The Profession (8 page)

“Whatever General Salter told you, it didn’t prepare you for this, did it, Gilbert?”

“He never says much, ma’am.”

“You did well. But then I would expect nothing less from a blood relation.”

The first lady shakes my hand warmly and presents her cheek. I am not unaware that I am standing in the presence of royalty.

“Give my best to Jim when you see him. You shall stay with me on my farm, Gilbert, the next time you’re in Virginia.”

I ARRIVE IN CAIRO
at 0630 Zulu—eight thirty in the morning, local time—22 August 2032, seven hours after departing the highlands and five after wheels-up out of Inverness. Cairo is enormous, nineteen million people, bigger than New York, L.A., and Chicago combined. It’s ugly. I’ve never seen an uglier city. And it’s hell to get around. It takes three hours to clear Customs at Cairo International, followed by another ninety minutes of add-on security (hastily emplaced because of the Saudi crisis), complete with biometric scan, full body search, and polygraph interview. I emerge to sunlight at two in the afternoon. A traffic jam extends for twenty miles in every direction.

A car is waiting for me. “William” picks me up in a black-and-white ’02 Opel with no meter and all the windows open. He’s wearing a white cotton shirt, soaked through. In the Middle East, a passenger will often ride up front with the taxi driver as a sign of social solidarity. I get in back. William apologizes for the heat and the diesel fumes; it seems his A/C has crapped out just ten minutes earlier. William is not a real cab driver; he’s a policeman moonlighting on a
private contract. The first item I take note of in any vehicle is the fuel gauge. William’s is on empty. “How far are we going, William?”

“Not far. Near.” His accent is thick but penetrable.

I make him fill up. In Cairo every median and boulevard crossing is populated by boys selling a liquid they claim is gasoline, which they dispense from ten-gallon plastic jugs via a pouring funnel. Gas in the States has hit eight bucks a gallon; here it’s $6.50 USD (42.5 Egyptian pounds) a liter. The juice is half kerosene but people pay because they’re all driving around with the needle on E in cars so ancient that they don’t dare top off for fear that the tank will outlive the vehicle.

Egypt, since the fall of Mubarak and the National Democratic Party, has transitioned, after an interval of freedom, from a secular police state to an Islamic police state. The trick to fueling in Cairo or in any part of the country, I’ve been forewarned, is to have either a police badge or a retina-scan card from the EST, the civil and humanitarian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. EST has all the petrol, in service compounds behind fences topped with razor wire. Of course everybody carries a siphon. If a foreigner is foolish enough to park his car without passing out a little
baksheesh
to a pack of street urchins to stand sentry over it, his tank will be dry in five minutes, not to mention tires and wheel covers stripped, along with the alarm rig, the sealed-argon headlamps, and the nav and sound systems. If the thieves can get at the engine, they’ll winch that out too, though every car hood in Cairo is double padlocked and booby-trapped with pepper spray. I was in Egypt briefly during the NDP’s last days. One of the stunts the street kids worked then was to wait on the sidewalk outside a hotel for any European or Asian who was wearing a clean business suit. The little hoodlums would approach, holding out one hand empty, palm up, the other holding a thick black glob of shoe polish. You learned to dive into a cab fast.

I pay for the gas and slip two folded U.S. fifties into William’s shirt pocket. We are instantly the best of buds. This is not entirely inauthentic. By recognizing his state of need and addressing it at once and without ceremony, I have proved myself a friend. Who else will do this for William? Not even his own brother, if he has one, who’s for sure as tapped out as he is.

I am here in Egypt to contact and recruit a gentleman named Abu Hassan el-Masri. These are my orders from Salter. El-Masri is a generic name, the equivalent of Joe from Kokomo. It means “father of Hassan, the Egyptian.” My man is not from Egypt. He’s from Bergen, New Jersey.

I know el-Masri from Yemen in 2019 and from several contract assignments over the decade. El-Masri was a contractor flown in to Sana’a by Salter to act as an interpreter and disbursements adviser, meaning bagman. Before that, el-Masri had served as a sergeant in the Egyptian army and, earlier still, as an undercover agent of the Amn al-Dawla, the old regime’s secret police. My instructions are to recruit him CDW—Can’t Do Without. Americans are not permitted in Egypt since the rise of the Brotherhood, so I’m traveling on a Canadian passport.

El-Masri lives in Helwan, a prosperous suburb. William gets me there in about an hour, coming in down Uribe Street, by Sadat’s tomb, then past the Citadel and through Maadi into a maze of streets choked with taxis and buses, minicabs, gharries, bicycles, and mopeds. I haven’t been in an Arab country in over a year. It all comes back. The smell—which is a malodorous amalgam of diesel fumes, animal and human excrement, rotting fruit, dust, and body odor that is simultaneously revolting and romantic—triggers a full-body flashback.

“Do you have something for me, William?”

He indicates the cargo pouch behind the driver’s seat. Inside an
oiled rag I find a U.S. Army Colt .45 automatic, M1911A1, loaded, with three full clips in a wrapper. I see William smile in the rearview. “Beautiful,” he says.

I agree.

I have traveled to Egypt without a weapon, knowing that Customs and the police at any hotel will go through everything I have.

“William, let’s talk some shit.”

I ask him who hired him and what he knows. The tone I take is agent to agent, peer to peer. Does he work for a specific agency or department that’s part of an overall operation? No, he’s freelance. He doesn’t know who hired him; a broker he often works for phoned him with a job. Did the hiring agent say what the job was? To bring you to this address. William doesn’t know who lives there.

“Then what?”

“Wait for you. Watch over you.”

