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was paid, his
old friend would hold the upper hand.
    “All right,”
Denniston conceded at last. “I’ll let it go. But you’d better
not be hiding anything else, buddy. If you do anything to screw up
this operation, there will be hell to pay.”
    Linder nodded in solemn
agreement while praying that his story would hold.
    * * *
    Shortly before one
o’clock, Warren Linder exited the cab and straightened his tie
again in the display window of a trendy men’s clothing boutique
near Place Sassine in Christian East Beirut. He was now fully in
character as Joe Tanner, diehard Mormon rebel leader, eagerly
awaiting the opportunity to meet Roger Kendall, offshore banker to
the anti-Unionist insurgency.
    According to the cover
legend developed for the operation, Tanner had traveled by freighter
from Vancouver to Korea on an alias Australian passport, then boarded
a flight to Dubai, and then another to Beirut with help from a
friendly Asian intelligence service. He had risked his life to
escape, and would risk it once again on his return in order to win
the financial and operational support of wealthy American emigrés
like Kendall and Eaton.
    In Tanner’s mind, the
survival of the persecuted Mormon Church and the very lives of his
coreligionists depended on winning support from Roger Kendall and his
influential father-in-law. More than a million Mormons were now
languishing in resettlement camps in Alaska and the U.S.-occupied
Yukon, having been forcibly removed from Utah and Idaho during the
insurgency when the President-for-Life declared the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints a terrorist organization. The Mormons now
demanded a “right of return” to their ancestral homeland in Utah
and the Mormon Return Movement was created to fulfill it.
    Linder remained before
the display window when a well-heeled foreigner in a raw silk suit
passed behind him carrying a shopping bag with the Dunhill logo. The
man was slightly shorter than average height but exuded an air of
confident authority that befit a former Wall Street law partner like
Roger Kendall. Linder waited until Kendall had advanced twenty or
thirty paces, then followed him up Rue Sioufi toward the Place
Sassine.
    Seen from behind,
Kendall gave the impression of someone intensely aware of being
watched but affecting not to care. The perfect tailoring of Kendall’s
bespoke suit, his bronzed complexion, the freshly trimmed gray
sideburns, all contributed to Linder’s assessment that, despite the
impeccably groomed shell of the former corporate litigator, inside
dwelled a hollowed-out soul like that of hundreds of rebel exiles he
had known since the fall of the Third American Republic.
    These men had escaped
Unionist America with their money but had left behind their
businesses, their professions, their contacts, their clubs, their
neighborhoods, their charities, their connectedness to the
communities that defined who they were. Linder had come to know men
like Kendall during his student years at Exeter, Kenyon, and
Columbia. Good-looking, sophisticated, well-traveled youths from
Greenwich and Rye, Brookline and Cambridge, Wilmington and
Philadelphia’s Main Line, who by young adulthood had little time to
spare for anyone outside their interconnected circles of privilege.
    Linder guessed that,
until he ran short of funds, Kendall had not even attempted to
circumvent the prohibition on gainful employment that was a condition
of his British residence permit. According to reports in his DSS
file, Kendall had never intended to start a fresh life in London;
rather, he had hoped to resurrect his old one once the Unionist
regime collapsed. But this hadn’t happened, and it was why Linder
considered Kendall vulnerable to a covert appeal to return, and it
was why the man would likely meet his end in a Unionist labor camp.
    Linder caught up to
Kendall as he entered a small Lebanese-style patisserie and lingered
by the door as the headwaiter pointed Kendall to a table at the