Countdown in Cairo

THIRTY-TWO

Alex passed through Egyptian customs, then immigration. The Egyptian security officer scanned her passport. He waited for something on a computer screen, and so did she.

Whenever she traveled on a fake passport, immigration unnerved her. She watched everything the agent was doing and observed every facial gesture carefully. She even watched his eye movements as he looked at his computer screen. She felt her heart race and felt her blouse moisten with sweat.

Then the agent closed her passport, handed it back, and nodded to her. He smiled. “Welcome to Egypt,” he said in English.

Moments later, she retrieved her baggage from a clanking, outdated carousel and soon found a young man from the US Embassy holding a piece of paper with her new name on it. She approached him, smiled, and identified herself.

They shook hands. As it turned out, there had been one other passenger on her flight who was attached to the US diplomatic section in Cairo. He was a man about ten years older than she. The driver was also waiting for him. Once he had found both travelers, the driver took Alex’s bags and carried them to a waiting van.

“I’m Mo,” the driver said as they piled into the van.

“Short for Mohammad, I assume,” Alex answered.

“Mo is fine,” the man said without humor.

“Well, at least they didn’t send Larry or Curley,” the other traveler said sotto voce to Alex, who had to suppress a smile.

Mo and Cairo traffic were perfectly suited to each other. The ride into the city was crazy, with hyped-up drivers often passing between two other cars in the actual lanes, as a static-filled radio filled the van. It was not usual to be in a stream of traffic four-cars-across on a two lane highway at sixty miles per hour. Alex and the other American in the van exchanged another glance. She checked that her seatbelt was tight. The driving was worse than what Alex remembered from some of her trips to Central and South America. The only worse traffic that she could recall was during her trip to Lagos two years earlier, where there seemed to be no rules at all.

“I wish I had a helmet,” she said to the other man.

He laughed and shook his head.

“Me too,” he said. “And maybe some extra life insurance.”

Mo either couldn’t hear them or chose to ignore them.

The highway passed through several upscale blocks in the northern fringe of the city. Alex noted a number of satellite dishes on buildings, most of them looking as if they hadn’t worked for the past twenty years. Gradually the new buildings gave way to some very old ones, and she knew she had arrived in an ancient and picturesque city, a city she read about so many times in her life.

Cairo. Al Qahirah, as it had originally been called. The Triumphant City, so named for all the invading armies that had conquered it and then left, defeated by the quirky eccentricities of the city itself. The ancient was intermingled with the new on endless blocks. And even after the highway, traffic was a nightmare.

Their van pulled up in front of one of the better hotels, the Metropole Cairo. The Metropole was a bright modern building with several guards around it, many with heavy weapons. There was a display of foreign flags above the entrance arcade. Alex nodded a good-bye to the other passenger, and she stepped out. A porter picked up Alex’s one piece of luggage from the rear of the van.

Alex tipped Mo with an American ten-dollar bill. He grunted in response.

The Metropole stood impressively by the River Nile. The lobby was modern. It gleamed with new furniture and artwork in an Egyptian motif. Alex checked in easily, and a second porter took her to her room.

The room was a small suite, actually, more like a room and a half, a sitting area, and a sleeping area. It was thoroughly air-conditioned and had numerous amenities-multiple telephone lines, internet access, satellite television, a small refrigerator, and a polished marble bathroom with separate showers. It afforded a spectacular view of the Nile as well as a hotel pool. It was obviously designed for diplomatic and business travelers, a fine base for conducting business or exploring historic Cairo. She had heard the Metropole was considered one of the best business hotels in the Middle East, and her impression on arrival did nothing to undermine that premise.

She knew from her previous “official” visits to Nigeria and Ukraine that every US Embassy provided arrival kits for guests, including maps of the city and phrase books. She found such a kit waiting for her with a card from a political officer at the Cairo Embassy. His name was Richard Bissinger.

She knew from experience that the political officer was often more than simply that. For better or worse, Bissinger, or whatever his real name was, was her CIA contact.

On one of the maps was a notation as to where the embassy was. It wasn’t far. She had also noticed on arrival that the entire neighborhood was well policed, even beyond the weapons-toting guards that ringed the hotel. Also within the kit was a cell phone, new and presumably secure.

Alex changed into a knee-length tan skirt, a conservative light blue blouse, and shoes that would allow her to walk or run as needed. She had a linen jacket and threw it over her arm. She carried an extra silk scarf but tucked it into a jacket pocket. She knew that if she wished to enter a mosque or any Islamic holy place, she would need her neck and arms covered. She memorized the short walking direction to the embassy and set out on foot, ready for anything, not wishing to consult a map or guide book and look conspicuously like a tourist.

What struck her immediately on her way, in addition to the remorseless heat, was the din of the city-a confirmation of what Rizzo had mentioned. There was an unyielding background noise to every block. Motor vehicles jammed the streets. The drivers had one hand on the horn and a rules-free way of attacking any intersection. Trucks and cars ducked up onto the sidewalk to pass. Many seemed to have won an uncontested divorce from their common sense as well as their mufflers. Vehicular anarchy reigned. Alex regretted having not taken Rizzo’s advice about the earplugs.

Big trucks rumbled by. Pickup trucks hit their air horns at each other. Battered black-and-white taxis honked, and their drivers exchanged profanities with each other. She was secretly pleased she didn’t understand Arabic, at least not right now. Men worked on cars in the street. Vendors hawked newspapers, snacks, water, fruit, and bootlegged DVDs from tables on the streets. Butchers hawked meat in stands that overflowed out onto the sidewalks. They blasted radios and cranked up the volume on television sets. As she walked, muezzins’ calls to prayer wailed from loudspeakers in the minarets of thousands of mosques in the city, as they would five times every day.

Forewarned, Alex could still not believe the din. People in private conversations shouted to be heard. Some blocks were only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer. She wondered how people could live here. It was unlike New York or London or Madrid or Moscow or any other internal-combustion-engine-choked metropolis that she had ever experienced. This was like living next to a lawnmower.

To her relief, she was at the embassy in fifteen noisy minutes.

The American Embassy was a green high-rise of about a dozen stories, next to the Japanese Embassy. Like her hotel, it overlooked the Nile. Ten minutes after arriving in the lobby, she sat in the office of Richard Bissinger on the third floor of the embassy, savoring the silence within the American enclave.

There she waited.