The Cairo Affair (10 page)

Dragan had obviously run into a particularly troublesome bureaucrat that morning, for most of Egypt’s security infrastructure was still intact, with the same old hands at the wheel. Yet Stan said, “I understand perfectly.”

Dragan clapped his hands together. “Say what you like about the old boys, but they knew how to wine and dine. That’s how you get things done.”

“Like what I’m doing to you right now.”

“Exactly,” he said without hesitation. “You bring me to an excellent restaurant, you let me order what I like, and you soften me with compliments, perhaps a little inside information. Only
then
do you place your cards on the table. These new guys…” He shook his head, lost for words.

“It’s time,” Stan told him.

Dragan patted his lips with a napkin. “Time?”

“My cards.”

“Of course, of course. Tell me, my friend.”

Though they had talked around the subject before, they had never broached it directly. With Emmett’s murder, there seemed to be no choice. He said, “Is Zora Balašević still in your shop?”

Eyebrows rose. “Balašević? Do I know her?”

“Look at the label on that wine, Dragan. That’s a chunk of the national budget right there.”

A grin. “Oh, Zora
Balašević
! Like the great singer. I know of this woman, yes, but she’s not part of my shop, as you say.”

The lack of sleep and a gin-heavy Negroni before the meal were catching up to Stan. He rubbed his eyes. “Please, Dragan. This is about a murdered diplomat. I need a little perestroika here.”

“Why does everyone think that Russian words will get you anywhere with a Serb? I hate those bastards.”

“Zora Balašević.”

He sniffed and sipped at his glass of Clos des Papes Rhone, then spoke very seriously and quietly. “If Zora Balašević has come to you, I firmly suggest you give it a second thought. She’s connected to criminal gangs in Belgrade, probably trading in little girls. You don’t want someone like that on your team.”

“She was on your team, though. Wasn’t she?”

“Once,” said Dragan. He frowned and seesawed his right hand. “Briefly, Stan. Then we kicked her onto the street. Seriously.”

“But you ran her when Emmett was in town.”

“When did Emmett come to town?”

“February of 2009.”

“That’s when we got
rid
of her, Stan. February—no: March of 2009.”

There was something convincing about Dragan’s manner, and if he
was
being honest, then the events of last summer had been something entirely different than he had imagined. Stan leaned close, his voice serious and low. “Let me tell you a story, and maybe you can help me explain it.”

Dragan waited.

“This woman, Balašević, came to Emmett. This would be February of 2009. They knew each other back in the nineties, but times had changed since then. Emmett was now a diplomat, and she, she claimed, was one of your people. She used blackmail. She told Emmett that she would publicize some nasty secrets from his past if he didn’t give her classified embassy intelligence. For at least a year this went on.” He paused, staring hard, but Dragan wasn’t saying anything. “Look, if she
was
one of your people during that year, then I might become angry. I might even call you names. But I’ll soon get over it, and next year you’ll have some similar complaint about me. If, however, she
isn’t
one of your people, then I’m not only going to become angry, I’ll become destructive. I’ll start digging into her life, and into yours, until I find out who stole our information. You understand my position?”

Dragan held his gaze for ten full seconds before saying, “Perfectly.” Then: “I’m sorry to say that Zora Balašević never passed intelligence from Emmett Kohl to my office. More’s the pity.”

“Why did you get rid of her?”

He glanced over Stan’s shoulder at the restaurant. “She was
moon
lighting—that’s the correct word? We discovered, with the greatest sadness, that we were not the only client for her intelligence. I wanted to have her sent home missing some body parts, but it turns out that she has friends in Belgrade, friends who owe her. So I was told to keep my hands to myself.”

“Who was she moonlighting for?”

“Our hosts, the Egyptians.” He shook his head. “She is like Hosni.”

Stan frowned, not understanding.

Dragan smiled. “Remember what that Iraqi corpse, Saddam Hussein, used to say of Mubarak? That he was like a pay phone.
You deposit your money, and you get what you want in return
. Zora Balašević is the same. She will take a coin from anyone.”

Stan considered this. “She continued working for them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she now?”

