It took two weeks of work before Sophie Kohl finally came around, and once that relationship had been established the rest of the infrastructure could be put into place. Balašević was paid through a front company called Beautiful Nile Enterprises, and in return she passed flash drives directly to Rashid el-Sawy.
The Serbian embassy soon realized that their agent was no longer loyal, and Dragan Milić attempted to have her sent out of the country. Ali Busiri met him for lunch to explain that Balašević was not to be touched, at least not within the borders of Egypt.
By April, once the quality of Sophie Kohl’s intelligence had been established, Omar was taken off of the operation and moved to less demanding assignments. “You’ve had one heart attack,” Busiri told him. “Why don’t we let you survive to retirement?” It was left to el-Sawy and Busiri to collect and process the files before distributing selected intelligence to other departments. Again, Omar had been sidelined, but he chose not to dwell on this as he watched over the well-being of diplomats in their city and came to terms with the strong possibility that the acquisition of Zora Balašević would be the final accomplishment of his career.
A year later, in April 2010, Busiri asked him to meet with Balašević again. Why him? “Because she’s getting angry with Rashid, and she doesn’t know I exist. I’d prefer to keep it that way.”
He visited her apartment on Al-Muizz Street and found her in a state. “What is the problem?”
Biting her nails and gulping Turkish coffee, Zora said, “Sophie is losing her taste for it. I am losing her.”
“Has she told you she wants to quit?”
A quick shake of the head. “Not yet. But she will.”
“This is normal enough,” he told her. “You should threaten her. Can you use the threat you used against Mr. Kohl?”
She shrugged, unsure. “I don’t want to.”
“Then we can approach her ourselves. We have enough evidence of her cooperation—we threaten to make that public, and she will continue working.”
“No,” Zora said firmly. “She does not know about you. She thinks all this is for my people. You come in, and she will snap.”
He wondered if this was true, or if Zora, with the greed that had brought her to Cairo in the first place, was afraid that she would be cut out of the chain and lose her considerable income. “Well, then,” he said. “I suppose you have no choice.”
She didn’t seem convinced.
“What is the problem, Zora? Your work has been excellent.”
Finally, she said, “I like her. I always have. She trusts me, but I also trust her. We have built something here, and this is going to destroy it.”
He would have never thought Zora Balašević so sentimental.
“You know how much she has done,” Zora continued. “All of it, for me.”
Busiri had told him nothing, but he nodded.
She said, “She did not have to sleep with him. I don’t think she wanted to. But I told her it could be important. I told her that if any suspicion came up, then it would be best to have him already attached to her.”
“Who?”
She gave him a suspicious look. “Stanley Bertolli. Who else do you think?”
He tried to talk his way out of it, but his slip had been obvious. She said, “Who’s running me?”
“Michael Khalil.”
“I mean, who’s running Khalil?”
“We are, Zora. That is all that matters.”
Of course that wasn’t all that mattered, for running agents is the closest of all relationships, closer sometimes than that between a husband and wife. Zora was shocked the way a wife would be if her husband had been sharing her intimate secrets with a stranger.
Once the Kohls left Cairo, he took it upon himself to visit Zora again as she prepared to leave the country. She was calmer now, more tired. A year and a half working for them had taken something from her. “Come to see me off?” she asked.
“You are heading home?”
“Indirectly.”
“Yes?”
She measured him with her eyes a moment, then said, “They really don’t tell you anything, do they?”
He settled on the sofa. “Why don’t you tell me?”
She told him that by July she’d had enough. “It happens, you know. People tire.” She had told Khalil that it was time to wrap things up. “I could see it in Sophie’s eyes. She was dying. Her marriage was going to hell, and her relationship with Stan was killing her. And me—she did not even have me. Just as I predicted, she tried to pull out, and so I had to become the whip. When I was younger this would not have bothered me. But look at me. I am not young. I am tired. I want to live my life.”
“What did Khalil say?”
