The Third Target (5 page)

BEIRUT, LEBANON

I stared at my hands.

They were trembling. Not much. Not so that anyone else would necessarily notice. But I noticed. It had never happened before.

I unscrewed the top from a bottle of Evian and took several gulps. A flight attendant announced the local time of 6:54 p.m. We had lifted off from Heathrow in London at 10:05 that morning. Air France flight 568 was touching down a minute early. I pulled out my grandfather’s gold pocket watch, the one he gave me just before he died. I wound it up and set it. Then I pulled out a pen and my dog-eared passport and began filling out the Lebanese immigration and customs form.

Name:
James Bradley Collins

Date of birth:
May 3, 1975

City of birth:
Bar Harbor, Maine

Nationality:
American

Country of residence:
United States

City passport was issued:
Washington, D.C.

Countries visited before landing in Lebanon:
Turkey, France, Germany, U.K.

Purpose for visit:
Business

I filled in my passport number and marked that I had nothing to declare. Then I flipped through the pages of my well-traveled passport from back to front, reading through all the stamps I had acquired over the years
 
—every European capital, every Asian capital, and every capital in the Middle East and North Africa. Except Israel’s. I had been in and out of Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv more times than I could count, of course, but I had always been careful to ask the authorities there to stamp my visa, not my passport, so it didn’t prevent me from entering certain Arab countries that would refuse a traveler entry if he had an Israeli stamp in his travel documents.

Before I realized it, I was wincing at the terrible photo of me taken nearly a decade earlier. I was reminded of the old adage: “If you really look as bad as your passport picture, you’re too ill to travel.” Then again, in some ways the photo was better than the current reality. My eyes were green back then. Now they seemed permanently bloodshot. I’d had twenty-twenty vision then. Today I sported prescription eyeglasses in black, semi-rimless designer frames for which I’d paid more than I care to mention. In the photo, my muddy-brown hair was hideously long and badly in need of a cut. But then again, I actually
had
hair
 
—on my head, at least, though not on my face. Ten years later, I was completely bald (by choice, thank you very much) and sporting a salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee.

As we taxied to the gate, I powered up my phone and checked my e-mails. The first that came up was from my brother. I skipped it and moved on. Most of the rest were a potpourri of updates and questions from colleagues in D.C. and sources I was working around the world, as well as RSS feeds of the latest stories published by the
Times
on the Middle East, national security issues, intelligence matters, and other issues pertaining to my beat. One story was by Alex Brunnell, the
Times
bureau chief in Jerusalem. I scanned it quickly. It was a ridiculously pedestrian piece that focused on why the peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians had bogged down again and why the White House might soon abandon its effort to strike a comprehensive deal and shift its attention from the Middle East to the Pacific Rim. It was badly sourced and poorly written and contained nothing but conventional wisdom. Everyone knew the talks were going nowhere. Everyone knew President Taylor and his secretary of state had bitten off more than they could chew. This was hardly news. The
Wall Street Journal
had done the same story a month earlier. Everyone else had done it since then. But this was typical of Brunnell. He never seemed to break news, just chase it. Why the suits in Manhattan had given a third-rate hack a byline in the world’s most respected newspaper, I would never understand.

The next e-mail, however, sucked the wind out of me.

It was from our publisher, addressed to all of the paper’s staff around the world.

It is with a heavy heart that I write to inform you of the tragic death of Janet Fiorelli,
New York Times
Cairo bureau chief. Janet was working on a story detailing the lingering effects of the Arab Spring in Egypt when she was killed yesterday in a suicide bombing in Cairo. The U.S. State Department is investigating the attack. Janet was a top-rate journalist who was respected and beloved by colleagues and readers alike for her professionalism and kindness, and . . .

I stopped reading. I couldn’t believe it. I knew Janet. We were friends. We’d worked together on countless stories. I knew her husband, Tom, and her twins, Michael and Peter. I’d been to their home
in Heliopolis a dozen times or more. I read the first sentence of the e-mail again and again. It couldn’t be true.

Suddenly we were at the gate. Everyone else got off the plane, but I just sat there, staring out the window.

“Sir, is everything okay?” asked an attractive young flight attendant, trying to be helpful.

No, it wasn’t, I wanted to say. But I just nodded and stood, trying to get my bearings.

“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?” she asked.

She had a lovely smile and gentle eyes. I found myself looking at her for a moment too long, then caught myself.

“Sorry; no, I’m good,” I said.

I felt numb. I’d had dinner with Tom and Janet in Alexandria only a few weeks earlier. Now she was gone. It seemed impossible.

