The Cairo Affair

5

Though he would never see her again, Stan never considered this possibility. She might have walked out on him, but she was in his town. He was, at heart, an optimist, and he believed—he knew—that within hours or days they would be together again. Ragged, perhaps, a little scarred, but together.

By ten that evening, through a call to a contact in Egyptian security, he learned that she had checked into the Semiramis InterContinental, just around the corner from the embassy. While his first impulse was to follow her there, crash through her door, and smother her, he knew that she needed space. Once her anger had passed she would come around, for who else did she have in Cairo? He was the only one who truly wanted to help her.

Patience, his father once told him with typical exaggeration, is the only worthwhile tool in an agent’s arsenal.

His one concession to his desire was to ask Paul to sit in the Semiramis lobby to watch out for her.

“Sophie Kohl?” Paul asked over the line, incredulous. “What’s she doing here?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Stan said as coolly as he could manage. “Don’t make any approach. Just make sure she doesn’t get hurt, and if she leaves, you call me and keep track of her. Once we have some answers, I’ll take it to Harry. In the meantime it’s between us. Got it?”

Afterward, he lay down but couldn’t sleep. He was too disorganized, too muddled, his mind flickering over the tangled mess of things he knew and didn’t know, so he got up again, swallowed two Tylenol with a glass of water, and tried to think back to Thursday, before Sophie had arrived to scramble his thinking. What had he learned?

From Dragan Milić: Zora Balašević had not been reporting embassy secrets back to him. She’d been reporting to Ali Busiri in the Central Security Forces. Whether the secrets had come from Emmett or someone else was another question entirely.

On Friday, Omar Halawi, or RAINMAN, had passed on a piece of advice through Paul: If you want to find Emmett’s murderer, you need to look at yourselves. Someone in the Agency, Halawi was suggesting, had wanted to keep Emmett quiet.

Perhaps that was true, but Stan was still hesitant to trust an Egyptian’s word.

Then there was what Sophie had brought to the table: Jibril Aziz, Emmett, and Stumbler.

Finally, there were the elusive facts that Harry had given up on Saturday. Aziz was dead, but he wouldn’t say how or why. Was his death connected to John Calhoun’s secret mission? Harry had also dredged up Stan’s original investigation into the leak last year, throwing even the existence of a leak into doubt.

There was one more thing, but it was only a question: How did Sophie find out that Aziz had a family?

This was what he had, but the facts refused to gel into a comprehensive theory. Sleep remained distant. He stared into the darkness at the ceiling until, at 4:48 A.M., the call to Fajr prayers convinced him to give up. He showered, dressed, and ate, and was back at the embassy by six. Security. Elevator. Office. He didn’t bother powering up his computer. Instead, he unlocked the old five-drawer file cabinet in the corner and opened the bottom drawer. Like all the other drawers, it was full of manila folders, labeled with names and locations, background information on paper that hadn’t yet been transcribed into the databases, but he wasn’t interested in old information. He reached into the file marked HOTELS ELEC and removed three stapled sheets of paper. On the first two was a list of Cairo-area hotels, and he found the Semiramis quickly. Beside it was a code, BRB-9. He reached into the rear of the drawer and took out a rubber-banded stack of twenty hotel keycards. BRB-9 was the last one.

He reached the Semiramis before six thirty, just as the sun was rising to cut through the cold, and waited on the Corniche El Nil that separated the hotel from the river. He called Paul. After a few minutes, the young man was jogging across the road to meet him. He looked tired, perhaps as tired as Stan was, but he put on a good show. “Quiet as the grave,” Paul said.

“Nothing? No one in, no one out?”

“No one that I recognized. But the staff sure took an interest in me.”

They both knew that this didn’t matter. The hotel staff would inform Central Security that some Westerner was camping out in their lobby, and the Egyptians would use CCTV footage to identify Paul, but he was breaking no laws. And he probably wasn’t the only foreign spy reading newspapers and drinking coffee on their sofas. “Go back inside,” Stan said. “I’ll relieve you later on.”

As he watched Paul cross the street again and head back into the hotel, Stan took out his phone and called the front desk. He asked for room 306 and listened as it rang and rang. Six thirty in the morning, and she wasn’t answering.

He hung up and crossed the street, pausing in front of the Semiramis’s glass doors. A valet eyeballed him. What was she doing up there? Was she overcome by paranoia now, trembling in fear whenever the phone rang? Or was she simply cold and hard, shaped by tragedies like the murder of her husband and the deception of her lover? Eventually, she would have to call him. There was no other choice.

Or was there? He’d had the sense during their hours together that she was holding something back. He’d assumed it was that final conversation with Emmett about Zora Balašević—but what if it was something else? What if she wasn’t alone in Cairo? Someone had told her about Aziz’s family. What if …

Before he could think through the pros and cons, Stan entered the lobby and patted the air in reply to Paul’s questioning look. He ignored the clerks and concierge as he headed toward the elevators. He was just another Caucasian face breezing through town on business, never getting to know the city, never tipping enough, and never learning a word of the local language.

