The Cairo Affair

by Olen Steinhauer

  That night, though, he set aside these concerns. She was with him, finally, and his appetite rose. They were out of most of their clothes while still in the living room, and then she—she, not he—led him to the bedroom, where she allowed him to finally have her.

  Afterward, he watched her drift into sleep, feeling possessive and eager and childlike. It was so much better than it had been before, and in that postcoital glow he resolved to put all his efforts into taking care of her. Clear up the mysteries around them and quell her fears and confusions. She was so still that he held a hand under her nose and waited to feel her warm exhale; then he rested a hand on her hip under the covers, and closed his eyes. He had no answers, but some things are better than answers.

  4

  On Sunday morning, he found it impossible to leave. He was tired, but after a shower they made love again on the sofa. It was different between them. Different from the standoffishness of the last couple of days, and different, too, from the illicit attraction of the previous year. It felt fresh and new, and not unlike empathy. Why would he walk out the door when this was in his home?

  She felt otherwise. By eleven she said, “Don’t you need to go track down Aziz?”

  “Right.”

  He dressed and gave her a kiss that she returned with wrists linked behind his neck.

  He said, “You can stay here, you know.”

  “Well, I wasn’t planning on a hotel.”

  “I mean longer. As long as you want.”

  From her face he could tell she understood, but being perceptive didn’t mean that he had the faintest notion of what was going on in her head, for her words at first baffled him: “They’re burying him today.”

  He first thought of Jibril Aziz, but she was talking about Emmett. “Yes, of course. Boston?”

  “Amherst.”

  “You wish you’d gone?”

  She thought about that, then shook her head. “Funerals aren’t much use.”

  He gave her another kiss, chaste, and headed out the door. It was the last time he would ever see Sophie Kohl.

  Since he lived close to the embassy, he left his car behind and walked, buoyed by the change in his fortunes—smiling, even. When he got to his office and found an e-mail from Saul, fortune seemed to still be on his side. He didn’t know what connections Saul was using, but his results were swift. He had tracked down the September 4 footage from Frankfurt International, which he had uploaded to one of the Agency’s secure servers. Six hours of Zora Balašević wandering the corridors of the airport, from a variety of angles, in a total of seventy-nine video files with time code embedded. He started to download them and, as soon as the first file was completed, began to watch.

  Balašević was five-six, five-seven, and despite the wear on her face she moved like a healthy forty-year-old, though she was a decade and a half older. Her hair was tuned to a pitch black common to the Balkans, and there were signs that either she worked out or her lifestyle demanded a lot of her physically. She wore a knee-length skirt with high black heels. She walked with confidence. She didn’t look around for watchers, nor did she hesitate when faced with gun-toting airport security. She carried a leather shoulder bag—large, with a vertical brown stripe as decoration, perhaps a laptop bag.

  The footage began with her entrance into the airport around 9:00 A.M. in Terminal 1 and rolled along in files ranging from thirty seconds to twenty minutes. Stan watched her enter shots and shrink as she headed out of them, sometimes in the thick of a crowd, sometimes alone. She went first to a functional little café for some caffeine, then headed to the toilets. Inside, she used a stall briefly, then washed her hands and moved on, the bag always very close.

  Though she didn’t come across in the video as aimless—she headed to each rest stop as if to an important meeting—it soon became clear that she was just killing time. She would double back to a café she had been in an hour earlier, or sometimes sit at the same gates she had visited before, thumbing messages into her phone. But with her purposeful demeanor, no one in that airport would have thought that she was solely waiting around; everything she did absorbed her entirely.

  Then, at 11:08, two hours into her wandering, she sat down at Gate 32 and pushed the bag under her seat. Then she straightened and used her left heel to push it deeper. She took out her phone and started fooling with it again.

