Bride of a Bygone War (18 page)

“I know I shouldn’t have done it,” Prosser conceded, “but I thought it might be better if you two worked things out between yourselves before Ed comes and wades into the middle.”

“Oh, God, don’t tell me Ed knows she’s here.”

Prosser winced. “They ran into each other at Muriel Benson’s dinner party last night. Ed had already downed a few drinks, so her name may not have fully registered, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Well, I suppose it was just a matter of time. Now that she’s here, it’s just as well that she found me. I told her before I left Amman that I wouldn’t be able to see her for at least two months—I thought that would buy me some time, and that we could meet up afterward in the States. It never occurred to me that she could turn up so damned fast.”

“Walt, it’s really none of my business,” Prosser went on. “But Lorraine said you two were living together in Amman. In fact, she made it sound as if you were taking her back to the States to get married. Is that really—?”

“For a while it was. Before they sent me here, at least. But things have a way of changing in this business.”

Prosser was aghast. The chances of Lukash keeping his security clearance, and thus his job, if he married Lorraine Ellis were next to zero. Even cohabiting with a foreign national was sufficiently against the rules to draw an official reprimand, and Lorraine was not just any random foreigner. Her former marriage to a notorious Islamic extremist had made her persona non grata with Headquarters and virtually every other Western intelligence service.

“Last-minute assignment changes are something you come to expect from Headquarters. But luring you to Beirut for a two-month TDY assignment and then telling you the day you arrive that it’s been converted into a full tour of duty is pretty rotten, even for them,” Prosser added sympathetically. “What do you intend to do, Walt? Knuckle under or find a way out?”

“I don’t know,” Lukash replied with a shrug. “Right now I can’t think of any way out.”

“What about Lorraine? I mean, you haven’t proposed to her, have you?”

“Of course not,” Lukash retorted. “Lorraine’s a foreign national; I’d have to get it cleared first. And there’s no goddamned way Headquarters is going to clear Lorraine, at least not while I’m posted out here. For Christ’s sake, for six years she was married to a guy who plotted to kill the king of Saudi Arabia.”

Prosser was relieved to hear that Lukash at least seemed sensible about the predicament he was in. “So then what’s the point of taking her to the States at all? What would it accomplish?”

“Once she’s within the FBI’s reach, the security types at Headquarters may feel more at ease that she can’t do any mischief without being caught at it,” Lukash explained. “And once people in the division get to meet her under more relaxed circumstances in Washington, they may stop thinking of her as the ex-wife of an Islamic radical. There’s no guarantee, of course, but I hear the clearance process for foreign marriages is getting more lenient these days. In time we may be able to turn things around.”

“Wouldn’t you still be required to submit your resignation along with the clearance request?”

Lukash nodded. “That’s still the rule, which is why I’m in no hurry to propose. Once we’re back in the States, I expect I’ll be able to get an idea of whether it will fly or not. If it looks hopeless, we may have to wait a bit longer.”

“Does Lorraine know anything about the clearance process?”

“She knows that all prospective Agency spouses have to get a security clearance. What she doesn’t know is that if they were to turn her down I’d be out of a job. I didn’t want to lay a guilt trip on her.”

“Some outfit we’re in, eh?” Prosser observed drily.

Lukash grinned with unexpected cheerfulness. “It has its drawbacks, sure, but can you honestly think of anything else in the world you’d rather do for a living?”

The Renault entered the traffic circle and dodged the swarms of Polish Fiats, Suzuki three-wheel delivery wagons, and white Mercedes taxis that seemed to be constantly accelerating in order to pass the cars in the outside lanes and escape the circle.

“Okay, we don’t have a lot of business to cover together this morning, so I’ll try to keep it short,” Prosser said. “As Ed told you before, he wants you to concentrate on getting the Phalange to be comfortable with you. Meet as many of them as you can, and try to spend social time with them in the evenings and on weekends to find out which of them might be recruitment prospects down the road. Don’t worry about picking up reportable intelligence in the first few weeks. Once they get to know you and trust you, the reports ought to be there for the taking.

