An Accidental American: A Novel (Mortalis) [Paperback]

Alex Carr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2007 | Series: Mortalis

Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime’s worth of secrets and betrayal–all in the name of staying alive.

Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog.

But when U.S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she’ll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole’s former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn’t just a document forger–he’s a suspected terrorist.

Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her.

“Thought-provoking . . . The gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Chilling and utterly believable, An Accidental American hurls the reader into the dark and forbidding world of espionage. Not to be missed.”
–Gayle Lynds, author of The Last Spymaster
______________________________________________________________

THE MORTALIS DOSSIER- ALEX CARR’S NOTE ON THE BOMBING OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY IN BEIRUT

On April 18, 1983, at one o’clock in the afternoon, a van carrying two
thousand pounds of explosives blew up outside the American embassy
in Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Among the victims were
seventeen Americans, eight of whom represented the Central Intelligence
Agency’s entire Middle East contingent. In the years preceding
the bombing, an increasing number of attacks on Western and
Israeli interests had been carried out by Palestinian and Muslim extremists,
but the Beirut bombing was widely seen as a watershed
event for American policies in the region. With the exception of the
seizure of the American embassy in Tehran four years earlier, an act
that was carried out within the framework of Iran’s Islamic revolution,
the embassy bombing represented the first time America had
been so directly and bloodily targeted by Islamic terrorists for its military
involvement in the Middle East.
It’s impossible to see why the United States was such an unwelcome
force without an understanding of the history of Lebanon and
the surrounding region, and of American and Western involvement
in the politics of the Middle East in general. Though Lebanon has
existed in one form or another since the ninth century b.c., the modern
country of Lebanon was not established until 1920, when it was
granted to the French as part of a system of mandates established for
the administration of former Turkish and German territories following
World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, almost
all of what we think of as the modern Middle East was shaped
by these mandates.
America’s first direct intervention in Lebanese politics came in
1946. During World War II, Lebanon had been declared a free state
in order to liberate it from Vichy control. But when, after the war,
Lebanon eventually moved toward full independence, the French
balked, and the United States, Britain, and several Arab governments
stepped in to support Lebanese independence. It was at this time
that Lebanon’s system of political power sharing was devised. Well
aware of the country’s shaky precolonial past and determined to keep
Lebanon intact, the fledgling nationalist government agreed to split
power along sectarian lines, based on the numbers of the 1932 census.
It was a well-intentioned plan, but one that inadvertently set the
stage for decades of strife and civil war.
The power-sharing government’s first major stumbling block came
with the partitioning of the British Mandate of Palestine in the wake
of World War II, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed. The
ensuing influx of some 100,000 Palestinian refugees into Lebanon
proved a strain on the carefully crafted power-sharing system. Tensions
were further exacerbated in 1956, when Egyptian president
Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, provoking the
United States, along with Britain, France, and Israel, to respond with
military force. While Lebanese Muslims wanted the government to
back the newly created United Arab Republic, Christians fought to
keep the nation allied with the West. In 1958, with the country teetering
on the brink of civil war, the United States sent marines into
Lebanon to support the government of President Camille Chamoun,
thus inextricably linking itself with Christian forces.
It was an alliance that would be tested when, nearly two decades
later, sectarian rivalries finally erupted into full-scale civil war. While
Lebanon had enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, tensions
between the United States and the Soviet Union, and between
the United States and Iran, had escalated significantly, as had tensions
between the Israelis and the Palestinians. By the spring of
1975–when gunmen from the Christian Phalange militia attacked a
bus in the suburbs of Beirut and massacred twenty-seven Palestinians
on board in what is widely agreed to have been the first act of the
