The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  He believed sincerely in dedicating his powers of office to advancing the cause of opportunity and freedom for the ordinary people by whatever means it took, Soviet or Western. In bygone days, the moneylender traveled on the heels of the tax collector and saved the peasants from the lash by advancing loans to pay their dues; and then the foreign traders would buy the crop at forced giveaway prices to enable them to pay the moneylender. Kabuzak saw the descendants of those peasants now, living in high cities, sending their children to modern schools, and on their way to becoming proud, self-sufficient citizens of the twenty-first century. Allah made only one gift of life, after all. It was only proper and holy to see that the gift was appreciated, and the way to achieve that was to help people enjoy it.

  “Tonight we have dinner at seven with McCormick’s party,” Ali said.

  “Hmm,” Kabuzak grunted. That was duty, to be expected. Ali knew Kabuzak’s tastes well enough by now not to have left the evening’s arrangements at that.

  “Afterward, I’ve arranged for you to have a talk privately with their public-relations woman,” Ali said. “There appears to be a lot of misunderstanding of your position in the Western press, and it seemed a good opportunity for you to set the record straight.”

  Kabuzak hesitated in the act of closing his briefcase. “Eva… what’s-her-name?”

  “Eva Carne. Yes.”

  “Well she’s certainly nice and pretty, Tal, but does she?… I mean, would it be wise?”

  “I thought her company might also provide something of a stimulating aperitif,” Ali said. “Naturally there will be a more substantial main course to follow back here, afterward.”

  Kabuzak smiled with relief. And why not? What was good for the people was surely good, too, for their hard-working representatives. Even ministers needed a break sometimes. “A hint?” he said lightly as they walked toward the door.

  Ali made a circle in the air with his thumb and forefinger. “Oh, a choice speciality that combines the best of the Old World with the spice of the New. Slim, blond, German-American.”

  “She sounds delightful, Tal. Very well, let’s be on our way and put in a good day’s work. To really enjoy the little pleasures in life, one has to feel that one has earned them, eh?”

  The talks that morning were held at the Cairo Governate, east of the river near the various handsomely housed ministries. During the midmorning break, Talaat Ali withdrew from the general company for a while to attend to certain pressing items and to make some telephone calls. For one call, not included on his official list, he went to a public pay phone in the lobby. The call was answered by a man with a French accent.

  “ ’Allo?”

  “Jacques?”

  “Oui, c’est Jacques.”

  “Pasha here. Everything is arranged. The details are all as you requested.”

  “Very good. Your invoice will be cleared.”

  Which meant that by three o’clock that afternoon, one hundred thousand Egyptian pounds—worth almost the same number of U.S. dollars—would have been transferred to a numbered account opened in Ali’s name in Zurich. The rest would follow upon successful completion of the operation.

  • • •

  The public were excited and curious, and it was reflected in the attention that the media were giving to the occasion. In the room at the Cairo Governate where the interim press conference had officially ended fifteen minutes before, Stephanie, bathed in the glare of arc lamps and with microphones being thrust at her from all sides, was still answering the questions of at least two dozen journalists and TV reporters.

  “Our position is that in the longer term, any kind of giveaway program suffers from the same drawbacks internationally as it does domestically. Ultimately it creates dependency and prolongs backwardness.”

  “What alternative will the Constitutional party substitute?” a woman asked, scribbling in a notepad without looking up.

  “Unrestricted free trade. With a nation like the U.S., that has to be the best thing that could happen. In fact if the amendment goes through, it would become law.”

  “Would the U.S. continue to supply Israel with military equipment?”

  “I think that would best be left until after the visit there later this week. In any case, it’s a policy matter that the president should comment on after his inauguration.”

  “Could I have another two copies of the release that was handed out?” a man in a green jacket asked.

  “Sure. Here.” Stephanie reached into a box and passed them over.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  A woman in a red dress said, “In his statement earlier, Mr. McCormick said that one of the most important effects of the amendment would be to prevent the use of government force to eliminate business competition.”

  “That’s correct,” Stephanie said. “Government’s proper function is no more to protect a privileged business than to impose a favored religion.”

