Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Within seconds, her body had shut down without a fight, sending her crashing into a dreamless sleep.

Keeping an embassy in Beirut had been a major headache for the State Department for over thirty years. Although the pain had abated of late, anyone who worked there knew it was only a temporary respite.

The old building on the busy corniche, overlooking the Mediterranean, was due to be replaced in the mid-1970s by a purpose-built facility. The civil war that began in 1975 put an end to that plan. Ambassador Francis E. Meloy was kidnapped while being driven across the city’s Green Line and assassinated in 1976, and by the time the fighting took the first of many breathers a year later, the city had been carved up by rival factions and the area the new embassy was being built in was no longer considered safe for Americans. The project was shelved, its abandoned concrete shell still standing to this day.

The embassy staff soldiered on in the old building until a suicide car bomb — the first major use of the terror weapon, and a herald of many further devastating attacks against U.S. interests around the world — ripped its front half right off in April of 1983. Forty-nine embassy staff were killed, including eight CIA agents, one of whom was the agency’s Near East director, Robert Ames. Their deaths effectively wiped out the Agency’s capabilities in the country and paved the way for the string of high-profile kidnappings that followed. It took years to build up a presence there again, only for five of its agents — the team that had only recently started to delve through the mess that was Lebanon in the 1980s — to get blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 while on board Pan Am Flight 103.

What was left of the diplomatic mission squatted in the nearby British embassy — a seven-story apartment building that was bizarrely veiled by a massive, tentlike antirocket net from top to bottom — for a few tense months before relocating to two villas in Awkar, in the lush, forested hills just north of the city. The area was under Christian control, but it didn’t prove to be any safer. Another car bomb ripped through that compound the following year, killing eleven. The State Department threw in the towel and closed its mission down for a couple of years, but with fighting finally subsiding in the early 1990s, the staff returned to Awkar while awaiting the construction of a new, highly fortified compound east of the city, close to the Ministry of Defense, a project that had yet to materialize.

Corben had driven straight to Awkar after leaving Mia at his apartment.

He checked in briefly with his colleagues on the second floor of the consular annex. The CIA station chief, Len Hayflick, and the four other agents in the Beirut team had their offices there. They had their hands full. Beyond the ongoing assignments, such as tracking down Imad Mughniyah, the man thought to be behind the truck bomb that blew up the marines’ compound in 1983 and killed 241 servicemen, and monitoring burgeoning militant groups such as Fatah al-Islam, Lebanon was “in play” again. An undeclared, dirty war was in full swing. It was the bread and butter of the agency, but while there were big opportunities, there were even bigger risks. Still, the Bishop kidnapping needed to be handled with urgency, and Corben had quickly maneuvered to snag the assignment once Baumhoff had shown him the Polaroids.

Corben spent the afternoon in his office working his phone and his databases. There was nothing new on the kidnapping. No calls had come in, no one had claimed responsibility, no ransom demands had been made. Not that it surprised him, but he still half-expected some fringe group to claim it for their own and try to use it for some kind of leverage. The United States wielded a big stick in the region, but it could also bestow great favors if merited or, in this case, coerced. No such favor was requested.

A follow-up call to a Fuhud officer he’d conferred with briefly after leaving Mia in her hotel room informed him that the dead man from the apartment didn’t have any identifying papers or tags on him. They would be running a close-up of his face in the next day’s papers, but Corben didn’t think anyone was going to be claiming him anytime soon. He made a couple of other calls to contacts of his in the Lebanese intelligence services and sounded them out without giving too much away about his involvement beyond looking for a kidnapped American national. Nothing new had come up, no fingers pointed one way or another. He made sure they would contact him if anything broke.

He recovered Evelyn’s cell phone from Baumhoff and scrolled through to its received-calls log, but the last caller wasn’t ID’d, confirming what Baumhoff had told him. No one had called it since. He accessed the dialed-calls log. She’d called a bunch of local numbers over the last few days, but the most recent call was the one that immediately piqued his interest. A U.S. number. Rhode Island, according to the area code.

He remembered the business card that had been sitting on her open organizer on her desk and pulled it out. The number matched. It belonged to someone called Tom Webster, at the Haldane Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. Corben made a quick calculation of the time difference and realized it was still early on the East Coast. It was unlikely anyone would be there at this hour. He opened a browser window on his computer and got onto the institute’s Web site. It informed him that it was a privately funded research center devoted to the study and promotion of the archaeology and art of the ancient Mediterranean, Egypt, and Western Asia, affiliated with Brown University. There was no sign of anyone by the name of Webster in its listings. He jotted down “Tom Webster,” “Haldane, Brown U,” and “privately funded” in his notebook and made a mental note to call it later.

He walked the phone over to the communications office and handed it to the chief geek there, technical operations officer Jake Olshansky, asking him to work his magic and see if he could trace the shy caller who had called Evelyn’s phone. He also requested a log of incoming and outgoing calls going back two weeks and asked the young techie to see if he could also pull up similar logs for Evelyn’s home landline, assuming she had one. He picked up Mia’s phone from Baumhoff and had a quick look through it, but nothing on it jumped at him. He asked Olshansky to run a quick log off its SIM card and made a mental note to pick it up on his way out to bring back to her. He also gave him Evelyn’s laptop — his own attempt to boot it up had been thwarted by password-protected access, but he knew Olshansky would find a way in without too much trouble.

Back in his office, he turned his attention to Evelyn’s personal organizer again. It was overflowing with cards and notes, an active, busy life’s cache of information. His first trawl through it didn’t kick up anything useful. The calendar entries of the last week, and of the last two days in particular, didn’t appear to mention anything about the man from her past that Evelyn had come across. He put the organizer aside, saving it for later. He knew he’d need more time to go through it in detail.

The profiles he pulled up for Evelyn and Mia didn’t kick up any surprises — not that there was much there. Nothing about either of them hinted at anything other than two women who lived quiet lives and never strayed on the wrong side of the law, not even for an unpaid parking ticket. He found some fairly vocal comments Evelyn had made during the struggle over the downtown area between the developers and the conservationists, but it wasn’t overly confrontational and he quickly dismissed its relevance.

Corben sat back and ran through the events since Mia’s drink with Evelyn the night before. He latched onto the ease and the confidence with which the goon squad was operating. Beirut had come a long way since its lawless dark ages, and a well-armed, well-trained hit team couldn’t just operate with impunity without having some kind of “official” link or sanction from one of the handful of main local militias, which meant, inevitably, a “big brother” connection to one of the government intelligence services — Lebanese or Syrian. Identifying the dead shooter could immediately point to which clan the goon squad was working for, but that didn’t seem likely. Hired guns were cheap to come by, and tracks were easily covered. Every militia, every agency, had someone on tap on the inside to make things happen or, more often, disappear.