The flight attendant handed me my black leather jacket and backpack from the overhead bin. I thanked her and deplaned and made my way through the crowds to the baggage claim. I never checked any bags, not anymore, not since Lufthansa lost my luggage back in 2007 while I was on the way to interview the German chancellor. Nevertheless, my editor had told me to meet my colleagues at baggage carousel number three, so that’s where I went.

“J. B., my friend, welcome back to Beirut
 
—you look terrible!”

A gargantuan man, swarthy and unshaven, laughed from his belly, his booming voice turning heads in the terminal
 
—not exactly the low profile I was looking for. Then he gave me a bear hug that nearly crushed my spine. I’d told him a hundred times to go a tad lighter, but it was always the same thing.

“Good to see you, too, Omar,” I replied, so not in the mood for all his energy. “You ready for this?”

“Ready?” he shot back. “Have you completely lost your mind? You’re a fool, a complete lunatic. You’re going to get us all killed one day. You know that, don’t you?”

I just stared at him.

“What?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”

“You haven’t read your e-mails,” I said.

“No, what e-mails?”

“You haven’t heard about Janet Fiorelli.”

His expression changed immediately. “No, why? What has happened?”

I nodded toward the smartphone in his hand. He read the e-mail and I watched as the enthusiasm drained from his face.

Omar Fayez and I had been through a great deal together, and we had lost more than our share of friends and colleagues over the years. Though he was only thirty-two, he had always treated me like I was his younger brother, looking out for me, watching my back. Six feet five inches tall, at least 275 pounds, and in remarkably good shape for his size, Omar looked like an NFL linebacker. But he had a master’s from Harvard and a PhD from Oxford in Middle Eastern studies and spoke four languages
 
—Arabic, French, Farsi, and English. Born and raised in Jordan, he’d been a reporter, interpreter, and “fixer” for the
Times
in Jordan and Baghdad for the last six years, much of that time working at my side.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “I can’t process this right now.”

Omar nodded.

“How’s Hadiya?” I asked, going straight to his favorite topic.

“Like always, my friend, a gift from heaven,” Omar replied, his voice now more subdued.

“Glad to hear it.”

“She sends you a kiss,” he said.

“Give her my love.”

“I will.”

Then he paused.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, I was going to save this for later, but maybe you need to hear it now.”

“I can’t handle any more bad news just yet,” I said.

“No, no, it’s good news.”

“Oh?”

“Hadiya and I are expecting in March.”

I couldn’t help but grin. This
was
good news. They had been trying to have children for years without any success, and their marriage had struggled for a time because of it. I gave him a hug and congratulated him. “Good for you, Omar
 
—when we get back, we must celebrate.”

“We would like that very much,” Omar replied. “God has been so good to us. Hadiya is happier than I have ever seen her.”

I had no doubt. But I couldn’t help but notice that as he said this, the tone of Omar’s voice and his body language changed ever so slightly. He was worried about the task ahead of us, and for the first time, I felt a pang of guilt for taking him into harm’s way.

“Where’s Abdel?” I asked as I scanned the faces in the crowd.

“He’s bringing the car,” Omar said. “Come; we must hurry. A storm is rolling in. We need to get moving. We don’t have any time to spare.”

As we exited the airport, what struck me first was the chill in the air. The sun had long since set. It was mid-November. The winter rains were coming. Dark thunderheads were rolling in over the city. The winds were picking up. Omar was right
 
—a storm was coming, and I needed something warmer than a T-shirt and khakis. I stopped for a moment, dug out a black wool crewneck sweater from my backpack, and put it on along with my leather jacket.

Just then, a silver four-door Renault pulled up to the curb and stopped in front of us. As the trunk popped up, the driver’s door opened too, and out jumped a lanky young man with a touch of acne and long, curly, unkempt hair. He wore tattered blue jeans, a dark-green hoodie, and black running shoes. “Mr. Collins, I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said with a genuine air of anxiety in his voice. “Please forgive me, sir.”

“Don’t worry, Abdel; you’re not late,” I assured him, shaking his
hand. “We’re a bit early. My flight was on time for once, and I didn’t check any bags.”

“You are very kind, sir, very kind,” he said as he took my backpack and put it in the trunk alongside Omar’s luggage and his own. “Please, get inside and get warm, Mr. Collins. I have the heat on for you, plus hot coffee and baklava.”

I didn’t know Abdel Hamid particularly well. We had worked together just one time, and only briefly at that, but everyone said he was a good kid. I knew for certain he was a phenomenal photographer, and I had asked for him by name to be assigned to me on this project. A Palestinian by birth, he’d grown up in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. He had no college degree and no formal training as a photographer, but prior to being hired by the
Times
, he had made a name for himself as a freelancer for the work he’d done in Syria, producing some of the most heart-wrenching images of the civil war of anyone in the business. As I got into the backseat, Omar headed around to the other side of the car and got in beside me so we could talk more easily on the three-hour drive ahead of us. And sure enough, waiting for us were two cups of steaming hot coffee.

