Bride of a Bygone War (23 page)

Lukash smiled. “A couple of those same Phalange pals offered to fix me up tonight, but I told them I’m trying to cut back.”

“Yeah, I know about that one, too. I have an ex-wife in Tennessee who’s been wanting me to do that for years.”

“And have you?”

“Now and then, but never for long. A man needs companionship when he’s on the road, especially in the shithole places where I get sent. Hell, I’ve done so many TDYs in the last year, I had to get me some extra pages in my passport for all the visas.”

“Bud, you sound like a man in need of a drink. Pull up a chair. What will it be? Beer, bourbon, gin and tonic?”

“Bourbon and water, if you don’t mind. But before we get too relaxed, let me deliver your mail.” Strickland pulled a folded manila envelope from his waistband and dropped it on the table. “Connie told me to make sure you got this by the end of the day. Most important is the list of equipment that Headquarters is prepared to offer the Phalange, along with delivery dates. And there’s also some personal mail that arrived in yesterday’s diplomatic pouch.”

Lukash ripped open the sealed envelope, scanned each message from the station briefly, and then glanced at the return addresses on each piece of personal mail. “It’s all routine stuff. Let’s call it a day and pour some drinks. Bourbon and water coming up.”

Lukash left Bud Strickland seated at the dining room table while he filled a small ice bucket with ice. He returned with the bucket, a bottle of Old Fitzgerald, two crystal tumblers, and a dish of Lebanese roasted nuts.

“Walt, I don’t mean to pry,” Strickland started as he reached for a handful of nuts, “but Connie asked me to remind you of the cable Ed wanted you to write about that Irish gal who followed you here. He asked me to pick it up from you if it’s ready to go.”

“It’s not,” Lukash answered abruptly while he filled their glasses with ice and poured three fingers of bourbon in each.

“Okay,” Strickland replied, backing off. “Is there anything I can tell them by way of explanation?”

“It’s gotten to be such a mess, Bud, I don’t even know where to start.” Lukash swirled the ice in his glass and took a long sip of bourbon before continuing. “Do you remember the assassination plot against King Khalid two years ago in Jeddah?”

Strickland nodded.

“Lorraine was married to the ringleader. She was also sleeping with our agent, who was one of the plotters. Of course, Lorraine had nothing to do with the assassination plot, but to Headquarters her name will always be tarred by her association with Islamic militants and terrorism. But what bothers them even more is that after Connie and I helped her escape from Saudi Arabia, Lorraine showed up in Amman and started appearing on the cocktail circuit.

“You see, Lorraine has this uncanny way of fitting into any social group and ingratiating herself with just about everybody. Within days after arriving in Amman, she got herself a job with Royal Jordanian Airlines and was turning up regularly at the American Club. I’m telling you, if she were working for the U.S. government, she’d recruit more agents than any of us.

“So, anyway, one night she and I had a long talk at the American Club about her old life in Saudi Arabia. We hit it off pretty well, and after that we kept on running into each other. One thing led to another and after a while I let her move in.”

“Excuse my asking,” Strickland interrupted, “but didn’t the chief of station have anything to say about that? Wherever I’ve been posted, there’s been a rule against case officers shacking up with foreign nationals.”

Lukash took another sip of whiskey. “Maybe so. But this COS didn’t seem to care, and the DCOS had his own share of foreign sweethearts, so he didn’t push it either. It wasn’t till a new chief arrived that anyone thought to do a name trace on Lorraine. Soon after that, Headquarters warned me to drop her if I didn’t want major trouble with the Office of Security. But by then I was getting close to the end of my tour of duty, and I was thinking a lot about returning to Washington.
 

“Lorraine must have figured out what was going on, too, because she started leaning on me…hard. The ironic thing is, I might have taken her back with me if they hadn’t sent me over here. I’ve never met anybody who suits me nearly as well as Lorraine. Yeah, it would have been an uphill battle getting a security clearance for her so I could marry her without having to quit the Agency, but those kinds of things can be arranged if you’re at Headquarters long enough to see it through. There’s always a way. I just needed some time to work things out.”

