The Perfect Kill (29 page)

As soon as I pulled away from Colette's apartment, the rain started. A hundred feet farther down the hill, I noticed a pair of headlights behind me. Strange, I thought, someone else out on the road at this time of the morning. Then again, there are a lot of Lebanese who live by night. I decided not to worry about it.

The rain started to really come down, sheets of water rolling across the road. I slowed down, and so did the car behind me, holding back maybe two hundred feet.

Rather than the direct route home, I took the Beit Mery road. Beit Mery was sound asleep, not a light on anywhere. When I came around a bend at the edge of town with a particularly good view of Muslim Beirut, I slowed down long enough to see an exchange of tracer rounds from the southern suburbs.
Keep it up, you bastards,
I thought.
At least another week.
The car behind me slowed down too.

Somewhere between Beit Mery and Monteverdi, the car dropped off, leaving me to wonder why I wasn't more tired. I'd been up at five this morning for tennis, lunch at Kaslik, dinner, a nightcap, and now Colette's. I had apparently caught whatever manic pestilence afflicted the Lebanese. Was it the reason I'd decided to settle things with Hajj Radwan with a shaped charge?

I wasn't more than half a mile below Monteverdi when I noticed the same pair of lights behind me. It has to be my imagination, I thought. Or maybe it's another car. In my two years here, I'd never once caught surveillance. So why now? It didn't matter; I'd outrun him and think about it later.

I was doing more than forty when my BMW lost its footing on a switchback, sliding sideways on the wet pavement. When it slowed
enough, I yanked it out of the oncoming lane. I checked my rearview mirror. The car was there, stopped above me.

At the flats now it was a straight run from Mkalles to Jdeideh, nothing but pavement dimpled with rain. In an instant, the BMW got up to a full gallop. The engine was at a high-pitched whine. I didn't look, but knew I was doing more than a hundred. The way the water gunneled on either side, I felt as if I were in a speedboat. No way anyone could keep up with me now.

And then out of nowhere a pair of car lights shot diagonally across the road about a quarter mile ahead. I was going too fast to tell if the car was even moving. But then it definitely started across the road, oblivious to the two tons of metal hurtling down on it. It was way too late, but I slammed on the brakes.

Instead of skidding as I thought it would, the BMW spun in circles, a dizzying waltz, faster and faster. It felt as if I were on a fixed axis, but the view kept changing as I headed for the other car. The thing I noticed was the silence. Had I stopped hearing myself living?

I wondered why it was taking so long to hit the fucker. For some inane reason, I tried to remember how old I was, but I couldn't. It occurred to me that it didn't matter, not now or on the other side of life. It was some idiot fatalism, or maybe it's just that I'd had too much to drink. I closed my eyes.

I only opened them again when I realized the BMW wasn't moving. It was in the middle of the road, staring into a darkened clothing store. A pair of surprised mannequins in the window looked back at me. The hood of the BMW was steaming in the rain, the engine stalled. I noticed my heart wasn't racing. Fuck, these damned people really have infected me with all their bullshit about how death finds you when it's good and ready. Life beyond consequence, I guess. If I didn't get out of this country fast, I'd be a paid-up member of their idiotic death cult.

I got out of my car to see what happened to the poor bastard I'd almost taken into the black abyss with me. But the car was gone. Then I
noticed it fifty feet down the cross street. Its lights were off, but it was in the middle of the road. The driver's door was open. I walked down to take a look.

It was an old Peugeot—dented, cracked windshield, tattered upholstery. A stack of flat bread wrapped in plastic was on the backseat. There was the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Was he parked along the side of the road, smoking while he waited for me to come along? It was one more wasted thought, one I decided to kill in the cradle.

I also decided that there'd be no point in searching for the registration. Car registrations don't mean anything in this country. The real owner's never on it, or just as often, the car's stolen. It didn't matter; I'd take it as an omen. Get the fuck out of this place.

Don't wait until the enemy is too deeply ensconced in power or too inured to violence before acting. He'll easily shrug off the act and then come after you with a meat cleaver.

The morning started out above suspicion, a few sleek clouds scooting across an opulent sky. There was only the faintest of breezes. It was Sunday, and standing out on my balcony, I could see there was already traffic heading for the beaches. A couple of sailboats were out. More rain was promised, but you could've fooled me.

I went out on the balcony to listen to the Green Line. There were a couple of muted booms.
Good,
I thought,
the Shiites are still at one another's throats.
Which meant that Hajj Radwan was even shorter on ammunition and would be back knocking on the Christian's door, asking for more. But it wouldn't last forever.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Hezbollah would prevail in the end—if for no other reason than that they had belief on their side
and a lot of practice at war. When that day came, my little causeway into Hajj Radwan's world would shut down. Like all soft underbellies, this one wouldn't be around forever.

Missing the worst traffic, I got to Byblos early for lunch and wandered around streets unchanged since Phoenician times. After twenty minutes, I went to the restaurant to wait. I sipped a glass of wine as I watched a sailboat tack into port. A young girl was at the helm, mom and dad taking down the sails.

