The Cairo Affair (12 page)

Besides the how-are-yous and let-me-help-yous they didn’t speak in the airport, and on the way to the parking lot she only said, “It’s warm here.”

“I suppose it is.”

“I’d forgotten.”

It wasn’t until they were in the car, heading out of the airport and onto the long, well-lit El-Orouba Road into town, that he said, “Tell me about it, Sophie.”

“Do I have to?”

“You don’t have to do anything. But maybe you’d like to tell me why you’re in Cairo. I thought you’d be heading home.”

He got silence for his efforts, and when he looked over her face was twisted in an expression he recognized: eyes sad and the left corner of her lips sucked in, held tight between her teeth. It was a look of guilt—she had sometimes worn the same expression after their trysts.

“You’re here for a reason.”

Gazing at the passing streetlamps, she said, “It just seemed like the place to be. He—Emmett—was talking about Cairo before. It. Happened.”

“What about Cairo?”

“About a woman we knew a long time ago. Serbian. She was in Cairo, too.”

Stan had to concentrate on his hands to make sure he didn’t jerk the car off the road. Who else could she have been talking about? “Does she have a name?”

“Zora Balašević.”

He breathed through his nose, waiting, but she said nothing. “How did you know her?”

“Honeymoon. Back in ’91. We went to Novi Sad. I didn’t tell you?”

“Only that you’d been there.”

“The war was getting started,” she said, but didn’t continue.

“So he was talking about an old friend of yours.”

“Sort of. But we hadn’t seen her in twenty years, then she popped up in Cairo. They had lunch.”

“Why did he tell you about lunch with this Serb woman?” he asked. Maybe he’d been wrong—maybe she did hold answers.

“It was a story. It was on his mind.”

“What’s the connection?”

“Excuse me?”

“He talks about her just beforehand,” he said, sharing her unwillingness to say “murder” aloud, “and now you’re here. Do you think there’s some connection?”

“Maybe.” He couldn’t see her face; he was focused on a weaving truck up ahead. “Maybe I can find her and see if she knows something. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m just so tired, Stan. Can I sleep at your place?”

“I wouldn’t let you sleep anywhere else.”

Hiding what he’d known about Balašević hadn’t been his plan. In fact, he’d had no plan before collecting her from the airport. But she’d come out with the name so quickly that he didn’t have a chance to reflect; the concealment began on its own. Then he was trapped in a deception that he would have to carry on all night, at least. How easily these things could happen. At moments like this, he was in awe of his father.

Tomorrow, he thought as he focused on his driving, he could pretend to discover the name. But for that night deception would define their relationship. He hadn’t wanted that.

Perhaps because of this, there was a definite awkwardness between them when they got to Stan’s apartment. He made dinner—frozen tilapia filets and garlic simmered in olive oil—and they drank an Australian Riesling, but even with the alcohol in them the overwhelming feeling that they were strangers stuck in the same room never quite left. Yet she was here, actually
here,
and he remembered the feel of her skin, its texture and pliability and scent. It was all he could do to resist hauling her to the bedroom.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

After dinner, they moved out to the terrace, and he brought out some throw blankets to fight the mild chill. His apartment was just high enough that, when you stood, you could see over rooftops and straight across the Nile to the concrete cacophony of Giza and, beyond, the pyramids Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, lit up for the evening’s Sound and Light Show. He paid a lot for that partial view, but Sophie only gave the monumental structures a glance before settling down on one of his wooden chairs and losing sight of them entirely. She talked a while, telling him about the idiosyncrasies of her life in Budapest, her “quite crazy” friend Glenda, and how much she missed Cairo (Cairo, she said, not him). Then she asked, “What do you know about Jibril Aziz?”

He repeated the name back to her, and she nodded. “Nothing,” he said. “Who is he?”

“He’s American. I think he’s CIA.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because the Hungarians know that he is.”

Stan had no idea who Jibril Aziz was. “I’ll look into it,” he said.

“I’d appreciate that. And now that I’m here, I want to talk to Harry.”

This gave him pause. He thought of how it would look, Sophie staying in his place just after her husband had been killed. Would Harry connect that to Stan’s attempts to throw Emmett to the wolves at Langley? Of course he would. Harry was as suspicious as anyone in the department. “Wait,” he told her. “I can get more out of him than you can.”

