Legends Page 8

  “If he comes from Castletownbere, he must be Catholic. For the price of a generous donation, we can probably get the local Castletownbere church to slip his name into its baptism records.”

  “One fine day, like many, if not most, Irish men, he would have become fed up with the church.”

  “A lapsed Catholic, then,” said the chairman, jotting the biographical detail down on his yellow pad.

  “A very lapsed Catholic,” Martin piped up from his place along the wall.

  “Just because he’s lapsed doesn’t mean his family will have lapsed.”

  “Why don’t we give him a brother and a sister who are in the church but can’t be traced because they are no longer living under the name Pippen. Brother such and such. Sister such and such.”

  “The brother could be a Jesuit priest in the Congo, converting the natives to Jesus at the bitter end of some crocodile infested river.”

  “And the sister—let’s put her in a convent hospital in the back country of the Ivory Coast.”

  “She will have taken a vow of silence, which means she couldn’t be interviewed even if someone got to her.”

  “Is Dante Pippen a smoker or nonsmoker?

  The chairman turned to Martin, who said, “I’ve been trying to cut down. If Dante Pippen is supposed to be a nonsmoker, it’ll give me an incentive to go cold turkey.”

  “Nonsmoker it is, then.”

  “Be careful you don’t put on weight. The CIA takes a dim view of overweight agents.”

  “We ought to hire one or two—being obese would be a perfect cover.”

  “Even if our Dante Pippen’s a lapsed Catholic, he would still have gone to Catholic school as a child. He would have been taught to believe that the seven sacraments—Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Confession, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony and Holy Orders—could see you through a lifetime of troubles.”

  The chairman scribbled another note on his pad. “That’s a good point,” he said. “We’ll get someone to teach him rosaries in Latin—he could slip them into the conversation to lend credibility to the new identity.”

  “Which brings us to his occupation. What exactly does our Dante Pippen do in life?”

  The chairman picked up Martin Odum’s 201 Central Registry folder and extracted the bio file. “Oh, dear, our Martin Odum can be said to be a renaissance man only if one defines renaissance narrowly. He was born in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and spent the first eight years of his life in a Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown, where his father owned a small factory manufacturing underwear for the U.S. Army during World War Two. After the war the underwear business went bankrupt and the elder Odum moved the family to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to start an electrical appliance business. Crown Heights is where Martin was brought up.”

  “Being brought up in Brooklyn is not the most auspicious beginning for a renaissance man, even defined narrowly,” quipped Maggie Poole. She twisted in her seat toward Martin. “I’m not ruffling your feathers, am I?”

  Martin only smiled.

  “Yes, well,” the chairman continued, “our man majored in commerce and minored in Russian at a Long Island state college but never seems to have earned a degree. During vacations he climbed the lower alps in the more modest American mountain ranges. At loose ends, he joined the army to see the world and wound up, God knows why, toiling for military intelligence, where he focused on anticommunist dissidents in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Do I have that right, Martin? Ah, here’s something positively intriguing. When he was younger he worked in the private sector with explosives—”

  Maggie Poole turned to Martin. “What précisément did you do with explosives?”

  Martin rocked his chair off the wall onto its four legs. “It was a summer job, really. I worked for a construction company demolishing old buildings that were going to be replaced, then blasting through bedrock to make way for the subbasement garages. I was the guy who shouted through a bullhorn for everyone to clear the area.”

  “But do you know anything about dynamite?”

  “I picked up a bit here and a bit there hanging around the dynamiters. I bought some books and studied the subject. By the end of the summer I had my own blasting license.”

  “Did you fabricate dynamite or just light the fuses?”

  “Either, or. When I first came to work for the Company,” Martin said, “I spent a month or two making letter bombs, then I got promoted to rigging portable phones so that we could detonate them from a distance. I also worked with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which you know as PETN, an explosive of choice for terrorists. You can mix it with latex to give it plasticity and mold it to fit into anything—a telephone, a radio, a teddy bear, a cigar. You get a big bang out of relatively small amounts of PETN, and in the absence of a detonator, it’s extremely stable. PETN isn’t readily available on the open market but anyone with a blasting license, which Martin Odum has, can obtain the ingredients for roughly twenty dollars the pound. The explosive, incidentally, can pass through any airport X-ray machine in operation today.”

