Countdown in Cairo

TWENTY-ONE

At her uncle’s apartment, Janet stayed indoors. Her uncle was away for the day, catching up with some old friends from the State Department.

She grew restless and depressed by the hour. She made herself a lunch and barely touched it. She watched Oprah, CNN, and a rerun of the previous night’s Washington Bullets game. She didn’t even like basketball. She watched anything that came across the television screen, but she wasn’t really watching.

She read magazines, napped for a while, and browsed through her uncle’s library, which had books in seven different languages, including ancient Greek and Latin. She wondered why the old goat spent his declining years on such stuff when he could have been out romancing some wealthy widows. She spent time staring at the prints on the wall, a series of cool but sensual Cubist portraits of women from the 1930s. They weirded her out, as did many of her uncle’s tastes, even though the pop diva Madonna owned some of the De Lempicka originals. Well, if Madonna did something it was probably cool, and if her uncle did the same thing it was just terminally eccentric.

But Janet did realize his apartment was her safety island. As far as she knew, no one who was after her knew where she was. And yet, when she wasn’t fighting fear, she was fighting boredom.

Alex returned around 7:30 while Janet’s uncle was still out. Alex must have quickly picked up her protégée’s glum mood-she phoned her friend Ben and invited him to join them for an informal dinner. Ben, working on a law degree, said he could afford a break and would join them.

After a long, depressing day, Janet was grateful for the company.

Alex switched into jeans and pulled on a bulky sweatshirt that could conceal her Glock. She never went anywhere without the gun now; she had developed an affinity for it, like a favorite bracelet.

Alex and Janet met Ben forty-five minutes later at the pub around the corner from the Calvert Arms. They started with beer and ordered burgers, all three of them. Alex’s head was still reeling from the day of reading and searching files. And then there was the sudden prospect of being sent to the Middle East.

She wondered who was going to babysit Janet while she was away. She wondered if Ben could look after her a little, but she didn’t want to risk setting them up romantically. Then again, Alex didn’t entirely trust her own agency, and as she thought it through further, she didn’t trust anyone she didn’t know in the CIA at all. Not now.

She wondered: could Janet take care of herself? Was Janet’s paranoia real or imagined? Could she get out of town for a while, maybe crash with her parents? But if any bad people were really after Janet, would they look there?

Okay, reality check again: even if Janet had stumbled across something involving Michael Cerny, it was a stretch to think people were after her. Alex tried to downplay it while she, Ben, and Janet drank beer and waited for the burgers to arrive. But some scary scenarios would not go away. Obviously, by trying to access Cerny’s name, Alex had kicked over a hornet’s nest.

Their food arrived. They munched their burgers. Janet obviously felt more like a human being for having gotten out and socialized. Though Alex tried to stay away from it, the subject of the Middle East came up in general and Egypt specifically, when Ben asked Alex what her next trip might be.

Janet gave Alex a strange look. Alex gave her a pat under the table as if to say, “Don’t press me for details now, I’ll explain later.”

Ben, aware of the recent tragedy in Janet’s life, was always able to reach for some comedic banter. He tried to keep the mood from getting too somber, making jokes and gestures about old 1940s and 1950s horror films involving mummies. He got both Janet and Alex laughing.

“Hey, and then there was the old Steve Martin routine, ‘King Tut,’ ” he said. “You know? The song and dance. Check it out on YouTube if you’ve never seen it.”

“How’s it go again?” Alex asked. “ ‘When I die, don’t want nothing fancy but, gimme a royal sendoff like they gave to old King Tut.’

“ Ben laughed with them. “Something like that,” he said. “I think Steve Martin had a back-up group called the ‘Toot Uncommons’ for that.”

The laughter grew louder, along with a second and third round of Pabst. The mood grew goofier.

“How about this?” Alex said, moving her arms in the quirky parallel aloft motion of the ancient figures on the tombs. “Tell me where this is from. ‘All the swell paintings on the tombs,’ ” she sang, splitting up the other two with her brew-inspired riff on “Walk like an Egyptian.” “ ‘They do some silly dance, don’t you know…’ ”

She rolled her eyes and gave it her best Bangles-Susanna Hoffs imitation. The people at the next table applauded.

“Oh, my gosh,” said Janet. “Remember that goofy “Walk like an Egyptian” video with everyone walking around funny?”

“I was a little kid,” Alex said.

“I was in seventh grade,” Ben said. “I was in love with all four Bangles. Still am, actually.” Ben laughed. “I should have worn a fez tonight.”

They riffed on Egyptian stuff for a while, from Nefertiti to Nasser. Ben did his walking-like-an-Egyptian imitation with his arms and the women laughed again.

“When I was in Egypt, most people walked normally,” Janet said with a bittersweet grin. “Until Carlos’s car blew up.”

“I walked normally too, until I ran into a roadside bomb in Iraq,” Ben said. He tapped on his prosthesis. “But then I would never have met Alex if I hadn’t been rehabbing on the basketball court.”

“And I wouldn’t have been leading a normal life again if I hadn’t met Ben,” Alex said. “God works in strange ways, right?”

They walked back to the Calvert Arms later in the evening, a slight mist falling. Ben walked along with them, and both women felt as if they had exorcised a few demons over the evening. Two hours of beer and laughter with friends, and the world didn’t seem to be such a scary place. Janet felt better for being out of the apartment without incident, and Alex had calmed down a little concerning a possible trip to the Middle East.

Let’s see if it even happens, she told herself.

Alex watched the street just in case. She didn’t see any danger, but she continued to pay close attention to the configuration of cars on her block. That one car that she had been noticing recently, the battered old Taurus, wasn’t apparent when she did a quick scan of the block. A good sign perhaps. Potential stalkers, she reasoned, were illusory after all.

They arrived uneventfully at the entrance to Alex’s building. Ben said good-bye.

Janet and Alex entered the building.

“Ben’s great,” Janet said. “He seems like a really good guy.”

“He is.”

“You’re lucky to have him.”

“He’s a friend, not a boyfriend,” Alex answered.

“So he’s available?” Janet asked.

“Not for you.” She answered with half a laugh. “I might want to grab him for myself eventually.”

“Got it. Well, you’re still lucky to have him,” Janet said.

Against logic, Alex felt mildly taken aback by the question of Ben’s availability. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess he’s available. I know he’s got a job, goes to classes at law school on most evenings, and hits the gym two or three nights a week too.”

“Wow.”

“That doesn’t leave much time for dating, I’d guess.”

The two young women stood for a moment in the lobby. Alex felt a little ill-at-ease with the personal topics. “Anything else you need to do?” Alex asked.

“Like what?” Janet asked.

“Any shopping?” Alex asked. “Groceries, maybe? How you doing on supplies?”

“I could use a trip to the store,” Janet said.

It sounded like a reasonable request. But it was after 11:00 p.m.

“There’s a mini-mart a few blocks from here,” Alex said. “Would that work?”

“That’d work.”

Alex held up her car keys and indicated the steps from the lobby to the garage. “Let’s roll,” she said.

Their car traveled up the ramp out of the garage. The mist had grown heavier and Alex flicked on the windshield wipers. She pulled into a flow of light traffic and didn’t think much of the coincidence when a parked car pulled into traffic about fifty feet behind her.