The Cairo Affair (22 page)

“Did you tell Langley?”

“How well can they smell from five thousand miles away?”

Despite his anxiety, Stan grinned. “But he survived the changes.”

“So far he has,” Harry said. “My only point is that you should take Ali Busiri’s intel with a grain of salt. The same’s true of his employees, like Omar Halawi.”

They both thought about that a moment until Harry said, “Does Sophie have a theory?”

Stan blinked. “When she called me, she was in shock.”

“But certainly she shared some kind of opinion with you. After all, you were lovers.”

Stan said nothing.

Harry smiled softly, then waved at him. “Did you think I didn’t know? You kept using the same hotel room—bad security.”

Now Stan was the one rubbing his face. Yes, it had been bad security, and of course Harry had known. He was surprised that Harry had never brought him in for a talk, but now that it was out in the open he felt anxiety falling off his shoulders.

“This,” Harry said, “would be the other reason I didn’t haul Emmett off in chains. You can see the conflict of interest, can’t you?”

Stan could see it very clearly.

Harry covered his mouth again and looked at the ceiling, as if it were turning brown from the rain. “So let me ask you again: Do you know where she is?”

Stan remembered her words:
Do men really think that the only thing women want is protection?
“I have no idea,” he said, and that, at least, was true.

The desk phone buzzed. As Harry answered it, Stan considered asking for help tracking down Sophie. Harry knew, after all, about the affair—that obstacle had been taken away, yet Stan wasn’t ready to ask for help. Why?

It was because of a single gesture, that forehead, which seemed to cover up a whole world of secrets that he could not even guess at.
If you’re missing some crucial piece of information it’s best to assume you don’t know anything
. There was enough missing here that he couldn’t even assume he could trust Harold Wolcott.

Stan waited as Harry listened on line one; Nancy was talking to him. Harry’s face changed again. His mouth hung open, and unconsciously he touched the nick on his chin. “Okay,” Harry said into the phone. Then he hung up and met Stan’s gaze squarely with his own. “Look at the ceiling.”

Stan did so, and it looked the same as it always had.

“When it shits, Stan, it pours. Sophie Kohl is in Cairo.”

“Where?”

A heavy shrug. “The Hungarians finally told us where she went. The Egyptians haven’t verified it for us yet, but I assume they will eventually.” He frowned. “Question is: Why hasn’t she gotten in touch with us?” He wiped at his nose. “You’d think she didn’t trust us.”

7

Stan returned to his office and called Paul, who had spent the whole day in room 306. “Nothing,” he told Stan in the midst of a yawn. Hope was bleeding away. “You want me to leave?”

“No,” Stan told him, then hung up. He settled back in his chair, again looking at the Stumbler memo, and rubbed at his eyes. He thought back to a year ago, to the dour Langley man telling him of intercepted communications from the Syrian, Libyan, and Pakistani embassies. Pretending to be giving him the whole story. Had Langley really not trusted him, or Harry? Had—

His desk phone rang, breaking his wandering thoughts. He picked up. “Stan Bertolli.”

“My man,” said Saul, his voice rough from a lingering cold. “I got your name.”

Briefly, Stan didn’t know what he was talking about, then it came to him—the video still from Frankfurt, Balašević with a man. “Tell me.”

“Michael Khalil, American.”

“American?”

“So his passport says.”

“What do
you
say, Saul?”

“I say it’s fake because his passport number matches a guy who died of a coronary in 1998. He can’t use the passport to get into Fortress America, but he’s used it to visit other countries. We’re running his face through the recognition software, but God only knows how long that’ll take.”

“Where’s he been recently?”

Saul hummed as he read through his information. “The Khalil passport spent a week in Tripoli last year, but the rest of that year it was in your town—except for that one-day visit to Frankfurt. Then last week he visited Germany. Munich.”

“For how long?”

“Three days, March 1 to March 3. Then he flew to … well, why don’t you take a guess?”

“Cairo,” Stan said.

“I don’t care what anyone around here says, Stan. You’re one smart kid.”

