The Cairo Affair

2

Stan didn’t need to tell anyone about the murder, for when he arrived at the embassy it was already on everyone’s lips, having been an easy splash in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It was the only subject his five agents—Ricky, Tim, Klaus, Mike, and Paul—wanted to discuss. He allowed them a few minutes of conjecture before steering them back to the agenda they were obliged to deal with during their Thursday morning meetings: their sources, and how to handle them. Paul was having trouble with his primary source in Egyptian intelligence, RAINMAN, who had recently dropped off the radar and wasn’t answering his requests to meet.

They had various explanations for this—Ricky thought he was trying to prove his worth before hitting them up for a better deal; Tim was more generous, believing that since Mubarak’s fall RAINMAN’s position was less secure, so he was simply watching out for himself. Ricky’s cynical take was unlikely, for RAINMAN had come to them last year—not the other way around—and they had accommodated most of his requests for help getting business associates into the American markets. Tim’s felt more likely, as the end of Mubarak’s reign had thrown everything into disarray. While the military leadership running the country wasn’t interested in overturning the entire security apparatus, everyone knew that once the elections came around all bets were off.

“Maybe his superiors discovered he’s our friend,” said Klaus.

Stan shook his head. “If Ali Busiri knew, then RAINMAN would be locked up or dead. Yet we see him in all the usual places.”

“Send John” was Ricky’s suggestion. “Scare him into shape.”

That earned a few laughs. John Calhoun was their sole contractor, a huge Global Security tough who’d been around since late November. He wasn’t around today, though. Harry had borrowed him for a job. “Where is the dark knight?” asked Klaus.

“Boss isn’t sharing,” Stan told him.

Nancy, the pool secretary, tapped on the door and summoned everyone to Harry’s office.

They piled in, joining the embassy’s entire Agency presence—twenty-five or so people—and Nancy closed them inside. Harry stood behind his desk, white hair brushed so meticulously that it looked like a rug, hands deep in his jacket pockets. Though he had a great view that included a small slice of the Nile between other Garden City buildings, Harry kept his venetian blinds closed. He was chewing on gum when he said, “Folks, I’ve got some bad news.”

He told it in his measured, heavy voice, the one reserved for Statements of Importance, and Stan learned that by the time Sophie had called him the list of suspects had already been narrowed down to a single individual: Gjergj Ahmeti—a.k.a. Dumitru Cozma, Lajos Varga, and Andrzej Wójcik. Jennifer Cary asked the obvious question: “Sir, how did we verify this guy?”

“Hungarian police cameras. One down the street from the restaurant ID’d his car, which he left in a train station lot, then cameras inside the station saw him catch a EuroNight to Munich. One of our guys in Budapest, George Reardon, tells me that by the time they stopped the train to search it, just inside the Hungarian border, he was gone.”

That earned a collective sigh.

Harry shared an enormous rap sheet on Gjergj Ahmeti that included, among other things, two bank robberies in his native Albania, time in a Belgrade prison for multiple homicide, connections to two murders in Marseilles, and star billing on two “persons of interest” lists, in Yemen and Brazil. The man got around.

“But who does he work for?” asked Dennis Schwarzkopf.

With his index finger, Harry drew a question mark in the air. “Interpol’s spent a lot of time on his case, and there’s a file a few inches thick, but no one even knows for sure if he’s freelance. Looking at his sheet, though, I think he must be. There’s no single organization we know of that could account for the variety of places he’s worked.”

“Except us,” said Jerry, one of Jennifer’s agents. A couple of polite chuckles, until they saw the look on Harry’s face.

“Jerry,” he said, “I don’t want to ever hear that joke again.”

Jerry nodded, flushing immediately.

To the rest of them, Harry said, “Many of you knew Emmett. He was a good man, as well as a friend. I want everyone beating the bushes. If his murder has anything at all to do with Cairo, then that information belongs on my desk immediately. Any questions?”

As they were clearing out, Harry asked Stan to stay behind, and once they were alone Stan closed the door. Harry settled in his chair, popping a fresh ribbon of gum into his mouth. “So what do you think, Stan?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

Harry waved a hand, irritated. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Stan approached the desk, considering it. “As far as I know, he had no contact with Balašević after I brought my case to you. So it doesn’t make sense. Why would the Serbs wait a year and then get rid of him in another country?”

Harry rocked back in his swivel chair. Behind him was a portrait of the president, smiling. He said, “Maybe they tried to recruit him again.”

