I admit it, he thought, it’s not the safest way to enter this hostile country, strutting through the front door. But time was of the essence and most of Libya’s secret police watched its land and coastal borders. Tripoli International Airport was the last place a foreign secret service operative would choose as his entry point. At least, that was Justin’s reasoning and he prayed his reasoning was right.
Man, this place has changed so much. He passed through a set of automatic glass doors and stopped to admire the marble floors, the glass windows and the steel structures. Justin turned left and passed by a prayer room, a duty-free shopping area with not much selection, and a first-class passengers’ lounge. I think they expanded this hall. Or does it feel roomier because I haven’t seen the mukhabarat yet? Oh, there they are.
He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead as he reached a couple of tall skinny men in gray suits, who seemed to be doing nothing but chatting at one of the empty corners of the hall. They were standing to the right of the escalators. To the untrained eye, the men looked like stranded travelers killing time during layovers. But Justin’s eyes were trained to identify exactly what was there, and most importantly, what was not.
With a quick, casual glance in their general direction, as if wondering whether he was going in the right way, Justin noticed the men had no hand luggage. This was not the arrivals area, so they were not waiting for relatives or friends. The men from the Internal Security Service, Libya’s mukhabarat, were standing beyond the terminal’s security perimeter. Only authorized personnel were allowed in this area, but the men wore no identification badges and no uniforms.
They sported dress pants, dress shirts, and loose fitting jackets — perfect for hiding a small arsenal of firearms — and no ties. It was too casual for businessmen and overkill for common bodyguards. But what gave them away, what usually gives away most secret agents, was the look. The piercing look, aimed at understanding the intentions of an individual simply by looking at his eyes, his face, his hands, his body gestures.
Justin dropped his gaze to the floor as he approached the escalator. He did not shuffle his feet, cough, comb his hair with his hands, rummage through his pockets, or make any gestures that would attract the Libyan agents’ attention. There was no visible reason for his behavior to be out of the ordinary. Justin was unarmed and was not carrying any illegal or prohibited substances. Any frisking by the mukhabarat would reveal nothing incriminating, but Justin knew the mukhabarat did not need any evidence to hold a foreigner in their cells for weeks if not months.
“Sir, your shoe is undone,” one of the Libyan agents called at him in Arabic.
Justin resisted the urge to turn his head toward the voice or to stop and look at his black runners. A foreigner arriving alone and not as part of an organized tour, was still less suspicious than a foreigner who spoke the language of the country. Nice trick, but I’m not falling for it.
“Hey, you should tie your shoe,” the other agent said in English with a heavy Arabic accent.
Justin looked at the man and then at his feet. The shoelace of his left runner was slightly loose, not quite undone, and almost certainly it would not untie during Justin’s short walk to the taxi stand. But the small, almost undetectable detail, had not escaped their watchful eyes. Extremely observant these two.
“Thank you, mate,” Justin replied. He knelt and tightened the shoe lace.
He took the escalator down to the first floor. He never looked back, knowing the men of the mukhabarat would not stop staring until he was out of sight. They may even radio their buddies downstairs to keep an eye on me.
Justin strode past a long row of airline desks and customer service counters, their logos flashing over colored glass and fluorescent lights. Since the lifting of the UN sanctions in 2003 and the US sanctions in 2004 against the country responsible for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988—a bombing that claimed the lives of 270 people, 180 of them Americans — a stream of foreign companies had flocked to Libya, a place flooded with oil cash.
Most of them had left during the months of the civil war and rebellion that toppled Colonel Moammar Qaddafi and his forty-one-year, iron-fisted rule in 2011. They had returned soon after a new government was installed in the country with the help of the US and its European allies. The new leaders, especially the new prime minister, had promised democracy and an end to Libya’s long support for terrorist and rogue regimes all over the world. Still, four decades of tyranny could not be undone overnight. Change was slow, especially for the mukhabarat.
As soon as Justin reached the main entrance to the terminal, he felt the heat wave slap him across the face. A boiling, dusty wind gust embraced him as soon as he stepped outside. A crowd of taxi drivers swarmed him. They were all men, mostly in their thirties and forties, but he spotted a few age-wrinkled faces. They groped at his luggage, vying to pick him up, while shouting at him in Arabic, English, and French. He politely declined their offers and kept walking beside the long row of black and white taxi sedans. A couple of half-torn posters of Qaddafi caught his attention. Qaddafi was shown in a long black and green tunic, against a background of the map of Africa, saluting the nation with a clenched right fist. Someone had written a few insults over the deposed dictator’s face.
Justin started searching for a taxi driver. He was looking for someone less zealous and brazen and definitely younger, perhaps too young to be recruited by the mukhabarat. After a few sideway glances at the parked cars, he stopped next to a young man leaning against the hood of an old, rusty Fiat, reading a folded newspaper. Under the shade of a tall palm tree, the young man was enduring the ninety-five degree temperature, ignoring the sweat soaking his forehead and the collar of his short-sleeved shirt. The young man’s skin was dark brown, but his thick, broad nose, and short curly hair testified to his central African origin.
“Hey, is your taxi for hire?” Justin asked the young man who could not be older than seventeen.
“What? Oh, taxi, yes, yes, sir,” he replied in English, the language in which Justin had asked the question. “Yes, taxi.”
He tossed his newspaper in the backseat and opened the front passenger’s door. Before Justin had a chance to slide into the seat, a large number of taxi drivers crowded around the Fiat. They began to exchange harsh words with the young man who was stowing away Justin’s luggage. Amidst the commotion, Justin heard words like “pig” and “thief” and “evil.” The young man and Justin managed to get inside the car and drove off, the driver using uninterrupted honks to force away the people standing in front of his taxi.
“What was that all about?” Justin asked, feigning ignorance, after the Fiat rounded the curve. They headed toward Tripoli, twenty-one miles north of the airport.
“Huh? Oh, they… they says not my turn. You came to me. I did wrong nothing,” the driver explained in broken English.
Justin nodded. He was telling the truth, albeit sugar-coating it for him.
“Where are we going?” the driver asked.
Justin said one word, “Corinthia.”
Corinthia Hotel Tripoli was perhaps the most luxurious hotel in Tripoli. Even the US Embassy temporarily used its fifth floor when it first opened after the renewal of the diplomatic relation between the two countries. Now the embassy had its own building on Al Jrabah Street in the heart of Tripoli.