  At 11:16, a man crossed between the camera and Balašević, an identical bag on his shoulder, and took the seat behind Balašević, so that they were sitting back-to-back. After placing his bag on the floor beside his chair, he also took out a phone and worked at it. His mouth, though, was moving. So was Balašević’s.

  He was younger than Balašević, a light-skinned Arab in a pricey business suit. Long nose, thin lips. Just another traveling businessman in an airport full of men like him. At one point he glanced up at a passing security guard, his hard face full and well lit.

  Their conversation took all of four minutes before Balašević checked her wristwatch and got up, taking the man’s bag with her. Though he knew the man would also leave soon, reaching under the seat to retrieve Balašević’s bag, Stan didn’t see him do this because the video ended and picked up with Balašević heading to her next pointless destination.

  There were nearly four hours of footage left, but he didn’t bother watching any more. He replayed the video of the meeting, a file called 93-040911-394294-P.mov, and returned to that man looking at the security guard, at 11:18:23. He zoomed in and froze it, then exported the frame as an image.

  He mailed the image and a link to the video file back to Saul and asked him to track down the identity of the man meeting with Balašević. This was simply a matter of following the man to his own departure flight and checking the airline’s ID scan at the instant his passport went through it. With that name, he might be able to untangle a few threads.

  For the moment, though, he was stuck. Ali Busiri had not answered his request for a meet, and the dead Aziz had no means of answering his mail. He sent an e-mail to Jake Copeland, Aziz’s direct supervisor, asking where his analyst was, and, thinking of his lie the previous night, he queried a Libya watcher based in Langley, asking for any chatter among the exile community about Aziz. He returned to the database, thinking of Aziz’s four-year tenure in North Africa, from 2001 to 2005, and searched agent reports on Libya. During that period, most agent communiqués dealing with the region had come not from Tripoli but from Cairo station, and as he went through reports he followed a hunch, cross-referencing them with Harry Wolcott’s name. This was how he came upon reports of an agent known by two names, the cryptonym ASHA and the legend Akram Haddad.

  Though heavily redacted, there was enough here for Stan to put together a narrative that matched Jibril Aziz’s resume almost perfectly. A young agent who arrived in Cairo in 2001, taking a small apartment in New Cairo, from where he traveled with increasing frequency across the border into Libya to connect with locals, garner intelligence, and build networks until, in 2005, he was blown and barely escaped Libya with his life. Each and every ASHA report was forwarded to Langley by Harry Wolcott, Cairo station chief, who met ASHA in his apartment after each Libyan visit in order to debrief him and collect his reports.

  Stan rubbed at his eye sockets until they hurt. Harry hadn’t just read and turned down a proposal by Jibril Aziz—he had run Aziz for four years. Why hadn’t he admitted this? What was he hiding?

  His inbox dinged for his attention. Two sentences from Jake Copeland: “Mr. Aziz is on personal leave. I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you were he is.”

  As he was considering a reply, some diplomatic way to push Copeland for more, his phone buzzed. When he recognized the number, he cursed. She was calling from her Hungarian phone. “Hey,” he said.

  “Stan.” For an instant, he thought that a stranger had taken her phone. It was in her voice, a coldness. As if she had become someone else.

  “What’s up?”

  “You’ve been lying to me, Stan.”
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  How could he reply to that? He said, “About what?”

  “Jibril Aziz, Stan.” He didn’t like the way she was repeating his name.

  “What about him?”

  “His wife, Stan. You told me very definitely that he didn’t have a wife.”

  “It didn’t seem important,” he said, suddenly confused.

  “Didn’t it?”

  “You’re right, Sophie. I’ve been holding back.”

  “You’ve been lying.”

  “I’ve been trying to protect you.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Do men really think that the only thing women want is protection?”

  “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes,” he told her, using his commanding voice. “Wait for me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes,” he said, because he was tired of lying. Perhaps she would walk out on Cairo, but the rules of espionage ought not apply to those we love. He needed at least one relationship in his life that was clear and clean.

