Purpose of Evasion

PROLOGUE

Katifa’s skin was flawless. Bassam had no doubt of it as he caressed her, his fingertips gliding gently over her smooth flesh, which had the sheen of translucent amber. Not a freckle, not a blemish, not a single needle mark had he found — which was strange since the prescription for insulin was in her name.

Bassam had no doubt of that either.

About a week ago, a contact at the Turk Hospital pharmacy where it had been filled showed it to him. And though Katifa’s fiery beauty stirred Bassam’s passion, it was the medication that aroused his suspicion.

He immediately set out to satisfy both.

That afternoon, following a day of classes at Beirut University College, where she taught political science and Bassam taught economics, Katifa had hurried across the parking lot and got into her car.

The old Mercedes sedan refused to start.

Bassam just happened to be passing by and offered to help. He opened the hood and jiggled a few wires.

“Try it now,” he said in a confident tone.

Katifa turned the key and held it; still nothing.

“You’ve found me out,” Bassam joked with self-deprecating charm. “Fuel economy was my worst subject.” Then, after appropriate tinkering and head scratching, he deftly replaced the rotor he had removed from the vehicle’s distributor a short time earlier.

The engine kicked over.

Katifa beamed.

And as Bassam had planned, he soon spent an evening exploring Katifa’s supple body, paying special attention to the smooth expanse of her thighs and flat plane of her abdomen, sites where her nose and mouth. “I went through Al Zarif to make sure I lost him.”

Rashid’s face tightened. He led her to a window, peering through a slit in the boards nailed over it.

“You didn’t,” he said in a tense voice.

Katifa’s eyes narrowed to see a shadow moving across the grounds below. The glow from a window washed over the man’s face, revealing his features.

“Bassam… you bastard,” she hissed bitterly.

“You know him?”

“Yes, from school,” she replied, trying to hide the embarrassment she felt. “We’re… colleagues.”

Rashid saw the evasive flicker in his sister’s eyes. “You’ve been fucking a shetan,” he said, pegging Bassam for a spy, possibly a CIA operative, which he was. “He’s been making inquiries at every pharmacy in the city.”

What Rashid didn’t know was that several weeks before, CIA had been informed that a terrorist leader had been treated at the Turk Hospital private clinic for diabetic shock — unofficially, no name, no records — and Bassam had been checking out all new prescriptions for insulin.

Rashid gathered men from other rooms in the casino. Like him they were young and lean, with eyes that blazed with intensity — the offspring of Palestinians deported from Jordan who had sought refuge in Beirut amid the warring Druze, Amal, and Shiite militias, with whom they shared a hatred for the United States and Israel. Despite it, Palestinians were unwelcome in Beirut and had been without power since Yasser Arafat was expelled in 1982. They would have been long forgotten if not for the series of bombings, hijackings, and kidnappings that captured world attention. Yet it wasn’t the PLO that had orchestrated them, but a radical PLO splinter group called the Fatah Revolutionary Council.

Now Rashid and his band of FRC guerrillas fanned out into Casino du Liban’s marble corridors and stairwells in search of the intruder. All were armed. Several carried Skorpions, the ultralight, easily concealed submachine gun long favored by the PLO.

Bassam had crossed the darkened gaming room and was climbing the sweeping staircase, his hand wrapped around the grip of a pistol. He reached the top, moved slowly down a corridor, and had started up some steps to a landing when the marble tread beneath his foot creaked. He froze and cursed silently, deciding to leave while he still could, and report his discovery. But a shadow was stretching slowly across the floor in the corridor behind him. He glanced about for a way to avoid an encounter. The soft whisk of denim up ahead told him he was trapped. He holstered his weapon, inching his way back toward the corner, his eyes glued to the shadow, which grew longer and longer. His fingers slipped a knife from his pocket and opened it, skillfully masking the click of the blade as it locked in place. He waited until the last possible instant, until the terrorist’s lithe silhouette was about to turn toward him with his Skorpion. Then swiftly, instinctively, Bassam clamped a hand over his mouth, yanked his head back sharply, and drove the long blade upward into the soft flesh just behind his chin. It pierced his tongue, went through the roof of his mouth, and darted into the base of his brain. He died instantly without making a sound.

