The Cairo Affair

6

Hello?” said a woman’s voice, sleepy.

“Mrs. Inaya Aziz?”

“This is she.”

“Uh, hi. I’m trying to get in touch with your husband, Jibril.”

Inaya Aziz paused. “Who is this?”

“Oh, sorry. My name is Sophie Kohl. Your husband doesn’t actually know me, but he knew my husband. What time is it there?” Quickly, she did the math in her head. “Oh, five in the morning. I’m so sorry.”

“Kohl?” said Inaya Aziz. She heard breaths. “You’re not … from the news?”

“Yes. You might have seen me on the news, about my husband.”

“He was killed?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Aziz.”

“Inaya.”

“Inaya.”

Another moment of silence followed, until Inaya said, “What did you want to talk to Jibril about?”

“About my husband.”

“How does he know your husband?”

“They met a few times. Through work, I assume, but he might know something about what happened.”

Her reply was swift and logical: “Shouldn’t the police be calling him?”

“You’d think so, Inaya. But they don’t seem to be. Can you tell me how to get in touch with him?”

“If I knew, I would tell you.”

That was an answer Sophie hadn’t expected. “What can you tell me?”

“I can tell you he’s not here. I can tell you that he was supposed to call me two days ago, but he didn’t. I can tell you that I’m worried out of my mind.”

That was how it happened. Two women looking for the same man. One of them—Mrs. Inaya Aziz—seven months pregnant and unable to do a thing; the other woman in the ideal place to begin looking for him. “When he last called, he was still in Egypt,” Inaya said. “He was traveling with a man from the embassy named John.”

“John …” Sophie muttered, thinking. She didn’t think she knew any John from the embassy.

“He’d just left Marsa Matrouh, on his way to the Libyan border. But he was supposed to call me once he got to Ajdabiya.”

“Why was he going into Libya?”

“To help the revolution.”

Sophie closed her eyes, the phone pressed hard to her sore ear. She remembered Emmett’s obsession with the news from Libya. Just a few well-placed bombs … “How?”

“Excuse me?”

Sophie wasn’t sure of her own question, so she paused to regroup. “How did Jibril expect to help the revolution? He’s one man, after all.”

“Jibril’s not a soldier, Sophie. He’s an organizer. A single organizer can make as much difference as fifty soldiers.”

“He went in alone?”

“I told you. With a man from the embassy named John.”

“I mean, are you saying that the embassy knew he was going in? Or was it just him and this guy John?”

“You’re asking if he was authorized.”

“I suppose I am.”

Inaya paused, thinking through her answer. Was she wondering if this caller could be trusted? Finally, she said, “I think so. But he … he seemed to have something on them.”

“Them?”

“CIA.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, he didn’t tell me that, it was a suspicion I had. That he was holding something over their heads. When the protests began in Benghazi, he was very excited. His father was killed by Gadhafi—the man has been his obsession since childhood. He wanted to pack up and join the fight, but he couldn’t just go. He’s an analyst now. Then after a couple days he came home from work in a mood. Angry. I thought maybe he’d asked to go and was turned down. I was happy. But it turned out that he was already booked on a flight—bought with our own credit card. ‘They approved this?’ I asked. I couldn’t believe it. He told me they didn’t have a choice. I told him he was being stupid. We have a baby on the way, and I’m not working. We can’t afford him getting fired—or, God forbid, killed. But he wasn’t listening to me anymore—how can a wife and baby compare to the fate of an entire nation? He left two days later.”

As she was speaking, Sophie remembered Zora’s conviction that some of the best information came from uninformed people trapped in stressful situations—in this case, the wife of a missing husband. Sophie had spent the last day and a half in the home of a midlevel CIA officer, yet Stan had given her nothing approaching this. Then she realized that Stan was never going to give her anything of use. He had lied about knowing Zora, lied about Jibril having a family. How could he not have known that the embassy had taken Jibril into Libya? How deep did his lies go? She felt flushed, the full weight of her stupidity beginning to suffocate her. She said, “Did he tell you more?”

Inaya hummed quietly, then: “Those last few days, before he left, I hardly saw him at all. He came home late and passed out. In the morning he was gone before I got up. But the night before he flew out he squeezed me into his schedule. He was very caring that night, something like what he used to be. He wasn’t going direct to Libya. He was going to Budapest—I guess that’s where he met with your husband.”

“Why did he meet Emmett?”