  “I don’t know, Stan.”

  What didn’t she know? “Just wait. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  He waved at Eric as he burst out the front doors and ran across the grounds, out the gate, and through Garden City’s winding streets. It took him only seven minutes to get home, so it was more than a shock when he found the apartment empty—it was devastating. He felt it in his legs, which had once brought on his desire, and were now bringing on cramps. Unself-consciously, he held on to himself, arms around his stomach, and moved from room to room, finding only empty spaces. He was confused, angry, and in love, but he didn’t really know what pain was until he reached the bathroom, with its marble sink and large, unframed mirror where, scrawled across the glass in Sophie’s burgundy lipstick, was a single word, underlined.

  LIAR

  5

  Though he would never see her again, Stan never considered this possibility. She might have walked out on him, but she was in his town. He was, at heart, an optimist, and he believed—he knew—that within hours or days they would be together again. Ragged, perhaps, a little scarred, but together.

  By ten that evening, through a call to a contact in Egyptian security, he learned that she had checked into the Semiramis InterContinental, just around the corner from the embassy. While his first impulse was to follow her there, crash through her door, and smother her, he knew that she needed space. Once her anger had passed she would come around, for who else did she have in Cairo? He was the only one who truly wanted to help her.

  Patience, his father once told him with typical exaggeration, is the only worthwhile tool in an agent’s arsenal.

  His one concession to his desire was to ask Paul to sit in the Semiramis lobby to watch out for her.

  “Sophie Kohl?” Paul asked over the line, incredulous. “What’s she doing here?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Stan said as coolly as he could manage. “Don’t make any approach. Just make sure she doesn’t get hurt, and if she leaves, you call me and keep track of her. Once we have some answers, I’ll take it to Harry. In the meantime it’s between us. Got it?”

  Afterward, he lay down but couldn’t sleep. He was too disorganized, too muddled, his mind flickering over the tangled mess of things he knew and didn’t know, so he got up again, swallowed two Tylenol with a glass of water, and tried to think back to Thursday, before Sophie had arrived to scramble his thinking. What had he learned?

  From Dragan Milić: Zora Balašević had not been reporting embassy secrets back to him. She’d been reporting to Ali Busiri in the Central Security Forces. Whether the secrets had come from Emmett or someone else was another question entirely.

  On Friday, Omar Halawi, or RAINMAN, had passed on a piece of advice through Paul: If you want to find Emmett’s murderer, you need to look at yourselves. Someone in the Agency, Halawi was suggesting, had wanted to keep Emmett quiet.

  Perhaps that was true, but Stan was still hesitant to trust an Egyptian’s word.

  Then there was what Sophie had brought to the table: Jibril Aziz, Emmett, and Stumbler.

  Finally, there were the elusive facts that Harry had given up on Saturday. Aziz was dead, but he wouldn’t say how or why. Was his death connected to John Calhoun’s secret mission? Harry had also dredged up Stan’s original investigation into the leak last year, throwing even the existence of a leak into doubt.

  There was one more thing, but it was only a question: How did Sophie find out that Aziz had a family?

  This was what he had, but the facts refused to gel into a comprehensive theory. Sleep remained distant. He stared into the darkness at the ceiling until, at 4:48 A.M., the call to Fajr prayers convinced him to give up. He showered, dressed, and ate, and was back at the embassy by six. Security. Elevator. Office. He didn’t bother powering up his computer. Instead, he unlocked the old five-drawer file cabinet in the corner and opened the bottom drawer. Like all the other drawers, it was full of manila folders, labeled with names and locations, background information on paper that hadn’t yet been transcribed into the databases, but he wasn’t interested in old information. He reached into the file marked HOTELS ELEC and removed three stapled sheets of paper. On the first two was a list of Cairo-area hotels, and he found the Semiramis quickly. Beside it was a code, BRB-9. He reached into the rear of the drawer and took out a rubber-banded stack of twenty hotel keycards. BRB-9 was the last one.

