Carrie's run

CHAPTER 37

Minet al-Hosn, Beirut, Lebanon

The gay bar Wolf was on a side street in the Hamra district, close to the American University. By eleven at night, the sidewalk outside was crowded with men in shirts open to their navels with cocktails or bottles of 961 beer in hand. Carrie squeezed through and walked past the bouncer, a big shaved-headed man who stared at her quizzically.

Inside, the club was jammed, hip-hop music blasting, laser lights flashing across a sea of men, some talking, some kissing and groping each other. Along the walls were leatherette benches where slim young men in tight short-shorts gave lap dances to older men with money to spend. Carrie threaded her way through the crowd to the bar. She was the only woman there. Although she spent time looking, she didn’t see Bilal Mohamad anywhere.

“What’ll you have?” the bartender asked her in Arabic. He was a slim, baby-faced thirtysomething who could have passed for twenty, topless except for a pair of red suspenders holding up tight leather pants.

“Tequila, Patrón Silver,” she said, nearly shouting to be heard over the noise.

“Are you lost?” the bartender said when he came back with her drink.

“No, but he is,” she said, showing him the photograph of Bilal Mohamad on her cell phone. “Where I can find him?”

“Haven’t seen him,” the bartender said, moving down the bar to help someone else.

“You looking for Bilal?” a man crowded in next to her said.

“Bilal Mohamad.” She nodded. “Any idea where he might be?”

“Who wants to know?” he asked.

“Benjamin Franklin,” she said, showing him a hundred-dollar bill.

“You’re not Bilal’s type, habibi,” the man said. “Actually, you’re no one’s type around here.”

“Don’t be so sure. There are some really sick sluts in Beirut, habibi. I might even be one of them.” She grinned.

“You are a bad girl,” he said, tapping her shoulder with catty delight. “The key question, my darling habibi, is, does Assayid Franklin have a brother?”

“If he does, how do I know you’ll tell me the truth?” Carrie said, taking out a second hundred-dollar bill and sliding both bills toward him on the bar top.

“He’s in the Marina Tower. Sixteenth floor. You don’t believe me, ask Abdullah Abdullah,” the man said, pocketing the money and flicking his finger at the bartender, who came over.

“Are you really Abdullah Abdullah?” Carrie asked the bartender.

“No, but it’s what they call me.” The bartender shrugged. He motioned her closer. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, mademoiselle?”

“Does anyone?” she asked.

“Bilal has dangerous friends,” the bartender muttered.

“So do I.”

“No, mademoiselle. There’s dangerous and then there’s Bilal. He’s a psychopath. Trust me, you don’t want to go there. If you want coke, hashish, heroin, let me get it for you. Safer. Better quality. Better price too.”

“Is he at the Marina Tower?”

“You know the saying ‘The only way to get an apartment in Minet al-Hosn is for someone to die’? They’re not just talking about availability and money. They’re talking about what people are willing to do for such wealth-and what they’ll do to protect it,” the bartender said.

“I’m a big girl, sadiqi. Is he there?”

“I haven’t seen him in days. If you’re lucky, you won’t either,” he said, crushing mint leaves for a mojito.

The Marina Tower was a crescent-shaped white high-rise overlooking the waterfront, the lights from the building reflected on the water of the Marina. The lobby was ultramodern and expensive, an advertisement for the tenants who could afford the millions that an apartment here cost. She’d had to argue with Saunders to get him to let her go in on her own.

“We already know that he killed Davis Fielding-and probably others. And that was even before the bartender’s warning. And nobody makes that much money in Beirut without either being very dangerous himself or having very dangerous friends,” Saunders said in the BMW SUV on the way over. With them were two new Beirut Station operatives, Chandler and Boyce, two short-haired hard-as-nails transfers from the CIA’s Special Operations Group, both ex-Navy SEALs, whom Saunders had brought with him from Ankara to help him clean up Beirut Station.

“Chandler and Boyce. They sound like a law firm, don’t they?” Saunders had said, introducing them to Carrie.

“More like antique dealers,” she’d said, shaking their hands. “Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad they’re here. But we don’t want a shoot-out. We want to know who sent him to kill Davis.”

“I think we already know. Abu Nazir,” Saunders said.

“No, we think we know. That’s not the same thing,” she said.

“I should do it. Or Chandler or Boyce.”