  A huge, rotund, jovial-looking man with a dark face, wearing a loose seersucker jacket and a bright red fez, moved to the front on one side of the table. “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you by any chance happen to have any signed pictures of Hector Newell—maybe a dozen?”

  “Pictures? Well, no, I’m afraid…” Stephanie began answering automatically, and then her voice trailed away as his words registered. She looked up in sudden shock. The man in the fez stood beaming at her. “Er, I think we’ve given the last one away, but I’ll check,” she said. “How can I contact you?”

  “I would be so grateful, if it’s no trouble. My card.” He handed her a calling card that read, HAMDI KEMMEL Antiques, Ornaments, Rare Books, Curios with an address and a Cairo phone number. Stephanie knew she should wait until later, but she was unable to resist lowering it below the edge of the table and turning it over to peek at it. Handwritten on the reverse side were the words, “Wherever else you wander, there’s no place like home,” with another number. She looked up again, but Hamdi Kemmel had already disappeared.

  “Ms. Carne?” a man in a white shirt was saying.

  “Er… excuse me?”

  “I said, why does the Constitutional party reject the notion of a centrally planned economy?”

  “It would have the same problems—of catering to self-serving interests.”

  “Could you explain that please?”

  “Well, look at it this way. What planner would permit a system that didn’t need any planners?”

  • • •

  When Stephanie finally got away to grab a snack lunch, it was after three in the afternoon. The time was two hours earlier over southern England, where a British Airways flight was climbing from Heathrow Airport, London, bound for Cairo. Aboard, having made a tight connection from Toronto, Melvin Shears slumped back in his seat and let himself relax for the first time since his departure from Washington. After a night flight across the Atlantic, his first impulse was to sleep. But the cabin crew would be serving lunch as soon as the plane made cruising altitude and leveled out. He would eat first and then sleep, he decided. As his mind unwound, his thoughts drifted back over the things he had learned in the last two days, the enormity of which he still hadn’t absorbed fully. Perhaps minds, like anything else, took time to adjust to big upheavals.

  A ruthless and systematic exploitation of the mass of humanity, perpetrated for the most part without care or compassion by the very powers that the people trusted most, and in the name of their own good. Mel was unable to comprehend the kind of mind that it took. Newell had said that it went largely unseen because such power-lust was beyond the comprehension of ordinary people, who became not only unwitting victims of the process, but its instruments also. Yet, at the same time, he was convinced that in the end, the forces arrayed against the tide of human evolution could no more check it than a summer breeze could reverse the tide. This was what Stephanie had meant when she said that nothing had been able to stop it in fifteen billion years.

  He thought
of Stephanie and how long it seemed already. He thought about Eva. He thought about Brett… Brett dead because of a teacher. Had Martha Brodstein known she was consigning students to be killed when she passed their names back as “potentially valuable”? Probably not. In all honesty Mel couldn’t hold that much against her, whatever else he felt. Brett’s first meeting with Oberwald had taken place almost three years before the accident.

  Why had Martha done it? Mel wondered. He remembered how she had been in the early days, involved with Paul’s work, helping the cause, being a part of the scene. Then she had seemed to fade into the background, eclipsed by more pressing things in Paul’s life as the movement gathered momentum toward the election. The resentment, the jealousy, had been there then, Mel could see now, which through some Freudian sleight of mind Martha had transferred to the female students, such as Eva. It was true, as Quintz had said, that Paul’s bubbling enthusiasm and open personality had made him very approachable and popular with them. And in all this time, Mel had known nothing of Martha’s confrontation with Eva…

  He hauled himself slowly upright in his seat, fully awake suddenly with that foreboding that comes a moment before something that has been lurking just below the surface finally penetrates consciousness. He picked once more through the last threads of thoughts that he could recollect. Sheldon Quintz had said that Martha had accused Eva of having an affair with Paul, and that after the subsequent row between them, Eva stayed away from the house. It wasn’t the kind of thing to be forgotten in a hurry… And yet Mel and Stephanie, posing as Eva, had gone breezing in, full of smiles and good cheer, just as if nothing had happened. Only then did the significance dawn on him of the strange way Martha had behaved when he and Stephanie went to Florida.

