Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (5 page)

Chalhoub
folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Okay. I’ve got
your little white Irish butt covered, but you can’t go around
beating up security guards in billionaire presidential candidates’
offices. Not even in Beirut. I got the case dropped, but we’ll
still be lodging a formal protest with H.E.’

Lynch winced.
H.E. was His Excellency, the British Ambassador to Beirut, Sir St
John Winterton. He raised his bottle in a tight-lipped toast to the
last crusty old cold war era twit left in the diplomatic service
and drew a deep breath. ‘Fine, Tony. We all do what we have to do.
Sorry for the trouble.’

‘
I understand. Anything I can do to help, let me know. I’ll
check out the address.’ Chalhoub patted Lynch on the arm. ‘Don’t go
near General Security with this. Anything to do with Freij and
Falcon is off limits and loaded with a cocktail of
sectarianism,
wasta
, bribery, and vested interests. They’ll just fuck you
around, pass any information onto Michel and Selim and then shaft
you. The Yanks will stamp on your ass, too. Those boys are way off
limits. Way, way off.’

Lynch scraped
his hand over the stubble on his chin. He gazed into the mirror
behind the stacked bottles. He was pale, the dark patches either
side of his nose circling down to underpin the fleshy bags padding
the bottom of his eyes. His open shirt was a washed-out blue and
his collar was worn. He caught Chalhoub’s sympathetic
gaze.

Chalhoub slid
off his bar stool. ‘Come on, Gerald. You should get some
rest.’

Lynch nodded,
drained his bottle and banged it down on the bar top. ‘You’re
right, Tony. I’m beat. Thanks for the shoulder and the hint about
Michel and company. I’ll back off a bit until we have formal
guidance from London. I was just pissed off they killed my
boy.’

Lynch patted
his friend’s shoulder, palm-slapping Chalhoub’s bodyguard on his
way into the night with its cicadas and the smell of apple
shisha
smoke on the
breeze carried along with snatches of conversation and the clink of
glasses.

Lynch flagged
down a
servees
,
the ancient Mercedes taxi squeaking and groaning its way across the
busy traffic until they reached Ain Mreisseh. Force of habit had
him pay off the grubby old driver ten minutes’ walk from his
apartment and take to the streets alone and watchful.

Lynch froze
at his apartment door. A sliver of light shone under it. He had
switched the lights off before he left. He paused to catch his
breath and slipped open the door. He crept down the hallway lined
with books, framed photographs and Bedouin artefacts, his hand
ready under his jacket, the butt of the P99 cool against his
fingers. The muted notes of violin music sounded. He glanced at the
black iPod in the cradle of the Bose speaker and
relaxed.

She was
reading, curled up on the rattan chair by the open door to the
balcony, her poetry notebook at her side. She glanced up, her
faraway eyes focusing on the present and her full lips
smiling.

‘
Lynch.
You’re done snooping for the day?’

Leila
Medawar, student activist, dissident, blogger and poet to the
leftist anti-sectarian intelligentsia. Born into wealth and
privilege, she was heart-rendingly idealistic. Lynch sighed at the
sight of her, beautiful dark-haired Leila, lover of freedom,
equality and British spies.
Well,
spy.

Lynch had
been looking into a student protest that threatened to march
against the British Embassy, a boring little job he was only taking
half-seriously. Leila was one of the ringleaders. Her defiant eyes
had caught his across the student bar and held them. A week later
they were lying together in his bed, her hair a tumble of brown
curls across the pillow, and sweat glistening on her full breasts.
The memory made him randy for her. He kissed her, a brief touch of
the lips then a second, lingering, open-mouthed melting. She
laughed and ran her hand back through her hair.

‘
You are
dirty minded always, Lynch.’

He caressed
her cheek. ‘Thanks for washing up. Sure, you didn’t have to do
that.’

‘
An Arab
girl, Lynch. It’s what you wanted, no?’

