The Cairo Affair (43 page)

Dazed, she did so, expecting him to hand her a gun. Instead, he placed a single coin into her palm, one Egyptian pound.

“Put it in your pocket.”

She did so, and he said, “That coin may be one of two things. It could be compensation, your
diyya
—an initial down payment, you understand. Or it can be your fee to kill him. As he has done, I would be engaging a third party to commit the murder.”

She took a step back, horrified, and he said, “It is an offer of work, Mrs. Kohl. Not a command. I can engage either of these men to commit the act as well. I simply thought that you might want a chance at redemption.”

She didn’t know what to say. She was thinking,
Question, question, question
. She was thinking,
This is what the rest of the world looks like.
She thought,
Do I believe anything this man’s saying?
Then:
Does it even matter?
Because the truth was that she wanted this, not for anyone but herself. She had also wanted it in Yugoslavia, though Emmett had taken it from her.
That
was the truth.

This man’s guilt wasn’t nearly as important as what she wanted to believe.

“You do not have to decide at this moment,” said Omar. “Sit in the car and think. But I should like to have a decision before sunrise. We will need to clean up afterward.”

Omar

1

In February 2009, still recovering from the heart attack he’d had at the beginning of the month, and a week before Jibril showed up to introduce him to a plan the computers called Stumbler, Omar discovered the existence of Zora Balašević in an agent report. As with Jibril seven years earlier, it was his eye for anomaly that guided him. She was an odd choice for Dragan Milić, whose staff in the Serbian embassy consisted entirely of men between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-seven. He brought this news to Ali Busiri, who suggested they assign some watchers to her.

Omar sent Sayyid and Mahmoud, and by their third day of surveillance they had taken photographs of this fifty-five-year-old Serb woman having drinks with an American diplomat named Emmett Kohl, who had arrived in town not long before she had. It was a brief lunch, but Sayyid moved close enough to overhear its climax. Emmett Kohl said in English, “I don’t give a shit what you threaten me with, Zora. I’m not spying for you.” Not loudly, but calmly and with the kind of self-control only diplomats and hired assassins can master.

Clearly there was something going on—if not from Kohl’s blunt statement, then from the fact that Mahmoud recognized an American agent sitting at a table near the street, also snapping pictures. So with Busiri’s blessings they picked up Zora Balašević the next day, and Omar spoke with her in English.

She was tougher than she looked, refusing to be turned by threats. She
was
a spy, after all—they knew that—and therefore it was within their rights to imprison her or kick her out of the country. Neither option seemed to concern her. So Omar turned it around. “Of course, the situation could be different. For spies who work for us, life in Cairo can be very comfortable. Profitable, even.”

He’d gotten her attention.

She refused to be completely open with him, but she did reveal that she was preparing to tap a source in the American embassy. “We watched you try, Zora. We watched you fail.”

She shook her head. “There are two ways to do this, and I’ve only tried one.”

So Omar was on hand to watch the approach in the Arkadia Mall, and he listened to the wire Balašević was wearing in the Conrad Hilton. He marveled at her forwardness and the way she thought on her feet: Balašević motioned toward a blond woman with some Russians and claimed she was the woman’s controller. Such marvelous invention! He was amazed and inspired.

It took two weeks of work before Sophie Kohl finally came around, and once that relationship had been established the rest of the infrastructure could be put into place. Balašević was paid through a front company called Beautiful Nile Enterprises, and in return she passed flash drives directly to Rashid el-Sawy.

The Serbian embassy soon realized that their agent was no longer loyal, and Dragan Milić attempted to have her sent out of the country. Ali Busiri met him for lunch to explain that Balašević was not to be touched, at least not within the borders of Egypt.

By April, once the quality of Sophie Kohl’s intelligence had been established, Omar was taken off of the operation and moved to less demanding assignments. “You’ve had one heart attack,” Busiri told him. “Why don’t we let you survive to retirement?” It was left to el-Sawy and Busiri to collect and process the files before distributing selected intelligence to other departments. Again, Omar had been sidelined, but he chose not to dwell on this as he watched over the well-being of diplomats in their city and came to terms with the strong possibility that the acquisition of Zora Balašević would be the final accomplishment of his career.

