by Daniel Silva
"But?" Graham wondered.
"But I'm cooped up in the apartment with the children all day, and I'm beginning to go a bit insane."
"So what are you planning to do with the rest of your life?"
"Develop a drinking problem. More Scotch, please."
"Absolutely," Graham said. He made a vast show of snatching up the bottle with his long hands and dumping an inch of the whisky into Michael's glass. Graham had a deftness about him, a shocking uncontrived grace even in the simplest gesture. Michael thought he was a little too pretty for a spy: the half-closed gray eyes that projected bored insolence, the narrow features that would have been attractive on a woman's face. He was an artist at heart, a gifted pianist who could have made his living on the concert stage instead of the secret stage, had he chosen to do so. Michael assumed it was his father's wartime heroics—"his bloody wonderful war," Graham snarled once after too much Bordeaux—that drove Graham into intelligence work.
Graham said, "So when the senator asked you to do a little freelance work on the Ulster Freedom Brigade—"
"I didn't exactly stomp my feet and resist."
"Did Elizabeth see through your little game?"
"Elizabeth sees through everything. She's a lawyer, remember? And a damned good one. She would have made an excellent intelligence officer, too." Michael hesitated for a moment. "So what can you tell me about the Ulster Freedom Brigade?"
"Precious little, I'm afraid." Graham hesitated. "Usual rules for the game, right, Michael? Any information I give you is for your background purposes only. You may not share it with any member of your former service—or any other service, for that matter."
Michael raised his right hand and said, "Scout's honor."
Graham spoke for twenty minutes without interruption. The British intelligence and security organizations were not certain whether the Ulster Freedom Brigade had five members or five hundred. Hundreds of known members of Protestant paramilitary organizations had been interrogated, and none had provided a single useful lead. The sophistication of the attacks suggested the group had expertise and serious financial backing. There was also evidence to suggest that its leaders would go to extraordinary lengths to safeguard internal security. Charlie Bates, a Protestant suspected in the murder of Eamonn Dillon, had been discovered shot to death in a barn outside Hillsborough in County Armagh, and the bombers in Dublin and London had both died in the explosions—a fact that had not been made public.
"This is Northern Ireland, not West Beirut," Graham said. "The Northern Irish aren't suicide bombers. It's simply not part of the fabric of the conflict."
"So the leaders of the Ulster Freedom Brigade recruit action agents with no known paramilitary connections and then make certain they die so no one is left behind to talk."
"That would appear to be the case," Graham said.
"So what is this Ulster Freedom Brigade trying to accomplish?"
"If we take them at their word, they're out to destroy the peace process. If we judge them by their actions they are not going to be content to just kill off a few ordinary Catholics, like their Protestant brethren in the Loyalist Volunteer Force. They've demonstrated their willingness to attack high-profile soft targets and shed innocent blood."
"It looks to me as though they're out to punish all parties to the peace process."
"Exactly," Graham said. "The Irish government, the British government, Sinn Fein. And I think the leaders of the Protestant parties who signed the agreement had better watch their back as well."
"What about the Americans?"
"Your Senator George Mitchell brokered the Good Friday agreement, and the Protestant hard-liners have never been too fond of the Americans. They think you've clearly sided with the Catholics and want the North to be united with the Irish Republic."
"So the American ambassador to London would have to consider himself a potential target."
"The Ulster Freedom Brigade has demonstrated quite clearly that they have the will and the expertise to carry out spectacular acts of terrorism. Given their accomplishments thus far, taking out an American ambassador would seem to be a reasonable proposition."
An hour later they met Graham's wife, Helen, at a French restaurant called Marcello's in Covent Garden. Helen wore black: a tight-fitting black sweater, a short black skirt, black stockings, black shoes with impossibly thick heels. She went through phases like a teenage girl. The last time Michael was in London, Helen had been in the midst of her Mediterranean period—she had dressed like a Greek peasant and cooked only with olive oil.
