The Cairo Affair

by Olen Steinhauer

  4

  In the office, he barely held on, waiting for seven o’clock. Questions plagued him. Was Sophie running from the mess her life had become, or was she running toward him? He wasn’t sure how he felt about either of these possibilities. Should he tell Harry about her imminent arrival? She wanted to come in quietly, and the fact was that Stan wanted this, too. Harry would eventually learn she was in town, but first he wanted her all to himself. And finally, who told Emmett about the two of them? As he watched faces pass by the window of his office, their features tightened by the tension in the building, he speculated one by one on who might want to stab him in the back.

  Enough.

  He straightened himself and logged into one of five anonymous e-mail accounts he used for signaling contacts, then cut-and-pasted a short note in Arabic to Ali Busiri. It was a bit of spam, boasting investment opportunities in Southeast Asia, but the content wasn’t important. All Busiri needed to see was the from-address, and he would know that Stan Bertolli from the U.S. embassy wanted to have a chat with him as soon as possible. If RAINMAN, their source in his office, wasn’t returning their calls, then he would go straight to the boss.

  He looked up to see the whole floor walking past his door, in the direction of Harry’s office. Jennifer Cary waved for him to follow.

  Cramped tight in that room, they listened to the dismal news of potential leads that had led nowhere. Terry Alderman’s people had uncovered odd wires to Emmett’s Bank of America account, but those turned out to be for speaking engagements he’d done the previous year. Dennis Schwarzkopf’s agents were at first excited by the news that one of Emmett’s Egyptian associates, a real estate developer, had begun investing in Budapest a couple of months after Emmett relocated, but more probing revealed that the developer, after a month of fruitless negotiations, had thrown up his hands and abandoned the country entirely. That had been in December, and Emmett had had no connection to the failed dealings. Jennifer Cary’s people, like Stan’s, had nothing to offer the group, and Harry told them to get off their asses and back to work, as if he were speaking to a room full of auto workers. Then he took a breath, sat down, and waved his hands in the air. “Okay, okay. If there’s no connection to us, then there’s no connection. But try, all right? I’m not just asking for personal reasons. If we don’t find a local connection, but next week the Hungarians or the Egyptians do, then you know how that’s going to make us look.”

  The office door opened, and Nancy looked in, aiming a long, painted fingernail. “Stan, line two.”

  Everyone was watching, and he felt damp with sudden perspiration, fearing that it was Sophie. “Can you take a message?”

  “It’s Paul. He says you’ll want to take this.”

  He hurried to his office. Paul’s voice came in clearly despite traffic noises in the background. “Sorry for dropping out on you, but it was a last-minute meet.”

  “You should’ve checked in.”

  “It was RAINMAN.”

  “RAINMAN?” Stan asked, the coincidence making him briefly stupid. “Anything interesting?”

  “I’ll tell you in a few minutes.”

  A quarter hour later, Paul was sitting in his office. A blond Pennsylvanian with a farm childhood and a Princeton education, he looked like he had just gotten out of bed, which was apparently where he had been when RAINMAN called. “He got my message about Kohl.”

  Civil servants come and go, but RAINMAN, or Omar Halawi, had been around for decades and, based on his position in the Central Security Services, just under Ali Busiri, knew a lot about a lot of people. For a while he had been willing to share that knowledge. Sometimes the Agency paid for information with trade concessions for him and his friends. His original contact had been Amir Najafi, John Calhoun’s Global Security predecessor, but he’d been killed in a five-car pileup on the Ring Road around Cairo. So Paul had taken over the role.

  “He tells me one thing, just one thing. But he wants to tell it face-to-face. He tells me that if we want to find Emmett’s murderer, we need to look at ourselves.”

  Stan frowned. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  Paul leaned back, opening his hands. “I asked the same thing, and apparently it does. I asked him why we would want to get rid of one of our own consuls. What do you think he said?”

  “I don’t know, Paul.”

  “To keep him quiet.”

  “About?”

