On the Lisbon Disaster

by Olen Steinhauer

  A random thing can do all this to you—a change in the weather, or a spot of blood on your shoulder—and all the progress you think you’ve made slips away, receding until it’s so far out of reach that you can’t even see it anymore. That’s when you know that progress doesn’t just recede; progress isn’t there in the first place.

  14

  Carl Jaspers’s office in the back corner of the U.S. Commercial Section smells of Chinese takeout, soy sauce and Kung Pao chicken that’s been consumed before my arrival. Outside his window lies an uninspiring stretch of Avenida das Forças Armadas, where traffic has been stopped because of demonstrations against austerity: signs held high; chants bleeding through the bulletproof glass. Against all odds, Carl is smiling at me from his desk. “Sit down, John. Sit down.”

  I pull up one of his stiff chairs and settle across from him. Two days later, my back is still sore, but that’s the least of my troubles.

  “Nice holiday?” he asks, full of boyish enthusiasm.

  “Slept, mostly.”

  “Good, good,” he says, his eyes wandering around the room before finally returning to me. “I have to tell you,” he says, “I wasn’t sure about you. Call it prejudice—against contractors, mind, not blacks—but when Andy added you to the detail I wasn’t particularly enthused. I thought you’d be a fifth wheel. Turned out you were the one wheel that kept the whole thing in motion.”

  I nod, because he seems to want some sort of recognition of his broadmindedness. Outside, a roar from the demonstrators.

  He says, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the others did a stellar job. Fiona, Andy, Sam, Joe—”

  “Jake,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Jacob Keenan. Jake, not Joe.”

  “Of course,” he says, rubbing his temple. “But sometimes one piece of bad luck can bring down a whole ship.” He finds something on his desk to touch, a ballpoint pen, then lets it go. “You can imagine how hectic things have been around here. We’ve got a team in from Langley, trying to sort through the mess.”

  I nod.

  “What I’m trying say, John, is that I’m frankly impressed. Fortitude and loyalty. These are things we appreciate in the Agency.”

  I wait.

  “I’ve passed this on to Cy Gallagher.”

  Cy is my boss at Global Security. His is the only opinion that truly matters. “Thank you,” I say.

  “He and I both agree that your immense talents would be put to great use in a more interesting sphere.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Cairo. A position just opened up in Cairo.”

  I stare at him, hesitating before asking, “A new position?”

  Carl shakes his head. “Support for the local station. The previous man—Global Security, too—passed away recently. Car accident.” Again, he shakes that head, raising a hand. “Nothing suspicious, mind. More bad luck. These roads,” he grumbles, then changes his tone. “This could be very good for you. A fresh start.”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse me?” he says, leaning forward.

  “Why send me away?”

  He opens his hands. “The police are looking for you, John. They may not know your name or your face, but they know there were two more people in that van. They found a notebook in the wreck. Mohammed’s name’s in it. Hell of a mess.” He pauses, allowing me a moment to connect the dots. “Fiona kept her mouth shut, of course, and now she’s back home, but the Portuguese are interested. And this is going to hang over your head for as long as you’re in this country.” He pauses, trying to read my silence, for I’m starting to learn the value of silence. “It’s a gift, John. Egypt is a great place to be. Friendly dictatorships always are. Stable, safe. A plum posting.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Say yes!”

  “I mean, to the investigators. The ones from Langley.”

  His smile fades. “I don’t think you need to worry about them.”

  “They’re not interested?”

  He sniffs. “I’ve kept you out of the paperwork. Consider that another favor.”

  “What about Mohammed?”

  “What about him?”

  Quietly, because a part of me doesn’t want to be heard, I say, “He was innocent, you know.”

  Carl’s ears have been trained by a lifetime in the spy trade. He can even hear through a fresh wave of chants. Also lowering his voice, he says, “No one’s innocent, John. Least of all Mohammed. Least of all you. He was as much a victim of that crash as our people were. Now put him out of your mind. Put everything out of your mind. Go home and pack for warmer weather.”