Lynch
regarded her seriously. ‘Just let me know, Leila, before you come
round. We discussed that before. Anyway, I thought you were
studying.’

‘
I got bored.
Beside, you live like a pig, so I thought at least I would clean
the sty. Why don’t you get a cleaner?’

Lynch snorted
as he poured a whisky. ‘It’s not very secure, is it, hiring
cleaners?’

‘
You fuck activists, so why not have a decent hard
working
Sri Lanki
in the house too?’

He
acknowledged her point with a sardonic tilt of his glass, the ice
clinking. In truth, most of what he did would trigger an outbreak
of kittens back in London. Gerald Lynch was quite aware he wasn’t a
textbook SIS operative. Then again, the Levant was hardly a
textbook market.

He pulled a
Siglo IV from his beloved walnut humidor and clipped it. She
gestured to him to bring her a drink and he did so, heavy on the
ice the way she liked it, and in the Orrefors tumbler she brought
to his flat the evening after they first made love, pulling it from
her silver-studded handbag and plonking it down on the side table
with a diffident, ‘This is what I drink my scotch from.’

Lynch had
never asked her why. Questions weren’t part of the deal between
them. Sitting down at Stokes’ laptop, he searched the recent
documents history and pulled up a file of the contacts Paul had
made chasing after Michel Freij, the little job he had been doing
for Lynch that had cost him his life. The last entries were in bold
text, ‘Spike’ and ‘Deir Na’ee’.

Lynch called
across to Leila. ‘Where’s Deir Na’ee?’

She uncurled
and came to him, looking over his shoulder at the screen, her
blouse opening to show the warm brown mound of her breast. ‘Deir
Na’ee? The lonely home? Sounds like something up in the Bekaa.
Never heard of it. Try Googling it. Might be a village
somewhere.’

‘
And
“Spike”?’

She paused,
then turned to regain her place on the sofa. ‘No idea,
habibi
. I’m not a phone
book.’

Lynch
chuckled, the search phrase ‘Deir Na’ee’ for some reason returning
the Irish poem
A bhonnán
bhuí
, The Yellow Bittern. He read it out
loud, the Irish words coming back to him from the mists of distant
childhood, the disinfectant reek of the Sisters of Charity’s
classroom. ‘
A bhonnán bhuí, is é mo léan
do luí, Is do chnámha sínte tar éis do ghrinn, Is chan easba bidh
ach díobháil dí, a d'fhág i do luí thú ar chúl do
chinn.’

Leila was
laughing at him. ‘What are you
saying
?’

‘
It’s Irish.
Deir Na’ee gets that in Google. Christ alone knows why.’

‘
That is not
a language. It sounds like dogs fighting.’

‘
Póg mo thóin
.’

Leila picked
up her book again as Lynch opened the next file in the computer’s
‘recent files’ list, a Word document with the filename
Olives.
The smile left
his face as he read the document with dawning horror.

To be honest
with you, this was not one of my finest moments. I waited for
something to happen, picking flakes of paint off the wall and
cracking them between my fingernails before dropping them. The only
sound in the cell was the ambient roar of emptiness; the occasional
dry snap of paint.

It was
Stokes’ memoir of his time in Jordan. Lynch felt sick. He flicked
to the end of the document, 267 pages down.

And in
sorrowful envy he outran me and took you apart into his
quietness.

They were
Paul’s last words to his lover Aisha, the words taken from TE
Lawrence’s dedication. Lynch’s breathing was harsh as he read the
preceding paragraph, Paul’s description of the moment when he lost
her to the brutality of Jordanian special forces. Lynch had
arranged the raid himself. He hadn’t reckoned on them to be so
heavy-handed, so keen to clean up the loose ends.

They had
killed the girl.

His attempt
to resettle Paul in Beirut had been his way of making amends,
giving the young man a new life after Lynch had ruined his old one.
He had, of course, concealed that he had been the architect of the
raid. Bitterly, Lynch reflected he’d made the same mistake twice,
underestimating the amount of force his actions would bring to bear
on Paul Stokes’ life.

