Countdown in Cairo

THIRTY-SIX

You’re going to help us bring home a renegade intelligence agent,” Voltaire explained. “That’s why you’re here. But part of the way I work is to be seen as little as possible by anyone who knows exactly what I do. So for our purposes here, you’re going to be the point person, the person who’s on the front line to bring in Michael Cerny. Does the operation make sense to you so far?”

“From what I know of it, yes,” she said.

“This operation has more than one goal, as you’ll discover. I’ll tell you right now that there’s more going on here than you already realize or than you’ll perhaps ever know.” He paused. “Think of yourself as a colonel in artillery in the D-Day invasion. You have authority, but do you really know what the generals are doing? Of course not.”

Alex watched him, his steady gaze, his steady hands, and said nothing.

“I’m not planning to give you a thorough briefing today. We have a little window of time before we close a trap on the individual in whom we have an interest. ‘Judas,’ I’d like to call him,” Voltaire said.

“Judas,” Alex answered. “Very good.”

“I operate under the assumption that you’re fully up to an assignment like this, mentally and physically,” he continued. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been sent, nor would you have persevered to find this place. If you had any last minute trepidations, you would have disappeared in the alley. So I won’t even ask if you have second thoughts. You wouldn’t be sitting here if you did. My condolences on your loss in Kiev, your fiancé, by the way. I know the whole story.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I spoke to our mutual friend at the office in Cairo, the gentleman who directed you here. Fitzgerald.”

Alex nodded.

“He’s your guy for background information, what has already happened. One doesn’t understand the present without understanding the past,” Voltaire said. “But I’m your person for what we’re going to do, what will happen. Are you ready to get killed?”

“Not really.”

“Me, neither. That’s good. And I like you,” he said. “But if there’s a choice between one of us getting killed, I’ll choose you in a heartbeat. I’d expect you to do the same. Are you a religious person?”

“I am,” she said. “A practicing Christian.”

“I’m not anything.”

“I can tell.”

“That damns my soul to hell, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s a theory,” she said.

He laughed. “You’re good. Sharp. Hungry?”

“A bit. Is food an option?”

“Sometimes.” He signaled a waiter. The establishment had kebabs, a chicken couscous, and something called a bisteeya, which Voltaire suggested.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a flaky pastry concocted from almonds, dates, and pigeon.”

“Pigeon? Like underfoot in New York?” she asked. “Feathered rats?”

“Very similar. Hemingway survived on them when he was struggling in Paris after World War I. Try one.”

“I’m not struggling, I’m not in Paris, and I’ll have a kabob,” she said. “Lamb, not mutton, right? And with rice.”

“As you request,” Voltaire said. “If they bring salad, don’t touch it. That’s how you get dysentery.”

To be clear, Voltaire translated the order into crisp Arabic. The waiter nodded, smiled, and disappeared.

“Very good,” Voltaire said. His eyes swept the room. “You’ve got some sass to you too. That helps. How do you feel about seducing a man you’ve never previously met.”

“Depends on who he is, what he looks like, and where we are.”

“Good answer,” he said. “I was in the military for six years. Not with the Americans but with a Western power. I was in a branch equivalent to your US Marines. Whenever one was asked a question of logistics and wanted to hedge on the answer, one would say, ‘It depends on the situation and the terrain.’ That’s the answer you just gave.”

“This ‘seduction’?” she asked. “This ties in with an overnight with a Russian that Fitzgerald mentioned?”

“It might.”

“This seems to be emerging as a sub-specialty of mine,” she said facetiously.

“We all have our moments and our skills,” he said.

“What are yours?”

“You’ll find out as we go along,” he said. “As you need to know. But think of me as a Swiss Army knife. I have a lot of functions other than just cutting throats.”

“Which armed forces were you with?” she asked.

“If I wanted you to know that, don’t you think I would have just told you?”

“Of course,” Alex answered. “But I figured I’d give it a try.”

“You look like you’d be a real pleasure in bed,” Voltaire continued. “Sleep with me later tonight, and I’ll tell you about my army career.”

“I don’t need to know that badly. In fact, I don’t really care.”

“Good response. How many languages do you speak?” he asked.

“You’ve seen my file. You know the answer,” Alex said. “English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and I can get by in Ukrainian. I have a limited reading knowledge of German and a familiarity with Portuguese almost by default because it overlaps so often with the other Romance languages.”

Voltaire nodded. “I speak the same languages as you do, plus Greek and Arabic, obviously, but without the bloody Ukrainian. I mention all this in case it becomes an element in our communication over the next few days.”

He paused.

“The German I speak with considerable ease,” he said. “My parents were Nazis. My father and both of his brothers were in the SS.”

He looked her up and down.

“Are you shocked?” he asked.