civil war–the forces at work in Lebanon were not merely internal
ones. The Cold War, as well as the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, were
both being played out in Lebanon, and would be throughout the
course of the war, as international players funneled weapons and
money to the various Christian, Muslim, and Druze militias.
The United States was a major player in the civil war from the beginning,
providing mainly covert support for the Christian government,
with whom it had traditionally been allied. But it wasn’t until
1982, after the Israeli siege of Beirut, the assassination of Phalange
leader Bachir Gemayel, and the horrific massacres at the Palestinian
refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, that U.S. troops, along with
other members of a multinational peacekeeping force, formally intervened
in the conflict. The United Nations—backed coalition was
meant as a neutral presence, but the complications of Cold War allegiances
and the United States’ traditionally close ties to Israel and
Lebanon’s Christian government meant that the Americans were inevitably
viewed by Muslim and Druze factions as anything but impartial.
It was in this environment, less than six months after the
Americans arrived as peacekeepers, that the embassy bombing took
place.
There can be no doubt that the main goal of the bombing was to
intimidate the United States into pulling its forces from Lebanon.
But there were other, less obvious but no less significant reasons behind
the attack. Responsibility for the bombing, and the subsequent
bombing of the marine barracks, was claimed by a radical wing of the
Iranian-backed Hezbollah. In the years leading up to these attacks,
Iran had taken an increasingly aggressive role in its support of
Lebanese Muslim militias, most of which were traditionally Shiite,
transforming what had once been a mainly political fight into a religious
and moral one. Not only did Muslim radicals want American
troops gone, but they wanted to rid the country of Western cultural
influence–which they saw as mainly American–as well. In the
bloody years to follow, the American University of Beirut, as well as
American and Western journalists, would be targets of a concerted
campaign of kidnapping and intimidation.
Under any other circumstances, the Islamicizing of the conflict
might have been yet another disturbing development in an already
wildly fractured situation. But in the hothouse of the Lebanese civil
war, Hezbollah’s fierce brand of anti-Americanism became not just a
Shia or Iranian cause but a Palestinian and therefore pan-Arab cause
as well. In the years since the embassy bombing, the cause has taken
on many faces, including that of the vast al-Qaeda network, but the
anger remains undiluted. Not only is anti-American thinking still
prevalent today in the Middle East, but it has become the uniting
force for radical Muslims the world over.
Former high-ranking members of the Reagan administration have
confirmed that how to respond to the embassy bombing and the
bombing of the marine barracks was a subject of debate at the time.
There was a clear split within the White House between those who
believed that force was the best response and those who argued that
the use of military power would only add to the problem by antagonizing
America’s remaining friends in the Arab world. The lessons of
Vietnam, along with the horrific loss of life in both attacks, no doubt
helped cement the decision to follow a policy of disengagement. In
the end, the choice was made to pull all American troops out of
Lebanon.
It’s no coincidence that I chose to make the 1983 bombing of the
American embassy in Beirut central to the plot of An Accidental
American. This is a novel about U.S. involvement in the politics of
the Middle East, and the embassy bombing has shaped American
policy in that region as few other events have. Disengagement is no
longer the United States’ response of choice when dealing with Islamic
extremism. In light of the...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This thought-provoking thriller from the pseudonymous Carr features a heroine with an unusual background. Nicole Blake, the daughter of a Lebanese violin teacher killed by a car bomb and a corrupt American playboy whose primary contributions to her life have been U.S. citizenship and a prison term for forgery, reluctantly trades her quiet ex-con life in the French countryside for gunfire and skullduggery in Lisbon, where she tries to track down the players in a triple-cross that goes back to the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. The smooth pacing is marred slightly by frequent flashbacks to her childhood and a long-ago romance, but the gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end. Carr, the author of Flashback and three other novels under her real name, Jenny Siler, adds a timely postscript on the difficulty and value of writing fiction about real events. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

