Powell rolled up his window. "He's so stupid..."

"But he's the boss." Akbar eased the Mercedes around the corner and parked on the boulevard. He turned up the CB radio and listened to the voices and static on the channel. When they heard a voice speak in an unintelligible chaos of languages, Akbar started the car.

Clayton's voice came from the walkie-talkie. "Get ready."

Without acknowledging the instructions, Powell nodded to Akbar. They slowly cruised north on the boulevard. Few cars risked the uncertain safety of the latest cease-fire. They saw only two other vehicles on the dark street.

This section of the city had no electricity. No streetlights illuminated the roadway. No traffic signals flashed at the intersections. Buildings stood black against the darkness of the storm-gray night.

In the vacant lots, fires and lanterns lit the tents of the homeless. Groups of men with rifles gathered under shelters of plastic sheets to warm themselves around oil-drum stoves.

Past the burned-out businesses and tenement buildings, past the gutted, skeletal ruins of hotels, past the Green Line dividing the city, the skyline of East Beirut stood electric against the night. Thousands of lights marked executive suites and apartments. Swirls of neon marked the theatres, nightclubs, billboards for liquor and perfume. But for the dispossessed of West Beirut — Shias, Sunnis, Druze, Christians — the lights of the wealthy Maronite Christians meant nothing. The war had forced the peasants from the poverty of their mountain villages and thrown them into the poverty and devastation of West Beirut. They had always suffered poverty. The Maronite overlords of Lebanon had always flaunted wealth. In a Beirut divided by an arbitrary frontier called the Green Line, the traditions of Lebanon continued.

In the front seat of the Mercedes, the CB radio alerted the three men. Then Clayton spoke through the walkie-talkie. "We saw the limo. And we're moving. Where are you?"

Again, Powell did not acknowledge his officer's question. But he did rave, "He's so stupid! Why did they send him here?"

Hussain watched the rearview mirror. He glanced back to Powell, and said, "The Libyan comes."

Headlights gained on the Mercedes. They stared forward as a pickup truck with militiamen in the back roared past. Two limousines followed an instant later. The convoy continued ahead, then skidded around a corner.

Clayton followed. Accelerating, weaving past the Mercedes, the panel truck gained on the limousines. A second surveillance car, a Fiat, raced to keep up with the truck.

Powell leaned forward to Akbar. "Slow down. Let Clayton take point if he wants to."

The taillights of the panel truck and the Fiat turned. Akbar stayed two blocks back.

Suddenly, autofire and rocket blasts shattered the night. Powell saw flashes of high explosives over the buildings, and flames fuelled by gasoline. Rifles fired hundreds of rounds.

Akbar floored the accelerator. The Mercedes sped past the narrow street. Looking out the side window, Powell saw only one image.

A street of flames.

In the walnut-paneled luxury of an office in Washington, D.C., a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency discussed the assassination of a field agent in Beirut. He spoke with a State Department officer of corresponding rank. Both men, career civil servants, wore the uniform of the bureaucrat: three-piece suit, tie, gold cuff links. Their uniforms differed only in color. One man's suit was gray, the other's blue. The State Department paper Viking swiveled in his desk chair, considering the information his counterpart in the Agency was relaying to him.

"A standard surveillance operation. Absolutely no expectation of danger — other than the threat of random violence in that awful place, of course. Our man — his name was Clayton — and his assistants maintained strict procedural discipline. No one outside of the field unit knew of the assignment. Let me emphasize that — no one. If there was a breach of security, it came from someone within the group."

The State Department mandarin interrupted with a question. "Is there any chance your man simply drove into a firefight between rival militias? That he was an innocent bystander, in a sense?"

"Clayton had a good many years of experience in his work and he wouldn't have blundered into some crossfire between two ragtag gangs. The initial report indicates a carefully plotted ambush. The two cars received intense automatic-weapons fire and several hits from rocket-propelled grenades."

"Any indication of who supplied the weapons?"

"What?"

"The machine guns, the rockets. Who sponsored this? The Soviets? The Syrians? Or — perhaps this is an utterly Machiavellian thought — is it possible our Israeli friends decided to bloody our nose? With the intent of course of putting responsibility and therefore the blame on the Soviets and their allies?"

"We haven't had a chance to analyze the intent."

"When will you have the evidence from the scene? The forensic evidence?"

"We may never have that evidence. We simply do not have the manpower to send an investigative unit. And I don't know if the spent casings and bullets and whatever other evidence we could find would help us. Every weapon from every nation in the world shows up in Beirut. I think this situation requires interrogation of the personnel involved. To be exact, the Marine who survived."

"A Marine? Does the Agency employ servicemen now?"

"A Marine Corps captain. At least he was. He's now on detached duty with us. He served in the Multinational Peacekeeping Force. Before his Beirut duty, he'd studied Arabic. He became indispensible for our contacts with the fundamentalist Muslim groups, the various Shia gangs."

"What is his ethnic background?"

"Texas."

"Would I know his family? Are they prominent in society?"

The Agency officer laughed. "I doubt it! He's just a shack-town kid who made good in the Marine Corps."

"He's a negro? Is that why he relates to those Mohammedans?"

"No, he's white..."

"Strange."

"He had two years of college on his own before he enlisted. Then he worked hard and scored well on all tests and finally got into officer's training school through the backdoor. Learned passable Arabic somehow. And French. He proved himself in a difficult situation we had in California. Then he volunteered for the Beirut duty. He proved to be a remarkably effective liaison officer."

"How did he survive the attack?"

"He was in the third car. Clayton and the others were in the first and second. Powell saw the ambush and simply drove away."

"Leaving the others to die?"

"Exactly. When he returns to Washington, we'll question him very closely."

"What do you know about his links to Muslim gangs?"

"I know that he's our best man in Beirut, so far as the Shits go — as I call the Shutes. In fact, dismissing him will cost you the single most productive source of street-level information the State Department has in West Beirut. He knows every fundamentalist chieftain and every officer on the staffs of the raghead militias, which proved invaluable during the stationing of the Marine Beirut Force..."

"But which is of negligible value now." The State Department officer looked at his watch. "We really don't want anything to do with those groups. Not on a diplomatic level. For counterterrorism, yes. But his reports don't focus on that, if my memory is correct."

"No, his reports certainly don't. He almost seems to be pleading their case sometimes. Telling us of neocolonialist privileges and discrimination and institutionalized inequality..."

"As if we don't know the realities of demographics and politics there. Should we continue this over lunch?"