  Oh God! Mel felt himself turning cold as the realization of what it meant sunk in.

  Martha had known she wasn’t Eva. Therefore Martha knew she was Stephanie. Mel was on his way to warn Dave Fenner, via Stephanie, that Martha might have compromised him. But couriering for Dave wasn’t the only aspect that involved Martha. The people that she communicated to were also the ones that Brett had worked for. They were the ones who had already tried once to kill Stephanie. Never mind warning Dave in two days time; it was Stephanie who needed to be warned! And right now! It might even be too late already. Mel’s hands were already clammy from thinking about it.

  “Would you like something to drink, sir?”

  “Pardon?” Mel looked up. A cabin attendant was standing in the aisle with a refreshment cart.

  “Would you like a beverage?”

  “Oh, coffee, please… Ma’am, how long will it be before we reach Cairo?”

  “A little under six hours. We re due to land just after nine in the evening.”

  The red-bearded man on the other side of Mel grinned across over the paper he was reading. “It’s a long flight, eh? Hi. Name’s John. I do it all the time.”

  “It’s a long flight,” Mel agreed bleakly.

  • • •

  The mildness of Cairo’s January was a pleasant contrast to New York’s. Wearing a silk headscarf and a beige raincoat over a plain, pastel blue dress, the Lynx departed in the middle of the afternoon from the Nile Hilton, which stood in the row of hotels facing the river by the Tahrir Bridge. She had plenty of time to spare before her appointment, and strolled at a leisurely pace, map and tour guide in hand, eastward from the river toward the center of the city. At the wide, open expanse of Tahrir Square, she stopped to buy a Coca-Cola and a hot fried donut at one of the curbside booths, and then sat on a bench while she munched and sipped, watching the tide of every description of humanity ebb and flow around the fountains, flowerbeds, and stalls, where noisy men in colorful djellabas pestered passersby to buy peanuts and roast corncobs, hot dogs, and candies. There were garish plastic belts, cheap, mass-produced souvenirs, busts of Nefertiti in all sizes, and newspapers in Arabic, English, French, and Italian. On the far side of the square, the tawny frontage of the Old Egyptian Museum hunched like a fading grandfather against the white, upright modernity of the Nile Hilton, blocking the view to the river.

  Following her map, she walked from there along Kasr el Nil Street, and crossing opposite Groppi’s, a large and old, famous café at the convergence of two long avenues lined with shops and arcades, made her way to Opera Square. Swinging her purse casually and enjoying the sights, she traced her way between shady clusters of ilex trees and beds of scarlet and yellow cannas, and found the open-air café in the center that her instructions described. There, she took a seat at one of the sunshaded tables by a pool with a waterfall, ordered a Turkish coffee and baklava, and relaxed back in her chair to wait.

  According to her guidebook, the intricately embellished nineteenth-century Opera House had been built for the visit of a French empress—half of Cairo seemed to have been—and Verdi had been commissioned to write an opera in honor of the occasion. He wrote Aida, but the Franco-German war delayed production, and the first performance at the Opera House didn’t take place until two years later. As with everything else, the Old was giving way to the new, and the Opera House had ceded its dominance of the square to a white, modern skyscraper. The guidebook said it was the Telegraph Building. The huge equestrian statue in the middle of the square was of Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mohammed Ali—not a black heavyweight boxer, but a prince.

  The sound of a chair leg scraping on the ground made her look up. A tall, distinguished-looking man in sunglasses sat down at the table. He was in his early fifties, with tanned, aristocratic Gallic features and hair a shade too dark for his age not to have been tinted. He wore a yachting blazer with handkerchief showing in the breast pocket, red cravat and white shirt, light tan slacks, and white canvas shoes. In his hand he was carrying a small package in gift wrapping with a pink ribbon.

  “Punctual to the minute again. I’m getting to know your habits, Jacques,” the Lynx said.

