Exile Hunter Read online

  Two seconds later, Linder heard a metallic whirring sound and looked up to find a half dozen men in Lebanese gendarme uniforms rappelling from the roof onto Philip Eaton’s balcony. Then a pair of stun grenades exploded behind him, tossing him against the stone railing, dazed, deafened, and out of breath. The last thing Warren Linder remembered was the look of sorrowful reproach on Philip Eaton’s face.

  S3

  Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  SEPTEMBER, SATURDAY, WEST BEIRUT

  Warren Linder looked down a narrow alley with steep banks of granite-faced apartment buildings on either side. It was Beirut, but he had lost any sense of direction, so he set out uphill to find a vantage point from which he could determine where he was. After climbing for several blocks, he emerged opposite a dusty lot where the cinder-block shell of a two-story house lay unfinished, then mounted its concrete stairway to the flat roof.

  Standing on the concrete platform, he felt a chill wind at his back and scanned the distant shoreline from the setting sun to the port and onward to the glinting reflections of Jebel Achrafiyé in the east. All at once, he realized that he was on the wrong side of town, in West Beirut, and must cross the Green Line to reach his destination in Achrafiyé. However, to his surprise, the city before him was not the pacified Beirut of today, but some earlier version of the city during its decades-long civil war. The commercial district, which stood between him and his destination, seemed a dangerous no-man’s-land of destroyed and decaying buildings infested with snipers and squads of murderous militiamen who fought by night. Already sundown paled the sky, yet he must cross this wasteland before darkness fell. A flood of panic overtook him.

  Linder opened his eyes and sat upright with a start, unleashing a wave of nausea. He had been lying on a bare military cot in a concrete cell barely wider than the cot, with a stainless steel sink and toilet behind him and a few square meters of empty floor space separating the foot of the cot from the sliding steel door. The concrete walls were unfinished and the door bore a fresh coat of gray paint. A single incandescent light bulb hung far out of reach above him. On the floor beside the cot stood an unopened plastic bottle of Lebanese spring water and an earthenware plate stacked with a half-dozen disks of stale pita bread.

  Linder felt a throbbing pain at his left temple where his head had hit Philip Eaton’s balcony after he lost consciousness. He tried to stand but the pain drove him back onto the cot.

  He tried a different approach, resting his forearms on his thighs and tilting forward until his feet supported his weight and he could stand upright. As he balanced on wobbly legs, a sharp pain in his left knee suddenly eclipsed his nausea and headache. He limped across the floor to the door and tugged at the handle. It wouldn’t budge.

  Giving up on the door, he returned to the cot and sat to review his circumstances. First, the dream. It had been frightening, to be sure, but its content and images were refreshingly different from those in his usual nightmares. In those, the persons he had targeted over the years for assassination or capture had reproached him bitterly for having marked them for ruin, holding their pale and forlorn faces close to his.

  In this dream, no victims accosted him or barred his way. Though the way forward seemed perilous, it lay open to him if he dared force his way through. The problem, of course, was that the dream offered him no other choice. When and if it recurred, he would face this personal valley of the shadow of death again and again.

  A few moments later, he heard a crackling overhead like the static from an amplifier and looked up at the ceiling. Just above the door, he spotted a built-in loudspeaker and surmised that the unit might also contain a microphone or video camera.

  “Anybody there?” he called out as he examined the speaker more closely.

  No answer.

  “Anybody? Nobody?” he called louder. “Hey! Come on, how about opening the door?”

  Still no answer.

  He retrieved the water bottle and drank half of it at one draught. He still felt nauseous, but the throbbing at his temple and the ache in his knee pushed the nausea far enough into the background for him to notice his hunger. He broke off a piece of pita bread and held it to his nose. It was stiff and dry but smelled okay, so he ate it.