The Christian politician who joined me for lunch wanted to talk only about the upcoming elections and how the army commander intended to steal them by force. The Christian militias wouldn't stand for it, he said. The fighting would be bad. He offered names, the usual suspects of Christian bigotry. Every once in a while, he'd say that the United States needed to do something to stop it. He kept coming back to our “great betrayal” of the Christians and how we shouldn't have sent the Marines if we hadn't intended to finish the job.

When I brought up the Shiite civil war, he looked at me blankly. It could have been occurring on the other side of the world as far as he was concerned. If I'd suggested that there was such a person as Hajj Radwan who one day would be calling the shots in the Christian enclave, he wouldn't have believed me.

I got away about two, the return beach traffic still light. Before I got to Halat, there was a boom. It had to be close for me to hear it over the radio. Oddly, though, I couldn't see any smoke. Maybe it was a nearby quarry I didn't know about. But why would they be working on Sunday?

The road took a tight turn around a finger of rock that jutted out into the sea. Just as I came around it, there was a thundering explosion a few hundred feet in front of me, rock spewing out into the road. I thought that it had to have been a large-caliber artillery round. A bank of gray smoke and dust drifted up the side of the cliff.

There was an old Mercedes on the other side of the road, its nose into the rock, the windows spidered by shrapnel. The driver's door opened. A
man got out. He was holding his head, blood running down his face. He moved quickly and opened the back door. I slowed down, looking for a place to pull over. I watched him as he pulled a small girl from the backseat, cradling her in his arms. Her left leg from right below the hip was shredded, gushing blood.

There was static from my Motorola, then someone keying it. “Maverick, Maverick.”

Maverick was my radio call sign. I picked up the radio and yelled into it. “What!”

“Sorry to disturb you whatever you're in between.” It was Chuck.

“Fuck off.”

There was nothing I could do for the girl bleeding to death not twenty feet away, but I put down the radio and started to get out of the car.

The radio was insistent now. “Maverick, don't forget we got a meet at seventeen hundred.”

It was our private code that there was movement at Hajj Radwan's transfer house—and that we should meet up at ours.

There were people piling out of cars now. A man had the little girl on the ground on a coat. He was tying a tourniquet around her leg. It wasn't going to work; she would die. I wasn't going to watch.

I expected that traffic would be backed up along the coast road, but it wasn't. It was as if there'd been no shelling at all. I wondered about the Lebanese's capacity to shrug off violence, whether they were just numbed by it or if it was a case of sheer defiance.

I had no idea what the shelling had been about. But what I did know was that Muslim Beirut wasn't in range; it had to have been from a Christian position. Was this the start of it, the Christian civil war? Fuck these people and their shitty little blood feuds.

Instead of the direct route to our house, I continued along the coast road toward the port. Before I got there, I cut east through Sin el Fil. I stopped and turned the engine off to listen to the Green Line. There was some gunfire, the usual stuff for this time of day.

I stopped at a fork below the Ministry of Defense. It had a good view of the southern suburbs. No sign of fighting. I got out with a pair of binoculars. Our house looked as abandoned and forlorn as ever. I couldn't see Chuck's car, and there was no sign of movement at Hajj Radwan's transfer house. What was Chuck talking about?

I eased down the hill, still listening for any uptick of fighting. I called Chuck on the Motorola, but I was now out of repeater range. It was probably just as well; no doubt the chief had his radio on and was listening to us.

I walked around the house, checking to see if anything was out of place. I looked into the window and saw the Coke can on the coffee table that I'd left there on my last visit.

I opened the old padlock to the front door. It had taken Garfield two weeks to find an old rusted combination lock that still worked. I checked the untamperable plastic-encased counter above the door. Its purpose was to number each opening and closing of the door. It was at thirty-eight. The last time I'd been here, I closed the door at thirty-four. Had Chuck let himself in since we were last here? I'd have to wait until he showed up to ask.

I tried Chuck on the radio again, but there still wasn't a ping off the repeater. I went into the kitchen and pulled the dead refrigerator from the wall. I pulled off the back panel. The IR receiver was there. But there was no way to tell whether anyone had gotten to it.

A rocket's scream. The impact was maybe half a mile away, in the middle of the no-man's-land between the house and the southern suburbs. Where had it come from? I pushed the refrigerator back against the wall. There was a distant pop of a mortar launch and then another.

Death was now diving around the house, at least a half-dozen explosions. I crawled to the back bedroom, the one that smelled like piss. Too bad there was nothing to pull over me. I squatted in the corner. There were several more impacts and then silence. It was time to leave.

Thank God the car started right away. I peeled away and headed up
the hill, the car fishtailing with every rock and hole I hit. At an intersection I slowed down to get a look behind me. The Green Line was dead quiet. Had it been some dumb bastard on the other side unburdening himself of old mortar shells?

Then a new mortar round landed somewhere above me. I floored the car. By the time I got to the main road, two more fell in quick succession. They'd fallen so close together that I knew they'd been fired from separate tubes.

I didn't slow down at the intersection with the main road and only saw the van when it darkened the right side of my car. I don't remember the crash or anything else that happened in the next few minutes.

