Legends (27 page)

As he spoke, Lincoln kept his eyes on the Egyptian, who obviously ran the show here. He had not been introduced though Lincoln had a good idea of his identity; the FBI’s briefing book back in Washington had contained a blurry photo taken with a tele-photo lens of an Egyptian known as Ibrahim bin Daoud talking to a man identified as a Hezbollah agent in front of the entrance to the Maksoud Plaza Hotel in Sao Paulo the previous year. The long delicate nose and carefully trimmed gray beard visible in the photo were conspicuous on the Egyptian sitting on the sill across from him now.

Stretched out on the unmade bed in the room above a bar in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguay side of Triple Border, the muddy heels of his boots digging into the mattress, Leroy was nodding emphatically at the Egyptian. “He sure as hell’s got his self a Whitworth,” he confirmed.

Lincoln was hoping that gun collecting could provide a useful bond between him and the Texan. “Crying shame about your daddy’s Whitworth,” he said. “Bet the FBI goons didn’t have the wildest idea what a goddamn prize they had in their hands when they confiscated it.”

“They was too fucking dumb to tell the difference between fool’s gold and actual gold,” Leroy agreed.

Lincoln looked back at the Egyptian. “To answer your question: From the Whitworth and my other guns, it was just a matter of branching out to Kalashnikovs and TOW antitank missiles, with the grenades and ammunition thrown in for good measure. Pays a lot better than teaching Civil War history at a junior college.”

“We are not in the market for Kalashnikovs and TOWs,” the Egyptian noted coldly.

“He’s not interested in Ak-47s and TOWs,” the Texan explained. “Now that Commie Russia’s got one foot in the grave, you trip over this kind of hardware out here on Triple Border. He’s interested in Semtex or ammonium nitrate, something in the neighborhood of eighty thousand pounds of it, enough to fill one of those big moving vans. We pay cash on the barrelhead.”

Lincoln locked his eyes on the Egyptian. He was a skeletal man with a round pockmarked face and hunched shoulders, probably in his late fifties, though the gray beard could have been adding years to his appearance. The upper third of his face had disappeared behind dark sunglasses, which he wore despite being in a dingy room with the shades drawn. “Semtex in small quantities is no problem. Ammonium nitrate in any quantity is also no problem,” he said. “You probably know that ammonium nitrate is used as fertilizer mixed with diesel or fuel oil, it is highly explosive. The trick’ll be to buy a large amount without attracting attention, which is something I and my associates can organize. Where do you want to take delivery?”

Leroy smiled out of one side of his mouth. “At a site to be specified on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel.”

Lincoln heard the cry of the muezzin it wasn’t a recording but the real thing summoning the faithful to midday prayer, which meant he’d been taken somewhere within earshot of the only mosque in Ciudad del Este after Leroy had picked him up in front of the mosque in Foz do Iguacii. He’d been shoved into the back of a Mercedes and ordered to strap on the blackened-out ski goggles he found on the seat. “You taking me to the Saudi?” he’d asked Leroy as the Mercedes drove in circles for three quarters of a hour to confuse him. “I’m taking you to meet the Saudi’s Egyptian,” Leroy had answered. “If the Egyptian signs off on you, that’s when you get to meet the Saudi, not before.” Lincoln had asked, “What happens if he doesn’t sign off on me?” Leroy, sitting up front alongside the driver, had snorted. “If’n he don’t sign off on you, he’ll like as feed you to the pet crocodile he keeps in his swim pool.”

Now Lincoln could feel Daoud scrutinizing him through his dark sunglasses. “Where did you hurt your leg?” the Egyptian asked.

“Car accident in Zagreb,” Lincoln said. “The Croats are crazy drivers.”

“Where were you treated?” Daoud was looking for details he could verify.

Lincoln named a clinic in a suburb of Trieste.

The Egyptian glanced at Leroy and shrugged. Something else occurred to him. “What did you say the title of your book on Fredericksville was?”

Leroy corrected him. “It’s Fredericks burg.”

“I didn’t say,” Lincoln replied. “Title was the best part of the book. I called it, Cannon Fodder.”

Apparently Leroy was still fighting the War of Secession because he blurted out, “Cannon fodder is sure as hell what they was.” His normal drawl, pitched a half octave higher, came across loud and clear. “Federal cannon fodder, fighting to free the niggers and legitimize intermarriage and dictate the North’s way of thinking on southern gents.”

