replied in Arabic.

  “Forbidden, interdit,” the gendarme repeated.

  Prosser frowned and then pulled out his foreign ministry card and handed it over. “Diplomasi,” he announced.

  The policeman examined the card carefully, then returned it with a crisp salute and stepped aside to let Prosser pass.

  The flashing red lights belonged to two large firetrucks parked just outside the entrance of the Hala Building. While the first, a hook-and-ladder unit, began to back out of rue Californie onto rue Maislin, the other, a pump unit, remained in place. A pair of slickered firemen rewound a rubberized canvas hose onto a spool the size of a bass drum. Thick billows of acrid gray smoke continued to rise from the remains of an Audi hatchback parked along the front of the building to the right of the entrance.

  Prosser recognized Karin Larsen, the petite wife of the Danish chargé d’affaires, standing with her four-year-old son under a tree and asked her what had happened. She continued to watch the fireman as if hypnotized, her hand resting on the shoulder of her towheaded little boy while he clutched her leg tightly with one arm and sucked his other thumb. Both mother and son wore terry robes and looked as if they had been roused from a deep sleep.

  “Someone put a bomb under Kurt’s car,” she intoned blankly. “It exploded about twenty minutes ago.” She paused and added as an afterthought, “Ulf is in the embassy, trying to mop up the water from the fire hoses and clear out the smoke with electric fans. Everything will have to be repainted and all the curtains and upholstery replaced. It’s a horrible mess, just horrible. Thank God no one was hurt.”

  The Danish embassy occupied the first three floors of the Hala Building’s east wing. Although the Danes had covered its balconies and windows with heavy-gauge wire mesh to limit potential damage from rockets, shells, and stray bullets, the mesh had been incapable of preventing windows from shattering and smoke from entering. The Danish flag, still suspended from a flagpole outside the second floor, had been reduced to tatters and its white cross and red field obscured by greasy black soot.

  “Where was Kurt when the bomb went off?” Prosser asked.

  “In his apartment, watching a video,” she replied. “And the night concierge was in the back room. Thank God for that.”

  “Any idea who was behind it?”

  “Kurt seems to think it was the Armenians.”

  “Oh, great, now it’s the Armenians, for Christ’s sake...” Prosser muttered, aware of no less than three or four Armenian militant groups active in Beirut.

  Kurt, the Swiss consul, was a dour man in his early thirties with a vile temper, a sharp tongue, and a transparent contempt toward the Arabs. It was well known in consular circles that Kurt regularly harangued and browbeat visa applicants who overstayed their Swiss visas or did not follow the precise application procedures he had instituted. Since the Lebanese seldom followed any procedure with precision, most visa applicants left the Swiss consulate nursing some sort of grudge.

  In addition to the general ill will that Kurt aroused, the Swiss government had aroused the fury of one militant Armenian nationalist group earlier in the year by imprisoning two of its members in Geneva for illegal possession of firearms and explosives. The group had been threatening for weeks to retaliate if the pair were not set free.

  Prosser followed a fireman to the remains of the Audi to make his own inspection. Although the car’s body was generally intact, the hood had been blown off, the windows were gone, and the tires had already burst from the heat of the blaze that followed the explosion. The car’s metallic paint had all blistered away except for a small patch below each bumper where the flames had not reached.

  He peered into the engine compartment and then into the driver’s cockpit. The bomb appeared to have been placed at the very front of the car, against the bumper or grille, too far forward to breach the firewall between the en
gine and passenger compartments. It had probably contained less than a kilo of high explosive—a mere plaything compared to the 30- and 50-kilogram instruments of mass murder being set loose in other parts of the city.

  Prosser scanned the parking lot for his Renault, saw that it was undamaged, and started for the elevator. It had been a long day, and a car bomb exploding practically on his doorstep was simply too much. There were too many coincidences in his life lately, and despite what he had told Abu Ramzi a half hour earlier, Prosser did not believe in coincidences. It was time to pay more attention to them, he told himself, and to start watching his back far more closely.

  Chapter 15

  Tuesday

  Prosser turned away from his scrutiny of the Lebanese wall map tacked up behind his desk to answer the telephone.

