The Perfect Kill (9 page)

I already knew the Colonel had half a dozen Shiite soldiers from the southern suburbs in his brigade.

The Colonel whistled and turned his head to look out toward the sea.

I sensed I was losing momentum, but now wasn't the time to give up.
“Couldn't they be persuaded to look into it, give us something? I don't know, an address?”

He looked at me unwaveringly for a full five seconds before he asked, “Is your intention to kill this man?”

I hesitated a fatal split second before answering. “Right now, let's just find him.”

He pushed the three-by-five card back across the table toward me.

I didn't pick it up: “Keep it.”

“I will remember the name.”

I took the card and put it in the envelope. “So what do you think?” I said.

“Let me think. Maybe.”

In Lebanon, you never hear “no.” “Maybe” is the polite, perfectly serviceable stand-in for it. But in as much as I could read the Colonel's body language, his “maybe” was more like a “fuck no.”

I thought how here's a military man who's been on the front lines of war for the last ten years, produced the deaths of an untold number of people, and now refuses to help hunt down a man who wouldn't hesitate to murder both of us. Did I scare him with the story about Hajj Radwan stealing his papers from the police?

After the Colonel left, I took my drink out onto the balcony. A young girl in a bikini was swimming laps in the pool. The underwater lights were on. She looked too poised and classy to be someone's mistress. But who knows; there's so little I understand about this country.

Beirut, October 2009: On a trip to Beirut for the Hariri Tribunal, I call the Colonel to catch up on old times. He's now retired, but instead of
immigrating to the United States, he's in business here. We meet in the restaurant on the rooftop terrace of a fancy boutique hotel in Ashrafiyah, not far from where the Lebanese president-elect was assassinated in September 1982.

The Colonel has exchanged his starched fatigues for an expensive Italian suit and a hand-sewn silk tie. He's as slim as ever, his upright bearing still intact. He's apparently done well, a man no longer in need of the CIA's money or, for that matter, me.

We laugh about old times, how posh and intolerably chic Beirut's become, how the Lebanese have shed bloodlust for money. But isn't that the way these things usually go?

When we get around to political gossip, I drop it in—as naturally as I can—that it's something the way Hajj Radwan was caught red-handed in the murder of Hariri. The Colonel pretends not to hear and looks around for the waiter. “Sorry, I have an appointment. Maybe we can have dinner one night.” He catches a waiter's eye and makes as if he's scribbling on his hand.

I know there's no point in drilling a dry well, but I've come a long way and don't intend to let him go without something: “So, no opinion about Hariri?”

“I believe your question should be why Israel decided to kill Hariri.” When I look at him in disbelief, he says: “You know as well as I do that the Israelis will never leave us in peace.”

The cockeyed conspiracy theory that Israel killed Hariri started even before the smoke cleared that Valentine's Day. The truly inventive souls swore they'd seen the Israeli F-16 that had bombed Hariri's convoy. And now with news of the tribunal's indictments, the latest twist is that Israel somehow manipulated Lebanese telephone records in order to frame Hezbollah. Could the Colonel possibly believe this crap?

But never one to abandon a lost, dead, and buried cause, I ask, “So how then did the Israelis get to Hajj Radwan and murder him?”

“May I invite you to come up to my village?”

And there it is, I think: a genuine offer of hospitality to avoid the truth.

As I watch the Colonel disappear into the elevator, I think how you should never underestimate the upside of ostentatious savagery. Even from the other side of the grave, Hajj Radwan still terrifies the crap out of the Lebanese.

Now that I've been publicly linked to Hajj Radwan's murder, I'll never get a chance to visit his mausoleum in Nabatiyah. This leaves me to picture it as something like the Gothic reliquaries my mother used to drag me through when I was a kid in Europe—hushed, dark, eerie. A peephole into a very alien world.

But I didn't need to see Hajj Radwan's tomb to know that he lived in a world where moral ambivalence doesn't exist. There's no kicking the can down the road, no twiddling your thumbs waiting for bad karma to catch up with your enemies. It's a world of brutal calculations, where every important decision comes with a built-in on/off switch. Murder is like breathing—no blessing or license needed. It may all sound tribal, primeval, and repugnant to us, but it's the way many parts of the world work.