“I will look into it.” He took another sip of his wine, then set it down. “This is what I do know: She’s from Novi Sad. During the Bosnian War she supported Republika Srpska, which was how she made her influential friends. She’s in her early fifties, and she used to own a small place on Al-Muizz Street, in Islamic Cairo. And for a brief, wondrous period she held a respectable job in my office before she threw it away. That’s the extent of my knowledge.”

“So she’s a mystery.”

Dragan nodded, leaned back, and, proving he was as well connected as he had ever been, said, “Just like that Albanian thug who killed Mr. Kohl.”

3

Zora Balašević had left Cairo less than a week after Emmett and Sophie moved to Budapest, a fact that Stan had taken as further evidence of Emmett’s guilt. With her star source gone, why would she stay? Still tipsy from lunch, he returned to her file, tracking down the flight plan that had taken her back to Serbia. According to airline records, she had boarded a plane for Frankfurt and transferred to a Jat flight to Belgrade six hours later—an odd route. Direct flights from Cairo to Belgrade existed, yet she had chosen to spend six whole hours in Frankfurt’s dour international hub. An arranged meet? He thought a moment, then texted Saul, an old friend at Langley who had been part of the communiqués involving the leaked materials last year, asking how long Frankfurt International held on to security footage.

As for her criminal connections, there was little to go on. She was on a list of suspected members of the Zemun clan, which specialized in the transport of drugs, contract murder, and kidnappings. What was her connection? Association, and not much more: She’d been seen in the company of ranking Zemun members. Her criminal record was more than a decade old, from when she had run guns into Republika Srpska, that little mountainous region of Serb nationalism within the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Zealot or opportunist? As he stared at her file photo Stan suspected the former, but he was only guessing. She looked, with her dark eyes and black hair, as if she had been attractive in a slow-burn sort of way when she was younger, but that beauty had since been marred by hard living: eyes hollow and cheeks loose from a lifetime of heavy smoking. She had the face of someone with a whole world of tragedy behind her; she had a refugee’s face.

Though Dragan had been convincing, Stan wasn’t ready to accept his claims to innocence. Balašević could easily have been part of his crew, brought in temporarily because of her connection to Emmett, and in the face of Stan’s accusations Dragan’s only move would have been to wash his hands of her. But Stan thought he had a pretty good fix on Dragan Milić. The Serb was enough of a pro, and enough of an engaged station manager, to know that Stan wouldn’t attempt retaliation for what had been, in essence, a beautifully run operation to collect intelligence from the American embassy. In fact, had Dragan admitted to it, Stan would only have admired him more—his panache as well as his honesty. Stan, in turn, would have felt encouraged to act similarly. Despite the proliferation of satellites and networked databases and laser-guided drones, espionage was still a very personal business.

Were the rest of Dragan’s claims true?
Had
Balašević worked for the Egyptians? If so, then it was the Egyptians who had sold the intel on to Syria, Libya, and Pakistan. It was possible. Was it likely? He couldn’t be sure.

By close of business, Ricky and Klaus had heard back from two contacts but come up empty. These two Egyptians had known Emmett only distantly, having met him at embassy get-togethers in order to ask for ridiculous trade concessions that Emmett hadn’t even been in a position to consider. Stan gave Harry an update before leaving, and the station chief sat glumly behind his desk, listening distantly to their failures. Dragan Milić’s claims to innocence didn’t seem to surprise him, nor did the possibility of Egypt receiving Balašević’s intel.

Eventually, Harry said, “You know, Stan, it may have nothing to do with Cairo. Maybe Emmett made the mistake of sleeping with the wrong Hungarian girl.”

“Whose boyfriend just happened to be an international hit man?”

“I’ve seen worse luck in my time.”

“I haven’t,” Stan said.

“Then you need to get out more.”

Stan didn’t live far from the embassy, so he walked home in the growing darkness along Garden City’s elegantly curved, tree-lined streets, which had been built by the British at the start of the twentieth century to surround their embassy. On an empty block of colonial villas he gave Sophie another try. No answer, and no voice mail, either—he guessed it was full.

