The prince's Range Rover and driver were waiting out front, engine running, when I walked out. I was just about ready to get into the passenger seat when I spotted what looked like the same three guys I'd seen the day before sitting in the BMW. One guy was wearing the same black vest. Only now they were standing by a late-model Mercedes in front of the Al Dente restaurant. All three were wearing sandals. Christians, and especially Christians living in Ashrafiyah, don't wear sandals. Invading Muslim hordes wear sandals. The rest of their clothing was way too shabby for Ashrafiyah. None of them had beards, but that didn't mean anything.
I motioned for the driver to sit tight, then went back inside the Albergo and asked the receptionist if I could see the manager. I was told he was in the dining room on the eighth floor.
The manager was French, maybe fifty, as slim and elegant as the rest of the place: Lanvin tie, the whole Gallic works, shining like a lighthouse all
the way across the room. I asked him if I could have a word in private, and he led me out to the terrace, which overlooks Martyrs' Square, the old city and beyond that the Med. It crossed my mind that Buckley's penultimate act of freedom was doing just this: taking a last look at the sea.
"I need to use a private office."
"My office is completely at your disposal." It's hard to beat a deluxe hotel, as Mother used to lecture me.
I followed the manager downstairs and waited while he unlocked his office. Then I surprised him by closing the door behind me, with him on the outside. First, I scanned all the documents the prince had given me in Shtawrah and downloaded them onto the manager's computer. I logged onto the Internet and went to www| (com, a site run by a CIA proprietary with software that allows you to hide scanned documents in images. Then I picked out three photos from the hotel's website and distributed the documents between them. When I was through, I wrote an e-mail to John O'Neill:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. O'Neill: We are pleased to confirm your reservations for 24 September.
The Albergo.
As soon as the e-mail was launched, I erased it along with the scanned documents, then used the hotel's photocopier to make a copy of the documents for the manager to overnight to O'Neill. The originals I was going to walk out of the hotel with. If it wasn't my paranoia running wild-if in fact those three guys outside were waiting for me-I wanted them to have something to grab. Never disappoint a mugger. The last thing I did was to make out an Aramex international air bill addressed to O'Neill at his office.
The manager was waiting outside the door when I came out, seemingly unperturbed that I'd taken over his office for almost thirty minutes.
"There is a possibility someone will come and ask for this package you're about to send for me," I said. "Don't give it to them under any circumstances."
He nodded gravely as I handed it to him along with the air bill, like a partisan about to be sent over enemy lines.
The Albergo ran like a Swiss clock. It was famous for it in small circles. As soon as I turned around to leave, the manager would give the packet to an incorruptible bellboy who would run off to the nearest Aramex office, which would dispatch the documents to either the London or Paris flight. Within hours, my packet would be in the air, out of reach of whoever was waiting outside to talk to me.
As I headed for the door, I considered the possibility that the gang outside could simply push their way through the lobby when I was gone, image the Albergo's computer, and come up with the e-mail and scanned papers, but I didn't see it happening. The overnight package and the prince's originals, I thought, should be all the misdirection I needed.
As things turned out, I probably overreacted. The Mercedes was gone from in front of Al Dente. There wasn't a person in sight in sandals or underdressed in any way for overdressed Ashrafiyah. The entire streetscape was the very picture of upscale, old, Christian Beirut. I took a deep breath of relief, crossed the street, and let myself into the back of the prince's Range Rover.
As I got in, I saw three photos on the seat, all facedown. Two were eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies. The first one was of an overturned car, the prince lying beside it, eyes closed almost in repose, some kind of mottled scarf around his neck. The photo looked as if it had been taken on the Shtawra-Balabakk road. The second photo showed the same car, same road, from the other side. A second man lay faceup. Half his head seemed to have been blown off or scraped away. The other half looked enough like the prince that I guessed it was his brother, the adviser to Kuwaiti intelligence.
"Let's go!" I yelled to the driver as I picked up the third photo: an old Polaroid, color, four-by-four. The man kneeling in the foreground was some emaciated version of Bill Buckley. Standing behind him was the Iranian from Peshawar. A little younger but definitely him. In the sunlight, his red hair seemed to be on fire. Then I looked closer. Someone had colored the hair red with a Magic Marker.
"Go!" I screamed again at the driver.
He turned around, but it wasn't anyone I'd ever seen before. He was still staring at me as he slipped the key out of the ignition, opened the door and began to walk away.
I was lunging to do the same when a gray Internal Security Forces Toyota Land Cruiser screeched to within an inch of the Rover's front fender and the two occupants jumped out. Neither was in uniform, but one carried an M-16.
"Passport!" one of them yelled at me, sticking his head through the back window. He was clean shaven. He could have been a cop. How was I to know?
I was pulling the German passport out of my back pocket when he jammed his pistol into my temple. "On the floor!" he yelled, this time in French.
He opened the door, climbed in, dug his foot into the back of my head, and assured me that if I moved so much as a fingernail, I'd be pudding; then he threw a jacket over my head.
I was trying to figure out what the immediate future might hold-arrest, interrogation, torture, more; I'd been trained for them, even had more than a taste of each-when the other door opened and someone slid calmly in.
"Mr. Waller, you know what you are? The inoculation. The inoculation against the truth. You run around the world, wildly exposing some insane plot about bombing airplanes, a plot hatched by a redheaded Iranian. They write you off as mad. 'Poor, poor soul,' they say when another such story passes by them. 'Some fool actually listened to Waller.' If you didn't exist, I would have had to invent you."
The accent was American, but with a peculiar rolling r. Terry Anderson had been right on the money: like someone who learns French before English.
"So you see, Mr. Waller, the Bible is a liar. You have a small piece of the truth right now, but you don't look very free to me."
He was sliding out the far door when someone reached in and swiped me across the side of the head with the butt of a rifle-a love tap, really, just enough to stun me and send blood streaming down my shirt collar and jacket while he rifled my pockets. By the time I realized I was alone and
could finally get up, the ISF jeep was gone, as was anyone who had bothered to watch what was happening. A chic lady dressed to the nines walked by, looked at me in the backseat of the Range Rover, turned away in fright, and clattered down the street in her high heels. Beirut was back to being a prosperous Phoenician entrepot.
The envelope with the prince's documents was gone. So were the three gruesome photos, the German passport, every other piece of identity real or false, and my money.
Either Nabil was wrong about Mousavi being dead or someone was still trying to drive me over the edge.