The Cairo Affair (32 page)

As she was speaking, Sophie remembered Zora’s conviction that some of the best information came from uninformed people trapped in stressful situations—in this case, the wife of a missing husband. Sophie had spent the last day and a half in the home of a midlevel CIA officer, yet Stan had given her nothing approaching this. Then she realized that Stan was never going to give her anything of use. He had lied about knowing Zora, lied about Jibril having a family. How could he
not
have known that the embassy had taken Jibril into Libya? How deep did his lies go? She felt flushed, the full weight of her stupidity beginning to suffocate her. She said, “Did he tell you more?”

Inaya hummed quietly, then: “Those last few days, before he left, I hardly saw him at all. He came home late and passed out. In the morning he was gone before I got up. But the night before he flew out he squeezed me into his schedule. He was very caring that night, something like what he used to be. He wasn’t going direct to Libya. He was going to Budapest—I guess that’s where he met with your husband.”

“Why did he meet Emmett?”

“I don’t know, but he was going to talk to some contacts there. Then he flew to Cairo, and this John drove him across the border. That’s the last I heard of him.”

Sophie closed her eyes so she could better see them both—Jibril Aziz and Emmett, sharing secrets about Libya. About Stumbler. She said, “Did he say anything about Stumbler?”

“Stumbler?”

“Yes, Stumbler.”

Silence, again. Then: “Yes, actually. That first night, when he was angry, he said that they were doing it already. He said, ‘It’s Stumbler.’ I thought I misheard him, and I asked what that was, but he didn’t tell me, and he didn’t bring it up again. Neither did I.” A pause. “What is it?”

“A plan for revolution in Libya,” she said. “Jibril drafted it.”

“What?”
Sophie could feel her surprise through the line. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, Inaya.”

They said nothing for a moment, and through Stan’s windows she could hear voices and cars, little dollops of chaos. Then Inaya said, “You think this has to do with your husband’s murder.”

“I think so.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m in Cairo.”

“Are you working with the embassy?”

Was she? “No.”

“Then you need help.”

“I think I do.”

“I’m going to give you a phone number, okay? Jibril has a friend in Cairo. You should have a friend there, too.”

“I would appreciate that very much, Inaya.”

“But wait a little bit before calling. I need to warn him. I want to talk to him, too.”

Afterward, holding the local phone number in her hand with the name Omar Halawi scribbled under it, she felt pressure in her ears. It was light at first, a tickle of pressure, then grew until it pressed hard against her eardrums, threatening to rupture them. She couldn’t hear a thing. It was like after Emmett’s murder, when she’d had a gunshot ringing in her ears. Now she was simply deaf. Everything had shifted. That was when the tears came again, but this time she wasn’t crying for Emmett. She was weeping for herself. She had gone to great lengths to convince herself that she wasn’t alone, but like Stan’s words, that had been a deception.

For all she knew, Stan had gotten rid of Emmett in order to get her back for leaving him. Anything, no matter how ridiculous, seemed possible.

When her hearing returned, she called Jibril’s friend Omar Halawi, and they made arrangements to meet at a café in the Semiramis InterContinental at eight. He told her he was out of town and would have to drive back. Seven hours to go. Outside, the sun was high, bright in the way that only North Africa can be. She smelled car exhaust, and somewhere, maybe on a rooftop, someone was grilling lamb. She heard prayers in the distance, buzzy with the static of overworked speakers. She had time. She went around the apartment, collecting what she thought she might need. She packed her few items into her bag. It occurred to her that she needed clothes, badly. Then she went to Stan’s terrace but did not sit, for she wanted to look across the Nile and over the city to see the three pyramids over in Giza, but sun-baked pollution obscured the vista, leaving only a hazy outline of the Great Pyramid, built to house the bones of Pharaoh Khufu. She went back inside.

Before leaving, she checked herself in the mirror. Dabbed on some blush and fixed her eyes. She ran burgundy over her lips, then stared at herself in the mirror, thinking of Stan’s lies. She held the lipstick in her hand, staring a full minute before deciding what to write.