Bassam set the body aside, then retraced his steps through the corridors and down the staircase. He was crossing the gaming room when a half-dozen guerrillas sprang from the pitch blackness. Gun muzzles poked into him from every angle. They were muscling him between the tables when an anguished cry echoed through the casino. Several of the Palestinians dashed up the staircase to the source of the chilling wail. They found Katifa in the corridor, kneeling over Rashid’s body. His eyes were glazed. His head lay in a small halo of black blood that had spilled from the puncture beneath his chin.

While Katifa cradled her brother’s corpse in the corridor at Casino du Liban, the Soviet-made gunboat was cutting swiftly through Mediterranean blackness. A short, stocky man with wary eyes and an iron will sat in one of the cabins opening the package that Katifa had delivered to the pier.

He removed two boxes of pharmaceuticals.

One contained disposable syringes, the other a supply of insulin. His mouth was dry and his hands trembled, making it more difficult to peel the wrapper from the syringe. The laser-honed needle glistened as he brought it to the vial and pierced the blue polypropylene seal. He withdrew precisely 25 ccs of the milky fluid, flicked the syringe several times with a fingernail, then depressed the plunger until a few drops of insulin spurted from the needle. His thumb and forefinger pulled a thickness of abdomen from under his shirt and he deftly slid the needle beneath the skin.

Then the Fatah Revolutionary Council’s radical founder, the mastermind of international terrorism who had vowed to fight to the last man if that’s what it took for Palestinians to reclaim their homeland, cursed his poor health and shot the insulin into his flesh. His name was Sabri Banna but he was known to the world as Abu Nidal.

He had just withdrawn the needle when the phone in the cabin sounded. Nidal answered it and was informed by his radioman that Hasan was calling on the ship-to-shore radio. The news of Rashid’s death filled the terrorist leader with anger and sadness. He ordered the gunboat to return to Casino du Liban.

Katifa and Hasan were waiting on the dock when the vessel pulled into one of the slips.

The insulin had worked its magic. Nidal leapt onto the dock and hurried to Katifa’s side, embracing her emotionally. “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes welling.

Katifa didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She just broke down and, sobbing in Nidal’s arms, remembered another day eighteen years ago when he had comforted her. The horrid memory was a blur of screaming people, gunfire, and helicopters.

That was in 1967.

Egypt had closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping and the Six-Day War was in full swing. Ram Allah, an ancient city on the West Bank, was the center of Palestinian resistance. Katifa’s father, Abu Issa Kharuz, was the settlement’s leader. Days of bloody fighting with Israeli troops forced him to consider evacuating. He polled his two young protégés; Abu Nidal was vehemently opposed; Yasser Arafat sided with his mentor. Decision made, helicopters were called in. While Issa Kharuz and Nidal resisted the advancing Israelis, Arafat loaded the women and children. Nidal made it aboard the last helicopter; Katifa’s father didn’t. It lifted off in a hail of gunfire that killed him.

Now Katifa watched as her brother’s body was loaded onto the gunboat; then she and Nidal followed Hasan up the gangway into the casino. He led the way to a darkened Greek-style amphitheater opposite the gaming room. Towering Ionic columns circled the stage where spectacular shows had once dazzled jet-setters. And there, hanging naked from an ornate trapezelike apparatus that had been used to lower bare-breasted showgirls to the stage, was Bassam. His ankles were tied and he had been hoisted into the air upside down.

Hasan handed Abu Nidal a knife. Bassam’s knife.

“Who are you working for?” Nidal asked.

Bassam didn’t respond.

“Who?” Nidal shouted, grabbing his hair and yanking his face up toward him. “Who is he?”

“An American. He works at the embassy — in the communications section,” Bassam finally replied weakly, using information he’d been instructed to reveal should such a situation arise. “I… I don’t know his name.”

With a sudden slash of the blade, Abu Nidal cut off the clump of hair. Bassam yelped in fright. The stocky terrorist circled him, then suddenly stuck the blade, just the first half-inch of razor-sharp steel, into the flesh below Bassam’s rib cage.

He let out a short scream.

“His name,” Nidal commanded, flicking his wrist, causing the puncture in Bassam’s flesh to widen.