People who live close to the bone don't have a choice other than to preserve their reputations. Call it honor, a culture of shame, or whatever you like. The point is, you don't go around making empty threats, you don't miss, you don't kill the wrong person, and you don't wander into quagmires you don't know how to get out of. And God forbid, if you ever do, you never acknowledge the mistake.

The brutal economy of life means you can't afford to become tethered
to a failing enterprise. There's no tolerance for thoughtlessly flipping the on/off switch up and down, no changing horses midstream, no waiting around for a better opportunity to come along.

So it is, the assassin, with each and every act, demonstrates he's capable of bringing a quick, discrete, cathartic end to an enemy. Doing it expeditiously and right the first time gives him moral force; there are no points for a good try. You don't threaten to get bin Laden “dead or alive” and then wait a decade to do it.

It's with his reputation in mind that Hajj Radwan never advertised an assassination in advance. While he, of course, didn't want to lose the element of surprise, he also didn't want to make a promise he very well might not be able to keep. There is little doubt that this is what was at play with the first American embassy bombing in April 1983. By never acknowledging it was an attempt on Ambassador Habib, he let people believe it was a straightforward attack on the American embassy. And indeed, it's the way it's going to go down in history.

Like the Colonel, Hajj Radwan could only have shaken his head in disbelief at the failed attempt on Fadlallah. He couldn't have missed the sheer ineptness of it: an ally out of control, the wrong target, bad execution. Could it only have served as an encouragement to him to press on all the harder against the United States and its impotent Lebanese allies, the Maronite Christians?

No doubt he took away the same lesson from the two Iraq wars where the United States tried and failed to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Its shiny and expensive technology counted for nothing. Again, the same went for bin Laden. How could the United States lose the tallest Arab in the world and then flail around in Afghanistan for no purpose at all? It clearly had failed to heed that old piece of Persian wisdom: When you decide to kill the king, kill the king.

And by the way, never underestimate good old garden-variety ruthlessness. Sadly, it's what keeps a lot of us in line and society running smoothly.

I'll always remember the time the local florist assassinated one of my uncles (by marriage). She was good, bringing to bear impeccable intelligence, lightning speed, and total surprise. It came out of nowhere too, and in its fashion proved lethal.

To all appearances, my uncle was a happily married man. His wife was a class act, his children polite and dutiful. He often went on about the sanctity of marriage, how through thick and thin a man must stick with his wife, how monogamy is of a piece with the underlying order of the universe. My uncle worked hard. On his time off, he paraded his family around town. His wife turned their Santa Monica house into a gem of propriety and order.

One Valentine's Day, my uncle was jammed up between appointments but had just enough time to drop by the florist around the corner from his office. He asked for her twenty-four freshest red roses—twelve to be sent to his wife at home and twelve to another address.

The florist asked my uncle whether he wanted cards to go along with the bouquets. He thought about it for a second before he picked out two cards and jotted down quick notes on each. He licked the envelopes closed, making double sure there wasn't a mix-up with the addresses.

As soon as my uncle was out the door, the suspicious florist opened the envelopes to take a look. Confirming one bouquet was for my uncle's mistress, she switched the cards and sent the bouquets on their way.

By the end of Valentine's Day, my uncle's life came crashing to earth: His wife divorced him, and his mistress left him. (The wife got the Santa Monica house.) As for the florist, anyone with a secret steered well clear of her.

From time to time I wonder about her and all the other people with moral on/off switches. How is it that as soon as she decided my uncle deserved it she didn't hesitate to pull the trigger?

I used to think the ability to make instantaneous decisions was encoded in our DNA. You're either fast on the trigger or you're not. But a Navy SEAL told me that, in fact, it's possible to condition your brain to speed up your reactions. It has something to do with adjusting the amygdala. At the sound of gunfire, you either run or fire back, not stand there with your hands in your pockets.

Or maybe it's just plain common sense. After the botched Fadlallah attempt, how could the Colonel take the CIA seriously? Its putative henchmen didn't even know how to use a weapon thousands of Lebanese had mastered, the car bomb. Was this the best the CIA could do?

If I'd sat the Colonel down and told him the Lebanese army did it all on its own, I'm sure he wouldn't have believed me. Wasn't the Lebanese army an American proxy, at our beck and call? Surely, the General would first have come to Charlie to ask permission to kill the man. If we couldn't arrange that, we shouldn't be in the game.

