The Cairo Affair (21 page)

He reached the Semiramis before six thirty, just as the sun was rising to cut through the cold, and waited on the Corniche El Nil that separated the hotel from the river. He called Paul. After a few minutes, the young man was jogging across the road to meet him. He looked tired, perhaps as tired as Stan was, but he put on a good show. “Quiet as the grave,” Paul said.

“Nothing? No one in, no one out?”

“No one that I recognized. But the staff sure took an interest in me.”

They both knew that this didn’t matter. The hotel staff would inform Central Security that some Westerner was camping out in their lobby, and the Egyptians would use CCTV footage to identify Paul, but he was breaking no laws. And he probably wasn’t the only foreign spy reading newspapers and drinking coffee on their sofas. “Go back inside,” Stan said. “I’ll relieve you later on.”

As he watched Paul cross the street again and head back into the hotel, Stan took out his phone and called the front desk. He asked for room 306 and listened as it rang and rang. Six thirty in the morning, and she wasn’t answering.

He hung up and crossed the street, pausing in front of the Semiramis’s glass doors. A valet eyeballed him. What was she doing up there? Was she overcome by paranoia now, trembling in fear whenever the phone rang? Or was she simply cold and hard, shaped by tragedies like the murder of her husband and the deception of her lover? Eventually, she would have to call him. There was no other choice.

Or was there? He’d had the sense during their hours together that she was holding something back. He’d assumed it was that final conversation with Emmett about Zora Balašević—but what if it was something else? What if she wasn’t alone in Cairo? Someone had told her about Aziz’s family. What if …

Before he could think through the pros and cons, Stan entered the lobby and patted the air in reply to Paul’s questioning look. He ignored the clerks and concierge as he headed toward the elevators. He was just another Caucasian face breezing through town on business, never getting to know the city, never tipping enough, and never learning a word of the local language.

On the third floor he found a young couple trying to reason with their three- or four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the corner beside a potted plant, refusing to go anywhere. When the father looked up, his face full of despair, Stan gave him a sympathetic grimace and then looked at the boy, who had an oddly adult face—narrow and long, eyes sunken and intense. Almost judgmental. The boy watched Stan as his parents pleaded with him, and Stan could feel his eyes boring into his back until he turned a corner and continued on.

Her room was halfway down a long corridor, and in front of it was a
Herald Tribune
Sophie hadn’t bothered to pick up. He knocked and waited, listening. Nothing. He tried again and said, “Housekeeping.” Still there was nothing, so he took out BRB-9 and stroked it twice against the magnetic pad; the door clicked. He opened it slowly.

The room was empty, the bed disorganized as if it had been quickly abandoned. The dresser drawers were empty, and so were the tables.

He settled on the bed, feeling heavy and sluggish. She was gone. He thought he might cry, but he didn’t.

When he finally went downstairs nearly an hour later, he sat beside Paul on the lobby sofa. “Did you leave last night?”

Paul frowned and shook his head. “Of course not.”

Stan sighed, thinking first of kidnapping and only afterward of escape. There were other exits from the hotel, but he hadn’t imagined that Sophie Kohl would have the foresight to use them. Perhaps she had. Or perhaps her kidnappers had.

“What is it, boss?”

Stan looked at his hands in his lap; they were trembling. He took out BRB-9 and handed it to Paul. “Room 306. Stay in there and wait. If she returns, make sure she doesn’t leave.”

“Using force?”

“If necessary.”

In the embassy, Stan nodded at his co-workers and shut himself in his office, thinking of organization.
Start at the beginning,
he thought. It was a method, he knew, a way of pushing away the terror he felt. Where was she? Who was protecting her? Why had she left him? His hands shook as he typed on his keyboard and clicked the mouse, finally tracking down the original Stumbler memos from 2009. He wiped at his eyes and began to read.

Jibril Aziz had been prescient. As justification for his plan, Aziz had cited growing unrest throughout the region almost two years before anybody else in the Agency had thought to tie them into a regional shift. Stan and others had viewed the sporadic demonstrations and crackdowns as brushfires—Jibril Aziz had seen them as portents.