  “Would you come over when you have a minute?” It was Ed Pirelli.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Prosser had expected the call for more than an hour after dropping the batch of outgoing cables in Pirelli’s in-box. The cables included contact reports, trace requests, operational information, and substantive intelligence reports, all based on his meeting the night before with Abu Ramzi and his weekend meetings with Abu Khalil.

  He had omitted nothing—from the names and addresses in Abu Khalil’s DFLP guest book right down to Abu Ramzi’s threat to come after him if the Agency’s incautious use of his reporting brought Abu Ramzi under suspicion with his superiors. But it was the fragmentary reporting about Colonel Hisham that he was most certain would catch Pirelli’s eye. After all, Beirut was “Indian country,” and reports of scalping parties being planned against the white man could never be taken lightly. Prosser crossed the hall to Pirelli’s office and shut the door.

  “I’ve got a problem with your report about the attack on the bathing beaches,” Pirelli began as he typed out the final “S - E - C - R - E - T” at the bottom of one of his reports.

  “I figured you might,” Prosser replied as he seated himself on the cracked leather couch.

  “It’s fine up to the part about the Phalange war council sending their hands-off message to the Syrians, but it starts to break down where it talks about Syrian plans to assassinate American officials in retaliation for helping Phalange intelligence. Do the Syrian subsources who are allegedly making this threat have access to high-level Syrian government plans, or are they merely blowing smoke to impress their Palestinian buddies? If we report this information in its present form, the weenies at State will blow it all out of proportion. Before you know it, they’ll be ordering emergency security measures, the evacuation of nonessential embassy personnel, extra marine guards, and God knows what else. If the ambassador saw this, he’d hit the goddamned roof.”

  “So what are you suggesting? Do you want me to revise it or not send it at all?”

  “Well, we have to send something back in ops channels, in any event. But unless you have strong reasons to the contrary, I’d rather not release anything in intel format until Abu Khalil or Abu Ramzi can give us more details.”

  “I have another meeting with Abu Khalil scheduled for tonight, but Abu Ramzi won’t be checking in for another week. I’d hate for us to wind up with egg on our faces if an attack took place while we sat on the report.”

  Prosser had been hoping the report would attract some attention within the division. He needed all the visibility he could muster if he was going to crack the GS-12 barrier.

  “Believe me, Con, I don’t want to lose points with Headquarters any more than you do, but Ramzi’s credibility has me worried. He’s cranked out a considerable volume of threat reporting in the past few months, but so far not one of the operations he’s warned us about has materialized. Isn’t there anybody else we could run past Colonel Hisham? How about your friend, the engineer…al Fayyad? Your write-up on him says that he served under Hisham during the Leb civil war. Do you think he could help us?”

  “He might, if I could get some time alone with him. I’ve been working on his sister to set something up, but he seems to be avoiding me.”

  “Well, keep after him. We’re going to need somebody’s word beyond Abu Ramzi’s if we expect Headquarters to take this one seriously. Ever since the station turned in that phony threat from the Popular Front against Bill Thorson a couple years ago, the division has been pretty sensitive about false alarms.”

  Prosser let out a sigh and slumped back into the sofa. “Hell, Ed, I don’t know what Headquarters wants from us anymore. First they have us hound our Palestinian agents twice a week for early warnings about terrorism, and then when one of them finally comes through with a decent lead, they suddenly expect flawless predictive ability. What we’re doing here is trying to catch straws in the wind. Almost by definition, most of what we report is bound to turn out wrong. So why not just send it all in and let Headquarters sort it out?”

  “That’s exactly what we used to do until the Thorson flap,” Pirelli explained. “But now we have to be a damned sight more cautious, because if there’s anything the chief of ops hates to see, it’s a station that’s been taken in by a fabricator. So when we come up with a report that’s likely to create a sensation—as this one is—we’d better not send it in until we’re damned sure the agent knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Come on, Ed. Abu Ramzi and Abu Khalil have better access to intelligence on Syrian-sponsored terrorism than any other agents in our stable. If you don’t want to release the report, that’s your prerogative. But I hope to God nothing happens in the meantime to make us look like idiots.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Pirelli said as he tossed Prosser’s report into a manila folder. “I’m going to hold the report for a week until we’ve had a chance to hear again from both agents. If they’re still pitching the same story about Colonel Hisham a week from now and can back it up with details, I’ll go ahead and disseminate it.”

