He asked the same questions as her CIA visitors, but she found herself elaborating a bit more, perhaps from practice. This time, she didn’t dwell on her infidelity. He said, “Do you mind if I show you a few photographs?”
Behind her, Gerry Davis cleared his throat. Kiraly looked up, but Sophie couldn’t see what Gerry Davis was trying to communicate to him. Whatever it was, the Hungarian didn’t seem interested in playing ball. “It’s up to Mrs. Kohl,” he said.
She said, “Please. Show me your photographs.”
Gerry Davis pulled out the chair beside her and sat close. Despite how scrubbed he looked, he smelled of sweat. “There may be security issues here, Sophie. That’s my only concern.” To Kiraly, he said, “May I see the pictures first?”
A laconic shrug, and the Hungarian reached into his jacket and took out some passport-sized snapshots that he passed on to Gerry Davis, who held them up like a hand of tiny cards to examine. There were four in all, she saw, and on one he paused. He took it out and placed it facedown on the table. He pushed it over to Kiraly. “The rest are fine, just not that one.”
Kiraly lifted the photo, glanced at it, and slipped it into his pocket. “Please,” he said. “Let Mrs. Kohl see the others.”
Reluctantly, Gerry Davis gave her the three remaining photos, and she saw two men in their late thirties or early forties and a much older man, nearly sixty. She didn’t recognize any of the faces, but what struck her was the color of their skin. “I don’t understand,” she said aloud.
“Yes?” asked Kiraly.
“These men—they’re not Hungarian, are they? I mean, unless they’re Roma.”
He shook his head. “No, they are not.”
“Where are they from?”
“Do you recognize them?”
She gave them another look. Not only different ages, but different forms of dark-skinned masculinity. Middle Eastern or North African. The overweight one who looked addicted to smiles. The thick-necked thug—a darker model of the one who killed Emmett. The older one in glasses, maybe their leader, or maybe just nearsighted. “No,” she said. “I’ve never seen them before. What about the other?”
“They’re from different places,” Kiraly said, ignoring her question by answering her previous one. “Turkey, Egypt, Bosnia.”
“And what do they have to do with Emmett?”
Kiraly pursed his lips, then reached out to accept the photographs. “Nothing, perhaps. But we sometimes follow many different cases, and if incidents occur around the same time, then it’s a good idea to see if they are connected.”
“These aren’t?”
More of the lips, then he shrugged.
“I think Mrs. Kohl has answered enough. She’s tired.”
“I’m not tired,” she said, tired only of Gerry Davis’s shepherding. “And I’d like to know who you’re hiding in your jacket pocket.”
Kiraly looked as if he might bow to her demand, but instead he deferred to Gerry Davis, who just gave back a cool stare. Sophie turned on him.
“Why not, Gerry?”
He inhaled, finally giving her his full attention. “National security, Sophie. And if those other men aren’t connected to Emmett, then this one won’t be, either.”
“But I’d like to see the picture.”
Kiraly said in a tired voice, “Gerry, it’s just a face.”
Gerry Davis turned to the Hungarian, maybe angry, and after a full four seconds dredged up a smile. “Well, okay. If it’ll make you feel better. Go ahead, Andras.”
Kiraly reached into his jacket and handed over the final photograph. It wasn’t, despite what she was beginning to suspect, the gunman, nor was it Zora Balašević. Instead, it was another swarthy man in his thirties, a shadow of a smile on his face. Clean cheeks, dark eyes. He seemed different from the others, though she couldn’t place how. Healthier, maybe. Less a victim of a hard life.
She looked up at Kiraly. “Egyptian?”
He shook his head and began to speak, but Gerry Davis cut him off: “You don’t recognize him?”
She didn’t, and she admitted as much.
Like the CIA men, Kiraly gave her his business card and asked her to call if anything occurred to her. Perhaps sensing that Sophie was angry with him, Gerry Davis left with Kiraly, promising to remain in touch.
