Agents of Innocence Read online

  Agents of Innocence

  ALSO BY DAVID IGNATIUS

  The Bank of Fear

  A Firing Offense

  SIRO

  Agents of Innocence

  DAVID IGNATIUS

  Copyright © 1987 by David Ignatius

  All rights reserved.

  First published as a Norton paperback 1997

  The text of this book is composed in Janson Alternate, with display type set in Legend.

  Composition and manufacturing by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.

  Book design by Jacques Chazaud.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ignatius, David, 1950-

  Agents of innocence.

  I. Title.

  PS3359.G54A7 1987 813’.54 87-18583

  ISBN: 978-0-393-31738-1

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Eve and Elisa,

  and the nameless friends who shared

  their knowledge of the Middle East

  in the hope that it would do some good.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I am grateful to the friends who read and commented on drafts of this novel: my editor, Linda Healey; my agent, Raphael Sagalyn; my wife and first reader, Eve Ignatius; my parents, Paul and Nancy Ignatius; Lincoln Caplan; Mark Lynch; and especially my friend of nearly twenty years, Garrett Epps, who encouraged this project from the beginning.

  The story that follows is a work of fiction. Though it is drawn against the background of the Middle East, the characters, scenes, conversations, and events are the product of the author’s imagination. The action takes place in the Lebanon of the mind, not in any real place.

  Terror, and the pit, and the snare

  are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth!

  He who flees at the sound of the terror

  shall fall into the pit;

  and he who climbs out of the pit

  shall be caught in the snare.

  For the windows of heaven are

  opened,

  and the foundations of the earth

  tremble.

  —ISAIAH, 24:17–18

  Contents

  Part I: Prologue Beirut; April 1983

  Part II: Beirut; Fall 1969

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III: January–March 1970

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part IV: March–May 1970

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part V: June–September 1970

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part VI: September 1970–June 1971

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part VII: 1971–May 1972

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part VIII: June–November 1972

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Part IX: June 1978–January 1979

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Part X: Epilogue London; 1984

  PART I

  Prologue Beirut; April 1983

  Beirut; April 1983

  Fuad heard the bomb twice. What stayed in his mind long afterward was the reverberation of the explosion, sounding in real life a fraction of a second after he heard it on the telephone. In that moment, which contained at once the past and the future, Fuad thought of Rogers and said a prayer.

  Fuad was at a restaurant called Au Vieux Quartier in East Beirut, calling his hotel in West Beirut to check for a message, when he heard it through the earpiece. The roar of an explosion—loud even for Beirut—travelling through the telephone wires at near the speed of light. A millisecond later, in the time it took the sound waves to travel from West to East, he heard the roar in his other ear.

  “A bomb!” shouted the frightened desk clerk into the phone.

  “Can you see where the smoke is coming from?” asked Fuad. There was a pause as the clerk ran into the street to check.

  “From the Corniche,” said the clerk breathlessly when he returned. “Near the American Embassy.”

  “What color is the smoke?”

  “White,” said the clerk.

  “Ya’Allah!” said Fuad with a cry of supplication. My God!

  White smoke meant a very large explosion. A bomb that detonated so powerfully and quickly that it sucked the oxygen out of the air, leaving a white plume of smoke.

  Fuad’s first impulse was to bolt the restaurant and find Rogers, dead or alive. But discipline took over. He had a meeting at one-thirty with a courier who was bringing an important piece of intelligence. For a brief moment, he imagined what Rogers would say when they met that night at the Ararat Restaurant and Fuad told him that, even on this chaotic day, he had managed to obtain the document that Rogers had requested.

  Fuad took a seat at the bar, waiting for his contact to arrive. Everyone was talking about the explosion. Did you hear it? It was very loud! The bartender remarked that the bomb must have been in West Beirut and everyone nodded and relaxed slightly. West Beirut was on the other side. It was in another universe. Fuad said nothing. He ordered a glass of mineral water and sipped it quietly.

  The bartender and his friends continued their conversation. Fuad listened unobtrusively. He seemed almost to blend into the surroundings. Though he was a Sunni Moslem, he looked like any of the rich Christian businessmen sitting at the bar. Like them, he wore a silk suit and lit his cigarettes with a gold lighter. The Arabs have a word for this sort of camouflage. They call it taqiyya. It means that deception and concealment are permissible, when they are necessary. If a Moslem finds himself in the midst of a group of Christians, he should say that he is a Christian. What does it matter? The truth is elastic.

  A Lebanese man stuck his head in the door and shouted to the bartender: “L’Ambassade Américaine!” The buzz of conversation about the bomb grew louder. The American Embassy had been hit! Fuad felt his stomach tighten. He tried to think of something else, but every thought led back to the embassy and Rogers. He tried saying the names of Allah silently to calm himself. The compassionate. The merciful….

