Authors: Brad Taylor
“That man you see with the Druze is Nephilim Logan. He was a U.S. counterterrorist commando. One of the best they had. I know this because he almost killed me a couple of years ago. Now, I’m sure he’s working with the United States against you. That’s why I sent in the bomb. Trust me, he is not your friend, and he deserves to be dead. I’m sorry if the other deaths might cause you issues, but it wasn’t your meeting. You never said protect it. What I did was protect you. Like you pay me to do.”
Majid and Ja’far flipped through the digital stills of the camera, absently looking at the pictures. When they were done, Ja’far spoke. “You have your uses, Infidel, but only so many. You have done us a service until today. Now, the killing of the investigator is gathering interest, and you have compounded that by killing an American intelligence operative. What are we to do with you?”
The assassin blinked.
Gathering interest?
“What the hell does that
mean? The Tribunal hit was magic. No way can anyone connect anything with you guys.”
“No. Not magic. Close, but there were two bodies in the wreckage. The investigator and her boyfriend.”
“Yeah? So fucking what?”
“The boyfriend’s face was fractured. Like he’d been beaten.”
He snorted. “Who gives a shit? They died in a gas explosion. Maybe he was hit by some flying debris. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that people are digging now. Because of who the investigator was. We hired you for no fingerprints, and now there are questions.”
“You don’t have any directed at you. There is
no
connection to you. You’re clean.”
“You’re wrong. There
is
a connection. We worry about the future. What will the Sidon attack cause? Who will question that? The Americans?”
The assassin stood, edging toward the door. He knew what that meant;
he
was the connection. “That group was Palestinian, from the camps. At least that’s what you told me they were. I operated on your intelligence and cut off a threat to your operations. The Americans will look no further than the camps and chalk this up to rival groups. In the end, if there was an assassination plot, it’s dead now. Right? Isn’t that what you were afraid of anyway?”
Ja’far stiffened. “We don’t tell you the details. Only what we want done. And in this case, we wanted a
recording
. Not death. You may have—”
Majid cut him off with a look, and Infidel knew something more was going on. He now worried about getting out of the room alive. He backed toward the door.
“I’m sorry if I did anything to harm your interests. You know that’s not what I do. I’ve shown you my skill. I understand you’re upset, so let’s call the last payment you owe me null and void. We’re even. Okay?”
Majid laughed. “You Americans. It’s always about the money. We don’t care about that. If we wanted to kill you, we would do so right now—regardless of the money.”
Infidel waited, ready to pull the carbon-fiber blade. Now was the go or no-go moment.
“Don’t look so worried. You can go. We just want you to be aware of our concerns. If we are to continue, you need to be more attuned to our needs.”
Ja’far smiled. “Or more attuned to your final wishes.”
Infidel smiled back, a weak grin that made him feel foolish. The guard at the door with the AK-47 saw his trepidation and grinned as well, enjoying the feeling of superiority. The bully in the room liking his torment.
He left down the stairwell in controlled haste. When he reached the bottom, he was followed by the two men who had remained in the café. He paid them no outward mind, but caressed his carbon-fiber lucky charm again.
They followed him all the way out of the
Dahiyeh
. When he hailed a cab, they showed no sign that it was anything other than what they expected. When the cab pulled away, guaranteeing his freedom, he initiated the electronic collection device he’d installed in the wheel well of the vehicle he was leaving behind.
T
he Ghost checked the security
of his hotel room door, deciding it was good enough. If someone wanted to come through the hard way, it would take more than one blow, and that would leave plenty of time to get him out on the balcony, and away.
He’d managed to slip out of Sidon in the chaos of the bombing and had elected not to drive all the way home to Tripoli. He wanted to open the briefcase as soon as possible, but he needed a secure area to analyze the information. He’d stopped in Beirut and rented a room in the Hamra area, next to the university.
He placed the briefcase on the chipped table in front of the television and stared at it for a second. He went into the bathroom, blotted a washcloth in the sink, and returned. He righted the briefcase and cleansed the dried blood from the handle. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but it felt like the right thing.
