Decker appeared behind him on the other roof. “Hold on, Tony,” he shouted. “Don’t move.”
There was a shot and Decker ducked. Mecca was firing at him. He had rolled behind a chimney and was taking potshots at him from the other roof.
Decker shielded himself behind a set of chimney pots. “Hold on, I’m coming, Tony,” he shouted. “Just hold on.”
Decker couldn’t see Bartolo any more; he was hidden by the chimneys. Then Decker noticed Mecca on the other roof. The Arab was approaching his partner slowly through the rain.
Decker unholstered his gun — a double-action Beretta 92FS with a matte-black Bruniton finish. He aimed it at the Arab who continued to draw nearer and nearer, seemingly mindless of his obvious exposure. At first, Decker had the unreasonable feeling that he was going to pull the struggling agent to his feet. “Don’t move,” Decker shouted frantically. “Freeze. I said freeze!” But Mecca just ignored him. He leaned down over the parapet, as if to offer some assistance, eyeing Decker the whole time, reached out for Bartolo with his hand, and stabbed him in the back.
Decker fired.
The shot struck Mecca’s knife, blasting it from his grasp and up into the air. It spiraled out of sight. Mecca ducked and rolled away behind a low brick wall.
Decker holstered his gun. He zigzagged madly across the roof, set his foot, and leapt across the wide divide. A bullet whizzed above him. He sailed and sailed and sailed, and finally hit the other roof. He pulled out his Beretta as he rolled. He aimed, but Mecca had already disappeared.
The shooting had stopped.
Then Decker saw him — tearing across the roof two buildings down, immediately behind his two companions.
“Help me,” shrieked Bartolo behind him. His voice was desperate now. “John, for Christ’s sake, help me!”
Decker ran back to his partner. He was about to reach down for his wrist when he saw the fingers come apart, like the splaying of a fan, and slip and disappear as Bartolo flattened out against the backdrop of the street, his arms and legs stretched out, his mouth, his eyes more pregnant with surprise and disbelief than with the terrible foreknowledge of his doom. He hit the sidewalk with a sickening thud, still looking up, the back of his head smashed inward like an uncooked egg, already fertilized and forming, the blood seeping out beneath him, mixing with the fallen rain.
Decker squatted there on the edge of the parapet for a long time. He could not tear his eyes away. Somewhere, a woman screamed. Finally, as the rain ran down his collar and snaked around his neck, Decker got up and shook the water from his hair. He looked up at the night sky. In the unnatural glow of the streetlights, he could see raindrops falling out of nowhere, falling like liquid string around him, tying him down.
Chapter 7
El Aqrab sat absolutely still. Everything had been upside down after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Everything had been washed away… in a river of blood.
He had slipped home and changed and gone over to his friend Ibrahim ben Saad’s house for his older brother’s graduation from the Arab University. But after it was all over, but a few days hence, Ibrahim was revealed to have conspired with his wealthy father to hand over information about Syrian and Amal defense positions to the Zionists prior to the invasion, in exchange for assurances that ben Saad’s real estate investments would be spared. As a result of this betrayal, the rich entrepreneur, his wife and Ibrahim had been incinerated by Amal in a car bombing. And El Aqrab had been ordered to assassinate Jamal, Ibrahim’s older brother.
Jamal ben Saad had been arrested by the Israelis, and then released after only a few days. A few days! He was clearly an Israeli sympathizer too. So El Aqrab had arranged to meet him in Beirut, where he had stabbed and killed the frightened academic for his family’s treachery. It had not been difficult to draw him out. Jamal had always been enamored with El Aqrab, with his reputation as a soldier, and more than a little jealous of his brother’s friendship with the freedom fighter.
Throughout it all, El Aqrab remembered, Jamal had proclaimed his innocence. He’d cried and cried, invoking the name of his mother, Rabi’a, whom he had claimed was drowned by his own father. As the life drained out of him, Jamal had slipped back to his youth, describing in detail how his father had plied his mother with sleeping pills and wine, how he’d towed her out into the open water beyond the Coral Beach Hotel, until the tidal currents weakened her, and she had slipped beneath the waves. El Aqrab found it odd the kinds of things condemned men liked to talk about. Odd, but fascinating. With a spasm, Jamal had pleaded for his mother, had shrieked for her, and — looking up, his eyes clear now — had smiled and quoted the Qur’an: “‘My Lord has spread the earth out like a bed for me, and heaven like a canopy.’”
“When it got too hot for you to stay in Beirut,” said Seiden, “you went to Kazakhstan, to the camp of Gulzhan Baqrah. Curious that you didn’t go to Afghanistan or somewhere closer. This was before the 2001 invasion. Didn’t Al-Qa’ida trust you? Didn’t the Taliban?”
El Aqrab did not respond.
“You studied weaponry and explosives, battlefield tactics. According to our informants, you excelled in the use of explosives. Must have made Gulzhan Baqrah proud.”
Once again, El Aqrab remained impassive.
“Meanwhile,” Seiden continued, “the Multinational Force returned after Lebanese President Gemayel was assassinated. In 1983, Amal’s bastard offspring, Hezbollah, bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in south Beirut, killing two hundred and forty-one U.S. servicemen.”
Seiden reached out and pressed a button on the DVD deck. “Here,” he said. “I want to show you something.” After a few seconds, an image appeared on the TV. At first, it was grainy and unclear, the picture shaking as if the person filming it had been in motion. Then the destruction of the Marine barracks was revealed.
A truck appeared at the bottom of the screen. It barreled down the narrow street, headed directly through the barricades and up into the lobby. There was a huge flash of white light as the truck exploded, sending glass and stone and body parts into the sky. The air was sucked back through the widening cavity, as if the film were being rewound. The floors began to pancake down on top of one another. The building imploded. Seiden pressed a button and the clip slipped into slow motion. A tongue of flame licked out from the shattered walls; it was the word Allah, in Arabic script.
“All of these… these… ” He searched for the word. “… atrocities astonished most of the Knesset, not to mention our U.S. allies,” said Seiden, “because, until this time, you Shiites were considered the most docile, the most agreeable people in Lebanon, if not the entire Middle East. I suppose you were emboldened by the fall of the Shah in Iran. I suppose things changed forever after Sabra and Shatila.” He waited for a response but El Aqrab still stared at the flickering TV screen. “The man who engineered these suicide bombings must have been a genius,” he continued. “Look at the precision. Look at the perfection in planning.”
El Aqrab bounced his right leg up and down. Seiden examined him. The terrorist’s eyes glazed over as he slipped into another memory. “You were involved in all of these attacks,” said Seiden. “Weren’t you?”
El Aqrab watched, tremulous and excited, almost orgasmic as the building tumbled to the ground. Then he stiffened, turned and said, “You’re running out of time. You’d better hurry up if you want to ask me something.”
“What’s the hurry? You’re not going anywhere.”