The Cairo Affair

2

They took a turnoff before Tubruq, escaping the traffic and the Mediterranean and saying good-bye to the green of coastal foliage. The low, pale hills and long flat stretches were hypnotic and at times breathtaking. Occasionally cars blew past in the opposite direction, usually stuffed with men, one full of Bedouins with rifles. Some honked loud greetings. John kept the speedometer at about 70 miles per hour, watching out for boulders that might have rolled onto the road, or been pushed, and IEDs.

“Do you know what you’re doing once you get there?” he asked after the silence had grown tedious.

“I know who to look for,” Jibril said. “Some will still be around.”

“And you’ll be America’s ears in the heart of the revolution.”

“Hardly.” Jibril scratched his long nose. “This is bigger than me, John. It’s bigger than the Agency, no matter what Langley thinks. The Agency has a bad habit of doing the right thing at the wrong time, and that won’t happen here.”

“What does Langley think?”

There was a pause, and again John turned to look at Jibril, but his passenger was staring out the window at the desert creeping by. He heard Jibril say, “What Langley thinks is a drop in the ocean of history.”

John didn’t bother asking for an explanation.

Jibril finally turned back, his expression changed. “It’s all new. Geopolitics will never be the same. Remember the Green Revolution in Iran? The Arab Spring is Green two-point-oh, and this time they’re getting it right.”

Green, John thought.

“And until they invite us in,” Jibril continued, “we’ve got no business being here at all.”

“So why are you risking your life?”

He pinched his nose. “The point, John, is intelligence. Everything starts with a conversation. That’s how you show respect.”

He’d said that with an edge of disdain, but John was used to it. He’d been around long enough to know that most of the Agency viewed contractors as backwoods militia nuts, weekend soldiers disappointed by the drudgery of real life, by failed marriages and failed lives. Not that they were entirely wrong—it was just a point of prejudice with them. But Jibril Aziz was being opaque and contradictory. He certainly wasn’t the first Agency representative heading in to have a chat with the Libyan opposition—so what, really, was he going on about? He was acting as if he were the linchpin that would decide the fate of the entire nation.

“You get me there,” Jibril said. “That’s all you’ve got to worry about.”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve got to get out again.”

After passing a few tin buildings, they reached Al `Adam, a desert town on a limestone plateau. Had they continued to the southern end of town, they would have reached Gamal Abdul El Nasser Air Base, which had once launched Allied planes against the Nazis. But Jibril wasn’t interested in planes. He directed John to a small, dusty gas station—generic, no oil company logo on its sign—where they went inside and leaned against a counter, and Jibril held a conversation with the station manager. He ordered two Nescafés. As they were drinking, a tall, very dark Bedouin wearing sand-colored robes and an old pistol in his belt wandered into the station. John tensed. They’d left the Kalashnikov in the car. But Jibril stood, crying, “Salaam,” and the Bedouin strode briskly over. The two men embraced, even touching noses—they were old friends. The Bedouin broke out a huge smile, exposing a lost front tooth, and they walked outside, leaving John to the bad coffee. As he waited, gazing out the dirty windows at two children, no older than five, on the other side of the dusty road teasing a dog, the station manager returned to eyeball him, so John used hand signals to order some stale butter cookies with almonds the manager called ghrayba.

Jibril returned on his own, carrying a leather-bound book about a foot tall, then paid for the coffee, cookies, and gas. In the car, he put the book into the glove compartment, and they headed west into the chilly, open desert, the only landmark a long ridge of dunes in the distance. To reach Ajdabiya on the gulf, they were looking at three hours, minimum, along a road that was sometimes hidden by drifts of sand, but John at least understood why they were taking it. Jibril hadn’t been concerned about traffic along the coast; he’d just wanted to meet his contact in Al `Adam.

After a while John noticed the engine temperature rising, so he turned on the heater, which seemed to help. Jibril opened the glove compartment and took out the Bedouin’s book. It was a journal, primitive-looking with hand-sewn binding. “Can you do something for me, John?” The judgement was gone from his voice.

“Shoot.”

Jibril tapped the book with an index finger. “If I die, I’d like you to destroy this.”

“If you die, I’ll give that to the embassy.”

“No. I need a promise from you, or you can drop me off right here. If I die, then you will take this out into the desert and burn it.”

John gave him a look. He was serious. “What is it?”