“He told me that if I tried to walk away I would be arrested as a spy. Then he changed our arrangement. He told me that from that point on no money would be sent to my account. It would be collected, in escrow, until the time came for me to leave.”
Omar cleared his throat, then wiped self-consciously at his nose. “I am sorry about that.”
She shrugged. “So now we are down to passing packages in public places. I will meet him in Frankfurt, where he will give me the rest of my money.” She laughed hoarsely. “I can’t wait to get out of this shithole.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, so he got up and helped her latch a suitcase that was giving her trouble, then went to make two cups of coffee while she went to the bathroom. When she came out, she was smiling again, but the smile gave him no joy. “You just passed me on, didn’t you?”
“I had no choice. It was not my decision.”
She nodded at that and thanked him for the coffee. He followed her back to the living room. With the full boxes and empty walls it felt barren. He asked what she’d had on Sophie Kohl. After thinking about it a moment, she said, “I threatened to reveal to the world that she is wonderful, and that she has nothing to be ashamed of. I threatened to expose the fact that she is the kind of woman who can do anything, even if she cannot see it herself.” She paused. “Do not ever make an enemy of Sophie Kohl.”
Given this preparation, he expected something impressive from his first meeting with Sophie Kohl months later, but she was a disappointment. Perhaps Balašević had oversold her asset, but part of the problem was himself. By the time he arrived at the Semiramis, he felt as if his bones were going to splinter. Six hours in a bumping automobile to get back to Cairo from Marsa Matrouh—what had he been thinking?
The truth was that he had hoped he would never have to meet Sophie Kohl. His section had benefited from her information, but he had trouble feeling much appreciation for a woman who had given away her country’s secrets so easily, and then began an affair with another man in order to protect herself.
He’d seen her picture plenty of times and had watched from a distance as she met with Zora, but he was unprepared for the woman he found in the Semiramis café. She was thin, her hair flat and unkempt—she displayed that inattention to her looks that naturally beautiful women slide into, assuming the shape of their faces will compensate for their laziness. Then he admonished himself: Her husband had been killed, and he should be kinder.
Despite appearances, she proved herself more astute than he imagined, catching the contradictions inherent in the facts. For example: Why would the CIA kill her husband if he didn’t believe the Agency was behind Stumbler?
What could he say to such rational thought? This woman, like anyone outside of the intelligence services, believed that intelligence organizations worked by machine logic, and that this was their flaw. Their flaw was that they didn’t work by machine logic. They worked by human logic, which was as frail and emotional as the people who filled the agencies of the world. The best he could offer was hardly an example of perfect logic: “Mistakes were made.” Then he focused on his primary desire, which was to get Sophie Kohl out of Egypt. She was prying into sensitive things, and if she wasn’t careful she was going to get hurt.
&nb
sp; Did he care? Did it matter if an adultress and traitor was hurt or even murdered under his watch? Maybe; maybe not. But he was beginning to believe that the world really was a different place now that Mubarak was gone. The rules had been broken and tossed to the winds. A new beginning, the most important moment in any nation’s history. This was the moment when new precedents were being set. If he let the CIA murder this woman in Egypt, then it would do so again. If she left unscathed, then hope remained that the country could become a place where even Fouada would feel safe.
After their meeting, still not knowing if she was going to follow his advice and leave, he waited in his car, which he’d parked in the same spot from which he’d watched Jibril leave with John Calhoun. It was nearly nine. He thought about how she looked, this Sophie Kohl, how tangled in body and mind, and he worried what she might get up to before finally leaving Egypt. So he put in a call to Sayyid, who showed up within twenty minutes, climbing into the passenger seat. “Mrs. Sophie Kohl, wife of the murdered American consul, is in room 306. I need you to keep an eye on her. If she receives any visitors, tell me.”
Sayyid frowned. “What’s she doing here?”
“She’s trying to figure out who killed her husband.”
“Are we helping?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer, so he didn’t.
