Countdown in Cairo

FORTY-SEVEN

She heard a steel door to the visiting room rattle and felt her gurney being pushed forward. The room tone changed.

She heard voices. First Rizzo. Then Colonel Amjad. Then the embassy guy whom she hardly knew.

She heard the door close, and she knew she was on center stage. The room fell silent, and the gurney stopped moving.

The doctor spoke in English as she heard the clinician step back and keep her distance.

“Which of you is-?” Dr. Badawi began.

“I’m Rizzo,” she heard Rizzo say, his voice slightly muffled and disembodied, listening as she was from within the bag. The interpreter from the embassy explained who everyone was. He spoke in Arabic and English, and Alex wished she could understand the Arabic.

“Who will do the identification?” Dr. Badawi asked.

“I will,” said Rizzo. “So let’s get it done.”

“As you wish.”

The doctor reached to the zipper. He pulled it gently open, lengthwise across the body. He stopped just past Alex’s chin. She held her breath. She kept her eyes closed as someone lifted the thin gauzy fabric away from her face. She felt a hand land on the gurney and assumed it was Rizzo’s.

“Oh, my dear Lord,” she heard him mutter low and in Italian. “Oh, no…”

“This is the woman you were working with?” Dr. Badawi asked. “The American woman who was missing?”

Several seconds of silence. She wondered if she could sneak a breath. She tried not to. Another moment passed. She heard Rizzo answer.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

“You’re certain?” the doctor pressed.

Come on, she thought. Get it over. She couldn’t hold her breath forever.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m certain.”

“You knew her personally?” the doctor asked. “Or professionally?”

“Both,” Rizzo said.

Please, please, please. Close the canvas. At least put the gauze back.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she heard Rizzo say. There was more silence. She knew everyone was staring at her. Then something happened.

There was commotion. Colonel Amjad must have done something because she heard Rizzo getting very angry, and she could feel the vibrations of some sort of scuffle.

“Have some bloody decency, would you!” she heard Rizzo shoot back. “You keep your hands off this woman’s body or I’ll rip your arms out of their sockets! Understand me?”

There was an ominous pause.

“You tell him that!” Rizzo snapped to someone, she assumed Ghalid, the interpreter. “And make bloody well sure he understands!”

Ghalid urgently spoke Arabic to the other man.

“I was only making sure,” Colonel Amjad said.

“Making sure? Making sure of what? We’re in the blasted morgue!” she heard Rizzo roar. “What more do you want? A severed head? A bullet hole you can put your fist in?”

Zip the bag. I can’t keep holding my breath. Zip me back in!

“All right,” Amjad finally said to Rizzo.

“Too bloody true, ‘all right,’ “ Rizzo said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Someone swiftly rezipped the bag. The hand pulled the zipper all the way shut. Alex was in near darkness and a second surge of claustrophobia hit her. But other hands reached to the bag and pulled the zipper back down six inches and left it there.

“There is some paperwork,” Dr. Badawi said in English to his visitors.

Rizzo spoke softly. “Of course,” he said. “Paperwork. Always. The world could come to an end but there would be paperwork even if no one were left to complete it.”

The doctor turned to his assistant. “I’ll take it from here,” he said in Arabic, dismissing the technician. Alex heard the technician walk away. She heard the steel door open and clack shut.

“You’ve done a good thing by coming out here,” Dr. Badawi said, presumably to Rizzo. “A quarter of the deceased out here are never identified. The medical authorities tell me they had to bury six hundred unknowns since January of this year, unidentified and unclaimed.”

“Typical,” Rizzo mumbled.

The doctor answered, “This had been a fairly routine day until you arrived.”

“I’m honored,” Rizzo grumbled.

Her heart started to settle slightly. The worst was most likely over. Now if she could just get out of this horrible sack of death. Rizzo seemed to be rustling some papers.

“The United States Embassy in Cairo has started procedures to retrieve her body,” Ghalid explained softly. “However, it might take several days. So-”

“We’re taking the body with us today,” Rizzo said. “I’m not leaving without it.”

“That would be quite impossible, sir,” the doctor said.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Rizzo said. “Make it happen. We owe it to this woman to get her physical remains back to her country of origin. I’m acting on behalf of the Italian government and the government of the United States. I’m not leaving without her,” he said again. “And Mr. Bassiri from the American Embassy has brought the proper paperwork.”

“True?” Dr. Badawi asked.

She felt a toe twitch. Hopefully, no one saw it. Her face started to itch from the powder. She knew she was starting to sweat, and corpses aren’t supposed to sweat. God forbid if she had to sneeze!

They must have been shuffling documents.

Come on! Hurry up! This is a nightmare in here!

“All right,” she heard the doctor say softly. “This would seem to be in order. We won’t miss one more set of remains. Less storage, less digging-no disrespect intended.” A pause. “Will you call for the proper van to transport her?” he asked.

“Immediately,” Rizzo said. “I wish to see the body back to Cairo personally. Then I wish to come back here and visit the place where she was killed.”

She heard the doctor collect the documents. “Then we are finished here,” the doctor said. “Under the circumstances, I’ll see that the body is ready to move today.”

“Grazie mille,” Rizzo said. “Choukran.”

“Âfowan,” the doctor answered.

And thank you from me too! she thought.

“I’ll stay with the body,” Rizzo continued. “We owe it to her that she is returned to America. I want to make sure the body gets there.”

