“No, thanks,” he said. “Carrying around expensive, sophisticated technology won’t make me any safer.”
He found a driver outside the airport waiting for his next passenger. The man’s pickup truck reminded Alan of the small Japanese truck he had used thirty years ago to drive himself to Morocco. The memory made him trust this truck not to break down. He asked the driver if he could take him to a village just outside Benghazi, about 250 miles away. The driver countered that Benghazi was at least 300. Spencer said the village was closer than Benghazi. They arrived at a price, and Alan climbed in beside him.
The driver’s name was Abdullah, and he was a cheerful companion. He drove with great confidence and talked about his family, his village by the sea, and his hope that the fighting would end so he could go to Benghazi and open an electronics store. Spencer could see he was watching the road for anything ahead that might harm his tires, break his springs, or blow up.
Spencer told him he was a Canadian relief worker who happened to speak excellent Arabic. He told the practiced lie about coming to Libya as a child with his parents. He said he had volunteered for the relief mission to give a little bit back to the country.
He directed Abdullah to the village near Benghazi where he had met Faris Hamzah. The road that led to the place from the south was the same one he had used to bring the money to Faris Hamzah and to take it away again. The boundaries of the village had crept outward, and now it seemed to have become a town.
Spencer looked from a distance at Faris Hamzah’s complex. Now, over thirty years later, the wall around it had been built up and buttressed and was about ten feet tall. The house had been enlarged and raised to two stories with a flat, rectangular roof. He could see there were two other two-story buildings on the property—possibly housing for Faris Hamzah’s guards or servants—and a garage.
The couple of dusty, scraggly olive trees of thirty-five years ago were now a couple of dozen trees. They appeared to be grouped around the space where he had once seen a half-finished fountain, so he guessed the space must be a shaded garden now.
The big house was not a surprise. Hamzah must be a powerful man if he was sending teams of killers to the United States. In Libya, power meant military power, religious power, or factional power. Hamzah had not been a soldier, and had never been even remotely pious. But he did have a family and a tribe, and a connection with the local people. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had built a food stall in the village market into a store, and then added a few more stores in other villages. The intelligence report on Hamzah that he had read mentioned that the family’s fortunes had not been diminished by excessive honesty, but they did not seem to have suffered for it.
Spencer guessed that Hamzah had to have kept an unambiguous connection with the cluster of villages his tribe controlled, and especially this one. In the old days, he’d held no office, and probably didn’t now. After a first attempt by Libyans in the post-Gaddafi years to hold elections, the Islamic fundamentalists had announced that they had no intention of accepting their loss. After that there were no elections for Hamzah or anyone else to run in, and no offices to win. All a man like Hamzah could be doing was promising to deliver his faction to one side or another in the civil war. Right now, he must be on the side the United States supported, the Tobruk government. Otherwise US military intelligence wouldn’t be doing favors for him.
The car passed the block and Alan Spencer made a quick decision. “Abdullah,” he said. “Please drive on this way for another quarter mile and let me off. I’ll find my way back to Tobruk later.”
Abdullah stopped, and Spencer gave him the fee they had agreed upon and another third as much.
Abdullah thanked him for his generosity, and Spencer said, “Thank you for your kindness and your patience. May Allah protect you.”
“And may he protect you,” said Abdullah. He turned the car around and drove off.
“Aameen,” Spencer muttered. “May it be so.” He stepped away from the road and onto the dusty, weedy ground. He selected a route a distance from the first buildings and walked it, staying far enough away from the village to escape notice. He avoided a junkyard and then made his way upwind of a municipal garbage heap. He found a hill he remembered that overlooked the dry river and the village on the other side. He climbed up and sat down to wait for the world to get dark.
35