  “Well, that opens up some intriguing possibilities,” the chairman informed the others.

  “He could have done a stint as an explosive specialist at a shale quarry in Colorado, then been fired for something or other—”

  “Stealing PETN and selling it on the open market—”

  “Sleeping with the boss’s wife—”

  “Homosexualité, even.”

  Martin piped up from the wall. “If you don’t mind, I draw the line at having homosexuality in my legend.”

  “We’ll figure out why he was fired later. What we have here is an Irish Catholic—”

  “Lapsed. Don’t forget he’s lapsed.”

  “—a lapsed Irish Catholic who worked with explosives in the private sector.”

  “Only to be fired for an as yet undetermined offense.”

  “At which point he became a free-lance explosive expert.”

  “We may have a problem here,” said the chairman, tapping a fore-finger on one page of Martin Odum’s 201 folder. “Our Martin Odum is circumcised. Dante Pippen, lapsed or not, is an Irish Catholic. How do we explain the fact that he’s circumcised.”

  The committee kicked around several possibilities. It was Maggie Poole who invented a suitable fiction. “In the unlikely event the question should come up, he could say he was talked into it by his first American girlfriend, who thought she would have less chance of catching a venereal disease from him if he were circumcised. Pippen could say the operation was performed in a New York clinic. It shouldn’t be too difficult to plant a medical record at a clinic to backstop the story.”

  “Moving on, could he have been a member, at one point, of the IRA?”

  “An IRA dynamiter! Now that’s creative. It’s not something the Russians or East Europeans could verify because the IRA is more secretive than the KGB.”

  “We could give him an arrest record in England. Arrested, questioned about an IRA bombing or two, released for lack of evidence.”

  “We could even plant small items in the press about the arrests.”

  “We are mining a rich vein,” declared the chairman, his eyes bulging with enthusiasm. “What do you think, Martin?”

  “I like it,” Martin said from his seat. “Crystal Quest will like it, too. Dante Pippen is exactly the kind of legend that will open doors.”

  1989: DANTE PIPPEN SEES THE MILKY WAY IN A NEW LIGHT

  WHEN THE BATTERED FORD REACHED THE FERTILE RIFT KNOWN as the Bekaa Valley, the Palestinians knotted a blindfold over Dante’s eyes. Twenty minutes later the two-car motorcade passed through a gate in a perimeter fence and pulled to a stop at the edge of an abandoned quarry. The Palestinians tugged Dante from the back seat and guided him through the narrow dirt streets to the mosque on the edge of a Lebanese village. In the antechamber, his shoes and the blindfold were removed and he was led to a threadbare prayer carpet near the altar and motioned to sit. Ten minutes lat
er the imam slipped in through a latticed side door. A corpulent man who moved, as heavy men often do, with surprising suppleness, he settled onto the carpet facing Dante. Arranging the folds of his flowing white robe like a Noh actor preoccupied with his image, he produced a string of jade worry beads and began working them through the stubby fingers of his left hand. In his early forties, with a crew cut and a neatly trimmed beard, the imam rocked back and forth in prayer for several moments. Finally he raised his eyes and, speaking English with a crisp British accent, announced, “I am Dr. Izzat al-Karim.”

  “I suspect you know who I am,” Dante replied.

  The corners of the imam’s mouth curled into a pudgy grin. “Indeed I do. You are the IRA dynamiter we have heard so much about. I may say that your reputation precedes you—”

  Dante dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. “So does your shadow when the sun is behind you.”

  The imam’s jowls quivered in silent laughter. He held out a pack of Iranian Bahman cigarettes, offering one to his visitor.

  “I have stopped smoking,” Dante informed his host.

