Countdown in Cairo (24 page)

The door to the church was open across the street. She had time. She wandered in. There were a few older people sitting in various pews. There was stained glass at the front, a hundreds-of-years-old depiction of Jesus raising his hands to God.

Alex sat for a moment, then closed her eyes and said a prayer. She wanted wisdom. She wanted guidance. She wanted to know how to proceed. She opened her eyes.

Nothing much had changed. She stood, bowed slightly to the cross at the altar, turned, and walked back toward the front door.

She was near her decision. She would return home. The loneliness was too much.

Then something caught her eye.

In the back pew, among the old people she had walked past was the lady from the train. The old woman smiled at her and raised a hand. She signaled Alex to wait, as if she had something to say.

Outside, Alex waited. The old woman came out of the church a few seconds later.

“Today you will continue on to the Camargue?” she asked, recalling the previous day’s conversation.

Alex hesitated. “Yes. Yes, I think so,” she said. “Unless I change my mind and go back to Paris. I’m thinking about—”

“No, no, no!” the old woman said sharply. “
Il te faut continuer
,
ma chérie!
You must go on. You must stay with your plans. You are young and pretty. The world is big and wonderful and waits for you. You will make many friends. You are a blessed person, I can tell.”

“Merci bien,”
Alex said.

“If I had a gift, I would give you one,” the old lady said. “But I am old and not well off. So I don’t.”

“I think you just
did
give me a gift.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remind me so much of my grandmother. It’s almost as if you’re her.”

The old lady laughed. “You flatter me,” she said.

“My train leaves in an hour,” Alex said. “To the Camargue. Thank you.”

“Good luck to you,” the old lady said. “May God always bless you.”

They embraced again. On her way to the train station, Alex stopped by a small grocery store. From a cheerful shop owner, she bought fresh bread, a packet of cheese, two apples, and some bottled water for the train ride. She had an eye out for René but did not see him.

On the train through the French countryside, in a compartment that seated six, she wondered what guideposts, what angels, had been on earth for her. Across from her sat a mother with a boy of about ten. They were French of Sudanese origin, Alex learned as a conversation developed.

Alex tried her next phrase of greeting in Arabic. They smiled and responded with kindness. Alex engaged the boy in a casual conversation and eventually traded one of her apples for a pear while the mother smiled. The sun was brilliant outside, and there were new vistas beyond the train windows that she had never seen before. She sat in rapt attention and watched a new part of the world unfurl before her young eyes.

She felt older this morning. More confidant. Her French was coming more easily. She realized that she was a more confidant young woman this morning than the frightened young girl she had been twenty-four hours earlier. She would never, for example, have traded the apple for the pear a day earlier; she would have been too withdrawn. And she also suddenly realized that the knot in her stomach was gone. Oddly enough, it had disappeared when she was walking back up the short aisle of the church in Saint Etienne, when the old lady raised her hand and signaled her.

Now, a dozen years later, her flight from Rome leveled out. It followed the Nile River and finished its descent toward Cairo International Airport. Alex stared downward and again surveyed the ancient landscape, almost able to taste the millennia of history that lay along the river. Distantly, southward, beyond Cairo, she thought she could see the Pyramids of Giza.

Alex guessed that the old woman might well have passed away by now. She wondered what had ever happened to René, whether he ever visited Martinique or Polynesia or America. She could never remember his last name and wasn’t sure that she had ever known it. But she recalled the first three words of useful Arabic that he had taught her.

Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.

Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.

Well, she mused, you could live your whole life bracketed by those thoughts.

And she wondered whether that whole experience with René in the hostel and with the lady on the train and in the small church, whom she might also never see again in her life, had prepared her for this trip to Egypt more than any other single experience in her life.

THIRTY-TWO

Alex passed through Egyptian customs, then immigration. The Egyptian security officer scanned her passport. He waited for something on a computer screen, and so did she.