And it wasn't as if I had a good argument on my side: The United States has a long, miserable record of mismanaging foreign proxies. Take Vietnam. By 1963 the Kennedy administration had had it with Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's inept and stubborn president. But rather than do the job itself, it started a whisper campaign that we'd all be better off with Diem out of the game. And indeed, it wouldn't be long before the generals overthrew and murdered him. But as it turned out, Diem's successor was worse, proving the dictum you can't put political murder on remote control. You're either all in or not at all.

I also have to wonder whether the Colonel didn't look at Hajj Radwan as something of a Robin Hood, a man who served all Lebanese, not just his sect. He had given the Lebanese a sense of agency, one that they'd been without for thousands of years. He'd turned violence outward, away from civil war, and directed it at foreigners. In spite of being a
Christian, could the Colonel not have had a grudging respect for Hajj Radwan?

This is all to say that the night I pitched the Colonel to help assassinate Hajj Radwan, I suspect he thought it was a lot more likely Hajj Radwan would get to me before I got to him. The Colonel may have been fast on the draw, but it didn't mean it was a good idea to sign up with the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

Just as there are animals that let other animals do their killing for them—vultures and hyenas—employ a trusted proxy when one's available. If the plot's uncovered, you'll have someone to sacrifice.

Paris, December 1988: Mother was an industrial smoker. Whenever she'd visit me on an overseas posting, she'd always get off the plane with a carry-on full of Marlboros, a dozen cartons or so. How she made it through customs all those years, I'm not sure. It probably had something to do with her being built like a squat castle and possessing a bright, open face. She looked nothing like a smuggler.

As soon as I'd install her in her hotel, she'd insist on an elaborate lunch, bottles of both white and red wine. She usually wouldn't touch her food, though, instead she'd sip her wines, smoke one cigarette after another, and listen to how exactly I intended to entertain her during her visit. Although, by anyone's standards, her idea of “entertainment” was more like a forced march.

Mother didn't tour so much as she carpet-bombed. She insisted on missing nothing, on and off the beaten track. We had traipsed through some of the world's most accommodating and posh capitals and a few of its more exotic sumps—Dushanbe, Tajikistan, for example—but Mother's visits to Paris were always a nightmare.

The trouble was, she knew the place too well. She had dragged me there as a child so she and her bohemian friends could spend their days in faux-serious discussions in Left Bank cafés. Nights, it was usually a seedy transvestite bar they'd taken a liking to. In May 1968, she hauled me back again so I could see firsthand what a revolution looked like. She'd countenance nothing less than authentic Paris, but my portfolio was the Middle East, not France. The handful of French
authentiques
I knew weren't interested in entertaining mothers. I knew a few down-at-the-heel bistros, but that was it. No, I'd have to come up with a serious expedient. And then I got this blade of an icy thought: Why not borrow Mother to help recruit la femme Nikita!

This part takes a bit of background. A few months earlier, as I was about to transfer from Beirut to Paris, I made the rounds of my Lebanese friends to cadge names of people I could call on to jump-start my tour. A journalist who liked a good prank thought about it for a moment before he asked, “Do you want to meet an interesting French girl? She eats only what's alive.”

He'd first heard of her—I'll call her Alice—by reputation. It was in the early days of the Lebanese civil war when she showed up in Beirut to fight for the Palestinians, for Yasser Arafat's Fatah, to be precise. She must have been something like eighteen at the time and, from the descriptions he heard, a real thoroughbred—beautiful and precociously well educated.

Eventually, the journalist saw a TV clip of her running out into the street, firing her Kalashnikov in the direction of a Christian position, a bandolier of ammunition draped over one shoulder. After she'd empty
her Kalashnikov, she, like her young Palestinian comrades, would duck back behind a building to reload. “Her eyes were creased, smiling,” he said. “You just knew she loved it.”

For a time, Alice dated the Red Prince, the notorious Fatah security chief who ruled Beirut with a bloody, iron fist. He had a reputation for killing anyone who appeared to be even a remote threat to the Palestinians. After the Israelis found out the Red Prince had been one of the masterminds behind the Munich Olympics massacre, they assassinated him with a car bomb—en route (ironically, given my current intentions) to his mother's birthday party.

I wrote down Alice's name, reminding my journalist friend to see if he could find a Paris telephone number for her.

