The Cairo Affair (23 page)

“What about you?” Stan asked. “Should we be careful putting our representatives in the same room with you?”

Busiri raised his eyebrows. “Omar is passionate; I try not to be. I believe that things are very complicated. I
believe
that in the end this has little bearing on the security of Egypt, and so perhaps I shouldn’t care.”

Stan was hot, sweating inside his shirt, distracted by the wrong question: Was the Agency trying to hijack a popular revolution in Libya? And if so, what would this mean? He was losing track of the smaller threads, the ones he had requested this meeting to discuss. Busiri’s cigarette had gone out; the Egyptian noticed this and tossed it away, irritated, then stood.

Stan got to his feet as well. “Why did Aziz meet with Emmett Kohl a week before his murder in Budapest?”

“Do you want to know what Omar believes?”

“Yes.”

“Use your imagination.”

Busiri’s eyes were weary. He wasn’t goading Stan; he simply wanted him to do a little thinking for himself, so Stan spoke aloud as it came to him. “Aziz was going in to undermine Stumbler. Emmett was working with him.”

With a look of scorn, Ali Busiri clapped silently, then glanced up at the clouded night sky. “Allah tells us it’s time to go.”

“Wait,” Stan said as a new thought came to him.

The Egyptian frowned with impatience.

“Did you really try to defect?”

Busiri’s eyes widened. “What?”

“I was told that you tried to come to our side.”

Busiri sighed, then glanced at his watch, a Rolex. He glared at Stan. “Who told you this? It’s ridiculous.”

“So you’re denying it.”

“Absolutely.”

Someone was lying, but Stan wasn’t sure who.

Busiri stepped forward and, in an unexpected sign of kindness, put a hand on Stan’s shoulder and squeezed. “You and me, we love our countries. My country may be different now, but do we lose our love for a woman because she has matured?”

“Are you going to tell me who Balašević’s source was?”

Another pat on the shoulder, and this close he could see all the haggard lines in the old spy’s face. “It’s time for you to tell me where Jibril is.”

Stan hesitated, but Ali Busiri was through sharing his information. “Dead. I don’t know where, but he’s dead.”

Busiri withdrew his hand. “How?”

“I don’t know. But I was told he was dead.”

“By whom?”

“My station chief.”

“Harold Wolcott.”

Stan nodded.

“Do you believe him?”

“I think I do.”

After a moment, the Egyptian said, “I suggest you put some thought into your career path, Mr. Bertolli. Remember: Love makes us blind.” He raised a hand in farewell and, before turning to leave, added, “The answers are always in front of us.”

As Stan walked back through the darkness toward his car, he still felt the weight of Busiri’s hand on his shoulder. There had been times when, after reading some journalistic revelation or other, he had questioned his choice of employer, but those moments were rare. What he knew, because he’d been there, was that the people who clocked in each day at Langley were essentially decent. They tried, through whatever means necessary, to assure that their country remained safe. He’d never questioned that fact. The problems occurred when it came to the details, the
how
—that was when things became dirty. It was true of everything. Even so, the Agency tried to maintain a certain standard of morality—not for the sake of morality itself, but in order not to be caught with blood all over its hands.

Would Langley back a plan to put a friendly government into Tripoli in the middle of a popular revolution? Maybe. There were huge risks, but they weren’t insurmountable. More likely, though, Langley would follow the path of least resistance: Wait until the dust had settled, take a look at the situation, and then make its decisions.

Someone like Omar Halawi believed otherwise. He was influenced by the same misinformation the Agency had done too little to combat, the failed operations and occasional misdeeds that painted the Agency as a monster that needed to be kept caged if the world wanted its sons and daughters to remain safe. To people like Omar Halawi—and, perhaps, Busiri—CIA was part of a vast conspiracy to turn the planet into drones friendly to American business.

