The Cairo Affair

6

You know,” Harry began once his guest had taken a seat, “a lot of people think of our station as a backwoods outpost, even now.” There was a spot of red against his pale chin; he had nicked himself with a razor that morning. “We stumble into our intrigues, which from our perspective seem world-shattering and life-and-death. But from Langley’s perspective our time is taken up by tempests in teacups.”

Harry paused, as if this were something Stan needed a moment to comprehend.

“They’re wrong, of course. They often are. What they forget is that Washington is not the center of the world, and it hasn’t been for at least a decade.”

That he was referring to 9/11 before his after-work cocktail wasn’t a good sign.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Harry said. “They pay us lip service like it’s going out of style. They throw money at us and pass on our reports to members of Congress. But don’t ever fool yourself, Stan: Anytime one of us has an idea that contradicts one of Langley’s starched collars, it ceases to be a battle of ideas; it becomes a battle of school ties.”

He was getting at something, but he was taking the long way around to it. Like Stan’s own father, he showed his anxieties by launching into overstatement and weak metaphor. “We’re not the British, Harry.”

“And how does that make any difference?”

Stan shrugged. “You really think it’s that bad?”

“Worse,” he said, finally engaging with his eyes. “It’s why Cairo station has to be seen—from the outside, at least—as better than Langley. As more ironclad, more impeccable. More pristine. It’s the only way to stand a chance against the old-boy network. You and me, we have to be more; we have to be better.”

Stan nodded. Harry seemed to have woken in a mood of constructive self-criticism, or maybe he was misinterpreting.

“And then, Stan, there’s you.”

“Me?”

Harry rubbed his eyes and avoided Stan’s for a second, saying, “A senior member of this station making calls to people he’s not even supposed to know.” Their eyes met. “You know what I mean?”

Stan went through the calls he’d made recently. Who was he not supposed to know? Sophie? Saul? “I’m not sure I do.”

Harry took a breath, opened his desk drawer, and took out a single sheet of paper. “One Inaya Aziz, of Alexandria, Virginia.”

“Right,” Stan said, hesitant relief slipping into his shoulders. “That was Saturday, before you and I talked. Just a few seconds—I never identified myself.”

Harry knitted his brow, forehead contracting, and spoke in a hard voice. “Don’t lie to me, Stan.” He looked down at the paper in his hand. “Twelve-oh-nine in the afternoon on Sunday, from your landline, twenty-eight minutes of conversation.” He looked up at Stan, his expression pained. “Landline? Jesus, Stan. Are you working for the Egyptians? Because if you aren’t, then you might as well ask them to pay you for all this volunteer work.”

There it was, the trap opening up in front of him. Stan hadn’t been at home at 12:09 P.M. yesterday. Sophie had. Stan had been in the office, running through Frankfurt surveillance footage. A glance at the front desk’s entry/exit records would have told Harry this, but he apparently hadn’t checked that yet.

Which was the worse crime? Calling the widow of a man he wasn’t supposed to know about, or harboring the widow Sophie Kohl without telling anyone?

In this case, he wasn’t sure.

How had Sophie gotten Inaya Aziz’s number?

Harry said, “I believe I told you to forget about Aziz. Wasn’t I clear?”

“I had to verify some things.”

“You had to verify some things? What does that mean, Stan?”

He took a breath. “Look, Harry—if you’re not going to be up-front with me, then I’ve got no choice but to follow up on my own. Jibril Aziz met with Emmett, and soon afterward both were dead. You’re not telling me how or why Aziz was killed. So I kept digging, and it turned out that you used to run Aziz—you ran him for four years. You didn’t think I should know this?”

“There’s a reason it’s called undercover,” Harry told him, features stiff.

“Undercover. Okay. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of reasons to keep me stupid, but did you expect me to sit on my hands? So I called his wife to find out if she knew where he was.”

Harry rubbed his left eye. “And what did she say?”

“That she didn’t know where he was.”

“And what did that verify for you, Stan?”

