The Perfect Kill (28 page)

So here's what I needed to do: Nail down the specific time of a transfer, persuade my new source to rig the building with explosives and, most important, make sure Hajj Radwan was there in the house for the transfer. If I could pinpoint the room he'd be in, a small shaped charge through the wall would do the job. As for finding explosives and a house opposite Hajj Radwan's transfer house, it was a lead-pipe cinch.

—

H
ere I need to remind the reader that I've been obliged to fudge some of the names and details of this story, as well as fall back on secondary narratives—and omit the central plot against Hajj Radwan. But,
again, let's not forget this is a personal journey through political violence rather than history. What's absolutely true, though, is that Chuck took an instant dislike to the house I picked to stage Hajj Radwan's murder. Except for a couple of skeletal dead trees out front, there was an unobstructed field of fire from the other side of the Green Line—nothing to stop a sniper from sending a bullet through our house's front windows. When I told him we didn't have time to find a better place, he shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose we could sandbag the shit out of it.”

Frankly, I was worried about Chuck these days. He was itching to get something going. But the Lebanese were driving him crazy. They have this annoying habit of racing up behind a car and flashing their lights to let the other driver know he had better speed up or get out of the way. I'm not sure what he hoped to accomplish, but Chuck asked our tech to help him bore a small hole in his trunk from where he could shoot out the front lights of the bastards flashing him. (He planned to use a pellet gun.) The tech—an easygoing Texan with the radio call sign Garfield—talked Chuck out of it.

The rest of the house was equally unappealing—a decade of ruin and filth. There was a coppery smell of urine in the back bedrooms. The mattresses were gone from their frames, and trash was piled everywhere. There were bookshelves on one wall but no books, only a couple of faded magazines covered in an inch of dust and plaster.

There was a good view of the southern suburbs from the roof, including the house where Hajj Radwan staged the transfers. There was no sign of life now, but since the transfers went on at night, I wasn't surprised.

Directly behind the house loomed the Ministry of Defense. My hope was that this would dissuade the local Christian warlord—Hajj Radwan's arms dealer—from deciding to police us up. It also helped that with most of the houses reduced to piles of rubble there weren't many neighbors. In fact, no one in their right mind hung on here.

There was a knock at the door—two gray old ladies leopard-spotted
with age and all in black. By the looks of them, I guessed they were the owners, who, I imagined, wanted to see the idiot foreigners their nephew had swindled into renting their place.

We all sat down as if we were at pink tea at the Dorchester. Courtesies over, they asked if we would agree to pay the entire year's rent in advance. Since it was only twenty dollars a month, I said fine. I pulled out of my wallet two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. I got Chuck to give me two twenties.

The one with the densest liver spots coughed in her sleeve and then asked where we might be from. I said we were Hungarian engineers. I kept my fingers crossed she wouldn't now ask for a lease after all. The only Hungarian word I knew was
“Magyar.”

The two women looked at each and spoke rapidly in Arabic. I caught one saying it was a good sign Hungarians were moving in. Was it a harbinger that the civil war was finally coming to a close?

In Beirut in those days, putting your hands on things such as explosives, detonators, and radio-controlled firing devices was as easy as buying a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. And I mean everything from tanks to heavy artillery. It was only a question of money and knowing the right person.

It took one of my arms dealers less than twenty-four hours to find me two out-of-the-box American-made LAWs. A LAW is a single-use disposable rocket and rocket launcher. We made the transfer in the parking lot of a posh restaurant, no one paying us the least attention. It was fifty dollars a LAW.

Another arms dealer was a young American Armenian who knew his way around more exotic instruments of murder. I'd first gotten in touch with him to see if he could build a replica of a Samsonite airplane bomb.
He was supposedly very good at it. My objective was to show Langley how easily and expertly these things could be constructed.