“Cream and three sugars for you; is that right, Mr. Fayez?” Abdel asked as he got behind the wheel and checked his mirrors.

“It is indeed, Abdel.”

“And black for you, Mr. Collins?”

“You got it,” I replied. “You’re fast becoming my new best friend, Abdel.”

“I’m only too happy to help, Mr. Collins.”

“Abdel, please, call me J. B.,” I told him, patting him on the back. “You say Mr. Collins and I think my grandfather just showed up.”

“I would have loved to have met him,” Abdel said. “From all I have read, he was a remarkable man and a tremendous journalist.”

“That’s very kind of you to say, Abdel,” I said, touched that he knew anything about my grandfather.

“It is my pleasure, Mr. Collins; thank
you
, sir
 
—you are very kind.”

He had completely missed the request that he call me by my first name, but I didn’t have the heart to correct him again, so I moved on.

“So look, Abdel, last time I was here was what, July?”

“Yes, late July, Mr. Collins.”

“Right, and wasn’t there a young lady in your life at the time?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Collins, that’s true,” he said, clearly surprised. “You mean Fatima. You have a good memory.”

“How’s that going?” I asked. “As I recall, you were quite taken with her.”

“Yes, yes. I was
 
—I
am
.”

“How is she these days?”

“Ah yes, she is very well, Mr. Collins,” Abdel told me as he wove through evening traffic, heading east toward the city of Zahle. “Thank you for asking. We are very much in love.”

“And I understand you have a little news,” I said. “Is that right?”

Abdel looked at me in the rearview mirror, startled but not unhappy. “Well, yes, how did you know?”

“I have my sources, Abdel.” I smiled. “That is my job, after all, right?”

“Yes, you have always had very good sources,” he said, beaming, but then realized that Omar had no idea what we were talking about. “Fatima and I got engaged last week.”

“Oh, wow, congratulations!” Omar exclaimed.

“Yes, that’s very exciting, Abdel,” I added.

“Yes, it is. Thank you both. We are very happy.”

“When is the big day?” I asked.

“In a few months
 
—January, probably.”

“Very good. And Fatima is still in school, is she not?”

“Yes, she’s in her last year.”

“At A.U.?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is she studying?”

“Journalism.”

“How can you go wrong? Well, bravo, Abdel. I’d love to meet her, and maybe someday she’ll end up working for the Gray Lady.”

“Oh, she would love that, Mr. Collins. She would love that very much.”

Omar turned to me, took a sip of coffee, and asked me about my mom. I knew he was sincere. He was a decent, caring soul, and I loved that about him. But I also knew he was just warming up to the topic he really wanted to discuss: why in the world were we trying to meet Jamal Ramzy?

“Mom’s hanging in there,” I said, trying my best to be polite.

“And that old house you grew up in
 
—does she still live there?”

“She does, though for the life of me I don’t know why.”

“Too expensive?”

“Not really. The mortgage is all paid off. But you know, it’s big and empty and it’s just her. Takes a lot of work to maintain that old place, and with her knee and back trouble . . . Well, anyway, it is what it is.”

“And your suggestion that she sell it and move to Florida?”

“Going nowhere, I’m afraid,” I conceded. “Doesn’t even want to talk about it.”

“How is Matthew doing?”

“No comment,” I said. “Next question.”

Omar looked surprised by my clipped answer. He had once met my older brother at the airport in Amman and seemed to take a liking to him. But to his credit, he quickly shifted gears. “And Laura? How’s that all going?”

That wasn’t a topic I wanted to discuss either. There was a long, awkward silence as I stared out the window, trying to come up with a suitable yet honest answer as I watched row after row of newly built apartment buildings blur past. “About the same,” I said at last, then
changed the subject again. “So look, were you able to get anything from the Mukhabarat?”

A few days earlier, as we made plans for this trip, I’d asked Omar to work his sources in the Jordanian intelligence service to see if they would give us anything on Ramzy.

“A little,” he said, accepting my discomfort in talking about personal matters and getting to the main topic. “I had coffee with Amir last night. He wouldn’t give me much. Told me we were crazy to do this thing, said it simply wasn’t worth it.”

“He doesn’t believe we’re going to get to meet with Ramzy.”

“No, that’s not it,” Omar said. “He told me he absolutely thinks we are going to find and meet Ramzy. And that’s precisely what worries him.”

“What exactly?” I pressed.

“He doesn’t want to get on YouTube tomorrow and see the three of us being beheaded.”