Whenever she traveled on a fake passport, immigration unnerved her. She watched everything the agent was doing and observed every facial gesture carefully. She even watched his eye movements as he looked at his computer screen. She felt her heart race and felt her blouse moisten with sweat.

Then the agent closed her passport, handed it back, and nodded to her. He smiled. “Welcome to Egypt,” he said in English.

Moments later, she retrieved her baggage from a clanking, outdated carousel and soon found a young man from the US Embassy holding a piece of paper with her new name on it. She approached him, smiled, and identified herself.

They shook hands. As it turned out, there had been one other passenger on her flight who was attached to the US diplomatic section in Cairo. He was a man about ten years older than she. The driver was also waiting for him. Once he had found both travelers, the driver took Alex’s bags and carried them to a waiting van.

“I’m Mo,” the driver said as they piled into the van.

“Short for Mohammad, I assume,” Alex answered.

“Mo is fine,” the man said without humor.

“Well, at least they didn’t send Larry or Curley,” the other traveler said
sotto voce
to Alex, who had to suppress a smile.

Mo and Cairo traffic were perfectly suited to each other. The ride into the city was crazy, with hyped-up drivers often passing between two other cars in the actual lanes, as a static-filled radio filled the van. It was not usual to be in a stream of traffic four-cars-across on a two lane highway at sixty miles per hour. Alex and the other American in the van exchanged another glance. She checked that her seatbelt was tight. The driving was worse than what Alex remembered from some of her trips to Central and South America. The only worse traffic that she could recall was during her trip to Lagos two years earlier, where there seemed to be no rules at all.

“I wish I had a helmet,” she said to the other man.

He laughed and shook his head.

“Me too,” he said. “And maybe some extra life insurance.”

Mo either couldn’t hear them or chose to ignore them.

The highway passed through several upscale blocks in the northern fringe of the city. Alex noted a number of satellite dishes on buildings, most of them looking as if they hadn’t worked for the past twenty years. Gradually the new buildings gave way to some very old ones, and she knew she had arrived in an ancient and picturesque city, a city she read about so many times in her life.

Cairo.
Al Qahirah
, as it had originally been called. The Triumphant City, so named for all the invading armies that had conquered it and then left, defeated by the quirky eccentricities of the city itself. The ancient was intermingled with the new on endless blocks. And even after the highway, traffic was a nightmare.

Their van pulled up in front of one of the better hotels, the Metropole Cairo. The Metropole was a bright modern building with several guards around it, many with heavy weapons. There was a display of foreign flags above the entrance arcade. Alex nodded a good-bye to the other passenger, and she stepped out. A porter picked up Alex’s one piece of luggage from the rear of the van.

Alex tipped Mo with an American ten-dollar bill. He grunted in response.

The Metropole stood impressively by the River Nile. The lobby was modern. It gleamed with new furniture and artwork in an Egyptian motif. Alex checked in easily, and a second porter took her to her room.

The room was a small suite, actually, more like a room and a half, a sitting area, and a sleeping area. It was thoroughly air-conditioned and had numerous amenities—multiple telephone lines, internet access, satellite television, a small refrigerator, and a polished marble bathroom with separate showers. It afforded a spectacular view of the Nile as well as a hotel pool. It was obviously designed for diplomatic and business travelers, a fine base for conducting business or exploring historic Cairo. She had heard the Metropole was considered one of the best business hotels in the Middle East, and her impression on arrival did nothing to undermine that premise.

She knew from her previous “official” visits to Nigeria and Ukraine that every US Embassy provided arrival kits for guests, including maps of the city and phrase books. She found such a kit waiting for her with a card from a political officer at the Cairo Embassy. His name was Richard Bissinger.

She knew from experience that the political officer was often more than simply that. For better or worse, Bissinger, or whatever his real name was, was her CIA contact.

On one of the maps was a notation as to where the embassy was. It wasn’t far. She had also noticed on arrival that the entire neighborhood was well policed, even beyond the weapons-toting guards that ringed the hotel. Also within the kit was a cell phone, new and presumably secure.

