The Cairo Affair

1

He first discovered Emmett’s treachery in March 2010, though he had been following clues for at least a month. In early February Langley had sent a classified directive via one pale, sweating official from Internal Affairs who waited at Stan’s apartment, holding a file flown over in the diplomatic pouch. He sat in the kitchen while Stan called Virginia for verification, then in the living room he opened the file and laid out four pieces of intercepted communications from three Washington embassies, with the simple explanation, “The Bureau passed this on to us.” Syria, Libya, and Pakistan had been using material from top-secret communications that had originated in Harry’s office, material that covered aspects of trade, military analyses, and in two cases undercover operations. One was still in play, while the other—an exfiltration from Libya a month ago—had ended when the operative’s body was discovered, cut into pieces, in the desert outside Homs.

“Christ,” Stan said as he went through the papers. He had personally known the dead undercover agent, whose names—both his birth name and the one on his documents—were right there in capital letters. Yet the emissary was treating this like business as usual. “Who’s selling us out?”

The emissary shrugged. “That’s why we’ve come to you.”

“I’m that squeaky clean?”

“The easiest. We don’t have the manpower to send over a team at this point, so we decided to clear one of you and have you continue the investigation.”

Stan knew what he meant by “easiest”—his father, Paolo Bertolli, was a legend in Langley circles, and the Bertolli name still carried weight eight years after his death. Stan said, “You want me to do this on my own?”

The emissary smiled. “Is it really true your father spent six years undercover in the Brigate Rosse?”

“What do the files say?”

“Six years, entirely on his own.”

Stan scratched at his nose. “Is this what the office told you to say? In case I resisted?”

The emissary shrugged. Of course it was.

He and Sophie had been involved for three months by then, meeting twice a week in their Dokki hotel, and for this reason it didn’t occur to him to focus on Emmett. He was already cuckolding the man; he felt no desire to ruin him completely.

He first examined members of the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Section, in particular his boss, Harold Wolcott, and the other submanagers—Jennifer Cary, Dennis Schwarzkopf, and Terry Alderman. This took longer than expected, and while no amount of vetting could clear an individual with absolute certainty he decided eventually to move on. He expanded his search to include embassy staff who’d had access to the compromised trade, military, and undercover materials. Emmett made that list, but so did eighteen others from various embassy departments. He eventually discovered, from one year earlier, the surveillance photos taken by Terry’s men of Emmett meeting with an unidentified woman in a restaurant soon after his arrival in Cairo. No one had followed up on her identity—a note with the photo suggested it was a business associate, or a friend—so Stan sent Langley two shots of her face, with Emmett cropped out, and asked for an ID. Three days later he received the reply: Zora Balašević, suspected employee of the Bezbednosno-informativna agencija—the BIA, Serbia’s intelligence agency, which was run out of their Cairo embassy by a clever old man named Dragan Milić.

Was it really possible that Emmett Kohl was selling them out to the Serbs? Even then he doubted it, for everything he knew about Kohl suggested otherwise. But Stan had come up empty on everyone else; he had no choice but to push on.

After verifying that Emmett had had access to all four pieces of wandering intelligence, he spent another week following him through endless meetings and scouring his cell phone records. In their shared hotel bed, he asked Sophie about their past. He knew that she and Emmett had spent a week or two in Yugoslavia at the beginning of its long civil war, so he asked about their connections. She shrugged and told him that their Serbian relationships had faded soon after they returned to the States. “When you leave you’re convinced you’ll see your new friends again, but absence doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder, does it? It makes it colder.”

She also told him that on the morning of March 29, the following Tuesday, she and Emmett would be joining the consul general at the Sayed Darwish Theater for a performance of The Nutcracker by the Moscow Stars on Ice, followed by a reception at the Russian embassy. So that Tuesday morning he arrived at their apartment a little after eleven, typed in their alarm code, and went inside. He tethered his computer to Emmett’s laptop with a FireWire cable and began to copy his hard drive. Though he didn’t imagine that Emmett would have kept evidence of treachery lying around, he searched the apartment anyway, finding things he shouldn’t have looked at—old love letters between Emmett and Sophie that she had dutifully kept in a shoe box, faded photos of the two of them when they were much younger and, it seemed, much happier, and, in a secret box behind Emmett’s underwear, naked shots of Sophie in bed, smiling. As soon as the copying was finished, he disconnected the cable, reset the alarm, and left.

Emmett was a diplomat, not a spy—he had no idea how to cover his tracks. While deleting a file was enough to deny Stan access to the file itself, he was still able to find the record of its existence, and Emmett had never thought to rename anything. So among the deleted items he found W090218SQR and W090903SQB and W090729SQL—three top-secret documents that Langley believed had been the source of the compromised intelligence, items that were forbidden outside embassy walls.

The evidence was damning, yet it still took him two more days to accept the obvious. While “love” was a word he still struggled to use, he soon realized that his unspoken feelings for Sophie had been clouding his judgement. The facts couldn’t be ignored: His lover’s husband was a traitor. He thought of that undercover agent whose mutilated body had festered under the desert sun. How many other agents had been killed or kidnapped because of Emmett’s misdeeds? Stan’s own mideeds paled to insignificance, and he lost all sympathy for Emmett Kohl. He even allowed himself to hate.

He waited for Emmett on a street near the embassy. It was a warm day, and Sophie’s husband looked harried. Stan asked about The Nutcracker, and Emmett gave a noncommittal shrug. “Take a walk with me, will you?” Stan asked as he led him down a sweltering Cairo alley he had scouted beforehand, to a little courtyard café with yellow paint peeling off of old stone walls. Emmett had grown anxious by then, but Stan reassured him with aimless talk about personal problems he desperately needed help with until, finally, they were sitting across from each other at one of the plastic tables.