“Better me. I’m a woman. Less threatening, less likely to escalate. And I speak Arabic better than anyone here.”

“All the same, the only way you’re going in is wired up like crazy. The second I hear something that even smells like trouble, my antique dealers here-and me too-will be blasting in, shooting first and taking names later. That son of a bitch is dead, understood?”

“I get it. I just want to see what I can get out of him first,” she said as they parked the SUV on a side street and walked to the Marina Tower parking lot, the building lit up at night with horizontal lines of white light along the balconies, like a stack of curved neon blades.

“I don’t think you do, Carrie. Get it, I mean,” he said as they approached the parking lot. “If anything happened to you, Saul would crucify me. Possibly literally.”

“I know.” She looked at Chandler and Boyce. “If you think I’m in trouble, guys, come get me, please.” The two men nodded.

Kneeling beside a Mercedes sedan, they did a voice check on her wire setup and readied their weapons and equipment. When they were set, they walked, one at a time, to the back service entrance from the parking lot.

One of the men, Boyce, picked the service-door lock. They went inside to the elevator and took it up to the sixteenth floor. Three of them exited, one of them, Boyce, going up one more floor. He would set up to make an entrance onto Bilal Mohamad’s balcony from the balcony of the apartment on the floor above. The other two, Saunders and Chandler, would wait and monitor Carrie from the hallway stairwell, ready to break in to Bilal’s apartment at a moment’s notice. Her emergency code was anything to do with flowers. The instant she mentioned it, they would come running.

At a signal from Saunders, Carrie went to Mohamad’s apartment door-there were only two apartments on the entire floor-and, taking out her Beretta, knocked.

There was no answer. She knocked again, harder. And again. Nothing. All this and nobody home, she thought, annoyed. She put her ear to the door and listened but heard nothing. Then the faint whirr of something electric, like a razor. Looking back at the doorway to the stairwell, which was cracked slightly open, she couldn’t see Saunders or Chandler, but she was glad they were there. She took a deep breath and, taking out her lock pick, began working on the lock, trying to remember her training at the Farm.

There was a click; she turned the handle and opened the door, the Beretta ready. She stepped into a large, luxurious main room, brightly lit and with a panoramic glass view of the marina and the sea. The whirring electric sound was louder. It sounded like it was coming from the bedroom. Leaving the apartment door open a crack for Saunders and Chandler, she moved in a shooting stance toward the bedroom. Pushing the bedroom door open with her toe, she stepped in and stopped at the bizarre sight of a boyish-looking man, muscular, presumably Bilal Mohamad, his hair bleached pure blond-white and his body draped in a black plastic garbage bag with his head sticking out, with a gun with a silencer aimed directly at her.

They stood there, frozen. Neither moved a muscle. The oddest thought occurred to Carrie: he was like a male Marilyn Monroe, sexy and lost. And then it struck her that the whirring sound had stopped.

“Ya Allah, this is awkward,” Bilal said finally in Arabic. “Should we kill each other or see if there’s a way for us both to survive?”

“Put your gun down and, inshallah, we’ll talk,” Carrie replied in Arabic.

“Okay, but if you kill me I’m going to kick myself in hell for trusting a CIA agent. You are CIA, aren’t you? Idiotic question. Of course you are,” he said in English. “American, female, gun. Some idiot’s finally figured out that Davis Fielding didn’t kill himself. Was it you? Of course it was. They don’t take women as seriously as they should, do they?” he said, tossing his gun onto the bed. Now that she was able to pay attention, she noticed that his hands were covered with blood. He caught her looking at his hands. “You came at a bad moment. Another half hour and I’d have been gone,” he added.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“See for yourself,” he said, gesturing at the bathroom. “I hope you don’t have a weak stomach.”

“Don’t move. Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said, edging toward the bathroom door.

“Of course. You’re already nervous. Why wouldn’t you be? I don’t want you to shoot me by accident.”

She risked a quick glance at the bathroom. There was a man’s naked body in the bathtub. Its head and hands had been cut off, the head sitting neatly atop the hands at the foot of the tub. The whirring sound she had heard was an electric carving knife, still plugged in to the bathroom shaving outlet. Feeling nauseous, she sensed motion behind her and whirled back, ready to fire. Bilal had moved slightly, but only to wipe his bloodstained hands on the bedspread.

“Don’t move!” she snapped. “Who was he?”