ONE

Home, Sabri Kanj reminded himself as the jet touched down and the massive engines whined themselves to sleep. Home, he thought. Fairuz on the radio, his mother singing along in the kitchen. Lamb sausages on the grill. A memory to see you through, his friend Khalid had told him once, speaking from experience. Something they won’t be able to take from you.

The plane paused, and Kanj could hear the two Pakistanis who’d accompanied him laughing in the front of the aircraft, then one of the men lumbered back and unshackled Kanj’s feet from the metal bar beneath his seat. An oddly intimate act, Kanj thought, as the entire business had been, the man leaning against him as he had earlier, when they’d stripped and blindfolded and diapered him for the trip. All of it meant to humiliate him, to cow him for what lay ahead. Though Kanj knew all too well where they were taking him, understood as they could not that fear never promised salvation.

“Stand up,” the man said. He was so close that Kanj could smell his most recent meal. Stale cooking grease and green meat. He put his hand on Kanj’s shoulder to steady him, and Kanj winced. The Pakistanis had broken his collarbone in the raid, leaving it tender and raw. Kanj quickly checked himself and the pain, then shuffled into the aisle and started forward.

“Where are we, stewardess?” he asked with mock cheer, expecting no answer and getting none. Instead, the plane’s front hatch popped open, and the stink of jet fuel filled the cabin. Somewhere not far in the distance, another plane was taking off, its engines laboring the giant craft skyward.

From out on the void of the tarmac, Kanj heard a snippet of Arabic, the accent clearly Jordanian. Not that it mattered. They could be in any of a handful of places: Syria, Egypt, Morocco. Black holes all, places where a man could get lost, where humanity held little sway against power.

Kanj squinted into the darkness of his blindfold, conjuring the house in Ouzai again, the sound of his mother’s voice. Prettier than Fairuz’s, he’d thought at the time, and she had been prettier as well. This, before the war had ravaged them all. In the living room his older sister was scratching out her math homework, her chin propped in her left hand, her dark eyes studying the page. The smart one of the family. A doctor or a scientist in some other world.

The man touched him on the shoulder, and Kanj felt his gut tighten for an instant. “Step down,” the Pakistani commanded.

Some other world, Kanj reminded himself, putting his foot forward, feeling the edge of the stair, the drop down toward the tarmac. This memory and the secret he had hoarded along with it all these years. One or the other would save him in the end. A car door popped open, and the man forced Kanj’s head and shoulders down, stuffed him into the seat. Then the door closed behind him and Kanj was alone, his skin prickling in the air-conditioned chill.

They drove for what Kanj guessed was an hour. No turns, just a straight line out into the desert, though in which direction Kanj couldn’t be sure. South, most likely, or east, for they had not encountered the city. In Kanj’s mind, the map of Jordan didn’t stop at the great river but pushed like a fist into Israel’s gut, with Syria edging in from above. And above Israel was Lebanon. Beirut and home again. The Corniche and the sea curving around Pigeon Rocks. The unrestrained bustle of Martyrs’ Square. The cafés along the rue Bliss, girls from the American University sunning themselves at outdoor tables. The city as it had been, once, and was no more.

It was evening when the car finally stopped and Kanj was pulled from his seat. There was a smell to the air that told Kanj the sun had just set, the perfume of relief and release. The memory of another home. The dirt beneath Kanj’s feet was fine as flour, packed hard by thousands of years of sun and wind, the rare wash of rain.

No one spoke here. There were only hands. Hands that led him down into the earth. Fingers that chained him to the floor. The sting of an open palm across his face. Then the blindfold was off, and Kanj was blinking up into the face of the man from whom he knew everything now would come. Pain and fear. Hope. Salvation, even.

His new god, Kanj thought, though the man didn’t look the part. He was short and stocky, his underarms ringed with sweat, his bald head glistening in the light of the room’s single bare bulb.

Kanj took a deep breath and raised his head, readying himself for what was to come. “I want to talk to the Americans,” he said, the same words he’d repeated over and over in Pakistan. It was all they would get from him.



TWO

nnn

I knew the first time I saw John Valsamis what he was. It was a warm afternoon, one of those early-spring snaps that won’t last. Barely March and shirtsleeves weather, the streams fat with runoff, the first green shoots of the crocuses struggling up toward the light. I had taken Lucifer out for his walk, and when we came home, Valsamis was parked on the road just outside my driveway, a small neat man in a white Twingo, a rental. Though I didn’t know why, I knew as surely as if I had invited him that he had come for me.

He could have been any tourist, I suppose, a solitary American lost in this unimportant corner of the world. A wrong turn on the way to Tautavel or one of the Cathar fortresses, and this stop just to check his map and get his bearings. Could have been but wasn’t. Even Lucifer could tell something was wrong. Impatient to get home, he’d taken off ahead of me, but when I rounded the last corner toward the house, he was stopped dead in the middle of the road.

An ex-con like me, the old shepherd-cross mutt knew the meaning of loyalty, the value of a good home. I’d rescued him from the shelter and the imminent jaws of death, and he repaid the favor each day with his own fierce brand of love. His ears flattened now and his tail lowered, curling between his powerful back legs. The dark fur along his neck grew stiff as a straw broom. He turned his head briefly in my direction, then let out a low growl. I had to walk on ahead of him, pretending everything was all right, and even then I was halfway down the drive before he gave up his post and followed behind.