Alex changed into a knee-length tan skirt, a conservative light blue blouse, and shoes that would allow her to walk or run as needed. She had a linen jacket and threw it over her arm. She carried an extra silk scarf but tucked it into a jacket pocket. She knew that if she wished to enter a mosque or any Islamic holy place, she would need her neck and arms covered. She memorized the short walking direction to the embassy and set out on foot, ready for anything, not wishing to consult a map or guide book and look conspicuously like a tourist.

What struck her immediately on her way, in addition to the remorseless heat, was the din of the city—a confirmation of what Rizzo had mentioned. There was an unyielding background noise to every block. Motor vehicles jammed the streets. The drivers had one hand on the horn and a rules-free way of attacking any intersection. Trucks and cars ducked up onto the sidewalk to pass. Many seemed to have won an uncontested divorce from their common sense as well as their mufflers. Vehicular anarchy reigned. Alex regretted having not taken Rizzo’s advice about the earplugs.

Big trucks rumbled by. Pickup trucks hit their air horns at each other. Battered black-and-white taxis honked, and their drivers exchanged profanities with each other. She was secretly pleased she didn’t understand Arabic, at least not right now. Men worked on cars in the street. Vendors hawked newspapers, snacks, water, fruit, and bootlegged DVDs from tables on the streets. Butchers hawked meat in stands that overflowed out onto the sidewalks. They blasted radios and cranked up the volume on television sets. As she walked,
muezzins
’ calls to prayer wailed from loudspeakers in the minarets of thousands of mosques in the city, as they would five times every day.

Forewarned, Alex could still not believe the din. People in private conversations shouted to be heard. Some blocks were only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer. She wondered how people could live here. It was unlike New York or London or Madrid or Moscow or any other internal-combustion-engine-choked metropolis that she had ever experienced. This was like living next to a lawnmower.

To her relief, she was at the embassy in fifteen noisy minutes.

The American Embassy was a green high-rise of about a dozen stories, next to the Japanese Embassy. Like her hotel, it overlooked the Nile. Ten minutes after arriving in the lobby, she sat in the office of Richard Bissinger on the third floor of the embassy, savoring the silence within the American enclave.

There she waited.

THIRTY-THREE

Bissinger entered several minutes later. He was a thick, compact man of about five-eleven, with slicked-back hair. His brow jutted, his eyes were dark, and his chin receded sharply into his body. He looked like a prize-fighter who’d been knocked out several times but lived to fight again.

“Well,” Richard Bissinger said, “welcome to Egypt.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“So who are you?” he asked. “Other than who you really are, I mean.”

She handed him her passport. He opened it, studied it for a moment, curled a lip, gave her a bemused smile, and slid the passport back.

“Nice work, the passport,” he said.

“Latest thing, in more ways than one.”

“Josephine, huh?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, I read your c.v. this morning, Josephine. You’ve been busy in the last two years. Lagos. Ukraine. Spain. Points in between.”

“Seriously,” she said. “Either a dark cloud follows me or I’m following it.”

Bissinger nodded. “That’s how most of us feel,” he said. “Welcome to the club.”

“You know why I’m here,” she said. “Reports about a Michael Cerny.”

“I know all about that. Transcripts from Langley. Plus local activity. This is a headache. Need to get this wrapped up quickly. Make Cerny disappear and everyone who sails with him. You used to work for him? Cerny?” “He was my case officer when I was on the Ukraine assignment. He was involved in a gunfight in Paris in June, and I thought he was shot to death. So did the Agency. Now we’re getting sightings.”

“Like Elvis,” said Bissinger. “Only more radioactive and not in a Walmart.”

“What else can you tell me?” Alex asked.

“Not much good,” he said. “We’ve had a lid on Egypt for several years. The place is out of control but under control. Know what I mean?”

“
We
means the CIA?” she asked.