Countdown in Cairo rt-3

by Noel Hynd

  “Sorry!”

  “I was just coming to see you.” He nodded toward her office. She picked up on the hint. They stepped in and he closed the door.

  “What have you been doing in here?”

  “Why?”

  “My telephone practically exploded ten minutes ago. I got a call from someone named William Quintero at CIA. Do you know him?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Well, he knows you.”

  “How?”

  “What did you try to access?” Gamburian asked, nodding toward her computer. “Within the last fifteen minutes. Were you checking the Guarneri files?”

  “Yes. No problem with them,” Alex said. “Then I moved on to Michael Cerny. And I got blocked.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “ ‘Uh-oh’ what?” she demanded.

  “You got more than blocked,” Guarneri said. “You just won yourself a personal invitation over to Langley to explain why you wanted access. They phoned me since you reported to me.”

  “Then what’s going on with Cerny?”

  “Alex, if I knew, I’d tell you.” He paused. “Honest. Here’s what I know: first, you’re invited to go over to Langley tomorrow morning and view the file in person at the CIA. Nine a.m. Be there tomorrow morning, not here.”

  “What’s the second?” she asked.

  “I’ve been asked to clear your schedule in this department so you can travel.”

  “The Venezuela trip?”

  “You wish,” he said. “Wrong direction, Alex. From the tenor of the very angry phone call I just received, you’re on your way to Egypt.”

  TWENTY

  Victor, one of the Russians Janet and Carlos had seen that evening at the Royale, was peaceably having his dinner in a cafe in Old Cairo when the men in police uniforms arrived to see him. The squad of eight men surrounded him. Although apprehensive, Victor reacted calmly and asked the policemen in Arabic what he could do for them.

  The alpha cop, the one with the ranking insignia on his sleeve, that of a captain, responded with equal calm. “Just a few questions, sir,” the cop said. “First, could we see your identification?”

  Victor drew a breath. The local police, he knew, were a nuisance that had to be indulged in order to get business done, especially these street patrols run by low-level officers. Institutionalized extortion was what it was, but it was also the way things worked in this part of the world. So Victor was sure this was a setup for some sort of bribe. Well, it was the cost of doing business, he told himself, and his own bosses back in Russia paid him well to get his job done. So there was nothing much he could do other than to indulge these local hooligans.

  Victor produced his Russian passport and handed it to the head man, who looked at it thoughtfully and then returned it.

  “Maybe a word with you in private?” the lead cop suggested. With his eyes he indicated a passageway that led to an alley behind the restaurant. Victor wasn’t happy. His meal was only half-finished. These Egyptians were a pain beyond belief sometimes.

  Victor rose. He followed the leader of the police squad. They went into a dark lattice-covered alley behind the restaurant. For good measure, Victor carried with him his knife from the dining table.

  “Now, captain,” Victor finally said. “Let’s get directly to your business. What do you and your men want from me?”

  The captain’s eyes lowered and saw the knife in the Russian’s hand. The Arab shook his head. “Please,” he said. “There is no need for that.” He held out his hand and expected Victor to turn over the utensil.

  Victor gave it a long moment’s thought. He held out the knife, blade forward, as if deciding what to do. For a moment, he had the mad idea to plunge it through this pest’s palm. But he decided against that and gave the knife to the policeman.

  The man in the captain’s uniform accepted it with a smile. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”

  “Now,” said Victor, “perhaps you can finally tell me what you want.”

  There was a strange moment when nothing happened. Then Victor realized that the police squad had blocked all the doorways to the alley so no one could intrude on their meeting. Doors to restaurants were closed and curtains pulled for the men in police uniforms. In that moment, Victor suffered a flood of hot fear, but it was too late.

  From behind him a silk garrote was dropped deftly over his head. Two of the men surrounding him grabbed his arms. They held his upper body as he began to struggle. Someone else hit him in the face with a mallet, shattering his nose on impact, and then another person stuffed a rubber ball into his mouth so he couldn’t scream or breathe. Behind him, whoever was working the garrote yanked the noose tight.