It didn’t take her long to reach the Semiramis, for it, like Stan’s apartment and the embassy itself, was part of the winding nest of streets that comprised Garden City. She walked westward to the Nile before turning right to head up to that beautiful thumb of tower rising from, and being reflected by, the great river. She was breaking a sweat, but not from exertion—it was the adrenaline of her sudden rash decisions.

The lobby was busy, and she stood in line, feeling the anxiety slip away from her as she handed over her passport and asked for a room. It turned out that they had only one free—“Your lucky day”—on the third floor.

The room was small but clean, and she lay down for a while, eyes closed, feeling the depth of her loneliness. From out of that depth the anger grew again, focused on the man who had been lying to her ever since she had arrived in Egypt. She had been betraying him as well, had betrayed them all last year, and that only deepened her anger. After a long time she sat up and searched in her bag until she had found her phone. She powered it up and dialed and said, “You’ve been lying to me, Stan.”

She could hear the pain in his voice as he tried to convince her of his innocence, of his desire to protect her, and the shift in tone when he commanded her to wait at his apartment. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

What, of all the things that came from his lips, could she believe? And why should she have to second-guess everything? So she hung up, knowing as she did so that she had burned the only bridge she really had. When she turned off the phone the room felt colder. Outside her window, the sun was low over the busy capital.

Omar

1

Over the space of his sixty years, twelve spent in the foreign missions section of the Central Security Forces, Omar Halawi had learned that the quickest way to uncover hidden facts is to keep an eye out for things that do not belong. This particular sense had many times proven to be his primary asset, and it was how he came to learn of Jibril Aziz.

Given the wealth of nationalities that made up the United States, it had always amused him how many white men with English and Irish and German surnames the CIA flew into Egypt, and so when, in 2002, a casual report on Harry Wolcott noted a three-hour clandestine meeting with a young Libyan American, Omar took notice. Once they had his name, Omar followed the files backward to the 1993 coup attempt against Muammar Gadhafi and the execution of young Aziz’s father. It wasn’t long before they had a barebones story for him: Jibril Aziz was in Cairo under nonofficial cover, meeting only occasionally with Wolcott, always outside the embassy, though his primary work had him slipping with mounting frequency over the border into Libya.

At the time, Abdel Suyuti ran Omar’s section, and so together they pored over the facts in front of them. Abdel, unlike his successor, had considered it his duty to protect the foreigners in his land, whether or not they were spies. They decided to leave Jibril Aziz alone for the time being, as there was no evidence he was spying on Egypt. Aziz was plainly gathering information on that madman of the western deserts—who, despite proclamations of solidarity between Egypt and Libya, was an embarrassment to all of North Africa.

When Abdel retired in 2004, there had been good reasons for Omar to believe that he would move up to lead the section, so he was surprised to find Ali Busiri, from the sometimes-competing State Security Investigations Service, sitting behind the desk that had been empty for only three days.

Fouada had told him to send in a letter of protest. “It’s not done that way,” he explained. She didn’t care how it was done, she told him. There was a principle here. There was also, he suspected, a woman’s desire to be married to an important man, a desire that had remained just beyond her reach for going on three decades, just as the desire for children had been denied them both.

He had not protested Ali Busiri’s ascension, but he had asked questions. He’d been around long enough to have friends throughout Central Security, as well as a couple in the very well-informed General Intelligence Service. In a sly café off of Halaat Tarb one old hand explained that Ali Busiri was friendly with Mubarak’s inner circle, particularly with Omar Suleiman, director of the General Intelligence Service and arguably the next in line to rule Egypt. Cronyism had given Ali Busiri Abdel’s old chair, but what else had he expected? Omar, in the end, was a realist, a flaw that Fouada often pointed out to him. “But don’t get down,” one of his friends told him. “Busiri’s no wilting flower. He did great things at the SSI.”

“Like what?”

“Stopped a Japanese Red Army hijacking. This was 1992. They were going to take over a flight from Cairo to Tripoli and demand cash from Gadhafi.”

Omar frowned, running a hand through his hair. “I never heard about this.”

“Which shows how well he took care of it.”

