The Cairo Affair (9 page)

His eyes had grown into saucers. “I’m telling you, Stan. I didn’t give her anything. She asked—
threatened,
really—but I refused.”

People lie. During his ten years with the Agency Stan had listened to more lies than he could count, and he’d lied at least the same number of times. Being his father’s son, he was pretty good at it, but in his experience diplomatic staff were among the most skillful liars around. So it was no surprise that Emmett told him these things with a straight face. He went on to say that, yes, he’d brought home his work, even brought home material that wasn’t supposed to leave the embassy. “I’m loose with the rules. I’ll admit to that. But I’m
not
a traitor.”

“What does Balašević have on you?”

“It doesn’t matter, Stan. That was a
year
ago. She asked, I said no—end of story.”

“Then why didn’t you report it?”

“Because I didn’t know you. I didn’t know Harry. I was worried about my job.”

Stan gave him a good long stare to show that he wasn’t buying any of this. He said, “You’re going to close it down. Tell her the truth—you were uncovered, and now it’s all over.”

“It never started.”

“I’m trying to close a leak, Emmett. I’m not here to abuse you. I’m not even going to make you feed them disinformation—the Serbs aren’t worth it. But you have to be open with me. What you need to do now is admit it to me.” He opened his hands. “I’m not carrying a wire, I swear. You and I just need to come to an understanding. You admit what you’ve done, and I promise to control the fallout. But I’ll only do that if I know it’s over. Right here and now. Am I making myself clear?”

It was Emmett’s turn to stare, turning over his options, examining them from different angles. He gave a long exhale and said, “I don’t know how many ways I can say this. I gave away nothing.”

“This isn’t a game, Emmett. One of our men was
killed
because of what you did. Understand? If you don’t give me what I need, then I’m taking this to Harry. Got it?”

Emmett understood perfectly. He chewed the inside of his cheek, leaned back, and, frowning, finally said what Stan had never thought he would have the courage to say: “Why
haven’t
you gone to Harry about this? If it’s so goddamned serious, then why are we having coffee and a chat? I mean, look. Maybe I’m not the brightest bulb in the store, but I’m wondering why I’m not on a plane back to D.C. If your evidence is so damned ironclad.” When Stan didn’t answer immediately, he leaned closer. “You don’t
want
to bring this to Harry. Why?”

Because I’m sleeping with your wife!
he wanted to scream. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Emmett Kohl, but if Emmett was sent home his wife would follow him back to the States—he feared that even more than a leak in the embassy. Instead, he controlled himself. He answered Emmett’s lies with his own.

“Emmett, you and I are friends. I happen to place some importance on such things, so don’t try to take advantage of me. Right now you have two options. You can do as I ask and return to your life. Don’t worry about Balašević. If she knows you’re blown, she won’t use whatever she has on you—she’ll step back. Or you can go on with what you’re doing, and we can both find out how many days it takes for me to drop friendship in favor of duty.”

Emmett spent another minute thinking about this, his expression drifting between moods that Stan could not interpret. Then he raised his head and looked squarely at his accuser. He smiled, nodded, and stood up. “Thanks for the coffee,” Emmett said before walking away.

At three in the morning one year later, still sticky with sleep, Stan listened to Sophie: “We were having dinner and a man walked into the restaurant and shot him in the head and the chest.” Then the conversation was over, and he poured himself a drink—the first sip was a toast to Emmett Kohl, but the second became a toast to Emmett Kohl’s passing, and it took a while to shake the terrible pleasure this news had given him.

When it finally did leave him, he called Harry Wolcott to pass on the news. Though Harry had also been asleep, he sounded sharp, asking why Sophie had thought to call him of all people at that hour.

“She scrolled through her phone, and my name was the first she came across,” Stan lied—smoothly and without self-consciousness, the way his father would have.

“The mind of a woman is an unfathomable thing,” Harry told him, as if that could explain a lifetime of confusion regarding the opposite sex. “Let me make the announcement, all right? I’ll call Budapest for details and share everything in the morning.”

“Sure.”

“Did she say who was investigating it?”

“I didn’t think to ask.”

Harry grunted. “Next time, think.”