“You do not have any reason to think-,” the doctor said.

“I have every reason to think something could happen,” Rizzo retorted sharply. “I said I’d stay with the body! What language do I have to say that in so that you’ll understand?”

“Very good, ya-effendim,” the doctor said. All a big show for one piggish, corrupt cop. “If it pleases you, you may wait here in this chamber. Over there, perhaps.”

More conversation. Several more seconds.

Her face was really starting to itch now. And some sweat mixed with powder had leaked into her eye. It was stinging. Beneath her backside, the sheet was soaking with her sweat. It was turning cold and making her shiver. She started to fight off a sneeze.

“Should we wait with you?” she heard Ghalid ask.

“No.” Then Rizzo went off on Amjad. “Get him out of here before I shoot him. We’re already in the morgue and I’m starting to think it’s just too convenient to pass up.”

A few more seconds. A sneeze that was harder to put a lid on.

“I’ll be at the embassy if you need anything else,” Ghalid said to Rizzo. “Be advised, transport for the body back to the US will probably have to go to Frankfurt first, then New York or Washington.”

“Just get the paperwork done,” Rizzo said. “It’s bad enough the way it is.”

Then she heard what she most wanted to hear. Doors closing. She heard no new voices and no alert from Rizzo. So Amjad was maybe out the door. Then she heard more steps, and the door opening and closing again.

More steps. No voices.

She lost track of who was where.

Then she heard a final set of footsteps. Rizzo’s? It had to be his. She doped out the scenario. He was going to the door where Amjad and Ghalid had exited. She heard him open it. Then she heard him close it and bolt it from within.

The footsteps came back to the gurney where she lay. She felt a presence hovering over her.

It’s you, Gian Antonio, yes? It has to be you! I pray to God Almighty that it’s you!

She cheated. She opened her eyes very slightly to where she could see through narrow slits and through the gauze across her face.

It was Rizzo. She was sure. He placed a hand on the bag and gave it an affectionate touch, almost a caress. She felt it on her right shoulder. Then with both hands, he reached to the zipper and pulled it downward lengthwise again.

With a cryptic, stoic expression on his own face, he stared down at her, unaware that she could faintly see through eyelids that were so narrowly open.

“Oh, my Lord…,” Rizzo said softly. “What have we done now? Oh, my Lord.”

Then Rizzo laughed. With that, Alex fully opened her eyes.

“Extraordinary,” Rizzo said calmly.

She felt fine cracks in the wax on her face. She smiled a long smile of relief and exuded a long breath.

“It’s over?” she asked.

“It’s over,” Rizzo said.

He drew the zipper down completely. She held the sheets to her, wearing little or nothing under them but still with the Beretta in her palm.

“Welcome back from the dead,” he said.

“Nice to be back,” she said. “I can’t wait to get out of this bag.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Most people never do.”

“How did Amjad take it?” she asked.

“I’d say he bought it completely,” he said. “But who knows?”

Throughout the following days, returned to Cairo and ensconced in a new hotel under a new name, Alex sought to recover from her own death. She stayed off the streets and emerged only in a veil. She dined with Rizzo one night and with Voltaire at his home the next. She met Voltaire’s wife as well as his two young children. His wife, it turned out, was a stunningly beautiful Japanese woman named Mieko. She was his third wife, he said, and was about thirty. The family brought Alex no closer to figuring out Voltaire’s origins than she had ever been. Alex wondered if even his wife knew.

But that was neither of the questions that raged before her.

In her quiet moments, in the many hours that she spent alone, she wondered two things. First, had their gambit been successful in feigning her death, and would the man she had known as Michael Cerny now emerge from whatever cover he was under? Would he attempt to finish his deal with the Russians or the Israelis or whoever was buying these days? She waited for a signal from Bissinger at the embassy in Cairo that would alert her of such movement. Alex would need to be present for the identification and the apprehension.

But then second, there was the larger enigma. Mentally shaking the pieces of the larger puzzle, she kept trying to work Yuri Federov into the equation of all that had transpired in the last year. There was a connection somewhere between Federov and Cerny, but no matter how much she racked her brain, she couldn’t locate the proper geometry of it. No matter how much she rearranged the angle and the pieces, she couldn’t nail the logic.

She went out for lonely walks as days passed. She kept her own counsel. Rizzo returned to Rome by way of Monte Carlo, Mimi in tow, where they tried their devious hands at chemin de fer and, according to an email, apparently came up big winners.

And all this time Alex remained in Cairo, laying low. A week passed. Then part of another. On instinct, she started again through the minefield of her laptop, accessed everything, backtracked, and marched forward. She reviewed all the salient events of the last year, ranging across Kiev, Paris, Venezuela, Spain, and Switzerland.

Then, expanding the venues somewhat, she started a handwritten list of all the places that had figured into her three operations. When she included the previously overlooked, Novo-Ogaryovo, Vladimir Putin’s suburban estate outside Moscow, there was a flash of light, almost like a little flare of ignited gas.

Suddenly she had it.

Words from William Quintero, the CIA case officer she had met with most recently before embarking on this trip, came back to her.

“Notice the Christmas tree. Nice homey touch, huh?” he had said.

Homey, indeed!

She reopened her laptop and went to the internet.

Yes, indeed. Alex was certain now. She had it.

She booked a flight to Switzerland immediately to seek corroboration of her final theory.