Legends

1989: DANTE PIPPEN SEES THE MILKY WAY IN A NEW LIGHT

WHEN THE BATTERED FORD REACHED THE FERTILE RIFT KNOWN as the Bekaa Valley, the Palestinians knotted a blindfold over Dante’s eyes. Twenty minutes later the two-car motorcade passed through a gate in a perimeter fence and pulled to a stop at the edge of an abandoned quarry. The Palestinians tugged Dante from the back seat and guided him through the narrow dirt streets to the mosque on the edge of a Lebanese village. In the antechamber, his shoes and the blindfold were removed and he was led to a threadbare prayer carpet near the altar and motioned to sit. Ten minutes later the imam slipped in through a latticed side door. A corpulent man who moved, as heavy men often do, with surprising suppleness, he settled onto the carpet facing Dante. Arranging the folds of his flowing white robe like a Noh actor preoccupied with his image, he produced a string of jade worry beads and began working them through the stubby fingers of his left hand. In his early forties, with a crew cut and a neatly trimmed beard, the imam rocked back and forth in prayer for several moments. Finally he raised his eyes and, speaking English with a crisp British accent, announced, “I am Dr. Izzat al-Karim.”

“I suspect you know who I am,” Dante replied.

The corners of the imam’s mouth curled into a pudgy grin. “Indeed I do. You are the IRA dynamiter we have heard so much about. I may say that your reputation precedes you—”

Dante dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. “So does your shadow when the sun is behind you.”

The imam’s jowls quivered in silent laughter. He held out a pack of Iranian Bahman cigarettes, offering one to his visitor.

“I have stopped smoking,” Dante informed his host.

“Ah, if only I could follow your example,” the imam said with a sigh. He tapped one of the thin cigarettes against the metal tray on a low table to tamp down the tobacco and slipped it between his lips. Using a Zippo lighter with a picture of Muhammad Ali on it, he lit the cigarette and slowly exhaled. “I envy you your strength of character. What was the secret that enabled you to give up cigarettes?”

“I convinced myself to become a different person, so to speak,” Dante explained. “One day I was smoking two tins of Ganaesh Beedies a day. When I woke up the next morning I was someone else. And this someone else was a nonsmoker.”

The imam let this sink in. “I wear the black turban of the sayyid, which marks me as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his cousin Ali. I have two wives and I am about to take a third. Many people—my wives, my children, my fighters—count on me. It would be awkward for everyone if I were to become someone else.”

“If I had as many wives as you,” Dante remarked, “I’d probably start smoking again.”

“Whether you smoke or abstain,” the imam replied, his voice as soft as the cooing of a pigeon, “you will only live as long as God gives you to live. In any case, longevity is not what inspires a religious man like myself.”

“What does inspire a religious man like yourself?” Dante heard himself ask, though he knew the answer; Benny Sapir, the Mossad spy master who had briefed Dante Pippen in a Washington safe house before the mission, had even imitated the imam’s voice delivering stock answers to religious questions.

“The thought of the angel Gabriel whispering the verses of the Holy Koran into the ear of the Prophet inspires me,” the imam was saying. “Muhammad’s description, in what you call The Book of the Ladder and we call The Miraj, of his ascent to the nine circles of heaven and his descent into hell, guided by the angel Gabriel, keeps me up nights. The Creator, the Maker, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate, the All-Sublime, the All-Mighty inspires me. The one true God inspires me. Allah inspires me. The thought of spreading His word to the infidel, and killing those who do not accept it, inspires me.” He held his cigarette parallel to his lips and studied it. “And what is it that inspires you, Mr. Pippen?”

Dante grinned. “The money your organization deposited in my account in the Cayman Islands inspires me, Dr. al-Karim. The prospect of monthly installments, paid in exchange for services rendered, inspires me. No need to shake your head in disapproval. It comes as no surprise to me that you find our several inspirations discordant, yours, of course, being the nobler of the two, and mine, by far the more decadent. Since I don’t believe in your God, or any God, for that matter—I am what you would call a very lapsed Catholic—I think that your particular inspiration is as ephemeral as the contrails I saw on my drive down from Beirut. One moment they were there, sharp and precise, each with a silver Israeli jet fighter streaking through the crystal Lebanese sky at the cusp, the next they were thickening and drifting and eventually dissipating in the high winds.”

The imam considered this. “I can see you are not a timid man, Mr. Pippen. You speak your mind. A Muslim who permitted himself to say what you have said would be putting his limbs, perhaps even his life, in jeopardy. But we must make allowances for a very lapsed Catholic, especially one who has come all this way to teach our fedayeen how to devise bombs to blow up the Isra’ili occupiers of Lebanon and Palestine.” He leaned toward Dante. “Our representative in Paris who recruited you said you were born in an Irish town with the curious name of Castletownbere.”

Dante nodded. “It’s a smudge on the map on the southern coast of the Beara Peninsula in County Cork. Fishing port. I worked on one of the salmon trawlers before I went off to seek my fortune where the streets are paved with gold.”

“And were they paved with gold, Mr. Pippen?”

Dante laughed under his breath. “At least they were paved, which is more than you can say for some parts of the Beara Peninsula. Or the Bekaa Valley, for that matter.”

“Am I correct in thinking there was an expensive restaurant in Castletownbere called The Warehouse?”

“There was a pricy restaurant for the occasional tourist, but it wasn’t named The Warehouse. It was called The Bank because it was in the old bank, one flight up on Main Street. Still had the bank vault in the back when I was there. I seem to remember a Mary McCullagh ran it in the sixties. I went to school with one of her daughters, a pretty little thing we called Deidre of the Sorrows because she made so many of us sorry when we discovered we couldn’t sweet talk her into bed.”

“You were arrested by Scotland Yard following the explosion of a bomb on a bus near Bush House, the BBC building in London.”

“Is that a question or a statement of fact?”

“A statement of fact that I’d like you to corroborate, Mr. Pippen.”

“I was killing time in London when the bus blew,” Dante said, his eyes blinking innocently. “The coppers barged into a licensed tabernacle and more or less picked up anyone who spoke the King’s English with an Irish accent. They were obliged to release me after forty-eight hours for want of evidence. Bloody bastards never even apologized.”

“Did you blow up the bus, Mr. Pippen?”

“I did not. But the two who did learned which side was up from yours truly.”

The imam smiled thinly. Glancing at a wall clock with a silhouette of Ayatollah Khomeini on its face, he pushed himself to his feet and started to leave. At the door, he turned back. “I seldom have the chance to speak with an Occidental nonbeliever, Mr. Pippen, especially one who is not in awe of me. Talking with you is going to be an enlightening experience. One must know the enemy before one can defeat him. I invite you to visit me in my study after your afternoon classes, every day of the week except Friday. I will offer you mint tea and honey cakes, you can reciprocate by offering me insights into the secular mentality.”