Then it was a home of women. Glenda had recovered and was in the kitchen cooking something with an entire chicken and a bottle of wine in a large pot. Fiona was flitting between CNN and her cell phone. She smiled when Sophie came in, then patted the sofa cushion next to her. “How you doin’?” she asked as Sophie sat.
“What’s the deal with Gerry Davis?”
“Gerry?” Fiona considered the question. “He’s very good at his job.”
“What’s his job?”
“Some kind of liaison. Quite fluent in Hungarian.”
“Is he a spook, too?”
A high-pitched laugh. “Gerry? He’s more of an errand boy.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged. “It’s how he was described to me.”
Together, they watched footage from Libya, young rebels in need of razors looking sweaty but optimistic on the desert roads, carrying rifles they sometimes waved over their heads. She could imagine the men from Kiraly’s photographs in these newsreels.
Smelling something burning, Sophie went to check on Glenda, who shooed her from the kitchen and told her to take a rest, but then opened a bottle of Emmett’s Chilean red and insisted she take a glass. Sophie lingered, and as they drank Glenda asked about Kiraly, whom she had seen leaving. “He didn’t look like a cop to me.”
“He isn’t. He’s a spy.”
She grinned. “Well. Isn’t that something?”
Sophie took her wine upstairs and sat on the bed but didn’t lie down. She was unsure what to do with herself. The food was being taken care of, and Fiona had spent much of her time tidying up the place. She remembered that there was a load of shirts in the dryer, but it seemed ridiculous to deal with that.
Yet as the minutes of her doing nothing ebbed past, she began to feel the pressure in her intestines, the discomfort, the hole.
She took the business cards out of the pocket of her slacks and looked at them. It was as if she’d been to one of Emmett’s parties, where each handshake came with one of these, everyone ready to hand out their personal details to anyone who might do their career some good. But she couldn’t do any of these people any good, not really. Not if she wanted to remain a free woman.
Is that what I am now?
The truth was that, even taking her own crimes into account, she knew nothing about what had happened to Emmett; she knew less than nothing. And if she had shared everything with the people behind these business cards, would it really have accomplished anything?
Like Gerry Davis, she was suddenly able to see the future. Rather, she saw multiple futures, and they all began with a simple decision—whether or not she would choose ignorance. All she had to do was stop asking why Emmett’s life had ended like that. Of course, she wanted to know, but how strongly did she want to know? Did she want to know so badly that she would be willing to give up everything else? Or was it better to keep her eyes closed, to let it go and return to Boston with her husband’s corpse? Let the machine of law enforcement take over. After the funeral she could change her life, maybe even for the better. Go back to school—teaching wasn’t out of the question. They had a sizable savings account, and there was another, very private account in Zurich, which she had never touched. There wasn’t much she couldn’t do. Or—and this thought came quickly—she could eventually return to Cairo and try to rekindle that joy she once felt. Not with Stan—no—but with the city itself.
Was that even possible now?
The cheapest of the business cards, laser-printed on low-quality stock, was Andras Kiraly’s. King. She wiped her eyes dry and picked up the bedroom extension and dialed. He answered after two rings like Stan—“Kiraly Andras”—re
versed because Hungarians begin with their surnames.
“Mr. Kiraly, it’s Sophie Kohl.”
“Mrs. Kohl. Hello. How may I help you?”
How could he help her? It was an excellent question. But of all her visitors, she thought that he was probably her favorite. “I got the feeling,” she began, then, “I sensed during our talk that you wanted to tell me something more, and so I’m calling.”
She waited for him to speak. She didn’t know exactly how he had felt about Gerry Davis’s meddling, but she couldn’t imagine that he had liked it. Finally, he said, “Perhaps you would be interested in asking a precise question, so that I may better help you.”
There was a difference, in his mind at least, between answering questions and offering unsolicited information. So she gave it a try. “That last photograph, the one Mr. Davis didn’t want me to see. Who is he?”
By his longer pause, she guessed—and this filled her with a tingle of pleasure, her first of the day—that she’d asked something crucial. Then the silence went on, and she wondered if he’d walked away from the phone.
“Mr. Kiraly?”
“I’m here.”
“Maybe you can just tell me what his nationality is.”
