Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (15 page)

‘
Lost the
bastards.’

Nathalie
uncurled, her ashen face streaked with tears and her makeup
smeared. She stared about as if at a new dawn. ‘How did that
happen?’

Lynch
gestured. ‘This is Chatila, the Palestinian refugee camp, where the
Israelis stood by as their Christian militia allies massacred
thousands of innocent people during the civil war. I didn’t think
Michel’s Christian thugs would be too keen to come in here firing
off their guns. They’d never have got out alive.’ He patted the
driver on the shoulder. ‘Thanks, Hassan. You did a good job. I was
serious, I’ll pay for the damage. Next time you meet me flying in,
bring a gun in the glovebox.’

Hassan
smacked the steering wheel, wheezing laughter. ‘It was like driving
during the war, huh? Shit, those guys were crazy.’

Lynch brushed
shards of glass from the armrest between him and Hassan. He glanced
at Nathalie, who was trying to repair some of the damage to her
makeup and dignity. ‘Now, there’s a proper greeting committee for
you. Welcome back to your homeplace, Miss Durand.’

Her brief
smile in response was tight-lipped.

THIRTEEN

The strollers
along Beirut’s paved corniche hunched against the buffeting cold,
the watery late afternoon sunlight tempered by the looming shadows
across the railings and sea wall. On the roadside by the silvery
thrust of the Manara lighthouse, a street vendor handed steaming
sweetcorn to a group of young men who tossed the cobs from hand to
hand, laughing. Above the city’s swaths of buildings and the green
hills rising up from the rich blue Mediterranean, the snowy peaks
of Mount Sannine gleamed.

Lynch and
Leila waited together for their double espressos at Uncle Deek’s
roadside coffee shop, the two coffees handed over in brown plastic
cups with wooden stirrers thrown in with surly panache by the
coffee man. They crossed the corniche road, wary of the speeding
cars. Leila was warm in his arm, nestled against him as they
promenaded along the seafront, her hair tumbling over her shoulder.
Her pale, fine skin reddened in the chill, the cold making her
sniffle. Lynch’s smile faltered, his happiness tempered by the
necessity of breaking their idyll.

He stopped at
a railing overlooking a tumble of barnacle-encrusted concrete
slabs, remnants of one of Lebanon’s many conflicts. Leila hooked
the hair blowing in her face back behind her ear, uncertain as she
gauged his expression.

‘
What is it,
Lynch? You’ve been funny since we met today.’

Lynch spoke
to the sea, the clouds reflected in his green eyes. ‘You have to
stop coming to the flat. I’ve arranged a place for you nearby, you
can stay there and I can come and see you there. I have a big job
on and you can’t stay with me or come to the apartment for now.
Apart from anything else, it’s dangerous.’

Lynch knew
she’d be unhappy, but this was worse. She was shocked, searching
his face. He focused resolutely on the sea, the breakers smashing
against the rust-streaked concrete.

Her voice was
low. ‘You have someone staying with you.’

‘
Yes.’

‘
From
intelligence.’

‘
Yes.’

‘
A
woman.’

Lynch glanced
down at the little brown plastic cup in his hand.
Damn her intuition
.
‘Yes.’

‘
Fine.’

He reached
for her. ‘Leila, come back.’

He followed
her, striding to catch up until they were both almost running down
the corniche. He caught her, spun them both around and held her
pinioned against the cold metal as she pummelled his chest, the
tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘
Fuck off,
Lynch.’

‘
It’s not
personal. It’s what I do – we’re part of a big operation against,’
God help him, but Lynch the practised liar faltered for a split
second, drug smugglers and they need her to be here. She’s an
expert in electronic surveillance and online security stuff. She’s
nothing to me, just a colleague from another intelligence
service.’

‘
Which
one?’

‘
Oh come on,
you hardly expect me to ...’

‘
To what? To
tell me?’ Leila broke away, stepping back from him. ‘To let me into
your private world? The secret garden, where all you little boys
play your dirty little games with the destinies of decent
people?’

‘
Look, here’s
the key to the flat. It’s in Hamra, it’s close by. The fob has the
address and everything on it. It’s furnished. I’ll call
you.’

‘
I don’t want
it, Lynch.’

‘
Here. Just
take it.’

He took her
unresisting hand and placed the key there, closing her limp fingers
on it.

‘
I will not
wait for you, Lynch. Not while you play with your Bond
girl.’

‘
I’ll be in
touch.’

He reached
for her, but she turned her head away, leaving his unfulfilled kiss
a brief contact against her cold, salty cheek.

Lynch watched
her walk away up the corniche, the urge to smoke a cigarette
clawing at his frayed nerves. When she had gone, he turned to the
sea. He wandered along the seafront until darkness fell, flagging
down a
servees
to
take him home to his apartment with the stranger who’d moved
in.

He drew on
his cigar and sat back in the chair, settling down to enjoy the
dusk bringing the streets to life. The umber sunset tinged the
waters of the Mediterranean, the sea at the end of the street.
Church bells rang out far away across the city, answered a few
seconds later by the sweet tones of a nearer bell. One by one,
the
azan
sounded
from the mosques, joining the bells.

Nathalie
stepped onto the balcony, held the railing and surveyed the street
below. ‘It is a very beautiful city, no?’

Lynch puffed
smoke. ‘It has its upsides.’

Nathalie
raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure it is no problem I stay
here?’

Lynch shook
his head and tapped the cigar on the rim of the faded green plastic
ashtray he kept outside for cigar nights, stolen from a pub
somewhere in Monot a million years ago.

‘
Not at all,’
he lied. ‘It’s a pleasure to have you here.’