“The pleasure will—” Dante started to say but the imam had already vanished through the latticed door, which squeaked back and forth on its hinges, evidence of his passage.

Dante was taken to his living quarters, a room in the back of one of the low brick houses with flat roofs at the edge of the village beyond the perimeter of the Hezbollah camp. At sunup an elderly woman with a veil over the lower part of her face appeared with what passed for breakfast: a steaming pot of green tea to wash down the chalk-dry biscuits covered with an oily paste made from crushed olives. Dante’s bodyguard, who trailed after him everywhere, including to the outhouse, led him down the dirt path to the lip of the quarry. Several young boys in dusty striped robes were already tossing stones at a troop of goats to steer them away from the perimeter fence and up a nearby slope. A yellow Hezbollah flag decorated with a hand holding aloft a rifle flapped from the pole atop the brick building where the explosives and the fuses were stored. High overhead the contrails of Israeli jets on their dawn patrols crisscrossed the sky. Dante’s students, nineteen fedayeen, all in their late teens or early twenties and wearing identical baggy khaki trousers and blouses and thick web belts under their robes, waited at the bottom of the quarry. An older man with an orange and white kaffiyah draped over his shoulders squatted on the rocky ground, setting out cartons filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, commonly known as PETN, along with latex, coils of electric wire and plungers powered by automobile batteries. “I, Abdullah, will translate for you,” the man informed Dante when he reached the floor of the quarry. “Please to speak slow in consideration of my English, which is curdled like last week’s goat milk.”

Dante inspected the cartons, then kicked at the coils of wire and the plungers. “We will need modern detonators that can be tripped by radio-controlled devices from distant locations,” he informed Abdullah.

“How far will be the distance to these locations?” Abdullah inquired.

Dante pointed to the goats disappearing over the top of the slope. “We will mix the PETN and the latex in a manner that I will demonstrate,” he said, “and conceal the charges here in the quarry. Then we will climb to the top of that hill and detonate the explosives from there.” Dante pointed to the hill and imitated the boom of the explosion. Abdullah translated for the fedayeen and they all turned to stare at the hill. They talked excitedly among themselves, then looked at their instructor, nodding respectfully at his expertise.

During the first several sessions, Dante concentrated on the PETN and the latex, showing the Hezbollah fighters how to mix the two and then mold the clay-like explosive to fit any receptacle. He filled a portable radio with explosives one day, then turned it on to demonstrate that it still functioned, which was important if you wanted to get the radio past military checkpoints or airport security. Another time he packed the plastique into one of those newfangled satellite telephones and explained, with Abdullah translating, the advantages: If it was done correctly, you could actually telephone the target and identify his voice before setting off the charge and decapitating him.

In the beginning, the young men were afraid to touch the explosive charges until they saw Dante juggling a clump of it from one hand to the other to demonstrate how stable it was. Abdullah, meanwhile, took Dante’s hand-written list to Dr. al-Karim and then set off for Beirut in the Ford with a purse-full of the imam’s precious American dollars to purchase the battery-operated transmitters and receivers that would go into the construction of remote detonators.

The first afternoon that Dante turned up in Dr. al-Karim’s study, he found the imam seated well back from a table, leaning over his abundant stomach and typing away with two fingers on an IBM electric typewriter. From behind the building came the low hum of the gasoline-powered generator. “Assalamu aleikum—Peace be upon you. I would offer you a cigarette if you smoked cigarettes,” the imam said, swiveling to face his visitor, waving him toward a wooden kitchen chair. “Can I assume you do not mind if I light up?”

“Be my guest.”

The imam appeared to be puzzled. “How is it possible for me to be your guest in my house?”

“It was a meaningless figure of speech,” Dante conceded.

“I have observed that Americans often come up with meaningless cliches when they do not know what to say.”

“I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

The woman who brought Dante breakfast appeared from the next room and set out plates filled with small honey-coated cakes and two glasses filled with mint leaves and boiling water. Nibbling on one of cakes as he waited for the mint tea to cool, Dante took in the Spartan furnishings of the imam’s study: framed photographs of the training camp’s fedayeen graduating classes (slightly askew, as if someone had dusted them and left them askew to show they’d been cleaned), a poster depicting the golden-domed Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem tacked to one wall, the Kalashnikov in a corner with a clip in it and a spare clip taped to the stock, the glass bowl on a low table with a single goldfish circling round and round as if it were looking for the exit, the copies of Newsweek stacked on the floor near the door. Dr. al-Karim scraped his chair around the table and, settling his bulk onto it facing his guest, warmed both his hands on the glass of mint tea.

Speaking softly, selecting his words carefully, the imam said: “There was a time when people held me in high esteem.”

“Judging from what I’ve seen, they still do.”

“How long, Mr. Pippen, will this last? How long do you think one can go on preaching that the destruction of your principal enemy is inevitable without it transpiring; without losing the credibility that is indispensable to continue as the spiritual leader of a community? This is the predicament I find myself in. I must continue to hold out hope that our sacrifices will be rewarded not only with martyrdom but with certain victory over the Isra’ili occupiers of Lebanon and Palestine, and the Jews who are conspiring to take over the world. But in time even the simplest of the fedayeen, sent to combat the enemy, observes through binoculars that the Isra’ilis still occupy their sandbagged fortresses in the south of Lebanon, that the wakes of their patrol boats still crisscross the waters off our coast, that the contrails of their jet aircraft still stain the sky over our heads.”

“Do you believe victory is inevitable?” Dante asked.

“I am convinced that the Jews will one day be seen, like the Christian Crusaders before them, as a footnote in the long flow of Arab history. This is written. Will it happen in my lifetime? Will it happen in the lifetime of my children?” Dr. al-Karim sipped at the tea, then, licking his lips to savor the taste of the mint, he leaned forward. “I can buy time, Mr. Pippen, if your talents provide me with some incremental measure of success. Our Hezbollah fighters, armed with conventional weapons, are unable to inflict casualties on the better armed Isra’ili soldiers occupying the zone in southern Lebanon. We attack them with mortars or artillery, fired from the heart of some Lebanese village so that the Isra’ilis are unable to riposte. Very occasionally, we manage to wound or kill one or two of them. For every one we kill, we lose twenty or thirty fedayeen when our enemies, with remarkably accurate intelligence, descend from their fortresses to raid our bases here in the Bekaa Valley, or closer to the front lines. They always seem to know where we are, and in what strength.” The imam shook his head. “We are like waves lapping against boulders on a shore—I cannot recruit and train and send into combat fighters by telling them that the boulders will, in a century or two, be washed smooth and reduced in size.”

“I suppose that’s why you retained my services,” Dante said.

“Is it true that you can mold your explosives to fit almost any receptacle?”

“Absolutely.”

“And detonate them from a great distance by radio command, as opposed to electrical wires stretched along the ground?”

Dante nodded emphatically. “Hard wire on the ground is more reliable, but radio-detonated explosions are more creative.”

