Jibril Aziz had been prescient. As justification for his plan, Aziz had cited growing unrest throughout the region almost two years before anybody else in the Agency had thought to tie them into a regional shift. Stan and others had viewed the sporadic demonstrations and crackdowns as brushfires—Jibril Aziz had seen them as portents.
It took a while to wade through the pages of Aziz’s optimism, and, thinking of what Emmett would have been consulted on, he reread the section titled “Fallout,” which dealt with the economic repercussions of regime change. Aziz had put forth the idea that, with Tripoli in its pocket, with the support of the Egyptian government (which, before Mubarak stepped down that month, they could have been assured of), and with the compliance of Tunisia (which, again, was a given before that chaotic year had begun), the United States would gain effective trade control of the entire North African coast—a third of the Mediterranean coastline. They could have done simple things, like negotiate reduced port fees for their own freighters, but more importantly it would have given America better access to the African market for anything from toilet brushes to nuclear power plants.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, this still felt like a stretch, and he imagined that when Harry had read it he’d thought the same thing. But neither he nor Harry was an economist. Emmett had been.
Stan went to his file cabinet, and from the middle drawer removed a slender folder in which he’d kept the documentation he’d collected to establish Emmett’s guilt. Among the list of files from Emmett’s computer was a ten-digit code that, he saw now, matched the Stumbler documents. Yes, Stumbler would have reached Zora Balašević as well.
As he was returning to his seat, John Calhoun tapped on his door. “I’m free if you need anything.”
Stan blinked at him, still caught in the myopia that had taken control since visiting the Semiramis. He considered pulling in John for some legwork, or even to grill him on Jibril Aziz, but then changed his mind. The man didn’t look well, and as soon as he started asking about Aziz John would go to Harry—that was a given. “Go get some lunch,” he told the big man. “Take it easy.”
Once he was alone again, he closed his eyes, shoving away his fears for Sophie, imagining instead the sequence of events. Emmett copied the Stumbler plans from his laptop onto a flash drive and passed them on to Zora Balašević, who sold them to Ali Busiri. Months later, Emmett discussed Stumbler with Aziz, and both he and Aziz soon perished. From these sketchy details, it certainly did look as if Omar Halawi was right in at least one way: Emmett, and presumably Aziz, had been killed to keep them quiet. Quiet about what? Emmett’s treason? Stumbler? Or … the identity of the real leak?
And who really wanted them silenced? CIA? Egypt? Dragan Milić, covering up a plateful of lies he’d been feeding to Stan? Without knowing the answer to one question, the other could never be answered. Without knowing who was behind this, he would never find Sophie.
His computer dinged an incoming e-mail. It was from LogiThrust LLC about the wonderful world of penile enhancements. The codes were ridiculous but effective. He checked the text against a list of translations and learned that Ali Busiri would be waiting for him at al-Azhar Park at five thirty that evening. Finally.
He went back to the memo, but there was another tap at his door. It was Nancy. With a smile she told him a single word: “Harry’s.”
6
“You know,” Harry began once his guest had taken a seat, “a lot of people think of our station as a backwoods outpost, even now.” There was a spot of red against his pale chin; he had nicked himself with a razor that morning. “We stumble into our intrigues, which from our perspective seem world-shattering and life-and-death. But from Langley’s perspective our time is taken up by tempests in teacups.”
Harry paused, as if this were something Stan needed a moment to comprehend.
“They’re wrong, of course. They often are. What they forget is that Washington is not the center of the world, and it hasn’t been for at least a decade.”
That he was referring to 9/11 before his after-work cocktail wasn’t a good sign.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Harry said. “They pay us lip service like it’s going out of style. They throw money at us and pass on our reports to members of Congress. But don’t ever fool yourself, Stan: Anytime one of us has an idea that contradicts one of Langley’s starched collars, it ceases to be a battle of ideas; it becomes a battle of school ties.”
