The Devil's Light (38 page)

There was silence. “Look out for yourself,” Grey told him. “We can't help you from here.”

Lebanon
September 7–11, 2011

O
n a warm, clear morning, Brooke checked out of the Albergo, picked up a land rover, and began the drive toward Baalbek.

Outside the city, he took the road ascending the Mount Lebanon Range, which, on its other side, formed the western edge of the Bekaa Valley. Steep and winding, his course was bordered by shade trees, sumptuous homes, broad vistas of bare hills, and, briefly, an old monastery carved into rock. Now and then he slowed to pass through villages beside the road. At last, reaching the crest, he saw the green-brown sweep of the Bekaa.

Less valley than plateau, the rich expanse stretched in all directions, its eastern edge demarked by the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. As with Lebanon itself, the Bekaa was defined by its contradictions: the yellow flags of Hezbollah with a green hand grasping a semiautomatic rifle; the omnipresent posters of Hassan Nasrallah and Imad Moughniyeh, its living and dead icons, who, in Israel and the West, were labeled terrorists and murderers; vast fields of hashish, in theory an affront to Islamic piety; the sprawling villas of drug lords and farmers; junkyards full of rusting cars; majestic ruins from the Roman and Arab past. But its recent history was defined by the mountain range Brooke saw in the distance.

Dotted with caves and half-concealed pathways, in the early 1980s these stark, red-brown mountains had become the gateway for Iranians who filtered in to train the militias of Hezbollah. Other terrorist groups formed encampments there; after his confrontation with jihadist Islam
in Iran, Carter Grey had sought permission to go to the Bekaa. Citing the dangers, his superiors had refused. Shortly thereafter, the torture and murder of William Buckley—a special project of Moughniyeh—had effectively put the area off-limits. When Brooke first visited there in 2007, adopting the guise of a tourist, he became a rarity within the CIA—an agent who had seen the valley at firsthand.

His purpose, as on subsequent trips, was to travel the area and make acquaintances where he could. Brooke had found the Hezbollah iconography jarring; he had seen the tape of Buckley's torture. But by 2008 the images of Moughniyeh inspired a certain black humor: that spring a team of assassins, no doubt from the Mossad, had blown him to pieces in Damascus. In Baalbek, Brooke had purchased a keychain that featured an image of the newly minted martyr and sent it in a diplomatic pouch to a colleague who, for years, had conducted a fruitless effort to determine Moughniyeh's whereabouts. With it, Brooke had enclosed a note: “Funny—I found this guy in five minutes.” Then, it had seemed amusing; now, four days from September 11, Brooke thought his joke puerile. For him the Bekaa had become a place of terrible danger.

Reaching the outskirts of Baalbek, he saw the majestic colonnades and arches of the most impressive Roman ruins outside Italy, then the rectangular Temple of Bacchus, its massive pillars still intact. As Brooke expected, Baalbek offered more evidence of the martial spirit of Rome than of Hezbollah. While its yellow flags were everywhere, the only soldiers in sight were images of the dead that hung from buildings or lampposts. Some fighters were in the mountains; others in underground installations beneath the valley or near the southern border; still others conducted civilian lives, awaiting the next war with Israel. Their rockets and armaments were hidden from view. But their intelligence agents, while also invisible, were ubiquitous, as was the job and social service network that, in Baalbek alone, employed forty thousand people. It was Hezbollah, Brooke knew, that had uncovered the Mossad's agents in Lebanon—some now dead, others in prison. It would mark Brooke's presence here before an hour had passed.

Bypassing the city, he drove into the rolling hills above it. For whatever reason, his Shia friend Fareed Karan had not answered emails or calls to his cell phone. This provoked anxiety, but not alarm; a freelance
journalist who often worked for Reuters or Agence France-Presse, Fareed often disappeared for days. But that compelled a visit to Fareed's sprawling house near the village of Jamouni, five thousand feet above the floor of the Bekaa.