“Precisely how do radio-detonated explosions work?”

“You need a transmitter—a cordless phone, a wireless intercom, a radio paging system—and a receiver, both tuned to the same frequency. The transmitter sends not just a signal but also an audio tone—known as electronic pulses—which are modulated by the transmitter and demodulated by the receiver. The receiver picks up the transmission, demodulates the audio tone, closes the electric circuit, which sends current to the blasting cap which, in turn, detonates the explosive charge.”

“With your expertise, could we disguise the explosives in what appears to be ordinary roadside rocks and explode them from, say, a hilltop a kilometer away as an Isra’ili patrol passes?”

“Child’s play,” Dante declared.

The imam slapped his knee in elation. “God willing, we will bloody the Isra’ilis, Mr. Pippen. God willing, the waves lapping against the shore will demolish the boulders in my lifetime. And when we have finished with the near enemy, we will turn our attention to the distant enemy.”

“The Israelis are obviously the near enemy,” Dante said. “But who is the distant enemy?”

Dr. al-Karim looked Dante in the eye. “Why, you, Mr. Pippen, are the distant enemy. You and your American civilization which considers smoking dangerous for the health while everything else—extramarital sex, pornography, carnal secularism, materialism—is permissible. The Isra’ilis are an outpost of your corrupt civilization. The Jews are your surrogates, dispatched to steal our land and colonize our countries and demoralize our souls and humiliate our religion. When we have defeated them we will turn our attention to the ultimate enemy.”

“I can see how you might attack what you call the near enemy,” Dante replied. “But how will you war against a distant enemy who can obliterate you the way he would a mosquito caught in flagrante delicto on the back of his wrist?”

The imam sat back in his chair, a knowing smile flickering on his pudgy face. “We will use the vast amounts of money we earn from selling you petrol for your gas-guzzling cars to hire the talents of people like you, Mr. Pippen. American heads are already poisoned by Hollywood films and glossy magazines such as Playboy or Hustler. We will poison their bodies. We will hijack their planes and crash them into their buildings. We will construct, with your help, the poor man’s bomb—valises filled with germs or chemicals—and explode it in their cities.”

Dante reached for the glass of mint tea and touched his lips to it. “I’d best be immigrating back to Ireland, then,” he said lightly.

“I can see that you do not take what I say seriously. No matter.” The imam pushed back his sleeve, glanced at his wristwatch and rose to his feet. “You will sleep fitfully tonight as you turn over in your mind what I have told you. Questions will occur to you. I invite you to come back tomorrow and pose them, Mr. Pippen. God willing, we will pick up the conversation where we left it off.”

Dante stood up. “Yes. I will return. Thank you.”

In the days that followed, Dante used what Abdullah had brought from Beirut to show his students how to assemble remote control detonators and set off explosive charges in the quarry from the top of the nearby hill. When Dr. al-Karim’s people supplied the first molded rock made out of plaster of paris, Dante filled it with PETN and rigged a remote detonator. The students set the molded rock down at the side of the road and tethered a lame goat ten meters from it. Then everyone trooped up the hill. The imam himself, hearing of the experiment, showed up at the lip of the quarry to watch. Dante waved to him and Dr. al-Karim, surrounded by four bodyguards, raised a palm in salute. One of the young fedayeen wired the small transmitter to a car battery. Everyone turned to stare at the goat at the bottom of the quarry. “Okay, Abdullah,” Dante said. “Let her rip.” Reaching for the small radio, Abdullah rotated the switch until there was an audible click and then depressed it. Far below, in the quarry, a dry cough of a blast stirred up a swell of dust. When it cleared, the goat had vanished. Where it had stood, the ground was saturated with blood and entrails.

“God is great,” Abdullah murmured.

“PETN is greater,” Dante remarked.

When Dante entered the imam’s study that afternoon, Dr. al-Karim came bounding around the desk to congratulate him. “You have earned your wages, Mr. Pippen,” he said, throwing a pulpy arm over Dante’s shoulder. “My fighters are eager to use your remote control device against the Jews.”

The two settled onto kitchen chairs. Dr. al-Karim produced his jade beads and began threading them through his fingers with great dexterity as Dante explained that he needed another ten days, no more, no less, to make the imam’s fedayeen ready for combat.

“We have waited this long,” the imam said. “Another ten days will not inconvenience us.”

The conversation drifted on to the two-year-old Syrian occupation of parts of Lebanon; the month before Dante’s arrival, Damascus had installed surface-to-air missiles in the Bekaa, a move that Hezbollah did not appreciate since it was bound to attract Isra’ili attention to the valley. Dr. al-Karim wanted to know whether President Bush would put pressure on the Isra’ilis to pull back from the buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Dante said he was far from being an expert in such matters, but he doubted it. He, in turn, wondered whether the Iranians would put pressure on the Syrians to end their virtual occupation of Lebanon now that the civil war had quieted down. The imam replied that the death the week before of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had created a vacuum in the Islamic world and predicted that it would be a long time before the Shiites found someone with enough charisma to take his place. Dante asked jokingly if the imam aspired to the job. Dr. al-Karim took the question seriously. He stopped manipulating his worry beads and placed a finger along the side of a nostril. “I aspire to serve God and lead my people to victory over the Jews,” he said. “Nothing more.”

“Tell me something, Dr. al-Karim—” Dante hesitated.

The imam’s head bobbed. “Only ask, Mr. Pippen.”

“I notice that you often speak of the Jews, not the Israelis. I’m curious to know if Hezbollah isn’t confusing the two. What I’m getting at is this: Are you anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish?”

“In as much as Isra’il is an enemy state,” the imam replied without hesitation, “we are, of course, anti-Isra’ili.” He started manipulating his worry beads again. “But make no mistake, we are also anti-Jewish. Our common history goes back to the Prophet Muhammad. The Jews never recognized the legitimacy of Islam as the true religion, and the Koran as the word of God.”

“Your critics say this attitude more or less puts you in the same boat as Adolf Hitler.”

The imam shook his head vigorously. “Not at all, Mr. Pippen. Our critics miss an essential point. Hitler was anti-Semite. There are enormous differences between being anti-Jewish and anti-Semite.”

“I’m afraid you’re losing me …”

“Anti-Semites, Mr. Pippen, believe that once a Jew, always a Jew. For Hitler, even a Jew who converted to Christianity remained a Jew. It follows that for the Nazis in particular and for anti-Semites in general, there was no solution except what they called the Final Solution, namely the extermination of the Jews. Being anti-Jewish, on the other hand, implies that there is a solution short of extermination; a way for Jews to save themselves from extermination.”

“And what might that be?”

“The Jew can convert to Islam, at which point Islam will have no quarrel with him.”

“I see.”

“What do you see, Mr. Pippen?”

“I see that I shouldn’t have started this conversation in the first place. I am a hired gun. You pay me for services rendered, not my opinions on your opinions.”