On the third floor he found a young couple trying to reason with their three-or four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the corner beside a potted plant, refusing to go anywhere. When the father looked up, his face full of despair, Stan gave him a sympathetic grimace and then looked at the boy, who had an oddly adult face—narrow and long, eyes sunken and intense. Almost judgmental. The boy watched Stan as his parents pleaded with him, and Stan could feel his eyes boring into his back until he turned a corner and continued on.

Her room was halfway down a long corridor, and in front of it was a Herald Tribune Sophie hadn’t bothered to pick up. He knocked and waited, listening. Nothing. He tried again and said, “Housekeeping.” Still there was nothing, so he took out BRB-9 and stroked it twice against the magnetic pad; the door clicked. He opened it slowly.

The room was empty, the bed disorganized as if it had been quickly abandoned. The dresser drawers were empty, and so were the tables.

He settled on the bed, feeling heavy and sluggish. She was gone. He thought he might cry, but he didn’t.

When he finally went downstairs nearly an hour later, he sat beside Paul on the lobby sofa. “Did you leave last night?”

Paul frowned and shook his head. “Of course not.”

Stan sighed, thinking first of kidnapping and only afterward of escape. There were other exits from the hotel, but he hadn’t imagined that Sophie Kohl would have the foresight to use them. Perhaps she had. Or perhaps her kidnappers had.

“What is it, boss?”

Stan looked at his hands in his lap; they were trembling. He took out BRB-9 and handed it to Paul. “Room 306. Stay in there and wait. If she returns, make sure she doesn’t leave.”

“Using force?”

“If necessary.”

In the embassy, Stan nodded at his co-workers and shut himself in his office, thinking of organization. Start at the beginning, he thought. It was a method, he knew, a way of pushing away the terror he felt. Where was she? Who was protecting her? Why had she left him? His hands shook as he typed on his keyboard and clicked the mouse, finally tracking down the original Stumbler memos from 2009. He wiped at his eyes and began to read.

Jibril Aziz had been prescient. As justification for his plan, Aziz had cited growing unrest throughout the region almost two years before anybody else in the Agency had thought to tie them into a regional shift. Stan and others had viewed the sporadic demonstrations and crackdowns as brushfires—Jibril Aziz had seen them as portents.

It took a while to wade through the pages of Aziz’s optimism, and, thinking of what Emmett would have been consulted on, he reread the section titled “Fallout,” which dealt with the economic repercussions of regime change. Aziz had put forth the idea that, with Tripoli in its pocket, with the support of the Egyptian government (which, before Mubarak stepped down that month, they could have been assured of), and with the compliance of Tunisia (which, again, was a given before that chaotic year had begun), the United States would gain effective trade control of the entire North African coast—a third of the Mediterranean coastline. They could have done simple things, like negotiate reduced port fees for their own freighters, but more importantly it would have given America better access to the African market for anything from toilet brushes to nuclear power plants.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, this still felt like a stretch, and he imagined that when Harry had read it he’d thought the same thing. But neither he nor Harry was an economist. Emmett had been.

Stan went to his file cabinet, and from the middle drawer removed a slender folder in which he’d kept the documentation he’d collected to establish Emmett’s guilt. Among the list of files from Emmett’s computer was a ten-digit code that, he saw now, matched the Stumbler documents. Yes, Stumbler would have reached Zora Balašević as well.

As he was returning to his seat, John Calhoun tapped on his door. “I’m free if you need anything.”

Stan blinked at him, still caught in the myopia that had taken control since visiting the Semiramis. He considered pulling in John for some legwork, or even to grill him on Jibril Aziz, but then changed his mind. The man didn’t look well, and as soon as he started asking about Aziz John would go to Harry—that was a given. “Go get some lunch,” he told the big man. “Take it easy.”

Once he was alone again, he closed his eyes, shoving away his fears for Sophie, imagining instead the sequence of events. Emmett copied the Stumbler plans from his laptop onto a flash drive and passed them on to Zora Balašević, who sold them to Ali Busiri. Months later, Emmett discussed Stumbler with Aziz, and both he and Aziz soon perished. From these sketchy details, it certainly did look as if Omar Halawi was right in at least one way: Emmett, and presumably Aziz, had been killed to keep them quiet. Quiet about what? Emmett’s treason? Stumbler? Or … the identity of the real leak?

And who really wanted them silenced? CIA? Egypt? Dragan Milić, covering up a plateful of lies he’d been feeding to Stan? Without knowing the answer to one question, the other could never be answered. Without knowing who was behind this, he would never find Sophie.

His computer dinged an incoming e-mail. It was from LogiThrust LLC about the wonderful world of penile enhancements. The codes were ridiculous but effective. He checked the text against a list of translations and learned that Ali Busiri would be waiting for him at al-Azhar Park at five thirty that evening. Finally.

He went back to the memo, but there was another tap at his door. It was Nancy. With a smile she told him a single word: “Harry’s.”