It took a while to wade through the pages of Aziz’s optimism, and, thinking of what Emmett would have been consulted on, he reread the section titled “Fallout,” which dealt with the economic repercussions of regime change. Aziz had put forth the idea that, with Tripoli in its pocket, with the support of the Egyptian government (which, before Mubarak stepped down that month, they could have been assured of), and with the compliance of Tunisia (which, again, was a given before that chaotic year had begun), the United States would gain effective trade control of the entire North African coast—a third of the Mediterranean coastline. They could have done simple things, like negotiate reduced port fees for their own freighters, but more importantly it would have given America better access to the African market for anything from toilet brushes to nuclear power plants.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, this still felt like a stretch, and he imagined that when Harry had read it he’d thought the same thing. But neither he nor Harry was an economist. Emmett had been.

Stan went to his file cabinet, and from the middle drawer removed a slender folder in which he’d kept the documentation he’d collected to establish Emmett’s guilt. Among the list of files from Emmett’s computer was a ten-digit code that, he saw now, matched the Stumbler documents. Yes, Stumbler would have reached Zora Balašević as well.

As he was returning to his seat, John Calhoun tapped on his door. “I’m free if you need anything.”

Stan blinked at him, still caught in the myopia that had taken control since visiting the Semiramis. He considered pulling in John for some legwork, or even to grill him on Jibril Aziz, but then changed his mind. The man didn’t look well, and as soon as he started asking about Aziz John would go to Harry—that was a given. “Go get some lunch,” he told the big man. “Take it easy.”

Once he was alone again, he closed his eyes, shoving away his fears for Sophie, imagining instead the sequence of events. Emmett copied the Stumbler plans from his laptop onto a flash drive and passed them on to Zora Balašević, who sold them to Ali Busiri. Months later, Emmett discussed Stumbler with Aziz, and both he and Aziz soon perished. From these sketchy details, it certainly did look as if Omar Halawi was right in at least one way: Emmett, and presumably Aziz, had been killed to keep them quiet. Quiet about what? Emmett’s treason? Stumbler? Or … the identity of the real leak?

And who really wanted them silenced? CIA? Egypt? Dragan Milić, covering up a plateful of lies he’d been feeding to Stan? Without knowing the answer to one question, the other could never be answered. Without knowing who was behind this, he would never find Sophie.

His computer dinged an incoming e-mail. It was from LogiThrust LLC about the wonderful world of penile enhancements. The codes were ridiculous but effective. He checked the text against a list of translations and learned that Ali Busiri would be waiting for him at al-Azhar Park at five thirty that evening. Finally.

He went back to the memo, but there was another tap at his door. It was Nancy. With a smile she told him a single word: “Harry’s.”

6

“You know,” Harry began once his guest had taken a seat, “a lot of people think of our station as a backwoods outpost, even now.” There was a spot of red against his pale chin; he had nicked himself with a razor that morning. “We stumble into our intrigues, which from our perspective seem world-shattering and life-and-death. But from Langley’s perspective our time is taken up by tempests in teacups.”

Harry paused, as if this were something Stan needed a moment to comprehend.

“They’re wrong, of course. They often are. What they forget is that Washington is not the center of the world, and it hasn’t been for at least a decade.”

That he was referring to 9/11 before his after-work cocktail wasn’t a good sign.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Harry said. “They pay us lip service like it’s going out of style. They throw money at us and pass on our reports to members of Congress. But don’t ever fool yourself, Stan: Anytime one of us has an idea that contradicts one of Langley’s starched collars, it ceases to be a battle of ideas; it becomes a battle of school ties.”

He was getting at something, but he was taking the long way around to it. Like Stan’s own father, he showed his anxieties by launching into overstatement and weak metaphor. “We’re not the British, Harry.”

“And how does that make any difference?”

Stan shrugged. “You really think it’s that bad?”

“Worse,” he said, finally engaging with his eyes. “It’s why Cairo station has to be seen—from the outside, at least—as better than Langley. As more ironclad, more impeccable. More pristine. It’s the only way to stand a chance against the old-boy network. You and me, we have to be more; we have to be better.”