What was Sophie’s life like now? Had she found someone else in Budapest, some Stan-replacement to make up for her wreck of a husband? And who had told Emmett about them—who else knew? He had told no one, so there were two possibilities. First, that Sophie had trusted the wrong person with her secret. Though generally tight-lipped, Sophie Kohl had a tendency to wander when she became comfortable, heading down trails of association, and it didn’t seem improbable that, maybe after a few drinks in some Budapest bar, she’d let their secret slip to the wrong person. That, at least, was preferable to the second possibility, which was that their affair had not been as much of a secret as he’d thought. Had someone in the office decided to expose him to Emmett? To what end? He thought through his colleagues in the embassy—who among them was jockeying for power? All of them, really, but there were easier ways to unseat Stan than throwing mud at his sexual life.

Maybe it wasn’t anyone in the embassy, but a representative of another government. The Egyptians, the Serbs, or even, for all he knew, the Hungarians. But why? The affair had been over for half a year—what would the embarrassment serve at this point?

He scratched at the side of his nose, remembering Sophie’s burgundy lipstick, the arch of her calf, the cinnamon tint of her perfume. Stan wasn’t a man of great experience; at thirty-seven, he could count all his lovers on a single hand, and perhaps for that reason it still hurt to remember the end of his relationship with Sophie Kohl.

It had been sudden, so abrupt that they hadn’t even had time for a final teary fight. Her husband announced that they were moving on to Budapest, and then she stopped answering his calls. Just like that. Had she known that their flight from Cairo was a direct result of his investigations? He didn’t think so, but he had suddenly become her husband’s co-worker again, and nothing he whispered during their brief moments in the same room did anything to change that. Her excuse, muttered under her breath, was that they’d both known this time would come, and ending it quickly was the best course. She hadn’t been cold about it; she’d just been incomprehensibly rational. Stan, on the other hand, had not been. He began drinking too much, slipping up at work, and it took many weeks before he was able to climb out of his hole again. Then, six months later, at three in the morning, she was calling him. How could he not be surprised?

You told him about us, and you said you were in love.

He had not told Emmett any such thing, but he easily could have.

“Mr. Bertolli?”

He was at his corner, and the voice belonged to one of two men with dark hair and severe smiles. He’d been too distracted to notice them approaching.

“Mr. Bertolli, right this way.”

Polite but firm. Late twenties, Slavic accents, and tight-fitting suits. No guns, but their manner suggested they didn’t really need them. So he followed them to a black Audi parked on the other side of the street, in front of his building. One of them opened a rear door, and, before getting in, Stan peered inside to verify his suspicion: It was Dragan. He was sitting back against the opposite door, an arm across one headrest, his free hand holding a highball glass with an inch of something strong in it, an old man at rest. He was smiling, winking. “Come, Stan. A quick word.”

He slid in; the young man behind him closed the door.

“Drink?”

Stan shook his head, for all he really wanted was sleep.

Dragan looked into his glass. “
Vinjak,
a lovely brandy from home.”

“I’m sure it’s lovely, but no thanks.”

A shrug, and he took a swig. “That woman, Zora Balašević. You are still interested?”

“Absolutely.”

He nodded, closing his eyes briefly, then said, “I was not giving you the runaround earlier—I told you what I knew. But I made some calls. She’s in Novi Sad right now. She came into some money last year—Egyptian, no doubt—and now she’s living in an enormous house on the Danube. Amazing security system on this place, they tell me. If you like, we can pick her up and have a word with her.” He waited, and when Stan didn’t answer he said, “All you have to do is tell me what questions to ask.”

On the surface, it was an excellent offer, but Stan hesitated. All Dragan wanted in return was to know everything that he knew—or to know what he
didn’t
know, which in the intelligence game was the same thing. What Dragan didn’t realize was that Stan didn’t know anything yet. “I just want to know who she works for—or who she worked for when she was in Cairo.”

“Nothing more?” Dragan asked, but the answer hadn’t disappointed him at all, and that was when it happened: Stan became his father. Such moments were rare, but when they occurred they often saved him. He felt it in his thighs, a weight that mocked Paolo Bertolli’s fat legs, and his thoughts turned labyrinthine, motivations twisting upon themselves until, in a sudden burst of clarity, a simple truth presented itself. In that warm Audi, he realized that his questions for Zora Balašević were entirely beside the point. Dragan simply wanted to bring in a woman who he now knew had had access to reams of classified American material—
that
was his real interest.