Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

  With downcast eyes, the child took the money and surrendered the basket of dusty green fruit. He stuffed the bill deep in the pocket of his jalabiyya while Rima looked on with surprise.

  “Done like a Lebanese,” she observed sarcastically.

  But as Prosser pulled the basket through the driver’s window and set it down on the back seat, he called out to the boy. “Yaa, walad, come back. You forgot something.”

  The child looked back sheepishly and remained at a prudent distance. Prosser pulled out a five-lira banknote from his trouser pocket and held it out. “Take it. Baksheesh.” The dust-covered little hand hesitated for only the briefest moment before seizing the banknote.

  “Why did you give him extra?” Rima asked in bewilderment after the boy disappeared behind a row of waiting taxis. “He accepted your last word—khalas, it was finished.”

  “The bargaining was for the sport of it. Surely you don’t think I would take unfair advantage of a child, do you?”

  “Batta, sometimes I feel I do not know you at all.” She bit her lip as if she were holding something back.

  “Come on, Rima. I know you well enough now to see when you’ve got something on your mind. Out with it.”

  She took a deep breath and tilted her head back; then she let out a weary sigh. Her lower lip pushed forward into a pout.

  “You’ve had it on your mind since Wednesday night, haven’t you?” he said.

  She turned to meet his gaze and he could see the hurt in her eyes. “You can be very cruel, batta.”

  Prosser looked out over the road ahead and said nothing.

  “And yet I cannot believe you intend it.”

  “I don’t, if that makes any difference,” he said. “I know we don’t spend as much time together as you would like, Rima, but it’s not because I’ve been seeing other women when I’m not with you. My work...”

  “Please, I have heard a hundred times how much you must work. When you are not at the embassy, you must attend dinners or receptions, or someone expects you to meet him for coffee or a glass of whiskey. But in all the time I have known you, never have you talked about where you have been or whom you have met at these meetings of yours. I want to believe you, batta, but it is difficult when people I know say they have seen you at a restaurant or a nightclub when you said you would be at work. I feel so…humiliated.”

  Prosser spoke softly. “Believe me, Rima, when I say I am working, I am working.”

  “I want to believe you. But still it hurts that you do not trust me enough to say more about where you are when we are not together.”

  “Trusting you has nothing to do with it. You know as well as I do that some of the people I talk to don’t want others to know they are on good terms with someone at the American embassy.”

  “I understand, batta, but still I cannot bear having so many secrets kept from me. At times I feel you have remained a complete stranger.”

  Prosser let out a deep breath and looked at Rima again. She was still holding something back.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m doing the best I can,” he said.

  It was her turn to remain silent.

  “It seems you’ve already made your decision. You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Prosser said.

  “Yes. I am going with Husayn to Germany. On Monday.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I finish my thesis. I will spend a few weeks with Husayn in Stuttgart, then go on to Lyon to resume my doctoral research.”

  “And how long is that likely to take? A couple of months? A year?”

  “Perhaps as little as five or six months, perhaps longer.”

  “My tour of duty will expire next June. Will you be back before then?”

  As they left the congestion of Pepsi Cola Circle, Prosser made a wide sweeping turn onto Avenue Camille Chamoun and headed due south toward the Cité Sportive Stadium and the southern suburbs.

  Rima peered out the window and noticed a dense cloud of gray smoke and dust drifting to the east just beyond the stadium. She watched it distractedly as Prosser braked behind the slow-moving traffic. “Perhaps I will,” she answered at last. “If you wish me to.”

  Prosser found her hand where it rested on her purse and squeezed it gently. “I do wish.”

  “D’accord,” Rima replied and put her other hand on top of his.

  They were less than a mile from the Cité Sportive before Prosser spoke again. “I’m not quite sure how to say this, Rima, but there’s a question I have to ask you. You don’t have to answer, but I do have to ask.”

  “There is nothing you may not ask me, batta.”

  “There used to be a journalist here by the name of Graham Overton. Did you know him?”

