CODE NAMED BLUE CEDAR

"Code named Blue Cedar" is a spy thriller; it is a character driven plot. The main character Mohammed is an ex-marine who is a never do well kind of guy neither financially nor emotionally.That year like all the young men of his midteenage years Mohamed was drafted into the militias and after 15 days of training he is sent to fight in Beirut in the bitterly contested hotel district until he is captured and taken to an underground interrogation center where he is beaten , tortured and almost killed, before the Lebanese army overran the underground bunker killing his captors and freeing him. Upon return to his home in the relative safety of the mount Lebanon county, his mother barely believing that

he is still alive sells her jewelry to buy him a plane ticket to come to live with his brother in southern CA USA, where two days after arrival he starts attending high school and graduating in June of that year. He then enters a trade school and becomes a machinist but six years later he takes off to Mexico to live and work on a resort near the Guatemalan boarder, the place becomes his home the next 5 winters, Mohammed returns to LA the rest of the year where he lives with different Arab American families and works in their small businesses. In 1992 Mohammed is 32 years old he has his first unexplainable catatonic spell. He is admitted in a mental hospital and when he wakes up from a deep coma. He becomes very violent and has to be subdued and injected with a myriad of psychiatric drugs. He is finally released after seven months in a state mental hospital, but he is penniless and ashamed to go back to his family, so he takes off and becomes a drifter riding cargo trains all over the US. For the next 11 years he is in and out of mental hospitals, and homeless shelters nationwide, until he finally gets fed up with institutional living and recalling with sadness and melancholy the times when he had jobs with friends and family and a cozy living arrangement with them, those were happy times when he was care free. Finally he makes up his mind that he is going to go back to live with an Arab American family whenever he gets his first opportunity. So he returns to southern California and is accepted at the salvation army, where he gets is accepted into a long term treatment program for alcohol addiction and mental illness. On his day off he visits the area around Pasadena citiy college where he frequents the coffee houses in the area and chats with young patrons who remind him of his lost youth. Then his opportunity comes one day when he meets a young Saudi student at an internet cafe in that area, who befriends him after hearing his life story and vows to help him, eventually he moves in with the Saudi student and his four other roommates. However Mohammed gets an unsettling feeling from a mysterious Latino young man named Louie who doesn't say much, but spends a lot of time with Mustafa the head of the household. Mustafa is a middle aged Yemeni who exhibits leadership and mystery, who seemed not to object to Mohammed moving in.

However,Mustafa has an aura about him of extreme seriousness and depth. Seldom has he smiled and even when he does, he does it in such a way as if he is mocking his own spirit. The combination of the last two characters, keeps Mohammed on the edge and he makes up his mind to flee again. However that never comes to fruition, for he has been stung by the scorpion of Middle Eastern intrigue. Mohammed's roommates continue to joke and irritate him with their nosy inquisitive interrogation that he had even fantasized about becoming a CIA agent, he had gone to the library and read books about different intelligence agencies world wide, even while his roommates were playing cards he had gone on the CIA website and applied for a job as an agent. Now it is April 2003 America had just invaded Iraq., and in retaliation Al-Qaeda had set off a car bomb downtown San Francisco killing 64 people and wounding 248 and as the terrorists were trying to escape to Mexico there was a huge shootout at the border checkpoint at Nogales Arizona 4 boarder patrol agents lay dead and 9 are wounded in addition to 23 innocent migrant workers killed and 197 wounded. Mohammed had no idea that his worst fears had become a reality, the people whom he is sharing an apartment with, are the Al-Qaeda cell responsible for those acts, he had never suspected it since they are so kind and they had helped him get a job at an Arab American club, and even got him a singing gig over there. Mustafa the leader of the cell had finally decided that Mohammed already had seen and knows too much, therefore he had to be eliminated, but that doesn't work out because after Mustafa lured Mohammed into an abandoned building downtown LA under the pretense of showing him the next location for his next half owned club, Mustafa had drawn the gun prematurely and Mohamed had overpowered and killed him. Mohamed was now is in limbo, he cannot go back to his apartment because Mustafa's attack was the proof beyond the shadow of any doubt that his roommates were Al-Qaeda operatives, so he took the money and all of Mustafa's belongings from his body, and drove the car away eastward staying in motels in the California desert, until a Motel clerk recognized him after seeing his picture on America's most wanted, and

called the police. As part of a plea bargain the FBI asked him to co-operate with the CIA since he is so knowledgeable about al the warring factions in Lebanon and sent him back there after training in Langley VA to track a terrorist by the nom de guerre of Abu Saad. However Mohammed was promptly arrested by the Lebanese internal security forces. The arrest happened after Tom, Mohamed's trainer in VA and contact in Lebanon is killed in a drive by shooting while having coffee in a side walk café in the fashionable Hamra Street. After a lengthy trial, Mohammed is sentenced to die by a firing squad, because the best Lebanese defense attorney could not argue successfully against the prosecutor who based his argument on the nation's constitution and its laws regarding high treason. etc...