Brooke found only his wife, a reticent woman who wore a black head scarf. Unlike Fareed, who knew everyone in the valley—Iranians, smugglers, Christians, Shia, Sunni, and the key figures of Hezbollah—Azia was homebound. She knew only that Fareed was elsewhere, and professed to have little sense of when he might return. At his chosen time, Fareed would just appear.

Frustrated, Brooke left Adam Chase's card and drove to the Palmyra Hotel.

It was past six o'clock. With no choice but to await Fareed, Brooke decided to take a room there. He parked the land rover in front and walked into the lobby.

The Palmyra was a sandstone monument to faded grandeur, perhaps the most flavorful of the colonial relics dotting the Middle East. Its door was a graceful archway and its sitting room had marble floors and plush but worn furnishings. The lobby leading to the restaurant featured a painting of Kaiser Wilhelm II commemorating an imperial visit in 1898, and its peeling plaster walls were lined with photographs of other long-ago guests: Lawrence of Arabia, Charles de Gaulle, Kemal Atatürk, Leopold of Belgium, Jean Cocteau, Ella Fitzgerald, and the general staffs of two armies—the Germans in the First World War, the British in the Second. Upon checking in, Brooke went to a drafty room with a view of the ruins, scanned his email, and called Fareed's cell phone without results. Restlessly deciding to seek out the proprietor of a Shia restaurant, a particular friend of Fareed's, he returned to the lobby. He could feel time running through his fingers.

Near the entrance, a woman in khaki shirt and pants gazed into the street.

Brooke paused for a moment, wondering who or what she might be. From the back, she gave an impression of tensile alertness that evoked a sliver of steel. Her head was covered by a black scarf, and her jet-black hair was caught in an efficient ponytail. Her posture suggested vigilance; hearing his footsteps, she turned abruptly.

She was dark, slight, near Brooke in age, and—despite an absence of adornment—strikingly pretty. Completely still, she stared at him, not bothering to conceal this, just as Brooke could not conceal his own scrutiny. Their seconds of silence seemed longer. Then her expression became puzzled and, it appeared, embarrassed. “Can I help you?” Brooke asked.

She shook her head with brisk impatience, as if to clear it. “Sorry,” she said in the accent of the American eastern seaboard. “For a moment, I thought I knew you from somewhere. You're not an archaeologist, someone working here?”

Brooke smiled at this. “Hardly. All I know about these ruins is that they're very old. Are you an archaeologist?”

“Yes. And you're a fellow American, obviously.” As though remembering her manners, she extended her hand. “I'm Laura Reynolds.”

Brooke took it, cool to the touch. “I'm Adam Chase,” he told her. “I was in Beirut on business, and decided to become a tourist.”

The corner of her mouth flickered upward. “That makes you a novelty. You weren't frightened?”

“Only of getting lost. But here I am, in Baalbek, with Rome across the street.” He angled his head toward the bar. “I don't want to impose on your obvious good nature, but I don't know a soul here. If I buy you a drink, could you tell me where to go and what to do?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Me? You really are lost.” Swiftly glancing at her watch, she said, “Fifteen minutes, then. My fee is a glass of arrack.”

“What do I get for two?” Brooke inquired.

High in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains, Al Zaroor watched the sunset from beneath the edge of a cave.

He had been here since the first light of dawn. The night before, Rasul Jefaar had driven upward in the darkness, headlights off, taking a dirt path so precarious that at times Al Zaroor could see nothing but the black void of the next sheer drop. He stopped looking—after all these years he had mastered, but not banished, the fear of heights he had discovered in Afghanistan. Only at Jefaar's suggestion did they stop.

Getting out, he pointed to an indentation in the mountainside. “We'll leave them here,” Jefaar said, “where the vultures will draw less attention.”

With help from the nameless younger man, they carried the bodies
of Azid and Hussein into the darkened aperture. Hauling Hussein by his arms, Al Zaroor discovered that the trucker, once so doughy, was already stiff.