  She pondered the question for a long moment and then shook her head. “I do not remember such a name. He was American?”

  “British. He was murdered back in June, on rue Abdel-Aziz. You may have read about it.”

  She remained expressionless.

  “So you don’t remember meeting him?”

  “I do not. But nor do I like the manner of your question. Why are you asking me this?”

  “Because one of Graham Overton’s friends says he saw the two of you together at the Coral Beach nightclub two nights before Graham was killed.”

  “I have been to the Coral Beach many times. Now that you speak of it, I can remember some weeks ago sitting at dinner beside a funny, long-nosed Englishman with curly brown hair. Perhaps he may have been a journalist.” She looked across at Prosser, who kept his eyes on the road. “It was before I met you,” she said softly.

  “Do you remember who else was with you?”

  “Some people whose names I do not remember. Husayn knew them; some had done business with my father.”

  “Husayn was there?” he pressed.

  “He could not come that night.”

  “And you don’t remember their names?”

  She shook her head. “The only reason I went was because I thought it might help Husayn with our father’s business. I thought...”

  Suddenly she clutched his forearm and drew in a sharp breath.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Go slowly,” she replied in a frightened voice, staring off to the left of the highway at a group of people gathered near an olive drab Range Rover.

  “What’s going on? What are you looking at?”

  “The Rover will cross ahead of us in a moment,” she replied in a hushed voice. “Stop and let it pass.”

  “Why? What’s going on?” He took his eyes from the road for a moment to cast another quick glance to the left.

  Before Rima could reply, the Range Rover pulled away from the crowd and crossed in front of the Renault. Following directly behind was a second car, a low-slung American station wagon filled with five or six young men in uniform. Several small boys in jalabiyyas broke away from the crowd to run after the Range Rover, which seemed to be towing something at the end of a three- or four-meter length of cable.

  Rima let out a sharp gasp. “Cannibales!” she whispered in horror.

  As he braked before the intersection, Prosser recognized the object trailing from the Range Rover as a ragged, dust-covered corpse. Already the friction of being dragged across the ground by the wrists had torn the dead man’s dark jacket to shreds and pulled once-white trousers down to the ankles. The remaining clothing was permeated with a powdery reddish dust, and the skin of the corpse was coated with the same stuff, except where patches of a deeper reddish brown mottled its thighs, abdomen, hips, and buttocks.

  The limp figure hit a bump in the road and rolled over onto its back for a few moments before another bump sent it once again onto its belly. Then Prosser noticed that one of the corpse’s feet was much larger than the other. In an instant he recognized the neon-green ankle cast beneath a coating of ochre dust.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

  The dead man’s hands reached out pathetically overhead, cupped as if in prayer or suppli
cation. With every bounce of skull upon pavement, Prosser experienced an imagined pain.

  “Husayn!” Rima gasped in recognition.

  As if in response to her exclamation, a hatless militiaman stuck a pistol out the rear passenger window of the Range Rover and fired three shots into the air. One of his comrades sat on the station wagon’s tailgate and, raising his Kalashnikov to a forty-five-degree angle, fired ten or twelve rounds in the general direction of the Renault.

  “Follow them!” she shrieked, pointing after the two vehicles.

  Prosser kept his eyes on the helmeted militiaman who faced him from the rear of the station wagon and slowed down to make the right turn. But the gunman saw the move and fired a second warning burst scarcely a meter above the Renault’s roof. Prosser downshifted and accelerated straight through the intersection. Pursuit, he knew, was out of the question.

  “No! Go back! We must save Husayn!” Rima screamed as she turned to look behind her. She pulled Prosser’s arm away from the steering wheel and was startled when he shook it off roughly.

  “Stop it!” he snapped. “They’d kill us! We’re too late; Husayn is gone.”

  He sped toward the next intersection to rejoin the coastal road back to Ras Beirut. Despite his apparent self-possession, his hands were shaking, his breathing was shallow, and his heart raced out of control.

