showed no sign that it was anything other than what they expected. When the cab pulled away, guaranteeing his freedom, he initiated the electronic collection device he’d installed in the wheel well of the vehicle he was leaving behind.
22
The Ghost checked the security of his hotel room door, deciding it was good enough. If someone wanted to come through the hard way, it would take more than one blow, and that would leave plenty of time to get him out on the balcony, and away.
He’d managed to slip out of Sidon in the chaos of the bombing and had elected not to drive all the way home to Tripoli. He wanted to open the briefcase as soon as possible, but he needed a secure area to analyze the information. He’d stopped in Beirut and rented a room in the Hamra area, next to the university.
He placed the briefcase on the chipped table in front of the television and stared at it for a second. He went into the bathroom, blotted a washcloth in the sink, and returned. He righted the briefcase and cleansed the dried blood from the handle. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but it felt like the right thing.
He placed it back down flat and opened it. Inside was a sheaf of papers, a wallet, a thumb drive, and a passport.
He picked up the passport and wallet first. Credit cards and Saudi Arabian identification for a man named Ahmed al-Rashid. One more name for his record books. He was pleased to see it was a Gulf Cooperation Council country. Being in the GCC would make it much easier to pass across borders of any member state. The passport itself looked official, but was in pieces, with the picture missing. He assumed he would have received instructions on final assembly, but that was obviously not going to happen now.
The credit cards were in the same name, as was the international driver’s license. In the sheaf of papers he found a bank statement, with a balance of fifty thousand dollars. He assumed one of the cards was a debit card from the bank. The money was fine to get started, but he wouldn’t be using the identity of Ahmed for very long. If he decided to continue.
He continued flipping through the papers and found the biography of the United States Middle Eastern envoy. A man named Jeffrey McMasters. Fifty-seven years old, with the face of a distinguished patrician. Gray around the temples and a hint of a smile around the eyes. A professional diplomat with over thirty-five years of service. He noted he was a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and had worked in the Jordanian Embassy, but had done nothing with the state of Israel. That stood to reason because the United States would be looking for someone who understood the area, but who could never be accused of having a bias.
He flipped to the next page and saw the itinerary of McMasters’s Middle East trip. The envoy was hitting quite a few countries over the next seven days. Most stops simply stated the city and duration, but some actually listed the events of the day and the lodging arrangements. The Ghost guessed that the Hamas offshoot group had greater penetration of some countries than others.
He saw the envoy was due to land in Lebanon tomorrow, but would be spending only about eight hours on the ground before leaving again and flying to Turkey. He would visit at least four other countries before his final stop in Doha, Qatar, for the peace talks. The stop before that was Dubai, UAE.
Dubai was one of the few places with a complete itinerary, and the chosen hotel caught his eye. The Al Bustan Rotana, a premier five-star establishment in a city known for five-star establishments. But this hotel had a little extra notoriety, beyond the luxury. It was the same one where the Mossad had assassinated Mahmoud al- Mabhouh, chief of Hamas’s military wing, in 2010. A spectacular killing by the Zionists that made the Palestinians look weak.
Using fake passports from at least four different European countries, the hit team had conducted surveillance on Mahmoud for days, penetrated his room in the hotel, waited on him to return, then suffocated him to death.
The irony of the envoy choosing this hotel bit deep. Maybe he
He shuffled through the rest of the paperwork, seeing more credit receipts and other useful information, but nothing substantial. In truth, he only half focused on it, his brain turning over the nuances of the attack.
He knew that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah would acknowledge any role in the killing, which left him alone. Breaking up the peace process might be good enough for those factions, but he wanted the world to know why. He’d have to create a group out of whole cloth and begin seeding jihadist websites with some statements. Get them ready for the claim of credit after the attack. Luckily, in this day and age, all it took was an Internet connection to be an instant jihadi. He knew he would have the name of his “group” on the world stage should he succeed. More important, he’d have the Palestinian plight on the world stage as well, just like Black September had at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
He kicked around the idea. He knew if he chose to do it, he’d have to get rid of the Saudi identity within forty-eight hours after using it. Someone had leaked the information of the meeting in Sidon, and he had to assume that whoever that was had all the information he had. Including the target. Thus, he couldn’t use it to attack. He would need to get another, without Hezbollah help.
He reflected on the explosion in Sidon yet again, at a loss as to who had perpetrated the attack. It couldn’t be Hezbollah, because the setup was way more complicated than necessary. Why go through the trouble of bringing him down to Beirut, convincing him to attend the meeting, then agree to the change in venue if they only wanted to kill him? And if the targets were the other men, why bring him in at all? Simply do it.
In the end, he decided it didn’t matter. Someone had attacked the meeting, and he’d probably never find out the who or why, since everyone had an agenda. The only decision that mattered was whether he wanted to continue on or disappear. If he wanted to continue, he needed to make sure that Hezbollah knew he was alive. Give them confidence that he was working for them and prevent them from shutting off the credit cards and bank accounts for the Saudi identity. In fact, have them complete the passport and other identity papers. He was sure they could point him to a forger.
He made his decision and picked up the phone. He would continue on, initially as their man, on their puppet strings. Lull them a little bit, before cutting the strings and becoming
The Ghost.
23
The man called Infidel saw his Hezbollah contact take a seat along the Corniche, eating a cup of gelato just like he’d been instructed. He dialed the contact’s number, watching him pick up the phone.
“I’m across the street from you, inside the park. See me?”
He saw the kid look left, then right, finally fixating on his park bench.
“Come on. You can finish the ice cream over here. I have another assignment.”
The boy raced across a break in traffic and slid into the park bench next to him. He gave the assassin his goofy smile and said, “A lot of work lately. That’s good, huh?”
The assassin handed him an MP3 player, saying, “I need you to listen to this and translate what’s said.”
The boy eagerly took the device, wanting to be a part of an operation, loving the feeling of being a Hezbollah foot soldier. He was no more than sixteen or seventeen and could have been a merchant or an aspiring businessman, something Lebanon used to be known for. Instead, he was an aspiring terrorist in an organization that was cultlike in its brainwashing. He’d never had a chance to live, and now, because of his affiliation, the assassin would see to it that he never did.
The boy was his conduit into Hezbollah for mundane matters, when he didn’t need to see the hierarchy. He was the person who had provided the computer camera/bomb to the Druze. Whenever simple instructions, money, or equipment needed to be passed, it came through the boy. He was smart and loyal to a fault, convinced that the