The Armenian's workshop was deep in an Armenian neighborhood called Bourj Hammoud. As it was in Hajj Radwan's neighborhood, the unbidden didn't dare set foot in it. According to one story, a local Christian militia sent a team in to arrest someone, but before making it ten feet in, they were all mowed down in a blaze of gunfire. I'll call my Armenian arms dealer Joe.

The day my replica airplane bomb was ready for pickup, Joe met me on the road that skirts Bourj Hammoud. We drove about a hundred feet down a street so narrow that I was sure the side mirrors would snap off. We pulled up in front of what looked like a junk shop.

It was pitch-black inside. Something with a pair of menacing red eyes was curled up in a blanket on a sofa. It reminded me of an alert reticulated python.

I sat down at a workbench. Joe went in the back and brought out a new, ash-gray Samsonite suitcase.

“Open it,” he said. “You can't even smell the glue.”

Joe turned on a Coleman camping lantern and hung it over the suitcase.

The work looked good to me. There was no sign the interior lining had been replaced by mock plasticized and rolled penthrite explosives—PETN. I picked it up; the weight felt right too.

Joe: “Let 'em X-ray it. They won't see a damn thing. Fuck, Samsonite couldn't tell the difference.”

From upstairs came the crying of a child, which gave me an opening for a new piece of business. I pulled out a picture of a baby's bassinet: “Could you work with one of these, turn it into a bomb?”

“Of course.”

“With PETN? I need it to cut through a wall. A shaped charge.”

Joe smiled: “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

“And hook it up to an infrared trigger, at about a mile distance?”

“You got it.”

Joe fished around in a drawer until he found a double-sided circuit board with filaments of wire and diodes attached to it. “It's a light-sensitive trigger switch,” he said, handing it to me to look at.

“More faithful than Old Faithful. When 8,192 counts have been received, the generator is turned off, the light-sensor circuit is enabled, then the relay driver is enabled. Got it?”

I vaguely knew that he was talking about a wiring scheme that would make this thing foolproof, but other than that, I just had to trust him.

“You see what's cool about this is that the device has no memory effect.” He looked at me and no doubt saw I didn't have a clue what he was talking about.

“Let me try again. Any exposure to light during the safe/arm delay time will have no effect. It's only the illumination right after the safe/arm delay that triggers this baby.”

He was starting to warm up to the subject. “You'll love this feature. A red-light-emitting diode monitors the state of the output. If the output is energized, the LED glows.”

I asked him where he'd gone to school. “Brigham Young,” he said.

By the time I walked out of Joe's cabinet of wonders, I'd put in an order for a device that closed the detonating circuit after 8,192 counts, an infrared relay, and a PETN-rigged bassinet (multiprimed).

—

A
s I started to accumulate my arsenal, the problem was to make sure it worked. Fortunately, we had our very talented tech Garfield, the good old boy from Texas who had talked Chuck out of shooting out the lights of cars pissing him off.

Garfield could turn anything into a bomb, even a jar of Maxim instant coffee. (Maxim is a wonderful oxidizer.) He also could make old crappy Soviet weaponry work. Once, in order to check out a batch of Soviet surface-to-air missiles, he fooled the missiles by hanging a lighted
cigar from a string and swinging it back and forth. The missiles' “gimlet” followed the cigar like a hound dog on a wild pig's scent. Garfield also was a genius with video. A couple of months before, he'd rigged up a camera on a warehouse associated with Hajj Radwan, allowing us to record the comings and goings.

Garfield put all of the weapons in good working order. But there was a problem with Joe's infrared device. While the IR link worked fine, the reception at our end was bad.

Garfield listened for a minute. “Bud, your UPS is giving you AC but chopping off the signal.”

UPS stands for “uninterrupted power supply,” and AC is “alternating current.” It took Garfield about a day to fix it.

By the way, the deeper I got into the mechanics of murder, the easier it seemed it would be to cross the tropic of murder. I'd already absorbed the zeitgeist of this place, along with the Lebanese way of looking at the instrumentalities of political violence. I'd lost all perspective on the rights and wrongs of it, other than thinking I was on the right side. The kill-or-be-killed thing wasn't some abstract notion I'd read about in a book; it was all around me. So rather than sit around parsing the morality of the act, I was single-mindedly focused on making it work.