His friend, it turned out, had been right: Busiri seemed born for subterfuge. While on paper their section existed primarily for the protection of various foreign diplomatic corps in the capital, Busiri soon raised the bar, expanding their mandate by issuing new directives to turn diplomatic staff into Egyptian assets.

Before altering their basic purpose, however, Busiri spent weeks reviewing the work that had been done under Abdel Suyuti, and they often had to face Busiri’s rage as he blustered on about the ridiculous state the section was in. They’d been sitting on their hands, he told them. Collecting dust. When he came across a file chronicling the activities of one Jibril Aziz, he called Omar into his office. “Am I to believe that you discovered an American spy and didn’t do anything about it?” Omar wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical. “Do you want to explain this apparently treasonous behavior?”

Unlike others in the office, Omar was too old to be intimidated by this newcomer’s rage. “His territory is Libya, not Egypt. There was no point letting him know that we knew about him. Better to watch from a distance.”

“And what has watching for an entire year taught you?”

“He visits often enough to suggest he has a large network inside Libya. He’s been building up something valuable.”

“How often does he go in?”

“It’s irregular.”

“How irregular?”

This was all in the file, but he answered anyway. “One or two months between visits. Stays between a week and a month each time.”

Busiri sniffed, a sign of irritation. “Can you at least tell me the next time he crosses over? Is that too much to ask?”

“Of course, sir.”

When in December 2004 Omar reported that Aziz had crossed over again, his boss said, “Thank you. It’s so nice to be trusted with sensitive information.”

While Omar bristled at this treatment—he was, after all, ten years Busiri’s senior—he couldn’t help but recognize that their section was entering a renaissance phase. For the first time in his memory, intelligence was moving
out
of their office on the seventh floor of the Interior Ministry to other parts of Central Security, to SSI, and to GIS. They were depending less and less on the kindness of other departments. “Independence,” Busiri told them during one of their weekly meetings, “is the great reward of intelligence.”

Even so, there were failures. In early 2005, a colleague in the office, Hisham Minyawi, recruited a high-ranking official in the Libyan embassy named Yousef Rahim, using a double ploy of bribe and blackmail. There was a night of celebration in the office—cookies and tea for everyone—but it turned sour when, three days later, Rahim was recalled to Tripoli and summarily executed.

A few weeks after that incident, while Ali Busiri and his personal assistant, Rashid el-Sawy, were on a trip to Damascus to discuss new cooperation initiatives, Omar received a call in the office. A young man had been picked up on the Libyan border, hungry and dehydrated, without documents. He’d spoken to the border guards in Libyan Arabic, calling himself Akram Haddad. No one believed it, but since he refused to say more they e-mailed a well-lit photograph to Cairo, and each of the section heads was contacted by the fifth floor to help identify the stranger. Omar gazed at the image from the internal server, and in the features of that vacant face he recognized Jibril Aziz.

He had Sayyid drive him nearly eight hours to the border, where the guards—Bedouins, mostly, for they were the only ones who could take the climate—cleared out a communal dining room for the conversation. Their prisoner sat at the center table, a bowl of soup in front of him. Omar took the seat opposite and laid his fingertips on the edge of the table. In English, he said, “Hello, Jibril.”

To his credit, the young man didn’t react, only stared into his untouched soup. Only twenty-seven, but he had the skill set of an older man. Or maybe he was just in shock.

Omar continued in English. “There is no need for you to play this game. I am not going to take you away in chains.” He patted his pockets, coming up with cigarettes. Back then he never went anywhere without his Winstons. He offered the pack to Jibril, but the young man shook his head. Omar lit one and spoke quietly. “We have been watching your progress for over two years. You are really very talented—that it has taken this long for you to find serious trouble in the Brother Leader’s kingdom is a great feat. I know of good men who lasted less than a week before being returned in body bags.” He was stretching the truth, but it didn’t matter. “Can you look at me?”

Jibril did so. He was thin and too pale, his eyes still bloodshot; the man needed sleep. The border guards had told him that Jibril had appeared with dried blood smeared across his neck, but by then it had been cleaned off, revealing vertical scratches from his ear down to his collarbone. He needed a shave.