2

Stan didn’t need to tell anyone about the murder, for when he arrived at the embassy it was already on everyone’s lips, having been an easy splash in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It was the only subject his five agents—Ricky, Tim, Klaus, Mike, and Paul—wanted to discuss. He allowed them a few minutes of conjecture before steering them back to the agenda they were obliged to deal with during their Thursday morning meetings: their sources, and how to handle them. Paul was having trouble with his primary source in Egyptian intelligence, RAINMAN, who had recently dropped off the radar and wasn’t answering his requests to meet.

They had various explanations for this—Ricky thought he was trying to prove his worth before hitting them up for a better deal; Tim was more generous, believing that since Mubarak’s fall RAINMAN’s position was less secure, so he was simply watching out for himself. Ricky’s cynical take was unlikely, for RAINMAN had come to them last year—not the other way around—and they had accommodated most of his requests for help getting business associates into the American markets. Tim’s felt more likely, as the end of Mubarak’s reign had thrown everything into disarray. While the military leadership running the country wasn’t interested in overturning the entire security apparatus, everyone knew that once the elections came around all bets were off.

“Maybe his superiors discovered he’s our friend,” said Klaus.

Stan shook his head. “If Ali Busiri knew, then RAINMAN would be locked up or dead. Yet we see him in all the usual places.”

“Send John” was Ricky’s suggestion. “Scare him into shape.”

That earned a few laughs. John Calhoun was their sole contractor, a huge Global Security tough who’d been around since late November. He wasn’t around today, though. Harry had borrowed him for a job. “Where
is
the dark knight?” asked Klaus.

“Boss isn’t sharing,” Stan told him.

Nancy, the pool secretary, tapped on the door and summoned everyone to Harry’s office.

They piled in, joining the embassy’s entire Agency presence—twenty-five or so people—and Nancy closed them inside. Harry stood behind his desk, white hair brushed so meticulously that it looked like a rug, hands deep in his jacket pockets. Though he had a great view that included a small slice of the Nile between other Garden City buildings, Harry kept his venetian blinds closed. He was chewing on gum when he said, “Folks, I’ve got some bad news.”

He told it in his measured, heavy voice, the one reserved for Statements of Importance, and Stan learned that by the time Sophie had called him the list of suspects had already been narrowed down to a single individual: Gjergj Ahmeti—a.k.a. Dumitru Cozma, Lajos Varga, and Andrzej Wójcik. Jennifer Cary asked the obvious question: “Sir, how did we verify this guy?”

“Hungarian police cameras. One down the street from the restaurant ID’d his car, which he left in a train station lot, then cameras inside the station saw him catch a EuroNight to Munich. One of our guys in Budapest, George Reardon, tells me that by the time they stopped the train to search it, just inside the Hungarian border, he was gone.”

That earned a collective sigh.

Harry shared an enormous rap sheet on Gjergj Ahmeti that included, among other things, two bank robberies in his native Albania, time in a Belgrade prison for multiple homicide, connections to two murders in Marseilles, and star billing on two “persons of interest” lists, in Yemen and Brazil. The man got around.

“But who does he work for?” asked Dennis Schwarzkopf.

With his index finger, Harry drew a question mark in the air. “Interpol’s spent a lot of time on his case, and there’s a file a few inches thick, but no one even knows for sure if he’s freelance. Looking at his sheet, though, I think he must be. There’s no single organization we know of that could account for the variety of places he’s worked.”

“Except us,” said Jerry, one of Jennifer’s agents. A couple of polite chuckles, until they saw the look on Harry’s face.

“Jerry,” he said, “I don’t want to ever hear that joke again.”

Jerry nodded, flushing immediately.

To the rest of them, Harry said, “Many of you knew Emmett. He was a good man, as well as a friend. I want everyone beating the bushes. If his murder has anything at all to do with Cairo, then that information belongs on my desk immediately. Any questions?”

As they were clearing out, Harry asked Stan to stay behind, and once they were alone Stan closed the door. Harry settled in his chair, popping a fresh ribbon of gum into his mouth. “So what do you think, Stan?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

Harry waved a hand, irritated. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Stan approached the desk, considering it. “As far as I know, he had no contact with Balašević after I brought my case to you. So it doesn’t make sense. Why would the Serbs wait a year and then get rid of him in another country?”