“Just names. But if this gets into the wrong hands, all of these people are dead.”

“What’s the wrong hands?”

“Anybody’s except mine.”

“Including the Agency’s?”

“Just burn the papers and pretend you never saw them. Can you promise?”

There seemed no point denying him this, so John made the promise. If Jibril died, then it was a dying man’s final wish. If he survived, then John could console himself with the knowledge that he’d lied. If they both died, then it wouldn’t matter.

“On your mother’s life,” Jibril said.

“My mother’s dead.”

A pause. “On your children’s lives. You have children?”

“I’ve promised, Jibril. That’s enough.”

Jibril he waited a moment before nodding and putting the book back into the glove compartment. “It’s not just intelligence,” he said.

“Of course it isn’t,” John agreed, though once again he wasn’t entirely sure what the man was talking about.

Jibril said, “In 1993, my father was part of an attempted coup by the Libyan army. Beforehand, he sent me, my sister, and our mother to Florida to stay with relatives. Next time we heard from him, it was by phone, and he told us the Revolutionary Guard was at the door. He wasn’t striking some metaphor—we heard them banging against his office door as he screamed good-bye to us down the line. I was fifteen. With outside assistance, that coup might have succeeded, but it didn’t, and the outcome was that my father was tortured and beheaded in a basement in Tripoli. We know this because an agent of the Libyan Intelligence Service showed up in Florida to share photographs of my father—before, during, and after the beheading.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that, so John only watched the unchanging landscape.

“In that situation,” Jibil said, “we might have been able to do some good, because the coup was doomed to failure. Every year since then, the Agency could have helped the opposition topple Gadhafi. But this year the situation is different. This year, the people are rising en masse. Nothing can stop them. We can supply them with weapons; we can send in food. But this year the revolution is theirs, and theirs alone. They deserve it.”

“Sounds like you’re splitting hairs,” John said before realizing that Jibril wasn’t interested in his opinion. This was a lecture, not a conversation. A hard silence followed, and when he finally glanced over, he saw the back of Jibril’s head as he stared out his dirty window. He said something John couldn’t hear. “What?”

Jibril turned back, but there was no anger in his face. “I told you it’d been six years since I was here. It didn’t end well. I was blown, and some of the people in this book ended up as dead as my father. I made mistakes, and those mistakes killed good people. I don’t want that to happen again.” He paused. “You’ll burn it, right?”

“I said I would.”

“Good.” Jibril blinked and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. Anxiety, or frustration. After another moment, Jibril said, “Sorry. You didn’t need to hear all that.”

“No problem.”

“It was lousy security.”

It had been, but so had most of this trip. Case in point: He hadn’t needed to know Aziz’s real name. Harry had only given him a description and pass-phrase, but Jibril, perhaps taken by the excitement of the road, had handed over his name the moment they shook hands outside his hotel. At the border, as if remembering something of his long-ago field training, Aziz had demanded that John give him his passport so that he could deal with the border guards, and when they were handed back John saw that Aziz had used a Libyan passport. John didn’t know Aziz’s cover name, but if he was captured on the way back from Ajdabiya that would be small consolation. John said, “Look. By tomorrow I’ll be back in Cairo. I’ll be busy forgetting this entire conversation. I’ll be busy forgetting you.”

Jibril smiled. “Good man.” Then, despite the apology, he opened up further, but not about the mystery of his trek into the desert. He asked about John’s family, and once he’d heard a few sketchy details that did not include the divorce, Jibril talked mistily about his wife, Inaya, whom he’d met in Baltimore. Her family had been Berbers, he told John, “a hard people.” She was seven months pregnant with their first child, a boy.

This really was too much. Jibril Aziz was throwing security to the wind, as if preparing to die.

By then, the sun was flickering on and off against the horizon, and when it disappeared they saw a yellow Toyota pickup stopped up ahead on the opposite lane. Around it stood five men, all of them toting rifles, with green bandannas around their skulls. Green. As John slowed the Peugeot, the men wandered into their lane, raising rifles high. John stopped less than a hundred yards away.

“What do you think?” Jibril asked.

“I told you not to take this road.”

“Shit.”

Two of the men stepped forward, waving them closer, smiling to show how friendly they were. One was shouting something. “What’s he saying?” John asked.

“Oil for Libyans.”

“Can’t they see our Egyptian plates?”

“Yeah. I think they can.”