He was getting at something, but he was taking the long way around to it. Like Stan’s own father, he showed his anxieties by launching into overstatement and weak metaphor. “We’re not the British, Harry.”
“And how does that make any difference?”
Stan shrugged. “You really think it’s that bad?”
“Worse,” he said, finally engaging with his eyes. “It’s why Cairo station has to be seen—from the outside, at least—as better than Langley. As more ironclad, more impeccable. More pristine. It’s the only way to stand a chance against the old-boy network. You and me, we have to be more; we have to be better.”
Stan nodded. Harry seemed to have woken in a mood of constructive self-criticism, or maybe he was misinterpreting.
“And then, Stan, there’s you.”
“Me?”
Harry rubbed his eyes and avoided Stan’s for a second, saying, “A senior member of this station making calls to people he’s not even supposed to know.” Their eyes met. “You know what I mean?”
Stan went through the calls he’d made recently. Who was he not supposed to know? Sophie? Saul? “I’m not sure I do.”
Harry took a breath, opened his desk drawer, and took out a single sheet of paper. “One Inaya Aziz, of Alexandria, Virginia.”
“Right,” Stan said, hesitant relief slipping into his shoulders. “That was Saturday, before you and I talked. Just a few seconds—I never identified myself.”
Harry knitted his brow, forehead contracting, and spoke in a hard voice. “Don’t lie to me, Stan.” He looked down at the paper in his hand. “Twelve-oh-nine in the afternoon on Sunday, from your landline, twenty-eight minutes of conversation.” He looked up at Stan, his expression pained. “Landline? Jesus, Stan. Are you working for the Egyptians? Because if you aren’t, then you might as well ask them to pay you for all this volunteer work.”
There it was, the trap opening up in front of him. Stan hadn’t been at home at 12:09 P.M. yesterday. Sophie had. Stan had been in the office, running through Frankfurt surveillance footage. A glance at the front desk’s entry/exit records would have told Harry this, but he apparently hadn’t checked that yet.
Which was the worse crime? Calling the widow of a man he wasn’t supposed to know about, or harboring the widow Sophie Kohl without telling anyone?
In this case, he wasn’t sure.
How had Sophie gotten Inaya Aziz’s number?
Harry said, “I believe I told you to forget about Aziz. Wasn’t I clear?”
“I had to verify some things.”
“You had to verify some things? What does that mean, Stan?”
He took a breath. “Look, Harry—if you’re not going to be up-front with me, then I’ve got no choice but to follow up on my own. Jibril Aziz met with Emmett, and soon afterward both were dead. You’re not telling me how or why Aziz was killed. So I kept digging, and it turned out that you used to run Aziz—you ran him for four years. You didn’t think I should know this?”
“There’s a reason it’s called undercover,” Harry told him, features stiff.
“Undercover. Okay. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of reasons to keep me stupid, but did you expect me to sit on my hands? So I called his wife to find out if she knew where he was.”
Harry rubbed his left eye. “And what did she say?”
“That she didn’t know where he was.”
“And what did that verify for you, Stan?”
“The only thing it verified was that you know more than you’re sharing, and it’s time to stop pl
aying games. Talk to me about Omar Halawi.”
“Who?”
“RAINMAN. He works out of Ali Busiri’s office.”
Harry raised his head, squinting.
Stan said, “Omar Halawi says that we killed Emmett.”
There it was—the slap, square in the forehead. “He says what?”
“He sent me this message through Paul. I haven’t had a face-to-face with him yet. I want to talk to Busiri first.”
Harry leaned back, fingers threaded together across his narrow chest, and said, “Why, pray tell, did we kill Emmett?”
“To keep him quiet.”
“About what?”
Stan shrugged. “Stumbler? Or maybe the identity of another leak in the embassy.”
Harry sighed and, with a loose left hand, pointed at the ceiling. “It’s raining shit.”
It was an unexpected thing for him to say, but Stan held his tongue.