Not long after I arrived in Paris, I ran a trace on Alice. Langley fired back what's called a “screamer.” Alice wasn't just a pretty girl with a colorful past, she was an in-the-flesh Angel of Death, almost certainly connected to a half dozen assassinations. One of her boyfriends came out of her apartment and put the key in the ignition only to have the car explode, killing him instantly. At some point, she joined the armed French leftist group Action Directe and then somehow ended up connected with the German Red Army Faction, the assassins of Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen. Her new friends, as they prided themselves, were the kind of people who spend their days plotting murder rather than standing out on the front lawn talking about the weather. There also was the little question about whether she had set up the Red Prince for assassination.

The more I read about this female hyena, the straighter my hair stood on end. I couldn't understand why she wasn't in jail. By the time I got to the end of the cable, I decided the last thing I needed on a new tour was to hang out with this girl. But with Mother on the way, I had a change of heart. And who could tell whether she might get me back into the game in Beirut.

Alice's radical past would still be a fresh memory in Beirut. I'd have
to actually meet her to find out if she was in a position to dig up a lead on Hajj Radwan. Or, who knows, she might be prepared to serve him up on a platter à la (maybe) the Red Prince. Or, what the hell, pull the trigger herself if she could get close enough. And as long as I'd gotten this far, what better way to approach her than hiding in the wake of Battleship Mom?

When I asked a French police contact to help me find Alice, she looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. It took her a couple of days before she came back with a phone number for Alice, a Left Bank bookstore.

I had no trouble getting Alice on the phone, but when I did, my French, a language I'd never quite mastered, failed me. Mercifully, she switched to English: “Please, what is it that you want?”

I mumbled something about having a common friend in Lebanon. The icy silence that came back down the line suggested I wasn't retaking ground. So I blurted it out: “My mother's in town. Would you like to join us for dinner?”

I knew I sounded like a total idiot, maybe insane. I waited for Alice to slam down the phone. Instead, she asked, “Where?” I let her pick.

And that's how I ended up on a date with an authentic Femme Nikita, with my mother as chaperone and (although she didn't know it) a beard in the bargain.

—

M
other and I got to the restaurant first. She immediately decided she didn't like the place, if for no other reason than that it was full of tourists happily consulting their guidebooks and chatting about Paris's splendors. She took pointed offense at a table of older Germans in pastel and earth tones. (They looked pleasant enough to me.)

Mother put on her tortoiseshell reading glasses and picked up the wine list. After a moment, she looked up: “And who is this woman we're having dinner with?”

Before I could answer, I spotted a middle-aged woman stalled in
the front door, obviously looking for someone she didn't know. Even in the dimness, I could see Alice's days as a siren were long past: She was syphilitic thin and hard as flint. I half stood up and waved. Alice came over to our table.

She coldly shook my mother's hand, looking her up and down with what I took to be a sneer. Alice sat down and half turned in her seat to look for a waiter. Not seeing one, she sighed. My mother asked if she could pour Alice a glass of wine. Alice looked at her with a painted smile: “I don't drink.”

I looked over and caught Mother sniffing the way she does when she suspects something is off. She started to rummage through her purse, but rather than her claws, she pulled out her silver etui and her cheap Bic lighter. She lit a Marlboro and for what seemed an eternity inspected the lighted end.

Through dinner, the conversation was painfully ordinary—the weather, Paris prices, the hideous traffic. I tried to get in a couple of questions about Beirut, probing for something I could pry open with Mom safely back across the Atlantic, but Alice ignored my every foray. For a second, I wondered if my cop friend hadn't put me on to the wrong Alice. I had to remind myself that my friend had assured me the police knew exactly who she was.

Her chicken fricassee done, Alice abruptly stood up and announced she couldn't stay for dessert. She had a rendezvous, she said. She left us to pay the bill.

If I'd had a traditional romance in mind, that one dinner was more than enough to cool any ardor. And not to mention that I, no doubt, was too clunky for Alice's tastes. But what I couldn't get out of my mind was the outside chance that Alice had run across Hajj Radwan during her Beirut
days. The Red Prince—her ex-boyfriend—had initially recruited Hajj Radwan into Fatah and had served as his mentor during his rookie years. Had the Red Prince introduced Hajj Radwan to Alice? Had Hajj Radwan fought side by side with Alice? Unlikely, but I'd never know until I could sit Alice down again and ask her.