A year later, in April 2010, Busiri asked him to meet with Balašević again. Why him? “Because she’s getting angry with Rashid, and she doesn’t know I exist. I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

He visited her apartment on Al-Muizz Street and found her in a state. “What is the problem?”

Biting her nails and gulping Turkish coffee, Zora said, “Sophie is losing her taste for it. I am losing her.”

“Has she told you she wants to quit?”

A quick shake of the head. “Not yet. But she will.”

“This is normal enough,” he told her. “You should threaten her. Can you use the threat you used against Mr. Kohl?”

She shrugged, unsure. “I don’t want to.”

“Then we can approach her ourselves. We have enough evidence of her cooperation—we threaten to make that public, and she will continue working.”

“No,” Zora said firmly. “She does not
know
about you. She thinks all this is for my people. You come in, and she will snap.”

He wondered if this was true, or if Zora, with the greed that had brought her to Cairo in the first place, was afraid that she would be cut out of the chain and lose her considerable income. “Well, then,” he said. “I suppose you have no choice.”

She didn’t seem convinced.

“What is the problem, Zora? Your work has been excellent.”

Finally, she said, “I
like
her. I always have. She trusts me, but I also trust her. We have built something here, and this is going to destroy it.”

He would have never thought Zora Balašević so sentimental.

“You know how much she has done,” Zora continued. “All of it, for me.”

Busiri had told him nothing, but he nodded.

She said, “She did not have to sleep with him. I don’t think she wanted to. But I told her it could be important. I told her that if any suspicion came up, then it would be best to have him already attached to her.”

“Who?”

She gave him a suspicious look. “Stanley Bertolli. Who else do you think?”

He tried to talk his way out of it, but his slip had been obvious. She said, “Who’s running me?”

“Michael Khalil.”

“I mean, who’s running Khalil?”

“We are, Zora. That is all that matters.”

Of course that wasn’t all that mattered, for running agents is the closest of all relationships, closer sometimes than that between a husband and wife. Zora was shocked the way a wife would be if her husband had been sharing her intimate secrets with a stranger.

Once the Kohls left Cairo, he took it upon himself to visit Zora again as she prepared to leave the country. She was calmer now, more tired. A year and a half working for them had taken something from her. “Come to see me off?” she asked.

“You are heading home?”

“Indirectly.”

“Yes?”

She measured him with her eyes a moment, then said, “They really don’t tell you anything, do they?”

He settled on the sofa. “Why don’t you tell me?”

She told him that by July she’d had enough. “It happens, you know. People tire.” She had told Khalil that it was time to wrap things up. “I could see it in Sophie’s eyes. She was dying. Her marriage was going to hell, and her relationship with Stan was killing her. And me—she did not even have me. Just as I predicted, she tried to pull out, and so I had to become the whip. When I was younger this would not have bothered me. But look at me. I am not young. I am tired. I want to live my life.”

“What did Khalil say?”

“He told me that if I tried to walk away I would be arrested as a spy. Then he changed our arrangement. He told me that from that point on no money would be sent to my account. It would be collected, in escrow, until the time came for me to leave.”

Omar cleared his throat, then wiped self-consciously at his nose. “I am sorry about that.”

She shrugged. “So now we are down to passing packages in public places. I will meet him in Frankfurt, where he will give me the rest of my money.” She laughed hoarsely. “I can’t wait to get out of this shithole.”

He wasn’t sure what to say, so he got up and helped her latch a suitcase that was giving her trouble, then went to make two cups of coffee while she went to the bathroom. When she came out, she was smiling again, but the smile gave him no joy. “You just passed me on, didn’t you?”

“I had no choice. It was not my decision.”