“I don’t know, but he was going to talk to some contacts there. Then he flew to Cairo, and this John drove him across the border. That’s the last I heard of him.”

Sophie closed her eyes so she could better see them both—Jibril Aziz and Emmett, sharing secrets about Libya. About Stumbler. She said, “Did he say anything about Stumbler?”

“Stumbler?”

“Yes, Stumbler.”

Silence, again. Then: “Yes, actually. That first night, when he was angry, he said that they were doing it already. He said, ‘It’s Stumbler.’ I thought I misheard him, and I asked what that was, but he didn’t tell me, and he didn’t bring it up again. Neither did I.” A pause. “What is it?”

“A plan for revolution in Libya,” she said. “Jibril drafted it.”

“What?” Sophie could feel her surprise through the line. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, Inaya.”

They said nothing for a moment, and through Stan’s windows she could hear voices and cars, little dollops of chaos. Then Inaya said, “You think this has to do with your husband’s murder.”

“I think so.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m in Cairo.”

“Are you working with the embassy?”

Was she? “No.”

“Then you need help.”

“I think I do.”

“I’m going to give you a phone number, okay? Jibril has a friend in Cairo. You should have a friend there, too.”

“I would appreciate that very much, Inaya.”

“But wait a little bit before calling. I need to warn him. I want to talk to him, too.”

Afterward, holding the local phone number in her hand with the name Omar Halawi scribbled under it, she felt pressure in her ears. It was light at first, a tickle of pressure, then grew until it pressed hard against her eardrums, threatening to rupture them. She couldn’t hear a thing. It was like after Emmett’s murder, when she’d had a gunshot ringing in her ears. Now she was simply deaf. Everything had shifted. That was when the tears came again, but this time she wasn’t crying for Emmett. She was weeping for herself. She had gone to great lengths to convince herself that she wasn’t alone, but like Stan’s words, that had been a deception.

For all she knew, Stan had gotten rid of Emmett in order to get her back for leaving him. Anything, no matter how ridiculous, seemed possible.

When her hearing returned, she called Jibril’s friend Omar Halawi, and they made arrangements to meet at a café in the Semiramis InterContinental at eight. He told her he was out of town and would have to drive back. Seven hours to go. Outside, the sun was high, bright in the way that only North Africa can be. She smelled car exhaust, and somewhere, maybe on a rooftop, someone was grilling lamb. She heard prayers in the distance, buzzy with the static of overworked speakers. She had time. She went around the apartment, collecting what she thought she might need. She packed her few items into her bag. It occurred to her that she needed clothes, badly. Then she went to Stan’s terrace but did not sit, for she wanted to look across the Nile and over the city to see the three pyramids over in Giza, but sun-baked pollution obscured the vista, leaving only a hazy outline of the Great Pyramid, built to house the bones of Pharaoh Khufu. She went back inside.

Before leaving, she checked herself in the mirror. Dabbed on some blush and fixed her eyes. She ran burgundy over her lips, then stared at herself in the mirror, thinking of Stan’s lies. She held the lipstick in her hand, staring a full minute before deciding what to write.

It didn’t take her long to reach the Semiramis, for it, like Stan’s apartment and the embassy itself, was part of the winding nest of streets that comprised Garden City. She walked westward to the Nile before turning right to head up to that beautiful thumb of tower rising from, and being reflected by, the great river. She was breaking a sweat, but not from exertion—it was the adrenaline of her sudden rash decisions.

The lobby was busy, and she stood in line, feeling the anxiety slip away from her as she handed over her passport and asked for a room. It turned out that they had only one free—“Your lucky day”—on the third floor.

The room was small but clean, and she lay down for a while, eyes closed, feeling the depth of her loneliness. From out of that depth the anger grew again, focused on the man who had been lying to her ever since she had arrived in Egypt. She had been betraying him as well, had betrayed them all last year, and that only deepened her anger. After a long time she sat up and searched in her bag until she had found her phone. She powered it up and dialed and said, “You’ve been lying to me, Stan.”

She could hear the pain in his voice as he tried to convince her of his innocence, of his desire to protect her, and the shift in tone when he commanded her to wait at his apartment. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

What, of all the things that came from his lips, could she believe? And why should she have to second-guess everything? So she hung up, knowing as she did so that she had burned the only bridge she really had. When she turned off the phone the room felt colder. Outside her window, the sun was low over the busy capital.