  Paul shrugged. “He wasn’t going to say. But he told me to tell you—he mentioned you by name—that you should watch your back.”

  “Sounds like he’s trying to scare me.”

  Another shrug. “I’m just the messenger.”

  Stan nodded, taking this in.

  “Well? It’s something, no?”

  “It’s certainly that,” Stan said, then shook his head. “Or it’s nothing. He drops contact for a few weeks and suddenly pops up with this? Halawi’s an old pro—he could even be passing on a message from Busiri. I wouldn’t take anything either of them says at face value. Not yet.”

  “Want me to send a reply?”

  “Let me talk to Busiri first, establish some parameters, then we’ll have better questions for Halawi. And keep this under your hat. If we bring in something like this and it fizzles out, Harry’s going to have a coronary.”

  After Paul left, Stan puzzled over the accusation. The Agency had a checkered history, but when it wanted to keep fellow Americans quiet, it smeared their names in the newspapers and slapped them with lawsuits. It seldom had reason to reach for a gun.

  His phone rang. Nancy said, “I’ve got John Calhoun. He wants the boss, but Harry’s out for a cigarette.”

  “Patch him through.” Once the familiar sequence of clicks ended, he said, “John, you back already?”

  He hadn’t seen John in a couple of days—Harry had taken his contractor away for some unknown job. But instead of giving Stan a clue John only muttered, “Yeah.”

  “We’ll see you today?”

  “No.”

  Like many big men, John used silence to his advantage, and that morning he was master of the monosyllable. “So you’re just checking in?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “No,” John said, then paused, preparing himself for more words than he’d planned to use. “But I’ll need to sleep it off. Just tell Harry that it didn’t work.” As an afterthought, he added, “Please.”

  “It…” Stan said, waiting for him to fill in something, anything.

  “I’ll file my report for him Monday. If he wants it sooner, I can come in tomorrow.”

  “I’ll let him know, but he’s a little backed up today. We got some shit news from Budapest.”

  “Budapest?”

  Stan told him about Emmett, and he said, “My condolences,” as if he gave a damn. Stan doubted he did.

  When Harry returned from his cigarette break, Stan knocked on his door and found him immersed in his laptop, which he closed. The room smelled of cigarette ash. “Anything?” he asked by way of greeting.

  “I’ll let you know later,” Stan said. “John called in and said something about it not working. He’s going to sleep but will report on Monday. Unless you want him to come in tomorrow.”

  The sign was unmistakable. Harry’s forehead crinkled, as if it had been slapped. “That’s all he said?”

  Stan nodded. “What does it mean?”

  Harry exhaled through his nose. After a pause, he said, “It means Langley is going to be even more irritated with us than it usually is.”

  Stan waited for more, but Harry was already reopening his laptop. On the way back to his desk, the BlackBerry in his pocket vibrated a message from his friend at Langley, Saul.

  FRA holds footage indef. In practice about 5 yrs. What are you looking for? I’ll make some calls.

  Stan switched to email to thank Saul and send the details: September 4, 2010, Zora Balašević, Lufthansa 585 from Cairo to Frankfurt, and Jat
351 to Belgrade.

  Then his mind was drawn inevitably back to Omar Halawi’s warning. Look at yourselves. He hesitated a full five seconds before clicking SEND.

  5

  He was at the airport a half hour early because he couldn’t think of what to do with himself, and he wandered among the listless crowds and armed security, wondering how his father would have approached the questions before him. Paolo Bertolli would have taken it easy. He had been a doyen of the long-term operation, an agent with immeasurable patience—it was the only way he could have survived for so long within the Red Brigades, while around him young Marxist-Leninist Italians ate themselves up with paranoia. Stan had never had that kind of patience, nor that kind of bravery.

