I walked down Gumhuriya Street, a little calmer than the square behind me and less crowded than Downtown’s interlocking grid. Then, without warning, something flew up behind me, whizzed over my right shoulder, and came to a halt in midair about a meter in front of my face. Another drone? No, it was the same one I’d left at the apartment. Maybe it had followed me all the way, or maybe it had been looking for me and had only just found me. It hovered in front of me as though asking permission to come along. Had drones become sentient? Fine. I had no objection to being watched. I just wanted to go on my way, that was all. I nodded, signaling my consent that it accompany me. Let’s see if it understands. . . . What happened next was genuinely extraordinary: it flipped three times in the air, completed a single circuit around me, and came to rest on my right shoulder. I walked on. It was so light I could hardly feel it was there.
I gave passersby the name of the street and building number, and got directions off several of them. They all described the same route, but I asked more than one to make sure. Three in a row gave me a shortcut. At last, I found myself in a small alley that terminated at a small building; an alley branching off a wider street and containing no shops or large buildings, but squat residential blocks, none more than three stories high. 6.45 p.m. I wouldn’t go up until the exact time. I’d wait in the dark for fifteen minutes. I’m the king of waiting.
The choice of the building at the far end of the narrow alley suggested extreme stupidity. This was a trap, not a safe place to meet. Who was going to escape from a building like that if the police raided? The alley was perfectly still and silent, the ideal setting to sniff glue and inject, a place for streetwalkers.
The scarab flew off my shoulder, made for the streetlight, and hovered beneath it for a moment.
A man was hoisting up a naked leg and pressing its owner against the wall of one of the buildings, pushing her body into the wall, his trousers and underwear slipping down off his bare ass, jabbing her repeatedly with his cock, as she held her face up and away from his panting breath and gazed nervously at the alley’s distant entrance. What they call a quickie. I hunt in places where dirty deeds are done.
He finished up in no time and the whore started adjusting her clothes, taking two steps backward into the circle of light beneath the streetlamp. She had taken off one trouser leg to make it easier for the man, and now she was trying to put it back on again. The man pissed against the wall and shook his cock. But where was the cash? Could you get one for one, as well? Was there new slang for the trade? I don’t know why I was so bothered, so angry. Was prostitution going to put paid to my dreams of a happy future? Was Ahmed Otared rediscovering his high moral principles after one quick tour through the streets of Cairo? The drone returned to my shoulder, but this time did not keep still and crawled slowly across my collarbone. Tell me, dear drone, if you’d be so kind: does my anger come from my Hope in Tomorrow?
So far, the man and woman had been silent—and I had held my tongue, too, hoping to watch undiscovered for as long as possible, if only for the sake of a little entertainment and to kill time. For some reason, she slapped him, the sound of the slap ringing out into the emptiness, and he responded in kind, a violent blow that gave off a muffled report. Suddenly, the drone fell still, as though it were listening or watching, but I was distracted from the drone by what the man and woman were doing. She was scratching his face with her nails, and he began to punch her hard. At last, he managed to get her off him, at which she picked her bag off the ground and started rummaging around inside, searching for something. As she did so, he advanced toward her nervously and jabbed her in the arm with a short-bladed knife. There were no screams. His face was bleeding, and she took the knife thrust in complete silence. He backed off a couple of paces as she took what looked like a small handgun from her bag. At a glance, I could tell it was a weapon made here in Egypt, a basic zip gun, knocked up by a metalworker in his workshop to no blueprint, and untested—conceivably one of just ten that he’d put together and sold to anyone wanting a small, cheap, unlicensed firearm. The barrel being brandished in the man’s face had kinks that were clearly visible even in that wan light. The weapon bucked gently in her hand and little holes spread over the man’s face, and chest, and the wall he’d been pissing against earlier. A shotgun cartridge, then. Usually not fatal, but at such close