I ask if I’m in danger. He grins. “The blind are leading the blind, no?”

We inch forward in the gridlock. One of the things I do to kill time when I’m traveling is to cupcake A.D.’s byline. She never stops working. She’s got contacts at every videomag, holozine, and network, mainstream or alternative, and at a hundred online and subscription journals. Sure enough, here she is now with an op-ed two hours old in the satfeed
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. The piece is about Saudi Arabia and mercenary forces. It’s about Salter. A.D. has pounded it out, I’m certain, within minutes of our holo call from Amman and placed it within hours after that.

“For those who fail to recall General Salter’s résumé,” A.D.’s second paragraph begins,

A.D.’s next two paragraphs recap Salter’s career, post–Marine Corps. She names General Pietter van Arden, the legendary South African mercenary, and cites the 2018 acquisition by van Arden’s company, AST Security, of Xe International, Titan, DynCorp, and half a dozen others to form the military-contracting superfirm, Force Insertion. Salter, A.D. writes, has been employed for almost a decade by this notoriously secretive enterprise. Where is he now? Why is none of this in the press? Why aren’t we seeing satellite real times, Twitter feeds, or street-cam videos smuggled out of the kingdom? Who’s putting the lid on this? “Our friend,” A.D. reminds her readers, referring to Salter,

A.D. is shrewd to write this as an op-ed. Because it’s an opinion piece, it’s not subject to strenuous fact-checking. She can speculate. But what she’s really doing is angling for a gig. She wants some network or mega-zine to send her to Saudi Arabia. Stay tuned, I tell myself.

William breaks free of the traffic finally. Our taxi enters a neighborhood of quiet lanes lined with jacarandas and magnolias. Streets are paved, sidewalks shaded. On both sides of a fragrant way I glimpse gated enclosures, their pastel walls brightened by pots of geraniums and bougainvillea. William finds el-Masri’s house. He parks across the street. I dismount. William is reaching for a girly magazine he keeps under the driver’s seat.

“William, do something for me.”

“Sure, boss.”

“Take a post on that roof.”

I indicate a tangerine-colored two-story house, kitty-corner from el-Masri’s.

William squints unhappily. “People live in that house, sir!”

“Watch over me.”

I hand him the .45. It would be an insult to el-Masri’s hospitality to bring it into the house.

Affluent Eastern residences are often built around courts. You enter through a stronghold door in an exterior wall, in this case
opened by el-Masri himself when I ring the copper bell. My old friend is reinforced by two bull-necked gentlemen, one of whom carries an S74U, the snub-nosed version of an AK-47. The other comes forward and pats me down. El-Masri greets me with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. He has been eagerly awaiting me, he says.

“You are still trim, Gent!”

He beams and pats his own jelly roll. In we go. While a boy fetches iced drinks, the phone rings; it’s the lady from the tangerine two-story, wondering why a strange man has just climbed onto her roof and inquiring whether this outrage has anything to do with the Englishman who has just entered el-Masri’s court. The conversation is in Arabic but el-Masri, grinning and holding his palm over the receiver, translates.

“By the way,” he asks me, “you’re not here to kill me, are you?”

He apologizes to the lady, feeds her some story that she clearly doesn’t buy, then sends his boy across the street to tell William to come down.

“Seriously, are you here to assassinate me?”

I tell el-Masri I’m not sure his stature merits the term “assassinate.”

“Don’t fuck with my head, Gent.”

I’m a friend, I swear.

“I would not hold it against you …”

I repeat my denial.

“… in fact, I would respect Salter more if I knew he was operating with such prudence.”

A spread of hummus, sliced tomatoes, onions, and olives appears, served by the bodyguards, whom el-Masri introduces as his brothers—“Jake” and “Harry.” The pair either live here in the compound or are doing a hell of a job of faking it; one is barefoot, the other wears pajama bottoms.

“Brothers, we can learn much from our guest,” says el-Masri.
“I have seen him take the head off a man, like this”—he pantomimes two backhand hacking blows—“and blast an entire village down a mountainside into a river. He is a one-man wrecking crew, believe it!”

I assure el-Masri that I have come only to talk and to deliver an offer of employment. We sip John Collinses—the English version of a Tom Collins—on a shaded terrace that overlooks a court where el-Masri’s two children play around a fountain. Temperature, I’m guessing, is 105. El-Masri speaks English with a New Jersey accent. He says “tie-yid” for “tired” and “ma-fack” for “matter of fact.”

El-Masri tells me about tough times in Egypt. In place of his former profession in the Awn al-Dawla, the secret police, he (and his brothers) now work in the furniture business; they own a factory at a town called Damietta, which is the artisanal center of the country for hand-carved chairs, desks, cabinetry. “Ninety percent of our shit is for export, but with gas through the roof, we’re fucked. Then the tariffs. Don’t get me started!” He tells me he’d give anything to get back to Jersey.

“Go,” I say. “You’re an American citizen.”

“Tell that to Homeland Security. Why do you think I was with you in Yemen in ’19, Gent? Because my name came up on a list. The CIA promised they’d get me home after that hump. Guess what? I’m still here. I can’t go near the States, me or my brothers.” He waves as if to say, What are ya gonna do?

“Well,” I say. “Maybe I can change that.”

There’s a festival in Egypt called the “Ascent,” commemorating the overthrow of the secular state. The Islamic calendar is lunar; this year the date falls on August 7. But for those in government service who cannot celebrate at that time, there’s a second feast called “Little Ascent” two weeks later. That’s tonight. Before el-Masri can quiz me about Salter’s proposition, or I can offer it, we must celebrate. Everyone in the clan shows up.