  It’s done. And it doesn’t matter how I feel about Cairo, or about Mohammed, because my job prospects have always been dismal. Be happy you’re just a tool, Jake told me. Let the big kids do the thinking for you.

  Okay, then. Think for me, please, and as soon as I leave this building I’m going to start drinking. I don’t know when, or if, I’m going to stop.

  “You’ll like it there,” he says as I reach the door.

  I look back.

  “Egypt,” he says. “Stability and calm. Hosni Mubarak doesn’t brook this kind of nonsense.” A thumb to the noisy window. “It’s an Arab success story. A place of progress.”

  “Progress?”

  He smiles, and it’s such a convincing smile that I try to believe him.

  Look, I understand the anger, Jake told me.

  “I’m sure I’ll be very happy there, sir.”

  Carl winks at me and says, “Good man,” but I know better.

  Read on for an excerpt from Olen Steinhauer’s masterful new thriller

  The Cairo Affair

  Follow the latest news from Olen at

  OlenSteinhauer.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Olen Steinhauer

  CHAPTER 1

  Twenty years ago, before their trips became political, Sophie and Emmett honeymooned in Eastern Europe. Their parents questioned this choice, but Harvard had taught them to care about what happened on the other side of the planet, and from the TV rooms in their dorms they’d watched the crumbling of the USSR with the kind of excitement that hadn’t really been their due. They had watched with the erroneous feeling that they, along with Ronald Reagan, had chipped away at the foundations of the corrupt Soviet monolith. By the time they married in 1991, both only twenty-two, it felt like time for a victory lap.

  Unlike Emmett, Sophie had never been to Europe, and she’d longed to see those Left Bank Paris cafés she’d read so much about. “But this is where history’s happening,” Emmett told her. “It’s the less traveled road.” From early in their relationship, Sophie had learned that life was more interesting when she took on Emmett’s enthusiasms, so she didn’t bother resisting.

  They waited until September to avoid the August tourist crush, gingerly beginning their trip with four days in Vienna, that arid city of wedding-cake buildings and museums. Cool but polite Austrians filled the streets, heading down broad avenues and cobblestone walkways, all preoccupied by things more important than gawking American tourists. Dutifully, Sophie lugged her Lonely Planet as they visited the Stephansdom and Hofburg, the Kunsthalle, and the cafés Central and Sacher, Emmett talking of Graham Greene and the filming of The Third Man, which he’d apparently researched just before their trip. “Can you imagine how this place looked just after the war?” he asked at the Sacher on their final Viennese afternoon. He was clutching a foot-tall beer, gazing out the café window. “They were decimated. Living like rats. Disease and starvation.”

  As she looked out at shining BMWs and Mercedeses crawling past the imposing rear of the State Opera House, she couldn’t imagine this at all, and she wondered—not for the first time—if she was lacking in the kind of imagination that her husband took for granted. Enthusiasm and imagination. She measured him with a long look. Boyish face and round, hazel eyes. A lock of hair splashed across his forehead. Beautiful, she thought as she fingered her still unfami
liar wedding band. This was the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with.

  He turned from the window, shaking his head, then caught sight of her face. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  She wiped away tears, smiling, then gripped his fingers so tightly that her wedding ring pinched the soft skin of her finger. She pulled him closer and whispered, “Let’s go back to the room.”

  He paid the bill, fumbling with Austrian marks. Enthusiasm, imagination, and commitment—these were the qualities she most loved in Emmett Kohl, because they were the very things she felt she lacked. Harvard had taught her to question everything, and she had taken up that challenge, growing aptly disillusioned by both left and right, so uncommitted to either that when Emmett began his minilectures on history or foreign relations, she just sat and listened, less in awe of his facts than in awe of his belief. It struck her that this was what adulthood was about—belief. What did Sophie believe in? She wasn’t sure. Compared to him, she was only half an adult. With him, she hoped, she might grow into something better.