She frowned, not liking this, so he explained himself:

“You’re going to come in, and he’s going to handle you. He’ll sweet-talk you and give you the illusion that he’s sharing everything—but you’re not cleared for things, and it doesn’t help that you’re a grieving widow. He won’t really tell you a thing. You can talk to him, of course, but wait. Let me get in there first.”

“You’ll ask about Jibril Aziz?”

“I will. Just tell me how he connects to Emmett.”

She sighed, a touch of irritation, as if the connection were obvious, and he noticed the mellow glow of sweat on her upper lip. She said, “He was in Budapest; he met with Emmett. Twice. He also met with some people the Hungarians think might be terrorists.”

Stan rubbed his face, wondering how to connect this to Zora Balašević. He had no idea. Maybe to avoid the increasing confusion, his thoughts began to grow carnal again. He could feel it in his legs, different from the weighty feeling of his father coming to him, for this tingling rose higher. The same desire he’d felt in the airport, to crawl across the terrace and pull her down off her chair, wrap himself around her, lick the sweat off of her lip, and slowly, meticulously, devour her. He pressed his eyes with his fingertips and tried to focus.

“I’ll do everything I can. You know that. But it sounds to me like this is all connecting to Budapest, not Cairo.”

She smiled suddenly, and it was then that he realized she hadn’t really smiled, not a real smile, since she arrived. Her eyes were wet. “You don’t understand, do you?”

He apparently didn’t.

She leaned forward and took the hand he had left on his knee, squeezing. “I know you’ll help me, Stan. That’s why I’m here.
You’re
why I’m here.”

Just like that, he was in love all over again.

Then the moment was gone, and she was looking out, as if through the villa across the street she could see the pyramids. She stood slowly to her full height and squinted at the distant glow. She exhaled. “They’re so damned beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” he said, but he had no need to stand. Now that she was here, he felt little need for anything.

John

1

W
ELCOME TO THE NEW LIBYA
, read the spray-painted greeting, for the border guards had fled the night before. Creeping in his direction along the desert road, loaded-down cars and handcarts and burdened refugees on foot made their painful way toward Egypt. John wondered how they could stand so many miles under this sun, fingers burned yet chapped by the desert winds, straining under the weight of woven luggage and plastic bags, duct-taped boxes and suitcases, hauling clothes, food, and babies. The Mediterranean wasn’t far away but the landscape gave no sign of this. Each time he heard an infant scream his heart jumped into his throat.

How did they keep moving? It was instinct, he supposed. They were just motivated by the human urge to run from danger, and that was explanation enough.

Danisha had once told him that the instinct for flight was natural—it was a sign of health. The inverse was a symptom of sickness. It wasn’t the reason for the divorce, but it certainly hadn’t helped, and it was impossible not to think of her as he leaned against the dirty hood of the Peugeot, preparing to move against the tide of healthy people fleeing a civil war.

Still, it was a giddy time. In Cairo, he’d seen young faces rapturous with the wild-eyed jubilation of the Apocalypse. The world had changed so quickly. A couple of months ago, people on the streets of North Africa wouldn’t have thought to raise their voices at all, but in Tunisia one Friday morning in December a produce seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, driven to the edge by corrupt police and a senseless bureaucracy, soaked himself in paint thinner and set himself on fire. Protests had grown until President Ben Ali, after twenty-three years of power, fled the country. Algeria came next, protesting and rioting, followed soon by Lebanon.

John had been on hand to watch Egypt rise up, and Libyans had been watching it, too. Four days after Hosni Mubarak stepped down, unrest rolled through Benghazi, Libya’s second city. Protesters had been shot and kidnapped from the sidewalks, yet it went on. The protesters raided government weapon depots and went to war. Blood on the pavement, it turned out, wasn’t enough to stop history.

More fires were raging elsewhere: Jordan, Mauritania, Sudan, Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Syria, Djibouti, Morocco, Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, and the perpetual fire of Iraq. It was, John had been told by enthusiasts, a remarkable time to be alive.

Even the Bedouins guarding the Egyptian side of the border had seemed lighthearted as they checked their passports and waved them through. “Journalists? Yes? Go, go!” Though the guards were overwhelmed by the flow of refugees and Egyptian workers returning home, their steps were buoyant.
Hold on to that feeling,
John wanted to tell them.
Next week you’ll be dreaming about it.