He placed it back down flat and opened it. Inside was a sheaf of papers, a wallet, a thumb drive, and a passport.
He picked up the passport and wallet first. Credit cards and Saudi Arabian identification for a man named Ahmed al-Rashid. One more name for his record books. He was pleased to see it was a Gulf Cooperation Council country. Being in the GCC would make it much easier to pass across borders of any member state. The passport itself looked official, but was in pieces, with the picture missing. He assumed he
would have received instructions on final assembly, but that was obviously not going to happen now.
The credit cards were in the same name, as was the international driver’s license. In the sheaf of papers he found a bank statement, with a balance of fifty thousand dollars. He assumed one of the cards was a debit card from the bank. The money was fine to get started, but he wouldn’t be using the identity of Ahmed for very long. If he decided to continue.
He continued flipping through the papers and found the biography of the United States Middle Eastern envoy. A man named Jeffrey McMasters. Fifty-seven years old, with the face of a distinguished patrician. Gray around the temples and a hint of a smile around the eyes. A professional diplomat with over thirty-five years of service. He noted he was a former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and had worked in the Jordanian Embassy, but had done nothing with the state of Israel. That stood to reason because the United States would be looking for someone who understood the area, but who could never be accused of having a bias.
He flipped to the next page and saw the itinerary of McMasters’s Middle East trip. The envoy was hitting quite a few countries over the next seven days. Most stops simply stated the city and duration, but some actually listed the events of the day and the lodging arrangements. The Ghost guessed that the Hamas offshoot group had greater penetration of some countries than others.
He saw the envoy was due to land in Lebanon tomorrow, but would be spending only about eight hours on the ground before leaving again and flying to Turkey. He would visit at least four other countries before his final stop in Doha, Qatar, for the peace talks. The stop before that was Dubai, UAE.
Dubai was one of the few places with a complete itinerary, and the chosen hotel caught his eye. The Al Bustan Rotana, a premier five-star establishment in a city known for five-star establishments. But this hotel had a little extra notoriety, beyond the luxury. It was the same
one where the Mossad had assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, chief of Hamas’s military wing, in 2010. A spectacular killing by the Zionists that made the Palestinians look weak.
Using fake passports from at least four different European countries, the hit team had conducted surveillance on Mahmoud for days, penetrated his room in the hotel, waited on him to return, then suffocated him to death.
The irony of the envoy choosing this hotel bit deep. Maybe he
would
take on the assignment. To kill McMasters in the same hotel as the Hamas operative would send a clear signal—especially if done in the same manner. No giant car bomb. No random slaughter of civilians. A targeted killing in a special place.
He shuffled through the rest of the paperwork, seeing more credit receipts and other useful information, but nothing substantial. In truth, he only half focused on it, his brain turning over the nuances of the attack.
He knew that neither Hamas nor Hezbollah would acknowledge any role in the killing, which left him alone. Breaking up the peace process might be good enough for those factions, but he wanted the world to know why. He’d have to create a group out of whole cloth and begin seeding jihadist websites with some statements. Get them ready for the claim of credit after the attack. Luckily, in this day and age, all it took was an Internet connection to be an instant jihadi. He knew he would have the name of his “group” on the world stage should he succeed. More important, he’d have the Palestinian plight on the world stage as well, just like Black September had at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
He kicked around the idea. He knew if he chose to do it, he’d have to get rid of the Saudi identity within forty-eight hours after using it. Someone had leaked the information of the meeting in Sidon, and he had to assume that whoever that was had all the information he had. Including the target. Thus, he couldn’t use it to attack. He would need to get another, without Hezbollah help.
He reflected on the explosion in Sidon yet again, at a loss as to who had perpetrated the attack. It couldn’t be Hezbollah, because the setup was way more complicated than necessary. Why go through the trouble of bringing him down to Beirut, convincing him to attend the meeting, then agree to the change in venue if they only wanted to kill him? And if the targets were the other men, why bring him in at all? Simply do it.
