“Smoking,” Leroy remarked, “poisons the lungs. You ought to give it up.”
“Trouble is,” Lincoln said, “to give up smoking you need to become someone else. Tried that once. Went cold turkey for a while. But it didn’t work out in the end.”
After awhile the Egyptian returned to the room and settled into the wooden chair set catty-corner to the sofa. “Tell me more about what you did in Croatia?” he instructed Lincoln.
Croatia had been Crystal Quest’s brainchild. For all her imperiousness, she was old schooclass="underline" She believed a good legend needed more than a paper trail to give it authenticity. “If he’s supposed to be an arms merchant,” she’d argued when she dragged Lincoln up to the seventh floor at Langley to get the director to sign off on the operation, “there’s got to be a trail of genuine transactions that the opposition can verify.”
“You’re proposing to actually set him up in the arms business?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Whom would he sell to?” the director had demanded, clearly unsettled by the notion of one of the Company’s agents establishing his bona fides by becoming a bona fide arms merchant.
“He’ll buy from the Soviets who are running garage sales from their arsenals in East Germany, and deliver to the Bosnians. Since U.S. policy tilts toward the Bosnians, our Congressional oversight commissars won’t give us a hard time if they get wind of it, which they won’t if we’re careful. The idea behind this is to put Lincoln in the path of one Sami Akhbar, an Azerbaijani who buys arms for an al-Qa’ida cell in Bosnia.”
“As usual you’ve covered all the bases, Fred,” the director had noted with a flagrant lack of enthusiasm.
“Sir, that’s what you pay me for,” she’d shot back.
Lincoln had spent the next four months tooling around the Dalmatian coast in a serviceable Buick, avoiding the Serb undercover agents like the plague, using a fax to contact a shadowy Frankfurt entity and purchase truckloads of the Soviet surplus arms being sold off by Russian soldiers soon to be recalled to the USSR from East Germany, meeting the drivers at night on remote back roads as they came across Slovenia, then arranging for delivery at crossing points on the Dalmatian coast between Croatia and Bosnia. It was at one of these pre-dawn meetings that Lincoln first felt the fish nibbling at the bait. “Could you get your hands on explosives?” a Muslim dealer who went by the name Sami Akhbar had casually asked as he took possession of a two-truck convoy loaded with TOW antitank missiles and mortars and handed Lincoln a satchel filled with crisp $100 bills bound in wrappers from a Swiss bank.
Lincoln had dealt with Sami five times in the past four months. “What do you have in mind?” he had inquired.
“I have a Saudi friend who is shopping around for Semtex or ammonium nitrate.”
“In what quantities?”
“Very large quantities.”
“Your friend looking to celebrate the end of Ramadan with a big bang?”
“Something like that.”
“Russians aren’t peddling Semtex or ammonium nitrate. It would have to come from the States.”
“Are you saying it is within the realm of possibility?”
“Everything is within the realm of possibility, Sami, but it will cost a pretty penny.”
“Money is not a problem for my Saudi friend. Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich.”
The Muslim had produced a scrap of paper from a shirt pocket and, pressing it to the fender of the truck, had printed out with the stub of a pencil the name of a town and the street address of a mosque, along with a date and an hour. Lincoln had crouched in front of the Buick parking lights to read it. “Where in hell is Foz do Iguaçú?” he’d asked, though he knew the answer.
“It is in Brazil right across the frontier from Paraguay at a place called Triple Border, where Brazil and Paraguay and Argentina meet.”
“Why can’t we get together somewhere in Europe?”
“If you are not interested, only say so. I will find someone else who is.”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong, Sami. I’m interested. I’m just worried that it’s a long way to go for nothing.”
Sami had coughed up a laugh. “You guys who deal arms tickle me. I do not call two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. nothing.”
Lincoln had glanced again at the scrap of paper. “Are you sure your rich Saudi friend will contact me if I am standing outside the mosque on Palestine Street at ten in the morning ten days from today?”
Sami had nodded into the darkness. “A person will contact you and take you to him.”
In the small room over the bar, the Egyptian listened in silence to Lincoln’s account of his dealings in Croatia. In the alcove, the boy, working again at his jigsaw puzzle, blew bubbles with the gum until they burst against his fleshy lips. Leroy cleaned the fingernails of his left hand with a fingernail of his right hand. When Lincoln reached the end of the story, the Egyptian, lips pursed, sat without moving a muscle, weighing his next move. Finally he announced, “Leroy will take you back to your hotel in Foz do Iguaçú. Wait there until you hear from me.”
“How long will that take?” Lincoln asked. “Every day I’m away from the Balkans costs me money.”
The Egyptian shrugged. “If you become bored, you are free to yawn.”
“How did it go?” Lincoln asked Leroy when the two were alone in the car and heading toward the bridge and Foz do Iguaçú.
“The fact that you’re still alive can only mean it went well.”
Lincoln glanced at the Texan, whose face flashed in and out of the light as cars passed in the opposite direction. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Fucking A, I’m serious. Get it into your skull,” he said, drumming a forefinger against his own. “You’re associating with tough customers down here.”
Lincoln had to swallow a smile. Felix Kiick had used much the same words as he wound up the briefing back in Washington. “Holy mackerel, watch your ass when you get to Triple Border,” he’d said. “You’ll be rubbing shoulders with mighty ornery folks.”
The briefing in Washington had taken place on neutral turf, a nondescript Foggy Bottom conference room that had been swept by Company housekeepers and then staked out until the principals showed up at the crack of noon. From word one, the tension had been as thick as the fog Lincoln had braved driving to work that morning from the safe house in Virginia. It wasn’t so much the FBI briefer, a short, stumpy veteran counterterrorism maven named Felix Kiick with the low center of gravity of a NFL linesman; the CIA had dealt with him on any number of occasions (most especially when he directed the FBI’s counterterrorism team at the American embassy in Moscow) and considered him to be a straight shooter. The tension could be traced to the clash of cultures; to the mistrust J. Edgar Hoover (who had run the FBI with an iron hand until his death in 1972) had sewn into the agency’s bureaucratic fabric during his forty-eight years at the helm. The fact that the FBI, acting in obedience to a formal presidential “finding,” was being obliged to pass on to its arch competitor at Langley an operation and the assets that went with it, or what was left of them, only made matters worse. Kiick put the best possible face on the situation in his opening remarks. “Triple Border,” he told Lincoln as Crystal Quest and several of her wallahs looked on, “which is the nickname for the zone where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet up, is a cesspool filled with scum from Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, Colombia’s FARC, all of them operating under false identities or false flags. The FBI’s interest in Triple Border goes back roughly ten years when a large expatriate population fleeing the civil war in Lebanon gravitated into the area. The local authorities, some of them bribed, some of them intimidated, turned their backs on the sharp rise in crime in their backyard. You could buy and sell almost anything down there—passports for two-thousand dollars a clip, including the mug shot and the official government stamp; stolen cars; cheap electronics; along with the staples on any lawless frontier these days, drugs and arms. Several terrorist organizations set up guerilla training camps in the mato graso—the outback—to teach recruits how to rig car bombs or shoot the Soviet hardware that anyone could purchase in the back alleys of the border towns using money conveniently laundered by the banks at Triple Border.”