range it just might be. Would certainly take out an eye if a pellet hit it. The man held himself together, didn’t cry out, and she took another cartridge out of her bag and tried feeding it into the barrel. He came closer, apparently able to see only some of what was taking place in front of him. With his left hand, he grabbed the zip gun and tried to wrench it from her grasp. His right hand was out of my line of sight, but eventually he managed to pull his knife out of the woman’s arm and started stabbing her hysterically in the face. At the fifth or sixth blow, the woman dropped to the ground. She had reloaded by now, and this time she extended her arm and brought the muzzle right up to the man’s body. There were about ten centimeters between the mouth of the barrel and his crotch when she pulled the trigger. The man jerked upright and his trousers caught fire, a pale flame licking up where the shot had gone in. The pellets had clearly hit a major artery, because I could see he was bleeding heavily and hear the sound of the blood splashing onto the asphalt. He kicked her a few times, then brought the knife up to her neck and started cutting. A few moments passed, then a fountain of blood spurted out over her head and hair. The pair of them were now indistinguishable from one another, their features obscured by the blood and wounds that covered their faces. She had loaded the gun a third time and now she lifted it up to the man’s face and inserted the barrel into his mouth. The man didn’t try to move his head away. He could have done, but he was too busy sawing at her neck. For a few seconds, the woman held the pose, arm raised in the air as the man worked away at her throat. Then, finally, she fired.
The drone flew off my shoulder and went over to where the two bodies lay locked together, then returned and, dancing in front of my face, inviting me to follow, made for the door of the building where the meeting was to be held and smoothly passed inside.
It was 7 p.m. I entered the building and calmly climbed the stairs.
4
ONE EVENING, I’D RECEIVED A message informing us that a technician would be coming to produce a mask for each of us. He would be at the tower in no more than two hours. The message requested that we be clean-shaven for the cast to be taken.
At first I didn’t understand what was being asked of us. True, we carried out our orders to the letter, as though we were still officers with the Interior Ministry, but what did masks have to do with the task at hand? The whole thing was absurd.
The technician asked me to lie down on the floor and placed two thin tubes in my nostrils. He covered my head, my hair, and my neck, then poured a cold, damp paste over my face, waited a few minutes for the paste to dry, and lifted the mold. Inspecting the inside of the mold, he told me that this wouldn’t be the final one, that he would make another mold from which to cast the mask. I was on my way to the bathroom when he asked what design I’d like. “Hold on,” I said, “Let me think about it.”
We had treated the business with the masks as extracurricular entertainment—something frivolous but fun. Our unusual situation meant we welcomed any distractions at all, but I was considering motivations greater and more profound than providing distractions to the troops; the leadership had some undeclared objective in all this. I held my counsel and told myself we’d find it all out soon enough.
When I went back in, the technician had finished making molds for everybody. They had also chosen faces for their masks. All had gone for comic actors. One had picked Fuad al-Mohandis and had asked for the actor’s famous black-framed spectacles to be added as well. As I thought about what I’d like, the face of Buddha floated before my eyes.
If it was a memory, it was a very obscure one. I couldn’t recall having seen the face anywhere before. A picture of him
in a magazine or newspaper, perhaps? Maybe I’d watched a documentary about him. In my mind, Buddha was associated with wisdom, but really I knew nothing about him. Was he a prophet? A god? Did he worship cows? I had no idea why I asked for a Buddha mask. Later, a few people would come to call me Buddha. For some in the resistance, it became my nom de guerre, but my personality would be more readily associated with mystery than wisdom. Others would assume that by making this choice I thought myself superior to everyone else—to those who chose celebrities for their masks. I later found out that all the snipers received masks made especially for them by professional sculptors, and learned, too, that this was a privilege granted only to the elite—to those who had killed, or were about to kill, large numbers of people.