“Quite right, quite right. Though if my answers don’t interest you, I will admit to you that your questions interest me.”

Abdullah materialized outside the window, tapping a fingernail against a pane. When the imam went over to the window, Abdullah pointed to the car winding its way up the dirt road toward the Hezbollah camp.

“I had almost forgotten,” Dr. al-Karim said, turning back to Dante. “I am expecting a visitor. The Syrian commander in the Bekaa stops by every once in awhile to see what we are up to. He will stay through prayers and the evening meal tomorrow. It might be wise if you keep out of sight, as I have not informed him of your presence and the Syrians do not take kindly to foreigners in the valley.”

“How about if I disappear in the direction of Beirut,” Dante asked. “It’s been almost three weeks since I arrived. As tomorrow is Friday and my students will be in the mosque praying, I was going to ask you for a day off.”

“And what will you do on this day off of yours?”

“In my entire life I have never gone this long without a swill of beer. I will take my warm body off to a bar and drink a barrel of it.”

“Why not? Beirut has quieted down. And you have earned a day of rest. I will send Abdullah and one of my bodyguards to keep you out of harm’s way.”

“An Irishman does not go to a licensed tabernacle to keep out of harm’s way, Dr. al-Karim.”

“Nevertheless, out of harm’s way is where we must keep you until you have completed your work here. What you do after that is your affair.”

The following afternoon the battered Ford that had transported Dante to the Bekaa three weeks earlier threaded its way through a tangle of secondary roads in the direction of Beirut. The bodyguard, sporting baggy khakis and cradling a Kalashnikov with notches cut into the stock for each of his kills, sat up front bantering in Arabic with the driver, a coal-black Saudi with matted dreadlocks. Dante, wearing a coarse brown Bedouin burnoose, a black-and-white checkered kaffiyah and dark sunglasses, shared the backseat with Abdullah, who climbed out of the car at each Syrian checkpoint to wave, with an imperious snap of the wrist, the letter bearing Dr. al-Karim’s seal and signature in the face of the soldiers who were (so Abdullah swore) completely illiterate. Dante, lost in thought, stared through his reflection in the window, barely noticing the dusty villages with the swarms of barefoot boys playing soccer in the unpaved streets, the crowded open-air souks with giant dish antennas for sale on one side and donkeys and camels tethered to a nearby fence, the tiled butcher shops with young boys fanning the flies off the carcasses hanging from hooks. At the outskirts of Beirut, the Ford passed through the first of the militia barricades but (as Abdullah explained in halting English) the pimply gunmen there, though literate, were more interested in the twenty-dollar bills folded into Dr. al-Karim’s letter than the letter itself or the passengers in the car.

With the presence of the Syrian army, the warring factions that had slaughtered each other in the streets of Beirut since the mid 1970s had more or less gone to ground; Muslim and Christian emissaries were rumored to be meeting at Taif, in Saudi Arabia, to formalize the cease-fire accord but armed militias still patrolled the city, which sprawled like a mutilated virago at the edge of the Mediterranean, its shell-ridden buildings mute testimony to the brutal fifteen-year civil war. As the sun dipped into the sea and darkness enveloped Beirut, the whetted crack of distant gunfire reverberated through the city; Abdullah, visibly edgy, muttered something about old scores being settled before the formal cease-fire came into effect. Careful not to stray from the Muslim-controlled areas of Beirut, he guided the driver to the port area and deposited Dante on a corner opposite the burnt-out shell of a neighborhood mosque. A narrow street angled off down-hill toward the docks. “We will wait for you here,” Abdullah told Dante. “Please to be returned by the hour of ten so we can be returned to the camp by the midnight.”

On the narrow street, broken neon lights sizzled over a handful of bars that catered to the seamen from the ships docked at the quays or tied to giant buoys in the harbor. Waving cheerfully at his keepers, Dante skipped down the sidewalk and, ducking to get under a broken neon tube dangling from its electric cord, shouldered past the thick rug that served as a door into the first bar, set up in a mercantile building that had been gutted by a direct hit from a mortar. The charred rafters that held up the jury-rigged sloping roof had been whitewashed, but they still stank from the fire. Dante found a place at the makeshift bar between two Turkish sailors holding each other up and a Portuguese purser wearing a rumpled blue uniform.

“So now, what will your pleasure be?” the barman called, a distinct Irish lilt to his gruff voice.

Dante punched a hole in the cigarette smoke that obscured his view and spoke through it. “Beer and lots of it,” he called back, “the warmer the better.”

The bartender, a thick man with a shock of tousled rusty hair spilling over his eyes and a priest’s white shirt buttoned up to his neck, plucked a large bottle of Bulgarian beer from a carton at his feet. He flicked off the metal cap with a church key, stopped the throat of the bottle with the ball of his thumb and shook the beer to put some life into it, then set it on the counter in front of Dante. “And will your lordship be wanting a mug to drink from?” he inquired with a laugh.

“Do you charge for it?” Dante asked.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, why would we want to do that? You’re paying such an outrageous price for the goddamned beer, we supply the mug at no extra cost to yourself.” He slid a freshly washed mug down the bar to Dante. “Now what ship did you say you were off?”

“I didn’t say,” Dante shot back. “It’s the H.M.S. Pinafore.”

The smile froze on the bartender’s face. “H.M.S. Pinafore, did you say?”

Dante filled the mug, swiped away the foam with the back of a forefinger and, tilting back his head, drank off the beer in a long gulping swallow. “Ah, that surely transforms the way a man sees the world,” he announced, starting to fill the mug again. “H.M.S. Pinafore. That’s what I said.”

Accepting this with a brisk nod, the bartender made his way to the far end of the bar and, blocking one ear with the tip of a finger, spoke into a telephone. Dante was halfway through his second bottle of Bulgarian beer when the woman appeared at the top of the broken wooden steps that led to what was left of the offices on the upper floor of the mercantile building. A sailor buttoning his fly trailed behind her. The woman, wisps of long dark hair falling across a face disfigured by smallpox scars, was wearing a tight skirt slit high on one thigh and a gauzy blouse through which her breasts were as visible as they would be if she’d been caught walking naked through a morning haze. All conversation ceased as she came across the room, her high heels drumming on the wooden floorboards. She stopped to take her bearings, spotted Dante and installed herself at the bar next to him.

“Will you buy me a whiskey?” she demanded in a throaty murmur.

“I’d be a horse’s ass not to,” Dante replied cheerfully, and he held up a finger to get the bartender’s eye and pointed to the woman. “Whiskey for my future friend.”

“Chivas Regal,” the woman instructed the bartender. “A double.”

Dante authorized the double with a nod when the bartender looked at him for confirmation, then turned to scrutinize the woman the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. As usual he had difficulty figuring out her age. She was Arab, that much was evident despite the thick eyeliner and the splash of bright red on her lips, and probably in her forties, but exactly where he didn’t know. It occurred to him that she must be Christian, since Muslims would kill their women before they’d let them work as prostitutes.

