Stalin's Hammer: Cairo: A novel of the Axis of Time

by John Birmingham

  The world wasn’t making the same mistakes all over again. It was making a whole new bunch, all of its own.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The city was smaller than she remembered. Maybe a quarter of the size of Cairo the last time she’d visited in 2018 or 2019. Julia was annoyed that she couldn’t remember right off the top of her head. There was no mistaking the wider geography of the Nile Delta, however. The biscuit-colored sands of the North African continent, shot through with tributaries of the Nile that branched and branched again, bright opalescent green sinews pouring into the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean.

  The seatbelt signs were already on as the cabin crew made their final checks before landing. The 707-AT banked to line up on the third runway at the giant American-built airport northeast of the approximate site of Cairo International Stadium in Nasr city. Or what would have been the stadium sometime after 1960.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Harry, blinking away the last of the sleep from his eyes. And he was right, it was. None of the vast, chaotic sprawl of greater Cairo existed here. The old colonial quarter, with its wide boulevards, white stone palaces and generous public gardens, all modeled on Baron Haussmann’s reimagined Paris, was girdled by the government’s administrative districts, some of them holdovers from the British colonial period, some of them a newer, denser and more functional gridwork of Stalinist architecture. But being Stalinist it was, of course, drab on a monumental scale. Julia leaned across Harry to see what she could recognize. The core of old Cairo, the medieval city, was largely unchanged from the memories of her last trip there uptime. The rooflines of blocky low-rise buildings, the color of toffee, poked above a thick mat of palm and date trees that gradually thinned out to the west where the orderly quiltwork of 19th-century French and British architecture took over.

  “That’s our digs down there,” Harry said, pointing to a long, knife-shaped island that reminded her of Manhattan.

  “Zamalek,” she said, pleased with herself for remembering the detail. “I went to a reception at the golf course down there, on the middle of the island last time I was in town, you know, seventy, eighty years from now.”

  He smiled at her.

  “The Gezira Club,” he said, before frowning. “Although I don’t know whether it exists in that form now. At any rate, we’re not staying there. We’ve got digs on the riverfront at the north end of the island. It’s a bit of a white man’s ghetto, I’m afraid, but it’s still very handy to work for me. And for you, if you’re going to write anything about this conference.”

  She nodded, shading her eyes against the morning sun as it poured in through the cabin window.

  “I’ll file something, to justify my bar tab. There will be a bar, won’t there? It’s not going to be like uptime Cairo after the Brotherhood locked everything down?”

  Harry scoffed at the very idea.

  “The Muslim Brotherhood is a proscribed organization here. King Farouk has a long list of many, many proscribed organizations. But liquor retailers aren’t on it. We won’t go thirsty.”

  Julia linked her arm through his and gave his hand a squeeze.

  “Be cool if that was the least of my worries,” she said. “I’m hoping we do better here than we did in Rome. Wasn’t much of a catch-up, was it?”

  “No,” Harry admitted. “It wasn’t. I’m sorry about that. The embassy blindsided me, and then everything turned to custard at the reception. I’m sorry, you sort of got lost in the shuffle.”

  The engine whine grew louder as they descended. Her ears popped just after she heard the undercarriage deploy.

  “I know you can’t talk about what you’re doing here,” she said, pitching her voice low enough so that they could not be heard by the other two passengers in first class. Not that they would be remotely interested in Harry and Julia. The sheikh and his young mistress were entirely self-involved. “But if the business looks like it’s going to turn bad, like it did in Rome, please don’t shut me out. They obviously decided it was safe for you to bring me. Maybe not safe for me. But safe for them. Don’t go dark on me, Harry. If shit is about to go down, let me know. I’m not entirely useless.”

  He took a moment regarding her, while he seemed to digest what she had said. As they dropped towards the tarmac he leaned over and kept his voice low.

  “None of this is ideal, Duff,” he said. “I can honestly say that this time yesterday I didn’t expect to be flying into Cairo today. I have business here, but I’m hoping it’s going to be simple. There should be plenty of time for us to chill. In fact, that’s all we’re doing for the first day or so. Until I get a brief sent through from my office. The new office,” he added. She let him go on, as they touched down with a squeal of tires and a heavy bump which shook the cabin.