  “The Marines will know what to do!” said the bartender knowingly. Several customers agreed.

  No, they won’t, thought Fuad. That was the problem. There were 2,000 Marines at the airport and no one could explain why. When Fuad had asked a member of the CIA station six months ago what the Marines were going to accomplish in Lebanon, the young CIA officer had explained that it was “a presence mission.” “A presence mission,” Fuad had repeated thoughtfully, nodding his head, not wanting to offend the young CIA man. “Of course.” Perhaps Rogers would know what to do.

  Fuad chain-smoked cigarettes and stared out the window. At precisely one-thirty, his contact, a dignified little man named Mr. Khoury,
arrived to find Fuad lying in wait outside the restaurant. Fuad steered the man into a back alley, took the document from him and bid a hasty goodbye. Then he raced toward West Beirut and the wreckage of the embassy.

  Bombs bring out the crowds in Beirut, and Fuad found throngs of people still surging along the Corniche toward the embassy when he arrived at 2:30 P.M. The area had been cordoned off and he had to show his American passport to a Lebanese Army checkpoint to get close enough to see the building.

  What he saw brought tears to his eyes. It was as if the flesh of the building had been ripped away, revealing the frail skeleton beneath. Many of the survivors were still standing in small groups in front of the building, too dazed to move. As Fuad listened to their conversations, he pieced together a picture of what had happened.

  The people inside the embassy had never heard the sound of the explosion. Their first sensation was a sudden flash of light, then a terrific force blowing in the windows and hurling them, still in their chairs, against the walls of their offices. It was like being in a centrifuge, the survivors said. Dust and shards of glass seemed to fly through the air in slow motion.

  When things stopped moving, the first thought most people had was that the embassy had been hit by a mortar round. Several people, who had been through such attacks before, stayed on the floor awaiting another round. Others, their bodies pumping with adrenalin, pushed through the debris like Supermen in a half-mad effort to lock their office safes.

  The lobby of the embassy was now a vision of Hell: a blackened wreck, dense with smoke and dust. Outside there was chaos as ambulances, fire trucks, Lebanese Army troops, and Marines from the airport converged on the bombed-out embassy. The Marines had established a defense perimeter around the building. The young soldiers, tense and hollow-eyed, fingered the triggers of their automatic weapons as they scanned the gathering crowd of Lebanese onlookers.

  Behind them in the ruins of the embassy, rescue workers were picking pieces of bodies out of the rubble.

  Fuad considered asking one of the embassy officials standing numbly in front of the building about Rogers, but decided against it. It would be a gross breach of security. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the truth yet. So he loitered instead in the shadows. He felt a chill, so cold that he trembled for a moment there by the sea.

  Fuad checked his hotel for messages, thinking that perhaps Rogers had left a coded signal, but there was nothing.

  A last wisp of hope led him to the hotel where Rogers had been staying, an anonymous, out-of-the-way place off Hamra Street. He peppered the desk clerk with questions. Was Mr. Rogers in his room? Had he left any messages? Had he checked out? Had anyone been in his room?

  The clerk refused to answer any questions until Fuad slipped 100 Lebanese pounds into his coat pocket.

  Rogers had not come back, the clerk said. But an hour ago three men had arrived from the embassy in a great hurry. They entered Rogers’s room, packed up all his belongings, and took them to a car waiting outside.

  They paid the bill and said that Mr. Rogers had checked out.

  PART II

  Beirut; Fall 1969

  1

  Beirut; September 1969

  Tom Rogers stepped off the Middle East Airlines plane into a vision of Oz. The new office towers and apartment blocks of West Beirut sparkled in the afternoon sun; the diminutive porters at the airport bustled to and fro, shouting and strutting as they hurled the baggage from place to place; in the distance, their horns blaring to wake the dead, a line of cars and trucks stood bumper-to-bumper along the airport road, bound for the enchanted city.

  Rogers carried his two-year-old daughter Amy gently in his arms. She had gotten sick in Oman and was still weak. Rogers blamed the incompetence of the Omani doctor. But in Beirut, Rogers was convinced, Amy would get well. Behind Rogers, holding their eight-year-old son Mark by the hand, came his wife Jane. She was radiant, with jet-black hair and a creamy complexion, looking stylish even in the simple gray skirt and red blouse she had worn on the long flight.

  The air was soft and fragrant, scented with traces of olive and mint. It was early fall, the start of that long, blissful season before winter. Rogers cradled his daughter against his chest and carried her to the red-and-white Middle East Airlines bus for the ride to the terminal. The other passengers smiled as they gave up their seats for Rogers’s wife and children. A man offered Rogers’s son a piece of candy.