“So what would be your name, darling?” Dante asked.

She absently combed the fingers of one hand through her hair, brushing it away from her face; two large silver hoop earrings caught the light and shimmered. “I am Djamillah,” she announced. “What is your name?”

Dante took a long swig of beer. “You can call me Irish.”

“From the look of you, you have been at sea for a while.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’re dying of thirst, I can see that from the way you gulped down that disgusting Bulgarian beer. What else are you dying of, Irish?”

Dante glanced at the bartender, rinsing glasses in a sink just out of earshot. “Well, now, Djamillah, to tell you the God awful truth, I haven’t been laid in a month of Sundays. Is that a predicament you could remedy?”

The Portuguese purser, sitting with his back to Dante, could be heard snickering under his breath. Djamillah was unfazed. “You are a direct man,” she said. “The answer to your question, Irish, is: I could.”

“How much would it set me back?”

“Fifty dollars U.S. or the equivalent in a European currency. I don’t deal in local money.”

“Bottoms up,” Dante said. He clicked glasses with her and downed what was left in the mug, grabbed the half-empty bottle of beer by the throat (in case he needed a weapon) and followed her across the room to the stairs. At the top of the stairs she pushed open a wooden door and led Dante into what must have once been the head office of the mercantile company. There was a large desk covered in glass with photographs of children flattened under it near the boarded-over oval windows, and an enormous leather couch under a torn painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Acre. A dozen sealed cartons without markings were stacked against one wall. Locking the door behind them, Djamillah settled onto the couch and, reaching through a torn seam into the cushion, produced a folder filled with eight-by-ten aerial photographs. Dante, settling down alongside her, used his handkerchief to grip the photographs and examined them one by one. “These must have been taken from high altitude,” he remarked. “The resolution is excellent. They’ll do nicely.”

The woman offered Dante a felt-tipped pen and he began to draw arrows to various buildings in the camp and label them. “The recruits, nineteen fedayeen in all, live in these two low buildings inside the perimeter fence,” he said. “Explosives and fuses are stored in this small brick building with the Hezbollah flag on the roof. Dr. al-Karim lives and works in the house behind the mosque. It is easily the largest in the village so your people won’t have a problem identifying it. I don’t know where he sleeps but his office looks out at the mosque so it must be—” he drew another arrow and labelled it “K’s office”—“here. I bunk in with a family in this house in the village.”

“What kind of security do they have at night?”

“I’ve strolled around the camp after dark several times—they have a roadblock, manned by two recruits and one of the instructors, stationed here where the road curves uphill to the village and the camp. There’s a bunker with a heavy machine gun on top of the hill over the quarry which is manned during the day. I’ve never been able to get up there at night because the gate in the perimeter fence is locked and I didn’t want to raise suspicions by asking for the key.”

“We must assume it is manned at night. They’d be fools not to. The machine gun must be a priority target. What kind of communications do they have?”

“Don’t know really. Never saw the radio shack, or a radio for that matter. Spotted what looked like high frequency antennas on the top of the minaret of the mosque, so whatever they have must be somewhere around there.”

“We don’t want to bomb a mosque, so we’ll have to take that out by hand. Does Dr. al-Karim have a satellite phone?”

“Never saw one but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.”

“When will this round of training be finished.”

“I’ve told Dr. al-Karim I needed ten more days.”

“What happens then?”

“The graduating class goes off to the front to kill Israeli soldiers occupying the buffer zone in Lebanon. And a freshman class turns up to start a new cycle of training.”

“How many instructors and staff are in the camp?”

“Including transportation people, including the experts on small arms and martial arts, including Dr. al-Karim’s personal bodyguards, four that I’ve seen, I’d say roughly eighteen to twenty.”

Djamillah went over the photographs again, double checking the distances between buildings, the location of the gate in the perimeter fence, identifying the footpaths that crisscrossed the village and the Hezbollah camp. She produced a military map of the Bekaa to see what other forces Hezbollah might have in the general vicinity of the camp. “When the raid begins, you must somehow get to this spot”—she pointed to a well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. She handed Dante a white silk bandanna and he stuffed it into the pocket of his trousers. “Wear this around your neck so you can be easily identified.”

“How will I know when to expect the raid?”

“Exactly six hours before, two Israeli M-16s will fly by at an altitude high enough to leave contrails. They’ll come from north to south. When they are directly above the camp they will make ninety degree turns to the west.”

Djamillah slipped the photographs and the map back into the folder and wedged it into the seam of the cushion.

“Looks as if we’ve more or less covered the essentials,” Dante remarked.

“Not quite.” She stood up and began matter of factly stripping off her clothing; it was the first time in his life Dante had seen a woman undress when the act didn’t seem sensual. “You are supposed to be up here having sex with me. I think it would be prudent for you to be able to describe my clothing and my body.” She removed the blouse and the skirt and her underpants. “I have a small scar on the inside of my thigh, here. My pubic hair is trimmed for a bikini. I have a faded tattoo of a night moth under my right breast. And on my left arm you will see the scars of a smallpox vaccination that didn’t prevent me from getting smallpox, which accounts for the pockmarks on my face. When we came up here I locked the door and you put fifty dollars—two twenties and a ten—on the desk and weighed them down with the shell casing that’s on the floor over there. We both took off our clothing. You asked me to suck you—that was the expression you used—but I said I don’t do that. You stripped and sat down on the couch and I gave you a hand job and when you were erect I slipped on a condom and came on top of you. Please make note of the fact that I make love with my shoes on.” She began to dress again. “Now it’s your turn to strip, Irish, so that I can describe your body if I need to. Why do you hesitate? You are a professional. This is a matter of tradecraft.”

Dante shrugged and stood up and lowered his trousers. “As you can see, I am circumcised. My first American girlfriend talked me into having it done—she seemed to think there was less chance of her catching some venereal disease from me if I were circumcised.”

“Circumcised and well endowed, as they say. Do you have any scars?”

“Physical or mental?”

She didn’t think he was humorous. “I do not psychoanalyze my clients, I only fuck them.”

“No scars,” he said dryly.

She inspected his body from foot to head, and his clothing, then gestured for him to turn around. “You can put your clothes back on,” she finally said. She walked him to the door. “You are in a dangerous business, Irish.”

“I am addicted to fear,” he murmured. “I require a daily fix.”

“I do not believe you. If you did not believe in something you would not be here.” She offered her hand. “I admire your courage.”

He gripped her hand and held it for a moment. “And I am dazzled by yours. An Arab who risks—”

She tugged her hand free. “I am not an Arab,” she said fiercely. “I am a Lebanese Alawite.”

“And what the hell is an Alawite?”

