Retribution Read Online Free PDF Page B

if the Brotherhood had warned his mother to do something about him, perhaps
     because of the anti-Israel record of his three brothers.
    Getting a passport to Lebanon was a problem. Unlike West Bank Palestinians, who qualified for Jordanian passports, Gazans
     were stateless and had to ask Egypt for something called a Travel Document for Palestinian Refugees.
    Beirut had not yet been destroyed then, and he was dazzled by its beauty and life in the fast lane. The university was founded
     in 1866 by an American misionary, and the city around it was said to be like the Montparnasse area of Paris, which he later
     found was true. He studied hard, not so much to be anything in particular, but so he would never have to scrounge for a living
     again in Gaza.
    As the civil war worsened, he became associated with a PLO group for his own protection. After Arafat’s men were forced to
     leave, the split occurred in the PLO. His group was anti-Arafat. They pulled him from the university, where he was contentedly
     studying modern languages, and put him in a guerrilla training camp in the Bekaa Valley.
    Naim feared for his life, did what he was told, and kept his mouth shut. He dreaded being sent on a suicide mission—and he
     feared the worst when he was assigned to a group led by Abu Jeddah. This man he knew to be a superintelligent, superviolent
     extremist that not even the regular terrorists at the training camp felt comfortable having around. Naim discovered that Abu
     Jeddah wanted him because of the languages he had learned: English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German, as well as Arabic.
     He denied knowing Hebrew, althoughhe understood it, for fear of being sent, on a mission to Israel.
    He had just turned twenty-four when Abu Jeddah sent him to Rome. His task was to polish his languages, learn to live like
     a European, get to know all the major cities, kn?? how to order in a restaurant, who to tip at a hotel. Money was no problem.
     Sometimes he traveled as a student and stayed at cheap hostels. Other times he pretended to be a Lebanese businessman and
     went by limousine to the best hotel. He
almost
reached the point of forgetting that he was being trained for a certain purpose.
    Ali Khalef did not bother to look out the train window at the passing countryside. It didn’t interest him. Neither did the
     people around him. He spoke good French and good English, as well as his native Arabic, but he had not learned these languages
     out of any interest in foreign countries or people. Growing up on the streets of Beirut, selling smuggled merchandise from
     an early age, he had learned the hard way. Being able to read the information in Western-style characters on smuggled containers
     was an essential part of his trade. He could do it at twelve. For him English and French were associated with hair dryers,
     transistor radios, and cigarettes, not London and Paris.
    His father worked in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and they saw him for a few weeks once a year. He sent money to his large
     family, but it was never enough. Allthe boys found ways of, raising money in the streets. Ali had been the most successful of them.
    He was proud to be a Palestinian, although he had never been there and, the way things were going, probably never would. The
     Burj al Brajneh quarter of Beirut, where he was born and grew up, was heavily Palestinian. The Palestinians were accused of
     acting superior in Lebanon and were never popular. This had been no problem when Yasir Arafat was in control. After he and
     many of his men had been driven out by the Israelis, things were not so easy.
    But Ali had never for a moment expected that life would be easy. In his late teens he got his hands on a battered yellow Dodge
     taxi with reinforced truck axles, which he used to run goods from the coast inland to Damascus in Syria. Prices were higher
     in Syria, and he could sell just about anything in the city’s big Hammadiya souk. From that he moved on to