By that day, March 3, one day after the murder of an American diplomat in Budapest and two weeks after the Day of Revolt, the Libyan body count—estimated from panicked reports, anecdotes, and unreliable official statements from Tripoli—had passed a thousand. The east was in rebel hands, based in Benghazi, where revolutionary councils were optimistically setting up new local governments, while Tripoli and most of the west were still held by Muammar Gadhafi’s loyalists, who showed their allegiance by wearing green shirts and scarves. Green was Gadhafi’s color.

Somewhere, another baby was screaming. He couldn’t find it in the crowd.

He smelled smoke on the cool desert wind as he adjusted the wide-brimmed safari hat he’d picked up that morning in Marsa Matrouh, then examined the loose groups of men in soiled jackets and clean shirts, in robes and local headdress, talking. Families squatted in protective circles on the sand, others joining a long line heading to the Egyptian border post. There were cars parked here and there, dusty Western makes cooling off around a makeshift refreshment stand stocking warm bottled drinks and hot tea. A few yards from the stand, Jibril Aziz was talking in Arabic to three men who had come from Benghazi.

He had picked up Jibril from the Semiramis InterContinental before dawn, as Cairo was just starting to wake up. They hadn’t met before, but the man from Langley had been interested in only the briefest of introductions. John was just a driver, after all. Jibril had sniffed at their late-nineties Peugeot before climbing in, and as they took the long coastal road, fighting heavy traffic along the way, Jibril had spent a lot of time on his smartphone, checking maps, news reports, and weather forecasts, and occasionally holding conversations in Arabic. Did he know that his driver only understood enough of the language to order a meal? John had no idea.

It had been a long drive from Cairo. They had refueled and bought grilled lamb from a street vendor in Marsa Matrouh, where Jibril met with a short man in a red-checked ghutra for a quick coffee at an outdoor café while John bought his hat. Once the meeting was over, Jibril laid down some coins, shook the man’s hand, and nodded at John to meet him back at the car. They drove on in silence. John wanted to ask questions, but he knew his place. His only responsibility was to get this man safely to Ajdabiya, on the Gulf of Sidra. From there, a contact would take him farther, to Brega, where fighting was going on—he’d told John that much. Afterward (John guessed from the occasional proper nouns amid the Arabic), Jibril was heading toward Tripoli.

Once inside Libya, John’s plan had been to stick to the northern coastal highway that arced westward from Tubruq, through the green cities of Derna and, inland, Al Bayda, before heading south through Benghazi to Ajdabiya. In case of trouble, they could find help. Jibril, though, was in a hurry and insisted that they take the direct but unpredictable desert road from Tubruq down to Al `Adam, then straight on to Ajdabiya, through 250 miles of desert, much of it, he guessed, with no phone reception. It had been their single subject of conversation, and the one thing they couldn’t agree on.

When Jibril finally returned to the car, he was carrying a dirty Kalashnikov. His white shirt was clean and dry, but he had a few days’ growth on his cheeks; with another day and a change of clothes, he would be indistinguishable from these refugees. “We’re skipping the coastal road,” he told John.

“Don’t say that.”

“After Tubruq it’s a mess. We’ll never get through in time.”

In time for what?
John wanted to ask, but there was nothing to say. The decision had been made. So John nodded at the Kalashnikov. “How much did that cost?”

Jibril raised the weapon, turning it over in his hands. “Hundred fifty.”

“Dollars?”

“Euros.”

“How many rounds?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Does it even work?”

Jibril looked down at the weapon and, with a flash of embarrassment, said, “That’s an excellent question.”

John tried to hide the judgment in his face as he walked around the Peugeot and took the rifle from him, then carried it out past the road, past the groups of huddled smoking men, and into the cracked desert. Jibril followed from a distance and watched as he cleared the breech, then pulled out the banana clip and checked the cartridges. This, at least, was an area in which John had some authority. He got down into a kneeling position and adjusted the rear iron sight, raised the gun to his shoulder, and aimed into the desert at a small boulder about a hundred yards away. He fired a single shot. A couple of yards to the right of the rock, sand exploded. He adjusted the front sight, then fired again. Another burst of sand. He adjusted once more, and this time the rock went up in a burst of cloud. He carried the rifle back, noting all the stares as he approached Jibril and handed it over. “Looks all right.”