“Walt, you can tell me to go to hell if you think I’m out of line,” Strickland said, “but I was in Ed’s office when he read the cable from the division chief about Lorraine showing up in Beirut. Believe me, if you don’t drop her fast, Headquarters will be hauling your ass home regardless.”

“Let them. I’m not dropping her,” Lukash asserted.

Strickland downed the rest of his bourbon and Lukash did the same. He refilled both glasses and added more ice to each.

“Is there something I’m missing here, Walt? It seems to me that you can’t possibly win this.”

“Maybe not, but there’s a reason why I’m doing what I’m doing, and it’s something that I’ve never talked about with you or Connie or anyone else. If I tell you, will you promise to keep it to yourself until I get all this worked out? It would mean a lot to me, Bud. Will you promise me that?”

Strickland hesitated. “This isn’t anything that the counterintelligence staff or the FBI ought to know about it, is it? Because if it is, I can’t make you a promise like that. You realize that, don’t you?”

Lukash gave a mirthless laugh. “I haven’t been spying for the Russians or stealing government funds, if that’s what you’re worried about. It may be just as rotten, in a way, but it’s definitely not a federal offense.” He watched Strickland nod his assent and suddenly stood up with glass in hand. “Bud, top up your glass and come with me.”

Lukash opened the sliding door to the east-facing balcony and carried a pair of chairs and a portable stereo cassette player out the door. He turned on a tape of local belly dance music and beckoned Strickland to take a seat. “Bud, were you ever in Beirut before the Events?”

“A couple of times, in transit. Spent a few days at the Hotel St. Georges, checked out the casino and the nightclubs, that sort of thing.”

“Do you remember what it was like here then, how free it made you feel, as if there were absolutely no rules and anything was possible?”

Strickland nodded in understanding.
 

“I was sent here in 1975 to study Arabic under cover as a student,” Lukash continued. “They gave me a tourist passport under the name of Bill Conklin, told me to stay away from the embassy, and to come back in a year with fluent Arabic for assignment to Cairo under nonofficial cover.” Lukash swirled the ice in his glass nervously, and felt a shiver run down his back. He rubbed his cold hands together and then went on.
 

“I hired an Arabic tutor and took lessons in the morning and afternoons, preparing my homework in the evenings after dinner. I worked nonstop, and in a few months I had made good progress with the language but was starting to burn out. I decided to cut back to morning lessons only, with homework in the afternoon, and to spend the evenings on the town, practicing my Arabic, getting a feel for the local culture, and having some fun.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” Strickland noted.

“No joke. Anyway, my Arabic tutor at that time was a middle-age woman named Claudette Hammouche, who also taught part-time at the U.S. embassy. We got along well enough, and she had me over to the house a number of times for lunch or for coffee. Not long after I started going out in the evenings, Claudette arranged a blind date for me with her niece, Muna, who had just graduated from Beirut University and was working as a graphic artist for a local advertising agency.

“Muna was a lovely girl—extremely bright, full of energy and ambition. She would practice her English on me, and I’d practice my Arabic and French on her. We never ran out of things to talk about, and she never seemed to tire of my stories about the U.S. and the places I’d visited in Europe and Asia. And she was such a beautiful girl that I simply couldn’t take my eyes off her. Or my hands, for that matter.”

“Uh-oh. I see it coming,” Bud broke in.

“No doubt about it, the bachelor life in Beirut had gone to my head. I had a terrific apartment, a decent salary, time on my hands, and a city that was full of excitement. Muna and I went out to restaurants and nightclubs several times a week, joined a private beach club, and took ski trips on the weekends. I thought it would never end. Even when it started getting close to the time for my reassignment to Cairo, somehow I assumed that I’d be able to arrange for Muna to go there, too. Of course, I never told her that I worked for the Agency, but at the same time, I never told anyone in the station or at Headquarters that I might be getting serious about this Lebanese girl that none of them knew I was even seeing.