  Jacques took off his sunglasses, folded them, and put them in his breast pocket. His eyes were gray, deep-set and weathered, and sparkly. “Some of us are busy people, my dear. For you this is more of a vacation than work.”

  “Oh, really? Care to trade places?”

  A waiter appeared, and Jacques ordered a Pernod. Then his manner became more serious and his voice dropped. “Everything is arranged as planned. There are no last-minute changes.”

  “Good.”

  “Let us just recap on the main points briefly. Kabuzak will meet the American girl privately in the main bar at Shepheard’s Hotel after the dinner there tonight. Thus, they will have been seen together, which is enough. Afterward, he will return to the Omar Khayyam for his date with you. Talaat Ali will have taken you in through a side entrance earlier in the evening and left you in Kabuzak’s suite. The security people know his ways and are used to looking the other way when women are brought in.”

  “Do I still meet Ali outside the Palmtree bar?”

  “Yes. He’ll pick you up there at eight sharp.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ali will then go to Shepheard’s and collect Kabuzak. When Kabuzak arrives, fuck his brains out and put him out of it by eleven. I’ll give you a drug for him that will last all night. It’s widely used as an aphrodisiac, and soporific overdoses are not uncommon. It’s important that the lethal stuff isn’t administered until later, after the American girl is there. Otherwise an autopsy might reveal inconsistencies. Got that?”

  “Jacques, don’t talk to me as if I were an amateur.”

  “I apologize. The American girl will be induced over to the Khayyam on a pretext. Ali will bring her in the same way and leave her in his suite, which adjoins Kabuzak’s. She’ll be there by eleven o’clock.” Talaat Ali, Kabuzak’s secretary, had agreed to set things up, but he wanted no part of it beyond that.

  “Okay,” the Lynx said.

  “How you handle it then is up to you. When you’ve put her out, move her through into Kabuzak’s suite, and then take care of both of them.” Jacques pushed the p
ackage across the table. “This contains the drug, dose premeasured, and the coup de grace: ricin in a DM SO carrier. It’s absorbed through the skin and lethal in under ten minutes, so for God’s sake be careful handling it. You wouldn’t be the first to terminate yourself instead of the target. That’s why it was picked for this job.”

  The Lynx nodded. “I’ve used it before.”

  Jacques shrugged. “And that’s how they will be found in the morning. Use your know-how to set the scene. The way we want it to be reconstructed is that the plan was for her to get into his room, screw him silly, apply the juice, and slip away without anyone being the wiser. But they overdid it with the drug and knocked themselves out. She tried to finish it when she came round, but was too groggy, bungled it, and got both of them. So I’d suggest soles of the feet for him, but splashed clumsily on palms or arms for her. Knock some furniture over. Leave her near the door, maybe with half her clothes back on. There should be semen traces—you know the kind of thing. When you’re through, let yourself out. There will be no need to see Ali again.”

  The Lynx nodded and had no more questions. She sipped her coffee and sat back, staring at the Frenchman curiously. “So what’s the angle? Are you out to shoot the Constitutionals down?”

  “Now, I think, you’re getting into aspects that don’t concern you,” Jacques said. “Just worry about enjoying the rest of your vacation. Have you thought about taking one of the boats up to Aswan afterward?…”

  CHAPTER 54

  Shepheard’s was an old name among Cairo hotels, but the original building had been burned down in 1952 and completely rebuilt in the sixties. It was after eight in the evening, and the dinner, which had been scheduled earlier than was customary, to cater to the American guests, was over. Stephanie was sitting with Mehemet Kabuzak in a booth on one side of the main bar opening off the lobby, sharing a pot of tea as they talked about Kabuzak’s image in the West, the eternal Arab-Israeli problem, and the differences and similarities between people the world over. He had indulged and laughed freely at dinner, and now as he talked easily and fluently, Stephanie couldn’t help becoming just a little captivated by his deep brown, lively, intelligent eyes. She had heard rumors about his amorous exploits, and could see how they could easily be true. In the present situation, however, apart from paying some glowing personal compliments that had seemed sincere, he had remained perfectly gentlemanly and confined his attentions strictly to business.