Countdown in Cairo

by Noel Hynd

  Outside, two SUVs were waiting in the scorching sun, both with their motors running. Tony walked her to one of them. He opened the back door for her. As Alex stepped up to slide in, she saw the form of a man in the back seat. He was bare-headed with sandy-hair and sunglasses. He wore a beige linen suit. He had been waiting for her.

  Handsome devil, he was. Voltaire.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said. “On the other hand, I was sure I would.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t sure myself,” Voltaire said. “But you were of great value here in Cairo, so I wanted to see you off personally. There’s a final bit of business, then we’ll get you to the airport.”

  She waited. “What sort of business?” she asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  He engaged her in small talk for several minutes, and she gained the impression that he was stalling. Then she saw why. While her SUV and the neighboring one were poised and ready to go, a third vehicle swung into the driveway. It was an armored car. Green, the color of Islam, but with no markings.

  “Welcome to the world of espionage,” Voltaire said softly. “And what would the world of espionage be without payback?”

  “I’m not sure I like it,” she said.

  “What? Payback?”

  “No. The world of espionage.”

  “Ah! Who does? Often it’s like a disease. You didn’t choose to have it, it found you. And you’re in it now, my dear lady,” he said. “And you do excel at it. You have your own assets, your own nascent network. I’m very favorably impressed. Back and forth you went to Europe. You used the database in Washington as you worked; you helped us reel in some troublesome people here. You really did a formidable job. I’d work with you again any day.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “It could be construed as one. How’s that? Take it as an expression of praise only if you wish.”

  Voltaire motioned to the armored car. The rear door opened. No one got out. Two security people stood around the vehicle with machine guns, however.

  “What am I watching?” she asked.

  “The final act. We have our instructions from Washington.”

  She kept silent. Half a minute later, two guards brought Cerny out in wrist manacles and leg chains. They frog marched him to the armored car and roughly pushed him into the back. One of the guards went into the back with him, presumably to chain him to a seat. After a moment, the guard came out.

  Then they were underway, a small cortege of three vehicles, traveling at about twenty miles an hour down the paved road, through the sandy landscape of the barracks, through the gates, and into the outside world. Alex’s SUV was the second in the progression, and the third SUV followed them.

  “You have your luggage, your passport, everything you need for your return to America?” Voltaire asked.

  “I have everything,” she affirmed. For a moment, she started to relax.

  “Good. In a short while you’re going to feel very lucky to be leaving this dreadful place.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Where are they taking Cerny?”

  “Not far,” Voltaire laughed. “Remember those five agents of mine who were murdered? I did mention that, correct?”

  “No, I don’t remember that,” she said.

  “Oh. Dreadful oversight on my part,” he said in a voice that indicated that it wasn’t. “See, that’s part of my personal tab with Mr. Cerny. I’ve lost people here in Egypt thanks to him. Same way you lost someone in Kiev, same way that girl lost her boyfriend via the car bomb at the hotel. Compris?”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said.

  Watching over the shoulder of Tony, the driver, through the front windshield, Alex saw the armored car accelerate and pull away from them. It went from being fifty feet ahead of them to one hundred feet, and then to maybe one hundred and fifty. And as the armored vehicle pulled away, she felt Tony ease up on the gas. He allowed the interval between cars to grow.

  Then the SUV from behind them did something that at first appeared crazy. It overtook Alex’s vehicle and went speeding beyond them. Everything played out as if it were slow motion. The armored car up ahead pulled to the side of the road and its driver and its guard jumped out. They walked with a leisurely pace away from their vehicle as the trailing SUV pulled to an abrupt halt behind it.

  Two executioners stepped out, their feet hitting the ground almost before the car had stopped, Uzis across their chests. Tony eased to a crawl, and they continued to approach the scene of the stopped vehicles. But Tony didn’t overtake them. He slowed almost to a halt and stayed distant.

  The armed men went to the gun portals in the armored car and pushed their own automatic weapons inward. The van wasn’t so much a security vehicle now as much as it was an execution chamber. As Alex watched, she knew that Cerny was a dead man this time. And he probably even knew it himself. She didn’t hear him scream, but she was sure he did.

  Even over the air-conditioning of their van, Alex could hear several seconds of gunfire. There must have been fifty shots all fired into the armored car. The man in the back, no doubt chained into the most vulnerable position, had no chance at all.

  The gunmen followed with a second burst and stepped back.

  They gave Tony a wave and he accelerated. Seconds later, they passed the armored car. The gunmen were masked with light camouflage kerchiefs, and Alex could not see their faces. Nor would she have wanted to. The armored car was surrounded in a small noxious cloud of gun smoke, and the men waved to them as Tony’s vehicle slid past. Then Alex looked away, feeling nauseous.

  “There,” Voltaire said calmly. “That’s done. Excellent.”

  Alex was silent.

  “Which airline again?” Voltaire asked her. “Swiss International? That’s a good choice. Can’t go wrong with Swiss International. I understand the hors d’oeuvres are excellent.”

  Several minutes passed before Alex answered.

