Legends

The committee kicked around several possibilities. It was Maggie Poole who invented a suitable fiction. “In the unlikely event the question should come up, he could say he was talked into it by his first American girlfriend, who thought she would have less chance of catching a venereal disease from him if he were circumcised. Pippen could say the operation was performed in a New York clinic. It shouldn’t be too difficult to plant a medical record at a clinic to backstop the story.”

“Moving on, could he have been a member, at one point, of the IRA?”

“An IRA dynamiter! Now that’s creative. It’s not something the Russians or East Europeans could verify because the IRA is more secretive than the KGB.”

“We could give him an arrest record in England. Arrested, questioned about an IRA bombing or two, released for lack of evidence.”

“We could even plant small items in the press about the arrests.”

“We are mining a rich vein,” declared the chairman, his eyes bulging with enthusiasm. “What do you think, Martin?”

“I like it,” Martin said from his seat. “Crystal Quest will like it, too. Dante Pippen is exactly the kind of legend that will open doors.”

1989: DANTE PIPPEN SEES THE MILKY WAY IN A NEW LIGHT

WHEN THE BATTERED FORD REACHED THE FERTILE RIFT KNOWN as the Bekaa Valley, the Palestinians knotted a blindfold over Dante’s eyes. Twenty minutes later the two-car motorcade passed through a gate in a perimeter fence and pulled to a stop at the edge of an abandoned quarry. The Palestinians tugged Dante from the back seat and guided him through the narrow dirt streets to the mosque on the edge of a Lebanese village. In the antechamber, his shoes and the blindfold were removed and he was led to a threadbare prayer carpet near the altar and motioned to sit. Ten minutes later the imam slipped in through a latticed side door. A corpulent man who moved, as heavy men often do, with surprising suppleness, he settled onto the carpet facing Dante. Arranging the folds of his flowing white robe like a Noh actor preoccupied with his image, he produced a string of jade worry beads and began working them through the stubby fingers of his left hand. In his early forties, with a crew cut and a neatly trimmed beard, the imam rocked back and forth in prayer for several moments. Finally he raised his eyes and, speaking English with a crisp British accent, announced, “I am Dr. Izzat al-Karim.”

“I suspect you know who I am,” Dante replied.

The corners of the imam’s mouth curled into a pudgy grin. “Indeed I do. You are the IRA dynamiter we have heard so much about. I may say that your reputation precedes you—”

Dante dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. “So does your shadow when the sun is behind you.”

The imam’s jowls quivered in silent laughter. He held out a pack of Iranian Bahman cigarettes, offering one to his visitor.

“I have stopped smoking,” Dante informed his host.

“Ah, if only I could follow your example,” the imam said with a sigh. He tapped one of the thin cigarettes against the metal tray on a low table to tamp down the tobacco and slipped it between his lips. Using a Zippo lighter with a picture of Muhammad Ali on it, he lit the cigarette and slowly exhaled. “I envy you your strength of character. What was the secret that enabled you to give up cigarettes?”

“I convinced myself to become a different person, so to speak,” Dante explained. “One day I was smoking two tins of Ganaesh Beedies a day. When I woke up the next morning I was someone else. And this someone else was a nonsmoker.”

The imam let this sink in. “I wear the black turban of the sayyid, which marks me as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his cousin Ali. I have two wives and I am about to take a third. Many people—my wives, my children, my fighters—count on me. It would be awkward for everyone if I were to become someone else.”

“If I had as many wives as you,” Dante remarked, “I’d probably start smoking again.”

“Whether you smoke or abstain,” the imam replied, his voice as soft as the cooing of a pigeon, “you will only live as long as God gives you to live. In any case, longevity is not what inspires a religious man like myself.”

“What does inspire a religious man like yourself?” Dante heard himself ask, though he knew the answer; Benny Sapir, the Mossad spy master who had briefed Dante Pippen in a Washington safe house before the mission, had even imitated the imam’s voice delivering stock answers to religious questions.