The Cairo Affair (11 page)

Stan imagined the hours since their lunch: Dragan’s piqued interest, looking into Balašević, then the disappointment that he hadn’t actually extorted Emmett himself. Dragan would have wondered how to make up for his shortcomings. Maybe he had called home and learned that, given Balašević’s connections, simply picking her up was out of the question. Therefore, he wanted to come with a different story:
Brothers, this is a request from the Americans. We do this, and we get a new level of cooperation.
They would bring her in, and Dragan would fly back to sit with her in a barren room in the countryside, with easy access to all the American secrets in her head.

It wasn’t worth it, not yet at least. “Leave her alone,” he said. “Maybe later I’ll come to you, hat in hand, asking for this. But it’s too early.”

“I can’t promise that I’ll know where she is later.”

Stan gave him a smile. “I have faith in you.”

Dragan smiled then, too. The Paolo Bertolli in Stan knew that Dragan had suspected this outcome from the start, and if he’d gone along with the plan Dragan probably would’ve been disappointed in him. Instead, he’d earned a little respect from the old spy. Perhaps it was that respect that led Dragan to pat Stan’s knee lightly and say, “There is one more thing, my friend. While I might enjoy watching you chase your tail, I will admit that I did know about that meeting between Zora Balašević and Emmett Kohl. This is why she came to Cairo. She claimed she had an old friend in the American embassy she could extort. A very forthright woman, Zora. She convinced Belgrade, and Belgrade sent her here. She approached Emmett and made her case to him. According to her, he refused. A patriot, she called Emmett. Soon afterward, she was no longer working for us, because we had discovered her connection to the Egyptians.”

Stan felt as if Dragan had tossed him a live grenade, shattering his entire vision of the last year. If Emmett hadn’t been leaking to Balašević, then it meant that he’d been wrong from the start. Did that mean that someone else in the embassy had been selling information? If so, Emmett and Sophie never would have had to leave town. He and Sophie could have remained together. Emmett, perhaps, would still be alive. Stan squeezed his forehead. “Did you believe her?”

“I did,” Dragan said, musing over this. “Until, that is, we realized she had those new employers. I thought to myself,
Why would the Egyptians want an old bitch like that?
”

“Because she really did have Emmett.”

Dragan shrugged, smiling.

“What did she have on him?”

“On Emmett?”

Stan released his forehead and nodded at him. “What was she blackmailing him with?”

Dragan shrugged. “I have no idea. She wouldn’t share with me, and when I insisted she referred me to those offices in Belgrade, where her protectors work. I’m just a station chief, Stan. I don’t have any actual authority.”

“Do you know who she reported to in the Egyptian service?”

Dragan considered this a moment, wondering how much to share, then shrugged. He’d already shared more than Stan would have, but tonight he was feeling generous. “Two meetings in public parks with someone from Ali Busiri’s office. You know Busiri, of course.”

Of course. Ali Busiri: a tough nut who ran his own section in
Al-Amn al-Markazī,
the Central Security Forces, where Paul’s source RAINMAN worked. Occasionally, Busiri butted heads with embassies, for while part of Central Security’s mandate was to protect foreign missions, Busiri’s office often used that access to turn embassy staff into sources. He’d apparently done that with Zora Balašević. He was very good at the game, but he was also an old hand—someone who, like Dragan, Stan could probably talk to.

As if reading his mind, Dragan said, “I’m not sure he’ll be very forthcoming. I tried to have Zora kicked out of Egypt, and he bought me lunch in order to threaten me.”

“Did he?”

“Ali Busiri is a man who knows the value of brute force. Still, he’s one of the old ones, and I can’t help but respect his muscle.”

“Thank you, Dragan.”

The Serb raised his glass. “You enjoy your evening, my friend.”

Stan pulled the latch and opened the door, then climbed out. Dragan’s two assistants, waiting on the curb, climbed into the front seats. The Audi drove off as, from over the rooftops, Stan heard a crackly speaker call the faithful of Cairo to Maghrib prayers.

That haunting sound came back to him later, in his dreams, lingering when, at three thirty, Sophie woke him to say that she would be arriving the next evening on EgyptAir 552, landing at seven. “Can you keep it quiet?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want anyone to try to stop me.”