“We’re a sliver of a people lost in a sea of Arab Muslims who consider us heretics and detest us. We had a state once—it was under the French Mandate when the Ottoman Empire broke up after the First World War. The Alawite state was called Latakia; my grandfather was a minister in the government. In 1937, against our will, Latakia became part of Syria. My grandfather was assassinated for opposing this. These days most of the Lebanese Alawites side with the Christians against the Muslims in the civil war. Our goal is to crush the Muslims—and this includes Hezbollah—in the hope of returning Lebanon to Christian rule. Our dream is to reestablish an Alawite state, a new Latakia on the Levantine shore washed by the Mediterranean.”

“I wish you good luck,” Dante said with elaborate formality. “What is it that Alawites believe that Muslims don’t?”

“Now is not the moment for such discussions—”

“You are a professional. This is a matter of tradecraft. I might be asked what we talked about after we had sex.”

Djamillah almost smiled. “It is our belief that the Milky Way is made up of the deified souls of Alawites who rose to heaven.”

“For the rest of my life I shall think of you when I look at the Milky Way,” he announced.

She unlocked the door and stepped aside. “In another incarnation,” she remarked solemnly, “it would have been agreeable to make love with you.”

“Maybe when all this is over—”

This time Djamillah did smile. “All this,” she said bitterly, “will never be over.”

Two days after his return from Beirut, Dante was squatting in the dirt at the bottom of the quarry, demonstrating to his nineteen apprentice bombers how to fill the body cavity of a dead dog with PETN, when there was a commotion at the gate of the perimeter fence above them. Several of Dr. al-Karim’s personal guards were tugging aside the razor wire. Horns blaring, two cars and a pick-up truck roared into the camp and pulled up in a swirl of dust. As the dust settled, gunmen wearing the distinctive checkered Hezbollah kaffiyah could be seen dragging someone wearing loose fitting striped pajamas and a hood over the head from the second car. Women from the village emerged from their homes and began filling the air with ululations of triumph. Lifting the hem of his burnoose, Abdullah trotted up the path until he was within earshot of the gunmen who had stayed behind to guard the vehicles and called out to them. One shouted an answer to his question and fired a clip from his Kalashnikov into the air. Abdullah turned back toward the quarry and, cupping his hands around his mouth, yelled, “God is great. They have captured an Isra’ili spy.”

The apprentice bombers started talking excitedly among themselves. Dante, suddenly edgy, barked at them to pay attention to the demonstration. The students reacted to the tone of his voice even before Abdullah, scampering back down to the group, translated the words. Dante, wearing a surgical glove on his right hand, finished pulling the intestines through the slit he’d made in the dog’s stomach and began stuffing the packets of PETN wrapped in burlap, and then the radio-controlled detonator, into the cavity. Using a thick needle and a length of butcher’s cord, he sewed up the slit with large stitches. Standing, peeling off the surgical glove, he addressed Abdullah. “Tell them to position the dead dog so that its stomach is facing away from the enemy when he approaches.” One of the students raised his hand. Abdullah translated the question. “He says you, is a dead dog more suitable than the papier-mâché rocks we learned to plant at the side of the road?”

“Tell him the Greeks couldn’t have used the Trojan horse trick twice,” Dante said. “Tell him the same goes for the Israelis. They’ll catch on very quickly to the fake rocks stuffed with explosives. So you need to invent other ruses. A dead dog lying in the middle of a road is so common that the Israeli jeeps will keep going. At which point—”

Dr. al-Karim appeared above them on the rim of the quarry. He raised a bullhorn and called, “Mr. Pippen, I would like a word with you, if you please.”

Dante saluted lazily and started to climb the path. Halfway to the top he looked up and noticed that several of the Hezbollah gunmen had joined the imam. All of them had pulled their checkered kaffiyahs over their faces so that only their eyes were visible. Out of breath, Dante reached the top and approached Dr. al-Karim. Two of the gunmen slammed bullets into the chambers of their Kalashnikovs. The metallic sound caused Dante to stop in his tracks. He forced a light laugh through his lips. “Your warriors seem jittery today,” he remarked. “What’s going on?”

Without answering, Dr. al-Karim turned and stalked off toward his house. Two of the gunmen prodded Dante with the barrels of their rifles. He bristled. “You want me to follow him, all you have to do is ask. Politely.”

He trailed after the imam to the large house next to the mosque. When he reached the back of the house he found the door to Dr. al-Karim’s office ajar. One of the gunmen behind him gestured with his Kalashnikov. Shrugging, Dante kicked open the door with his toe and went in.

Time seemed to have stopped inside the room. Dr. al-Karim, his corpulent body frozen in the seat behind the desk, his eyes hardly blinking, stared at the Israeli spy, bound with strips of white masking tape to a straight-backed kitchen chair set in the middle of the floor. Muffled groans came from the prisoner’s mouth under the black hood. Dante noticed the thinness of the prisoner’s wrists and ankles and jumped to the conclusion that Hezbollah had arrested a teenage boy. The imam motioned for Dante to sit in the other straight-backed chair. Four of the gunmen took up positions along the wall behind him.

“Where did we leave off our last conversation?” Dr. al-Karim inquired stiffly.

“We were talking about the Greeks and Aristotle. You were condemning them for teaching that reason gives access to truth, as opposed to faith.”

“Precisely. We know what we know because of our faith in Allah and His Prophet, who guide us to the right way, the only way. It may be seen as a transgression when a lapsed Catholic like you does not accept this; normally a believer such as myself should attempt to convert you or, failing at that, expel you.” He glanced at the spy. “When one of our own turns his—or her—back on faith, it is a mortal sin, punishable by execution.”

The imam muttered an order in Arabic. One of the gunmen came up behind the Israeli spy and tugged off the hood. Dante caught his breath. Patches of Djamillah’s long dark hair were pasted to her scalp with dried blood. One of her eyes was swollen shut, her lips were badly cut, several front teeth were missing. A large hoop earring dangled from one lobe; the skin on the other lobe hung loose, the result of having had the earring wrenched off without first undoing it.

“You do not deny that you know her?” Dr. al-Karim said.

Dante had trouble speaking. “I know her in the carnal sense of the word,” he finally replied, his voice barely audible. “Her name is Djamillah. She is the prostitute who worked the licensed tabernacle I visited in Beirut. She carted me off upstairs to what the Irish call the intensive care unit.”

“Djamillah is a pseudonym. She claims she cannot remember her real name but she is obviously lying; she is protecting members of her family against retribution. She was passing herself off as a prostitute in order to spy for the Jews. Aerial photographs of several training camps, ours included, were discovered hidden in the room she used. Some of the photographs had notations, in English, describing the camp layout. We suspect you may have provided her with these notations when you visited the bar in Beirut.”

A rasp of a whisper came from Djamillah’s cracked lips; she spoke slowly, struggling to pronounce certain consonants with her mouth open. “I told the ones … ones who questioned me … the Irishman was a client.”

“Who, then, made the notations on the photographs?” demanded the imam.

