Reception woke me the next morning. Someone had dropped off a note. The bellboy brought it up.
Dear Max,
My brother is in Beirut tomorrow tonight. Let's meet. I'll
send my car around at eight.
Prince Al Sabah
I should have already left Lebanon, satisfied with what the prince had given me. Each minute I stayed was a roll of the dice. But I was intrigued by what the prince's brother would be bringing from Kuwait, especially if he knew something new about BT Trading. It looked now like it was a good decision.
The rest of the day I spent on the Albergo's eighth-floor terrace, trying to come up with a working theory from the bits and pieces I already knew,
or thought I knew. Essentially, Frank Beckman retires and starts digging up old contacts to make his fortune. Most are informants he ran during his thirty-two-year career, but one is David Channing, whose father seemed to have a knack for meeting people all over the Middle East, especially on the far ends of the continuum. My guess, and here I was stretching, was that David Channing had taken over Oliver's networks when the old man died and that he was now Frank's conduit to those same people. After what India had told me, Webber was likely part of the package, too. That would explain why Webber framed me. Frank realizes I have a photo of Oliver Channing with bin Laden (that KSM took) and decides I have to be discredited and fired, and the photo destroyed. Webber takes care of Frank's dirty work.
A lot of question marks remained in the margins. Was the prince correct that an American was working with KSM? If so, was it Channing the younger or (and) Beckman? And if so, had he/they been working with KSM on the investment side back in '94 when he was plotting to bring down those twelve airplanes? (Frank was just getting his feet wet then in the private sector. This would have been a chance for him to make a big enough bundle to launch his business in grand style.)
I admit believing Frank was involved in bombing twelve passenger airliners was a deeply cynical link in this chain of thought. Christ, I'd known Frank forever. I'd had my ass saved by him. But I couldn't avoid it. Frank's frieze, his India-Modigliani, the Tuttle Street mansion-they all sat there at the edge of my memory, gnawing on my score-keeping. So did the fact that Frank had tried to tie me up with a crook like Rousset and everything India had told me about Frank and Lawson and Webber. Moral flaws run through me like the Amazon, but Frank had betrayed me in ways I didn't expect or deserve.
When the sun started to set, I borrowed a laptop from the front desk and went back to my room to check e-mail.
There was the usual spam, an e-mail from the landlord telling me a pipe had broken in my bathroom and that he'd let the plumbers in to fix it. Nothing from Marissa. Worse, nothing from Rikki. I'd been gone so long,
under the radar and off the grid so many months, that they both must have figured I'd finally disappeared from their lives for good. Channels of communication were closing down fast. Marissa, I wasn't worried about. We kept up the usual incivilities of exes. I could disappear for years and not afflict her with my absence. Rikki was something else: I was afraid I might never repair things with her. We'd ended last summer's visit so well. This summer there wouldn't be a visit. More necessary losses. Or maybe not so necessary. Maybe that was just my excuse to myself.
I scrolled down and found a message from the e-fax site. It had to be from O'Neill. I got in the site, typed in my cell phone number, and watched it unlock an Adobe document: eight pages of calls for Millis's phone from June 1 through June 4, the day Millis was found dead.
I scanned the sheet until I came to a call made at 13:56 on June 2. It was to Frank Beckman's home number. Millis must have called Frank minutes after he got back to his office after having lunch with me. The next call to Frank was at 07:32 on June 4, the same day Millis was found with his head blown off in the Breezeway Motel.
Granted, Millis and Frank knew each other from Millis's Peshawar days, when Frank was head of the Afghan Task Force. It wouldn't be odd if they called each other from time to time. But what was the call on June 4 about? I would have thought Millis had other things on his mind.