Valsamis stayed in his car while the dog and I went inside. I could see him from the kitchen window while I got Lucifer his food, the car framed perfectly by the single pane of glass, as if he’d parked there deliberately, wanting to give me a view. His face was unmoving behind the windshield, half masked by the reflections of the bare trees overhead. I didn’t recognize him, couldn’t remember what might have brought him to find me. He didn’t look like an old client, and he wasn’t a cop, of that I was sure. If anything, he seemed more like a con.

I gave Lucifer his bowl, then went into the pantry, climbed up past the shelves of homemade apricot jam and pickled beans I’d put up the previous fall, and took down the battered old twelve-gauge I’d found in the attic when I first moved in. It wasn’t much of a gun, but I felt better having it, and it was loud enough to convince the foxes that had ravaged my henhouse that there were better places in the valley for a free meal.

Hoping it would do the same for my visitor, I hefted it prominently in my left hand and headed out the kitchen door. I wanted to get a better look at the man, wanted to let him know for sure I knew he was there, but when I stepped outside, the Twingo was gone.

I stood on the gravel drive, wishing I hadn’t quit smoking, wishing I had a cigarette to steady my hands. The wind kicked up just slightly, and the brittle branches of the trees in the garden lifted and resettled against one another, the rustling like gossip spreading through a crowd. Rubbing my bare arms, I smoothed away goose bumps and scanned the empty road, then turned back inside. Gone, I told myself, and maybe I’d been wrong. I’d let the old paranoia get me, the old prison fears. Not every parked car held some dark specter of the past. And yet I didn’t believe my own story.



THREE

nnn

I spent the rest of the afternoon putting the finishing touches on a copy of the new Angolan passport I’d been working on. The geeks at Solomon, the document security firm for which I freelanced, had come up with a new kind of multilayer infilling system that was a bitch to beat, but I’d cracked it in the end, and my final result was about as close to perfect as possible, a far better match than what would be needed to fool the immigration officers in Luanda. Bad news for my employers, but that’s what I was paid to deliver. If I could beat their security, there were others out there who could get around it just as well.

It was close to five by the time the FedEx truck came to collect my package for Solomon.

“Running late,” the driver, Isham, offered breathlessly as he fished in his pocket and pulled out a biscuit for Lucifer. “Sorry.”

I smiled. “Did Madame Lelu need your services?”

Isham nodded. “The lightbulb in her bedroom was out again.”

“Of course,” I remarked. “And you’re so tall.”

My neighbor down the hill and her less-than-subtle attempts to lure the young man inside were a running joke between us.

Isham patted Lucifer on the head and grinned up at me. “You know how it is with these lonely older women,” he countered playfully.

Isham was a nice kid, a first-generation Frenchman with a good Arab name and manners to match. He took my ribbing in good humor and gave as good as he got, but I could tell by the way his face colored that Madame Lelu’s attentions made him slight...

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (April 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812977084
• ISBN-13: 978-0812977080
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,407,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique perspective on the War on Terror, May 30, 2007

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Accidental American: A Novel (Mortalis) (Paperback)

The War on Terror and its fallout will no doubt provide fodder for novel plots for years, if not decades, to come. AN ACCIDENTAL AMERICAN by Alex Carr takes a somewhat unique perspective on the War on Terror in general and the Iraqi war in particular, tying in the mistakes of the past with the disasters of the present in both international and personal affairs.

Nicole Blake is an ex-convict who is living a quiet, blissfully boring existence on a self-sustaining farm in the French Pyrenees. But her life is shattered when John Valsamis, a no-nonsense CIA agent, appears on her doorstep requesting her assistance in locating Rahim Ali. Blake's former lover from a lifetime ago, Ali appears to be involved with a terrorist cell that is planning a major incident, making it imperative that he be located.

Valsamis secures Blake's reluctant cooperation by playing upon the death of her mother --- murdered in a terrorist attack --- but Blake discovers all too soon that Valsamis has a history of treachery that stretches back in time and distance, even as his past has intersected with Blake's in ways she cannot even begin to imagine, let alone believe.