Stan closed his eyes, thinking about that flight in and out of Munich. After murdering Emmett, Gjergj Ahmeti had been tracked to a train heading from Budapest to Munich. Emmett was killed on March 2. Khalil could easily have flown in and out of Munich for a visit to Budapest to oversee the killing—what other way could he interpret it? Which meant that the man Zora Balašević had met in Frankfurt—her Egyptian or Serbian client—had been behind Emmett’s murder. Not the United States of America.

Stan stared at the dead phone still in his hand, then checked with Nancy: Harry had stepped out again, destination unknown. He was overwhelmed by the feeling that he was playing catch-up, yet he didn’t know what he was trying to catch up to. It was getting late.

He called Paul. “Close it down. Go home.”

“Need me in the office?”

“Just get some sleep. I’ll call you later if I need you.”

“Yes,
sir,
” Paul said, evidently pleased.

8

The low sun was hidden behind clouds as he drove to al-Azhar Park on the east side of town. He parked along a quiet section of the Passages Insaid al-Azhar Garden, near the main road, then locked up and headed into the vast, sculpted park. As he moved forward, he assessed (as Paolo Bertolli might) everything he saw: a long line of empty cars parked down the curb, a couple taking a relaxing stroll toward the enormous cafés on the man-made lake, two old men on a bench talking over a hand of cards, a woman in a hijab watching three children dance to a transistor radio playing Arabic pop. He followed a cobblestone path deeper into the park, where it opened up and palm trees were aligned geometrically and marble bridges crossed over little streams. It wasn’t busy here—most families were preparing for dinner—and he saw a couple with a teenaged girl packing up a picnic and heading out. He settled on a bench, gazing across the lake with its fountains and restaurants and sunken garden on the other side, a spot of tranquility in the clogged mess of Cairo. As he waited, the clouds released a sprinkle of welcome rain that dimpled the lake and misted his hair, but only briefly.

He thought of these Egyptians whose world he passed through every day—how many friends had he made among them? None. He and most of his embassy co-workers were ghosts in this town, circulating only among themselves, as if the locals were there just to make sure their electricity and water flowed, and that they were well fed. He lived among Egyptians but not with them, which, on those rare days when he grew philosophical and criticial of his life, bothered him deeply.

Ali Busiri found him easily. They didn’t know each other well; a couple of meetings in other parks were the sum of their personal relationship. There were no pass-phrases with a contact as high-ranking as Busiri.

He was plump and healthy-looking, and if Stan hadn’t known Busiri’s file he would’ve been tempted to use the word “jolly” to describe him. But he knew enough about Ali Busiri to know that he was far from jolly, and his expression that day, interrupted only by drags on a filtered Camel, did nothing to change his opinion. He sat down beside Stan, stinking of smoke. “This is about Emmett Kohl?”

Stan nodded.

“Otherwise I wouldn’t have come. He was a good man.”

“Maybe you didn’t know him that well,” Stan said in spite of himself.

Busiri turned to give him a look, something close to disgust. “You wanted to talk.”

“First I have a question: Do you know where Sophie Kohl is?”

The older man blinked. “Emmett’s widow? No. Is she missing?”

Stan very nearly answered the question before changing his mind. If Busiri didn’t know where she was, then that part of the conversation was finished. “I’d like to talk about Zora Balašević.”

Busiri smiled thinly; it did nothing to brighten his face. “The lady Serb. What about her?”

“She was working for you.”

Busiri rocked his head from side to side, but he wasn’t up to playing games today. “Yes.”

“She passed you intelligence from the American embassy.”

“Yes.”

“And her source was Emmett Kohl.”

This time the smile did brighten his face, just barely. “No,” he said.

Stan took a breath. “Then who was it?”

Busiri turned away from him to look up the length of the path. Stan supposed he was looking for shadows, though there seemed little reason for it. Meetings between American diplomatic staff and Egyptian civil servants happened all the time. Some, Stan had heard, were even friends. Speaking in the direction of the rest of the park, so that Stan could only see his profile, he said, “Mr. Bertolli, what did you think of Omar Halawi’s warning?”

“Who?”

Busiri turned back. “You think I don’t know about Omar? You call him RAINMAN, as if he’s some idiot savant, but he’s not.”

“You’ve been running him?”

Busiri looked surprised. “Of course. You didn’t know?”

No, Stan hadn’t known, though he’d had his suspicions. He felt stupid.

