Dynamite Fishermen (22 page)

“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 follows 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?”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t shredded my agent meeting notes just yet. But I also have no intention of being yanked home short of my full tour of duty unless there’s a damned good reason for it. Somehow I doubt that riding a Headquarters desk would help me get me promoted to GS-12. Besides, I rather like it here. If one doesn’t mind the unruly neighbors, the living is pretty good.”

Pirelli smiled indulgently and then turned his swivel chair around to begin typing another report.

Chapter 16

The elderly Lebanese American translator came into view just before two o’clock, walking west on rue Sidani at surprising speed for a man of seventy-six years. As usual, he wore gold-rimmed spectacles, a bow tie, and a thick wool cardigan despite the midday heat, and carried a half-full plastic grocery sack of the kind used by pushcart vegetable vendors.

As soon as the old man passed Prosser’s vantage point by the window of the Idriss Supermarché, Prosser took his olives and yogurt to the checkout counter, paid for them, and started off in pursuit. The Lebanese traversed less than half a block before turning abruptly to cross the narrow street and enter Salloum’s Market. Prosser followed at a leisurely pace and, when he was satisfied that neither of them was being followed, entered the store.

Picking up a wire shopping basket, Prosser tossed into it the sack with the olives and yogurt and headed toward the back of the store, adding a bottle of Sohat mineral water, a bag of mixed nuts, and a package of Danish butter on the way. Within fifteen seconds of entering, he spotted the old man in his beige cardigan at the rear left corner of the store by the meat counter. He took up a place to the man’s right and waited to be served.

Behind the counter, the butcher, a jovial bear of a man in a blood-spattered white apron, carefully positioned a slab of Emmentaler in the electric slicer while his teenage assistant wrapped a scrawny chicken in heavy white butcher paper.

“Anything else?” the assistant asked his elderly customer as he sealed the bundle with cellophane tape.

“Yes, a half kilo of your best kabab meat.”

As the teenager took up his cleaver, Prosser set his grocery basket on the ground alongside that of the bow-tied Lebanese. The contents of the second basket were nearly identical to those of his own except for the sack of vegetables he had seen the old man take into the store in lieu of his own sack of olives and yoghurt.

“And you,
siidi
, what would you like?” the butcher asked Prosser after he passed the cheese to his helper.

“A half kilo of lean ground beef, please.”

The butcher weighed the meat, wrapped it, marked the price in crayon, and handed it across the counter.

“Something else today,
siidi
?” he asked in English. “My chicken is very fresh, very tasty.”

“Sorry, but that’s all.”

Prosser dropped his package of meat into the basket containing the old man’s bag of vegetables and carried it off in the direction of the cashier. The old man, absorbed in supervising the preparation of the kabab meat, paid him no attention. By the time the elderly Lebanese reached the checkout counter, his vegetables were on their way to the American embassy. Beneath two kilos of carrots lay fifteen neatly handwritten pages comprising translations of Abu Ramzi’s and Abu Khalil’s documentary reporting for the past week.

* * *

The khaki-uniformed traffic policeman stepped defiantly into the path of a rust-eaten Mercedes taxi, whose driver had attempted to cross rue Abdel-Aziz after the policeman gave the signal to stop. The policeman shouted a scabrous insult at the driver and then whirled around to signal the opposing traffic to proceed. Prosser, whose gray Renault was four cars behind the leader, rushed through the intersection with rue Hamra and advanced another fifty meters before coming to a halt at the end of a long file of cars.

He thought there should have been ample room to accommodate two lanes of traffic along the one-way street, but the parked cars lining both sides of the street left barely enough clearance for a single lane to pass. This was not the first time he had been stuck in Ras Beirut’s afternoon rush-hour congestion, however, and he resigned himself to the prospect of waiting fifteen or twenty minutes to cover the remaining three hundred meters to rue Bliss.

As the queue inched its way forward, Prosser watched the pedestrians who overtook him. Most were housewives doing their daily shopping, but there were also knots of schoolchildren in blue uniforms heading home for lunch and solitary old men, worry beads in hand, exchanging elaborate Arabic greetings with the shopkeepers they passed.

He advanced another half a block before he noticed the sound of automobile horns some distance behind him. The noise seemed to be coming from beyond rue Hamra and was getting perceptibly closer. Over the blare of the horns he thought he heard pistol shots.

The line of automobiles continued to push forward, ten or twenty meters at a time, pausing for a minute or more between each move. The sound of horns came closer. In his rearview mirror he saw three cars attempting to pull off the road at once into the same driveway. More pistol shots rang out, this time no more than one hundred meters away.

Prosser turned around and saw an expensively suited Gulf Arab, probably in his mid-thirties or early forties, running erratically between the line of stalled traffic and the row of parked cars along the left curb. The runner, who was tall and lean and had a cruel, hawkish face, carried a slender shining object in his right hand that at first looked like a hammer but on second glance turned out to be a long-barreled nickel-plated revolver.

As the Arab came abreast of the Renault, Prosser paused to look behind him. Sweat dripped off the man’s pallid face as he breathed in great heaves, all the while scanning both sides of the street for a means of escape. He must have realized that the traffic jam blocked every route except the one he was taking, because a moment later he resumed his flight toward rue Bliss. But before he did, his gaze met Prosser’s for the briefest instant. Prosser had never seen a look of pure terror to match the one in the Arab’s eyes.

The queue advanced once again, this time far enough for the Renault to once again draw nearly even with the running man before the car ahead braked. The horns were much louder now, and pistol shots could still be heard above the din. In his side mirror Prosser saw cars darting into vacant driveways and jumping the curb onto the sidewalk in an attempt to make room on the left.