In training, they'd taught us how it's possible to cut through the strap muscle and sever a man's carotid artery with a razor-sharpened karambit (an Indonesian claw-shaped knife) wielded with sufficient force. The instructor said it was a matter of concentrating on a man's anatomy and nothing else. It's the way I now started to frame things in my mind.

Hajj Radwan apparently wasn't distracted enough by the intra-Shiite fighting to entirely forget about us. We'd picked up bits and pieces of intelligence that he was planning an attempt on the ambassador—the
same ambassador who'd told us to get serious about bringing Hajj Radwan to justice. The ambassador's security detail was beefed up, and the hunt for Hajj Radwan's mole inside the embassy was intensified. State Department investigators had narrowed it down to a single man, but they were struggling to come up with enough evidence to do something about him.

One morning the ambassador was on his way back to the embassy from an appointment when two cars straddling the road blocked his convoy. When the gunmen leaned over the hoods of their cars and pointed their automatic rifles at the convoy, the Delta Force gunner behind the .50-caliber machine gun in the turret of the lead Suburban opened fire. The gunmen fled, but then gunmen from across a field bordering the road opened fire on the convoy. The .50-caliber returned fire, and the convoy made good its escape.

If it was an attempt on the ambassador, it was a clumsy one. And no one thought Hajj Radwan was behind it. He was better than that. Anyhow, he would never have risked a classic ambush in the Christian enclave. But it didn't lessen our fear that Hajj Radwan had something up his sleeve. I needed to speed things up.

—

A
dirty, complicit moon hung over the cluster of shabby apartments. Colette, the girl who hosted my birthday party, was sitting on her balcony, wrapped in a blanket. She waved to me to come up. The telephone was on the table in front of her. She was looking at it as if it were dead. I apologized for not calling.

The day before, we'd eaten lunch at a restaurant in a little mountain town called Brummana. Untouched by the fighting, it was picture-postcard beautiful. We took a table out on the polished limestone terrace, a Prussian-blue-and-white-striped umbrella shading us from the midday heat. I ordered water pipes and arak.

We watched in silence as the waiter went through the ritual of
preparing two glasses for us: the arak was always poured first, then the water, then the ice. Colette said she wanted my help in getting out of Lebanon. Anything had to be better than here—the hate, the war, and now the Christian warlords were getting ready for their own little in-house fight.

Colette's family was from the south, Hezbollah country, which meant they weren't going home anytime soon. They'd be permanent refugees in their own country for who knows how long. But my mind was elsewhere. It sounds like the flattest of clichés, but hunting another man concentrates your senses, makes you feel—I don't know—more vital. Never mind that I had nagging doubts about whether I could go through with it.

We were the last to leave. When I dropped her off that afternoon, I told her I'd pass by the next night after dinner with some sort of plan to help her get out. And now I was back, sans plan.

Colette pulled the blanket up around her neck, then laughed as if she were scaring away some unwanted thought. Abruptly, she unwrapped herself from the blanket, went inside, and came back with a bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured me a glass but left hers empty. I drank mine and filled it back up. I was drinking a lot these days. For the sugar boost, I told myself.

I didn't have the nerve to tell her I was leaving in less than a month. My replacement had already come and gone on a quick familiarization trip.

Colette again brought up the coming fight between the Christians: “It's coming, right?”

I nodded. Who hadn't predicted it?

There was a streak of lightning over the port. We'd been promised rain, and now I believed it.

I hated the ugly clarity of my thoughts. But in the Lebanon I'd gotten used to, there's a transactional side to every relationship, use and be used. Colette wanted to leverage our friendship into a ticket out; I'd used
her to meet Ali. It was the same thing as my trying to use the Colonel to murder Hajj Radwan in return for my help in settling him in the United States.

I stood up and said I had to leave. We'd get back together tomorrow, I said.