In the end, he decided it didn’t matter. Someone had attacked the meeting, and he’d probably never find out the who or why, since everyone had an agenda. The only decision that mattered was whether he wanted to continue on or disappear. If he wanted to continue, he needed to make sure that Hezbollah knew he was alive. Give them confidence that he was working for them and prevent them from shutting off the credit cards and bank accounts for the Saudi identity. In fact, have them complete the passport and other identity papers. He was sure they could point him to a forger.
He made his decision and picked up the phone. He would continue on, initially as their man, on their puppet strings. Lull them a little bit, before cutting the strings and becoming
Ash’abah
.
The Ghost.
T
he man called Infidel
saw his Hezbollah contact take a seat along the Corniche, eating a cup of gelato just like he’d been instructed. He dialed the contact’s number, watching him pick up the phone.
“I’m across the street from you, inside the park. See me?”
He saw the kid look left, then right, finally fixating on his park bench.
“Come on. You can finish the ice cream over here. I have another assignment.”
The boy raced across a break in traffic and slid into the park bench next to him. He gave the assassin his goofy smile and said, “A lot of work lately. That’s good, huh?”
The assassin handed him an MP3 player, saying, “I need you to listen to this and translate what’s said.”
The boy eagerly took the device, wanting to be a part of an operation, loving the feeling of being a Hezbollah foot soldier. He was no more than sixteen or seventeen and could have been a merchant or an aspiring businessman, something Lebanon used to be known for. Instead, he was an aspiring terrorist in an organization that was cultlike in its brainwashing. He’d never had a chance to live, and now, because of his affiliation, the assassin would see to it that he never did.
The boy was his conduit into Hezbollah for mundane matters, when he didn’t need to see the hierarchy. He was the person who had
provided the computer camera/bomb to the Druze. Whenever simple instructions, money, or equipment needed to be passed, it came through the boy. He was smart and loyal to a fault, convinced that the assassin was some super-secret Hezbollah weapon who had the ear of Nasrallah himself. The name Infidel meant a great deal in the boy’s circle of friends, and the fact that he was the conduit gave him special status and envy.
“I had a meeting today with some people on behalf of the party. It went a little strange, and I implanted a technical device to record what was said after I left. That’s what I want you to translate. It’s a couple of hours of tape, but not all of it is dialogue.”
It was no accident that he’d left the Hezbollah meeting without asking for his backpack or other equipment. The digital camera he had shown the Hezbollah members cloaked a remote recording device with a wireless transmitting capability. It would pick up all conversation for two hours of continuous use and transmit that recording in bursts to a special collection device. The range was limited, so the assassin had been forced to embed the collection capability in the frame of his car, which he could access via the cell network.
He’d waited three hours after his meeting before conducting the download. He hadn’t wasted the time, going straight back to his apartment, packing up, and moving to a small, nondescript hotel. He’d taken precautions to never let Hezbollah know where he lived, but was under no illusions about their reach. Luckily, everything he owned fit into a large duffel bag and two Pelican cases.
The boy pulled out a notebook. Before hitting play, he said, “Does this have something to do with the computer I’m picking up from the Druze contact?”
Taken aback, the assassin showed no emotion. “Yeah, it does. How’d you get roped into getting the computer back? I thought that was a one-way deal.”
“It’s not your computer. I think that one is destroyed. The meeting the Druze attended was attacked, and he left with someone else’s computer.
He called the party, and I’m supposed to pick it up in a few hours near the university.”
The assassin simply nodded, his brain working in overdrive. “Well, we don’t have a lot of time then. Listen to this, and you’ll be on your way.”
The boy put in the earphones and hit play, listening and scribbling on his pad. The assassin left him to it, trying to puzzle out this latest bit of intel. What was this about a computer? And why would the Druze contact Hezbollah? Surely Nephilim Logan was now dead, and the Druze would suspect Hezbollah had killed him. Something was not right.