Nathalie had
settled into the spare room and sat gazing at her laptop on the
coffee table in the living room when Lynch returned from his awful
confrontation with Leila. He had called her mobile but she hadn’t
picked up. He found himself constantly resisting the temptation to
go across to the flat in Hamra, torn between wanting to give her
space and his dread of her threat to pass him by. Lynch knew her
too well to shrug off Leila’s fiery revenge. He abhorred the
thought of a tousle-headed girl answering the door in the oversized
shirt she liked, some swarthy ape calling from the bedroom, ‘Who is
it,
Lei-Lei
?’

Lynch
shuddered as his imagination ran amok.

Nathalie
turned from the railing, her voice breaking his bleak reverie.
‘There are two nuclear warheads on this yacht. What do you think
Freij intends with them when he brings them here?’

Fuck.
Shop.
Lynch drew on his
Cohiba. ‘That’s the big question, isn’t it? Freij is a spoilt
billionaire brat who holds huge political power and wants to be
president on a unity ticket. He never disbanded his father’s
militia, just folded it up into his political party. Yet his
business partner is a respected figure in the Shia community,
someone you’d have thought would be violently opposed to Freij’s
Christian militia thugs. It’s hard to call. I just know they’re not
safe hands to put those warheads in. Actually, come to think of it,
there are no hands here I’d put them in.’

‘
Our analysts
have found this question hard, too. They have compiled a list of
known assets of Falcon Dynamics. It owns many companies. Falcon has
major holdings in Germany, Albania, Greece and Lebanon, and offices
in several more countries. They are obviously very close to the
Americans. We do not know how close.’

Lynch drew on
the cigar again, sending blue smoke into the encroaching darkness.
‘And that’ll be the tip of the iceberg. Freij and his fat friend
have a whole network of offshore companies.’

‘
Fat
friend?’

‘
His partner,
Selim Hussein. He’s a big lad, got more chins than fingers. They
founded Falcon together. It’s built on Freij’s money and Hussein’s
engineering skill. Freij is a Maronite Christian, Hussein is a Shia
Muslim. As I said, it’s an odd pairing to find here in
Beirut.’

Lynch
finished his cigar, flicking the stub over the balcony. He pulled
himself to his feet wearily. ‘Have your people had any luck getting
past their security systems?’

Nathalie
shook her head. She was wearing an elegantly understated evening
dress and burgundy lipstick.

Lynch paused
by the sliding door. ‘Are you going out?’

‘
We have gone
as far as we can with remote hacks and surveillance. Their systems
are very good, and we are worried if we try any harder over
networks, we will be identified. We are setting up a team here at
the French Embassy but we need a physical intervention. And yes, I
am going out for dinner. So are you, if you would like to clean up
a little and come.’

Lynch crossed
his arms behind his head, stretching. ‘Where?’

‘
Chez Madame
Chalabi. She worked for my father during the civil war. She has
long been a great ally for France here in Beirut. I thought she
might help us with some links to people associated with Falcon. She
knows everybody.’

‘
Your father?
Here?’

Nathalie
laughed at Lynch’s evident confusion. ‘Yves Dubois. My father is
Yves Dubois,
non
?
Do your British
intelligence
people not brief you at all?’

‘
No,’ Lynch
growled kicking the door to his bedroom open. ‘They bloody
don’t.’

Nathalie and
Lynch tramped together past the flashy boutiques and designer
frontages of Beirut’s Hamra district. The dummies pouted and
preened in lifeless tableaux of scant cloth and revealed flesh.
Owl-eyed at the richness around them, cars honking and jostling to
their left, a feeling of sadness washed over Nathalie and she
hooked her arm into Lynch’s.

‘
You know I
said I was born here? My mother was Lebanese. I suppose they didn’t
tell you that, either. This is the first time I have come back here
since I was a child. It feels very strange to be here. Familiar,
even safe.’

She caught
the surprise in Lynch’s glance down at her. He was gruff. ‘It can
be, sure. It can be vicious, too. When did you leave?’

‘
Eighty-six.
My father came out here at the start of the civil war. He met my
mother here and they worked together.’

‘
For French
intelligence.’

Nathalie
nodded, hopping up onto the uneven pavement to avoid a
blaring
servees
as it squeezed past. ‘Yes.’

Nathalie
forgot Hamra for a second and was back in the airy kitchen in
Dijon, bees buzzing around the lavender outside the window. Blame
Damour, her mother told her, laughing and still beautiful in middle
age, despite the illness eating away at her. ‘We first became
lovers after Damour. The massacres made everyone scared and many
people found comfort in each other, then and in the years to
come.’

Lynch’s voice
broke in on her reverie. ‘So how come the name change?’

She blinked
to clear her head. ‘The same way all women change their
names,
non
? I was
married. I think it is here if I understood the directions
correctly. It has been a long time since I was here
before.’

They passed a
tatty shop front. Lynch pushed open the creaking iron gate to its
side that led into a musky alleyway lit by a dirty glass carriage
lamp. Leaves and rubbish littered the concrete path. Nathalie rang
the doorbell as Lynch gazed up blinking at the arches and
decorations of the fine Ottoman house looming into the darkness
above them, the brass ornamentation on the mahogany door dull in
the baleful light. She thought him attractive in a brutal sort of
way but, really, not her type. Catching her eye, he smiled. Old
enough to be her father, for a start. She smiled back.

Madame
Chalabi answered the door herself, dressed in black and wearing a
string of remarkably large, round pearls. She smiled
regally.

‘
Goodness,
you must be Nathalie. Good evening, my dear. It has been so very
many years. And welcome, Monsieur ...’

Distracted by
setting up her team of hackers and online watchers, Nathalie had
neglected to mention Lynch would be with her. She cringed inwardly
at the crass oversight. Madame was far too genteel to make a fuss,
which made it feel worse. ‘Lynch. Gerald Lynch. He is working with
me. He is English.’