  Victor’s powerful body kicked and fought, but the grip from behind was expert. The narrow cord cut like a razor into the flesh of Victor’s thick throat and severed all the important arteries. He was alive long enough to feel the excruciating pain that shot through him and the cascade of blood that burst from his wounds onto his chest.

  He dug his fingers into the area where the cord was, fighting for his life, violent curses bottled up in his throat but unable to burst free.

  Then he began to slump. Gradually, he stopped kicking. For Victor, there was unspeakable pain, then blackness.

  The noose was held in place for an extra half-minute just to make sure the job was complete. Then the body was left on the debris of the alley as the death squad moved away.

  Real Cairo police, who were not nearly as efficient as their imposters, would find the cadaver the next morning. An unmarked van would take it to the morgue and ready it for a speedy disposal.

  TWENTY-ONE

  At her uncle’s apartment, Janet stayed indoors. Her uncle was away for the day, catching up with some old friends from the State Department.

  She grew restless and depressed by the hour. She made herself a lunch and barely touched it. She watched Oprah, CNN, and a rerun of the previous night’s Washington Bullets game. She didn’t even like basketball. She watched anything that came across the television screen, but she wasn’t really watching.

  She read magazines, napped for a while, and browsed through her uncle’s library, which had books in seven different languages, including ancient Greek and Latin. She wondered why the old goat spent his declining years on such stuff when he could have been out romancing some wealthy widows. She spent time staring at the prints on the wall, a series of cool but sensual Cubist portraits of women from the 1930s. They weirded her out, as did many of her uncle’s tastes, even though the pop diva Madonna owned some of the De Lempicka originals. Well, if Madonna did something it was probably cool, and if her uncle did the same thing it was just terminally eccentric.

  But Janet did realize his apartment was her safety island. As far as she knew, no one who was after her knew where she was. And yet, when she wasn’t fighting fear, she was fighting boredom.

  Alex returned around 7:30 while Janet’s uncle was still out. Alex must have quickly picked up her protegee’s glum mood-she phoned her friend Ben and invited him to join them for an informal dinner. Ben, working on a law degree, said he could afford a break and would join them.

  After a long, depressing day, Janet was grateful for the company.

  Alex switched into jeans and pulled on a bulky sweatshirt that could conceal her Glock. She never went anywhere without the gun now; she had developed an affinity for it, like a favorite bracelet.

  Alex and Janet met Ben forty-five minutes later at the pub around the corner from the Calvert Arms. They started with beer and ordered burgers, all three of them. Alex’s head was still reeling from the day of reading and searching files. And then there was the sudden prospect of being sent to the Middle East.

  She wondered who was going to babysit Janet while she was away. She wondered if Ben could look after her a little, but she didn’t want to risk setting them up romantically. Then again, Alex didn’t entirely trust her own agency, and as she thought it through further, she did
n’t trust anyone she didn’t know in the CIA at all. Not now.

  She wondered: could Janet take care of herself? Was Janet’s paranoia real or imagined? Could she get out of town for a while, maybe crash with her parents? But if any bad people were really after Janet, would they look there?

  Okay, reality check again: even if Janet had stumbled across something involving Michael Cerny, it was a stretch to think people were after her. Alex tried to downplay it while she, Ben, and Janet drank beer and waited for the burgers to arrive. But some scary scenarios would not go away. Obviously, by trying to access Cerny’s name, Alex had kicked over a hornet’s nest.

  Their food arrived. They munched their burgers. Janet obviously felt more like a human being for having gotten out and socialized. Though Alex tried to stay away from it, the subject of the Middle East came up in general and Egypt specifically, when Ben asked Alex what her next trip might be.

  Janet gave Alex a strange look. Alex gave her a pat under the table as if to say, “Don’t press me for details now, I’ll explain later.”

