A Gentleman's Game (30 page)

“The Prophet was a servant, Nia, just as we are servants. Glory is to Allah, praise Him, not His servants.”

“I don’t think Allah is so hard-hearted, Sinan. I don’t think Allah who taught Muhammad the True Religion thinks so poorly of His creation, of His children. Even the children who do not share the Truth, even them, we are taught to respect the People of the Book, to honor Jews and Christians, not to kill them.”

“The Jews were turned to apes and swine, Nia, because they turned away from the Truth. The Christians forsook the One God and now worship many, their money, their possessions—”

“But they aren’t, Sinan! They aren’t pigs or apes, they’re not animals! They don’t worship their money, they only
have
money!”

Matteen, ahead of Sinan, turned south, now heading down Sharia Amerika al-Latineya. Sinan tried to spot her, looking about frantically, and he saw the grounds to the American Embassy down the block, the guards and barricades, and he slowed as he reached Matteen, trying to conceal his anxiety, lowering his voice again.

“Nia, listen to me,” Sinan said. “You trust me, right?”

“Of course I do, Sinan.”

“You had a friend, you told me about him. You loved him. Think about him, Nia, think about what happened to him, and what he would want from you.”

There was silence, and Sinan thought that maybe he’d reached her.

Then Nia said,
“He wanted peace, Sinan. More than anything, he wanted peace. As all Muslims want peace.”

Matteen had stopped, looking at him with anxious curiosity. The remote was still in his hand.

“Where are you, Nia?” Sinan asked.

“I’m on the corner.”

“Which corner?”

“Sharia Maglis Ash-Shaab.”

“I can’t see you.”

“I know.”
Nia’s voice quavered.
“I can’t do it, Sinan. It’s wrong. I’m sorry, but if I am going to go to Paradise, I want to earn it through good works and good words, not like this. Not as a martyr. I’m sorry, Sinan.”

“As am I,” he said, and he reached out to the remote in Matteen’s hand, and he pressed the two buttons in quick succession, the right, then the left.

They heard the explosion, and then the screams, and Matteen stared at Sinan, dumbstruck, as Sinan lowered the phone, turning it off. He felt his eyes beginning to burn with tears, saw frantic people running past him, crying and yelling, heading both toward and away from the site of the explosion.

“What did you do?” Matteen asked him hoarsely.

“I saved her,” Sinan answered, and started down the block again, to see who Nia had claimed on her way to Paradise.

42

Egypt—Cairo, Islamic Quarter, Sharia Muski
20 September 1018 Local (GMT+3.00)

There’d been a bombing
in the Garden City, near the American Embassy, and, ironically, that was what allowed Chace to kill Muhriz el-Sayd.

She’d arrived in Cairo late the night before, taking a room at the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel, known for its opulence in catering to Westerners and its hopping casinos. She was still running on the DuLac identity, and it made her nervous, because she didn’t know how much longer it would last. Box would have gotten the passenger list for the Eurostar train she and Wallace had caught, would have gone over every name with a microscope, then put out a watch, seeing if any of those travelers appeared anywhere else. If they suspected she had headed to Israel, it wouldn’t take them long to find Monique DuLac on an Air France passenger list.

So she was quite possibly running blown.

After waking early, Chace bought two city guides from the hotel gift shop and a copy of the
Cairo Times,
an English-language weekly, more an oversized magazine than a newspaper. She spent her breakfast poring over the guidebooks, ignoring the paper for the time being. Borovsky had given her three possible locations to look for el-Sayd, places he was rumored to frequent, all of them in the Islamic Quarter, cafés and restaurants where he hid among sympathetic owners and employees, shielded from the Cairo police. None of the locations appeared on her map, and with a resigned sigh, Chace resolved to check each by foot.

Finishing her meal, she went to the desk and checked out of the hotel, then tossed one of the guidebooks in the trash on her way out—the weaker of the two—sliding the other into her hip pocket.

The newspaper she rolled loosely and tucked inside her jacket.

•

It wasn’t yet nine in the morning, and Cairo was already accelerating to full bustle. She threaded through the thickening pedestrian traffic to the nearest Metro station, then took the subway into the Islamic Quarter. When she came aboveground again, it was just past eight-thirty, and the streets were much quieter than in downtown. She took in the medieval architecture, orienting herself to the Mosque of Mohammad Ali, its silver domes shining in the morning light, atop the Citadel, then made her way on foot toward the Khan al-Khalili, the commercial heart of the quarter.

Vendors were already laying out wares, beginning to line the streets and alleyways, selling everything from spices to souvenirs. Chace passed a stand of beautifully crafted glass bottles, another of handcrafted waterpipes, a third of children’s toys, cheap plastic robots with flashing red eyes and mechanical shouts that urged her to halt. It was growing noisier, voices raised to be heard over the traffic.

