The Cairo Affair

2

Where was she? Where had her decisions brought her? Clutching the iPad, she passed anxious tourists and drowsy businessmen in the lobby of the Semiramis as she found her way to Café Corniche, a cramped gathering of marble-topped tables and elegant straight-backed chairs. She had to work her way around an old Australian couple and a young family camped, with bags, at a table, before settling near the glass cases full of sweets. She ordered espresso from a white-clad waiter, and as her heartbeat gradually settled she wondered if she could go back to her life. She had reserved the plane home, after all—in the morning she would be heading to Boston. With the optimism that is an American’s birthright, she believed for a moment that everything could be left as it was. Just go.

After finishing the coffee, she opened the cover on her iPad and began for the first time to read the backlog of e-mails she’d been too anxiety-ridden to look at before. Sixty-two: friends, family, the Budapest embassy, journalists. Glenda was terrified; Ray was official. Her parents simply wondered why she hadn’t gotten in touch yet, and asked what was wrong with her phone. No word from Emmett’s parents, and she wondered if their silence was a kind of recrimination. Droves of people, some of whom she couldn’t recall, wanted to give their condolences. And a short note from Reardon—whose first name was George: “Ms. Kohl, please contact me at your earliest convenience for some follow-up questions.”

So many questions to answer. There wasn’t really any choice—was there? She had to fly home and assure everyone by her presence that she was all right. Then, later, she could return and work to uncover the mystery of Emmett’s murder. That was the proper way of going about it. Anything else, she felt all at once, was patently unbalanced.

She even put the iPad to sleep and looked around for her waiter, prepared to abandon the meeting, but that was when her contact arrived, squeezing past the family with all the bags, looking sternly at her.

He was older than she had expected. Elderly, even, though she had trouble discerning the ages of Egyptian men. Tall, lanky, with at least a couple days’ worth of white hair on his cheeks and chin, yet well dressed in a mud-colored suit. He was walking heavily, as if his bones hurt. He didn’t offer a hand, but came close, leaning over the table, and whispered “Mrs. Kohl?” in a heavy accent that turned Kohl into Kowuhl. She nodded. “And you are?”

“Halawi. Omar Halawi.”

She gave a smile of welcome and opened her hand to the free chair. “Please.”

Before sitting, he looked around, as if worried someone might catch him joining a Western woman, or perhaps he was worried about more sinister things. Once he was seated, he said, “I will be honest with you, Mrs. Kohl. I do not like this.”

“This?”

“This,” he repeated, then placed ten fingertips on the surface of the table. “If Inaya did not call me herself, I would not be here.” He cleared his throat. “We may be watched.”

She looked around, suddenly worried, suddenly knowing that this had been a mistake. How quickly could she get back to Stan’s place? “Who’s following us?”

His lips pressed tightly together as if in preparation for an elaborate explanation, but all he did was shrug.

“You’re confusing me, Mr. Halawi. You’re saying that someone may be following us, but you don’t know who they are?”

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t like the sound of this. “I have a room,” she said. “Upstairs, number 306. We can talk in private.”

When a look of terror crossed his face, she understood that she’d stepped over a line. He wasn’t some halfhearted Muslim who would head up to a woman’s hotel room unchaperoned.

Enough.

“Look, Mr. Halawi. Inaya told me I could trust you. She said you could help me. If that’s not the case, then fine. You go, and I’ll return to where I came from.” This statement came out of her quickly, and once it was out in the air she felt as if a weight had lifted. Give up. There you go. She saw a boy on a bridge sticking his tongue out at her. Stop pretending you’re anything but a scared little woman.

It could have happened, and much later she would wish that it had. He could have accepted her suggestion, given her another little nod, and simply left. Instead, he stared at her empty espresso cup, weighing options, then pursed his lips again. “Yes,” he said finally, then looked into her eyes. “For Jibril.”

And that was that. Her course was now determined. “For Jibril,” she agreed, though she was thinking of Emmett.