Harry rocked back in his swivel chair. Behind him was a portrait of the president, smiling. He said, “Maybe they tried to recruit him again.”

“They had to know he was already blown. It would be shockingly amateur.”

Harry nodded at that, as if the possibility of an intelligence agency acting stupidly weren’t commonplace, then said, “Just check on what you can, but keep it quiet. I’m not interested in slandering a dead man.”

“He was a traitor.”

A look crossed Harry’s face, a flicker of anger. “You never proved it. Not conclusively.”

“How often are we able to prove anything conclusively?”

“Often enough that I wasn’t going to ruin a man’s life. Often enough that we’re not going to smear a dead man’s name.”

Though they rarely brought it up, the disagreement had colored their relationship, lurking beneath the surface of all their conversations for the past year. Stan wondered—not for the first time—if Harry already knew about Sophie, and if he had suspected ulterior motives when Stan had demanded that Emmett be taken into custody. Whatever Harry knew or suspected, right now he just opened his laptop and said, “Go get me some results, all right?”

He collected his agents again. RAINMAN was on the back burner, and Stan was finally free to discuss what had been on his mind since three in the morning.

They ran through their contacts, finding seven who’d had even a distant connection to the business affairs that Emmett had spent most of his time dealing with in Cairo. Each agent received his assignments and headed out to make calls and schedule meets. Once they were gone, Stan called the Serbian embassy and asked to speak with Dragan Milić.

Stan and Dragan had had plenty of informal conversations, that tit-for-tat between agencies that keeps intelligence in motion, and so he took the call quickly. When asked if he’d heard about Emmett Kohl, Dragan gave an exaggerated sigh. “My condolences, Stan. Yes, of course I heard about that.”

“Are you free for lunch?”

“For you?”

“Yes, Dragan.”

“Of course, my friend.”

They met halfway between their embassies, Stan walking to clear his head, and it took a half hour to weave through the crowds toward the 15th of May Bridge, where he crossed to Gezira Island and finally reached La Bodega Bistro on the 26th of July, in the old Baehler’s Mansions Building. It was a good walk, refreshing despite the stink of the Nile and the traffic backed up along the Corniche El Nil, and he took in the hijabbed women walking in pairs and trios, the gaunt men in sweat-dyed shirts, smoking. Arabic pop music, as ubiquitous as prayers, blared from cars, drowned out at times by the buzzing of mopeds and the choking roar of old, barely functioning pickups. At one point just before the bridge, he saw two men taking off their shoes and laying towels on the ground in preparation for midday Dhuhr prayers.

He had a brief flashback of late January, when the bridges had been stages for armies of black-clad men in riot gear facing off with angry crowds trying to break through government lines to reach Tahrir. He’d mostly kept out of it, slipping out of the embassy only a few times to get a better look at the conflict. Early on, he found himself standing off to the side among government forces. Later, standing at the same corners, he found himself among the weeping, jubilant Egyptian masses as the Central Security Forces were pushed back and then scattered, running for their lives, stripping off their black uniforms. Now those same revolutionaries were walking the bridge, loitering and laughing, occupied again by the little dramas of work, life, and love. They were relentless, he thought. After millennia suffering under the heels of autocrats, from the pharaohs to the meager dictators propped up by Western investments, they were still standing, laughing and holding on to their faith. Up ahead, a line of twelve shoeless men were on their knees, facing Mecca.

He took out his phone and called Sophie but got her voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.

La Bodega was busy, but Dragan had used his considerable influence to get a secluded table in the rear booth. Yellow fin-de-siècle lighting and art nouveau furnishings enhanced the ambience, which only made Dragan Milić look more out of place. He was not the kind of man who appeared comfortable in a suit; to Stan, Dragan always looked as if he should be wearing bikini briefs and lounging beside a concrete pool in some cheap Adriatic resort, his flabby torso burned pink and his wiry gray hair bleached yellow. He smiled a lot and gestured to the world with fat fingers that ended in gnawed nails, all his words effusive. He’d known Emmett, he told Stan. Not well, “but how well do any of us know each other?” By the time the platters arrived—sea bass for him, scallops for Stan—he was on to other topics, and Stan let him go on with his complaints about the new Egyptian security services. “They’re not gentlemen anymore, Stan. You understand me?”