Max, you bastard, where'd you get to?" Yuri sounded genuinely pissed. "I met a girl in Larnaca. We got to drinking, and, well, you know, when I woke up, your boat was gone."
"You went at it for twenty-four hours? Wow."
I knew I was running this girl thing into the ground. But the fact is that in this business you pretty much have to orient your life around a lie-or "cover for action," as headquarters calls it. If you're in Moscow and you own a dog, you spend your two-year tour walking Moscow's streets and parks. It gives you a reason for being out late at night, getting up at the crack of dawn, wandering around strange neighborhoods picking up shit. Antique collecting, jogging, amateur archaeology-they all work the same way. I can't remember when, but by default my cover for action became women. It seemed to still be working, at least with Yuri.
"I need to get to Lebanon," I told him, "but not through the front door."
It wasn't just that I didn't want to fly from Tel Aviv to Amman, Jordan, and from there on to Beirut on an overstretched German passport or an even more overworked Irish one, although that was certainly part of it. I also had to consider that I'd used Rafik Hariri to bait the Saudi trap, and I didn't want anyone thinking I was now heading to the prime minister's office in Lebanon. That's the problem with misdirection: You unknowingly burn bridges you might need later.
"Okay. Okay. I'll fix it," Yuri said. "I got a car leaving tonight. Call this number in Ramallah, and they'll tell you where to go."
You make a Russian your friend, and he sticks with you the whole way, potholes and all.
The number Yuri gave me led me to a garage just outside Ramallah-more accurately, a shed with a pit decorated with portraits of suicide bombers and presided over by a lone mechanic changing the transmission on a twenty-year-old Peugeot. After the mechanic made me a glass of tea, he took me around back to a sparkling Mercedes that looked as if it had just come out of the showroom.
"A 2001," he said, polishing the door handle with a rag.
Twenty minutes later a Palestinian in his twenties showed up, wearing Top-Siders, Quicksilver jeans, and a polo shirt. He put me in the passenger seat and we headed off east, to Jordan. Two miles from the border, we stopped by the side of the road so the driver could switch the yellow Israeli plates for green Palestinian ones.
As soon as we crossed the Israeli line, he stopped again and exchanged the Palestinian plates for Jordanian ones. Jordanian customs was a breeze- five minutes flat. The driver seemed to know everyone by first name.
We were halfway to Amman when it finally dawned on me what Yuri did for a living these days: He fenced cars. The new Audis and Porsches and Beemers waiting to board the boat in La Spezia, the new Mercedes I was riding in were all stolen.
By the time we passed through Amman and were heading to the Syrian border, I was dead asleep. I woke up just enough at the next checkpoint to
give the driver my German passport (at least I thought it was the German one), but I might just as well have handed him a four-day pass to Disney World. Yuri's networks clearly included Syrian immigrations and customs.
By the time I emerged into the land of the living again, the car was bouncing along a rutted dirt road. Dusk was turning to dark, but it was light enough to see we were ascending up into the anti-Lebanon range. Below was Zabadani, the old Iranian camp that was used to supply the Pasdaran in the 1980s, a stark reminder that I was about to jump from the frying pan into the fire.
When we got to the top of the pass, the road was hardly a cow path. We slowed down to a crawl, driving off the path to avoid boulders. My driver obviously knew the road. At the very top, someone had plowed a path through the remaining patches of snow. There wasn't a Syrian or Lebanese border guard in sight.
The road improved as we dropped down the other side into the Biqa' Valley. In Hamm, the first village, the road was even paved. Thirty minutes later, in Balabakk, the driver dropped me off in front of the legendary Palmyra Hotel. He might have said ten words the entire way. Nearby, the Roman ruins glowed in the light of a nearly full moon.
Before I went up to my room, I ordered a taxi for the next morning to take me to Beirut. I wasn't going to Beirut, but there was no sense in telegraphing that I was really going to Shtawrah.