The Egyptian repeated the title to make sure he’d gotten it right, then muttered something in Arabic to the fat boy piecing together the jigsaw puzzle on the linoleum-covered table in the alcove. The boy, who was wearing a shoulder holster with a plastic gun in it and chewing bubble gum that he inflated every time he fitted in a piece, sprang to his feet and rushed out of the room. The Egyptian followed him. Lincoln could hear their footfalls on the staircase of the ramshackle building as the boy headed downstairs and Daoud climbed up one flight. He let himself into the room overhead and crossed it and dragged up a chair as a telephone sounded. Lincoln guessed that the Egyptian was phoning abroad to get his people to check out details of the Dittmann legend.

The DDO’s people in Langley had anticipated this and laid in the plumbing. If someone nosed around the Trieste clinic, he would come across a record of a Lincoln Dittmann being treated by a bone specialist for three days, and paying his bill in cash the morning he was discharged. As for the book, Cannon Fodder had a paper trail. The Egyptian’s contact would discover a 1990 reference to the publication of the book in Publishers Weekly. If he dug deeper he would come up with two reviews, the first in a Virginia junior college student newspaper praising one of the school’s own teachers for his Civil War scholarship; the second in a Richmond, Virginia, historical quarterly devoted to the War of Secession, accusing Lincoln Dittmann of having plagiarized great chunks of a privately printed 1932 doctorate treatise on the battle of Fredericksburg. There would be a small item in a Richmond newspaper repeating the plagiarism charge and reporting that a committee of the author’s peers had examined the original treatise and Dittmann’s Cannon Fodder, and discovered entire passages that matched. The article went on to say that Lincoln Dittmann had been fired from his post teaching history at a local junior college. Chain bookstores would have reported modest sales before the book was withdrawn from circulation. If anyone hunted hard enough, copies of the first and only edition (what was left of the original five-hundred-book print run) could be found in the Strand in Manhattan and several other second-hand bookstores across the country. On the inside of the back jacket there would be a photograph of Dittmann with a Schimelpenick jutting from his lips, along with a brief biography: born and raised in Pennsylvania, a Civil War buff from the time he started visiting battlefields as a youngster, an expert on the Battle of Fredericksburg, currently teaching Civil War history at a Virginia junior college.

Waiting for the Egyptian to return, Lincoln plucked a Schimelpenick from the metal tin in his jacket pocket and held the flame of a lighter to the end of it. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke gush through his nostrils. “Mind if I smoke?” he inquired politely.

“Smoking,” Leroy remarked, “poisons the lungs. You ought to give it up.”

“Trouble is,” Lincoln said, “to give up smoking you need to become someone else. Tried that once. Went cold turkey for a while. But it didn’t work out in the end.”

After awhile the Egyptian returned to the room and settled into the wooden chair set catty-corner to the sofa. “Tell me more about what you did in Croatia?” he instructed Lincoln.

Croatia had been Crystal Quest’s brainchild. For all her imperiousness, she was old school: She believed a good legend needed more than a paper trail to give it authenticity. “If he’s supposed to be an arms merchant,” she’d argued when she dragged Lincoln up to the seventh floor at Langley to get the director to sign off on the operation, “there’s got to be a trail of genuine transactions that the opposition can verify.”

“You’re proposing to actually set him up in the arms business?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Whom would he sell to?” the director had demanded, clearly unsettled by the notion of one of the Company’s agents establishing his bona fides by becoming a bona fide arms merchant.

“He’ll buy from the Soviets who are running garage sales from their arsenals in East Germany, and deliver to the Bosnians. Since U.S. policy tilts toward the Bosnians, our Congressional oversight commissars won’t give us a hard time if they get wind of it, which they won’t if we’re careful. The idea behind this is to put Lincoln in the path of one Sami Akhbar, an Azerbaijani who buys arms for an al-Qa’ida cell in Bosnia.”

“As usual you’ve covered all the bases, Fred,” the director had noted with a flagrant lack of enthusiasm.

“Sir, that’s what you pay me for,” she’d shot back.

Lincoln had spent the next four months tooling around the Dalmatian coast in a serviceable Buick, avoiding the Serb undercover agents like the plague, using a fax to contact a shadowy Frankfurt entity and purchase truckloads of the Soviet surplus arms being sold off by Russian soldiers soon to be recalled to the USSR from East Germany, meeting the drivers at night on remote back roads as they came across Slovenia, then arranging for delivery at crossing points on the Dalmatian coast between Croatia and Bosnia. It was at one of these predawn meetings that Lincoln first felt the fish nibbling at the bait. “Could you get your hands on explosives?” a Muslim dealer who went by the name Sami Akhbar had casually asked as he took possession of a two-truck convoy loaded with TOW antitank missiles and mortars and handed Lincoln a satchel filled with crisp $100 bills bound in wrappers from a Swiss bank.

Lincoln had dealt with Sami five times in the past four months. “What do you have in mind?” he had inquired.

“I have a Saudi friend who is shopping around for Semtex or ammonium nitrate.”