He was near the entrance to the park when he paused beside a palm tree. Busiri’s final words came to him.
The answers are always in front of us.
Before that:
Love makes us blind.
He closed his eyes and squeezed the dome of his forehead against another impending headache. Ali Busiri wasn’t talking about the CIA. He was talking about …

He said “No” aloud. He held on to his stomach.

For a year he’d had all the facts in front of him, everything pointing in the same direction, yet he’d been blind to the obvious conclusion. He thought back, raising the puzzle pieces and refitting them, and …
there.
He saw with despair just how well the pieces meshed. Not all of them, no, but the mystery of the leaked information. It was right there. It had always been right there.

It took a few minutes for him to recover, but it was only a partial recovery. He straightened, fighting against the pounding in his head, and dialed her number. No surprise: She was unreachable. He stared at the phone in his hand. In an instant, she had become someone different. A stranger.

What would his father do?

His father would slink off in order to live another day, but Stan wasn’t his father, and he never would be. He would find Sophie. He would withhold judgement until they had spoken, because Harry was right: Until he knew everything, he didn’t know anything.

He jogged the rest of the way to the Passages Insaid al-Azhar Garden, along the line of dark cars until he reached his own. He unlocked the door and climbed inside, thinking alternately of Sophie Kohl and of revolutionaries fighting in Libyan streets. Dying, so that they, and no one else, would control their fate.

The inside of the windshield was foggy, and he wiped at it with his sleeve. It took a moment, him sliding the key into the ignition, before he noticed the smell in the car: garlic. A strong stink of roasted garlic. Then he thought: The glass is
fogged.
He looked up at the rearview mirror, and from the darkness of the backseat he saw a nose, eyes dark above them, and a bar of light shining across a large ear that—why?—had a tip of blue rubber sticking out of the canal. All of these details so close he could touch the face rising from the gloom. It was a face he’d seen before—a light-skinned Egyptian—and as the fear swelled (he now understood why the man wore earplugs) the recognition followed. On a computer screen, sitting down in Frankfurt Airport, glancing up at a passing security guard. Stan said, “Who the hell—”

John

1

Saturday night he stayed in. He poured himself only one glass of whisky and sat in front of the television. On BBC the news of the dead deputy consul in Budapest had been supplanted by more important events, and through their cameras John watched Libya erupting. He listened to talking heads pronounce the end of an era, and the ecstatic voices of revolutionaries proclaiming the beginning of something wonderful. But he remembered those protesters in Tahrir Square who, nearly a month ago, had attacked an American TV journalist, an angry tangle of men descending on one terrified woman, groping angrily at her breasts and groin, an assault that went on until a crowd of Egyptian women and soldiers broke it up. There were no saints in North Africa, because there were no saints anywhere. There could be no new world, John believed, because the people who filled it would be the same ones as yesterday.

Was that really cynicism? Jibril had thought so, and perhaps he was right.

In Libya, Zawiya was in rebel hands, while in nearby Tripoli Gadhafi was giving families four hundred dollars apiece and announcing to the world that the Libyan people had his back. His handsome, well-spoken son, Seif al-Islam, was doing interviews with Western news outlets, looking very in control as his country was torn apart, explaining that those fighting against the government had been given hallucinogenic drugs and were being controlled by al Qaeda.

Had he made it through, Jibril would probably have been in Zawiya by then, plotting his infiltration through government lines into Tripoli. Squinting at the television, clutching his empty glass, John thought that for all his foolishness Jibril had been a brave man, more so than he could ever hope to be.

No, bravery wasn’t the point, and Jibril had tried to make that clear to him. The point was responsibility. As you knock around through your days you acquire other people, and with them come commitments. Eventually, as the weight of those responsibilities grows, you reach a point of no return, and a man could be measured by what he did at that moment. Either he faced his new commitments or he fled. John’s father had fled before his first birthday. Jibril had been so tied to his commitments that he had abandoned the newer responsibilities of fatherhood in order to deal with the old ones. And John? Fatherhood had been his primary commitment, yet he’d gone to Cy Gallagher at Global Security, asking to be taken away from his broken family, which had grown too heavy to bear.