Betrayed and in mortal danger, the only person Blake can trust is an extremely unlikely and unwilling ally whose innocence is at once a virtue and a hindrance. Pursued by a hunter who seems able to find her at will, Blake not only must save herself and her unexpected companion, but also bring to an end the scheme in which she finds herself immersed, even as she is staggered by discoveries revealing that practically everything she knew about herself and her world is wrong.

AN ACCIDENTAL AMERICAN is reminiscent of the best work of John le Carre, informed with a world-weariness even as each page is infused with tension and danger as Blake, who gets deeper and deeper into a situation she does not understand, finds that those around her each have their own agendas. A page-turner that does not sacrifice literacy at the altar of expediency, it is a quietly explosive work that haunts and excites with each paragraph.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tight Prose, Moderately Enjoyable Story, Poorly Drawn Characters, May 26, 2007

By 

J. Avellanet "author of Get to Market Now!" (Williamsburg, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Accidental American: A Novel (Mortalis) (Paperback)

The book is a mixed bag. It's tightly written, with multiple narrators and points of view - first-person and third-person - that switch frequently between characters. There are moments when the story is completely engrossing, but others where I found it hard to really care...and together, I think that's the novel's true weakness: the tight prose, increasing pace and constant back and forth between flashbacks, multiple points of view, multiple settings and multiple characters is just too much for 217 pages.

The story is enjoyable but ultimately, rather forgettable.

5.0 out of 5 stars A thriller with the feel of serious literature, January 10, 2011

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TChris (Tzer Island) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Accidental American: A Novel (Mortalis) (Paperback)

Nicole Blake should not be in France. She was invited to leave the country -- permanently -- after she finished serving her sentence at the Maison des Baumettes prison in Marseille. Nonetheless she lives with a rescued dog in an old farmhouse with a chicken coop in the Pyrenees, enjoying fresh eggs for breakfast while doing contract work for a document security firm (her expertise in forgery is the cause of her unwelcome status in France). Nicole's life is good until John Valsamis shows up with a photo of her former lover, Rahim Ali. Valsamis claims Rahim is assisting Saddam Hussein's cohorts with terrorist bombings. Valsamis, who works for the shadowy Dick Morrow, a member of a clandestine agency unknown to the CIA that is affiliated with the Defense Department, threatens to expose Nicole if she doesn't help him find Rahim. Off to Lisbon Nicole goes and the adventure begins.

The story plays out against the backdrop of the American invasion of Iraq and the search for elusive WMD's. From the first page, Carr creates a sense of foreboding that compels the reader's attention. Point of view shifts between Nicole's first person account and third person narration that follows other characters. From time to time Nicole fills in her backstory with memories of her childhood in Beirut, her mother's defiance of the city's violence, and the time she spent with Rahim in Lisbon (a time when she had "surrendered to the fetish of longing," one of the novel's many striking phrases).

An Accidental American is structured as an intricate puzzle, pieces falling into place as the story unfolds. Early passages gain meaning as later passages impart new information. The ending is unexpected. The structure commands the reader's attention without becoming Byzantine (as it tends to do in Carr's second novel, The Prince of Bagram Prison). At one point Nicole takes a dangerously stupid action that advances the plot but doesn't seem credible. For the most part, however, the story is plausible; in any event it is suspenseful. Carr's writing style is stark yet evocative -- the novel reads like serious literature in a way that most thrillers do not.

Carr paints a grim picture of American intelligence operations in the Mideast. Readers who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq and those who revile unsympathetic portrayals of America's foreign policy will probably dislike An Accidental American. Readers who base their judgments on the quality of the writing rather than disagreement with the novel's political stance will probably enjoy it. Carr appended an "author's note" at the novel's end discussing the 1983 embassy bombing in Beirut and the relationship between fact and fiction. Readers may or may not agree with her historical view but that should be (although it probably isn't) irrelevant to how they experience the novel. In her note, Carr writes that she struggled to create realistic characters "whose motives are often less than pure and always complicated." Many readers have no patience with characters who are not morally pure; they prefer simple characters who "know right from wrong" to characters with a more nuanced perspective. Those readers should probably avoid this novel. Readers who believe fiction should reflect the complexity of the world and its peoples are more likely to appreciate An Accidental American.

Alex Carr is the penname of Jenny Siler. The character of Dick Morrow connects this novel to The Prince of Bagram Prison. An Accidental American is the more successful of the two novels. I would give it 4 1/2 stars if Amazon offered that option.