  FIFTY-THREE

  On December 24, Alex observed her thirtieth birthday. The event was a bittersweet occasion, considering the events of the year. But she celebrated with a small group of friends in Washington. As was frequently the case with her birthday, falling on the day it did, it was a half-Christmas half-birthday celebration. Friends from work filtered in, as well as friends from the gym. Don Tomás dropped by to speak five languages and keep everyone amused. And once again, Alex missed Robert horribly.

  She went to a Christmas Eve service at her church in Washington and then went home alone. On Christmas morning, she did something unusual. She slept.

  Over the next two days, she packed. The job in New York had been offered to her, and she had accepted it. The moving men arrived on the twenty-seventh. Her personal bags were packed and stashed in the trunk of her car. The listening devices she had personally disabled. One morning when she was out for a walk, she threw them into the Potomac.

  As the moving men worked, she dropped by a few of the establishments that she had patronized in the neighborhood. She said her good-byes.

  When she went back to her apartment, it was empty. She stood and looked at it for a long, cold moment. An instinct told her to take a walk through and then another instinct warned her not to. Enough was enough. She closed the door.

  She rapped softly on Don Tomás’s door to say good-bye.

  He answered. She gave him a shrug and tried to keep her eyes from welling. He did much the same. Then they embraced in a wordless hug. He had been as close to family as anyone in the last days—older brother, uncle, and advisor. She would miss him.

  Then she went down to her car.

  She turned the key in the ignition, came up out of the garage, and left her block for the final time as a resident. She drove past the monuments again and then watched them recede in her rearview mirror. Thus, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon, Alex moved out of Washington and drove north to New York.

  By this time, Janet, her protégée, had found her own friends, her own apartment, and a new j
ob. She was happy, living in Brooklyn, and anxious to introduce Alex to her new boyfriend, who—against Alex’s best advice—was one of her former bodyguards.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Six weeks later, Alex was at her desk in her new office in Manhattan when her cell phone rang. She glanced at the LED and read the incoming number.

  She recognized the country code: 39. Italy. She also recognized the number.

  She smiled. She picked up. “Ciao, Gian Antonio,” she said.

  He laughed. “I should be used to the technology by now, but I’m not,” he said in English. “You know who’s calling before you answer.”

  “Consider yourself flattered,” she said. “I knew it was you and I picked up.”

  “I’m deeply humbled, Signora,” he said with evident amusement.

  She glanced at her watch. “What time is it there?”

  “Evening,” he said. “So buona sera,”

  “Buona sera.”

  Within a minute, he moved to the objective of the call. “Your Russian has lost track of you,” Rizzo said.

  “Which Russian?”

  “There’s more than one? Federov. He’s been quite ill, you know.”

  “I knew he was ill,” she said in a more somber tone. “I didn’t know how ill he was. Where is he?”

  “Geneva,” Rizzo said. “He’s residing in a place called Le Clinique Perrault.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  There was a heavy pause. Rizzo’s voice assumed a grim tone. “He’s in a—What do you call it in English?” he asked. He switched to Italian to be clear. “Uno ospedale per i malati in fase terminale. Un ospizio.”

  “A hospice,” Alex said, her chair moving forward. It took a moment for it to sink in. “Terminale?” she asked, making sure she had heard right.

  “Terminale,” he said again.

  “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “He phoned me. He says there is something enormously important,” Rizzo continued, changing back to English. “And he will only talk to you.”

  “Give him my number,” she said gently. “He can phone me anytime that he—”

  “No, no. He wishes to speak to you—and only you— in person,” Rizzo advised.

  She sighed and felt the weight of the news. “Gian Antonio, I’m beat. I just started a new job in New York. I don’t know whether I have another trip in me right now. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I know, I know,” he said. He paused. “Advise me what flight you will be on. I’ll meet your flight in Geneva. Would that make it any easier?”

  “I didn’t say that I was going.”

  “Not yet, you didn’t, no,” Rizzo said. “But I know you very well by now, Signora Alex,” he said. “I doubt if you’d turn down the request of a man who is so gravely ill.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Alex?”

  “Si, Gian Antonio?”

  “You should come as quickly as you can.”

  Two mornings later, the February sky in Geneva was gray and grim, much as it had been almost exactly a year earlier in Kiev on a similarly fateful day. Alex had taken a direct flight from New York. Gian Antonio Rizzo was at the airport in Geneva waiting reliably for her.

  Their taxi drove them through the center of the city, past the Hotel de Roubaix from which Alex had been abducted. Then, five minutes later, they arrived at the Clinique Perrault on the rue Joffrin in central Geneva. The cab pulled onto the gray gravel of a wide semicircle driveway that formed the front courtyard of the medical clinic.

  The driver hopped out of the cab and hurried to open the door for Alex. A small flock of startled pigeons fluttered upward from the driveway as she stepped out. The birds took roost within the crevices of the ornate façade of the Clinique, where they lurked and watched her arrival. It was all inconsequential to them.

  Alex reached for the wallet in her purse, but Rizzo, ever a gentleman around those he respected, waved her off and paid for the ride from the airport. He tipped the driver generously. They both carried only overnight bags. Then another sense of déjà vu was upon her—an unwelcome flashback to Kiev again—as a slight snow had begun to fall.