A couple of weeks after my mother left, I called Alice. She sounded friendlier this time and even suggested we get together. She said she was at a conference the following day in the late afternoon. Maybe we could meet for coffee afterward?

“On second thought,” she said, “why don't you come along and sit through it with me?”

I had to wonder what sort of conference a French assassin would attend, but I immediately agreed. She gave me the address of a hotel in Montparnasse I'd never heard of. Little did I know that three blocks away, less than a year later, a wonderful lead to Hajj Radwan would go up in smoke, literally.

When I left work to meet Alice, it was raining, traffic at a standstill. By the time the taxi finally made it across the Seine, I was already twenty minutes late. In frustration, I jumped out and half ran down the Boulevard Montparnasse.

When I got to the address, I found a modern, boxy hotel, the kind of place Parisians have fought valiantly to keep out of their city. But if banality truly is the essence of a good smoke screen, the place couldn't be beat. Who would think of looking for la femme Nikita in France's version of a Motel 6? The concierge directed me to the conference room on the mezzanine level.

The door was closed. I could hear a man's voice inside hectoring a hushed room about something. I was about to let myself in when I noticed next to the door an easel with a placard on it. There were three small letters at the bottom right,
EST
.

Vaguely familiar, I leaned over to read the fine print: Erhard Seminars Training.

Fuck.

The little I knew about est was that it was some New Age, California-based cult where you aren't allowed to piss for hours so you can have the pleasure of being verbally assaulted for every real and imagined character flaw inflicted on you at birth. Enlightenment through bladder distress. Okay, I had enough flaws for est to incarcerate me for life. But now wasn't the time I needed to be reminded of it.

I let go of the knob, turned around, and slinked away like a bilge rat abandoning a sinking ship. I never called Alice again.

How could I have been so stupid to think Alice would ever be able to help me hunt down and murder Hajj Radwan? I should have seen right away she was a flake who couldn't be trusted with a sensitive mission. If I'd sent her to Beirut to help me find Hajj Radwan, she would only have kept looking for herself. I'd have done better recruiting Mom to do it. At least she and I had had a womb in common.

When I was a young man, an old family friend once put his hand around my shoulder and offered me a little piece of wisdom. “Finding the right girl is like testing a used car. The first thing you need to do is take her out on a hard drive to see what parts fall off.” He was half serious.

Before deciding whether he would make it with a girl or not, he'd take her on a long brutal road trip to Baja California . . . usually in a small sports car. They'd camp along the way, whatever the weather. If she survived the scorpions that crawl around Mexican beaches, there was a chance they might have a good run.

“Most didn't,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “You find out pretty quick who the batshit crazy ones are.”

Hezbollah has a more conventional way of selecting new recruits.
They'd line them up on a very hot day, warning them to remain rock-still. Just as the first of them would start to succumb to the heat and wobble, a drill instructor would fire a Kalashnikov down the line—at eye level. In the tape I saw, one of the new recruits is hit in the ear, falls to the ground, writhing in pain and holding the bloody stump where his ear used to be. For his efforts, he was selected out because he didn't have the fortitude to fight in a war.

Hajj Radwan had more of an artisan's touch to hiring his people. Corporate America would call it an “internal referral”—someone already working for a company who will vouch for an applicant. The idea is an insider is not about to recommend a dud and risk losing his job. Or in Hajj Radwan's regime of discipline, his life.

Hajj Radwan only took in people who were an open book to him. Many of them he knew from birth, had grown up with, and/or was bound to by marriage or blood. The point is he needed to be able to examine a person's entire life cycle before he could ever trust him—how he coped with extended families, how he did in pre-K, who he dated, how he related to Islam.

As the Lebanese police discovered from analyzing telephone data, all of Hariri's assassins were in one way or another attached to a small town in southern Lebanon called Nabatiyah. Hajj Radwan's brother-in-law was from there, as were a lot of the street men who tracked Hariri the morning of his murder. (Hajj Radwan's own village is close to Nabatiyah.)

But none of this is to say Hajj Radwan engaged in nepotism. He wasn't a godfather who reflexively took family into the business. He knew relatives, as well as anyone, can get you killed. As for friends, Hajj Radwan looked at them as a frivolity and a self-indulgence, never as ready-made recruits.