“In what quantities?”

“Very large quantities.”

“Your friend looking to celebrate the end of Ramadan with a big bang?”

“Something like that.”

“Russians aren’t peddling Semtex or ammonium nitrate. It would have to come from the States.”

“Are you saying it is within the realm of possibility?”

“Everything is within the realm of possibility, Sami, but it will cost a pretty penny.”

“Money is not a problem for my Saudi friend. Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich.”

The Muslim had produced a scrap of paper from a shirt pocket and, pressing it to the fender of the truck, had printed out with the stub of a pencil the name of a town and the street address of a mosque, along with a date and an hour. Lincoln had crouched in front of the Buick parking lights to read it. “Where in hell is Foz do Iguacii?” he’d asked, though he knew the answer.

“It is in Brazil right across the frontier from Paraguay at a place called Triple Border, where Brazil and Paraguay and Argentina meet.”

“Why can’t we get together somewhere in Europe?”

“If you are not interested, only say so. I will find someone else who is.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong, Sami. I’m interested. I’m just worried that it’s a long way to go for nothing.”

Sami had coughed up a laugh. “You guys who deal arms tickle me. I do not call two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. nothing.”

Lincoln had glanced again at the scrap of paper. “Are you sure your rich Saudi friend will contact me if I am standing outside the mosque on Palestine Street at ten in the morning ten days from today?”

Sami had nodded into the darkness. “A person will contact you and take you to him.”

In the small room over the bar, the Egyptian listened in silence to Lincoln’s account of his dealings in Croatia. In the alcove, the boy, working again at his jigsaw puzzle, blew bubbles with the gum until they burst against his fleshy lips. Leroy cleaned the fingernails of his left hand with a fingernail of his right hand. When Lincoln reached the end of the story, the Egyptian, lips pursed, sat without moving a muscle, weighing his next move. Finally he announced, “Leroy will take you back to your hotel in Foz do Iguacii. Wait there until you hear from me.”

“How long will that take?” Lincoln asked. “Every day I’m away from the Balkans costs me money.”

The Egyptian shrugged. “If you become bored, you are free to yawn.”

“How did it go?” Lincoln asked Leroy when the two were alone in the car and heading toward the bridge and Foz do Iguacii.

“The fact that you’re still alive can only mean it went well.”

Lincoln glanced at the Texan, whose face flashed in and out of the light as cars passed in the opposite direction. “You’re serious, aren’t your

“Fucking A, I’m serious. Get it into your skull,” he said, drumming a forefinger against his own. “You’re associating with tough customers down here.”

Lincoln had to swallow a smile. Felix Kuck had used much the same words as he wound up the briefing back in Washington. “Holy mackerel, watch your ass when you get to Triple Border,” he’d said. “You’ll be rubbing shoulders with mighty ornery folks.”

The briefing in Washington had taken place on neutral turf, a nondescript Foggy Bottom conference room that had been swept by Company housekeepers and then staked out until the principals showed up at the crack of noon. From word one, the tension had been as thick as the fog Lincoln had braved driving to work that morning from the safe house in Virginia. It wasn’t so much the FBI briefer, a short, stumpy veteran counterterrorism maven named Felix Kuck with the low center of gravity of a NFL linesman; the CIA had dealt with him on any number of occasions (most especially when he directed the FBI’s counterterrorism team at the American embassy in Moscow) and considered him to be a straight shooter. The tension could be traced to the clash of cultures; to the mistrust J. Edgar Hoover (who had run the FBI with an iron hand until his death in 1972) had sewn into the agency’s bureaucratic fabric during his forty-eight years at the helm. The fact that the FBI, acting in obedience to a formal presidential “finding,” was being obliged to pass on to its arch competitor at Langley an operation and the assets that went with it, or what was left of them, only made matters worse. Kuck put the best possible face on the situation in his opening remarks. “Triple Border,” he told Lincoln as Crystal Quest and several of her wallahs looked on, “which is the nickname for the zone where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet up, is a cesspool filled with scum from Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, Colombia’s FARC, all of them operating under false identities or false flags. The FBI’s interest in Triple Border goes back roughly ten years when a large expatriate population fleeing the civil war in Lebanon gravitated into the area. The local authorities, some of them bribed, some of them intimidated, turned their backs on the sharp rise in crime in their backyard. You could buy and sell almost anything down there passports for two-thousand dollars a clip, including the mug shot and the official government stamp; stolen cars; cheap electronics; along with the staples on any lawless frontier these days, drugs and arms. Several terrorist organizations set up guerilla training camps in the mato graso the outback to teach recruits how to rig car bombs or shoot the Soviet hardware that any one could purchase in the back alleys of the border towns using money conveniently laundered by the banks at Triple Border.”