“There is one thing Ed wanted to alert you to, though. Yesterday we had a walk-in who claimed to represent a dissident faction within the Syrian military. He says the faction calls itself the Syrian Free Officers’ Movement and it wants help from the U.S. to overthrow the al-Asad regime—radios and medical supplies, in particular. I talked to the fellow myself; he claimed to be a first lieutenant in the Syrian air force and seemed quite clever. Too clever, maybe. I’m not sure.

“Anyway,” Prosser continued, “Ed suspects he’s a fabricator, and the ambassador is scared witless that he’s a provocation sent by Damascus to find out whether we’re aiding the Syrian opposition so that they’ll have an excuse to shell the embassy to smithereens. At any rate, Ed and the ambassador have decided to turn the guy down, and they want you to let us know if he turns up on the Phalange’s doorstep. If he does, find out as much as you can about the group and what the Phalange plans to do with them. Just in case he might be a ringer from Syrian intelligence, though, don’t attend any meetings with him. Or if you do, don’t say anything that will give him the idea that you’re an American. We don’t want to risk tipping off the Syrians that we’ve got an American working full-time at Phalange headquarters. At any rate, as soon as you hear that these Syrian Free Officers are in contact with the Phalange, give me a buzz and I’ll get a list of requirements out to you.

“And one more item. Headquarters sent back traces on Major Elie Musallam, the guy you and Ed met on Thursday. They didn’t have much on him, except for name, date, place of birth, and the information he submitted on a tourist visa application back in ’77. What’s more interesting is that one of our unilateral agents is a good friend of this Major Elie of yours, and the major has been an unwitting subsource of several of his reports in the past few months. Do you know anything about PBSLEET?”
 

“I’ve heard the cryptonym a couple of times, but that’s it.”

“Ed Pirelli recruited SLEET himself in ’76 when he was deputy chief here during the fighting. SLEET was a fairly high-level officer in the Chamounist militia who had lost just about everything he owned when the fighting engulfed the commercial district: his business, apartment, even his wife, poor guy. Ed spotted SLEET when he came to the consular section with a missing persons inquiry. It seems his only daughter married an American just before the outbreak of fighting in ’75, and within a day or two after returning from the honeymoon, the husband disappeared without a trace. Never been heard from since.

“That’s where Major Elie comes in. The major is apparently an old friend of the family and has had a thing for SLEET’s daughter since she was a teenager. SLEET wants to settle this business with the missing husband one way or another so that the way will be clear for the major to marry his daughter. Small world, eh?”

Lukash’s face remained expressionless. “And SLEET has asked you to help him track down the missing husband?”

“He’s given me every scrap of information he has on the guy. Of course, it’s no more than what he gave Ed five years ago, at the time he was recruited. But Headquarters has all kinds of new computer capabilities now, and there’s a good chance that the guy will have left some sort of paper trail. I’ve asked Headquarters to check with the passport office and the FBI, as well as their own files. If there is or ever has been a William F. Conklin who meets SLEET’s description, something is bound to turn up on him.”

Chapter 10

The turbaned Pakistani carwash wallah opened the car door even before Prosser had brought the Renault to a complete stop in the parking lot.

“
Lavage, monsieur? Lavage?
” He was barely out of his teens, painfully thin, with a pencil-thin mustache setting off rows of gleaming white teeth. He wore a faded blue-and-white-checked shirt of the thinnest gingham, with a sort of skirt wrapped several times around his waist, and carried a tin pail half filled with murky gray water. Prosser guessed he might be one of the Pakistani stevedores from one of the illegal Phalangist ports trying to earn some extra pay between ships.

“No, thanks, friend,” Prosser replied, tilting back his head and clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth in a poor imitation of the Lebanese gesture of dismissal.

“Your car very dirty,
siidi
. Make car clean—ten pounds.”

“Four pounds, and you fetch a fresh bucket of water first, eh?”