  “We love children,” said the man in English, as if speaking for the entire Arab world.

  “Shokran,” said Rogers’s son, using the Arabic word for thank you. The passengers beamed. How cute. How innocent.

  Rogers listened to the buzz of Arabic voices on the bus: Lebanese accents, mostly; a few Palestinian; a few Egyptian. Most of them were talking about how good it was to be back in Beirut.

  A fellow passenger might have guessed that Rogers was a college professor visiting Lebanon with his family to teach for a year at the American University of Beirut, or perhaps a journalist assigned to Beirut by one of the big American newspapers. He was tall and thin, wearing a worn corduroy suit. He had a slightly disheveled look: a shock of dark hair not quite combed, his white shirt fraying slightly at the collar, his suit jacket missing a button on the sleeve. He was wearing reading glasses to study the customs forms: they were half-glasses, made of tortoise shell, perched on the middle of his nose so that he seemed always to be looking over the top of them. As Rogers stared out the window of the bus toward the hills above the airport, he had a blank expression. The look of a man lost in thought, or perhaps lost in the absence of thought.

  The bus deposited the passengers at the terminal. Rogers presented his diplomatic passport to the Lebanese policeman at passport control. The policeman looked at him and smiled the thin, corrupt smile of immigration officers around the world. Rogers could almost hear the click of the shutter as a camera somewhere took his picture. He studied the policeman’s face and wondered, for an instant, how many different intelligence services had bought a piece of him.

  Rogers hailed one of the sorry-looking yellow taxis outside the terminal. He told the driver in crisp Arabic that he wanted to go to the Sarkis Building in the Minara District, near the old Beirut lighthouse. That, he told the children, would be their new home.

  “As you like,” said the driver in English. He was shocked that an American—he had to be an American, he was so tall and he wore shoes with laces in them—could speak the language.

  Rogers bribed the landlord the first day, in the precise amount suggested by the administrative officer at the embassy. The man was effusively grateful and took to calling Rogers by the honorific, Effendi. Rogers also paid a small bribe to the doorman, who mattered a good deal more to the happiness and security of his family. He was a dark-skinned man who had come to Lebanon several decades ago from Assiut, in upper Egypt, and never left. He liked to be addressed by the Egyptian term for doorman: Bawab.

  The apartment was vast and bright. It was laid out like a villa, with a large living room and dining room for entertaining, surrounded by bedrooms, a library, a playroom, and a maid’s room. The center of the apartment was a large screened porch overlooking the Mediterranean. From the porch, you could watch the fishermen heading out to sea in their skiffs in the morning, and you could hear the crash of the waves against the rocky coast, 200 feet below. It was an apartment where a family could live richly and stylishly, in the Lebanese way.

  Jane took the children on forays to scout out the neighborhood. There was Smith’s market on Sadat Street, which seemed to have every spice and condiment—every canned, potted, and dried food imaginable—from around the world. A few doors down was the ice-cream man selling the Arab version of ice cream, sweeter than sweet, with a texture and flavor almost like pudding. In an alley was a tiny shop that sold coffee, mixed with spices in the Arab way, and on a summer day the whole of Sadat Street seemed to smell of cardamom.

  Across the street was a florist, selling the most delicat
e flowers: orchid and rose, iris and gladeolus. The owner was a burly Sunni Moslem man, completely bald, who had the appearance and manner of a Turkish wrestler. It was a incongruous sight: this huge bull of a man, gently wrapping flowers for the fine ladies of Beirut.

  The fall social season began in Moslem West Beirut soon after Rogers arrived. The shops in the Place des Canons twinkled with lights and the city was swept along by a tide of self-congratulation and good cheer.

  It was the season for frantic partying: a prominent Lebanese doctor who worked for Aramco threw a farewell bash for himself at the Phoenicia Hotel; he was departing, poor man, for Saudi Arabia and received many condolences; in the Sunni neighborhood of Koreitem, the Moslem ladies of the Beirut College for Women were beginning rehearsals for their annual concert of Christmas music; in a similar spirit of ecumenicism, the International Women’s Club of Beirut was planning its fall tour of churches and mosques.

  Hamra Street, the grand boulevard of the new Lebanon, was crowded with shoppers, peering in the windows at the latest dresses from Paris, shoes from Italy, books from London and New York. This was the precinct of Lebanon’s new money, where the middle class flocked to buy fashion, culture, respectability. The language in the shops was French, perhaps a little English, but certainly not Arabic, which represented a culture the Lebanese were rushing to escape.