Tripoli's Target (Justin Hall # 2) (12 page)

Jack Schmitt passed his first obstacle,
Justin thought as he dropped his Australian passport with that name inside the front pocket of his black jeans. A few hours earlier, an Egyptian Air Force Mi-17 had picked them up at the border with Sudan. They flew to Aswan, a city in the south of Egypt, then took a military plane to Cairo International Airport. George picked up Carrie and the Israeli man while Justin boarded a flight to Tripoli.

He nodded a quick goodbye to the customs officials at the arrivals counter of the International Terminal and began strolling toward the gates, following a large crowd of North Africans. Besides his two Kodak Pro digital cameras hanging around his left shoulder—part of his cover as a travel journalist—Justin had brought a single carry-on suitcase, which he rolled slowly behind him. The luggage was lighter than he pretended it to be, but a slow, relaxed walk allowed him a few extra seconds to observe his surroundings.

I admit it,
he thought,
it’s not the safest way to enter this hostile country, strutting through the front door.
But time was of the essence and most of Libya’s secret police watched its land and coastal borders. Tripoli International Airport was the last place a foreign secret service operative would choose as his entry point. At least, that was Justin’s reasoning and he prayed his reasoning was right.

Man, this place has changed so much.
He passed through a set of automatic glass doors and stopped to admire the marble floors, the glass windows and the steel structures. Justin turned left and passed by a prayer room, a duty-free shopping area with not much selection, and a first-class passengers’ lounge.
I think they expanded this hall. Or does it feel roomier because I haven’t seen the mukhabarat yet? Oh, there they are.

He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead as he reached a couple of tall skinny men in gray suits, who seemed to be doing nothing but chatting at one of the empty corners of the hall. They were standing to the right of the escalators. To the untrained eye, the men looked like stranded travelers killing time during layovers. But Justin’s eyes were trained to identify exactly what was there, and most importantly, what was not.

With a quick, casual glance in their general direction, as if wondering whether he was going in the right way, Justin noticed the men had no hand luggage. This was not the arrivals area, so they were not waiting for relatives or friends. The men from the Internal Security Service, Libya’s mukhabarat, were standing beyond the terminal’s security perimeter. Only authorized personnel were allowed in this area, but the men wore no identification badges and no uniforms.

They sported dress pants, dress shirts, and loose fitting jackets—perfect for hiding a small arsenal of firearms—and no ties. It was too casual for businessmen and overkill for common bodyguards. But what gave them away, what usually gives away most secret agents, was the look. The piercing look, aimed at understanding the intentions of an individual simply by looking at his eyes, his face, his hands, his body gestures.

Justin dropped his gaze to the floor as he approached the escalator. He did not shuffle his feet, cough, comb his hair with his hands, rummage through his pockets, or make any gestures that would attract the Libyan agents’ attention. There was no visible reason for his behavior to be out of the ordinary. Justin was unarmed and was not carrying any illegal or prohibited substances. Any frisking by the mukhabarat would reveal nothing incriminating, but Justin knew the mukhabarat did not need any evidence to hold a foreigner in their cells for weeks if not months.

“Sir, your shoe is undone,” one of the Libyan agents called at him in Arabic.

Justin resisted the urge to turn his head toward the voice or to stop and look at his black runners. A foreigner arriving alone and not as part of an organized tour, was still less suspicious than a foreigner who spoke the language of the country.
Nice trick, but I’m not falling for it.

“Hey, you should tie your shoe,” the other agent said in English with a heavy Arabic accent.

Justin looked at the man and then at his feet. The shoelace of his left runner was slightly loose, not quite undone, and almost certainly it would not untie during Justin’s short walk to the taxi stand. But the small, almost undetectable detail, had not escaped their watchful eyes.
Extremely observant these two.

“Thank you, mate,” Justin replied. He knelt and tightened the shoe lace.

He took the escalator down to the first floor. He never looked back, knowing the men of the mukhabarat would not stop staring until he was out of sight.
They may even radio their buddies downstairs to keep an eye on me.