  “All right, we wait,” Prosser agreed. “But let’s assume for a moment that both agents come through with more details and we send the report in a week from now. Why all the fuss? We’re big boys out here. We’re supposed to be able to take a little heat.”

  “Here’s why. As soon as your report hits the airwaves, Headquarters is going to come down with a serious case of the sweats. They’ll want every scrap of information about this Colonel Hisham that we can get our hands on. At minimum they’ll want to pass his biographic data to the FBI and then to British, French, German, Italian, Israeli, and every other goddamned liaison service you can think of around the world. Then they’ll inform State, which will promptly lay on gobs of extra security around the embassy so that everybody in town will know we’re expecting trouble. And if that isn’t bad enough, the ambassador will be breathing down our necks day and night to make the whole thing go away. Remember, he’s the one trying to convince Washington that Lebanon is on the mend again and that the central government has everything under control.”

  “I’m afraid all that extra security would not sit well with Abu Ramzi. Once the rumors start flying, it won’t take him long to figure out why we’re suddenly on red alert. He wouldn’t like that. Not at all.”

  Pirelli chuckled. “If that’s how it plays out, you might want to put in for some annual leave next week, Con. If I were you I might give Switzerland a try. The Swiss don’t give many visas to Arabs these days, I hear. And the Alps are a damned good place to drop out of sight for a while. I promise to let you know when it’s safe to come back.”

  “Gee, thanks, Ed. By any chance is that where Bill Thorson went when his agent in the Popular Front reported their plan to assassinate him?”

  Pirelli’s smile faded. “No, good old Bill was ordered straight back to D.C. When somebody is mentioned by name as a terrorist target, Headquarters doesn’t take chances.”

  “So if my report flies, so do I, is that it?”

  “You want my best guess?” Pirelli said. “If this Colonel Hisham character actually names you as his spy of the week, or if Abu Ramzi f
ollows through on his threat to take you with him to Paradise, I would guess that Headquarters would yank you out on the next plane. You’d be desk-bound for a few weeks until things blew over and then they might consider sending you back. But, then again, they might keep you deskbound like Thorson. It’s hard to say.”

  “But that’s ridiculous, Ed. In this country anybody can generate a terrorist threat. If all it takes to get you or me sent home is a planted rumor or a crank phone call, it’s a miracle that this station stays in business at all.”

  Pirelli leaned back in his chair and looked out his window onto the tennis courts below, where a bevy of immaculately groomed AUB coeds in tennis whites were playing a doubles tournament.

  “You have to look at it from Headquarters’ point of view,” he explained patiently. “If you or I were gunned down on the street by a terrorist, you can’t begin to imagine the flap it would cause in Washington. The division chief would be hauled before the DDO, the DDO would be called in by the director, the director would be summoned to the White House and the congressional oversight committees, and God knows where it would end. There would be a full-scale investigation to explain why we kept a case officer in the field after there were reported threats on his life. And then, at the end of the day, somebody in the senior ranks of division management would likely end up pushing a broom on the night shift in Central Files. Call it covering ass or call it what you will, but Headquarters always errs on the side of caution. Always.”

  “In that case, maybe I should think twice before reporting the rest of the threat information I’ve been getting from my agents lately, because I frankly don’t believe the half of it.”

  Pirelli frowned, his eyes taking on a hard set. “Hold on—I’m not saying that you can suppress this kind of reporting, Con. If Headquarters found out that either of us was in the habit of sweeping intelligence information under the rug, we’d be out of a job, pronto. Use your best judgment, but if there’s any chance that a threat might be for real, report it in ops channels first—better yet, hide it in a telepouch—and don’t submit it as a formal intel dissemination until you’ve had time to check it out. That way it’ll be on the record, but by the time it comes to anyone’s attention, you’ll have been able to build the other side of the case. See what I mean?”