Emerging, he saw the distant outline of a mosque against the foothills, a reminder that he was now approaching the land of the Shia and Hezbollah. But by tradition and necessity, the Jefaar clan, an extended family of ten thousand people, recognized no authority but its own. He could only trust that this would hold.

They got back into the van. Reaching the crest of the mountain range, they began descending toward the Bekaa, bent on reaching their destination before daylight. Al Zaroor began feeling a quiet elation. He had been here months before, and found a place that met his needs. Now he was on the cusp of history.

At dawn they had reached the site, traversing the last half mile of scrubby hillside above it without the benefit of a road. Standing here six months before, Al Zaroor had memorized the landscape. A hundred yards below, a dirt road wound toward the valley; a quarter mile farther this artery passed an aqueduct that was dry in summer. Behind Al Zaroor was the mouth of a cave.

This morning, Rasul Jefaar had backed inside. After thirty yards the cave was but two feet wider than the van; Al Zaroor got out, guiding him deeper. Suddenly the cave opened. Illuminated by a generator were two black vans of identical make. Near them were caches of food and weapons guarded by three Palestinians, who sat cross-legged, and three al Qaeda fighters from Iraq who had crossed the border weeks before.

The last man, a former member of the Pakistani air force, had met the Palestinians in a Sunni town known for its lack of watchful Shia eyes. Seeing Al Zaroor, he composed his features in a mask of resolve. Alone among the smugglers and the men waiting in the cave, he knew what Al Zaroor had brought with him.

Al Zaroor embraced each man in turn. None were strangers to him; all but the Pakistani had sworn their loyalty to al Qaeda. Each had met Al Zaroor on a single occasion—the Palestinians in Beirut; the Iraqis at a safe house in Basra; and the Pakistani in Peshawar, through the good offices of General Ayub. This man had been chosen for his secret sympathy for jihad, his lack of a family, and his willingness to assume the new identity and life of ease Al Zaroor had promised him. “You are as essential
as the prize I seek,” Al Zaroor had assured Hazrat Jawindi. “All I ask is that you prepare it to be used.”

The bomb technician had shifted from side to side. “How long will our mission take?” he asked.

“A week at most,” Al Zaroor had promised. “Then you can begin a better life.”

In paradise.

T
he room was dark and snug, with a few tables, a long wooden bar, and shelves stocked with Western whisky. Brooke and Laura Reynolds sat at the bar, sipping from glasses of arrack served by a slight, balding man with a thin mustache who then busied himself polishing glasses. Laura gave the man a sharp glance before laying a worn map on the bar. “What are you interested in?” she asked Brooke.

“Everything. I'm a connoisseur of experience.”

Silent, Laura looked him in the face, then placed a finger on the map to trace a route. “For a man of such broad interests, there's a lot to see. If you like architecture, you can easily drive to Zahle, a Greek Catholic enclave with wonderful Ottoman era stone houses. Then there's the Ksara winery nearby, a scenic place that produces lovely whites. Closer to Baalbek, there's a small but exquisite Roman temple, perfectly preserved, near the remnants of an ancient mosque.” She glanced at the bartender, then continued moving her finger on the map. “If you're not sick of ruins, I'd recommend a trip to Anjar.”

“What's in Anjar?”

“An absolutely stunning site from the Umayyad period. In the morning light, it feels almost haunted by those who lived there.” In profile, a reflective smile played on her lips. “Sometimes, when I'm alone, I imagine the city as it was. It's quite magical, really.”

Brooke kept watching her face, at most times guarded, at odd moments lovely and expressive. “How did you come to work there?”

She took a sip of arrack before answering. “It's not as long a road as
you might think. My mother is Lebanese, a Maronite. She met my father in Beirut—he's a New Yorker who worked for the State Department. They lived in Saudi Arabia until my mother told him she could deal with New York, but not Riyadh. The solution was a new job for Dad in Manhattan, where I was born, and trips to Lebanon every summer. So I grew up bilingual, with a foot in two cultures.”