  Ben, aware of the recent tragedy in Janet’s life, was always able to reach for some comedic banter. He tried to keep the mood from getting too somber, making jokes and gestures about old 1940s and 1950s horror films involving mummies. He got both Janet and Alex laughing.

  “Hey, and then there was the old Steve Martin routine, ‘King Tut,’ ” he said. “You know? The song and dance. Check it out on YouTube if you’ve never seen it.”

  “How’s it go again?” Alex asked. “ ‘When I die, don’t want nothing fancy but, gimme a royal sendoff like they gave to old King Tut.’

  “ Ben laughed with them. “Something like that,” he said. “I think Steve Martin had a back-up group called the ‘Toot Uncommons’ for that.”

  The laughter grew louder, along with a second and third round of Pabst. The mood grew goofier.

  “How about this?” Alex said, moving her arms in the quirky parallel aloft motion of the ancient figures on the tombs. “Tell me where this is from. ‘All the swell paintings on the tombs,’ ” she sang, splitting up the other two with her brew-inspired riff on “Walk like an Egyptian.” “ ‘They do some silly dance, don’t you know…’ ”

  She rolled her eyes and gave it her best Bangles-Susanna Hoffs imitation. The people at the next table applauded.

  “Oh, my gosh,” said Janet. “Remember that goofy “Walk like an Egyptian” video with everyone walking around funny?”

  “I was a little kid,” Alex said.

  “I was in seventh grade,” Ben said. “I was in love with all four Bangles. Still am, actually.” Ben laughed. “I should have worn a fez tonight.”

  They riffed on Egyptian stuff for a while, from Nefertiti to Nasser. Ben did his walking-like-an-Egyptian imitation with his arms and the women laughed again.

  “When I was in Egypt, most people walked normally,” Janet said with a bittersweet grin. “Until Carlos’s car blew up.”

  “I walked normally too, until I ran into a roadside bomb in Iraq,” Ben said. He tapped on his prosthesis. “But then I would never have met Alex if I hadn’t been rehabbing on the basketball court.”

  “And I wouldn’t have been leading a normal life again if I hadn’t met Ben,” Alex said. “God works in strange ways, right?”

  They walked back to the Calvert Arms later in the evening, a slight mist falling. Ben walked along with them, and both women felt as if they had exorcised a few demons over the evening. Two hours of beer and laughter with friends, and the world didn’t seem to be such a scary place. Janet felt better for being out of the apartment without incident, and Alex had calmed down a little concerning a possible trip to the Middle East.

  Let’s see if it even happens, she told herself.

  Alex watched the street just in case. She didn’t see any danger, but she continued to pay close attention to the configuration of cars on her block. That one car that she had been noticing recently, the battered old Taurus, wasn’t apparent when she did a quick scan of the block. A good sign perhaps. Potential stalkers, she reasoned, were illusory after all.

  They arrived uneventfully at the entrance to Alex’s building. Ben said good-bye.

  Janet and Alex entered the building.

  “Ben’s great,” Janet said. “He seems like a really good guy.”

  “He is.”

  “You’re lucky to have him.”

  “He’s a friend, not a boyfriend,” Alex answered.

  “So he’s available?” Janet asked.

  “Not for you.” She answered with half a laugh. “I might want to grab him for myself eventually.”

  “Got it. Well, you’re still lucky to have him,” Janet said.

  Against logic, Alex felt mildly taken aback by the question of Ben’s availability. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess he’s available. I know he’s got a job, goes to classes at law school on most evenings, and hits the gym two or three nights a week too.”

  “Wow.”

  “That doesn’t leave much time for dating, I’d guess.”

  The two young women stood for a moment in the lobby. Alex felt a little ill-at-ease with the personal topics. “Anything else you need to do?” Alex asked.

  “Like what?” Janet asked.

  “Any shopping?” Alex asked. “Groceries, maybe? How you doing on supplies?”

  “I could use a trip to the store,” Janet said.

  It sounded like a reasonable request. But it was after 11:00 p.m.