Harry said, “I’d be careful about what Ali Busiri says. He’s a sneaky bastard.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do. About a month ago, when things fell apart for Mubarak, do you know what he did?”
Stan shook his head.
“He called me for a meeting. In a hotel room. He was pouring martinis. Made me wait forever before he got around to it—he wanted to come over to us.”
Stan frowned, but waited.
“He was scared. Terrified. He thought he was going to end up with a bullet behind the ear, and so he made me an offer. We give him a nice house in California and new names for him and his wife, and he gives us everything.”
“Everything?”
Harry nodded.
“But you didn’t take him up on it.”
Harry shook his head. “When you’ve been neck-deep in it for as long as I have, you learn to smell who’s bullshitting you. I smelled it—that hotel room was lousy with it.”
“Did you tell Langley?”
“How well can they smell from five thousand miles away?”
Despite his anxiety, Stan grinned. “But he survived the changes.”
“So far he has,” Harry said. “My only point is that you should take Ali Busiri’s intel with a grain of salt. The same’s true of his employees, like Omar Halawi.”
They both thought about that a moment until Harry said, “Does Sophie have a theory?”
Stan blinked. “When she called me, she was in shock.”
“But certainly she shared some kind of opinion with you. After all, you were lovers.”
Stan said nothing.
Harry smiled softly, then waved at him. “Did you think I didn’t know? You kept using the same hotel room—bad security.”
Now Stan was the one rubbing his face. Yes, it had been bad security, and of course Harry had known. He was surprised that Harry had never brought him in for a talk, but now that it was out in the open he felt anxiety falling off his shoulders.
“This,” Harry said, “would be the other reason I didn’t haul Emmett off in chains. You can see the conflict of interest, can’t you?”
Stan could see it very clearly.
Harry covered his mouth again and looked at the ceiling, as if it were turning brown from the rain. “So let me ask you again: Do you know where she is?”
Stan remembered her words: Do men really think that the only thing women want is protection? “I have no idea,” he said, and that, at least, was true.
The desk phone buzzed. As Harry answered it, Stan considered asking for help tracking down Sophie. Harry knew, after all, about the affair—that obstacle had been taken away, yet Stan wasn’t ready to ask for help. Why?
It was because of a single gesture, that forehead, which seemed to cover up a whole world of secrets that he could not even guess at. If you’re missing some crucial piece of information it’s best to assume you don’t know anything. There was enough missing here that he couldn’t even assume he could trust Harold Wolcott.
Stan waited as Harry listened on line one; Nancy was talking to him. Harry’s face changed again. His mouth hung open, and unconsciously he touched the nick on his chin. “Okay,” Harry said into the phone. Then he hung up and met Stan’s gaze squarely with his own. “Look at the ceiling.”
Stan did so, and it looked the same as it always had.
“When it shits, Stan, it pours. Sophie Kohl is in Cairo.”
“Where?”
A heavy shrug. “The Hungarians finally told us where she went. The Egyptians haven’t verified it for us yet, but I assume they will eventually.” He frowned. “Question is: Why hasn’t she gotten in touch with us?” He wiped at his nose. “You’d think she didn’t trust us.”
7
Stan returned to his office and called Paul, who had spent the whole day in room 306. “Nothing,” he told Stan in the midst of a yawn. Hope was bleeding away. “You want me to leave?”
“No,” Stan told him, then hung up. He settled back in his chair, again looking at the Stumbler memo, and rubbed at his eyes. He thought back to a year ago, to the dour Langley man telling him of intercepted communications from the Syrian, Libyan, and Pakistani embassies. Pretending to be giving him the whole story. Had Langley really not trusted him, or Harry? Had—
His desk phone rang, breaking his wandering thoughts. He picked up. “Stan Bertolli.”
“My man,” said Saul, his voice rough from a lingering cold. “I got your name.”