  “I do have some new work on. Quite different from what I’ve been doing the last couple of years. We will need to sit down and talk through a few aspects of it, and I wish we had time to do that before this job came up. But we didn’t. And it’s in the nature of the work, I’m sure you’ll understand, that I can’t go blabbing about it right now.”

  He cast a glance over at their fellow passengers.

  “It’s a lot of contract stuff, commercial in confidence, that sort of thing,” he said looking into her eyes with an expression that told her it was nothing of the sort.

  “I understand,” she said. “I used to be an embed, remember.”

  He grinned at her. “I do,” he said. “And as soon as we’re settled into a hotel, and freshened up, we’re going to get you deeply fucking embedded again.”

  ###

  True to his word, Harry hardly left Julia’s side over the next day and a half. His instructions were simply to wait for contact. Not from the professor but from someone Section 6 had put into the city to do the initial legwork for him. He was fine with that. Their hotel, The Marlowe, was one of the Davidson chain’s new boutique offerings, a self-contained, six-star resort with a maximum occupancy of only twenty-four. Named after famous writers‌—‌although Julia insisted Jim Davidson probably thought Marlowe was named after Chandler’s detective‌—‌the hotels packed in as much uptime luxury and amenity as the wealthy guests could afford.

  Harry smirked at the heart attack some bean counter at MI6 would have when the expenses chit for this teddy-bears’ picnic hit his inbox. Once upon a time his thoughts would have immediately moved on to what would happen if the same expenses claim found its way to one of the tabloids, but that was less of an issue here. In fact, not much of an issue at all. The government still handed out D Notices like Smarties, shutting down any press coverage of national security issues that it didn’t much fancy having to explain away before the coverage got started.

  He stretched out on a banana lounge by the kidney-shaped pool, popped a pitted date into his mouth and washed it down with a mineral water. A nice, crisp ale or a glass of champagne would’ve been more to his taste, but he was a little more wary after Rome. You never knew when you were going to be facing off against some dreadful Smedlov intent on doing you a nasty turn. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the dappling effect of the palm fronds wafting above him in a gentle breeze, protecting him from the fierce Egyptian sun.

  Duffy had popped out for a spot of shopping along Abou Al Fada, which boasted a tidy collection of French and Italian fashion houses calculated to keep her distracted until she returned to the hotel for a nooner. After that they might step out for a late lunch at one of the restaurants a few blocks up at the tip of the island. Harry was contemplating an invite from the palace to drinks with Farouk’s court that evening. It had arrived without notice, and was probably avoidable, although at some point he would have to do the right thing and pop in on the Egyptian monarch. Although he no longer had a claim on the British throne, he had found that made little difference to the local potentates across the Middle East, or back on the Continent. He supposed that great swathes of Eurotrash royalty enjoyed only the most mar
ginal claims to peerage themselves, so it was natural they would want to embrace him. And of course he was a favorite of his grandmother’s. Everybody knew that.

  He was just contemplating a couple of laps in the pool to lower his body temperature, when the waiter appeared in front of him, blocking the sun, and holding out a small silver platter with a neatly folded note weighed down by an antique fountain pen. An affectation of the Marlowe. Harry thanked the man and unfolded the note. He recognized the long, looping penmanship right away.

  Viv.

  “Got time for a cold one with an old army mate, governor?”

  Viv, he knew, was not Section 6, but if he was here in Cairo, and he had come looking for Harry, he was almost certainly working on their quid. He finished the rest of his iced mineral water, meaning to clear his head, but drinking it so quickly he felt a small spike of pain behind his eyeballs. Feet into a pair of slippers to protect them from the blistering heat of the terracotta tiles around the pool. T-shirt slipped on over a torso which had thickened up the last ten years or so, mostly with slabs of heavy, middle-aged muscle. Sunglasses on. Room key.

  He found his old regimental sergeant-major waiting in the foyer. The giant Jamaican was dressed in khaki drill pants and a white linen shirt. His teeth gleamed as he smiled at his old friend.

