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Raouché, Ramlet el Baida, and Jnah.
    Prosser swung his feet to the floor and sat up on the sofa where he had spent the night in his boxer shorts. Cool, moist morning air blew in through the wide-open French doors separating the living room from the broad terrace and chilled his naked shoulders. He stepped outside and stood at the iron rail to watch the street vendors set up their espresso machines and citrus presses at the backs of decrepit vans parked along the Corniche. Though it was barely half past six, the sun’s warm and soothing rays were already above the horizon and touching his skin.
    He drew a deep breath. Often in the early morning, when the air was fragrant and still and free of clouds or haze, he would gaze out like this from his apartment across the mirror-smooth Bay of Beirut toward the peaks of the Sannin Ridge and ask himself why he found life in Beirut so satisfying. Many of the advantages that had long ago earned the city its reputation as an Eastern paradise—climate, culture, architecture and cuisine—remained intact five years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war.
    But what set Beirut apart, he realized, was the danger. There was enough of it to serve as a tonic; but for a foreigner who did not take part in the war, there was not so much of it as to justify a rational decision to flee or to hole up inside one’s office or apartment. The most tangible threat facing Prosser was the same as that facing any other human being in Beirut, whatever his nationality, religion, or political affiliation. If he were killed, it would likely be from the random impact of a stray bullet or shell or from the indiscriminate devastation of the car bomb.
    The Hala Building, in which Prosser’s apartment occupied the westernmost quarter of the fourth floor, stood on a north-facing ridge in West Beirut’s safest and most expensive neighborhood. Its apartments were spacious by American standards and finished expensively, albeit to Lebanese tastes, with locally quarried marble floors, wood trim of stained tropical hardwoods, and modern Italian-made kitchen and bathroom fixtures. Nearly every apartment had a full-length terrace and French doors on its northern and southern ends. Tenants were also given exclusive use of West Beirut’s only surviving rooftop swimming pool.
    By the summer of 1981 the Hala Building had become almost entirely a Western enclave. A half dozen American diplomats, nearly as many American journalists, and an assortment of others from Japan, West Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Denmark, and Australia made it their home. In fact, owing to Lebanon’s rent-control statute, the building’s owner refused to rent to anyone but foreigners, who were exempted from the statute and willing to pay the extortionate rents demanded for accommodations at one of the city’s best addresses.
    Aside from suites belonging to the Hala family, only two apartments held Lebanese tenants. One, across the hall from Prosser, belonged to a retired Greek Orthodox shipping agent who had been a boyhood friend of the landlord, while another, on the same floor but on the opposite end of the building, was occupied by an Alawite Muslim politician from the Bekaa Valley who not many weeks before had brought his Syrian-backed militia into West Beirut to compete in the major leagues of Lebanon’s national sport.
    Prosser knelt at the entrance of the Hala Building to tighten the laces of his running shoes, all the while taking a careful look around him. Seeing nothing suspicious, he rose and began his daily exercise run in the barricaded alley behind the Saudi Arabian embassy. Prosser recalled vividly having been awakened from a sound sleep the previous December when pro-Iranian extremists had tossed a bundle of plastic explosives over the wall into the Saudi embassy compound. Ever since the incident, the alley had been closed to vehicular traffic. Jeep-mounted heavy machine guns of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces were now