  “But he can’t be! They promised! They promised he would be safe!” Rima protested. She held her face in her hands and collapsed into a fit of convulsive sobbing.

  Prosser turned at the intersection and headed west toward the coast; then he slowed down and pulled off onto the shoulder.

  Rima cried without interruption, racking her lungs for breath as she cursed herself, her brother, his murderers, and God himself for the death of her only brother.

  Prosser sat silently and stroked her hair, still recalling the image of Husayn’s flayed and twisted body. “There’s nothing you could have done, Rima. He’s gone. Let him go.”

  Prosser offered her his handkerchief when at last her sobbing began to subside, and she took it.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” she burst out once more. “How could I have been so stupid as to believe?”

  “Believe what?” he asked gently.

  “That he would be safe. Oh, Husayn,” she sobbed.

  “Who are you talking about? Who told you Husayn would be safe?”

  She shook her head and swallowed hard. “His old enemy from the war. The one who knows Zuhayri.”

  “Colonel Hisham?” he asked in disbelief.

  “Yes, Hisham,” she answered dully.

  “You met with him yourself?”

  The sobbing stopped. She stared blankly at her delicate hands, now formed into loose fists in her lap.

  “I was afraid,” she answered, her voice barely audible. “As Husayn grew desperate to collect the money Zuhayri owed us, he talked about using Colonel Hisham to persuade him to pay. It was a foolish idea, but Husayn wouldn’t listen. So I went to Colonel Hisham and begged him for my sake to stay away from Husayn.”

  Prosser took a deep breath. “Did your brother have any idea what you were doing?”

  She shook her head. “He would never have permitted it. But I had to protect him.”

  “And Colonel Hisham agreed to leave your brother alone?”

  She nodded. “But Husayn, not knowing what we had agreed, continued to devise ways to approach him. The fact that Hisham was avoiding him seemed only to persuade Husayn further that if only he could reach Hisham, he could find a way to use him to make Zuhayri pay us.”

  “So you went back to see Colonel Hisham again?”

  “I did not go to him. He phoned me. He said he needed a favor from me.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “The first time it was only a small matter. He wanted to know about people I knew in Tripoli. Their telephone numbers. Addresses. Where they worked.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she twisted the corner of the handkerchief nervously in her lap.

  “Then he called again?”

  “Yes. To ask about others.”

  “What others?”

  “The British journalist...” The tears began to stream down her face.

  “Who else?”

  She turned away and covered her eyes with her hands.

  “Did he ask you about me?”

  She sobbed softly.

  “I have to know, Rima.”

  “I never...”

  He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her gently toward him. He felt her stiffen and he released her. “You never what?” he asked gently.

  Slowly her head turned toward him, and for an instant it seemed that an answer was forming on her lips. He watched so intently that he did not notice her hand extend slowly at her side and then sweep around suddenly to strike his face.

  “Akruut!” she hissed. She burst out the door without looking back to see the startled look of pain in his eyes.

  Chapter 30

  Prosser opened the door to the communications vault and walked past the row of four-drawer safes to the back room. He found Ed Pirelli sitting at a gray metal desk surrounded on three sides by racks of electronic communications equipment. A batch of fresh cables from CIA Headquarters and various Agency field stations lay in neat piles before him. Owing to the seven-hour time difference, Headquarters could be relied upon to send a flurry of last-minute messages just as he and Pirelli were preparing to leave at day’s end.

  “Take a look at this one,” Pirelli remarked as he put one of the messages aside. “Your Syrian walk-in seems to be loose on another courier run.”

  Prosser picked up the cable. The Syrian captain had arrived in Larnaca on Thursday morning and had taken a taxi directly from the airport to the station’s safe house in Limassol. Fortunately, the station’s operations assistant was there when he appeared. Despite the Syrian officer’s limited knowledge of English, the assistant had managed to understand the gist of his message for the Arabic-speaking “Mr. Paul,” the alias Prosser had used with the walk-in. In a stroke of good luck, another Arabic-speaking case officer happened to be available to debrief the agent.