“But his message, Mr. Bertolli.”

“That we should look at ourselves.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know what to think. Particularly now that I know everything he told us was coming from you.”

Busiri snorted softly, then shook his head. “Omar liked Emmett. Omar also has some problems that I believe will eventually require medication.”

“Are you saying he’s paranoid?”

“I am no doctor. However, for some people the layers upon layers of lies have a detrimental effect. One has to rewire the brain to do the kind of work we do. One crossed wire can throw everything off.”

“What does he believe?”

Busiri took another drag and exhaled smoke. “Why don’t we start with a simple question? The inverse of yours. Where is Jibril Aziz?”

“Tell me what Omar Halawi believes; then we can move to that.”

“So you
do
know where Jibril is?” he asked, a trace of hope in his voice.

Stan nodded.

Busiri considered him for a moment, smoking, then tossed the unfinished cigarette into the damp grass, where it sizzled. “Omar and Jibril are friends. When Jibril drafted a plan to overthrow the mad despot in Tripoli, he brought it to Omar for consideration.”

That was a surprise—Aziz had brought a top-secret plan to the Egyptians? Stan shook his head; it didn’t matter now. “You know we rejected it, right? The Agency shelved the operation.”

“Did you?” Busiri asked. “Perhaps
you
rejected it. Jibril was certainly
told
that it was rejected. But what was the reality? In some back room at your Langley, the planners were reconsidering. They reconsider everything, don’t they? They put everything on
ice.
”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Stan admitted.

“I’m not going to be coy with you, Mr. Bertolli,” he said, opening his hands. “You see how open I’m being. However, you’ll also notice that Omar has been reticent of late. This is his decision, not mine. He’s appalled by what he believes the Agency is up to.”

Stan shifted on the bench so that he could see Busiri’s face better in the sudden darkness—sunset had occurred without him noticing, even though a distant prayer should have reminded him. “I don’t have keys to secret back rooms, so you’re going to have to be clearer with me. I’m just a cog.”

“Just a cog?” Busiri grinned, then lit another Camel. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Bertolli, because maybe you are just a cog, or maybe you’re the man with his fingers on the controls. Either way, you should know what I know, for perhaps that will lead you to reconsider your actions.”

Stan waited.

“Jibril called Omar a couple of weeks ago. February 22, five days after the Day of Revolt in Benghazi. He said, ‘They’re doing it, Omar. Stumbler is beginning.’ That’s all he had to say.”

Though Stan knew the answer, he still wanted it spelled out. “What did
it
mean?”

Busiri brought the cigarette to his mouth, blinking, and took a drag. “It meant,” he said, smoke coming out with his words, “that it was all set up. Once the Libyan people began to work for their own future, once they were dying in the streets, your people were prepared to take advantage of the historic moment. Take advantage of their courage and their martyrs. It meant that your world-renowned Agency was ready to steal the revolution from the bloodied hands of those in Libya who love freedom.” He paused, took another drag, then said, “And because of this breach of basic human decency, I suggest you keep your distance from Omar. If placed in the same room with a representative of your Agency—with you, perhaps—I fear he may become violent. And we don’t want that, do we?”

Stan thought about this a moment, briefly feeling Omar Halawi’s anger, an anger Busiri seemed to share. Busiri wasn’t talking about the CIA helping the revolution but taking it over, installing America’s handpicked leaders in the presidential palace. He could understand the Egyptian’s anger, but only to a degree. He thought again, then said, “I’m not going to take a lecture on basic human decency from a member of the Central Security Forces. We weren’t gunning down protesters in Tahrir Square.” Stan paused, but Busiri didn’t react, so he went on. “What do you think the radicals are going to do once there’s a vacuum in Tripoli? Do you think they’re going to sit back and watch from their caves? No. They’re going to threaten and sweet-talk the electorate until they get power, and then it’ll be sharia law, women as chattel, and the export of teenagers with backpack bombs. Which would you prefer on your border—a Western-leaning government, or an Islamofascist state?”

Busiri scratched the edge of his lip, smiling. “You speak as if there’s a world of difference when dealing with those two kinds of entities. There isn’t, Mr. Bertolli. States are predictable, particularly when they have an extreme ideology. So are intelligence agencies.”