Justin strode past a long row of airline desks and customer service counters, their logos flashing over colored glass and fluorescent lights. Since the lifting of the UN sanctions in 2003 and the US sanctions in 2004 against the country responsible for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988—a bombing that claimed the lives of 270 people, 180 of them Americans—a stream of foreign companies had flocked to Libya, a place flooded with oil cash.

Most of them had left during the months of the civil war and rebellion that toppled Colonel Moammar Qaddafi and his forty-one-year, iron-fisted rule in 2011. They had returned soon after a new government was installed in the country with the help of the US and its European allies. The new leaders, especially the new prime minister, had promised democracy and an end to Libya’s long support for terrorist and rogue regimes all over the world. Still, four decades of tyranny could not be undone overnight. Change was slow, especially for the mukhabarat.

As soon as Justin reached the main entrance to the terminal, he felt the heat wave slap him across the face. A boiling, dusty wind gust embraced him as soon as he stepped outside. A crowd of taxi drivers swarmed him. They were all men, mostly in their thirties and forties, but he spotted a few age-wrinkled faces. They groped at his luggage, vying to pick him up, while shouting at him in Arabic, English, and French. He politely declined their offers and kept walking beside the long row of black and white taxi sedans. A couple of half-torn posters of Qaddafi caught his attention. Qaddafi was shown in a long black and green tunic, against a background of the map of Africa, saluting the nation with a clenched right fist. Someone had written a few insults over the deposed dictator’s face.

Justin started searching for a taxi driver. He was looking for someone less zealous and brazen and definitely younger, perhaps too young to be recruited by the mukhabarat. After a few sideway glances at the parked cars, he stopped next to a young man leaning against the hood of an old, rusty Fiat, reading a folded newspaper. Under the shade of a tall palm tree, the young man was enduring the ninety-five degree temperature, ignoring the sweat soaking his forehead and the collar of his short-sleeved shirt. The young man’s skin was dark brown, but his thick, broad nose, and short curly hair testified to his central African origin.

“Hey, is your taxi for hire?” Justin asked the young man who could not be older than seventeen.

“What? Oh, taxi, yes, yes, sir,” he replied in English, the language in which Justin had asked the question. “Yes, taxi.”

He tossed his newspaper in the backseat and opened the front passenger’s door. Before Justin had a chance to slide into the seat, a large number of taxi drivers crowded around the Fiat. They began to exchange harsh words with the young man who was stowing away Justin’s luggage. Amidst the commotion, Justin heard words like “pig” and “thief” and “evil.” The young man and Justin managed to get inside the car and drove off, the driver using uninterrupted honks to force away the people standing in front of his taxi.

“What was that all about?” Justin asked, feigning ignorance, after the Fiat rounded the curve. They headed toward Tripoli, twenty-one miles north of the airport.

“Huh? Oh, they… they says not my turn. You came to me. I did wrong nothing,” the driver explained in broken English.

Justin nodded. He was telling the truth, albeit sugar-coating it for him.

“Where are we going?” the driver asked.

Justin said one word, “Corinthia.”

Corinthia Hotel Tripoli was perhaps the most luxurious hotel in Tripoli. Even the US Embassy temporarily used its fifth floor when it first opened after the renewal of the diplomatic relation between the two countries. Now the embassy had its own building on Al Jrabah Street in the heart of Tripoli.

“Yes, I take you there,” said the driver.

Justin was not staying at the Corinthia. He had reserved a room at the Four Seasons Hotel, more than ten city blocks south of the Corinthia. If the driver moonlighted for the mukhabarat or was pressed to reveal his client’s destination, the diversion could buy Justin precious time. In Libya, a few seconds of advantage made all the difference between life and death.

“And I don’t want to share the taxi with anyone else,” Justin said.

Sharing taxis was a common practice and taxi drivers stopped regularly along the road to pick up more passengers. A general understanding existed among taxi drivers that foreigners disliked this practice, but Justin wanted to make sure there were going to be no uninvited guests and no unscheduled stops.

“Of course, not,” the driver replied. “My taxi black and white. We don’t stop for no one. Yellow cabs, they do that.”

“Great. If you make it a good trip, I’ll give you forty dinars.”