Amen,
he thought as a thrill rippled through his body. It felt a lot like hunger.

4

In the office, he barely held on, waiting for seven o’clock. Questions plagued him. Was Sophie running from the mess her life had become, or was she running toward him? He wasn’t sure how he felt about either of these possibilities. Should he tell Harry about her imminent arrival? She wanted to come in quietly, and the fact was that Stan wanted this, too. Harry would eventually learn she was in town, but first he wanted her all to himself. And finally, who told Emmett about the two of them? As he watched faces pass by the window of his office, their features tightened by the tension in the building, he speculated one by one on who might want to stab him in the back.

Enough.

He straightened himself and logged into one of five anonymous e-mail accounts he used for signaling contacts, then cut-and-pasted a short note in Arabic to Ali Busiri. It was a bit of spam, boasting investment opportunities in Southeast Asia, but the content wasn’t important. All Busiri needed to see was the from-address, and he would know that Stan Bertolli from the U.S. embassy wanted to have a chat with him as soon as possible. If RAINMAN, their source in his office, wasn’t returning their calls, then he would go straight to the boss.

He looked up to see the whole floor walking past his door, in the direction of Harry’s office. Jennifer Cary waved for him to follow.

Cramped tight in that room, they listened to the dismal news of potential leads that had led nowhere. Terry Alderman’s people had uncovered odd wires to Emmett’s Bank of America account, but those turned out to be for speaking engagements he’d done the previous year. Dennis Schwarzkopf’s agents were at first excited by the news that one of Emmett’s Egyptian associates, a real estate developer, had begun investing in Budapest a couple of months after Emmett relocated, but more probing revealed that the developer, after a month of fruitless negotiations, had thrown up his hands and abandoned the country entirely. That had been in December, and Emmett had had no connection to the failed dealings. Jennifer Cary’s people, like Stan’s, had nothing to offer the group, and Harry told them to get off their asses and back to work, as if he were speaking to a room full of auto workers. Then he took a breath, sat down, and waved his hands in the air. “Okay, okay. If there’s no connection to us, then there’s no connection. But
try,
all right? I’m not just asking for personal reasons. If we don’t find a local connection, but next week the Hungarians or the Egyptians do, then you know how that’s going to make us look.”

The office door opened, and Nancy looked in, aiming a long, painted fingernail. “Stan, line two.”

Everyone was watching, and he felt damp with sudden perspiration, fearing that it was Sophie. “Can you take a message?”

“It’s Paul. He says you’ll want to take this.”

He hurried to his office. Paul’s voice came in clearly despite traffic noises in the background. “Sorry for dropping out on you, but it was a last-minute meet.”

“You should’ve checked in.”

“It was RAINMAN.”

“RAINMAN?” Stan asked, the coincidence making him briefly stupid. “Anything interesting?”

“I’ll tell you in a few minutes.”

A quarter hour later, Paul was sitting in his office. A blond Pennsylvanian with a farm childhood and a Princeton education, he looked like he had just gotten out of bed, which was apparently where he had been when RAINMAN called. “He got my message about Kohl.”

Civil servants come and go, but RAINMAN, or Omar Halawi, had been around for decades and, based on his position in the Central Security Services, just under Ali Busiri, knew a lot about a lot of people. For a while he had been willing to share that knowledge. Sometimes the Agency paid for information with trade concessions for him and his friends. His original contact had been Amir Najafi, John Calhoun’s Global Security predecessor, but he’d been killed in a five-car pileup on the Ring Road around Cairo. So Paul had taken over the role.

“He tells me one thing, just one thing. But he wants to tell it face-to-face. He tells me that if we want to find Emmett’s murderer, we need to look at ourselves.”

Stan frowned. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

Paul leaned back, opening his hands. “I asked the same thing, and apparently it does. I asked him
why
we would want to get rid of one of our own consuls. What do you think he said?”

“I don’t know, Paul.”

“To keep him quiet.”

“About?”

Paul shrugged. “He wasn’t going to say. But he told me to tell you—he mentioned you by name—that you should watch your back.”

“Sounds like he’s trying to scare me.”

Another shrug. “I’m just the messenger.”

Stan nodded, taking this in.