Which was why he woke on Sunday with the conviction—his first conviction in a while—that it was time to straighten a few things out. He hadn’t called his kids in weeks, and he committed to doing so in the evening, once they were awake and had had their breakfast. In the meantime he would clean himself up. He shaved and showered and brushed his teeth, then made strong coffee and cooked scrambled eggs. After washing the dishes, he called Geert and told him that he would be happy to meet with some of his Egyptian clients looking to improve their English, because part of getting your life together is getting hold of your finances. Geert was ecstatic.

He went to work on the apartment, picking up bottles and bagging oily paper bags and takeout tins, then opened all the windows and got down to vacuuming. He even used damp paper towels to wipe the dust off of everything, amazed and disgusted by how much he picked up. He found books in the strangest places, and behind the hamper came across one in a Zip-loc bag—a collector’s item, a 1920 printing of T. S. Eliot’s
Ara Vos Prec
. It had been a gift from Maribeth when she discovered that the big black soldier she’d slept with was an avid reader of the old poets. John took it out of the bag gingerly, its heavy paper tinted and stiff, and opened it to a random page, reading:

                                               
Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

He sat down and read through the whole poem slowly, realizing that “Gerontion” was the source of the verse that had come to him while waiting for the Libyan undertaker:
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas …

He slipped it back into the bag and onto the bookshelf. Then he collected the three heavy trash bags and carried them down to the Dumpster in the street. By then it was two in the afternoon. He was doing so well. He could see the rest of the day—reading, he thought, would be a proper way to spend his time. He wanted to get back to the Eliot, and since arriving in Cairo he’d set down three novels around the thirty-page mark; it was time to finish at least one of them. He would call Kelli and Ray, and then, once dark had fallen, he would get rid of Jibril Aziz’s secret list, finally washing his hands of that mess. A gift for the Nile, and a clean break for him.

Talking to his kids was supposed to make him feel together, to pull him back into the world of human relations. He said all the right words, the ones that are written in the encyclopedia of civil society. He asked about their friends, their classes, and how good they were being. He asked what books they enjoyed, what movies, what they’d had for breakfast. He was unpracticed, but they were generous with him, and like always he wondered why he didn’t call them every day.

Afterward, Danisha came on and asked when they should expect to see him next. “A month, give or take,” he said, and she hummed quietly.

After the final, tumultuous year of watching, helpless, as their marriage fractured and crumbled, the divorce itself had been an amicable affair. There had been no getting away from the fact that they cared about each other, and the addition of children had meant that, no matter how bad it got between them, there would be two tethers mooring them to one another unto death. John’s bank made the automated alimony payments to her account, and so their only issue of contention was his absence. “They need to know their father’s around,” she’d told him numerous times. “It’s hard on them.” To which he always pointed out that they had Owen. “It’s not the same,” she said of her new husband, and when she said this he always thought about the kids he’d seen in Nairobi and Lisbon and Kandahar who had lost both their parents and, in some cases, entire extended families. He always wanted to tell her about these children, but he’d never become unhinged enough to make that mistake.

Now, she said, “Try to call more often, okay? It gives them a glow.”

Really?
he wanted to ask. A call from a man they hadn’t seen in more than half a year? A man they only saw on off-weekends even when he was in town? Did he really mean that much to them?

Were we all really that young once?

So he agreed, as he always did, to call more often.

Dusk was falling as he hung up, cooling off the city, and he stared at his newly cleaned home, wondering if it was all just a facade—or if (and this with hope) it was the facade that would eventually make his reality. Only one thing left to do, and he went to the kitchen to get Jibril’s book. As he was reaching up to the cookie jar, someone buzzed from the street. He pressed the intercom button and heard Maribeth. “I was sitting around Deals wondering where I could find a good time.”