After a long absence from the workforce she had recently taken a job as art director for a successful publishing house. Her new job came with a coveted space in the company car park. She had commandeered Graham's BMW and insisted on driving to work each morning, listening to her ghastly alternative rock CDs and screaming at her mother over her mobile phone, even though the trip would take half the time by tube. She was the kind of wife who turned heads at Personnel. Graham indulged her because she was beautiful and because she was gifted. She possessed a fire for life that the Service had long ago extinguished in him. He wore her like a loud tie.
Helen was already seated at a table next to the window, drinking Sancerre. She rose, kissed Michael's cheek, and held him tightly for a moment. "God, it's marvelous to see you, Michael."
Marcello appeared, all smiles and bonhomie, and poured wine for Michael and Graham.
"Don't bother looking at the menu," Helen said, "because I've already ordered for you."
Graham and Michael quietly closed their menus and surrendered them without protest. Helen's return to the workforce had left her no time to pursue her great passion, which was cooking. Unfortunately, her talent ended at the doorway to her £50,000 modern Scandinavian kitchen. Now, she and Graham ate only in restaurants. Michael noticed that Graham was beginning to put on weight.
Helen spoke of her own work because she knew Michael and Graham could not speak of theirs. "I'm trying to finish the cover for a new thriller," Helen said. "Some beastly American who writes about serial killers. How many different ways can you illustrate a serial killer? I produce a cover, we send it across the Atlantic, and the agent in New York rejects it. So bloody frustrating sometimes." She looked at Michael, and her bright green eyes turned suddenly serious. "My God, I'm being such a crashing bore. How's Elizabeth?"
Michael looked at Graham. He gave a nearly imperceptible nod. Graham routinely flaunted the regulations of the Security Service by telling Helen too much about his work.
"Some days are better than others," Michael said. "But overall she's doing fine. We've turned the apartment and the Shelter Island house into fortresses. It helps her sleep better at night. And then there are the children. Between her work and the twins, she has little time to dwell on the past."
"Did she really kill that German woman—oh, God, Graham, what was her name again?"
"Astrid Vogel," Graham put in.
"Did she really do it with a bow and arrow?"
Michael nodded.
"My God," Helen murmured. "What happened?"
"Astrid Vogel followed her into the guest cottage, where you and Graham stayed a couple of years ago. Elizabeth hid in the bedroom closet. One of her old bows was there. She was a champion archer when she was a girl, just like her father. She did what she had to do to survive."
"What happened to the other assassin, this October fellow?"
"The Agency received reports through channels it trusted that October is dead, that he had been killed by the men who hired him to kill me because he had failed."
"Do you believe it?" Helen asked.
"I thought it was remotely possible once," Michael said. "But now I don't believe it at all. In fact, I'm almost certain October is alive and working again. This assassination in Cairo—"
"Ahmed Hussein," Graham put in, for Helen's benefit.
"I've read the eyewitness accounts carefully. I can't explain it, but it just feels like him."
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"Didn't October always shoot his victims in the face?" "He did, but if he's supposed to be dead, it makes sense that he would have to alter his signature."
"What do you plan to do?" Graham asked.
"I'm booked on the first flight to Cairo tomorrow morning."
10
CAIRO
Michael arrived in Cairo early the following afternoon. As in Britain, he entered the country on his true passport and was granted a two-week tourist visa. He sliced his way through the madness of the airport arrival lounge—past Bedouins with all their worldly possessions crammed inside wilting cardboard boxes, past a bleating cluster of goats—and waited twenty minutes at the taxi stand for a rattletrap Lada sedan. He smoked cigarettes to cover the stench of exhaust pouring into the backseat. Michael found Cairo intolerably hot in summer, but die winters were remarkably pleasant. The air was warm and soft, and a desert wind chased puffy white clouds around an azure sky. The road from the airport was jammed with poor Egyptians trying to take some pleasure in the good weather. Entire families sprawled in the grassy median around picnic lunches. The taxi driver spoke to Michael in English, but Michael wanted to see whether his skills had atrophied, so he answered him in rapid Arabic. He told the driver he was a Lebanese businessman, living in London, who had fled Beirut during the war. For a half hour they talked of Beirut in the old days, Michael in flawless Beirut-accented Arabic, the driver in the accent of his Nile Delta village.
