The Third Target by Joel C Rosenberg Read Free Book Online

man could really spin a good yarn. I was in awe of the way he had seemed to have met everyone and seen everything. Then again, maybe I simply loved him because of all the ice cream Pop-Pop used to buy my older brother and me whenever he and Grammie Collins came to visit. Or maybe it was because my father had left us when I was only twelve, and I never saw him again   —none of us did   —and Pop-Pop was the only man I really had in my life growing up. It was he who took me fishing on Eagle Lake and hiking in Acadia National Park. It was he who taught me how to use his collection of rifles and took me on hunting trips all over Maine and even up in Canada. Whatever the reason, I loved the man with every fiber of my being, and for as long as I could remember, I wanted to do what he did, to be what he was. Now here I was, about to touch down in Beirut, a city he had worked in and lived in and loved dearly.
    Maybe the olive didn’t fall far from the tree.
    Then again, my grandfather had lived a long and fruitful life and despite his many adventures had died in his bed, in his sleep, in his old age. At the moment, I had no presumption of meeting such a quiet and peaceful fate.

7

    BEIRUT, LEBANON
    I stared at my hands.
    They were trembling. Not much. Not so that anyone else would necessarily notice. But I noticed. It had never happened before.
    I unscrewed the top from a bottle of Evian and took several gulps. A flight attendant announced the local time of 6:54 p.m. We had lifted off from Heathrow in London at 10:05 that morning. Air France flight 568 was touching down a minute early. I pulled out my grandfather’s gold pocket watch, the one he gave me just before he died. I wound it up and set it. Then I pulled out a pen and my dog-eared passport and began filling out the Lebanese immigration and customs form.
    Name: James Bradley Collins
    Date of birth: May 3, 1975
    City of birth: Bar Harbor, Maine
    Nationality: American
 Country of residence: United States
    City passport was issued: Washington, D.C.
    Countries visited before landing in Lebanon: Turkey, France, Germany, U.K.
    Purpose for visit: Business
    I filled in my passport number and marked that I had nothing to declare. Then I flipped through the pages of my well-traveled passport from back to front, reading through all the stamps I had acquired over the years   —every European capital, every Asian capital, and every capital in the Middle East and North Africa. Except Israel’s. I had been in and out of Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv more times than I could count, of course, but I had always been careful to ask the authorities there to stamp my visa, not my passport, so it didn’t prevent me from entering certain Arab countries that would refuse a traveler entry if he had an Israeli stamp in his travel documents.
    Before I realized it, I was wincing at the terrible photo of me taken nearly a decade earlier. I was reminded of the old adage: “If you really look as bad as your passport picture, you’re too ill to travel.” Then again, in some ways the photo was better than the current reality. My eyes were green back then. Now they seemed permanently bloodshot. I’d had twenty-twenty vision then. Today I sported prescription eyeglasses in black, semi-rimless designer frames for which I’d paid more than I care to mention. In the photo, my muddy-brown hair was hideously long and badly in need of a cut. But then again, I actually had hair   —on my head, at least, though not on my face. Ten years later, I was completely bald (by choice, thank you very much) and sporting a salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee.
    As we taxied to the gate, I powered up my phone and checked my e-mails. The first that came up was from my brother. I skipped it and moved on. Most of the rest were a potpourri of updates and questions from colleagues in D.C. and sources I was working around the world, as well as RSS feeds of the latest stories published by the Times on