Chace stopped on the east side of the market, opposite the Mosque of Sayyidna al-Hussein, checked her guidebook. A passerby stopped, a man in his late forties, asking her in French if she was lost, if she required any assistance. She answered him in English, and he surprised her by asking the question again, also in English.

“The carpet bazaar,” Chace said. “Which way is it?”

The man smiled, pointed back toward the west and south. She thanked him and wished him a good day.

“Inshallah,”
the man said with a smile, and continued on his way.

Chace started in the indicated direction, heading for the Al-Ghouri Complex, the combination mausoleum-and-
madrassa
with its red-striped minaret. Across the street from it, on Sharia Azhar, she found the first of the possible locations Borovsky had proposed, a narrow café, just opening for the day. She stepped inside and ordered herself some tea, sitting at a narrow table on an even narrower bench to drink it, while taking in the location.

There was no sign of el-Sayd, but she hadn’t expected there to be. She had serious doubts about her ability to find the man at all. Cairo was one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and even with her choice of three possible locations, the chances of el-Sayd being in one at the same time as she was seemed ludicrous at best. Worse, he could be present, in the back or on a floor above, and she would never know it. Asking the staff if they had seen the man wasn’t likely to be of much help, either.

She finished her tea, then checked her watch, saw it was only half-past nine. She headed back out onto the street, up to Sikket al-Badestan, heading west, stopping occasionally to peer at the items on display in windows and at stalls. If she’d exposed herself by stopping for tea, there was a chance she’d acquired a watcher, especially if Borovsky’s intel was to be trusted, and the locations were hot spots for the EIJ.

But Chace saw no one who alarmed her.

The next stop was an Internet café, surprisingly busy, eighteen terminals in two rows of nine, all of them occupied by young men gulping down coffee, tea, soda, snacking on chocolates and nuts and fruit. Every last one of them seemed to be doing two or three things at once, chasing hyperlinks as they carried on conversations with their neighbors, tapping away at e-mails as they listened to the pop music playing from the radio behind the cashier’s counter. Chace chose a seat near the door, ostensibly to wait for an opening at one of the computers, took out her copy of the
Cairo Times,
pretending to read.

There was no sign of him here, either.

Chace tried to keep her thoughts productive, tried to formulate a plan, but the sad truth of the matter was that
this
was the plan, and she didn’t think it was a very good one. There was a reason el-Sayd had managed to survive for twelve years on the Mossad’s hit list, and it wasn’t by accident. If Borovsky had truly known where the man was, Landau would have sent one of his Metsada boys after him long ago. That they hadn’t, meant that what Borovsky had given Chace was their best guess, but for all any of them knew, el-Sayd could have been holed up at Heliopolis or Giza or somewhere else entirely, perhaps even out of the country.

These were her thoughts and they infected her mood, and she was beginning to brood when she realized that the music had stopped and a man’s voice was now speaking somberly on the radio. At every workstation, hands became idle, heads turned to better hear the sound. One of the young men present called out to the man behind the counter, and Chace’s weak Arabic couldn’t keep up, but she guessed he’d asked that the radio be turned up, because that was what happened next.

She leaned forward to the nearest person, a man no older than eighteen, trying to sport a mustache.
“Min fadlak, law samahti. Hal tatakalam engleezee?”

He turned from the direction of the radio, reluctant, still listening. “English?
Naam,
a little.”

“Has something happened?”

The teen frowned, shook his head. “They are saying a, what is it? A bomb? A bomb has gone off near the American Embassy.”

“Oh, no,” she said, convincingly horrified. “That’s awful.”

“Yes, the police, they are looking for the ones who did it.”

“Good, that’s good.”

Chace sat back in her seat, taking in the room with new eyes. The reactions seemed to be much along the lines of the young man she’d just spoken with, but not all of them, and it struck her that if, in fact, el-Sayd had connections to the owner or employees here, the news might force them to move. Not the bombing itself, but perhaps the threat of the police. Cairo thrived on tourism, and the EIJ attacks on the tourists at Luxor in 1996 had hurt.

The police would respond quickly, trying to keep that financial disaster from happening again.

But none of the men at the workstations seemed to be looking to leave. If anything, they were at the computers with renewed enthusiasm, trying to glean news from the Internet. Chace looked past them, saw that the man behind the counter was speaking on the telephone. Beyond him there was a door, presumably to a back room, and Chace wondered if there was a back door as well.

She got up and stepped outside, crossing the street and buying a pair of very cheap but surprisingly good-looking sunglasses from a vendor, all the while keeping one eye on the café door. One of the young men from inside emerged as she was haggling on the price and headed west along the street. Chace handed over an Egyptian five-pound note and started off in pursuit, taking her time, sticking to her side of the street.