“Shocked? No. I’m not even surprised. And I’m certainly not impressed.”

“One of them was the commandant of a labor camp in Poland,” he said. “Very nice man as long as you weren’t a Jew, in which case he was a monster. He escaped here after the war. I rather liked Uncle Heinz, murderer though he was.”

“That’s for you to live with, not me,” she said. “Assuming there’s even a grain of truth to any of that, which I suspect there isn’t.”

He kept a tight gaze upon her, eye to eye. Then he relented and smiled. “All right,” he said. “You passed.”

“I passed what?”

“Until right now I could have rejected you as a working partner. You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“Now you do,” he said. “I’m going to talk to Fitzgerald by phone later this evening. He’ll send you some further background files, mostly on the intelligence operations of a ‘third party’ nation that is normally friendly to the United States, but isn’t always. Any idea who that might be?”

“I could offer a short list.”

“Good. Don’t. Fitzgerald will send you files. Read them in the morning. Tomorrow we’ll meet again. Have you been out to the Pyramids of Giza?”

“Never,” she said.

“Good again. We’ll go for an open-air ride. Perfect place to talk. I’ll explain what will be expected of you. Be in front of your hotel at 3:00 p.m. Dress a little bit like a tourist if you can. Khaki is good. If you don’t have any with you, there are shops around the hotel. It will be hot in the afternoon, then cool in the evening. Khaki is perfect.”

“I brought some with me,” she said. “Work shirt, slacks, and shorts.”

“Good move. Ever ride a horse?”

“Last year in the Kentucky Derby. Finished third.”

“Brilliant, but answer me for real.”

“When I was a teenager, neighbors had horses.”

“In the US?”

“Eastern Ontario. I also worked on a ranch in France one summer. I rode there too.”

“Like it?”

“France or the horses?”

“Either,” he asked.

“Both.”

“Good,” he said. “You might be on the back of a camel tomorrow. It’s similar, just hurts more if you fall because you’re higher up. And God help you if you get kicked with a hoof.”

“You’re serious about this camel thing?”

“Completely. It goes with my cover. I’m a local businessman. I invite friends and business associates from all over the world and take them out to the tourist places. Wide open air. We can talk in complete freedom. Many of my guests are beautiful single women, so even if we are observed, nothing raises an eyebrow.”

“Got it,” she said.

“Now, tell me a bit more about yourself,” Voltaire said.

“There’s very little reason to,” she said. “You obviously know a lot about me or you wouldn’t have come here to meet me.”

“True enough,” he said. “But tell me things anyway.”

“Such as?”

“Tell me something I might not know,” he said, “something that might have escaped your official file or record. And don’t bore me with any of that Canadian nonsense, I know exactly who you are.”

She thought for a moment. She sipped the chilled tea that accompanied the meal.

“All right, here’s something,” she said. “I got into this line of work almost by chance. I never had any desire to do it. I was at a desk in Washington working on internet financial frauds. Next thing I know, they put me out in the field on a mission to Nigeria. That was a group effort. But thereafter, I got hooked into a trip to Ukraine. They needed someone who spoke Russian, so they tapped me.”

“You never thought there might have been an ulterior reason?” he asked.

“For what?” she asked, slightly surprised.

“For sending you. Specifically you, to Ukraine.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“It never occurred to you?” “Not until now.”

“Always consider something like that,” he said. “That’s a word of good advice for the evening, free of charge.”

She pondered the point.

“I’m enjoying this dialogue. Keep talking,” he said.

“About?”

“How you never sought your current métier. But like greatness in anything, rather than seeking it or attaining it, you had it thrust upon you.”

Plates of food arrived. Suddenly, Alex was very hungry. She dug in, and they retreated to small talk for several minutes.

“Here’s something else, since you asked,” she said at length. “I tend to take code names very seriously,” she said. “The more one examines them, the more they reveal something about the person who has taken them.”

“Do tell,” said Voltaire.

“The desk-bound intellectual who yearns for action takes the name of ‘Fireman.’ The outlaw takes the name of ‘Sheriff.’ The atheist takes the name of ‘Priest.’ Somehow your code name expresses something about you. A reference to French parentage perhaps instead of the Nazi cover story that you tried to sell me. A coy allusion to the Enlightenment in Europe. You’re obviously well educated, I suspect perhaps even in the French language, as you speak it with no accent that I can pick up and with excellent diction and grammar. Or you have a yearning again to be what you’re not, vis-à-vis, French. I may never know, but somewhere the name is a key.”

“Very, very clever,” he said. “Maybe as a reward, I should tell you part of it.”

“Maybe you should. If you chose to, I’d listen.”