  He chewed slowly on the bread while his thoughts moved on. His physical discomfort was a tangible reminder that he had somehow been rendered unconscious and removed forcibly from Philip Eaton’s flat. Whatever prompted Bednarski and Denniston to order the capture of Eaton and his family, his cover as Joe Tanner was irretrievably blown and it was unlikely he would be cleared to resume undercover work against rebel exiles any time soon. It seemed he would be returning to the States, after all.

  The next question was how badly the Department’s effort against the rebel exiles had been compromised by the way the operation against Eaton had ended, and more pointedly, how much damage this would likely do to his career. Without a doubt, various regulations and procedures existed to cover situations like this, but in Linder’s experience, such rules were usually applied after the fact to justify whatever decision the bosses had already chosen to reach.

  Certain favorite sons, often those with strong Party credentials, were sometimes let off scot-free or with a nominal slap on the wrist. Employees with reputations as black sheep, mavericks, or lone wolves usually had the book thrown at them. And in his own case, Linder had a pretty good idea of how Headquarters would see things. Unless Denniston or Bednarski came to his rescue, he would be cast as the scapegoat and thrown to the wolves.

  Linder scolded himself for not having listened to his inner voice that had warned him not to come to Beirut. Even after his arrival, he might have found a pretext to shirk his role in the operation. It wouldn’t have required him to disappear completely, as in his persistent fantasy. All it would have required was to stay out of action long enough for Denniston and Bednarski to find a replacement.

  All at once Linder felt a wave of stomach-churning anxiety sweep over him as his thoughts turned to Patricia Kendall and her daughter. Had they also been gassed and brought unconscious to a cell like this, perhaps a few doors away? After having not seen Patricia for two decades, what could it possibly mean that their utterly improbable meeting had come to such an end?

  Linder strained his ears for sounds from the corridor. Nothing. That did not surprise him, as this was not some Hollywood dungeon or third-world fingernail factory, where the screams of torture victims echoed through the corridors to terrorize would-be enemies of the state. This was a temporary holding facility of thoroughly modern design, an isolation ward of sorts designed to preserve detainees and their information for orderly intelligence exploitation. If Patricia, her daughter, her father, and her husband were here, each would be kept apart from the other and interrogated one by one.

  Linder’s thoughts turned next to the words he would use if and when he saw Patricia again, whether now, at Philip Eaton’s trial, or after sentencing. The DSS would expect him to testify against her father and Roger, to be sure. If he refused, it could be the end of him. Yet if he took the witness stand and sent them to the camps, it would destroy his last shred of self-respect. Linder raised his hands and covered his eyes with his cupped palms. Of all the rebel exiles to be sent after, why did they have to sic him on Philip Eaton?

  Overwhelmed by a rush of conflicting emotions, Linder lay back on the cot to clear his mind. A few minutes later, he heard footsteps outside and then the grating of a key in a lock.

  The door opened. It was Neil Denniston, wearing a crisply pressed beige suit and a cheerful smile. Was it morning already or were they trying to disorient him? Behind Denniston stood a brawny pair of Marine Security Guards in desert camouflage fatigues, each armed with a truncheon containing a built-in canister of pepper spray.

  “May I come in?” Denniston asked.

  “I’d rather come out,” Linder replied.

  “Sorry.
Can’t do that. If you’ll step back, I’ll come inside and explain.”

  “You do that. And you’d better make it a damned good one.”

  Denniston walked past Linder and nodded to the Marines, who stepped back and rolled the sliding door shut.

  “Where am I?”

  “At the Embassy,” Denniston replied.

  “Why the cell?”

  “Listen, I can imagine what you must be thinking,” Denniston answered, observing Linder carefully. “You must have a million questions. If you’ll be patient, I’m sure we can work things out. But for the moment, I think it will be better if you stay here with the other detainees.”

  Linder remained silent.

  “The problem is,” Denniston went on, “we couldn’t tell you about our backup plan before you met with Kendall because we didn’t want that knowledge to color your approach to him. And, right now, despite whatever suspicions he and Eaton may have about you after being taken into custody, we want it to look like you’re in just as much trouble as they are.”