“They had to know he was already blown. It would be shockingly amateur.”

Harry nodded at that, as if the possibility of an intelligence agency acting stupidly weren’t commonplace, then said, “Just check on what you can, but keep it quiet. I’m not interested in slandering a dead man.”

“He was a traitor.”

A look crossed Harry’s face, a flicker of anger. “You never proved it. Not conclusively.”

“How often are we able to prove anything conclusively?”

“Often enough that I wasn’t going to ruin a man’s life. Often enough that we’re not going to smear a dead man’s name.”

Though they rarely brought it up, the disagreement had colored their relationship, lurking beneath the surface of all their conversations for the past year. Stan wondered—not for the first time—if Harry already knew about Sophie, and if he had suspected ulterior motives when Stan had demanded that Emmett be taken into custody. Whatever Harry knew or suspected, right now he just opened his laptop and said, “Go get me some results, all right?”

He collected his agents again. RAINMAN was on the back burner, and Stan was finally free to discuss what had been on his mind since three in the morning.

They ran through their contacts, finding seven who’d had even a distant connection to the business affairs that Emmett had spent most of his time dealing with in Cairo. Each agent received his assignments and headed out to make calls and schedule meets. Once they were gone, Stan called the Serbian embassy and asked to speak with Dragan Milić.

Stan and Dragan had had plenty of informal conversations, that tit-for-tat between agencies that keeps intelligence in motion, and so he took the call quickly. When asked if he’d heard about Emmett Kohl, Dragan gave an exaggerated sigh. “My condolences, Stan. Yes, of course I heard about that.”

“Are you free for lunch?”

“For you?”

“Yes, Dragan.”

“Of course, my friend.”

They met halfway between their embassies, Stan walking to clear his head, and it took a half hour to weave through the crowds toward the 15th of May Bridge, where he crossed to Gezira Island and finally reached La Bodega Bistro on the 26th of July, in the old Baehler’s Mansions Building. It was a good walk, refreshing despite the stink of the Nile and the traffic backed up along the Corniche El Nil, and he took in the hijabbed women walking in pairs and trios, the gaunt men in sweat-dyed shirts, smoking. Arabic pop music, as ubiquitous as prayers, blared from cars, drowned out at times by the buzzing of mopeds and the choking roar of old, barely functioning pickups. At one point just before the bridge, he saw two men taking off their shoes and laying towels on the ground in preparation for midday Dhuhr prayers.

He had a brief flashback of late January, when the bridges had been stages for armies of black-clad men in riot gear facing off with angry crowds trying to break through government lines to reach Tahrir. He’d mostly kept out of it, slipping out of the embassy only a few times to get a better look at the conflict. Early on, he found himself standing off to the side among government forces. Later, standing at the same corners, he found himself among the weeping, jubilant Egyptian masses as the Central Security Forces were pushed back and then scattered, running for their lives, stripping off their black uniforms. Now those same revolutionaries were walking the bridge, loitering and laughing, occupied again by the little dramas of work, life, and love. They were relentless, he thought. After millennia suffering under the heels of autocrats, from the pharaohs to the meager dictators propped up by Western investments, they were still standing, laughing and holding on to their faith. Up ahead, a line of twelve shoeless men were on their knees, facing Mecca.

He took out his phone and called Sophie but got her voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.

La Bodega was busy, but Dragan had used his considerable influence to get a secluded table in the rear booth. Yellow fin-de-siècle lighting and art nouveau furnishings enhanced the ambience, which only made Dragan Milić look more out of place. He was not the kind of man who appeared comfortable in a suit; to Stan, Dragan always looked as if he should be wearing bikini briefs and lounging beside a concrete pool in some cheap Adriatic resort, his flabby torso burned pink and his wiry gray hair bleached yellow. He smiled a lot and gestured to the world with fat fingers that ended in gnawed nails, all his words effusive. He’d known Emmett, he told Stan. Not well, “but how well do any of us know each other?” By the time the platters arrived—sea bass for him, scallops for Stan—he was on to other topics, and Stan let him go on with his complaints about the new Egyptian security services. “They’re not gentlemen anymore, Stan. You understand me?”

Dragan had obviously run into a particularly troublesome bureaucrat that morning, for most of Egypt’s security infrastructure was still intact, with the same old hands at the wheel. Yet Stan said, “I understand perfectly.”

