Dynamite Fishermen (42 page)

The dead man’s hands reached out pathetically overhead, cupped as if in prayer or supplication. 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. What 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?”

Prosser swallowed hard. “Actually, I talked to him last night,” he said. “He was supposed to get back in touch today or tomorrow. I’ll let you know when I hear from him.”

“Good work. And one more thing. You’ll be seeing Abu Ramzi tonight, won’t you?”

“At nine,” Prosser answered.

“Then tell him to drop everything and find out where Colonel Hisham is and what he’s planning to do with those explosives. Set another meeting with him for Sunday. If we don’t come up with something by then, it’s my bet that the ambassador will either ask the Lebanese to lay on more security around the embassy, or he’ll start reducing the staff—maybe both. We’ve got to move quickly on this.”

“Terrific,” Prosser grumbled. “Once they put sandbags and armor out front, everybody and his uncle will know we’re expecting an attack. How long do you suppose it will take for the Syrians to figure out that they’ve got a leak? Abu Ramzi will go ballistic.”

“I hear what you’re saying, Con, but it’s the ambassador’s call. Our job is to collect the information. It’s his to use it.”

Pirelli consolidated the individual stacks of cables on the desk into a single pile; then he rose from his chair and carried the pile over to his safe. He twirled the dial of the combination lock as Prosser passed behind him.

“If I get anything urgent from Abu Ramzi tonight, do you want me to drop by your apartment?”

“Yes, why don’t you,” the station chief agreed. “What time will you finish?”

“Probably not later than ten.”

“Fine,” Pirelli replied. “I’ll be home till about ten thirty. After that I’ll be going out for an hour or two. Drop by before I leave if it looks like it can’t wait.”

“If the meeting lasts till after ten thirty, where will I be able to reach you?”

“That might be difficult. It’s some sort of club. I don’t even know if they have a phone.”

“I’ll come find you there,” Prosser volunteered. “Which club is it?”

“It’s not one of the main ones. You probably wouldn’t know it.”

“Try me,” Prosser persisted.

“The Hamra Cellar, on rue Makdissi,” he answered.

Prosser smiled. “Actually I was there last night. I spotted you on the dance floor as I was leaving.”

“You did?” Pirelli raised a suspicious eyebrow.

“Yeah, and she was some dish, Ed.”

Chapter 31

Prosser prayed Ulla would not be at home, although he knew she seldom went out in the evening now that she was on her own again. As he drove along the bluff past the Bain Militaire toward Raouché, he tried to predict what she would say upon seeing him at her door. Would she refuse to let him in? Or listen in cold silence? Or embrace him, thinking he had come back to be her lover?