John scanned the desert, not liking what he saw. The patch of sand around them wasn’t solid enough to trust with the car, and if they got stuck they were finished. It was an ideal spot to corner someone. “We have to go forward, or back.”

“Can we plow through them?”

It was a shockingly naive thing for an Agency man to say, but John controlled his surprise as, up ahead, the man who’d been shouting placed his rifle on the road and started walking toward them. “We can’t risk it,” John explained slowly. “If they blow a tire, we’re dead.”

“Don’t tell me we have to go back.”

“You’ve got the Kalashnikov.”

Jibril raised it from between his legs.

“Can you shoot well?” John asked.

“Well enough.”

“I trained as a sniper,” he said, letting his own security slip. But Jibril did nothing—he simply held on to the Kalashnikov. “Well, then,” said John. “Go to it.”

The man in the green bandanna was close enough that they could read his eyes, which were full of smiles and welcome. His skin was tough and prune-dark. Jibril got out of the car and stood behind the open door for protection and translated for John: “He says they ran out of gas.”

“Tell him we don’t have enough. Tell him we’ll send someone for them.”

“He’ll just ask for a lift.”

“Then kill him.”

The man raised his hands to show how empty they were, then continued talking. Jibril spoke briefly, and the man smiled, pointing at their car as he talked. John understood enough—he wanted a ride.

“What I said, Jibril. Shoot him now.”

Jibril lifted the rifle to his hip, pointing it around the side of the door at the stranger, and said something John could barely hear over the rising wind whistling through the car. The man stopped, his smile faltering. A little more conversation, then the man shrugged elaborately, turned around, and walked back to his friends. Jibril got back into the car and closed the door.

“Well?”

“He says he understands. Lawless roads and all that. He thanks us for sending someone back to help them.”

“And you believe him?”

Jibril hesitated. “If I’d shot him, we’d be in a war. We’ve only got one gun.”

Just before reaching his friends, the man turned toward them again and raised a fist in the air, shouting proudly.

“Tell me,” John said, though he recognized the slogan.

“He says, God, Muammar, Libya—nothing but!”

“Give me that rifle, will you?”

Jibril stared a moment, then shifted his knees to pass over the Kalashnikov. John took it and got out, the chill wind buffeting him. One of the other men shouted something, waving his own rifle like an old Hollywood Comanche. Again, John didn’t need a translation. He walked around the back of the car and climbed onto the hot, filthy trunk. He lay so that his stomach was pressed against the rear windshield and his elbows were on the roof. As he took aim, trying to gauge wind resistance, he saw how fast the darkness was falling, which didn’t make him feel any better.

Someone shouted something, and the men scattered. Two to the right, two to the left, jumping behind their truck. John fired once, knocking down the man who had come to talk to them as he bent to retrieve his gun. The man rolled into the sandy road and didn’t get up again.

Bursts of automatic gunfire filled the whistling air, and he took aim at the Toyota and waited. Two bullets pinged off the Peugeot. One of the men stood up from behind the truck to fire. Though John aimed for the head, the shot entered the man’s chest before he disappeared behind the truck.

John saw sparks of muzzle-flash beneath the truck, then heard the Peugeot’s windshield crack, but couldn’t get a bead on the shooter. So he swiveled his sight to the other side of the road, where a gunman had settled in a ditch. He waited. This time he hit the head he aimed for, a flash of red and pink.

He took a moment to refocus in the fading light. There were only two of them now. One under the truck, the other hiding behind a lump in the sand. “Jibril,” he called as calmly as he could manage, for his nerves were shot through, and he had to hold back screaming everything that came out of him. “Jibril, tell them to walk out into the desert and we won’t kill them.” Jibril didn’t answer. “Hey!” John called. “You hear me?”

There was a flash in the desert, then another ping against the car. He aimed at the spot. One more muzzle-flash, but the man didn’t rise to aim. He was just there to distract. John turned back to the truck where, beside the rear wheel, there was movement in the shadows—a rifle, then a body snaking out to get a better shot. A head wrapped in green fabric appeared, and he shot twice. The movement ceased. John turned back to the lump of sand and shouted, “Do you speak English?”

He got two shots in reply.

“English?”

“Fuck you English!”

“Everyone is dead!” John shouted, trying to enunciate clearly. “If you want to live, drop your gun and walk away! Do you understand?”