“Daleel Ismail. He always fancied me. You understand. You’re an attractive woman. People like us, we can’t help it if men fancy us. Poor Daleel. He thought he was finally going to do me. That’s the thing about life. You can never be sure if you’re going to be the one doing the screwing or getting screwed,” he said.

“Why’d you kill him?” she asked.

“Can’t you guess? Listen, can I take this plastic off?” He tugged at the garbage bag he was wearing. “It’s hot and the idea of dying while wearing this is disgusting. Unless you’ll let me continue what I was doing? No?” he said, looking at her. “Well, I’m taking it off then.”

He pulled the plastic covering over his head and tossed it onto the bed.

“We don’t have to stand here. Shall we have a drink and talk about it like the civilized murderers we are?” he said, walking to the bedroom door and into the main room. “I know you don’t trust me. You can watch as I wash my hands. The human body really is a messy thing, isn’t it? Amazing that we manage to idealize and sexually fantasize about it as much as we do.”

She followed him to the bar, where she held the Beretta on him while he washed his hands in the bar’s sink. He dried his hands on a towel.

“What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Tequila if you’ve got it. If not, Scotch,” she said.

“Scotch. Highland Park,” he said, checking the bottles behind the bar. He poured them both glasses and gestured for her to join him on twin ultramodern armchairs in the main room.

“What are we drinking to?” she asked.

“To us both still being alive-for the moment,” he said, and drank. She did too.

“This Daleel whatever-his-name-is, why’d you kill him?”

“He looked like me. Same size, height, musculature. People sometimes mistook him for me. I don’t know why he couldn’t understand my not wanting to do him. It would have been too much like masturbation.”

Suddenly, she understood.

“You were faking your own death. That’s why the head and hands. To make it hard to identify the body. They would assume it was you. What were you going to do with the head and hands? Dump them in the Mediterranean?”

“You see, you are a clever girl. All right if I smoke?” he said, reaching for a cigarette in an ivory-inlaid box on the glass coffee table. “I know what ridiculous Puritans you Americans are about these things. It’s okay to be a murderer, but one mustn’t smoke.” He lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled.

“What about DNA? They’d find out it wasn’t you.”

“Seriously?” He looked at her as if she’d suggested that a caveman program a computer. “This is the Levant, not Manhattan. There’s no database, no science. The purpose of police work here is to destroy your political enemies, not solve crime.”

“Where were you going?” she asked.

“Actually, it was a ridiculous choice. Death or living in New Zealand. Those two are virtually indistinguishable.”

“Who were you running from? Us?”

“There really is no limit to American arrogance, is there? Why be afraid of you? Become infamous with Americans and the worst that can happen is you get your own reality TV show. Can’t you figure it out? You don’t look stupid; still, people can fool you.” He exhaled a stream of smoke at her.

“What about Davis Fielding? You were lovers?”

“He called me. Can you imagine? All those years, using Rana to pretend he was straight, and him thinking he was running her, when in fact, between Rana and I, we milked him for every piece of intelligence in the Middle East. He called to say good-bye, the sentimental idiot. He was as bad a spy as he was a lover.”

Looking at him, with his oddly boyish face and white-blond hair, she suddenly understood.

“Abu Nazir. That’s why you killed Fielding. He’s shutting things down. That’s why you’re running,” she said.

“So,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke at her. “Not entirely stupid. So what’s it to be-Carrie, isn’t it?” He smiled nastily, sending a bolt of fear through her at the thought that he knew her real identity. She was seeing the real man. Worse, whatever he was going to do, he had made his mind up. She needed to get her people in here now. “You see, I did get everything out of Fielding. So, Carrie, are you going to let me get back to what I was doing and let me disappear? Or are you going to do something ridiculous, like putting me in a cell with those imbecile jihadis at Guantánamo Bay?”

“Neither. You’re going to work for us now,” she said, and, looking around, spoke into the air: “You know, flowers would do wonders for this place.”

Bilal sat up straight. “Who am I to spy on? Abu Nazir?” he asked.

She just stared at him. The sounds of Saunders and Chandler running in were combined with the sight of Boyce rappelling down onto the balcony.

“Ya Allah, you don’t know Abu Nazir at all, do you?” he said.

Reaching under the seat cushion of his chair, he pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol. Before she could react or say or do anything, he raised it and fired a bullet into his head.