Stan nodded. Harry seemed to have woken in a mood of constructive self-criticism, or maybe he was misinterpreting.

“And then, Stan, there’s you.”

“Me?”

Harry rubbed his eyes and avoided Stan’s for a second, saying, “A senior member of this station making calls to people he’s not even supposed to know.” Their eyes met. “You know what I mean?”

Stan went through the calls he’d made recently. Who was he not supposed to know? Sophie? Saul? “I’m not sure I do.”

Harry took a breath, opened his desk drawer, and took out a single sheet of paper. “One Inaya Aziz, of Alexandria, Virginia.”

“Right,” Stan said, hesitant relief slipping into his shoulders. “That was Saturday, before you and I talked. Just a few seconds—I never identified myself.”

Harry knitted his brow, forehead contracting, and spoke in a hard voice. “Don’t lie to me, Stan.” He looked down at the paper in his hand. “Twelve-oh-nine in the afternoon on Sunday, from your landline, twenty-eight minutes of conversation.” He looked up at Stan, his expression pained. “
Land
line? Jesus, Stan. Are you working
for
the Egyptians? Because if you aren’t, then you might as well ask them to pay you for all this volunteer work.”

There it was, the trap opening up in front of him. Stan hadn’t been at home at 12:09
P.M.
yesterday. Sophie had. Stan had been in the office, running through Frankfurt surveillance footage. A glance at the front desk’s entry/exit records would have told Harry this, but he apparently hadn’t checked that yet.

Which was the worse crime? Calling the widow of a man he wasn’t supposed to know about, or harboring the widow Sophie Kohl without telling anyone?

In this case, he wasn’t sure.

How had Sophie gotten Inaya Aziz’s number?

Harry said, “I believe I told you to forget about Aziz. Wasn’t I clear?”

“I had to verify some things.”

“You had to
verify
some things? What does that mean, Stan?”

He took a breath. “Look, Harry—if you’re not going to be up-front with me, then I’ve got no choice but to follow up on my own. Jibril Aziz met with Emmett, and soon afterward both were dead. You’re not telling me how or why Aziz was killed. So I kept digging, and it turned out that you used to run Aziz—you ran him for
four years.
You didn’t think I should know this?”

“There’s a reason it’s called undercover,” Harry told him, features stiff.

“Undercover. Okay. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of reasons to keep me stupid, but did you expect me to sit on my hands? So I called his wife to find out if she knew where he was.”

Harry rubbed his left eye. “And what did she say?”

“That she didn’t know where he was.”

“And what did that
verify
for you, Stan?”

“The only thing it verified was that you know more than you’re sharing, and it’s time to stop playing games. Talk to me about Omar Halawi.”

“Who?”

“RAINMAN. He works out of Ali Busiri’s office.”

Harry raised his head, squinting.

Stan said, “Omar Halawi says that we killed Emmett.”

There it was—the slap, square in the forehead. “He says
what
?”

“He sent me this message through Paul. I haven’t had a face-to-face with him yet. I want to talk to Busiri first.”

Harry leaned back, fingers threaded together across his narrow chest, and said, “Why, pray tell, did we kill Emmett?”

“To keep him quiet.”

“About what?”

Stan shrugged. “Stumbler? Or maybe the identity of another leak in the embassy.”

Harry sighed and, with a loose left hand, pointed at the ceiling. “It’s raining shit.”

It was an unexpected thing for him to say, but Stan held his tongue.

Harry said, “I’d be careful about what Ali Busiri says. He’s a sneaky bastard.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. About a month ago, when things fell apart for Mubarak, do you know what he did?”

Stan shook his head.

“He called me for a meeting. In a
hotel
room. He was pouring martinis. Made me wait forever before he got around to it—he wanted to come over to us.”

Stan frowned, but waited.

“He was scared. Terrified. He thought he was going to end up with a bullet behind the ear, and so he made me an offer. We give him a nice house in California and new names for him and his wife, and he gives us everything.”

“Everything?”

Harry nodded.

“But you didn’t take him up on it.”

Harry shook his head. “When you’ve been neck-deep in it for as long as I have, you learn to smell who’s bullshitting you. I smelled it—that hotel room was lousy with it.”