“I don’t know!” Bassam screamed in pain, blinded by the halogen atop a whirring videotape camera manned by one of the terrorists. He was crouched next to Katifa, who stared unflinchingly at the blood running over Bassam’s back, which still bore the marks of her passion.

“Do you know what happens next?” Nidal asked menacingly. “Have you ever seen a man skinned alive?”

Bassam was writhing in agony, blinking at the blood that covered his face and dripped to the floor.

“Only his name can save you,” Abu Nidal prodded, flicking the blade.

“Fitz… Fitz-gerald,” Bassam whimpered. “Thomas Fitzgerald.”

Abu Nidal smiled thinly; then, following Arabic tradition that a blood relative exact vengeance, he turned to Katifa and offered her the weapon that had killed her brother.

She lowered her eyes, declining. “No, no, it is your right, Abu-habib,” she said emotionally, paying tribute to Nidal. Though the prefix Abu, which means father in Arabic, is often used informally as a gesture of respect, it had special meaning for Katifa; and she had purposely added the suffix, beloved, to acknowledge that, having raised her and Rashid since their father’s death eighteen years ago, Abu Nidal had more than earned the right to avenge his adopted son’s death. She saw the pride and acceptance in Nidal’s eyes, then hugged him and hurried from the amphitheater.

When Katifa was out of sight, Nidal held the blade against Bassam’s torso while Hasan and one of the others spun him slowly on the trapezelike apparatus until a shallow incision completely girdled his waist.

“No! No! God, no! I told you! I told you!” Bassam howled; but his shrieks of pain and protest were for naught, as the two Palestinians pushed their fingers into the bloody slit and grasped his flesh tightly.

On the ground floor of the casino, Katifa was crossing the main gaming room when a piercing scream echoed off the mirrors, raising her pores.

The air was alive with the cool, salty bite of the sea as Tom Fitzgerald left his apartment on Rue du Caire in the once fashionable Hamra quarter of West Beirut, wishing he could walk to his office as he once had. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy on Avenue de Paris was a short distance away. Fitzgerald was listed as communications officer; but his real title was CIA chief of station. He waved to some neighborhood children on their way to school, then crossed to the beige Honda that he had recently begun driving to work.

Suddenly, a van came out of an alley and stopped next to him, almost pinning him against the car.

Fitzgerald knew what was about to happen; knew the horrid nightmare was about to swallow him. He turned to run but a young Palestinian leapt from the van, blocking his way. He reversed direction and ran into another, who pressed a gun to his temple and ordered him into the van. But Fitzgerald had long ago decided that capture wasn’t an acceptable option, that if the moment ever came, he would escape or die trying. He slapped the pistol aside, drove an elbow into the Palestinian behind him, and ran, expecting the searing sting of bullets to follow; but a third Palestinian appeared and drove the butt of a rifle into his solar plexus. The three terrorists dragged him into the van, slammed the door, and drove off.

No more than fifteen seconds had elapsed.

Later that week in Washington, D.C., a bodyguard assigned to Director of Central Intelligence William Kiley left the DCI’s home on the old Rockefeller estate on Foxhall Road to retrieve the Washington Post. As he did each morning before delivering the newspaper to his boss, he carefully checked it for explosive devices. This was standard security procedure.

Today the bodyguard found a package. It contained a videotape cassette. A Polaroid photograph of a haggard Thomas Fitzgerald was taped to the slipcase, announcing that he had been kidnapped—not by Abu Nidal’s Fatah Revolutionary Council, but by Hezbollah, a fanatical, pro-Iranian terrorist group.

The DCI’s face was ashen when he finished viewing the videotape of Bassam’s torture and death. He sat in stunned silence for several moments before his eyes drifted to the Polaroid of Fitzgerald. The chilling implication that his longtime colleague and friend could suffer the same fate horrified him.

This was the second time in as many months that Kiley had been personally burned by terrorists. The first, the discovery that two former CIA agents had set up and equipped numerous terrorist training camps in Libya, still tormented him.

“Goddamned animals,” the DCI whispered hoarsely, seething with hatred. “They turned the worst of my people, now they kidnapped the best.”

And that was the moment he went over the edge; there were no rules anymore, no cost too great, no person too valuable. Whatever it took, Bill Kiley would find a way to satisfy his hunger for vengeance.