When the same technician came back to see me, he took the mask from a wooden case and very carefully handed it over. And as I put it on, and felt the cold metal’s touch, and discovered that it didn’t fit exactly over my features, I asked him what the point had been of making the mold in the first place, and he said that the purpose of the mold hadn’t been to capture every detail of my face, but to get a rough idea of my measurements. “This is a mask of solid metal,” he said, “an alloy of aluminum and other lightweight compounds. It’s inflexible but affords protection for the face against small fragments of shrapnel.”
Mask in his hands, he said, “Don’t worry, it will never fit your face exactly. It will never become your face.” Well, he had been wrong about that.
For several days, I wore it just a few minutes at a time before taking it off, and then the period I spent masked grew. I would go days with it on, would wear it in place of my face, would forget that I had a face of flesh and blood. I would gaze into the mirror, unconcerned by the sight of my gleaming, immutable metal reflection—knowing that it wouldn’t age, that it was immune to changes in the weather and the aging effect of cigarettes. Taking it off every few days to shave, I would become afraid—so afraid to look at my own face while shaving that I had to ask a colleague to do it for me. I’d tremble when I came to bed. Against my will, I would lay it aside and would feel as though I were standing naked before millions. I would put out the light and, masked, walk over to my little bed, and I would not remove it until I was under the covers. And I would lay it beside my head in readiness for when the daylight came. I would put it on the moment I woke. For months on end, I would do this. And then the madness reached its peak, and for a full six weeks I slept with it on.
With time, I came to realize that I wasn’t substituting the mask for my face as I’d first thought, but putting a barrier between myself and everyone around me, though they were my colleagues and friends, the people I believed in and trusted most of all. Like me, I saw them go into decline, hanging onto their masks, refusing to take them off for extended periods of time. Once his face had become familiar, I wouldn’t smile to see Fuad al-Mohandis. I would develop the strangest ideas about the characters around me. Would completely forget all the conventional associations of those laughing, smiling, frowning masks and would forget, too, the original faces. I would create imaginary faces for their bodies, and whenever we received a group of snipers whose true faces I had never seen—just their masks—their actual personalities wouldn’t come into it at all: nothing would stick in my mind but details of those borrowed identities. I would reach a point when featureless masks—with no noses, ears, lips, or eyeholes, just a grille of very fine wires that the wearer could see through while his own eyes remained completely obscured—would leave me in a state of complete bewilderment. We were breaking down without being aware of it, throwing up barriers around us and ensuring they were buttressed and maintained.
It went further. I lost the ability to aim unless I was masked. It happened when I was lining up a target standing by the Maspero building. The officer was waiting for a car to pick him up; it was as rare an opportunity as you could get. According to protocol, I shouldn’t have waited or hesitated. We had standing orders to snipe soldiers and officers on sight. I took off the mask to get a clearer look through the scope’s narrow, round eyepiece and as I got back into position and searched around for the target I found that he was looking straight at me. The target, at a distance of approximately a kilometer, was staring into my eyes with a defiance that my hands shook to see, and if it hadn’t been for the last vestiges of common sense, I’d have assumed he was actually looking at me and that he recognized me. I moved back from the eyepiece in a daze and put on my mask, then looked through the scope to find that the man had turned his face away and was looking at the Nile. Much reassured, I took aim again and fired. I didn’t kill him because he was an officer of the occupation, but because I was convinced that he had seen me.
After taking out that target, I never again removed the mask while taking aim. The mask had become the secret to my precision, and maybe, without my realizing it, the secret behind the accuracy of the entire Tower Group.
For days and days, I studied East Cairo from behind my mask. I felt no need to hide behind the scope and heavy rifle. I did not give in to curiosity and inspect all the little details that the scope would let me see. Up here I was immune, protected by height, distance, and my mask. I was an ancient Egyptian god with a borrowed face, whose true features no man could ever know, do what he might. A Greek god, full of contempt for the world that he’d created—killing whomever he chose, deserting whomever he chose, sleeping with whomever he chose, impregnating whomever he chose. And the day a drone came with a message, telling me that my colleagues and I were now free to select targets and snipe without checking back with the leadership, I felt that my divine status had been confirmed, and I told myself that what was to come would fulfill me utterly.
