“And if you take him no watch at all?”
“Then Qaddafi will cut off my balls!”
“We’ll take the watch,” I had told the shopkeeper, and proffered him my credit card.
Now I had seen that same watch on Halil’s wrist, and I knew who he was: il Hayaween. Not that il Hayaween was his real name, any more than Halil was, or even Daoud Malif, which was the name usually ascribed to him by the Western press when they did not use the nickname. Il Hayaween was an Arabic insult meaning “the animal” and its first syllable was pronounced as an explosive breath, but on one would dare explode the word into Halil’s face for, in all the shadowy world of terror, he was reckoned the most famous and the most lethal and the most daring of all the deadly men who had ever graduated from the refugee camps of the Palestinian exiles. In the pantheon of death il Hayaween was the Godhead, a ruthless killer who gave hope to his dispossessed people. In the gutters of Gaza and the ghettos of Hebron he was the leveller, the man who frightened the Israelis and terrified the Americans. Children in refugee camps learned the tales of il Hayaween’s fame; how he had shot the Israeli Ambassador in a tea garden in Geneva, how he had bombed American soldiers in a Frankfurt night club, how he had ambushed an Israeli schoolbus and slaughtered its occupants, and how he had freed Palestinian prisoners from the jails of Oman. Whenever a misfortune struck an enemy of Palestine, he was reputed to be its author; thus when the jumbo jet fell from the flaming skies over Scotland the Palestinians chuckled and said that he had been at work again. Some Western journalists doubted his very existence, postulating that anyone as omnipotent as il Hayaween had to be a mythical figure constructed from the lusts of a frustrated people, but he lived all right, and I was talking to him in the saloon of a French yacht in Monastir’s marina.
Where I was not thinking straight; not yet. Terrorists live in a skewed world. Their view is dominated and overshadowed by the cause, and every single thing that moves or creeps or swarms on earth is seen in its relation to the cause, and nothing is too far away or too trivial or too innocent to escape the cause. Thus, to a man like il Hayaween, a game of baseball is not an irrelevant pastime, but evidence that the American public does not care about the monstrous crime committed against the Palestinian people; worse, it is evidence that the American people deliberately do not want to consider that crime, preferring to watch a game of bat and ball. Therefore a scheme to kill baseball spectators would be a justifiable act because it could jolt the rest of America into an understanding of the truth. Terrorists believe they have been vouchsafed a unique glimpse of truth, and everything in the world is seen through the distorting lenses of that revelation.
So perhaps, in such a skewed world, paying for weapons with a boatload of gold makes sense.
And risking the gold by sailing the boat across the Atlantic makes sense.
And allowing a Palestinian terrorist to choose the sailboat makes sense.
And involving the Palestinian’s most notorious killer in the purchase of Stinger missiles destined for Northern Ireland makes sense.
Or maybe not.
Halil pushed the folded newspaper cutting into his pocket. The cigarette had gone out, so now he lit another before staring into my eyes again. “Shanahan,” he said with a tinge of distaste. “You moved to Ireland when you were twenty-seven. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You lived in Dublin for one year and in Belfast for two.”
“Yes.”
“You joined the Provisional IRA?”
“That was why I went to Ireland.”
“And the Provisional IRA asked you to live on mainland Europe?”
“Because it would be easier to liaise with foreign groups from mainland Europe than from Ireland.”
“Yet six years later they ceased to use you for such liaison. Why?”
I understood that this man already knew the answers and that the catechism was not for Haiti’s information, but to make me feel uncomfortable. “Because of a woman,” I told him.
“Roisin Donovan.” He let the name hang in the stifling air. “An American agent.”
“So they say,” I said very neutrally.
“Do you believe she was CIA?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I assume the CIA choose their operatives more carefully. Roisin was impulsive and angry. She had a hair-trigger temper. She was not a person you would choose to keep secrets.”
“And you?” Halil asked.
I laughed. “No government would trust me to keep a secret. I’m a rogue. Civil servants choose people like themselves; dull and predictable and safe.”
Halil raised the trembling cigarette. His hand quivered as he inhaled the comforting smoke and again as he rested the cigarette. “But these agents she spoke of, they were different. They were not predictable.”
I said nothing.
He watched me. I could hear the halyards beating on the metal mast, I could even hear the slight noise of the chronometer’s second hand ticking away above the chart table behind me.
“These agents”—Halil broke the long silence—“would be sent from America and would have no ties to home. They would stay away for years, never talking to their headquarters, never reporting to an embassy, never behaving like an agent, but just watching and listening until, one day, they would disappear.” He made an abrupt gesture with his good hand. “They would go home with all their secrets and never be seen again.”
“That was Roisin’s fantasy,” I said.
“Fantasy?” He made the word sinister.
“She made things up. She was good at it.”
“She accused you of being such an agent…” He paused, searching for a definition. “An agent who does not exist,” he finally said.
“I told you, she made it up.” Roisin had indeed accused me of being one of the secret secret agents. It had been a clever and compelling idea. She claimed that the CIA had sent agents abroad who had no links with home. There would be no threads leading back to America, no footprints, no codenames even, no apron strings. They were one-shot agents, untraceable, secret, the agents who did not exist.
“She made it up,” I said again. “She made the whole thing up.”
Halil watched me, judging me. I could understand the terror that such a concept would hold for a terrorist. Terrorism works because it breaks the rules, but when the authorities break the rules it turns the terror back on the terrorists. When the British shot the three IRA members in Gibraltar a shudder went through the whole movement because the Brits were not supposed to shoot first and ask questions later, they were supposed to use due process, to make arrests and offer court-appointed defense lawyers. But instead the Brits had acted like terrorists and it scared the IRA, just as il Hayaween was scared that there might be traitorous members of his organizations who could never be caught because they would never make contact with their real employers. The agents that did not exist would behave like terrorists, think like terrorists, look like, smell like, be like terrorists, until the fatal day when they simply vanished and took all their secrets home with them.
Now il Hayaween worried at that old accusation. “Your woman claimed the CIA had infiltrated a long-term agent into the Provisional IRA with the specific intent of exploring the IRA’s links with other terrorist groups.” He paused. “That could be you.”
“She was desperate. She was ready to accuse anyone of anything. She wanted to blind her own accusers with a smokescreen. And how the hell would she know these things anyway?” I saw that question make an impression on Halil, so I pressed it harder. “You think the CIA told her about the agents who don’t exist? You think maybe she read it in Newsweek?”