“The notations … were on the photographs when they … they were delivered to me.”

Dr. al-Karim nodded once. The gunman behind Djamillah slipped two fingers through the hoop of the remaining earring and pulled down hard on it. It severed the skin on the lobe and came free in a spurt of blood. Djamillah opened her mouth to scream, but passed out before the sound could emerge from her throat.

A pitcher of water was flung in her face. Her eyes twitched open and the muted scream lodged at the back of her throat like a fish bone exploded with savage force. Dante winced and turned away. Dr. al-Karim came around the desk and planted himself in front of Dante. “Who are you?” he demanded in a low growl.

“Pippen, Dante. Free-lance, free-minded, free-spirited explosive expert of Irish origin, at your beck and call as long as you keep depositing checks in my off-shore account.”

The imam circled the prisoner, looking at her but talking to Dante. “I would like to believe you are who you say, for your sake; for mine, as well.”

“Come on, now—she must have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in the room over the bar. Any one of them could have been her contact.”

“Were you intimate with her?”

“Yes.”

“Does she have any distinguishing marks on her body?”

Dante described the small scar on the inside of her thigh, the trimmed pubic hair, the vaccination scar on her left arm, or was it her right—he wasn’t sure. Ah, yes, there was also the faded tattoo of a night moth under her right breast. Dr. al-Karim turned to the prisoner and, gripping the loose fitting shirt at the buttons, ripped it away from her body. He gazed at the faded tattoo under her breast, then flung the shirt closed, tucking the loose fabric under the strips of white masking tape.

“How much did you pay her?” the imam asked.

Dante thought a moment. “Fifty dollars.”

“What denomination bills?”

“Two twenties and a ten.”

“You handed her two twenties and a ten?”

Dante shook his head. “I put the bills on the desk. I weighed them down with a shell casing.”

“What was she wearing when you had sex with her?”

“Her shoes.”

“What were you wearing?”

“A condom.”

Dr. al-Karim watched Dane closely. “She, too, said you were wearing a condom—on your circumcised penis. I assume you can explain how an Irish Catholic from Castletownbere came to be circumcised?”

Dante rolled his eyes in frustration. “Of course I can explain it. In a moment of intense stupidity, I let myself be talked into it by my first American girlfriend, who more or less made it a condition of sleeping with me. She’d somehow convinced herself she stood less chance of my passing on a venereal disease if I had my foreskin lopped off.”

“What was the girl’s name?”

“For Christ’s sake, you don’t really expect me to come up with the name of every girl I slept with.”

“Where was the operation performed?”

“Ah, that I remember. On the fourth floor of an ether-reeking clinic.” Dante supplied the clinic’s name and address.

The imam returned to the chair behind the desk. “Consider yourself under house arrest,” he informed Dante. “Clearly you are an expert in explosives. But I fear you may be working for someone other than Hezbollah. We will reexamine your curriculum vitae with a fine-toothed comb. We will send someone to Castletownbere on the Beara Peninsula, we will start with Mary McCullagh and the restaurant called The Bank and follow the trail from there. We will check to see if the New York clinic has a record of your circumcision. If you have lied about a single detail …” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

As Dante rose to his feet a deep groan escaped from the prisoner. Everyone in the room turned to look at her. Her mouth agape, Djamillah hyperventilated and angled her head and, gasping for breath, fixed her one open eye on Dante. With some effort she managed to spit out, “You are … one lousy lover, Irish.” And then she smiled a crooked smile and gagged on the mordant laughter seeping from the back of her throat.

Back in his low room, with armed guards posted at the door, Dante sprawled on his cot and stared at the white washed ceiling, wondering if the stains of the crushed flies might convey bulletins from the front. And he re-created her voice in his skull; he could make out the words, forced with great effort through her bruised lips. You are one lousy lover, Irish.

At sunset Abdullah turned up at the door of his room. His manner had changed; it was written in his eyes that he no longer thought of Dante as a comrade in arms. “You are instructed to come with me,” he announced, and without waiting he turned and quit the room. Two gunmen with their kaffiyahs masking their faces and only their eyes visible fell in behind Dante as he followed Abdullah through the village to the Hezbollah camp’s perimeter fence. The gate in the fence had been dragged back and Abdullah signaled for Dante to follow him through it to the rim of the quarry. The nineteen apprentice bombers, along with the permanent staff and the Hezbollah gunmen who had brought the prisoner from Beirut were lined up along the rim. Across the quarry, her back to the setting sun, Djamillah was being bound to a stake by two of the gunmen. One of them hung a small khaki army satchel around her neck, then reached inside it to manipulate the wires and complete the electrical circuit. Djamillah’s knees buckled under her and she collapsed into the ropes holding her to the stake. As the gunmen left her side, the satchel dangling from its straps against her chest, Dr. al-Karim materialized alongside Dante. He was holding a small remote transmitter, which he offered to the Irishman. “Would you like the honor?”

Dante looked down at the transmitter. “She is not my enemy,” he said.

High above the Bekaa rift two Israeli jets, flying soundlessly, their contrails catching the last smudges of sunlight, appeared from the north. When they were directly over the Hezbollah camp they banked ninety degrees to the west. As they headed toward the sea the sound of their engines engulfed the camp.

The imam gazed across the quarry at the woman tied to the stake. Then, in an abrupt gesture, he raised the transmitter and rotated the switch until there was a hollow click and depressed it. For an instant that stretched into an eternity nothing happened. Dr. al-Karim, his brows knitted, was raising the transmitter to activate it again when, across the quarry, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it dissipated, the woman had vanished and only the stump of the stake remained. Around the rim of the quarry the fedayeen began to wander off into the darkness that settled quickly over the Bekaa at this time of year. The imam produced the string of jade worry beads and began working them through his pudgy fingers. The gesture struck Dante as therapeutic. He noticed that Dr. al-Karim’s fingers and lips were trembling. Could it be that this was the first time he’d killed someone with his own hand?

“When one of our own turns her back on faith,” the imam murmured—he appeared to be talking to himself—“it is a mortal sin, punishable by execution.”

By midnight the cold gusts that swept down from the Golan Heights most nights of the year had picked up, drowning out the sound of the helicopters coming in high and fast and plummeting toward the ground like shot birds to land at strategic points around the Hezbollah camp. The roadblock at the spot where the Beirut highway curved up hill to the village and the camp was overrun without a shot being fired. The fedayeen noticed that the men coming toward them were wearing kafiyyahs and made the fatal mistake of taking them for Arabs. “Assalamu aleikum,” one of the men in kafiyyahs called out; a sentry at the roadblock called back, “Wa aleikum salam.” It was the last word he uttered. In the bunker on top of the hill above the quarry, the fedayeen started firing their heavy machine gun into the darkness when they caught sight of figures sprinting up the slope; the attackers, equipped with night vision goggles, didn’t return fire until they were close enough to lob stun grenades over the bunker’s sandbags. Other teams from the helicopters, their faces blackened with charcoal, raced through the village to attack the two low buildings that served as the camp’s dormitory. Most of the apprentice bombers, as well as the staffers and the visiting fedayeen, were gunned down as they tried to flee through the doors and the windows. Explosive charges planted against the small brick building blew away the Hezbollah flag on the roof and set off a string of smaller explosions as the wooden boxes filled with ammunition caught fire.