  “Ah, if only I could follow your example,” the imam said with a sigh. He tapped one of the thin cigarettes against the metal tray on a low table to tamp down the tobacco and slipped it between his lips. Using a Zippo lighter with a picture of Muhammad Ali on it, he lit the cigarette and slowly exhaled. “I envy you your strength of character. What was the secret that enabled you to give up cigarettes?”

  “I convinced myself to become a different person, so to speak,” Dante explained. “One day I was smoking two tins of Ganaesh Beedies a day. When I woke up the next morning I was someone else. And this someone else was a nonsmoker.”

  The imam let this sink in. “I wear the black turban of the sayyid, which marks me as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his cousin Ali. I have two wives and I am about to take a third. Many people—my wives, my children, my fighters—count on me. It would be awkward for everyone if I were to become someone else.”

  “If I had as many wives as you,” Dante remarked, “I’d probably start smoking again.”

  “Whether you smoke or abstain,” the imam replied, his voice as soft as the cooing of a pigeon, “you will only live as long as God gives you to live. In any case, longevity is not what inspires a religious man like myself.”

  “What does inspire a religious man like yourself?” Dante heard himself ask, though he knew the answer; Benny Sapir, the Mossad spy master who had briefed Dante Pippen in a Washington safe house before the mission, had even imitated the imam’s voice delivering stock answers to religious questions.

  “The thought of the angel Gabriel whispering the verses of the Holy Koran into the ear of the Prophet inspires me,” the imam was saying. “Muhammad’s description, in what you call The Book of the Ladder and we call The Miraj, of his ascent to the nine circles of heaven and his descent into hell, guided by the angel Gabriel, keeps me up nights. The Creator, the Maker, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate, the All-Sublime, the All-Mighty inspires me. The one true God inspires me. Allah inspires me. The thought of spreading His word to the infidel, and killing those who do not accept it, inspires me.” He held his cigarette parallel to his lips and studied it. “And what is it that inspires you, Mr. Pippen?”

  Dante grinned. “The money your organization deposited in my account in the Cayman Islands inspires me, Dr. al-Karim. The prospect of monthly installments, paid in exchange for services rendered, inspires me. No need to shake your head in disapproval. It comes as no surprise to me that you find our several inspirations discordant, yours, of course, being the nobler of the two, and mine, by far the more decadent. Since I don’t believe in your God, or any God, for that matter—I am what you would call a very lapsed Catholic—I think that your particular inspiration is as ephemeral as the contrails I saw on my drive down from Beirut. One moment they were there, sharp and precise, each with a silver Israeli jet fighter streaking through the crystal Lebanese sky at the cusp, the next they were thickening and drifting and eventually dissipating in the high winds.”

  The imam considered this. “I can see you are not a timid man, Mr. Pippen. You speak your mind. A Muslim who permitted himself to say what you have said would be putting his limbs, perhaps even his life, in jeopardy. But we must make allowances for a very lapsed Catholic, especially one who has come all this way to teach our fedayeen how to devise bombs to blow up the Isra’ili occupiers of Lebanon and Palestine.” He leaned toward Dante. “Our representative in Paris who recruited you said you were born in an Irish town with the curious name of Castletownbere.”

  Dante nodded. “It’s a smudge on the map on the southern coast of the Beara Peninsula in County Cork. Fishing port. I worked on one of the salmon trawlers before I went off to seek my fortune where the streets are paved with gold.”

  “And were they paved with gold, Mr. Pippen?”

  Dante laughed under his breath. “At least they were paved, which is more than you can say for some parts of the Beara Peninsula. Or the Bekaa Valley, for that matter.”

  “Am I correct in thinking there was an expensive restaurant in Castletownbere called The Warehouse?”

  “There was a pricy restaurant for the occasional tourist, but it wasn’t named The Warehouse. It was called The Bank because it was in the old bank, one flight up on Main Street. Still had the bank vault in the back when I was there. I seem to remember a Mary McCullagh ran it in the sixties. I went to school with one of her daughters, a pretty little thing we called Deidre of the Sorrows because she made so many of us sorry when we discovered we couldn’t sweet talk her into bed.”