2
Fouada was asleep when he got home, and after a half hour sitting on the sofa, feeling his sore bones and muscles creak, thinking over his conversation with Sophie Kohl, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Yet when his phone rang a little after midnight, it woke him. He snatched at it. “Yes?”
“A visitor,” said Sayyid.
Omar blinked in the darkness, but nothing was coming into focus. “Who?”
“More than one, actually. Paul Johnson from the American embassy has been sitting in the lobby all night, but not long ago Rashid el-Sawy went to see her.”
Omar sat up straight. “What?”
“He took the elevator, so I went up the stairs. He was standing outside her door.”
“Did he go inside?”
“I think he wanted to, but she didn’t let him.”
“Do they know each other?”
“He introduced himself as Michael Khalil. After that, he talked too quietly.”
El-Sawy talking to John Calhoun, and then Sophie Kohl. What was going on?
He told Sayyid to keep him updated, then hung up. A light came on in the bedroom, and he heard Fouada: “Omar? What are you doing out there?”
He went to the bedroom door, leaned against the frame, his back aching. The sheets were up to her chin, and she was smiling dreamily. He said, “Work.”
“No more trips to the coast, okay?” she said. “My bones.”
He gave her a quiet laugh and came to sit on the edge of the bed, reaching out to hold her hand. “You’re not alone.”
“How did your meeting go?”
“Hard to say,” he said, then hesitated.
“Yes?”
“I have the feeling that Ali Busiri is playing at something.”
Her face darkened, her anger, years old by now, rising again. “Then you need to stop him.”
Had a single trip into the field with her husband really changed Fouada so much? He stared at her, holding her hand, remembering how she’d been decades ago, when they were younger and poorer and, if not happier, then at least more energetic. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, and so happiness had taken longer, but it had come.
Their bed was inviting, yet he really wouldn’t be able to sleep now. Not yet. “I need to step out again.”
She said, “Get the bastard, but don’t break yourself in the process.”
He kissed her high forehead, tasting her nightly creams.
On the drive to the office, Sayyid called to tell him that he had listened at Sophie Kohl’s door. “She’s getting ready for bed. Do you want me to make contact?”
“No,” he said. “Just wait.”
The night guards at the Interior Ministry were more lax than the day shift, and he was soon taking the elevator to the seventh floor, which was empty and dark. He powered up his computer, and once it was on he logged into the secure Web site, through which he found a database of flight manifests and a section marked “EXTERNAL TRAFFIC,” dealing solely with flights that had entered or left Egyptian territory. He chose the “BY PASSENGER NAME” form and typed “Rashid el-Sawy.” There were a few hits, but those were different el-Sawys. He tried “Michael Khalil,” then read through the results. The earliest one, in April of last year, was to Tripoli. What was Khalil doing in Tripoli? He had no family there, and by and large his work should have kept him in Egypt. In September there was the flight to Frankfurt to pass on Zora’s final payment, and on March 1—only five days ago—a trip to Munich, from which he had returned on the third. The ticket had been paid for in cash. Emmett Kohl had been killed on March 2.
He rubbed his eyes, wishing he’d picked up some tea on his way here. He let his mind drift back over what he’d learned during the last weeks. He thought of Emmett Kohl’s conviction that the American government wasn’t behind Stumbler, and Sophie Kohl’s excellent question: Then why did they kill him? Was the difference between human and machine logic really the explanation? What if the CIA really hadn’t killed Kohl? Then what followed?
Try the reverse, then: What if Emmett Kohl was killed because he didn’t believe America was behind Stumbler? Did this mean that Jibril, believing the opposite, was safe?
And what about Marsa Matrouh? Qasim was there, waiting for the arrival of Stumbler’s front line, yet he had heard nothing.