Her initial uncertainty vanished when she realized she was having to almost jog to keep up. The man was clearly in a hurry to get someplace, and although he didn’t seem to be even remotely concerned with possible tails, his haste and the traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, were enough that Chace twice lost sight of him altogether, before he veered south off the street into a narrow alley crammed with stalls.

She lost sight of him for a third time around a bend that made her think back to the dogleg in Lambeth, where she’d tried to flush Box. She stopped abruptly, turned, feigning vague interest in a collection of bootleg CDs offered at the nearest stall, counting the seconds in her head.

He didn’t come back.

Chace continued around the bend, hoping she hadn’t lost too much time, hadn’t lost him, and nearly cursed when she couldn’t immediately find him. The alley dumped out onto Sharia Muski, heavy with traffic.

She couldn’t see him and swore aloud.

Then she heard sirens, turned to look up the street, seeing three police cars, blue lights flashing, attempting to make their way in her direction through the clutter on the road. Chace looked back to the storefronts, seeing shops, restaurants, cafés, stall after stall, and people were looking at the oncoming cars, staring and wondering, and among them she saw her man, his reaction giving him away, moving while others stood still, ducking through the narrow door of a tattered shop.

Chace hurried forward to follow, feeling the pain in her knee return with a gentle thrum, as if cautioning her. As she had done with every other warning she’d received in recent memory, she ignored it.

The café was easily the most cramped and smoke-filled establishment she had ever been inside in her life. Perhaps a foot of clearance ran between the tables on the one side and the wall along the other, and with patrons seated, the room to move was halved again. Two sets of doors stood at the rear of the room, one on the far right wall, the other directly ahead of her.

As soon as she entered, every eye went to her, staring, and most of them were overtly hostile. The door at the back opened and a middle-aged man shaped like a tree stump emerged, carrying a tray, and at almost the exact same time the other door opened, on the right, and the man she’d been following emerged, looking much relieved.

The sirens outside were very loud, the cars coming to a stop.

That was what did it for her, what threw the switch, made Chace certain this was the place. Somewhere on the other side of that door on the right was el-Sayd, but he wouldn’t be for long, and she had to move, and she had to move now.

She couldn’t go through, so she went over, stepping on the thigh of a very startled man to get atop his table, and then half-running, half-hopping, knocking over cups and glasses, splashing drinks and spilling food, making her way to the door. Everyone seemed to be shouting at her at once, and as she came down off the last table, driving her good knee into the chest of the man she’d tailed, she heard new voices and new shouting as the police came through the entrance.

Her Arabic was good enough that, even in the confusion, she understood they were shouting for her, for everyone, to stop. She didn’t.

Crashing through the door, she found herself at the base of a narrow and rickety flight of stairs. She started up, craning her head, reaching into her coat for the newspaper. Above her, the air swirled with disturbed dust, and she thought she heard footsteps, heavy, a man’s, but, with the noise coming from the café behind her, couldn’t be sure.

She ascended, two, three steps at a time, her eyes fixed above as the stairs turned at the landing, continued climbing, only glancing down to be certain of her footing. In her hands as she went, she began rolling the newspaper tightly, the wrong way, from the bottom instead of the side, trapping and compressing the spine on one end, hardening its edge.

On the third floor, she heard a door bang open, and new daylight flooded the stairwell, and she caught a glimpse of a shoulder and head disappearing onto the roof. It was el-Sayd, she was sure of it now, and she remembered how he’d looked to her in San’a’, how big a man he was, and she wished the damn Mossad had given her a gun.

She sprinted, and her knee hated her but supported the weight, and when she burst out on the roof, he was there, thirty feet away, at the edge. She started toward him, but he’d already made the jump, disappearing, and when she reached the edge, he was already halfway to the next roof. The gap was short, no more than five feet, and the drop was at least that far, if not a couple more, and without hesitating Chace leaped after him. She landed on her feet, and he had already jumped to the next, and she raced after him, hurdling the ledge, sprawling this time, rolling back to her feet, the newspaper in her right hand.

He heard her tumble, and maybe because she hadn’t said anything yet, maybe because the sound of her hitting the rooftop wasn’t the sound he had expected, el-Sayd glanced back, then stopped cold, surprised. He’d been expecting a cop, Chace realized, not this blond Caucasian woman brandishing a newspaper instead of a weapon, and el-Sayd said something to her in Arabic, curt, and Chace understood he was insulting both her lineage and her anatomy, reaching around behind his back.

There were fifteen feet between them as he started to bring his gun around, and she closed it before he had his shot indexed to her, both hands on the rolled-up paper, now holding it low, to her right. She brought it up hard, the cruel edge of the hardened spine scything at his wrist, and el-Sayd screamed in surprise. The gun went off, wide, frighteningly loud, and he dropped the weapon, jerking his hand back reflexively. For an instant, he just gaped at her in wild disbelief.