Instead of answering, Jamal sat up in the chair and spit on the rug.
“Stop that!” said Marsh. Control your agent, he reminded himself.
The American picked up a leather attache case he had brought with him and placed it on the coffee table in front of Jamal. He turned it toward the Palestinian and popped the locks. The case was filled with $100 bills, neatly stacked and bound. The money, gathered covertly from a half-dozen banks in Europe, was dog-eared and dirty.
“I hope we can reach a businesslike agreement,” said Marsh. “There is $100,000 in that briefcase as an initial payment. You may count it if you like.” He picked up a wad of bills and rifled them with his thumb.
“As in any business arrangement, I must request that you sign a contract.” He removed a sheet of paper from his inside coat pocket and placed it face up on the table, next to the money. From another pocket he removed an ink pad, to take the fingerprint that would form his receipt.
Jamal lit another cigarette. His face had the tight surface tension of a balloon that is nearly ready to explode.
Marsh was oblivious. In his own nervousness, he had barely looked at the Palestinian.
“As you will see from the contract,” continued Marsh, “we propose to pay you a sum of three million dollars over the next five years. The balance will be paid in regular installments to a numbered bank account in Switzerland. We have taken the liberty of opening the account already.
“Three million dollars!” Marsh repeated the sum like an incantation. With this final, gross invitation to bribery, the balloon burst.
Jamal rose from his chair, muttered an oath in Arabic, and kicked the attache case-dumping the neat stacks of bills on the floor. He loomed over Marsh’s chair. His hands were shaking with rage. Hundred-dollar bills were scattered on the rug in front of Marsh.
“You bastard!” said the Palestinian. “If I had a gun I would shoot you!”
With that, Jamal went to the bedroom and began packing his bag.
Marsh, suddenly frantic, walked to the bedroom and began making blackmail threats. He talked about photos, tapes, incriminating evidence that would be sent to the Soviets, warrants that would be issued for Jamal’s arrest in Italy, Lebanon, and Jordan. When it was obvious that these threats were having no effect, Marsh picked up the phone and called a number that reached the switchboard of the Rome station. With a few prearranged code phrases, he signalled that he had a problem and needed a backup team in a hurry.
Jamal ignored the American. When he had finished packing, he walked briskly past Marsh to the door. He took the stairs to the ground floor and slipped out a side entrance, escaping into the heat of the Roman summer.
PART VI
September 1970-June 1971
24
Beirut; September 1970
Rogers was shattered when he heard about the Rome meeting. He felt mute and helpless, like a father hearing the news that one of his children has died while in the custody of someone else. In the first several weeks he tried to reestablish contact with Jamal. He came up with various strategems, but nothing worked. It was difficult to locate somebody if you couldn’t acknowledge that you knew him.
The Palestinian remained silent and invisible. The Lebanese had no record of his returning to Beirut. Indeed, nobody had any record of his going anywhere. He had vanished. It was then that Rogers began to suspect that he had underestimated Jamal.
Rogers’s immediate problem was Fuad. The Lebanese was disgusted by what had happened, and for a time he disappeared, too. He eventually sent a message to Rogers from Greece-a postcard from Skiathos-but Rogers let him be. Fuad’s anger toward the United States would help reinforce his cover, Rogers assured Hoffman. Eventually, Fuad returned to Beirut and threw himself into the whirl of Lebanese leftist politics. He went to meetings of the Progressive Socialist Party, the National Syrian Socialist Party, the Independent Nasserite movement. He watched, he gathered information, he reported at regular intervals to Rogers. And he wondered, in his idle moments, why it was that the Americans were so accident-prone.
The PECOCK file went dead. There were meetings and discussions. The DDP’s office conducted a review of Marsh’s handling of the Rome meeting and concluded that he had badly bungled the case.
Much as Rogers disliked Marsh, he felt sorry for him now. His career was in limbo. He asked for a transfer to the newly formed staff that was handling congressional relations. It was said to be a growth area for the agency. There was some debate about the wisdom of that move, but Stone vouched for Marsh’s integrity. Rogers was pleased that his own arguments about how best to run the case had been vindicated, but that did him little good now. The agent had bolted.
In August, Stone made a swing through Beirut. Without ever admitting that his own recommendations had been wrong, he commended Rogers for his patience and good judgment. He also advised him that he would receive a promotion and advance to a higher pay grade as of September 1. It was Stone’s way of saying that he was sorry.
Jamal found the disastrous meeting in Rome oddly comforting. It clarified matters for him. The Americans seemed, once again, to fit the stereotype. They were arrogant and manipulative, interested in the Arabs only to the extent that they could get something from them. Jamal was also relieved to have broken off the ambiguous relationship he had begun with Rogers. He liked blacks and whites better than grays.
The Old Man was not so pleased when he received a coded account of the meeting from Jamal through the Kuwaiti diplomatic pouch from Bonn. The Old Man regarded the American channel as a project of the highest importance. He sent Jamal a return message advising him to continue building his network in Europe. He should forget about the Americans for now. Fatah would maintain contact with them through other intermediaries in London and Amman.
Though the Americans didn’t know it, Jamal was under their noses. He had remained in Europe, staying mostly in Rome, where the Fatah security service maintained a secret base of operations. The Fatah intelligence service, the Rasd, had safehouses there and secret sources of funds and even a local documentation office that produced forged travel documents. Jamal travelled occasionally through the summer, especially to Germany and France.
He was building an infrastructure. The Rome center operated under the cover of a bar called II Principe Rosso near the Via Veneto. It was financed by wealthy Palestinians in Kuwait and provided the Rasd a discreet way to move large sums of money. The Italian authorities, had they been curious, would have believed it was nothing more than another Roman establishment cooking the books and cheating on its taxes. On his trips to Paris and Munich, Jamal broadened the network. He developed local contacts and used them to rent apartments, open bank accounts, spot local talent, and do the thousands of other mundane things that provide a base for clandestine operations.
Jamal didn’t ask what it was all to be used for. The Old Man had told him that the movement might need such a network someday and dismissed further questions with a wave of his hand. Making his rounds in Europe, Jamal felt sometimes like a squirrel storing up nuts for a long winter whose advent nobody could predict.
The crisis in Jordan had been building for months. But the final confrontation was triggered by an act of terrorism so foolish and inflammatory that even Jamal wondered later whether it had been a deliberate act of provocation.