With this settled, he relaxed, but when a waiter drifted by and looked at him he tensed again, shaking his head angrily. To Sophie, he said, “Inaya told me some things, but I am not sure I entirely understand your position. Your husband spoke to Jibril before he was killed. Yes?”

Killed—it was a word no one around her had wanted to say. “Yes.”

“You learned of this, and so you came to Cairo to find Jibril.”

“Yes.” He was staring at her, waiting, so she went on. “Jibril came up with a plan for the embassy. For regime change in Libya.”

“Stumbler,” he said, waving it away. “I know of this. Go on.”

Who was this guy?

She said, “Emmett used to work at the Cairo embassy. I know people there. I thought they could help.”

“Have they?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Yes,” he said, but was shaking his head no. “They would not. Do you think that they know about Jibril?”

“He’s a government employee—I suppose they know plenty about him.”

Again, he shook his head, this time with impatience. “The book—do they know about his book?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The names. Do they know about the network?”

“Maybe …” she began, then stopped. “Look, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Halawi leaned back and scratched at the hair on his cheek with the fingers of his right hand, again considering her. He said, “Who else were you seeking in Cairo?”

Wasn’t she supposed to be asking the questions? “Stan Bertolli. I thought he could help.”

Voice lowered, Halawi said, “I don’t mean your lover, Mrs. Kohl.”

He said that with a touch of disdain, and her impulse was to throw coffee into his face, but her cup was empty. “Then who do you mean, Mr. Halawi?”

There was little movement in his features as he said, “Your controller, Zora Balašević. Were you also looking for her?”

Her anger was quickly replaced by a deep-in-the-gut sickness; her head tingled. “I … don’t …”

He tipped his head closer. “She controlled you; we controlled her. At least, we tried to control her. I don’t think she was that easy to control.”

It was as Stan had said. Zora had been reporting directly to the Egyptians. They knew everything about her affair, for Zora had told them about it. They knew each megabyte of information she’d vacuumed off of Emmett’s laptop, because Zora had given it to them. Not they, necessarily, but he—this stoic, old Egyptian in front of her. He knew everything. For the first time in a long while, she was in the presence of someone from whom she had no secrets. It was terrifying.

“I wanted to get that into the open,” he said after a moment, the fingertips of one hand now touching the fingertips of the other.

She tried to control the pitch of her voice. “Yes, I was looking for her as well, but she’s not here.”

“She returned home. There was no reason for her to stay after you left. Her only advantage was her friendship with you and Mr. Kohl. We were lucky, you understand—she knew that we could pay her more than her own countrymen.”

Zora had abandoned her ideology—those convictions she had so admired—and given herself to the Egyptians for mere money. But hadn’t Zora said as much herself? Information wants to be free … I believe I should be paid for it. How much about Zora had she believed simply because she wanted to believe it? She felt as if she knew nothing. “But she wasn’t here just because of me. She had other people,” Sophie said, thinking of the blonde with the Russians. “She pointed one out to me.”

“Did she?” he asked, raising a brow. “Did you talk to these other sources?”

She shook her head.

“We watched Zora Balašević. If she had other sources, I think we would have known.”

The gall. Of course Zora had no one else—Sophie was the only one. Easy Sophie. Gullible girl. She inhaled loudly through her nose, trying to keep herself steady. “Is Zora connected? To Emmett. To his murder?”

Halawi rocked his head from side to side, then said, “I cannot be sure, but I think not. Not to your husband’s murder. Since she’s been gone, I have heard nothing from her. I believe she is happily living in Serbia with the money she earned here. She has no financial reason to get back into things, and she has no ethical stake in what happens in this part of the world. Jibril, however, does.”

She nodded, trying to rebuild her world, brick by brick. “You were talking about some names.”

He nodded, then stared a moment, eyes bleakly searching for something in her face. Finally, he said, “When he went into Libya, Jibril was to receive a book with the names and contact information of everyone in the old networks.”

“In what old networks?”

“Jibril’s. From before. When he ran his own network in Libya.”

She stared at his shaggy chin. “I thought he worked in an office.”

“You know nothing about him, yes?”