The man made no sign that he understood a thing, but he didn’t fire, either. John slid off the car on the passenger’s side, opened the door for protection, and saw that Jibril was still in his seat, eyes open above a black pit where his nose should have been. His shirt was soaked through and his lap was full of blood. He was staring at the blood-speckled windshield, directly at the small hole in the glass that had materialized an instant before his death.

John closed the passenger door, walked around the rear of the car to his door, then sat behind the wheel. Despite a couple of holes in the hood, the car started without trouble. He put it in reverse and backed away until the Toyota was only a twinkle in the darkness, then turned the car around. He lugged Jibril’s body to the trunk, wrapped in some old blankets. Settling him in that small space, folding his knees to his chin, John wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do it. He thought he might be sick. But he managed the chore, aching arms trembling, slammed the trunk, then drove back to where they had come from.

He got no phone signal in Al `Adam, so he continued north toward the coast, the only lights coming from drivers heading back out into the desert. It was well after ten when he reached the low, dry outskirts of Tubruq, and he pulled onto the cracked earth on the side of the road and called Washington. While his direct superiors, Stan and Harry, were in Cairo, Cy Gallagher in the D.C. headquarters of Global Security outranked everyone because he had hired John, he signed his checks, and he was the only person John could assume was looking out for his interests. “You let him go through the desert?” Cy asked.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“Jesus, we don’t need these kinds of fuckups. Do you know how many contracts are up for review?”

“Just tell me what to do with the body.”

“You’ve still got it?”

“Won’t they want it?”

Cy paused. “Let me ask. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, get yourself back to Cairo.”

“With a corpse.”

“Right. Okay. I’ll call you back.”

John closed his eyes, and as the cold quickly seeped into the car he tried to put the afternoon out of his mind, but that was impossible. He’d known people who could do that, could silence their heads and zero out, find Zen in the middle of war zones, but he was stuck with the endless internal chatter, most of it not worth listening to, and from the jumble of words came lines of verse half-forgotten:

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers

He pressed his dirty fingers into his eye sockets, but couldn’t remember what that was from. So familiar, yet his mind had gone blank. Some long-dead poet.

After ten minutes, Cy called to ask his coordinates and told him to wait. John waited for a while, then got out and walked to the trunk. He held his breath as he searched Jibril’s pockets, coming up with a passport, phone, and wallet, but no keys. His clothes, John noticed, had no tags on them. He brought the items back to the front and switched on the interior lamp. The wallet was filled with cash in a variety of denominations, but empty of credit cards or anything that used a name. The passport, as he had seen at the border, was Libyan, and the name inside it was Akram Haddad. It was full of stamps and visas, a long record of travels through North Africa and the Middle East up to 2005, and then one more stamp from today. John pocketed the cash, took the battery out of the cell phone, then placed the wallet and passport and phone in the glove compartment. That was when he noticed the leather book that Jibril had picked up in Al `Adam.

He took it out and opened it. Names, just as Jibril had said, but they were all in Arabic script, handwritten. Names with addresses and phone numbers and notations that he couldn’t decipher, many of the pages X’d over—these, perhaps, were contacts who hadn’t survived Jibril’s mistake six years ago. He extinguished the interior lamp and gazed off to the right, where the nighttime desert lay. Just a matter of walking out there and setting it on fire, and a part of him wanted to do this for the dead man. Another part didn’t want to, and this was the part that said, How are you going to light a fire? For he didn’t smoke, and he had stupidly brought no lighter with him into the desert.

So he put it back and closed the glove compartment, thinking that he would burn it in Cairo, while the disloyal part of him knew that he wouldn’t.

Nearly an hour later, a filthy, tarp-covered truck parked in front of his Peugeot, and a small man with a fat mustache got out, asking in English after Akram Haddad. “Well, you can see for yourself,” John told him as he walked to the trunk and opened it. The man sighed loudly. Together, they moved the body to the truck, where a large Persian rug was waiting. They rolled him up. Then the man smiled and opened his hand. John reached to shake it, but the man waved an index finger. “Payment, yes?”

“No one told me about that.”

“They tell me you pay three hundred euros.”

That came to about five hundred Libyan dinar, and he paid in a mix of currencies from Jibril’s stash—dinar, dollar, and euro. Only after the payment was completed did the man shake his hand.

“Congratulations on the new Libya,” John told him, but the man was already walking away.