  “Shit,” Prosser said as he began to read. “I told him specifically never to go to the safe house until he’d given the signal and allowed twenty-four hours for somebody to show up.”

  “Never mind his tradecraft,” Pirelli interrupted. “Go down to paragraph four.”

  Prosser turned the page and continued reading. As he did, blood rushed to his face and he felt his pulse race. He handed the cable back.

  “Well?” Pirelli demanded. “Is it the same guy?”

  Prosser nodded slowly. “No doubt about it. The man he’s talking about is Colonel Hisham. Everything he says squares with what we know from Abu Ramzi and Abu Khalil.”

  “What about the names of the people working for him? I noticed there were several Naamans still on the list.”

  “Yeah,” Prosser replied. It makes perfect sense that the Naamans would want revenge for dead members of their clan.”

  “Well, it looks as if we’ve counted Colonel Hisham out of the game a bit too early. If your captain is right, Colonel Hisham is not just alive and well again but also holds a commission with Syrian military intelligence. So we’ll have to assume that every step he makes is directed from Damascus. Which means the Syrian government may be plotting to blow up our goddamned embassy.”

  “Wait a second, Ed, that’s not quite what the report says. It says the colonel has five hundred kilos of explosives somewhere in the Bekaa Valley that he’s supposed to bring into West Beirut before the weekend. If you subtract the two hundred kilos earmarked for the Shiite militias, that leaves three hundred for the colonel, which is about enough for ten to twenty of his standard car bombs.”

  “Unless he intends to use the whole lot on a single project,” Pirelli answered. “Look, the report says he’s been ordered to construct a special device to be used against an embassy in West Beirut. Wh
at other targets are there? Us, the British, the French—maybe the Saudis and Iraqis.”

  Prosser nodded silently.

  “Based on what we already know about the colonel, we have to assume the worst,” Pirelli continued. “The ambassador certainly will and so will Headquarters. They’ll be harping at us for every last scrap we can get about the colonel and will want to know why we’ve been sitting on this thing since we heard of the colonel’s plan two months ago to shoot one of our people. Right now I’d say we’re looking pretty lame.”

  “What the hell do they expect us to do?” Prosser shot back. “Abu Khalil is missing in action, and Abu Ramzi hasn’t been able to track the colonel since June. Except for Maroun, none of our other agents has even heard of him until now.”

  “Well, you can start by looking into his connection to that crooked Palestinian the walk-in talks about, the one he says helped the colonel assassinate the three Iraqi diplomats a couple of months ago.”

  “Zuhayri?”

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Pirelli said. “Isn’t he the one your friend Ulla pals around with?”

  “They stopped being friendly years ago. I’d say that avenue is a dead end.”

  “Did you do a name trace on him?”

  “Of course. I probably still have a copy somewhere in my files.”

  “Good. Then do an update,” Pirelli ordered. “And I also want you to pay a call on Ulla and ask her if she might know what Zuhayri has been up to lately.”

  Prosser shook his head vehemently. “No way, Ed. Ulla and I broke up months ago. The last time I saw her she wouldn’t even speak to me. There’s no point in even trying.”

  “Then it’ll be a nice opportunity for the two of you to smoke the peace pipe. Go see her,” Pirelli directed.

  “Don’t be a jerk, Ed.”

  “I’m giving you a direct order. Go and see her. If she won’t talk to you, just keep trying. We can’t punt this one, Conrad.”

  “Damn. How much time do I have?”

  “Until tomorrow morning. I’ll have to tell the ambassador about the five hundred kilos of explosives as soon as he gets back from his meeting at the presidential palace, and I’d like to tell him we’re pursuing some leads. Which reminds me…what ever happened to that developmental asset of yours, the engineer who had the run-in with Colonel Hisham during the civil war? He knows Zuhayri, doesn’t he? Why don’t you invite him out for a drink and see what he can tell you?”