“He’s American, Mrs. Kohl. I’m just looking through my papers for his information.”
American?
“Here it is. Jibril Aziz. Would you like me to spell it?”
“Please,” she said. American?
He spelled it, and she wrote in clear block capitals on the Post-it pad Emmett had always kept beside the phone.
“What does he have to do with my husband?”
“That’s unclear. Mr. Aziz was in Budapest last week, and he met twice with your husband. He came in without any diplomatic visa, or any official standing. But we were curious.”
“Why?”
“He’s an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“He’s…” There was no point repeating it. Later, she would think that this was not so strange—as deputy consul Emmett met with CIA now and then; Sophie herself had gone to bed with CIA—but at that moment it floored her. “How about the other men?”
He sighed loudly into the phone. “I could tell you their names, but none of those names are real. Their nationalities are also suspect. In fact, we know nothing about them, only that they came to Budapest around the same time as Mr. Aziz and, early last week, met with him in a bar. Your husband was not in attendance. We do not know what they talked about, or why.”
“But you have suspicions.”
An amused grunt. “Mrs. Kohl, when a group of Arab-looking men, most with false passports, meet in secret, I think you know what we suspect. But we’ve found nothing to connect them to terroristic activities.”
“Does the embassy know about this?”
“I don’t know,” he said, which Sophie took to mean that he hadn’t been sharing his information with the American embassy. He was telling her, though.
She tried to take all this in, not even sure what she was ingesting. These were not the answers she’d been looking for. In fact, they didn’t look like answers at all. She had a name, though, and that was more than she’d had before. She said, “Where is he now? Where is Jibril Aziz?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Kohl. The last we heard was that he flew to Cairo from here, but that was nearly a week ago. He could be anywhere.”
Cairo. “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?”
“I was hoping you might have something to share,” he said, quite reasonably.
But he didn’t know who he was dealing with. “I wish I did,” she said. “Emmett was very quiet about his work.”
“If you do think of something…”
“Of course, Mr. Kiraly. I won’t hesitate to call you. I appreciate what you’ve already done.”
“I’ve done nothing, Mrs. Kohl.”
“But you—”
“I have done nothing for you. You understand?”
The slow-witted widow suddenly understood. “I’m sorry you couldn’t help me.”
“As am I, Mrs. Kohl. Have a pleasant evening.”
6
It turned out that Fiona Vale had no plans to leave her alone, and when, at six, Ray showed up to give more condolences, Fiona served the meal Glenda had spent the day cooking: coq au vin with herbed rice and grilled zucchini. Sophie had never imagined that Glenda knew her way around a kitchen, but it turned out that she was an excellent cook.
What Sophie wanted was to ask Ray about Jibril Aziz and his connection to Emmett. Presumably, Emmett had been meeting Aziz on consul business. Yet all through dinner she couldn’t think of a way to ask without betraying Andras Kiraly, who had stuck his neck out for her.
What to do with this information? She tried sidewinding queries. “Ray, was Emmett meeting with anyone out of the ordinary recently?” No, Sophie. Why do you ask? “Ray, did Emmett share any personal worries with you, like—I don’t know—about debts he might not have mentioned to me?” Emmett was the most fiscally sound man I’ve ever known. “To tell the truth,” she lied, “I thought that maybe he had gotten tangled up in something. I don’t know—something illicit?” A surprised look, then a slow shake of the head. Forget it, Sophie. Emmett was clean, absolutely upstanding. And unlike a lot of the guys we work with, he never even looked at another woman. That one hurt.
Finally, she excused herself and ran upstairs to find the slip of paper where she’d written Jibril Aziz’s name in capitals. It wasn’t the way she usually wrote, for she had wanted it to be perfectly legible. She took the paper downstairs and, as Glenda and Fiona watched in silence, handed it to Ray. He took it, read it, and looked up at her blankly. She said, “I found this in Emmett’s things. In one of his jackets,” the lie becoming more specific as the words came out. “The gray one. Why does Emmett have an Arab’s name in his jacket?”