Michael was bored with the Nile Hilton—and sick of the turmoil of Tahrir Square—so he took a room at the Inter-Continental, a sandstone-colored edifice looming over the Cor-niche that, like all newer buildings in Cairo, bore the scars of dust and diesel fumes. He lay by the rooftop pool, drinking warm Egyptian beer, his mind flowing from one thought to the next, until the sun vanished into the Western desert and the evening call to prayer started up—first one muezzin, a very long way off, then another, and another, until a thousand recorded voices screamed in concert. He forced himself out of his chaise lounge and went to the railing overlooking the river. A few faithful drifted toward the mosques, but mostly Cairo continued to churn beneath him.
At five o'clock he went to his room, showered, and dressed. He took a taxi a short distance up the river to a restaurant called Paprika, next to the towering headquarters of the state-run Egyptian television network. Paprika was the equivalent of Joe Allen in New York, a place where actors and writers came to be seen by each other and by Egyptians wealthy enough to afford the rather mediocre food. One side of the restaurant overlooked the parking lot of Egyptian television. Those were the most coveted tables in the restaurant, because sometimes patrons caught a glimpse of an actor or celebrity or senior government official.
Michael had reserved a table on the unfashionable side of the restaurant. He drank bottled water and watched the sun setting over the Nile and thought of the first agent he had ever recruited, a Syrian intelligence officer based in London who had a taste for English girls and good champagne. The Agency suspected the Syrian was siphoning some of his operating funds to support his habits. Michael approached the officer, threatened to expose him to his superiors in Damascus, and coerced him into becoming a paid spy for the CIA. The agent provided valuable intelligence on Syrian support for several different terrorist groups, Arab and European. Two years after his recruitment he provided his most valuable piece of information. A PLO terror cell had set up shop in Frankfurt, where it was planning to bomb a nightclub frequented by American servicemen. Michael passed the information to Headquarters, and Headquarters tipped off the West German police, who arrested the Palestinians. The Syrian was paid one hundred thousand dollars for the information, and Michael was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal during a secret ceremony. The medal had to be locked away in a file cabinet at Headquarters.
Yousef Hafez entered the restaurant. Unlike the Syrian, Hafez had come to the Agency voluntarily rather than through coercion. He had the fleshy good looks of an aging film star: black hair gone to gray, square features gone soft with twenty extra pounds, deep fissures around his eyes when he smiled. Hafez was a colonel in the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence service, and his job was to combat Egypt's Islamic fundamentalist rebels, the al-Gama'at Ismalyya. He had personally captured and tortured several of its leaders. Cairo Station had recruited Hafez, but he refused to work with Cairo-based officers because their movements were monitored so closely by his own service. Michael had been assigned to the case. Hafez had provided a steady stream of information on the state of the Islamic revolt in Egypt and the movement of Egyptian terrorists around the globe. In return he was paid handsomely—money that helped defray the costs of his relentless womanizing. Hafez liked younger women, and they liked him. He believed he was doing nothing to endanger his country and therefore he felt no guilt.
He spoke to Michael in Arabic—loudly enough so that the diners at surrounding tables could hear him—and Michael followed suit. He asked Michael what brought him to town, and Michael said business interests in Cairo and Alexandria. The restaurant buzzed for a moment, as a famous Egyptian actress climbed out of her car and walked inside the television building.
"Why Paprika?" Michael asked. "I thought Arabesque was your favorite restaurant."
"It is, but I'm meeting someone here when we're finished."
"What's her name?"
"Calls herself Cassandra. Comes from a Greek family in Alexandria. She's the most gorgeous creature I've ever seen. She plays a minor character in an Egyptian television drama, a little bitch who's always causing trouble—within the confines of our strict Islamic morals, of course." The waiter came over the table. "I'm going to have some whisky before we eat. What about you, Michael?"