  He reached the Semiramis before six thirty, just as the sun was rising to cut through the cold, and waited on the Corniche El Nil that separated the hotel from the river. He called Paul. After a few minutes, the young man was jogging across the road to meet him. He looked tired, perhaps as tired as Stan was, but he put on a good show. “Quiet as the grave,” Paul said.

  “Nothing? No one in, no one out?”

  “No one that I recognized. But the staff sure took an interest in me.”

  They both knew that this didn’t matter. The hotel staff would inform Central Security that some Westerner was camping out in their lobby, and the Egyptians would use CCTV footage to identify Paul, but he was breaking no laws. And he probably wasn’t the only foreign spy reading newspapers and drinking coffee on their sofas. “Go back inside,” Stan said. “I’ll relieve you later on.”

  As he watched Paul cross the street again and head back into the hotel, Stan took out his phone and called the front desk. He asked for room 306 and listened as it rang and rang. Six thirty in the morning, and she wasn’t answering.

  He hung up and crossed the street, pausing in front of the Semiramis’s glass doors. A valet eyeballed him. What was she doing up there? Was she overcome by paranoia now, trembling in fear whenever the phone rang? Or was she simply cold and hard, shaped by tragedies like the murder of her husband and the deception of her lover? Eventually, she would have to call him. There was no other choice.

  Or was there? He’d had the sense during their hours together that she was holding something back. He’d assumed it was that final conversation with Emmett about Zora Balašević—but what if it was something else? What if she wasn’t alone in Cairo? Someone had told her about Aziz’s family. What if …

  Before he could think through the pros and cons, Stan entered the lobby and patted the air in reply to Paul’s questioning look. He ignored the clerks and concierge as he headed toward the elevators. He was just another Caucasian face breezing through town on business, never getting to know the city, never tipping enough, and never learning a word of the local language.

  On the third floor he found a young couple trying to reason with their three- or four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the corner beside a potted plant, refusing to go anywhere. When the father looked up, his face full of despair, Stan gave him a sympathetic grimace and then looked at the boy, who had an oddly adult face—narrow and long, eyes sunken and intense. Almost judgmental. The boy watched Stan as his parents pleaded with him, and Stan could feel his eyes boring into h
is back until he turned a corner and continued on.

  Her room was halfway down a long corridor, and in front of it was a Herald Tribune Sophie hadn’t bothered to pick up. He knocked and waited, listening. Nothing. He tried again and said, “Housekeeping.” Still there was nothing, so he took out BRB-9 and stroked it twice against the magnetic pad; the door clicked. He opened it slowly.

  The room was empty, the bed disorganized as if it had been quickly abandoned. The dresser drawers were empty, and so were the tables.

  He settled on the bed, feeling heavy and sluggish. She was gone. He thought he might cry, but he didn’t.

  When he finally went downstairs nearly an hour later, he sat beside Paul on the lobby sofa. “Did you leave last night?”

  Paul frowned and shook his head. “Of course not.”

  Stan sighed, thinking first of kidnapping and only afterward of escape. There were other exits from the hotel, but he hadn’t imagined that Sophie Kohl would have the foresight to use them. Perhaps she had. Or perhaps her kidnappers had.

  “What is it, boss?”

  Stan looked at his hands in his lap; they were trembling. He took out BRB-9 and handed it to Paul. “Room 306. Stay in there and wait. If she returns, make sure she doesn’t leave.”

  “Using force?”

  “If necessary.”

  In the embassy, Stan nodded at his co-workers and shut himself in his office, thinking of organization. Start at the beginning, he thought. It was a method, he knew, a way of pushing away the terror he felt. Where was she? Who was protecting her? Why had she left him? His hands shook as he typed on his keyboard and clicked the mouse, finally tracking down the original Stumbler memos from 2009. He wiped at his eyes and began to read.