“The only thing it verified was that you know more than you’re sharing, and it’s time to stop playing games. Talk to me about Omar Halawi.”

“Who?”

“RAINMAN. He works out of Ali Busiri’s office.”

Harry raised his head, squinting.

Stan said, “Omar Halawi says that we killed Emmett.”

There it was—the slap, square in the forehead. “He says what?”

“He sent me this message through Paul. I haven’t had a face-to-face with him yet. I want to talk to Busiri first.”

Harry leaned back, fingers threaded together across his narrow chest, and said, “Why, pray tell, did we kill Emmett?”

“To keep him quiet.”

“About what?”

Stan shrugged. “Stumbler? Or maybe the identity of another leak in the embassy.”

Harry sighed and, with a loose left hand, pointed at the ceiling. “It’s raining shit.”

It was an unexpected thing for him to say, but Stan held his tongue.

Harry said, “I’d be careful about what Ali Busiri says. He’s a sneaky bastard.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. About a month ago, when things fell apart for Mubarak, do you know what he did?”

Stan shook his head.

“He called me for a meeting. In a hotel room. He was pouring martinis. Made me wait forever before he got around to it—he wanted to come over to us.”

Stan frowned, but waited.

“He was scared. Terrified. He thought he was going to end up with a bullet behind the ear, and so he made me an offer. We give him a nice house in California and new names for him and his wife, and he gives us everything.”

“Everything?”

Harry nodded.

“But you didn’t take him up on it.”

Harry shook his head. “When you’ve been neck-deep in it for as long as I have, you learn to smell who’s bullshitting you. I smelled it—that hotel room was lousy with it.”

“Did you tell Langley?”

“How well can they smell from five thousand miles away?”

Despite his anxiety, Stan grinned. “But he survived the changes.”

“So far he has,” Harry said. “My only point is that you should take Ali Busiri’s intel with a grain of salt. The same’s true of his employees, like Omar Halawi.”

They both thought about that a moment until Harry said, “Does Sophie have a theory?”

Stan blinked. “When she called me, she was in shock.”

“But certainly she shared some kind of opinion with you. After all, you were lovers.”

Stan said nothing.

Harry smiled softly, then waved at him. “Did you think I didn’t know? You kept using the same hotel room—bad security.”

Now Stan was the one rubbing his face. Yes, it had been bad security, and of course Harry had known. He was surprised that Harry had never brought him in for a talk, but now that it was out in the open he felt anxiety falling off his shoulders.

“This,” Harry said, “would be the other reason I didn’t haul Emmett off in chains. You can see the conflict of interest, can’t you?”

Stan could see it very clearly.

Harry covered his mouth again and looked at the ceiling, as if it were turning brown from the rain. “So let me ask you again: Do you know where she is?”

Stan remembered her words: Do men really think that the only thing women want is protection? “I have no idea,” he said, and that, at least, was true.

The desk phone buzzed. As Harry answered it, Stan considered asking for help tracking down Sophie. Harry knew, after all, about the affair—that obstacle had been taken away, yet Stan wasn’t ready to ask for help. Why?

It was because of a single gesture, that forehead, which seemed to cover up a whole world of secrets that he could not even guess at. If you’re missing some crucial piece of information it’s best to assume you don’t know anything. There was enough missing here that he couldn’t even assume he could trust Harold Wolcott.

Stan waited as Harry listened on line one; Nancy was talking to him. Harry’s face changed again. His mouth hung open, and unconsciously he touched the nick on his chin. “Okay,” Harry said into the phone. Then he hung up and met Stan’s gaze squarely with his own. “Look at the ceiling.”

Stan did so, and it looked the same as it always had.

“When it shits, Stan, it pours. Sophie Kohl is in Cairo.”

“Where?”

A heavy shrug. “The Hungarians finally told us where she went. The Egyptians haven’t verified it for us yet, but I assume they will eventually.” He frowned. “Question is: Why hasn’t she gotten in touch with us?” He wiped at his nose. “You’d think she didn’t trust us.”