Neither of them had a lot of time—end-of-the-month meetings were filling both of their schedules—so Stan didn’t bother easing into it. He showed Emmett the photographs of his meeting with Balašević and a CD-ROM that he assured him proved that Emmett had been loading secret files onto his laptop. “Jesus,” Emmett said, seeming to shrink before Stan’s eyes.

“This is about as serious as it gets,” Stan told him.

Emmett looked like a little boy who was going to be sick, his round, smooth face preternaturally young. Hiding his contempt, Stan reached across the table and patted Emmett’s hand.

“Just consider yourself lucky that I’m the one who discovered it.”

Emmett couldn’t manage an answer.

“Let’s start with who this woman is.”

He gave Stan the name he already knew, Zora Balašević, then the name of her employer: BIA, the Security Information Agency.

“You want to tell me what she has on you?”

A firm shake of the head. For the moment, it didn’t matter. “But I refused,” Emmett said.

Despite himself, Stan let a smile slip into his face. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Listen, Emmett. I don’t need to come to you with this. The information you gave her didn’t sit around in the Serbian embassy—it traveled. The Serbs sold it on to at least three different governments. By now it’s common knowledge. With what I’ve got, Harry can send you home in shackles.”

His eyes had grown into saucers. “I’m telling you, Stan. I didn’t give her anything. She asked—threatened, really—but I refused.”

People lie. During his ten years with the Agency Stan had listened to more lies than he could count, and he’d lied at least the same number of times. Being his father’s son, he was pretty good at it, but in his experience diplomatic staff were among the most skillful liars around. So it was no surprise that Emmett told him these things with a straight face. He went on to say that, yes, he’d brought home his work, even brought home material that wasn’t supposed to leave the embassy. “I’m loose with the rules. I’ll admit to that. But I’m not a traitor.”

“What does Balašević have on you?”

“It doesn’t matter, Stan. That was a year ago. She asked, I said no—end of story.”

“Then why didn’t you report it?”

“Because I didn’t know you. I didn’t know Harry. I was worried about my job.”

Stan gave him a good long stare to show that he wasn’t buying any of this. He said, “You’re going to close it down. Tell her the truth—you were uncovered, and now it’s all over.”

“It never started.”

“I’m trying to close a leak, Emmett. I’m not here to abuse you. I’m not even going to make you feed them disinformation—the Serbs aren’t worth it. But you have to be open with me. What you need to do now is admit it to me.” He opened his hands. “I’m not carrying a wire, I swear. You and I just need to come to an understanding. You admit what you’ve done, and I promise to control the fallout. But I’ll only do that if I know it’s over. Right here and now. Am I making myself clear?”

It was Emmett’s turn to stare, turning over his options, examining them from different angles. He gave a long exhale and said, “I don’t know how many ways I can say this. I gave away nothing.”

“This isn’t a game, Emmett. One of our men was killed because of what you did. Understand? If you don’t give me what I need, then I’m taking this to Harry. Got it?”

Emmett understood perfectly. He chewed the inside of his cheek, leaned back, and, frowning, finally said what Stan had never thought he would have the courage to say: “Why haven’t you gone to Harry about this? If it’s so goddamned serious, then why are we having coffee and a chat? I mean, look. Maybe I’m not the brightest bulb in the store, but I’m wondering why I’m not on a plane back to D.C. If your evidence is so damned ironclad.” When Stan didn’t answer immediately, he leaned closer. “You don’t want to bring this to Harry. Why?”

Because I’m sleeping with your wife! he wanted to scream. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Emmett Kohl, but if Emmett was sent home his wife would follow him back to the States—he feared that even more than a leak in the embassy. Instead, he controlled himself. He answered Emmett’s lies with his own.

“Emmett, you and I are friends. I happen to place some importance on such things, so don’t try to take advantage of me. Right now you have two options. You can do as I ask and return to your life. Don’t worry about Balašević. If she knows you’re blown, she won’t use whatever she has on you—she’ll step back. Or you can go on with what you’re doing, and we can both find out how many days it takes for me to drop friendship in favor of duty.”

Emmett spent another minute thinking about this, his expression drifting between moods that Stan could not interpret. Then he raised his head and looked squarely at his accuser. He smiled, nodded, and stood up. “Thanks for the coffee,” Emmett said before walking away.

At three in the morning one year later, still sticky with sleep, Stan listened to Sophie: “We were having dinner and a man walked into the restaurant and shot him in the head and the chest.” Then the conversation was over, and he poured himself a drink—the first sip was a toast to Emmett Kohl, but the second became a toast to Emmett Kohl’s passing, and it took a while to shake the terrible pleasure this news had given him.

When it finally did leave him, he called Harry Wolcott to pass on the news. Though Harry had also been asleep, he sounded sharp, asking why Sophie had thought to call him of all people at that hour.

“She scrolled through her phone, and my name was the first she came across,” Stan lied—smoothly and without self-consciousness, the way his father would have.

“The mind of a woman is an unfathomable thing,” Harry told him, as if that could explain a lifetime of confusion regarding the opposite sex. “Let me make the announcement, all right? I’ll call Budapest for details and share everything in the morning.”

“Sure.”

“Did she say who was investigating it?”

“I didn’t think to ask.”

Harry grunted. “Next time, think.”