Now I had the green light, the five battleships became easy pickings: close range, immobile, and, should we so desire, quite sinkable. And that was why we ignored them. Long-distance, arbitrary targets in East Cairo were now our main concern, and bulky drones brought us vast quantities of ammunition. We’d abandoned our beloved Dragunovs and now relied exclusively on two models: the McMillan Tac-50 and the Barrett M107. We must have poured thousands of half-inch rounds into East Cairo.
I killed the minister of foreign affairs. I received a message telling me his car would pass along the Corniche within the next quarter of an hour and that it would be stopping at some point between the Semiramis and Maspero. On tenterhooks, I tracked the black Mercedes and, as it sped toward the Maspero building and I realized that it was going to go on without pulling over, I had no choice but to fire five rounds into the vehicle. At last, it did stop, but only thanks to my bullets. Nobody got out. I killed the minister of information. I was watching the outside of the Maspero building through my scope when he stuck his head out of one of the windows, chattering away on his cell phone. A happy coincidence indeed. I don’t think it was more than three seconds between my spotting him and opening fire. I killed what could have been a general from the Fourth Army of the Knights of Malta who drove past in his armored car and got out to inspect a checkpoint. His mustache and eyebrows were what got my attention—the mismatch between his salt-and-pepper hair and the lone lieutenant’s star on his shoulder. I killed him, and I’m still not totally sure whether or not he was a general in disguise. I killed a former colleague, a major in the police, who was sitting on a balcony at the Semiramis. He was dressed in civilian clothes, slumped beneath an umbrella, drinking beer straight from the bottle and smoking. I recognized his face but couldn’t remember his name, just that I’d graduated a few classes ahead of him, and I supposed that if he was relaxing like that on a hotel balcony he must have done well for himself under the occupation. So I shot him.
One hot, listless day, I aimed my rifle in the general direction of Bulaq Abul-Ela and opened fire at random. Three hundred rounds buried themselves in the district’s buildings, and I had no idea if I had killed or injured anybody. Then I turned the gun on Tahrir Square and fired through a gap between the twin wrecks of the Nile Hilton and the A
rab League. I hit a large number of cars, and buses, and pedestrians until the square had cleared completely, and then I went on firing into the deserted space until my gun jammed.
I didn’t stop to consider what I would say to the leaders of the resistance to justify my actions, or to think about the reprimand I’d get. I didn’t care about my fellow snipers, standing around unable to understand what I was up to. And when I was done and I turned to face them, I saw only the immobility of their masks, kept on to hide their quaking eyes.
5
EVERYTHING HERE WAS OLD, AND I don’t just mean that the furniture and walls had seen twenty years come and go—they were so old and dusty I couldn’t tell which era they belonged to. It wouldn’t have made much difference if we’d met in a tomb.
There were five of us, including the leader of the resistance, Major General Kamal al-Asyuti. I had met him once before when I’d been an officer at the Interior Ministry and I’d later learned that he was our leader. He looked thinner than I remembered him. His cheekbones jutted, his front teeth stuck out, and his eyes bulged. White hairs outnumbered the black. Then there was his aide, Brigadier General Suleiman Madi. Him I knew well, and I knew his story. He’d been a detective his whole career, had never transferred to another department—the very essence of an officer who dedicates his life to police work and cares for nothing else, not even the standard pastimes of hunting and marksmanship, not even research. Suleiman Madi was a one-dimensional man without dreams, ambitions, or expectations—nothing more or less than a work machine. I’d been astonished to hear that he had not carried on as a cop following the occupation and had chosen to join the resistance, evincing a patriotic zeal quite at odds with his character. Then I had started to notice his methodical fingerprints all over the resistance’s actions and the violence meted out to the recruits and officers of the Interior Ministry. The last two officers I didn’t know, but the presence of the organization’s two most powerful figures gave an indication of this meeting’s importance.
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