  Always, in her mind, there had been a light snow in Kiev. At Robert’s funeral there had been a light snow. When the RPGs had been incoming at Mihaylavski Place there had been a light snow. What might God be trying to tell her? She didn’t know.

  She shivered, not from the temperature. The cold had been much worse elsewhere recently, and so had the sense of doom and foreboding and sadness. A few moments later, they were in a starkly modern but serene lobby. They presented themselves to the visitors’ desk, showing their passports. They registered properly as visitors and were directed toward a bank of elevators that would take them to Federov’s room on the fourth floor.

  Rizzo continued to speak Italian. “It might be better if I waited down here,” he said.

  “I think it might.” Alex agreed.

  She gave Rizzo a nod. He gave her hand a squeeze. Alex continued to the elevators, and Rizzo went toward the sitting area in the lobby.

  Moments later, she was on a floor of the Clinique where a middle-aged nurse named Naomi directed her toward Salle 434. The signs on the floor were in four languages. Very Swiss. French, German, Italian, and English, tacked on almost as a conceit. Every letter and word was perfect.

  In the back of Alex’s mind a little spark of absurdity danced forth: Naomi had also been the name of one of the girls at the nightclub in Kiev where Alex had knocked back too much vodka and had allowed herself too much time within Federov’s grasp. This was a day, it was clear, for heavy ironies.

  Well, she decided, she had come a long way from there. They both had, and it didn’t seem to matter much anymore, did it? Or did it?

  She proceeded down the hall. She was on an expensive wing of the hospice.

  Only the best for Federov, she mused. He had earned it, but in some ways he hadn’t. The door to Salle 434 was open. Moments later, her mind teeming, Alex peered in.

  She suppressed a gasp. The vision shocked her. The man in the bed was Yuri Federov, but not the Yuri Federov that she remembered. The man she remembered was strong and vibrant. This was an extremely sick man, attached to tubes, wires, and monitors. He lay in the bed with his eyes closed, his mouth open, his head tilted at an angle as he appeared to sleep, his face pallid.

  Across his chest was an open book with a Russian title. She couldn’t see it clearly yet. The book was positioned as if it had slipped from his hands when he fell asleep reading.

  With a shudder, and a conscious summoning of willpower, she stepped into the room. She moved quietly. Like a giant cat, however, Federov woke instantly—first one eye opened, then the other.

  It took a moment for his gaze to register an identity to go with Alex’s presence, but when it did, some of the fear and sadness washed away from his face. Under the circumstances, he looked pleased.

  “Ah!” he said in English. “Bless you, Alexandra!”

  “Hello, Yuri,” she said.

  “Heaven exists for me after all. My angel has arrived.”

  “It’s just me,” she said. “Just an overgrown American kid from California.”

  His smile widened.

  “You’re the person I most wished to see,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

  He motioned to the book that lay open across his chest. “I’m taking your advice, you can see, hey?” he said. “Catching up on the classics.”

  She looked at the jacket of the book.

  He smiled, as if in a small victory.

  “Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,” she said. “Very good, Yuri. I’m proud of you.”

  “I’m told it is the greatest of Russian novels,” he said. “And I’m told I should read it before I die.” He laughed. “Well, it might be a close call,” he said. He motioned to all the wires and tubes and monitors.

  “It started with lung cancer,” he said dryly, as if announcing a losing football score. “That’s
why I was in New York. Then it spread. Rather than being a typically slow and pokey cancer, mine was pure and aggressive. Presurgery Gleason scores of 9 or 10. Do you know what that means?”

  “It’s not good,” she said.

  “The higher the number on this scale of 10 the worse the news. So I had ten.”

  Despite everything, she felt a caving, tumbling feeling within her. She bit a lip as she settled into a chair beside the bed.

  His gaze traveled the length of her, up and down, toe to head, taking her in. Then it settled into her eyes.

  “I’m very sorry. I’ll pray for you,” she said. “And anything else you’d like.”

  Somehow he had the energy and nerve to raise an eyebrow, almost flirtatiously. “Anything?” he asked.

  “Within reason,” she said.

  He managed a sad smile and a laugh that was so weak that she was appalled. A rasp in his voice made him sound like a much older man. She had been ready for this but not really ready. Then again, what might one expect in a hospice? Not stand-up comedy.

  “Well, I don’t necessarily listen to the doctors,” he said. “I know I have more time than they tell me. And as for the book, I’ve already finished it. But I don’t think I understood it, hey? So I’m reading some sections again. Seems to me in the book, everyone is very unlucky with trains and train stations. Even the brat with the toy trains at the beginning. And then there’s the part you’d like. This ‘Lev,’ he’s not a Jew, even with a Jew name, or maybe he is. He ends up accepting the Christian God at the end.”

  “That was a recurring theme of Tolstoy,” she said.

  “What? Tricky Jews?”

  “No, the acceptance of Christianity,” Alex said. “Tolstoy was greatly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount. Much of his philosophy of peace followed from it.”

  “And you know this from your study of literature or from your knowledge of your faith?”