  “Fallen on your feet again, I see, you lucky bastard,” Viv said. “I suppose somebody else is footing the bill for this place, then?”

  “It’s nowhere near as big as the bill you’ll be sending them, you cheeky fucker.”

  The men shook hands, a firm grip, with Harry punching St. Clair lightly on the upper arm. “So you want that drink?”

  “Something cold,” Viv confirmed. “Doesn’t have to be nothing hard, guv.”

  “Come up to the room, then,” said Harry. “I’ll have them send up some ice for a couple of Cokes. It’s made from New Zealand spring water. Imported. Completely safe. And I’m trying to stay off the piss myself for now.”

  He asked the concierge at the front desk to send a runner out to find Ms Duffy with a note telling her that an old army friend had dropped by the hotel and they were going to get caught up. Julia and Harry were both carrying phones, but the cellnet in Cairo was all but nonexistent, and the city was so filthy with foreign and local intelligence it was best not to even bother powering the things up. The Marlowe would send boys out to find her instead. They would run up and down the Riverfront Boulevard, checking in every store and café until one found her and passed on Harry’s message.

  All of the suites looked over the pool deck, but Harry’s occupied two floors and had sweeping northern views across the manicured gardens of the colonial quarter by the river. There were two bedrooms and they had used the second as a storeroom for their luggage, and Julia’s growing pile of purchases. The lounge area and open-plan kitchen were both spacious and decorated with an eye to the hotel’s literary theme. Framed covers of first editions and hand-edited manuscript pages by Fitzgerald, Wodehouse, Forster and, adding some credence to Julia’s claim, Raymond Chandler.

  “Nice digs, guvnor,” said Viv as he hauled out various pieces of kit from the voluminous pockets of his cargo pants. Extending one finger and putting it to his lips, he swept the space for surveillance devices. Harry casually excused himself to have a shower and get changed, which gave St. Clair a couple of minutes to complete his check. Harry could have told him that both he and Julia had run their own scanner over the place but he knew his former sergeant major would not be satisfied with that. If you want something done properly, don’t expect an officer to do it.

  “Clean,” he announced as Harry reappeared.

  “Scrubbed till me belly button shined,” Harry shot right back. “That’s a good-looking kit, mate,” he added, indicating the scanning unit and small handheld screen St. Clair was tucking back in his pockets. “Twenty-first?”

  “The screen’s my old Samsung,” Viv confirmed. “But the magic wand was made here. Augmented tech by Grundig. Not fucking bad, Harry. Not bad at all. They even swapped out the battery on my Nexus flexipad last year. It’s an OLED screen, and when that goes I’ll be buggered, but there’s some pretty good AT getting around now, especially if you got the quids for it. Anyway, you’re clean. We can chat, unless there’s someone hiding in the closet.”

  They each pulled up a chair at the dining room table, after Viv declined Harry’s offer of a real drink.

  “So what’s happening?” Harry asked.

  “This fucking Nazi rocket scientist is what,” said Viv. “Six sent me down here with a few of my lads to give him a good sniffing over before we pointed you in his direction.”

  Harry frowned.

  “C’s using freelancers now? I’ve heard of him using cut-outs, obviously. But I thought the privatization of national security was strictly an uptime thing.”

  His old comrade, turned security contractor, shrugged.

  “I’ve had a few jobs that I was certain came out of Universal Exports,” he joked. “Not that they ever admitted it. Cut-outs, again. But that Plunkett geezer we kicked on with in Rome, he came to see me a few days later, back in London. Didn’t bullshit me or nothing. Put it all on the table. Said they been watching my operation for a while, keeping an eye on it, making sure I was behaving myself.” He grinned. “Anyway, he just straight up told me, guv, they are hard fucking pressed keeping up with the Smedlovs. After Rome, well, I’m assuming it was all after Rome, word came down from on high: get help where you can find it. All of a sudden, I have to rejig my invoicing software to meet government billing guides.”

  Harry decided he wanted a cool drink and fetched a couple of soft drinks from the chiller bucket of the double door refrigerator in the kitchen.

  “Can’t be as lucrative as your private work,” he said.

