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.
LITTLE WARNINGS THAT FALL ON DULL, COLD EARS
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.
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 wonder
ed 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.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: The frightened bird strives for light. Figure out what looks like light to him and wait for him there.
LAW
#21
GET TO IT QUICKLY
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.
WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHO THE MARK IS, IT’S YOU. EVEN WHEN YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHO THE MARK IS, IT’S STILL YOU
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.
The Perfect Kill Page 30