  “There’s a mini-mart a few blocks from here,” Alex said. “Would that work?”

  “That’d work.”

  Alex held up her car keys and indicated the steps from the lobby to the garage. “Let’s roll,” she said.

  Their car traveled up the ramp out of the garage. The mist had grown heavier and Alex flicked on the windshield wipers. She pulled into a flow of light traffic and didn’t think much of the coincidence when a parked car pulled into traffic about fifty feet behind her.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Alex drove eight blocks and spotted an open meter in front of the small 7-Eleven. The parking spot was small, but Alex knew she could squeeze her car in.

  Janet, feeling suddenly frisky, jumped out of the car before Alex could finish parking. “I’ll go ahead and start getting stuff,” she said. “See ya.”

  Alex was about to object, but Janet gave her the crazy walk-like-an-Egyptian arm movement again, followed by something reminiscent of the Steve Martin “Tut strut.”

  Still a little beery, they both laughed. Before Alex could suggest that she wait, Janet had walked through the automatic glass doors into the store.

  Alex parked. Then, in her rearview mirror, past the wiper that cleared the heavy mist, she saw a car pull into a No Parking spot close to the mini-mart entrance. She saw a man jump out of the car, and a second man, the driver, quickly followed. They were a pair of big men in dark jeans and black hoodies. The first man, who wore an overcoat over his hoodie, took one glance in Alex’s direction and forged onward into the store. The second man followed close behind. Alex felt a jolt go through her. Terrible vibes. There was something wrong with the way they were dressed, the way they swaggered, the way they went into the mini-mart on Janet’s heels.

  Heavy outer clothes. What were they hiding?

  Alex’s mind went into overdrive. In the back of her mind, she was processing something. The headlights of their car had been in her rearview mirror since pulling out from the parking garage. Under normal circumstances, she would have thought nothing of that. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Then too there was something about the first man, the quick furtive nature of his movements, that Alex didn’t like. She was three-quarters of the way into the parking place when she placed him. He was the man she had once seen sitting in a parked car on the block where the Calvert Arms stood. Alex kicked herself for letting Janet out of her sight for even a few seconds.

  Then Alex recognized the Taurus. It had been lurking somewhere, and sh
e had missed it. She was furious.

  She ripped the keys from her ignition and threw open the door. An oncoming car blasted her with the lights and honked, splashing her as it swerved and went around her. She ducked back in the rain. The driver yelled some profanity.

  Alex gestured back with the New York City turn signal, Robert used to call it, and kept moving. She turned toward the store and ran. Her hand went to her weapon, but she didn’t draw it yet.

  The suspicious car had left its doors unlocked but there was no one in it. Oh, Lord protect me, she thought. The wheels had been left pointing out and the driver had left a space of three feet between his car and the one in front. Standard smash-and-grab getaway parking position. Alex had seen it before and knew she would see it again.

  She also knew what she was seeing here. Trouble with a capital T. Alex burst into the store, looking in every direction.

  She didn’t see Janet.

  She didn’t see the two men.

  She looked down the first aisle, then a second. Still no one. She ran to a third, bumping into a woman with a cart. She turned a corner on an aisle and spotted Janet.

  “Hey! Janet!” she yelled.

  Janet turned, gave her a big smile. She had a plastic shopping basket on her arm and had already grabbed a few items.

  Alex made a sharp beckoning gesture with her hand. “Come here!” Alex hissed. “We got to get going. Now! ”

  “But we just got here!”

  “Now!” Alex called.

  She tried to make a gesture, pointing, that suggested imminent danger. She stepped quickly toward Janet. As a precaution she pulled her Glock out and held it to her side, as concealed as possible. The last thing she wanted was a close-in gunfight.

  Janet started to speak again. “But-?”

  “We’re leaving! Let’s go! ” Alex demanded. She walked to Janet and grabbed her wrist, pulling her.

  Janet resisted. “What the-?”

  “They’re in here! People who are after you!” Alex said.