Dante, crouching inside the door of his room, heard the two guards outside hollering into a walkie-talkie for instructions. When there was no response they both raced off in the direction of the imam’s house behind the mosque, only to be killed by one of the Israeli teams blocking the narrow streets. The first casualties for the raiders came when several of them burst through the back door into Dr. al-Karim’s office: One of the imam’s personal guards walked toward them with his hands raised over his head and then blew himself up, killing two of the attackers and wounding two more. The other raiders, streaming through doors and windows, stormed through the house, killing the bodyguards and servants and one of the imam’s wives and two of his teenage sons as they dashed from room to room. They found Dr. al-Karim hiding in an armoir on the top floor as his second wife and two other children cowered in a nearby bathroom fitted with gold-plated faucets on the sink and the bathtub. The imam was handcuffed and blindfolded and hauled through the streets toward one of the waiting helicopters.

When the sound of gunfire subsided, Dante knotted Djamillah’s white silk bandanna around his neck and darted from the house in the direction of the water well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. Turning the corner of a narrow street, he was suddenly caught in a cross fire between some fedayeen who had taken cover on the ground floor of the school and the attackers crouching behind a low wall across the street. Dante dove behind a pickup truck as the fedayeen started firing rifle grenades. One of them exploded next to the pickup and Dante felt the tingling prick of hot shrapnel in his lower back. The sound of gunfire seemed to grow more distant as he lay on the road, staring up at the dull white stain stretching across the night sky while he waited for the pain that always trailed after the tearing of skin. Slightly delirious, he was trying to focus on the Milky Way in order to identify the star that represented the deified soul of the Alawite prostitute, Djamillah, when it finally arrived: a searing stitch of pain shot up his spinal column and he blacked out.

Dante woke to the blinding whiteness of a hospital room. Sunlight streamed through two windows and he felt its warmth on his shoulders above the bandages. He turned his head away from the sunlight and discovered Crystal Quest sitting on the next bed, munching crushed ice as she worked on a crossword puzzle. Benny Sapir, the Mossad spymaster who had briefed him in Washington, watched from the foot of the bed.

“Where the hell am I, Fred?” Dante asked weakly.

“He’s come back to life,” Benny observed.

“About time,” Quest growled; she didn’t want Dante to take her presence there as a manifestation of softness. “I have other things to do in life besides holding his hand. Hey, Dante, being Irish, you ought to know this one: Joyce’s ‘Silence, exile, and …’ Seven letters, starts with a ‘c.’”

“Cunning. That was Stephen Dedalus’s strategy for survival in Portrait of an Artist.”

“Cunning. Ha! It fits perfectly.” Fred peered over the top of the newspaper, her bloodshot eyes focusing on the wounded agent. “You’re in Haifa, Dante, in an Israeli hospital. The doctors had to pry some metal out of your lower back. The bad news is you’ll wind up with a disagreeable cavity and a gimpy left leg, the result of a compressed nerve. The good news is there will be no major infirmities, and you’ll be able to tuck a pistol behind your back without it producing a bulge in your clothing.”

“Did you capture the imam?”

“We collared the guy who was masquerading as an imam. A direct descendant of the Prophet my ass! I suppose it won’t hurt if you fill him in,” she told Benny.

“Izzat Al-Karim was a pseudonym. Your imam’s real name was Aown Kikodze; he was the only son of an Afghan father and his third wife, a teenage Kazakh girl who won a local beauty contest in Alma-Ata. Kikodze studied dentistry in Alma-Ata and was working as a dentist’s assistant there in the early 1980s when he made hegira to Mecca, where he was discovered by Iranian talent scouts and recruited into Hezbollah. We first noticed him when he opened a mosque above a warehouse in southern Lebanon and began preaching some malarkey about the near enemy and the far enemy—nobody could make heads or tails out of what he was saying, but it came across like the Islamic version of what you Americans call fire and brimstone and he made a name for himself. Next thing you know he was sporting the black turban of a sayyid and running a Hezbollah training base. Even as we speak, my colleagues are trying to talk him into helping them with their inquiries into Hezbollah activities in the Bekaa.”

“I suspect they’ll succeed,” Fred said. “The Israelis are at war, Dante, so they don’t have weak-kneed civil libertarians breathing down their necks the way we do. If he’s still compos mentis when they finish with him, we get to get sloppy seconds.”

Dante turned on Benny. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when you briefed me in Washington?”

“If you’d been caught, you’d have talked. We didn’t want the putative imam to know we knew he was putative.”

“Yeah, well, we lost Djamillah,” Dante said bitterly.

Crystal Quest slid off the bed and approached Dante. “The Levant is full of girls named Djamillah. Which one are you talking about?”

“The Djamillah in Beirut, for God’s sake, the Alawite who was posing as a prostitute. They executed her six hours before the helicopters arrived. I’ll lay odds you don’t want to hear how.”

Fred snorted. “Oh, that Djamillah! Jesus, Dante, for someone in your line of work you can be awfully naive. ‘Djamillah’ was a legend. Her real name was Zineb. She wasn’t posing as a prostitute; she was working as a prostitute in Dubai when she was recruited. And she wasn’t an Alawite, she was an Iraqi Sunni. Thanks to some fancy footwork on our part, she believed she would be working for Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat. There was an elegant logic to this false flag pitch, if I do say so myself: Saddam detests the Shiites and their Iranian mentors, and by extension, he loathes Hezbollah, which is a Shiite client of the Iranian mullahs.”

Dante could hear Djamillah’s voice in his ear. You are one lousy lover, Irish. “Whoever she was, she tried to save me when she could have used what she knew to save herself.” He noticed the square of white silk hanging from a hook on the back of the door. “Do me a favor, bring me the bandanna, Fred.”

Crystal Quest retrieved the square of silk and folded it into Dante’s hand. “It’s a hell of a memento,” Benny said from the end of the bed. “You owe your life to that bandanna. When you didn’t turn up at the well, our raiding party decided to write you off. One of the teams taking a last look around the camp reported seeing a man lying next to a pickup wearing a white bandanna. It saved your life.”

“My Dante Pippen cover must be blown.”

“That’s the least of our problems,” Fred said with a titter. “One thing we have an endless supply of in Langley is legends. We’ll work up a brand new one for you when you’re back on your feet.”

Benny said, “Thanks to you, Dante, the operation was a great success.”

“It was a crying shame,” Dante said with sudden vehemence, and he meant it literally.