She nodded at that and thanked him for the coffee. He followed her back to the living room. With the full boxes and empty walls it felt barren. He asked what she’d had on Sophie Kohl. After thinking about it a moment, she said, “I threatened to reveal to the world that she is wonderful, and that she has nothing to be ashamed of. I threatened to expose the fact that she is the kind of woman who can do anything, even if she cannot see it herself.” She paused. “Do not ever make an enemy of Sophie Kohl.”

Given this preparation, he expected something impressive from his first meeting with Sophie Kohl months later, but she was a disappointment. Perhaps Balašević had oversold her asset, but part of the problem was himself. By the time he arrived at the Semiramis, he felt as if his bones were going to splinter. Six hours in a bumping automobile to get back to Cairo from Marsa Matrouh—what had he been thinking?

The truth was that he had hoped he would never have to meet Sophie Kohl. His section had benefited from her information, but he had trouble feeling much appreciation for a woman who had given away her country’s secrets so easily, and then began an affair with another man in order to protect herself.

He’d seen her picture plenty of times and had watched from a distance as she met with Zora, but he was unprepared for the woman he found in the Semiramis café. She was thin, her hair flat and unkempt—she displayed that inattention to her looks that naturally beautiful women slide into, assuming the shape of their faces will compensate for their laziness. Then he admonished himself: Her husband had been killed, and he should be kinder.

Despite appearances, she proved herself more astute than he imagined, catching the contradictions inherent in the facts. For example: Why would the CIA kill her husband if he didn’t believe the Agency was behind Stumbler?

What could he say to such rational thought? This woman, like anyone outside of the intelligence services, believed that intelligence organizations worked by machine logic, and that this was their flaw. Their flaw was that they
didn’t
work by machine logic. They worked by human logic, which was as frail and emotional as the people who filled the agencies of the world. The best he could offer was hardly an example of perfect logic: “Mistakes were made.” Then he focused on his primary desire, which was to get Sophie Kohl out of Egypt. She was prying into sensitive things, and if she wasn’t careful she was going to get hurt.

Did he care? Did it matter if an adultress and traitor was hurt or even murdered under his watch? Maybe; maybe not. But he was beginning to believe that the world really was a different place now that Mubarak was gone. The rules had been broken and tossed to the winds. A new beginning, the most important moment in any nation’s history. This was the moment when new precedents were being set. If he let the CIA murder this woman in Egypt, then it would do so again. If she left unscathed, then hope remained that the country could become a place where even Fouada would feel safe.

After their meeting, still not knowing if she was going to follow his advice and leave, he waited in his car, which he’d parked in the same spot from which he’d watched Jibril leave with John Calhoun. It was nearly nine. He thought about how she looked, this Sophie Kohl, how tangled in body and mind, and he worried what she might get up to before finally leaving Egypt. So he put in a call to Sayyid, who showed up within twenty minutes, climbing into the passenger seat. “Mrs. Sophie Kohl, wife of the murdered American consul, is in room 306. I need you to keep an eye on her. If she receives any visitors, tell me.”

Sayyid frowned. “What’s she doing here?”

“She’s trying to figure out who killed her husband.”

“Are we helping?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer, so he didn’t.

2

Fouada was asleep when he got home, and after a half hour sitting on the sofa, feeling his sore bones and muscles creak, thinking over his conversation with Sophie Kohl, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Yet when his phone rang a little after midnight, it woke him. He snatched at it. “Yes?”

“A visitor,” said Sayyid.

Omar blinked in the darkness, but nothing was coming into focus. “Who?”

“More than one, actually. Paul Johnson from the American embassy has been sitting in the lobby all night, but not long ago Rashid el-Sawy went to see her.”

Omar sat up straight.
“What?”

“He took the elevator, so I went up the stairs. He was standing outside her door.”

“Did he go inside?”

“I think he wanted to, but she didn’t let him.”

“Do they know each other?”

“He introduced himself as Michael Khalil. After that, he talked too quietly.”

El-Sawy talking to John Calhoun, and then Sophie Kohl. What was going on?