Briefly, Stan didn’t know what he was talking about, then it came to him—the video still from Frankfurt, Balašević with a man. “Tell me.”
“Michael Khalil, American.”
“American?”
“So his passport says.”
“What do you say, Saul?”
“I say it’s fake because his passport number matches a guy who died of a coronary in 1998. He can’t use the passport to get into Fortress America, but he’s used it to visit other countries. We’re running his face through the recognition software, but God only knows how long that’ll take.”
“Where’s he been recently?”
Saul hummed as he read through his information. “The Khalil passport spent a week in Tripoli last year, but the rest of that year it was in your town—except for that one-day visit to Frankfurt. Then last week he visited Germany. Munich.”
“For how long?”
“Three days, March 1 to March 3. Then he flew to … well, why don’t you take a guess?”
“Cairo,” Stan said.
“I don’t care what anyone around here says, Stan. You’re one smart kid.”
Stan closed his eyes, thinking about that flight in and out of Munich. After murdering Emmett, Gjergj Ahmeti had been tracked to a train heading from Budapest to Munich. Emmett was killed on March 2. Khalil could easily have flown in and out of Munich for a visit to Budapest to oversee the killing—what other way could he interpret it? Which meant that the man Zora Balašević had met in Frankfurt—her Egyptian or Serbian client—had been behind Emmett’s murder. Not the United States of America.
Stan stared at the dead phone still in his hand, then checked with Nancy: Harry had stepped out again, destination unknown. He was overwhelmed by the feeling that he was playing catch-up, yet he didn’t know what he was trying to catch up to. It was getting late.
He called Paul. “Close it down. Go home.”
“Need me in the office?”
“Just get some sleep. I’ll call you later if I need you.”
“Yes, sir,” Paul said, evidently pleased.
8
The low sun was hidden behind clouds as he drove to al-Azhar Park on the east side of town. He parked along a quiet section of the Passages Insaid al-Azhar Garden, near the main road, then locked up and headed into the vast, sculpted park. As he moved forward, he assessed (as Paolo Bertolli might) everything he saw: a long line of empty cars parked down the curb, a couple taking a relaxing stroll toward the enormous cafés on the man-made lake, two old men on a bench talking over a hand of cards, a woman in a hi
jab watching three children dance to a transistor radio playing Arabic pop. He followed a cobblestone path deeper into the park, where it opened up and palm trees were aligned geometrically and marble bridges crossed over little streams. It wasn’t busy here—most families were preparing for dinner—and he saw a couple with a teenaged girl packing up a picnic and heading out. He settled on a bench, gazing across the lake with its fountains and restaurants and sunken garden on the other side, a spot of tranquility in the clogged mess of Cairo. As he waited, the clouds released a sprinkle of welcome rain that dimpled the lake and misted his hair, but only briefly.
He thought of these Egyptians whose world he passed through every day—how many friends had he made among them? None. He and most of his embassy co-workers were ghosts in this town, circulating only among themselves, as if the locals were there just to make sure their electricity and water flowed, and that they were well fed. He lived among Egyptians but not with them, which, on those rare days when he grew philosophical and criticial of his life, bothered him deeply.
Ali Busiri found him easily. They didn’t know each other well; a couple of meetings in other parks were the sum of their personal relationship. There were no pass-phrases with a contact as high-ranking as Busiri.
He was plump and healthy-looking, and if Stan hadn’t known Busiri’s file he would’ve been tempted to use the word “jolly” to describe him. But he knew enough about Ali Busiri to know that he was far from jolly, and his expression that day, interrupted only by drags on a filtered Camel, did nothing to change his opinion. He sat down beside Stan, stinking of smoke. “This is about Emmett Kohl?”
Stan nodded.
“Otherwise I wouldn’t have come. He was a good man.”
“Maybe you didn’t know him that well,” Stan said in spite of himself.
Busiri turned to give him a look, something close to disgust. “You wanted to talk.”
The Cairo Affair Page 17