He went back to the computer and began searching the names of the men whose disappearances were to precede Stumbler, typing them one at a time. Yousef al-Juwali—still missing. Abdurrahim Zargoun—still missing. Waled Belhadj …
An article from Le Monde, which had just been posted online before its print appearance in the morning:
Last night, two workers discovered a body in a large sports bag at the lock in Soisy-sur-Seine.
The men called the police, who arrived at the scene at 18:54.
By morning, Sous-brigadier Bertrand Roux reported to journalists that the heavily decomposed corpse had been identified as Waled Belhadj, Libyan national, 41 years old, who had been missing since 20 February. Evidence suggests that he was shot in the head before being placed in the sports bag and deposited in the Seine. It is believed that he has been dead for more than a week.
Waled Belhadj was previously a member of the Association of the Democratic Libyan Front, which advocates democratic change in Libya. He moved to Paris from London in August 2009 after a disagreement with fellow members of the Democratic Libyan Front and was rumored to be establishing a new organization.
According to sources, a current Democratic Libyan Front member, Yousef al-Juwali, went missing in London on 19 February. Police are not able to confirm a connection between the murder and the disappearance.
Exhaustion was one thing, but he was starting to feel nauseous. This made no sense. Why take the men if they were only to be shot in the head? Who would have wanted that? Who—
Within him, a spark struck. Great understandings were rare in Omar’s experience, but when they came they did not come piecemeal. A spark was struck, and suddenly there was a whole furnace blazing. Such was the case now. The fire woke him up, burning away the nausea and the cobwebs. The puzzle pieces flew up in the air and settled back down in crystalline perfection. No, no sickness now. Just curiosity and the aesthetic pleasure of discovery. Then, as he examined the pieces, looking for anomalies that might rebut the entire theory, the curiosity twisted into a low, burning anger.
He called Sayyid. “Yes, boss?”
“She’s still there?”
“Yes.”
“If she tries to leave the room, stop her. Understand?”
“I … yes, I understand.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
Before le
aving, he checked the flight manifests again, and saw that Sophie Kohl had reserved a seat on a 9:30 A.M. flight back to America. If only she’d left yesterday. If only she’d skipped Cairo altogether. But she hadn’t, and now it was too late.
3
He was impatient, but impatience would not serve him well. This had to be done right, or not at all.
When he brought Sophie Kohl home, he was reminded again of Jibril. He was too soft, he realized. Caring for strays was becoming his fate.
Fouada had never learned English, but she knew how to take care of someone without words. He told her, “She’s been through a lot. She may become angry. If you like, I’ll ask someone to stay here with you. Mahmoud could come.”
Fouada waved that away. “This is about the bastard?”
“I believe it is.”
“Then I will handle it. You do what you have to do.” She kissed him on the cheek, then offered Sayyid some tea. A look from Omar convinced him to say no.
He and Sayyid spoke in the stairwell. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” the young man asked.
“When it’s verified, yes. Not before. But I need your trust. Do I have it?”
“Of course.”
“We’ll need Mahmoud as well. Can you see to that?”
A nod.
“Tomorrow, though, all three of us will be in the ministry like usual, as if nothing is amiss. By the end of the day it should be settled.”
Sayyid ran his fingers through his thick hair, nodding.
“Go take a nap, and I’ll see you in the office.”
By the time he returned to the apartment, Sophie Kohl had fallen asleep on the guest bed, on top of the sheets, her clothes still on. Fouada said, “The girl is exhausted.”
“So am I.”
He was at his desk by nine, running through his mental list of items to look into. He went back into history, rechecking things he already knew, in particular Hisham Minyawi’s disaster in 2005, when the source he’d gained in the Libyan embassy was executed. Omar walked over to Hisham’s office on the opposite end of the building and knocked. Hisham was in his midforties, his thick mustache prematurely gray, with a heavy paunch and bleak eyes. He was smoking a cigarette and wrapping up a phone call when Omar arrived. He waved the older man in. “Omar,” he said, shaking his head. “Busy times, no?”
The Cairo Affair Page 34