“Well? It’s something, no?”

“It’s certainly that,” Stan said, then shook his head. “Or it’s nothing. He drops contact for a few weeks and suddenly pops up with this? Halawi’s an old pro—he could even be passing on a message from Busiri. I wouldn’t take anything either of them says at face value. Not yet.”

“Want me to send a reply?”

“Let me talk to Busiri first, establish some parameters, then we’ll have better questions for Halawi. And keep this under your hat. If we bring in something like this and it fizzles out, Harry’s going to have a coronary.”

After Paul left, Stan puzzled over the accusation. The Agency had a checkered history, but when it wanted to keep fellow Americans quiet, it smeared their names in the newspapers and slapped them with lawsuits. It seldom had reason to reach for a gun.

His phone rang. Nancy said, “I’ve got John Calhoun. He wants the boss, but Harry’s out for a cigarette.”

“Patch him through.” Once the familiar sequence of clicks ended, he said, “John, you back already?”

He hadn’t seen John in a couple of days—Harry had taken his contractor away for some unknown job. But instead of giving Stan a clue John only muttered, “Yeah.”

“We’ll see you today?”

“No.”

Like many big men, John used silence to his advantage, and that morning he was master of the monosyllable. “So you’re just checking in?”

“That’s right.”

“Everything okay?”

“No,” John said, then paused, preparing himself for more words than he’d planned to use. “But I’ll need to sleep it off. Just tell Harry that it didn’t work.” As an afterthought, he added, “Please.”

“It…” Stan said, waiting for him to fill in something, anything.

“I’ll file my report for him Monday. If he wants it sooner, I can come in tomorrow.”

“I’ll let him know, but he’s a little backed up today. We got some shit news from Budapest.”

“Budapest?”

Stan told him about Emmett, and he said, “My condolences,” as if he gave a damn. Stan doubted he did.

When Harry returned from his cigarette break, Stan knocked on his door and found him immersed in his laptop, which he closed. The room smelled of cigarette ash. “Anything?” he asked by way of greeting.

“I’ll let you know later,” Stan said. “John called in and said something about
it
not working. He’s going to sleep but will report on Monday. Unless you want him to come in tomorrow.”

The sign was unmistakable. Harry’s forehead crinkled, as if it had been slapped. “That’s all he said?”

Stan nodded. “What does
it
mean?”

Harry exhaled through his nose. After a pause, he said, “It means Langley is going to be even more irritated with us than it usually is.”

Stan waited for more, but Harry was already reopening his laptop. On the way back to his desk, the BlackBerry in his pocket vibrated a message from his friend at Langley, Saul.

FRA holds footage indef. In practice about 5 yrs. What are you looking for? I’ll make some calls.

Stan switched to email to thank Saul and send the details: September 4, 2010, Zora Balašević, Lufthansa 585 from Cairo to Frankfurt, and Jat 351 to Belgrade.

Then his mind was drawn inevitably back to Omar Halawi’s warning.
Look at yourselves.
He hesitated a full five seconds before clicking
SEND
.

5

He was at the airport a half hour early because he couldn’t think of what to do with himself, and he wandered among the listless crowds and armed security, wondering how his father would have approached the questions before him. Paolo Bertolli would have taken it easy. He had been a doyen of the long-term operation, an agent with immeasurable patience—it was the only way he could have survived for so long within the Red Brigades, while around him young Marxist-Leninist Italians ate themselves up with paranoia. Stan had never had that kind of patience, nor that kind of bravery.

Sophie Kohl, he believed when he first laid eyes on her trailing the other passengers out of Arrivals, wouldn’t be any help. She looked overused, slumped under the weight of her bulky shoulder bag, which was apparently her only luggage. Even broken, though, she had taken the time to apply the burgundy lipstick he remembered so well. He took the heavy bag from her, gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and thought,
Christ you’re beautiful,
though he didn’t say it aloud. He noticed how easily she still fit in his arms, and how holding her brought on a carnivorous instinct, the desire to consume her whole. It was a strong desire, and six months hadn’t done a thing to lessen it. Without her, he had been able to convince himself that he was fine being alone, but in her presence the whole illusion was shattered, and he was just as stunned as he had been the previous year.