"Beer, please."
"One Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks, one Stella."
The waiter vanished. Michael said, "How old is she?"
"Twenty-two," Hafez said proudly.
The drinks came. Hafez raised his Johnnie Walker.
"Cheers."
Hafez was the Muslim equivalent of a lapsed Catholic. He had no quarrel with his religion, and its rituals and ceremonies provided him the comfort of a childhood blanket. But he ignored anything in the Koran that got in the way of his enjoyment of worldly things. He also worked most Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath, because his job required that he monitor the sermons of Egypt's more radical sheikhs.
"Does she know what you do for a living?"
"I tell her I import Mercedes automobiles into Egypt, which accounts for my well-appointed love nest on Zamalek." He nodded toward the river. Zamalek was a long, slender island, removed from the madness of central Cairo, filled with expensive shops and restaurants and fashionable apartment houses. If Hafez was keeping a mistress on Zamalek—a television actress, no less—he had blackmailed his new case officer into a significant increase in salary. "Ah, there she is now."
Michael turned discreetly toward the door of the restaurant. A woman who looked remarkably like Sophia Loren walked through the door on the arm of a young man with oiled hair and sunglasses.
They ordered dinner. Hafez sent a bottle of expensive French champagne to Sophia Loren's table. Michael was paying; he always paid. "You don't mind, do you, Michael?" Hafez asked.
"Of course not."
"So, what brings you to Cairo, besides a chance to have dinner with a debauched old friend?"
"The murder of Ahmed Hussein."
Hafez tilted his head slightly, as if to say, These things happen.
Michael said, "Were the Egyptian security services involved in his murder?"
"Absolutely not," Hafez said. "We don't engage in such behavior."
Michael rolled his eyes and said, "Do you know who was behind the assassination?"
"The Israelis, of course."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because we were watching the Israelis watching Hussein."
"Back up," Michael said. "Start at the beginning."
"Two weeks ago an Israeli
team arrived in Cairo on various European passports and set up a static observation post in a flat in Ma'adi. We set up a static post in the flat across the street."
"How do you know they were Israelis?"
"Please, Michael, give us a little credit. Oh, they could pass as Egyptians, but they were definitely Israelis. They used to be good, the Mossad. But now they sometimes act like a bunch of bumbling amateurs. In the old days they could attract the best—every spy a prince, and all that bullshit. Now, the bright boys want to make money and talk on their mobile phones in Ben Yehuda Street. Let me tell you, Michael, if Moses had these people spying for him, the Jews would never have made it out of Sinai."
"You've made your point, Yousef. Go on."
"They were clearly watching Hussein—monitoring his movements, photographic surveillance, audio coverage, the usual. We took the opportunity to engage in a little countersurveillance. As a result we have a nice photo album of six Mossad agents: four men, two women. Interested?"
"Talk to your real case officer."
"I also have a videotape of Hussein's death."
"What?"
"You heard me," Hafez said. "Every time he set foot outside his flat, we rolled the video cameras. We were rolling when the gunman on the motorcycle killed him on the steps of the mosque."
"Jesus Christ."
"I have a copy of the tape in my briefcase."
"I want to see it."
"You can have the fucking thing, Michael. No charge."
"I want to see it now."
"Please, Michael," Hafez said. "The tape's not going to disappear. Besides, I'm famished, and the veal here is excellent."
Forty-five minutes later, they entered the Egyptian television building: Michael, Hafez, and Cassandra. She escorted them to the newsroom and showed them into a small edit room. Hafez dug the videocassette from his briefcase and loaded it into a playback deck. Cassandra stepped out and closed the door, leaving behind the scent of sandalwood oil. Hafez smoked until the edit room felt like a gas chamber and Michael begged him to stop. Michael watched the tape three times at normal speed and three more in slow motion. He pushed the eject button and clutched the tape in his hand.