  While among historical artifacts and exotic languages she always felt inferior to her new husband, in bed their roles were reversed, so whenever the insecurity overcame her she would draw him there. Emmett, delighted to be used this way, never thought to wonder at the timing of her sexual urges. He was beautiful and smart but woefully inexperienced, whereas she had learned the etiquette of the sheets from a drummer in a punk band, a French history teacher’s assistant, and, over the space of a single experimental weekend, a girlfriend from Virginia who had come to visit her in Boston.

  So when they returned to their hotel room, hand in hand, and she helped him out of his clothes and let him watch, fingertips rattling against the bedspread, as she stripped, she felt whole again. She was the girl who believed in nothing, giving a little show for the boy who believed in everything. Yet by the time they were tangled together beneath the sheets, flesh against flesh, she realized that she was wrong. She did believe in something. She believed in Emmett Kohl.

  The next morning they boarded the train to Prague, and not even the filthy car with the broken, stinking toilet deterred her. Instead, it filled her with the illusion that they were engaged in real travel, cutting edge travel. “This is what the rest of the world looks like,” Emmett said with a smile as he surveyed the morose, nervous Czechs clutching bags stuffed with contraband cigarettes, alcohol, and other luxuries marked for resale back home. When, at the border, the guards removed an old woman and two young men who quietly watched the train leave them behind, Sophie was filled with feelings of authenticity.

  She told herself to keep her eyes and ears open. She told herself to absorb it all.

  The dilapidated fairy-tale architecture of Prague buoyed them, and they drank fifty-cent beers in underground taverns lit with candles. Sophie tried to put words to her excitement, the magnitude of a small-town girl ending up here, of all places. She was the child of a Virginia lumber merchant, her travels limited to the height and breadth of the East Coast, and now she was an educated woman, married, wandering the Eastern Bloc. This dislocation stunned her when she thought about it, yet when she tried to explain it to her husband her words felt inadequate. Emmett had always been the verbal one, and when he smiled and held her hand and told her he understood she wondered if he was patronizing her. “Stick with me, kid,” he said in his best Bogart.

  On their third day, he bought her a miniature bust of Lenin, and they laughed about it as they walked the crowded Charles Bridge between statues of Czech kings looking down on them in the stagnant summer heat. They were a little drunk, giggling about the Lenin in her hand. She rocked it back and forth and used it the way a ventriloquist would. Emmett’s face got very pink under the sun—years later, she would remember that.

  Then there was the boy.

  He appeared out of nowhere, seven or eight years old, emerging from between all the other anonymous tourists, silent at Sophie’s elbow. Suddenly, he had her Lenin in his hands. He was so quick. He bolted around legs and past an artist dabbing at an easel to the edge of the bridge, and Sophie feared he was going to leap over. Emmett started moving toward the boy, and then they saw the bust again, over the boy’s head. He hurtled it into the air—it rose and fell. “Little shit,” Emmett muttered, and when Sophie caught up to him and looked down at the river, there was no sign of her little Lenin. The boy was gone. Afterward, on the walk back to the hotel, she was overcome by the feeling that she and Emmett were being made fools of. It followed her the rest of the trip, on to Budapest and during their unexpected excursion to Yugoslavia, and even after they returned to Boston. Twenty years later, she still hadn’t been able to shake that feeling.

  CHAPTER 2

  Her first thought upon arriving at Chez Daniel on the evening of March 2, 2011, was that her husband was looking very good. She didn’t have this thought often, but it was less an insult to Emmett than an indictment against herself, and the ways in which twenty years of marriage can blind you to your partner’s virtues. She suspected that he saw her the same way, but she hoped he at least had moments like this, where warmth and pleasure filled her at the sight of his eternally youthful face and the thought that, Yes, this one’s mine. It didn’t matter how brief they were, or how they might be followed by something terrible—those bursts of attraction could sustain her for months.

  Chez Daniel, like most decent French restaurants—even French restaurants in Hungary—was cramped, casual, and a bit frantic. Simple tablecloths, excellent food. She joined him at a table by the beige wall beneath framed sepia scenes of the dirty and cracked Budapest streets that made for hard walking but wonderfully moody pictures. As they waited for the wine, Emmett straightened the utensils on either side of his plate and asked how her day had been.