“No,” she said, impatience creeping up again. “So maybe you should tell me.”

She read hesitation in his face, but he had already made his decision. He had already dropped his bombshells. He took another look around to be sure no one was listening, then began to describe a beautiful young man, a family man, “a man who wants nothing more than for his people to live in peace, and to live well.” Jibril was young, yet he had witnessed “things you must usually be as old as me to see.”

That Halawi had respect for Aziz wasn’t in question, but as he spoke it became clear that he idolized the younger man, and this began to scare her. When he said, “Jibril, he is a moral force,” she cut in.

“Right. I get it. He’s wonderful. But I’m trying to find out who killed my husband. Do you know?”

“Of course,” Halawi said matter-of-factly. “Jibril’s employers.”

“CIA?”

“Yes.”

Sophie rubbed her eyes, hard. “Why did they kill Emmett?”

“Because of Stumbler. Because he was talking to Jibril about Stumbler.”

She was starting to feel as if the conversation were just spinning in place. “Why was he talking to my husband, of all people, about Stumbler?”

Halawi scratched at his long nose. “He knew about your husband. He knew your husband was … like-minded. Both good men interested in what was right. Your husband was a moral force as well.”

Emmett? A moral force? “Specifics, Mr. Halawi. Please be specific, because if you aren’t I think I’m going to walk out of here.”

When anger flickered through his features, she had the sense that women didn’t talk to him in this way, but he recovered gracefully and placed both hands flat on the table. “Mrs. Kohl, this is about an American plan to steal the revolution from the hands of the Libyan people. Jibril created Stumbler years ago, when the aim was to rid the world of Muammar Gadhafi. A moral aim. But now the world is different. Now, the Libyan people have begun their own Stumbler, and when they succeed they will run their own country. It would be wrong for America to take over that fight and place its puppets in Tripoli. Do you understand now?”

She nodded.

“That is why Jibril spoke with your husband. He realized that the Americans were going to steal the revolution. He only knew one diplomat who would agree that this was a crime—Mr. Emmett Kohl. He spoke with your husband in Budapest, one week before his murder, and then went into Libya to warn the people in his book that they would have to fight off the Americans as well.”

For a while, she just stared at him, trying to absorb all this. “Was Emmett a party to Jibril’s plans?”

He shook his head. “Your husband was not a part of this, no. Jibril went to your husband to verify what he had discovered. Your husband was not CIA—he was objective.”

“Emmett verified that America was going to steal the revolution from the Libyans?”

Another look crossed Halawi’s face, but it was neither shock nor anger—it was embarrassment.

“Well?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Mr. Kohl said that he did not believe it. He believed America was doing nothing of the sort.”

Sophie thought a moment. “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that the CIA killed my husband. Yes?”

He nodded.

“Because they wanted to cover up Stumbler. Correct?”

“Yes. That is correct.”

“But Emmett didn’t believe we were behind it.”

“Correct.”

“Then why did they kill him?”

Halawi rubbed his eyes, maybe tired of spelling out the world to this woman. “Because Langley did not know for sure, Mrs. Kohl. It did not look deeply enough into the circumstances of their meeting.” He paused. “Mistakes were made. They often are.”

“And Jibril?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t know where he is, do you?”

“He is in Libya.”

“But you don’t know where in Libya.”

There was no point answering that, so he didn’t.

“What makes you think he’s still alive?”

Another smile, this one bordering on angelic. He placed a hand on his heart: “Because I believe, Mrs. Kohl.”

She wanted to laugh at him, but she didn’t. She wanted to cry as well, because for all the information he was willing to share, she was starting to believe he was as much in the dark as she was.

He sighed loudly. “Mrs. Kohl, this is not your fight. You know who murdered your husband. You can go home without shame.”

“You don’t know me very well, Mr. Halawi.”

He smiled, as if he really did know her, and said, “What do you plan to do that others cannot do better? You should be honest with yourself.” He inhaled through his nose, and she thought she saw sympathy in his features, but maybe it was a mirage. “You do not belong here, Mrs. Kohl. You should never have come.”