  Sophie Kohl, he believed when he first laid eyes on her trailing the other passengers out of Arrivals, wouldn’t be any help. She looked overused, slumped under the weight of her bulky shoulder bag, which was apparently her only luggage. Even broken, though, she had taken the time to apply the burgundy lipstick he remembered so well. He took the heavy bag from her, gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and thought, Christ you’re beautiful, though he didn’t say it aloud. He noticed how easily she still fit in his arms, and how holding her brought on a carnivorous instinct, the desire to consume her whole. It was a strong desire, and six months hadn’t done a thing to lessen it. Without her, he had been able to convince himself that he was fine being alone, but in her presence the whole illusion was shattered, and he was just as stunned as he had been the previous year.

  Besides the how-are-yous and let-me-help-yous they didn’t speak in the airport, and on the way to the parking lot she only said, “It’s warm here.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  It wasn’t until they were in the car, heading out of the airport and onto the long, well-lit El-Orouba Road into town, that he said, “Tell me about it, Sophie.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You don’t have to do anything. But maybe you’d like to tell me why you’re in Cairo. I thought you’d be heading home.”

  He got silence for his efforts, and when he looked over her face was twisted in an expression he recognized: eyes sad and the left corner of her lips sucked in, held tight between her teeth. It was a look of guilt—she had sometimes worn the same expression after their trysts.

  “You’re here for a reason.”

  Gazing at the passing streetlamps, she said, “It just seemed like the place to be. He—Emmett—was talking about Cairo before. It. Happened.”

  “What about Cairo?”

  “About a woman we knew a long time ago. Serbian. She was in Cairo, too.”

  Stan had to concentrate on his hands to make sure he didn’t jerk the car off the road. Who else could she have been talking about? “Does she have a name?”

  “Zora Balašević.”

  He breathed through his nose, waiting, but she said nothing. “How did you know her?”

  “Honeymoon. Back in ’91. We went to Novi Sad. I didn’t tell you?”

  “Only that you’d been there.”

  “The war was getting started,” she said, but didn’t continue.

  “So he was talking about an old friend of yours.”

  “Sort of. But we hadn’t seen her in twenty years, then she popped up in Cairo. They had lunch.”

  “Why did he tell you about lunch with this Serb woman?” he asked. Maybe he’d been wrong—maybe she did hold answers.

  “It was a story. It was on his mind.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He talks about her just beforehand,” he said, sharing her unwillingness to say “murder” aloud, “and now you’re here. Do you think there’s some connection?”

  “Maybe.” He couldn’t see her face; he was focused on a weaving truck up ahead. “Maybe I can find her and see if she knows something. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m just so tired, Stan. Can I sleep at your place?”

  “I wouldn’t let you sleep anywhere else.”

  Hiding what he’d known about Balašević hadn’t been his plan. In fact, he’d had no plan before collecting her from the airport. But she’d come out with the name so quickly that he didn’t have a chance to reflect; the concealment began on its own. Then he was trapped in a deception that he would have to carry on all night, at least. How easily these things could happen. At moments like this, he was in awe of his father.

  Tomorrow, he thought as he focused on his driving, he could pretend to discover the name. But for that night deception would define their relationship. He hadn’t wanted that.

  Perhaps because of this, there was a definite awkwardness between them when they got to Stan’s apartment. He made dinner—frozen tilapia filets and garlic simmered in olive oil—and they drank an Australian Riesling, but even with the alcohol in them the overwhelming feeling that they were strangers stuck in the same room never quite left. Yet she was here, actually here, and he remembered the feel of her skin, its texture and pliability and scent. It was all he could do to resist hauling her to the bedroom.

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  After dinner, they moved out to the terrace, and he brought out some throw blankets to fight the mild chill. His apartment was just high enough that, when you stood, you could see over rooftops and straight across the Nile to the concrete cacophony of Giza and, beyond, the pyramids Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, lit up for the evening’s Sound and Light Show. He paid a lot for that partial view, but Sophie only gave the monumental structures a glance before settling down on one of his wooden chairs and losing sight of them entirely. She talked a while, telling him about the idiosyncrasies of her life in Budapest, her “quite crazy” friend Glenda, and how much she missed Cairo (Cairo, she said, not him). Then she asked, “What do you know about Jibril Aziz?”

  He repeated the name back to her, and she nodded. “Nothing,” he said. “Who is he?”