  “Glenda,” she said. “Four hours with Glenda at the Gellért Baths. Steam, massages, and too many Cosmopolitans. What do you think?”

  He’d heard often enough about the Wednesday routine she’d been roped into by the wife of his boss, Consul General Raymond Bennett. Always the Gellért Hotel, where Sophie and Emmett had spent part of their honeymoon, back when even students could afford its Habsburg elegance. Emmett said, “Anything exciting in her life?”

  “Problems with Hungarians, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I tell her to ask Ray to put in for a transfer, but she pretends it’s beyond her means.”

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “Am I anti-Hungarian, too?”

  “How are you doing here?”

  Sophie leaned closer, as if she hadn’t heard. It wasn’t a question she posed to herself often, so she had to take a moment. They’d lived for six months in Budapest, where Emmett was a deputy consul. Last year, their home had been Cairo—Hosni Mubarak’s Cairo. Two years before that, it had been Paris. In some ways, the cities blended in her memory—each was a blur of social functions and brief friendships and obscure rituals to be learned and then forgotten, each accompanied by its own menagerie of problems. Paris had been fun, but Cairo had not.

  In Cairo, Emmett had been irritable and on edge—a backfiring car would make him stumble—and he would return from the office itching for a fight. Sophie—maybe in reaction, maybe not—had built a new life for herself, constructed of lies.

  The good news was that Cairo had turned out to be a phase, for once they arrived in Hungary the air cleared. Emmett reverted to the man she had decided to spend her life with twenty years ago, and she let go of the puerile intoxication of deceit, her secrets still safely kept. In Budapest, they were adults again.

  Emmett was waiting for an answer. She shrugged. “How can I not be happy? A lady of leisure. I’m living the dream.”

  He nodded, as if it were the answer he’d expected—as if he’d known she would lie. Because the irony was that, of the three cities they had called home, Cairo was the only one she would have returned to in a second, if given the chance. There, she had found something liberating in the
streets, the noise and traffic jams and odors. She had learned how to move with a little more grace, to find joy in decorating the apartment with star clusters and flowers of the blue Egyptian water lily; she took delight in the particular melody of Arabic, the predictability of daily prayers, and the investigation of strange, new foods. She also discovered an unexpected pleasure in the act of betrayal itself.

  But was it really a lie? Was she unhappy in Budapest?

  No. She was forty-two years old, which was old enough to know good fortune when it looked her in the eye. With the help of L’Oréal, she’d held on to her looks, and a bout of high blood pressure a few years ago had been tempered by a remarkable French diet. They were not poor; they traveled extensively. While there were moments when she regretted the path her life had taken—at Harvard, she had aspired to academia or policy planning, and one winter day in Paris a French doctor had explained after her second miscarriage that children would not be part of her future—she always stepped back to scold herself. She might be sometimes bored, but adulthood, when well maintained, was supposed to be dull. Regretting a life of leisure was childishness.

  Yet at nights she still lay awake in the gloom of their bedroom, wondering if anyone would notice if she hopped a plane back to Egypt and just disappeared, before remembering that her Cairo, the one she loved, no longer existed.

  She and Emmett had been in Hungary five months when, in January, Egyptian activists had called for protests against poverty, unemployment, and corruption, and by the end of the month, on January 25, they’d had a “day of rage” that grew until the whole city had become one enormous demonstration with its epicenter in Tahrir Square, where Sophie would once go to drink tea.

  On February 11, less than a month before their dinner at Chez Daniel, Hosni Mubarak had stepped down after thirty years in power. He wasn’t alone. A month before that, Tunisia’s autocrat had fled, and as Sophie and Emmett waited for their wine a full-scale civil war was spreading through Libya, westward from Benghazi toward Tripoli. The pundits were calling it the Arab Spring. She had health, wealth, and a measure of beauty, as well as interesting times to live in.