“Consider it an expression of opposites. It’s an expression of personal philosophy as opposed to anything of action, strategy, or import. You’re a rather educated little imp, yourself,” he said. “My guess is that you’ve studied French extensively and probably read it on a university level. So if you read French literature of any sort, you probably read Candide.”

“I did. And I once saw a production of the musical in New York.”

“And what was the key phrase of Dr. Pangloss? Of what was the real Voltaire mocking so bitterly?”

“The concept that this is the best of all possible worlds,” she answered.

“Exactly,” he said. “And that is exactly the opposite of what I’m making fun of, what I’m alluding to. This world that we live in is, in my benighted opinion, often the worst of all possible worlds.”

“Hence your code name fits you completely and gives away a large part of you,” she said. “Because that was absolutely the feeling of the real Voltaire.”

He laughed. “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who cut right through to the core of that,” he said.

“I might be the first person who cared enough to,” she said.

“That too,” he admitted. “Impressive. It’s rare enough to find an American who has read Candide.”

“I’m Canadian,” she said.

“Good catch.”

“Nice try.”

A waiter came by and cleared their table. They ordered a final mint tea.

The conversation drifted back to Voltaire’s long residence in, and expertise about, the city of Cairo. From there he rambled into local politics as he smoked again. Alex found it wise to listen.

“The people of Cairo don’t believe their rulers, but they give credibility to every halfwit political rumor that goes around, no matter how stupid and ill-founded. Did you know that Coptic Christians were waging a secret war by going around spray painting crosses onto the clothing of Muslims? Did you know Israel had hired and sent to Egypt one thousand AIDS-infected prostitutes to infect young Muslim men? Did you know that radical Muslim extremists were planning to dump poison into the vats at the Stella brewery? You keep your ear to the ground in this city and you’ll hear just about anything,” Voltaire said. “Unless you trust your source beyond any question, you believe nothing that you hear and maybe ten percent of what you see.” He paused. “Want to experience an example of it for yourself?” he asked Alex. “Right now?”

“Where? How?” she asked.

“There’s a little group in a café near here that I join every now and then. People talk. Often in English. I drop by and listen and do some give and take. It helps to keep an ear to the ground.”

He glanced at his watch. Alex glanced at hers at the same time. It was 10:45.

“And they don’t know who they’re talking to?” Alex asked.

“They don’t know and they don’t care,” Voltaire said. “My cover is this: I’m a Monsieur Maurice Lamara, an importer of air-conditioning units from France and Italy. I run a midsized company here. I have a dozen employees and I treat them well. I never go near the embassy, and I collect a nice payment every month from the Americans who put an electronic transfer into a bank in Europe for me every month. Cairenes voice a lot of noisy opinions, but they know better than to ask many questions because they might get a visit from the police. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Who will you say I am?”

“My femme du jour,” he said with a trace of lechery in his eyes. “They’re used to seeing me with beautiful Western women, one after another. I bring women by, just to show them off. They rather admire me for it in their swinish Arab way. If you’re game, I’ll take you there.”

“I’m your squeeze of the night, huh?”

“So to speak.”

“I didn’t travel four thousand miles to go home early,” she said.

“That’s the spirit.”

“Am I dressed okay? For wherever we’re going.”

“You’re fine. Keep the headscarf. We’ll have some high-artillery backup, anyway. I don’t go anywhere without it.”

“I noticed. You have at least six.”

“There are more than that, but I’m not giving away numbers.”

“Eight then? The two Persian women have guns?”

“Now you have it.”

“I never for a moment thought you were stupid,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Voltaire turned and gestured to a burley man seated two tables away. The man stood. As his body straightened up to standing position, Alex realized he was even larger than she had guessed. He stood maybe six-four. He wore a white robe and an Islamic skull cap. He came to the table and a grin spread across his face. He had the torso of a Kodiak bear and the face of a cherub with a stubbly beard.

“This is Abdul,” Voltaire said. “Abdul and I have known each other for twenty years. He’s one of my bodyguards and he’ll lead the way.”

Abdul held out a hand to Alex.

“Charmed,” he said.

“My pleasure, I’m sure,” Alex said. Abdul’s hand was like a catcher’s mitt.

Abdul nodded.

“Where are you from in America?” he asked.

“I’m from the Toronto area,” she said. “I’m Canadian. What about you? You’re a native of Cairo?”

“I’m Iraqi,” Abdul said. “I grew up in Detroit. I was in the US Army for six years. Fort Hood, Texas. Fort Benning, Georgia, stateside, one tour in Afghanistan.”

“Surprising place, isn’t it?” Voltaire asked. “I assume you have a weapon. Check that it’s functioning in case there’s trouble.”

“Expecting any?”

“I never expect any. And I always prepare for it.”

“My weapon is fine,” she said. It was where it always was, on her right hip, accessible, the safety catch on.

“Then let’s go,” he said.