Dragan clapped his hands together. “Say what you like about the old boys, but they knew how to wine and dine. That’s how you get things done.”

“Like what I’m doing to you right now.”

“Exactly,” he said without hesitation. “You bring me to an excellent restaurant, you let me order what I like, and you soften me with compliments, perhaps a little inside information. Only then do you place your cards on the table. These new guys …” He shook his head, lost for words.

“It’s time,” Stan told him.

Dragan patted his lips with a napkin. “Time?”

“My cards.”

“Of course, of course. Tell me, my friend.”

Though they had talked around the subject before, they had never broached it directly. With Emmett’s murder, there seemed to be no choice. He said, “Is Zora Balašević still in your shop?”

Eyebrows rose. “Balašević? Do I know her?”

“Look at the label on that wine, Dragan. That’s a chunk of the national budget right there.”

A grin. “Oh, Zora Balašević! Like the great singer. I know of this woman, yes, but she’s not part of my shop, as you say.”

The lack of sleep and a gin-heavy Negroni before the meal were catching up to Stan. He rubbed his eyes. “Please, Dragan. This is about a murdered diplomat. I need a little perestroika here.”

“Why does everyone think that Russian words will get you anywhere with a Serb? I hate those bastards.”

“Zora Balašević.”

He sniffed and sipped at his glass of Clos des Papes Rhone, then spoke very seriously and quietly. “If Zora Balašević has come to you, I firmly suggest you give it a second thought. She’s connected to criminal gangs in Belgrade, probably trading in little girls. You don’t want someone like that on your team.”

“She was on your team, though. Wasn’t she?”

“Once,” said Dragan. He frowned and seesawed his right hand. “Briefly, Stan. Then we kicked her onto the street. Seriously.”

“But you ran her when Emmett was in town.”

“When did Emmett come to town?”

“February of 2009.”

“That’s when we got rid of her, Stan. February—no: March of 2009.”

There was something convincing about Dragan’s manner, and if he was being honest, then the events of last summer had been something entirely different than he had imagined. Stan leaned close, his voice serious and low. “Let me tell you a story, and maybe you can help me explain it.”

Dragan waited.

“This woman, Balašević, came to Emmett. This would be February of 2009. They knew each other back in the nineties, but times had changed since then. Emmett was now a diplomat, and she, she claimed, was one of your people. She used blackmail. She told Emmett that she would publicize some nasty secrets from his past if he didn’t give her classified embassy intelligence. For at least a year this went on.” He paused, staring hard, but Dragan wasn’t saying anything. “Look, if she was one of your people during that year, then I might become angry. I might even call you names. But I’ll soon get over it, and next year you’ll have some similar complaint about me. If, however, she isn’t one of your people, then I’m not only going to become angry, I’ll become destructive. I’ll start digging into her life, and into yours, until I find out who stole our information. You understand my position?”

Dragan held his gaze for ten full seconds before saying, “Perfectly.” Then: “I’m sorry to say that Zora Balašević never passed intelligence from Emmett Kohl to my office. More’s the pity.”

“Why did you get rid of her?”

He glanced over Stan’s shoulder at the restaurant. “She was moonlighting—that’s the correct word? We discovered, with the greatest sadness, that we were not the only client for her intelligence. I wanted to have her sent home missing some body parts, but it turns out that she has friends in Belgrade, friends who owe her. So I was told to keep my hands to myself.”

“Who was she moonlighting for?”

“Our hosts, the Egyptians.” He shook his head. “She is like Hosni.”

Stan frowned, not understanding.

Dragan smiled. “Remember what that Iraqi corpse, Saddam Hussein, used to say of Mubarak? That he was like a pay phone. You deposit your money, and you get what you want in return. Zora Balašević is the same. She will take a coin from anyone.”

Stan considered this. “She continued working for them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she now?”

“I will look into it.” He took another sip of his wine, then set it down. “This is what I do know: She’s from Novi Sad. During the Bosnian War she supported Republika Srpska, which was how she made her influential friends. She’s in her early fifties, and she used to own a small place on Al-Muizz Street, in Islamic Cairo. And for a brief, wondrous period she held a respectable job in my office before she threw it away. That’s the extent of my knowledge.”

“So she’s a mystery.”

Dragan nodded, leaned back, and, proving he was as well connected as he had ever been, said, “Just like that Albanian thug who killed Mr. Kohl.”