“Eight pounds,
siidi
. Rice,
ghee
, tea…all very expensive here,
siidi
. This car very, very big one.” He stepped back from the four-door and swept it from front to back with a respectful eye as if it were an eighty-foot motor yacht.

“Five pounds. If you do a good job, maybe more. But first, dump that filthy liquid right here where I can see it and go get some clean water.”

The Pakistani bowed hastily and promptly overturned the bucket with the sole of his tire-tread sandal, narrowly missing Prosser’s khaki trousers with the gobs of mud that spread to either side of the toppled bucket. He picked it up again just as quickly and trotted off toward a palm-shaded garden, where an underground sprinkler system was watering a dense jasmine hedge.

Prosser glanced at his watch. Ten minutes after one—still too early for most Lebanese to eat their big midday meal, although he could see through the Libramarine Swim Club’s massive iron gate that a dozen or more bathers had already abandoned their white terry-covered chaises longues for lunch tables sheltered under a cobalt-blue-and-white-striped awning.

As he made his way toward the high-rise Libramarine condominium hotel, he stopped briefly to peer through the gate to the walled-in swim club and scanned the pool, the deck area, and the open-air café for a stout Lebanese of about fifty-five years with a bald spot on top of his head and curly ringlets of gray around the sides and back. Moments before he was ready to give up the effort, he found César Khalifé, aka PBSLEET, seated across from a man of approximately the same age whose back and arms were covered with a dense growth of curly gray and black hair.

César had used his electronic signaling device the night before to summon Prosser to a meeting at the Libramarine Club at one thirty that afternoon. The club had long been agreed upon as their emergency meeting site but until now had never been used. Since the place was a favorite watering spot for wealthy backers of Camille Chamoun’s National Liberal Party, César often met his Liberal friends there for lunch to glean whatever he could about their rivals in the Phalange. Although the swimming pool and lunch area were open only to those who owned flats in the high-rise or who had paid a substantial fee to join the Libramarine Swim Club—as César had, at U.S. government expense—Prosser intended to spend the next quarter of an hour drinking a beer at the public bar just off the lobby, as if waiting to meet a member.

To his discomfort, he found the barroom nearly empty and was relieved when at last he spotted the bartender, a dour little man with the belligerent expression of a diminutive Mussolini. Prosser ordered a bottled French beer and carried it back to a table near the window, where he could see César and his luncheon companion laughing uproariously over some witty remark one of them had unleashed.

At twenty-three minutes past one, Prosser’s glass was still half full. When he saw César rise from his seat, slip on his shirt, and excuse himself from the table, Prosser downed the remains of his beer and laid eight Lebanese pounds on the table.

The entrance to the men’s toilet was only a few steps from the door to the bar. Prosser entered and took up position in the middle of the three toilet stalls. Less than a minute later, he heard the door open, and then someone occupied the stall farthest from the bar.

“
Merde
, no toilet paper again,” a voice complained in a patois of French and Arabic.

“None here, either, brother,” Prosser answered in Arabic.

“Then perhaps you would like to take some of this,” the voice replied. A hand reached under the partition to offer Prosser a rolled-up section of newspaper.
 

He unrolled it quickly, removed a half-dozen sheets of onionskin stationery folded neatly three times, and slipped them into his rear trouser pocket. He handed the newspaper back to César Khalifé. “What do you have for me today?” Prosser whispered.

“Several important pieces of news,” César replied in a low voice. I had coffee this morning with my second cousin, who is a member of the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies. The man loves to hear himself talk. There was so much to write that I did not have time to use the invisible writing technique you showed me. It seemed more important at the time to bring you the news quickly.

“Anyway, he said that Bashir Gemayel has a plan to lure the United States into joining the Phalange in a conflict with Syria, and that Bashir’s intelligence chief is the one charged with carrying out the plan. No details, of course, but perhaps you may use this information to obtain details from other sources. My cousin also said that the Phalangists are plotting an operation against those of us who are still loyal to Camille Chamoun rather than the Gemayels. Something like what they did to Tony Franjiyé and his family. That is why I intend to leave Beirut this afternoon to spend the next few days in the mountains.”