  “Are they all here in the Embassy?”

  “All four, including the two females,” Denniston answered.

  “But why? Eaton was ready to turn himself in, for God’s sake. All he wanted from us was to leave his family alone.”

  “Yeah, we heard what he told you,” Denniston replied coolly. “We’ve played back the audio a dozen times. But Eaton’s no fool. If we had let him out of sight for even a minute, the whole gang would have slipped the noose. Once it was clear that your cover was blown, we had to move in.”

  “But what for?” Linder persisted. “Eaton’s money is nearly gone. He was ready to retire.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  But Linder did. In his decade of undercover work among foreign terrorists and domestic insurgents, he had developed a finely tuned sense of whom to believe and when. This was difficult to accept among the deskbound staff wallahs at Headquarters and do-nothing drones in the larger DSS bases abroad, for whom the only good insurgent was a dead one. But, as he should have known from the outset, the country’s bedrock presumption of innocence had died the moment the DSS was born.

  So why, he asked himself, had he assured the old man that he would go to bat for him? Linder could not form a clear answer. He might have known better, but had done it anyway.

  Denniston used the momentary break in conversation to reach into his breast pocket and pull out a multi-page typed document.

  “Here,” he said, presenting the document to Linder. “We’ll need you to sign this before the detainees begin their interrogation.”

  Linder scanned it rapidly. It was a criminal confession that admitted to a broad range of subversive activities. He leafed forward to the end, where he found an appendix listing the names of nearly every exile contact he had reported to Headquarters over the past year. He returned to the signature page, where his name was shown both as Joseph Tanner and as Warren Linder.

  “You’ve got my true name in there, you nitwit. Take it out and print a new one.”

  Linder tore the paper in half, then doubled it and tore it again before handing the pieces back to Denniston.

  “Now why would you do a thing like that?” Denniston asked as if he had been insulted. “We need your signature both ways: in true name and in alias. It’s not what you think it is.”

  “The hell it isn’t. Don’t take me for an idiot. Now get out of here and don’t come back till you’re ready to set me free.”

  Denniston clenched his teeth, turned abruptly to face the steel door, and pounded his fist on it three times to be released.

  * * *

  Linder spent the next two hours pacing back and forth along the narrow passage beside his cot. What had happened was unfair, he thought. How could his career have come to this after so many years of dues paying and risk taking to distinguish himself from the fakers, four-flushers, and wannabes? How could he not have seen it coming? Or had he?

  In his tiny cell in the bowels of the American Embassy, Warren Linder had to acknowledge that the Department of State Security did not value his services as highly as he had believed. The powerful and prestigious institution with which he had cast his lot now seemed to consider him expendable. And the man he had thought was his colleague and friend, rather than risk disfavor with those higher up, appeared ready to sell him down the river to preserve the DSS’s illusion of infallibility. Only individuals made mistakes, not institutions, and if any mistakes were made, they were not going to be Denniston’s.

  Linder was at heart an individualist who believed in free will and rejected determinism and its derivative notion of victimhood. To feel sorry for himself and play the victim, while consistent with Unionist doctrine, was beneath his dignity. He was a professional intelligence officer, a highly trained predator and a charter member of the Big Boys Club who was well aware that he had committed more sins than any mortal could atone for in a lifetime. If his personal worldview made any sense, he understood that he would likely be held accountable for at least some of those misdeeds one day, and perhaps that time had come.

  But to be held to account by scoundrels like Denniston and Bednarski offended his sense of natural order. How could one expect to extract truth or justice from distortions and mistruths concocted by professional liars? Perhaps because he did not know the answer and he sensed an inconsistency or two in his reasoning, his head began to ache and he decided to lie down again. An hour or more later, he awoke to the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

  This time, when the door rolled open, his visitor was Bob Bednarski. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled, and the armpits of his shirt stained with perspiration. Linder guessed that he had been working non-stop since the events at Eaton’s apartment. Linder smelled alcohol on his breath and in his acrid sweat.

  “That was the lamest undercover performance I’ve ever heard!” Bednarski exploded the moment the cell door clanged shut. “You rolled over at Eaton’s first objection! You didn’t even make an effort! Do you realize that, by botching your meeting with Eaton, you’ve compromised the Department’s entire campaign against Eaton’s network of offshore financiers? And by forcing us to move in and grab Eaton and his family, you’ve also stirred up a diplomatic incident with the Lebanese government?”

  As Bednarski spoke, flecks of spittle spewed from his mouth, his face turned crimson, and his dull red eyes bulged from their sockets. He had never seen Bednarski so close to hysteria. It was true that Linder had taken an unorthodox tack by not refuting Eaton’s suspicions of Joe Tanner’s story, and one could argue that he had implicitly admitted to being connected with the DSS, but the admission had been essential to eliciting Eaton’s surrender offer.

  No matter how Linder looked at it, Denniston’s and Bednarski’s reasons for storming the apartment, seizing everyone in it, and continuing to hold Linder captive did not add up. The stated goal of the operation had been to neutralize Eaton as an insurgent financier and seize his assets. Rather than allow Linder to persuade Eaton to surrender and return those assets voluntarily, Denniston and Bednarski had taken it upon themselves to grab him. So, whose fault was it now that Eaton’s money still eluded their grasp? And what could possibly justify their locking him up beneath the Embassy and pressuring him to sign a false confession?

  “It seems to me that the choice to take Eaton by force and piss off the Lebanese was all yours, Bob,” Linder replied evenly. “So why blame me? And what’s up with the phony confession? Listen, you can shout at me till you’re blue in the face, but I won’t lift a finger for you until I get out of here.”

  Linder’s measured response seemed to check Bednarski. The Base Chief’s posture and facial expression relaxed palpably before he resumed speaking.

  “Wrong as usual, Linder,” the chief replied. “Once you admitted a government connection and offered to go to bat for Eaton, we had no choice but to seize the lot of you. If we hadn’t, they would have bolted and we would have lo
st the chance to block their funding for the insurgency. Unfortunately, some neighbors saw our team enter the building in Lebanese uniforms and come back out carrying victims on stretchers.”

  Linder gave a bitter laugh.

  “So I’m to blame for everyone else’s screw-ups, too?”

  “No, but we need your confession to sort things out with the Lebanese government,” Bednarski replied. “You see, they’ve accused the Embassy of violating Lebanese sovereignty and using violence to intimidate Americans holding legal residence here.”

  “Don’t look at me, Bob,” Linder retorted, folding his arms across his chest. “I didn’t give the order to storm the place.”

  “That’s irrelevant now,” Bednarski answered with a dismissive flick of the wrist. “The point is, the Ambassador has already approved a plan to placate the Lebanese by showing that our team stepped in to rescue Eaton from an assassination attempt by a rival exile faction. This gives the Embassy grounds for keeping the Kendalls in protective custody until they can be safely repatriated to the United States. Since the Lebanese have identified you as Eaton’s would-be assassin, it would be very helpful if you would sign the confession that we’ve prepared for you.”

  “And if I do?” Linder inquired.

  “We slip you out of the country on a rendition flight and you get off with maybe a letter of reprimand and a year’s delay in your next promotion. If, on the other hand, you refuse to play ball, we fly you straight to a stateside interrogation center and put you on trial for whatever charges our lawyers care to throw at you. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Clear enough,” Linder replied. “But say I decide to go along. How do I know that the Department will follow through with its end of the deal?”

  Bednarski looked down his nose at Linder and scoffed.

  “You’re in no position to be demanding assurances, pal. Denniston has told me how you’ve concealed your prior relationships with Eaton and his daughter. If it were up to me, I’d order an investigation going all the way back to your first contact with those people. For all I know, you may have been in cahoots with Eaton’s insurgent gang all the way back to the Cleveland bank job. And how convenient that you arrived in London around the same time they did. I think that’s worth exploring, too.”