“Whether you smoke or abstain,” the imam replied, his voice as soft as the cooing of a pigeon, “you will only live as long as God gives you to live. In any case, longevity is not what inspires a religious man like myself.”
“What does inspire a religious man like yourself?” Dante heard himself ask, though he knew the answer; Benny Sapir, the Mossad spy master who had briefed Dante Pippen in a Washington safe house before the mission, had even imitated the imam’s voice delivering stock answers to religious questions.
“The thought of the angel Gabriel whispering the verses of the Holy Koran into the ear of the Prophet inspires me,” the imam was saying. “Muhammad’s description, in what you call The Book of the Ladder and we call The Miraj, of his ascent to the nine circles of heaven and his descent into hell, guided by the angel Gabriel, keeps me up nights. The Creator, the Maker, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate, the All-Sublime, the All-Mighty inspires me. The one true God inspires me. Allah inspires me. The thought of spreading His word to the infidel, and killing those who do not accept it, inspires me.” He held his cigarette parallel to his lips and studied it. “And what is it that inspires you, Mr. Pippen?”
Dante grinned. “The money your organization deposited in my account in the Cayman Islands inspires me, Dr. al-Karim. The prospect of monthly installments, paid in exchange for services rendered, inspires me. No need to shake your head in disapproval. It comes as no surprise to me that you find our several inspirations discordant, yours, of course, being the nobler of the two, and mine, by far the more decadent. Since I don’t believe in your God, or any God, for that matter—I am what you would call a very lapsed Catholic—I think that your particular inspiration is as ephemeral as the contrails I saw on my drive down from Beirut. One moment they were there, sharp and precise, each with a silver Israeli jet fighter streaking through the crystal Lebanese sky at the cusp, the next they were thickening and drifting and eventually dissipating in the high winds.”
The imam considered this. “I can see you are not a timid man, Mr. Pippen. You speak your mind. A Muslim who permitted himself to say what you have said would be putting his limbs, perhaps even his life, in jeopardy. But we must make allowances for a very lapsed Catholic, especially one who has come all this way to teach our fedayeen how to devise bombs to blow up the Isra’ili occupiers of Lebanon and Palestine.” He leaned toward Dante. “Our representative in Paris who recruited you said you were born in an Irish town with the curious name of Castletownbere.”
Dante nodded. “It’s a smudge on the map on the southern coast of the Beara Peninsula in County Cork. Fishing port. I worked on one of the salmon trawlers before I went off to seek my fortune where the streets are paved with gold.”
“And were they paved with gold, Mr. Pippen?”
Dante laughed under his breath. “At least they were paved, which is more than you can say for some parts of the Beara Peninsula. Or the Bekaa Valley, for that matter.”
“Am I correct in thinking there was an expensive restaurant in Castletownbere called The Warehouse?”
“There was a pricy restaurant for the occasional tourist, but it wasn’t named The Warehouse. It was called The Bank because it was in the old bank, one flight up on Main Street. Still had the bank vault in the back when I was there. I seem to remember a Mary McCullagh ran it in the sixties. I went to school with one of her daughters, a pretty little thing we called Deidre of the Sorrows because she made so many of us sorry when we discovered we couldn’t sweet talk her into bed.”
“You were arrested by Scotland Yard following the explosion of a bomb on a bus near Bush House, the BBC building in London.”
“Is that a question or a statement of fact?”
“A statement of fact that I’d like you to corroborate, Mr. Pippen.”
“I was killing time in London when the bus blew,” Dante said, his eyes blinking innocently. “The coppers barged into a licensed tabernacle and more or less picked up anyone who spoke the King’s English with an Irish accent. They were obliged to release me after forty-eight hours for want of evidence. Bloody bastards never even apologized.”
“Did you blow up the bus, Mr. Pippen?”
“I did not. But the two who did learned which side was up from yours truly.”
The imam smiled thinly. Glancing at a wall clock with a silhouette of Ayatollah Khomeini on its face, he pushed himself to his feet and started to leave. At the door, he turned back. “I seldom have the chance to speak with an Occidental nonbeliever, Mr. Pippen, especially one who is not in awe of me. Talking with you is going to be an enlightening experience. One must know the enemy before one can defeat him. I invite you to visit me in my study after your afternoon classes, every day of the week except Friday. I will offer you mint tea and honey cakes, you can reciprocate by offering me insights into the secular mentality.”
“The pleasure will—” Dante started to say but the imam had already vanished through the latticed door, which squeaked back and forth on its hinges, evidence of his passage.
Dante was taken to his living quarters, a room in the back of one of the low brick houses with flat roofs at the edge of the village beyond the perimeter of the Hezbollah camp. At sunup an elderly woman with a veil over the lower part of her face appeared with what passed for breakfast: a steaming pot of green tea to wash down the chalk-dry biscuits covered with an oily paste made from crushed olives. Dante’s bodyguard, who trailed after him everywhere, including to the outhouse, led him down the dirt path to the lip of the quarry. Several young boys in dusty striped robes were already tossing stones at a troop of goats to steer them away from the perimeter fence and up a nearby slope. A yellow Hezbollah flag decorated with a hand holding aloft a rifle flapped from the pole atop the brick building where the explosives and the fuses were stored. High overhead the contrails of Israeli jets on their dawn patrols crisscrossed the sky. Dante’s students, nineteen fedayeen, all in their late teens or early twenties and wearing identical baggy khaki trousers and blouses and thick web belts under their robes, waited at the bottom of the quarry. An older man with an orange and white kaffiyah draped over his shoulders squatted on the rocky ground, setting out cartons filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, commonly known as PETN, along with latex, coils of electric wire and plungers powered by automobile batteries. “I, Abdullah, will translate for you,” the man informed Dante when he reached the floor of the quarry. “Please to speak slow in consideration of my English, which is curdled like last week’s goat milk.”
Dante inspected the cartons, then kicked at the coils of wire and the plungers. “We will need modern detonators that can be tripped by radio-controlled devices from distant locations,” he informed Abdullah.
“How far will be the distance to these locations?” Abdullah inquired.
Dante pointed to the goats disappearing over the top of the slope. “We will mix the PETN and the latex in a manner that I will demonstrate,” he said, “and conceal the charges here in the quarry. Then we will climb to the top of that hill and detonate the explosives from there.” Dante pointed to the hill and imitated the boom of the explosion. Abdullah translated for the fedayeen and they all turned to stare at the hill. They talked excitedly among themselves, then looked at their instructor, nodding respectfully at his expertise.
During the first several sessions, Dante concentrated on the PETN and the latex, showing the Hezbollah fighters how to mix the two and then mold the clay-like explosive to fit any receptacle. He filled a portable radio with explosives one day, then turned it on to demonstrate that it still functioned, which was important if you wanted to get the radio past military checkpoints or airport security. Another time he packed the plastique into one of those newfangled satellite telephones and explained, with Abdullah translating, the advantages: If it was done correctly, you could actually telephone the target and identify his voice before setting off the charge and decapitating him.