  “You were arrested by Scotland Yard following the explosion of a bomb on a bus near Bush House, the BBC building in London.”

  “Is that a question or a statement of fact?”

  “A statement of fact that I’d like you to corroborate, Mr. Pippen.”

  “I was killing time in London when the bus blew,” Dante said, his eyes blinking innocently. “The coppers barged into a licensed tabernacle and more or less picked up anyone who spoke the King’s English with an Irish accent. They were obliged to release me after forty-eight hours for want of evidence. Bloody bastards never even apologized.”

  “Did you blow up the bus, Mr. Pippen?”

  “I did not. But the two who did learned which side was up from yours truly.”

  The imam smiled thinly. Glancing at a wall clock with a silhouette of Ayatollah Khomeini on its face, he pushed himself to his feet and started to leave. At the door, he turned back. “I seldom have the chance to speak with an Occidental nonbeliever, Mr. Pippen, especially one who is not in awe of me. Talking with you is going to be an enlightening experience. One must know the enemy before one can defeat him. I invite you to visit me in my study after your afternoon classes, every day of the week except Friday. I will offer you mint tea and honey cakes, you can reciprocate by offering me insights into the secular mentality.”

  “The pleasure will—” Dante started to say but the imam had already vanished through the latticed door, which squeaked back and forth on its hinges, evidence of his passage.

  Dante was taken to his living quarters, a room in the back of one of the low brick houses with flat roofs at the edge of the village beyond the perimeter of the Hezbollah camp. At sunup an elderly woman with a veil over the lower part of her face appeared with what passed for breakfast: a steaming pot of green tea to wash down the chalk-dry biscuits covered with an oily paste made from crushed olives. Dante’s bodyguard, who trailed after him everywhere, including to the outhouse, led him down the dirt path to the lip of the quarry. Several young boys in dusty striped robes were already tossing stones at a troop of goats to steer them away from the perimeter fence and up a nearby slope. A yellow Hezbollah flag decorated with a hand holding aloft a rifle flapped from the pole atop the brick building where the explosives and the fuses were stored. High overhead the contrails of Israeli jets on their dawn patrols crisscrosse
d the sky. Dante’s students, nineteen fedayeen, all in their late teens or early twenties and wearing identical baggy khaki trousers and blouses and thick web belts under their robes, waited at the bottom of the quarry. An older man with an orange and white kaffiyah draped over his shoulders squatted on the rocky ground, setting out cartons filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, commonly known as PETN, along with latex, coils of electric wire and plungers powered by automobile batteries. “I, Abdullah, will translate for you,” the man informed Dante when he reached the floor of the quarry. “Please to speak slow in consideration of my English, which is curdled like last week’s goat milk.”

  Dante inspected the cartons, then kicked at the coils of wire and the plungers. “We will need modern detonators that can be tripped by radio-controlled devices from distant locations,” he informed Abdullah.

  “How far will be the distance to these locations?” Abdullah inquired.

  Dante pointed to the goats disappearing over the top of the slope. “We will mix the PETN and the latex in a manner that I will demonstrate,” he said, “and conceal the charges here in the quarry. Then we will climb to the top of that hill and detonate the explosives from there.” Dante pointed to the hill and imitated the boom of the explosion. Abdullah translated for the fedayeen and they all turned to stare at the hill. They talked excitedly among themselves, then looked at their instructor, nodding respectfully at his expertise.

  During the first several sessions, Dante concentrated on the PETN and the latex, showing the Hezbollah fighters how to mix the two and then mold the clay-like explosive to fit any receptacle. He filled a portable radio with explosives one day, then turned it on to demonstrate that it still functioned, which was important if you wanted to get the radio past military checkpoints or airport security. Another time he packed the plastique into one of those newfangled satellite telephones and explained, with Abdullah translating, the advantages: If it was done correctly, you could actually telephone the target and identify his voice before setting off the charge and decapitating him.