When he asked if Jamal was there, one of them hung up. The other one laughed.
It was already nine-thirty. It was getting late. Fuad left his hotel, looking for a needle in the haystack of Beirut.
Fuad tried to put himself in the mind of an Israeli intelligence officer. If I was trying to kill Jamal Ramlawi with a car bomb, Fuad asked himself, where would I put it? Not near his office. That area was too heavily guarded by the fedayeen. The chance of getting caught was too great.
No, thought Fuad. If I was trying to kill Jamal, I would put the bomb near the Palestinian’s apartment. Or on the route between his apartment and his office. Or on the route between his apartment and his health club. Or on the route between the health club and his office.
Fuad took a taxi to the area where Jamal lived, in a district of West Beirut known as Verdun. The area was packed with cars, some parked, some honking their horns and pushing their way slowly through the morning traffic. They were going nowhere. There were thousands of cars to check and Fuad was stopped in a traffic jam. He decided it was better to leave the cab and explore the area on foot. In the crush of West Beirut, he would be able to move more quickly that way.
Fuad searched first along Rue Verdun, between Jamal’s apartment and his office. He grasped the piece of paper with the license numbers on it, by now ragged and dirty with sweat. It didn’t matter. A Ford, a Volkswagen, and a Mercedes. The license numbers of each were engraved on his brain after a few minutes. He moved as quickly as he could along Rue Verdun, checking every Ford, Volkswagen, and Mercedes he could find. Though it was January, he was sweating profusely. The check of Verdun Street took him an hour. He found nothing. None of the tags matched the ones on his list.
He ducked into a small appliance store on Rue Verdun and called Jamal’s office again. Yes, he had finally arrived, but he had left again. No, he didn’t say where he was going. Perhaps to his apartment. Perhaps to the health club.
Fuad took a taxi back to Jamal’s apartment and checked that area once again for cars. New cars had arrived, dozens of them. Especially Mercedes. He glared at them, hating them-every car an enemy, every one a potential killer. There were too many cars to check. He had already checked Verdun once. What about the health club?
Fuad was feeling increasingly desperate. He made his way along Rue Abdallah al-Sabbah, toward the health club. He passed the cars in a run so that they seemed almost a blur. Pedestrians stopped to look at him. People do not run in the streets in Beirut unless something is wrong. A policeman stopped him and asked to see his papers. Fuad had to give him 20 Lebanese pounds and invoke the name of the head of the Surete before the policeman let him go. He was losing time. The clock was ticking. There was nothing on Rue Abdallah either.
Where, then?
Shit, thought Fuad. What does Jamal do in the morning, on days when he has been out the previous night? He goes first to the office, to inquire about business, then to his apartment to sleep, to change clothes, to see his wife. My God! It must be Rue Verdun!
Fuad looked for a taxi. He waited. No taxis. Where were they all? Finally one appeared. It already had a passenger, but he flagged it down anyway. The driver said he was going to Corniche Mazraa. Verdun! shouted Fuad. The driver said he would let him off at the bottom of the street.
“Y’allah!” said Fuad. Let’s go.
When they got to Verdun, the driver wanted to haggle over the fare. Fuad threw a ten-pound note at him and began running up Rue Verdun, looking at more newly arrived Mercedes, Fords, and Volkswagens. His head was spinning. He passed Rue Bechir Qassar, Rue Anis Nsouli, Rue Hassan Kamel. Shit! Where is the car? Where is the car? The road curved right, past Rue Habib Srour, past Rue Nobel. He was nearing Jamal’s apartment. It was a quarter-mile away. He was running along the sidewalk, head down, looking at license plates, when he heard a loud honking noise. He ignored it at first and turned his head finally just as the car was passing at high speed, trailed by a Land-Rover full of armed men.
It was Jamal’s Chevrolet, honking other cars out of the way, racing up the street toward his apartment. Fuad heard the roar of the engine and the din of the horn. He screamed as loud as he could but the car was gone.
Fuad stopped dead in his tracks and held his breath. He counted ten seconds. Then fifteen.
Then he heard the explosion, several blocks away. A crack and then a rumble like thunder in his ears, echoing through the crowded streets. Then the screaming of so many people and the wailing of sirens.
Fuad sat down in the street and sobbed.
It was a large and well-designed bomb, detonated by remote control, containing the equivalent of 50 kilos of TNT. The explosion was very powerful, even by Beirut standards. It killed twelve people and injured seventeen.
Fuad eventually got up off the street and went back to his hotel. He could not bear to pass near the scene of the bombing. The Verdun area was swarming with people now. Fatah security men, policemen, Lebanese security men, journalists, curious thrillseekers. Fuad wanted to be anywhere else. He stayed in his room and closed the curtains so that it was dark at midday.
When the radio announced several hours later that Jamal Ramlawi had died on his way to the hospital, Fuad slashed his wrist. He watched it bleed for ten minutes and then applied a tourniquet. Even his grief was useless.
PART X
Epilogue London; 1984
London; 1984
Fuad survived the anguish of that first car bombing. But Rogers’s death in the embassy bombing four years later broke his spirit. Fuad decided then that he had seen enough of Lebanon-and enough of the Americans-and moved to London. The agency offered him a handsome settlement, asked him to sign a contract pledging eternal silence about his intelligence activities, and then wished him well. It was easy enough to let Fuad go. Other than Rogers, no one had ever really known him.
Fuad bought himself a flat in London, in a modern building north of Hyde Park called the Pentangle. It was an odd neighborhood, once the home of the prostitutes who serviced the gentlemen who lived south of the Park. Now it was composed almost entirely of foreigners. Saudis, Nigerians, Iranians, Lebanese, Kuwaitis, Venezualans. A modern class of whores. People who had made money abroad and, for whatever reason, had found it prudent to settle down in London. Fuad loved the neighborhood. It was the perfect place to hide.
Fuad bought himself a dog, an enthusiastic Yorkshire terrier, which he liked to take on walks in the park. And as he took these walks, out in the open spaces of London, he turned over in his mind the events he had witnessed in Lebanon, the deaths of Jamal and Rogers and so many thousands more.
The news from Lebanon seemed to get worse, week by week. In October 1983, a truck bomb exploded outside the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, killing 241 people. The United States reacted like a wounded Cyclops, bellowing, flailing about, making a loud noise but doing little damage. A World War II battleship lobbed shells the size of Volkswagens at Druse militiamen in the Lebanese mountains. Navy planes dropped iron bombs on Syrian gun positions. This display of firepower did not impress the local warlords. The foreign minister of Syria summed up the local sentiment when he remarked that the Americans seemed “short of breath.” In February 1984, to the surprise of no one, the Americans pulled up their tents and fled from Lebanon, leaving a situation far messier-and infinitely greater in human misery-than when they had first begun to play the role of benevolent proconsul several decades before.
One day, when Fuad had been in London nearly a year, he walked into an electronics shop on the Edgware Road and bought himself a tape recorder. He took it back to his apartment and began dictating a message for the one American to whom he felt he owed an explanation-Frank Hoffman, the man who had first spotted him, recruited him, and introduced him to Tom Rogers. He recorded many different versions of the message, and finally settled on one that said most of what he felt. He sent it to Hoffman in Saudi Arabia.
When Hoffman received the tape, he listened to it once, had his secretary transcribe it, and then destroyed it. It did no one any good. He sent the transcript to Edward Stone in Washington. The transcript read as follows:
