Bassam set the body aside, then retraced his steps through the corridors and down the staircase. He was crossing the gaming room when a half-dozen guerrillas sprang from the pitch blackness. Gun muzzles poked into him from every angle. They were muscling him between the tables when an anguished cry echoed through the casino. Several of the Palestinians dashed up the staircase to the source of the chilling wail. They found Katifa in the corridor, kneeling over Rashid’s body. His eyes were glazed. His head lay in a small halo of black blood that had spilled from the puncture beneath his chin.
While Katifa cradled her brother’s corpse in the corridor at Casino du Liban, the Soviet-made gunboat was cutting swiftly through Mediterranean blackness. A short, stocky man with wary eyes and an iron will sat in one of the cabins opening the package that Katifa had delivered to the pier.
He removed two boxes of pharmaceuticals.
One contained disposable syringes, the other a supply of insulin. His mouth was dry and his hands trembled, making it more difficult to peel the wrapper from the syringe. The laser-honed needle glistened as he brought it to the vial and pierced the blue polypropylene seal. He withdrew precisely 25 ccs of the milky fluid, flicked the syringe several times with a fingernail, then depressed the plunger until a few drops of insulin spurted from the needle. His thumb and forefinger pulled a thickness of abdomen from under his shirt and he deftly slid the needle beneath the skin.
Then the Fatah Revolutionary Council’s radical founder, the mastermind of international terrorism who had vowed to fight to the last man if that’s what it took for Palestinians to reclaim their homeland, cursed his poor health and shot the insulin into his flesh. His name was Sabri Banna but he was known to the world as Abu Nidal.
He had just withdrawn the needle when the phone in the cabin sounded. Nidal answered it and was informed by his radioman that Hasan was calling on the ship-to-shore radio. The news of Rashid’s death filled the terrorist leader with anger and sadness. He ordered the gunboat to return to Casino du Liban.
Katifa and Hasan were waiting on the dock when the vessel pulled into one of the slips.
The insulin had worked its magic. Nidal leapt onto the dock and hurried to Katifa’s side, embracing her emotionally. “I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes welling.
Katifa didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She just broke down and, sobbing in Nidal’s arms, remembered another day eighteen years ago when he had comforted her. The horrid memory was a blur of screaming people, gunfire, and helicopters.
That was in 1967.
Egypt had closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping and the Six-Day War was in full swing. Ram Allah, an ancient city on the West Bank, was the center of Palestinian resistance. Katifa’s father, Abu Issa Kharuz, was the settlement’s leader. Days of bloody fighting with Israeli troops forced him to consider evacuating. He polled his two young protégés; Abu Nidal was vehemently opposed; Yasser Arafat sided with his mentor. Decision made, helicopters were called in. While Issa Kharuz and Nidal resisted the advancing Israelis, Arafat loaded the women and children. Nidal made it aboard the last helicopter; Katifa’s father didn’t. It lifted off in a hail of gunfire that killed him.
Now Katifa watched as her brother’s body was loaded onto the gunboat; then she and Nidal followed Hasan up the gangway into the casino. He led the way to a darkened Greek-style amphitheater opposite the gaming room. Towering Ionic columns circled the stage where spectacular shows had once dazzled jet-setters. And there, hanging naked from an ornate trapezelike apparatus that had been used to lower bare-breasted showgirls to the stage, was Bassam. His ankles were tied and he had been hoisted into the air upside down.
Hasan handed Abu Nidal a knife. Bassam’s knife.
“Who are you working for?” Nidal asked.
Bassam didn’t respond.
“Who?” Nidal shouted, grabbing his hair and yanking his face up toward him. “Who is he?”
“An American. He works at the embassy — in the communications section,” Bassam finally replied weakly, using information he’d been instructed to reveal should such a situation arise. “I… I don’t know his name.”
With a sudden slash of the blade, Abu Nidal cut off the clump of hair. Bassam yelped in fright. The stocky terrorist circled him, then suddenly stuck the blade, just the first half-inch of razor-sharp steel, into the flesh below Bassam’s rib cage.
He let out a short scream.
“His name,” Nidal commanded, flicking his wrist, causing the puncture in Bassam’s flesh to widen.
“I don’t know!” Bassam screamed in pain, blinded by the halogen atop a whirring videotape camera manned by one of the terrorists. He was crouched next to Katifa, who stared unflinchingly at the blood running over Bassam’s back, which still bore the marks of her passion.
“Do you know what happens next?” Nidal asked menacingly. “Have you ever seen a man skinned alive?”
Bassam was writhing in agony, blinking at the blood that covered his face and dripped to the floor.
“Only his name can save you,” Abu Nidal prodded, flicking the blade.
“Fitz… Fitz-gerald,” Bassam whimpered. “Thomas Fitzgerald.”
Abu Nidal smiled thinly; then, following Arabic tradition that a blood relative exact vengeance, he turned to Katifa and offered her the weapon that had killed her brother.
She lowered her eyes, declining. “No, no, it is your right, Abu-habib,” she said emotionally, paying tribute to Nidal. Though the prefix Abu, which means father in Arabic, is often used informally as a gesture of respect, it had special meaning for Katifa; and she had purposely added the suffix, beloved, to acknowledge that, having raised her and Rashid since their father’s death eighteen years ago, Abu Nidal had more than earned the right to avenge his adopted son’s death. She saw the pride and acceptance in Nidal’s eyes, then hugged him and hurried from the amphitheater.
When Katifa was out of sight, Nidal held the blade against Bassam’s torso while Hasan and one of the others spun him slowly on the trapezelike apparatus until a shallow incision completely girdled his waist.
“No! No! God, no! I told you! I told you!” Bassam howled; but his shrieks of pain and protest were for naught, as the two Palestinians pushed their fingers into the bloody slit and grasped his flesh tightly.
On the ground floor of the casino, Katifa was crossing the main gaming room when a piercing scream echoed off the mirrors, raising her pores.
The air was alive with the cool, salty bite of the sea as Tom Fitzgerald left his apartment on Rue du Caire in the once fashionable Hamra quarter of West Beirut, wishing he could walk to his office as he once had. Indeed, the U.S. Embassy on Avenue de Paris was a short distance away. Fitzgerald was listed as communications officer; but his real title was CIA chief of station. He waved to some neighborhood children on their way to school, then crossed to the beige Honda that he had recently begun driving to work.