“Gosh, Sophie. I don’t know.” He actually said gosh. “But it could be anything, couldn’t it? Maybe he’s a friend.”
She wanted to say, He’s an American spy, you condescending shit, but said, “Do you know the name?”
When he shook his head, she realized that she didn’t really know Raymond Bennett. She knew Glenda’s perception of him—sturdy but weak-willed, an easy man to cheat on—but she didn’t know him. It was easy to forget that he was a consul, an important man. It was easy to forget what that job might entail. It was easy to underestimate him. Then she wondered if he was someone she should fear. She’d been frightened by very few people in her life; since Yugoslavia, most people hadn’t measured up. Maybe this was someone who could measure up.
It wasn’t until after dinner, once she had convinced Glenda to go home with her husband and Fiona had finally headed off to sleep, that she had a chance to be alone with the threads weaving through her head.
What did she have?
She had men who looked like terrorists but might not be. One of them was a CIA agent who met with Emmett, twice.
She had Emmett, who had been too strong and too good to be blackmailed by Zora Balašević. She’d had no idea he could be such a hero. She certainly was not.
She had American spies who smiled diplomats’ smiles and a kind-faced Hungarian spy who knew she had information and hoped that she would eventually share it.
What she had—all she really had—was a name, Jibril Aziz, and like the rest of the world she went to Google to assist her investigations. She would have used Emmett’s laptop, but it was no longer by the bed; she had no idea where it was. She turned on her iPad and began typing on its smooth screen.
There were many Jibril Azizes, she learned. They were on Facebook, on dating and gaming sites, and they had their own LinkedIn pages. But none of these looked right. They were young men, comfortable with sharing their lives online. No, Emmett’s Jibril Aziz would have been elsewhere—or, more likely, nowhere.
Almost nowhere.
For when she added “CIA” to the search, on the third page of res
ults she came across something that made her throat choke up. A Dutch hacker had set up an automated blog to index and tag all the material contained in WikiLeaks, the infamous organization that had, over the previous year or so, leaked hundreds of thousands of classified cables and e-mails to the world at large. In the automated list, Jibril Aziz appeared on one entry among a thousand others:
AMEMBASSY CAIRO to SECSTATE WASHDC: FALSE PREDICTIONS RE: STUMBLER. (link) TAGS: AE/STUMBLER, Africa, ALF, American, Arab, China, CNPC, Frank Ingersoll, Geneva, IFG, Jabal al Akhdar, Jibril Aziz, Libya, London, Muammar Gadhafi, Muslim, Paris, Revolutionary Guard, Rome, Washington, WRAL
She followed the link and was rerouted to WikiLeaks.org, where she found herself in a section called “Cablegate: 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables,” faced with a communiqué from December 2009, more than a year ago. It was the first of three cables dealing with something called Stumbler, but a search proved that the other two cables were not available.
She read it once, then sent it to the wireless laser printer in the closet and read it again. December 2009: She and Emmett had been in Cairo when the embassy worked on Stumbler—an operation, it seemed, that had originated with one Jibril Aziz. Which meant, she supposed, that Emmett had been working on it as well.
She took the printout to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of rosé from a half-sized Napa Valley bottle. As she was reading it a third time a voice said, “What’s that?”
She nearly dropped her glass.
Fiona grinned. “Sorry. Just saw the light.”
Instinctively, she folded the paper and slipped it into the pocket of her robe. “Old stuff. Memories.”
Fiona nodded mournfully. “I can’t imagine.”
“Maybe not,” Sophie said, “but thanks.” Then, “By the way, have you seen Emmett’s computer? It was in the bedroom.”
“I meant to tell you. Mr. Strauss took it. For the investigation. I’ve got a receipt around here somewhere.”
“I see,” she said, but she wasn’t thinking of the laptop. She was thinking of tomorrow, for while reading the secret cable it had dawned on her that she wasn’t going with Emmett back to Boston. She wasn’t going to sit around dealing with Glenda. She wasn’t going to do anything that she’d done before in her life. Emmett had been too good and too strong, and so she would try to at least be something better than what she had been.
The Cairo Affair Page 5