Lynch had
recruited Stokes in Amman, blackmailing the young journalist into
providing information on Jordanian government contracts as well as
on Aisha’s family as part of a joint operation with Israeli
intelligence. Now he had Paul’s side of the story at his
fingertips. He went back to the beginning and read, flicking the
pages until he reached Stokes’ description of their first meeting
together at the British Embassy.

Lynch was
sweating and I caught a hint of stale alcohol under the supermarket
aftershave. His accent was Northern Irish softened, I guessed, by
years away from home.

He stared at
the black text on the screen, his heart pounding in his
chest.
Yeah, thanks for that, Paul.
He couldn’t read any more of the dead man’s
words. He closed the file and slumped back, his forehead dotted
with perspiration.

Lynch had a
long and rich past and he didn’t like it catching up with him, any
of it. He gouged his fingers into his eyes to drive away the
thoughts with physical sensation and assert his sense of self in
the wash of encroaching memories.

‘
Christ, I’m
sorry. I didn’t know. I’ll nail the bastard, Paul. I won’t rest
until I do, I swear.’ He didn’t realise he was talking out loud
until Leila moved over to him, her long, tanned legs catching the
light. ‘What’s wrong, Lynch?’

He forced a
smile. ‘Nothing, nothing. A ghost.’ He pulled the lid of the
computer down. ‘I need a light.’

She handed
him a lighter and curled up on her chair, catlike. She was reading
Proust. He went onto the balcony to feel the cool evening air on
his damp face, lit the clipped cigar and watched the red glow
tremble as he forced himself to stop thinking of the blackened gash
in Paul’s neck.

Lynch gazed
down from the balcony to the street and the sea beyond where the
last of the day’s light still shimmered red on the distant waves.
The
azan
sounded,
the
maghrib
prayer. Lynch listened, enjoying the sweetness of the
muezzin
’s voice carried
over the sound of traffic on the streets below as the man repeated
his affirmations:
Allahu
akbar
, the rhythm calming and familiar.
God is great.

The doorbell
sounded. Lynch paused, puzzled, the cigar halfway to his lips.
Leila uncurled from her chair and escaped into the bedroom, part of
their unwritten agreement to lead separate lives in public. He left
his cigar balanced on the green plastic Heineken ashtray and went
inside.

Palmer stood
at the door. The embassy man was freshly laundered; Lynch could
even smell the soap and toothpaste. Palmer simpered. ‘Can I come
in?’

‘
Sure. G’wan
wit’ ye.’

Lynch kicked
the door shut with his heel and followed the young man down the
hallway, catching the flash of Palmer’s forehead passing the
mirror.

‘
Drink?’

‘
Um, no
thanks.’

‘
Suit
yourself. What gives, then?’

Palmer pulled
an envelope from his jacket pocket. ‘You’re to accompany Paul
Stokes’ body to London. The funeral’s on Monday. H.E. is not
terribly happy about the complaints from the Lebanese and the local
press have been giving Chancery quite a hard time about his
death.’

Lynch took
the envelope. At least it was a business-class flight. His eyes
narrowed. This was a hospital pass. ‘How much media interest,
exactly?’

Palmer
snorted. ‘You know what they’re like, journalists. Stokes was one
of their own, all that.’

‘
And pre-fucking-cisely what does that do for my cover, Nigel?
You remember
cover
don’t you? The quaint, old-fashioned notion that intelligence
is a covert activity? Like, you know,
secret
?’

‘
You’re
supposed to be the deputy commercial attaché, it’s not totally
unprecedented. You won’t be asked to act as spokesperson or
anything. But Chancery needs to send someone to accompany the body
and so on.’

Lynch read
the booking slip printout stapled to the ticket,
Accompanying deceased: Paul
Stokes
. He noticed Palmer staring at the
Orrefors glass on the table and the volume of Proust lying next to
it.

‘
Thanks,
Palmer. Door’s right there behind ye.’