“Then one day Muna came to me and said her period was three weeks late. Well, you know how those things go. We sweated and sweated, and in the meantime we started talking about the possibility of getting married. And when her period finally came, she didn’t stop talking about it. That was about a month before my reassignment was due. In a matter of days I was scheduled to travel to Headquarters for a ten-day TDY to take my Arabic examination, talk to the Egypt desk officers, and study the files of the agents I was supposed to take over in Cairo.”

Bud Strickland held up his hand to interrupt. “Wait a second. What sort of work did Muna and her family think you did for a living?”

“The cover story I told everybody in those days was that I was a salesman for a refrigeration equipment company and had been sent to Beirut to learn Arabic in preparation for a sales assignment in the Arabian Gulf. As I recall, my plan at the time—to the extent that I had one—was to return to Headquarters, tell them about Muna, wait for her security clearance to come through, and then get married before we moved to Cairo together.” Lukash added more bourbon to his glass.

“Pretty naïve, eh?” he added, looking to Strickland for a response and finding none. “In hindsight, what I did back then makes no sense at all. Maybe it was Muna’s persistence. Maybe I thought I would be able to force the issue once I got back to Headquarters. But whatever the reason, I proposed to Muna and we scheduled a wedding date for a week after my return from the U.S.”

Strickland swallowed hard.

“And as fate would have it, Headquarters postponed my trip to Washington until after the planned wedding date. I had outmaneuvered myself. I couldn’t think of a way out, so I went through with the wedding and we flew off to Corfu for our honeymoon. It seems completely unreal to me now, like a dream from long ago. I remember the scenes, but it’s difficult to believe that I was really there.”

“What about your family or stateside friends? Weren’t any of them at the wedding?”

Lukash shook his head. “My parents are divorced. My dad would never have come to Beirut, and my mom wouldn’t have been able to afford it even if she had wanted to. So I punted and didn’t tell either of them—or my brother or any of my friends. And especially nobody from the embassy.”

“Jesus,” Strickland murmured. “So what happened when you finally got back to Headquarters? What did they do when you told them you had married a foreign national without getting it cleared in advance?”

“I never got to Headquarters. The day I was scheduled to leave, I said good-bye to Muna and her parents, left my car at my apartment, took a taxi to the embassy, and went up to the station to pick up my plane ticket and any last-minute instructions from my inside contact, who happened to be none other than Ed Pirelli.” Lukash downed the remaining bourbon in his glass and refilled it hastily. His eyes took on a dreamy, watery look.

“I was taken completely by surprise by what Ed had to say. He said the division had changed its plans for me. Changed its plans. Such a simple thing…for them.” Lukash pressed his lips together for a few seconds and went on.

“He said there was a covert action program going on in the Saudi desert and that it needed a trained Arabist. It would be a joint effort with the Saudis, so I could go back to working under my true name and carrying an official passport and being attached to the embassy. And if I could stand living in the desert for a year or so and didn’t screw up, I could probably count on an early promotion.”

“And what did Pirelli say when you told him you were married?” Strickland asked expectantly.

“I didn’t,” Lukash replied flatly “I started to explain that I had become attached to a Lebanese girl—‘attached’ was the word I used, just like being attached to the embassy at Jeddah—but Ed cut me off. He said that the Agency had paid me well to take the year off to learn a foreign language and now it was payback time. He reminded me that availability to serve anywhere in the world was a condition of my employment and that my only options were yes or no. ‘Yes’ meant a promising future in the Agency, and ‘no’ meant a one-way ticket to some menial job at Headquarters and eventual dismissal.”
 

 
“Okay, so you went,” Strickland broke in. “What then? Did you contact your wife after you got there? What happened when your work in Saudi was finished?”

“I arrived in Saudi in 1976, when the Lebanese civil war was still at its worst. The embassy in Beirut had been evacuated. They never would have given me approval to go back there.”