  “He’s American. I think he’s CIA.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because the Hungarians know that he is.”

  Stan had no idea who Jibril Aziz was. “I’ll look into it,” he said.

  “I’d appreciate that. And now that I’m here, I want to talk to Harry.”

  This gave him pause. He thought of how it would look, Sophie staying in his place just after her husband had been killed. Would Harry connect that to Stan’s attempts to throw Emmett to the wolves at Langley? Of course he would. Harry was as suspicious as anyone in the department. “Wait,” he told her. “I can get more out of him than you can.”

  She frowned, not liking this, so he explained himself:

  “You’re going to come in, and he’s going to handle you. He’ll sweet-talk you and give you the illusion that he’s sharing everything—but you’re not cleared for things, and it doesn’t help that you’re a grieving widow. He won’t really tell you a thing. You can talk to him, of course, but wait. Let me get in there first.”

  “You’ll ask about Jibril Aziz?”

  “I will. Just tell me how he connects to Emmett.”

  She sighed, a touch of irritation, as if the connection were obvious, and he noticed the mellow glow of sweat on her upper lip. She said, “He was in Budapest; he met with Emmett. Twice. He also met with some people the Hungarians think might be terrorists.”

  Stan rubbed his face, wondering how to connect this to Zora Balašević. He had no idea. Maybe to avoid the increasing confusion, his thoughts began to grow carnal again. He could feel it in his legs, different from the weighty feeling of his father coming to him, for this tingling rose higher. The same desire he’d felt in the airport, to crawl across the terrace and pull her down off her chair, wrap himself around her, lick the sweat off of her lip, and slowly, meticulously, devour her. He pressed his eyes with his fingertips and tried to focus.

  “I’ll do everything I can. You know that. But it sounds to me like this is all connecting to Budapest, not Cairo.�
�

  She smiled suddenly, and it was then that he realized she hadn’t really smiled, not a real smile, since she arrived. Her eyes were wet. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  He apparently didn’t.

  She leaned forward and took the hand he had left on his knee, squeezing. “I know you’ll help me, Stan. That’s why I’m here. You’re why I’m here.”

  Just like that, he was in love all over again.

  Then the moment was gone, and she was looking out, as if through the villa across the street she could see the pyramids. She stood slowly to her full height and squinted at the distant glow. She exhaled. “They’re so damned beautiful, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” he said, but he had no need to stand. Now that she was here, he felt little need for anything.

  John

  1

  WELCOME TO THE NEW LIBYA, read the spray-painted greeting, for the border guards had fled the night before. Creeping in his direction along the desert road, loaded-down cars and handcarts and burdened refugees on foot made their painful way toward Egypt. John wondered how they could stand so many miles under this sun, fingers burned yet chapped by the desert winds, straining under the weight of woven luggage and plastic bags, duct-taped boxes and suitcases, hauling clothes, food, and babies. The Mediterranean wasn’t far away but the landscape gave no sign of this. Each time he heard an infant scream his heart jumped into his throat.

  How did they keep moving? It was instinct, he supposed. They were just motivated by the human urge to run from danger, and that was explanation enough.

  Danisha had once told him that the instinct for flight was natural—it was a sign of health. The inverse was a symptom of sickness. It wasn’t the reason for the divorce, but it certainly hadn’t helped, and it was impossible not to think of her as he leaned against the dirty hood of the Peugeot, preparing to move against the tide of healthy people fleeing a civil war.

  Still, it was a giddy time. In Cairo, he’d seen young faces rapturous with the wild-eyed jubilation of the Apocalypse. The world had changed so quickly. A couple of months ago, people on the streets of North Africa wouldn’t have thought to raise their voices at all, but in Tunisia one Friday morning in December a produce seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, driven to the edge by corrupt police and a senseless bureaucracy, soaked himself in paint thinner and set himself on fire. Protests had grown until President Ben Ali, after twenty-three years of power, fled the country. Algeria came next, protesting and rioting, followed soon by Lebanon.