The driver’s eyes lit up. The usual fare from the airport to downtown Tripoli varied between twenty to twenty-five dinars, about twenty dollars. “You must be a rich man.”

“Not really. But I appreciate good service when I can find it.”

“It will be very good trip. If you want, I don’t talk.”

“A little talk doesn’t hurt.”

Justin leaned back in his seat.

“First time in Tripoli?”

“Yes.”

“Where you from?”

“Australia.”

“Oh, Australia. Sydney?”

“No, Perth.”

“Perth?”

“Yes. It’s in west Australia. Sydney is on the other side.”

“My cousin Ishmael live in Sydney. He drive taxi there.”

“Sorry, I don’t know him.”

“Ishmael very good man. He doing good in Australia. He ask me to go and work there.”

“Well, you’re still here. How are things in Libya?”

The driver hesitated before giving an answer. “It’s OK. After civil war over, more foreigners came, more companies, more clients, so more money.”

“How safe is Tripoli?”

The reply came after another moment of hesitation. “Well, so-so. Many people disappointed with the new government. Some say Qaddafi was better. Violence continue.” As an afterthought, the driver added, “The suicide bombers, they stupid. The ones who sent them, the men of the Alliance, they will be caught and hung. All of them.”

“Where are you from?”

“My mother Libyan, my father from Burkina Faso. But I want my country safe.”

Justin nodded.

They drove in silence over the next few minutes. Justin observed the ever-changing landscape. Rows of palm trees and olive orchards were cultivated meticulously on parcels on both sides of the three-lane divided Airport Highway. Now and then, they were separated by strips of bronze-colored sand, sprinkled with scraggly looking weeds. Two- and three-story houses dotted the hills.

The houses grew larger and closer to one another as the Fiat approached Tripoli’s outskirts. Large mosques with green domes and white minarets pierced the sky at regular intervals. The driver would point out a warehouse, a hotel, or a restaurant and give Justin a word of advice about its owner, services, or meals offered at those establishments.

Justin mostly tuned out his driver and ignored the grits of sand entering through the open windows, the only air conditioning available in the taxi. His mind was planning the evening’s meeting at the US Embassy. Johnson had arranged for a briefing with Matthew Garnett, the Assistant Director of the Office of Protective Operations in the US Secret Service. Garnett was the man in charge of the US president’s security and safety in Libya. A twenty-year veteran with the Secret Service, Garnett had watched over the trip of the US vice president to neighboring Egypt less than six weeks ago. He was now running the Secret Service’s interim station in Tripoli. Justin was sure Garnett would welcome any help in accomplishing his mission successfully.

“Mister, mister, sir.”

The driver’s voice pierced Justin’s ears like the annoying buzz of an alarm clock at 4:00 a.m., pulling him away from his daydreaming.

“Huh . . . hmm . . . what?”

“You no talking to me. How you doing?”

“I’m fine, just trying to relax. Is that too much to ask?”

“Sorry, boss.”

Justin noticed they were at the edge of Tripoli. A complex of ten-story apartment towers rose up to the right of the Airport Highway. The towers were surrounded by cranes, backhoes, dump trucks, and an army of other heavy machineries and construction workers. The driver explained the government was building housing projects and he grumbled it took knowing people in “important positions” to get an apartment in the government complex.

“What’s that factory there?” Justin asked, pointing to this right as they approached an overpass. A Nissan dealership stretched out on that side, with a line-up of used cars and vans for sale. He had never seen some of the models and assumed they were produced specifically for Nissan’s African market.

“That’s the Pepsi-Cola factory,” the driver replied.

Justin glanced over the driver’s shoulders and saw another used vehicle dealership almost identical to the one they had left behind. At a distance, the tall Tripoli’s skyscrapers made their first appearance. Roadside buildings became more colorful, although green still remained the dominating color of facades, domes, and walls. The driver took a few turns, and the Fiat entered a maze of narrow alleys as they cut through the heart of Tripoli. Curbside vendors displayed their merchandise, while crowds of people lingered in squares, parks, and sidewalk cafes, sipping coffee and tea and passing their time.