I looked up to see a craggy old woman in black looking down at me. I thought for a moment she was one of my landladies come to ask what I'd done to her house. The woman said something I couldn't hear.

I was curious how the world had gone liquid and blurry, and then noticed the van was implanted in the side of my car, water from its radiator splashed into and across the wreck of my new car. I wondered what had happened to its driver.

I felt around on the passenger floor for my Motorola. It wasn't there. Someone had reached in and grabbed it, I thought. Why hadn't they also taken my Kalashnikov and my 9mm Browning, which were still on the floor? There were more people now gathered around the car. Someone opened the door for me and reached in to pull me out. As I started to get out, I felt something under my foot: my Motorola. I picked it up and keyed it. “This is Maverick. Anyone near the MOD? I need a ride.”

Garfield came up: “What's the problem, Maverick? Forget where you parked your car?”

—

T
hat night Chuck didn't help clear things up when he told me that he'd seen where the mortars were fired from. It wasn't from the southern suburbs, but from our side, a Christian position. And it
wasn't far from where he and the tech had been arrested six months before.

I felt as if ice water were coursing through me. Had Hajj Radwan's arms supplier found out about us and mortared our house as an invitation for us to kindly get the fuck out of his business? Or maybe Hajj Radwan himself was somehow behind it, letting us know he knew all about our plans. For all I knew, my two landladies worked for Hajj Radwan and told him about us. Not a shred of evidence for it, of course. I was worse off than Chuck with his Claymore mines and pellet gun.

I also never did find out who shelled the Byblos road. Maybe it had something to do with the upcoming presidential elections, not that that made any sense either. While I'm at it, I still don't understand exactly why the Colonel wouldn't help his natural ally, the United States, go after our common enemy, Hajj Radwan. The truth is that I wasn't anywhere near understanding this country.

But what I was certain of was that it was time to get out. Our house was compromised. If the Christian warlord hadn't noticed us before, he did now. I told Chuck he should leave too, but he told me he wasn't ready to get out of the game. Who knows, maybe he thought my replacement would know what he was doing.

To this day, I have no idea whether Hajj Radwan even knew who I was, let alone plotted my murder. I recently had a chance to ask Garfield about it. “Don't know, bud,” he said. “What I do know is that a couple of mortars were enough to make you turn tail and run away like a three-legged jackrabbit.”

I also don't know whether Law #2—Make It Count—applied by the
time I got around to planning Hajj Radwan's murder. Would it have made a difference by 1988? Would it have prevented Pan Am 103 and Chuck's murder? I doubt it. By then, someone else would have instantly filled Hajj Radwan's shoes.

What did I really know about Hajj Radwan? He supposedly had bottle green eyes, a color you don't easily forget. But without a good picture, it wasn't something I could ever pin down. It was the same thing later when I couldn't determine whether his new wife was Lebanese or Syrian. Who cares? No one. But the point is that if you can't tell whether a man has hazel or blue eyes, how can you even begin to get at the harder question about determining the value of his blood?

Like the Pashtun tribal belt, Lebanon is a horrendously byzantine place, and I mean byzantine in the sense that the country is incomprehensible to outsiders. Its hidden mechanisms of power, secret alliances, and opaque interests are forever out of our reach. My three-by-five cards might get me in the door, but they're not even close to a road map for political murder.

In other words, the chance of our following Law #21—Get to It Quickly—wasn't in the cards. By the time we figured out who he was, it was three years too late. He'd already driven us out of Lebanon, created a guerrilla force capable of beating any conventional force, and terrified the Lebanese to the point no one in his right mind dared defy him.

If there's anything I learned over the years about political murder, it's that you have to know your enemies as well as you know your own country. It's the only possible way to meet and destroy a rising threat. The French should have done something about Ho Chi Minh when he was a sous chef at the Ritz in Paris. The Saudis should have taken care of Osama bin Laden in the mid-nineties, long before he gave substance to smoke.

When you decide to swim in the deep end of Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, or any other foreign land, you'd better know exactly what's in the water swimming with you. Both the British Raj and the United States failed in
Pakistan's tribal belt because they didn't have a clue about the enemy they were fighting.

It's no consolation, but the American government isn't alone in being out of touch. On December 3, 2013, a senior member of Hezbollah was shot dead just after midnight near his home in the southern suburbs, not very far from Hajj Radwan's transfer house on the Green Line. A professional job, he was hit at close range and the assassin or assassins got cleanly away.

The New York Times
described the victim as a “major player,” and the BBC called him a Hezbollah “commander.” What neither apparently knew was that he was the right-hand man of Hajj Radwan, approximately number three in the Islamic Jihad Organization. He'd been instrumental in the attacks on the Marines and the two attempts on the American ambassadors. If indeed Hajj Radwan was involved in Pan Am 103, I suspect that this man also played a role.

Two weeks later, a pro-Hariri former finance minister was blown up by a car bomb as he traveled through Beirut. When someone asked me “why him” and “why now,” I could only offer that the man was an active backer of the tribunal. So maybe it was a matter of more cleaning up—Law #16. Or he might have been selected to pay down the debt of the murder of the Hezbollah “major player” from two weeks before.