Beirut Station by Paul Vidich

Author:Paul Vidich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

16 In the Box

You’ve met my family,” Rami said. He was leaning against the parked Land Rover and looked up when Analise approached. She had parked the vehicle a five-minute walk from the house and had walked back slowly to avoid attracting attention. He had been throwing stones at a pigeon standing on a nearby ledge. He threw another stone and the pigeon stepped aside, puffing its feathers, taunting his lackadaisical effort.

She saw a Disney-branded tote bag on the ground at his feet. She heard his comment as a judgment. “Your mother loves you.”

His hand dismissed her remark. “What she thinks doesn’t matter. I’m coming with you.” He threw one more stone, sending the pigeon into the air, and picked up his bag. He tried the passenger door.

“It’s locked.”

Rami held up a long metal sleeve used to break into cars. “It was locked.” He sat in the passenger seat, placing his tote bag at his feet.

“You have to go home.”

“Home? To what? I’m coming with you.”

There was no point arguing with him. She considered the complication. Analise got behind the wheel and placed her hijab on the seat. “Fine,” she said in a low voice.

She inserted the key in the ignition. Plans change. Adjust to the circumstance. Fuck. Part of her wished that everything was over—the lies, the deception, the killing. “Seat belt.” She added, “Stay down. You shouldn’t be seen riding with me.”

Analise knew the route and avoided streets that she had walked earlier while deploying the antennae. Analise organized what she remembered of the scene in the house, rehearsing how she would describe it. There was no intelligence that indicated the house had a large interior room. Laptops, servers, cables dropped from the ceiling, and the cool air of an air-conditioned facility. Her mind went over her time in the house minute by minute, separating each chaotic impression into a logic grid. Her mind’s eye looked past the distraction of Qassem’s appearance to the activity in the room behind him. Papers spread on the table, multiple computer screens, and the appearance of an operations center. She’d heard a voice speaking urgently through a computer speaker. A different dialect that she had not recognized. Her memory of the room was clear but the mystery of what they were doing tugged at her.

She glanced at Rami. They were traveling north through a bombed section of the refugee camp. He sat low in the seat, staring out the window. “Who were the men in the room?”

He stared at her for a long moment and then looked back out the window. “I don’t know.”

A lie, she thought. Analise considered calling Aldrich on her Nokia, but her phone wasn’t encrypted. The risk of blowing her cover was more critical than the urgency of her discovery. Cell-phone intercepts in the neighborhood would pick up a trace, and even if the call wasn’t recorded, it might be flagged. An alert Hezbollah technician could triangulate the call’s origin from cell towers and match the number against a target list of suspected cell numbers.

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