  “Nowhere near it,” said St. Clair. “But that Plunkett bloke, he was a champion at making me feel like a bit of a greedy wanker for grabbing my pile without any concern for the common good.”

  “Viv,” Harry said kindly, “you did your bit for the common good, back up where we came from. You run an honest shop. You don’t have to take any bullshit from these blokes.”

  “Fucking forget about it, man. I’m cool. And he told me you’re on board. Said you’d need the best backup they could offer, and on short notice, he said, that’s me. Cheeky fucker, I told him. I am the best fucking backup you could ever get, ever. Fucking short notice. Talk about taking the piss.”

  Harry ran the back of one finger up the side of his glass, wiping away some of the beaded condensation.

  “So you’re my contact. Better brief me, then.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  St. Clair bumped a large encrypted file from his flexipad across to Harry’s phone. A step up from near field communication, the physical tap negated any chance of sniffer technology pulling the data packets out of the air. Harry opened a moist travel wipe to clean up the screen before laying his thumb on the center for a DNA read. They repeated the procedure for St. Clair and the files unfolded themselves on the OLED screen.

  An older-looking Professor Ernst Bremmer stared a little past him, gazing slightly over Harry’s shoulder, as though he had been photographed mid-thought. His eyes were red-rimmed, and darkly pouched. All of the lines on his face were drawn too long and too deeply.

  “Not a happy chappy,” Harry said.

  “No. One of my lads snapped that yesterday. Well, one of the girls actually. This bloke is under a lot of pressure. He’s hitting the bar pretty hard every night. I’ve had three teams on him since we got the green light from Six. He hasn’t met with anybody he shouldn’t have, except for other depressive drunks at the conference hotel. Hasn’t done anything you wouldn’t expect from a tourist. Seems very tense around the wife, and a little distant with the kids, but she’s probably giving him grief about nudging the drink so hard. And you know what it’s like traveling with children. Well, maybe you don’t. But a nice quiet bar can lo
ok pretty fucking attractive at the end of the day. Anyways, we spent a lot of time, and Six will spend a lot of money when they get my invoice, trailing this bloke around on a drinking holiday.”

  Harry flipped through the file. Surveillance photographs, movement tracking, a surprisingly comprehensive list of everyone Bremmer had been in contact with since landing in Cairo‌—‌conference people mostly; and a couple of journalists, Brits and Americans‌—‌and finally a full profile, or as full as Viv could manage. Harry would read that later, and see how it differed, if at all, to the bio that C had given him.

  “Did Six let you poke around in the bottom drawer to put this together?”

  St. Clair laughed, a rich explosive baritone.

  “Access? No, more like they coughed up the edited highlights with a lot of bad grace and dire warnings about protecting sources and methods. Fucking spooks, mate. You know what those tossers are like. Oh, sorry, wait. You are one now.”

  Harry shrugged. “Just curious,” he said. “This whole gig’s got a whiff of panic and madness about it, pulling us in the way they did, after Rome. Makes you wonder who else they’ve tapped on the shoulder.”

  The giant Jamaican stood up and walked over to the French doors, which opened on to a deep, shaded terrace with a view of the pool deck and garden. “There’s a few blokes set themselves up like I did after the war,” he said. “Private security wasn’t much of an industry here when we arrived. So there’s a couple of companies got big, quickly, especially if they had temps on their board to sweeten things with the locals. Just like back up home, guv. The same cost structures, the same efficiencies and savings. But nothing like the scale in twenty-one. There’s no Blackwater or Halliburton here, just a lot of boutique outfits like mine taking specialist work on a contract basis.”

  He turned back to Harry.

  “But I haven’t seen any of them here. You’re always bumping into lads from the old crew and some of the noobs on the Wall and up and down the frontier. The oil and mining companies are the big tippers in this part of the world, of course, or Asia. And the banks and multinats in Free Europe, they’re always after minders for their people. There’s a few of us in that game. I haven’t done much work for the government boys. They don’t pay as well. But the fuckin’ OSS are throwing the readies around like a squaddie with his drink on. Maybe that’s why we’re here. Maybe C is playing catch-up.”