Countdown in Cairo (33 page)

“I’ve lived in Egypt for most of my adult life,” Voltaire said. “I’m not very religious in a traditional Judeo-Christian sense. But this is a place where spirituality can be felt almost anywhere. The country is full of discovered as well as undiscovered ancient burial sites. No matter where you go you’re sure to fall on pyramids, temples, or
mastabas
, which are tombs. I’ve visited Saqqâra and all its temples. Ever been there? It’s not far.”

“No,” she said.

“Saqqâra has the oldest pyramid in Egypt, that of King Zoser. Then there’s the city of Luxor and the Luxor Temple, then the Valley of the Kings, and the Valley of the Queens. There’s the Hatshepsut Temple, and the Karnak. Do you know anything about Queen Hatshepsut?” he asked.

“No,” Alex said, walking her horse briskly. She glanced behind her and, as expected, saw Abdul and the other bodyguards following at a discreet distance with a second pair of horses.

“She was more powerful than Cleopatra or Nefertiti,” Voltaire said, sounding now more like a professor of history than a spy. “Hatshepsut stole the throne from her stepson. She dressed as a man to assert her power and declared herself Pharaoh. Her reign was prosperous. But Hatshepsut’s legacy was systematically erased from Egyptian history, historical records were destroyed, monuments were torn down, and her corpse was removed from her tomb. The Egyptians don’t like the idea of women having power. Never did and never will. It’s a historical aberration when it happens.”

Up ahead lay the Giza Plateau and the three Great Pyramids. As Alex gazed ahead, she felt a surge of excitement. She had the sudden sense of watching a dream unfurl before her, of being transported to a time twenty-five centuries before the birth of Jesus when these great burial vaults were built by three generations of pharaohs: the father, Khufu; the son, Khafre; and the grandson, Menkaure. Voltaire kept quiet, letting her savor the moment.

The Sphinx was the guardian of the pyramid of Khufu and remained the center of superstitions because of its mysterious appearance. Known in Arabic as
Abu al-Hol
, the Father of Terror, the statue was called the Sphinx by the ancient Greeks. He resembled their mythical winged monster with the woman’s head and lion’s body who posed riddles and killed anyone unable to answer them.

Voltaire grinned as a couple rode past them on a pair of camels, barely in control. The woman seemed to be hanging on for her life. Voltaire, genial soul that he was, shouted after them in Arabic and everyone laughed, whether they understood or not.

“When I was a kid,” Voltaire said in a revelatory moment, “I went to a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a few years. We had a schoolboy game. We would rename the airlines. British Airways at the time was called BOAC. The British Overseas Airline Corporations.” He paused. “We called it ‘Better On A Camel.’ To this day I can’t look at a camel without thinking of that.”

Alex laughed. “Any other good ones?” she asked.

“SABENA. The Belgian Airline,” he said. “ ‘Such A Bad Experience, Never Again.’ ”

She laughed harder.

“Here’s the best,” he said. “TAP, the Airline of Portugal. ‘Take Another Plane.’ ”

She laughed again.

The horses began a pleasant trot, which created a slight breeze. Alex’s stomach had settled and she felt good again about the world.

“Thank you for coming out here with me today,” Voltaire said. “I don’t like to talk business with walls and telephone lines around.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “As well as my assignment.”

He reached to a shirt pocket and pulled out a small device about the size of an iPod. It was common currency between them that it was an anti-bugging foil. He entered a code and replaced the device in his pocket. “There,” he said. “That should wound the fragile feelings of anyone who might try to monitor us.” There, in the open desert, under God’s blue sky, they were absolutely free of any possible electronic surveillance.

Alex savored the beautiful silence around them, the rugged natural beauty of the Sahara, and the sweep of the sky. The only sounds were from the horses, including the swish of hooves on the sand.

They came near the first pyramid, the tallest of the three, Khufu Pyramid, called Cheops by the Greeks. It rose to a summit of nearly five hundred feet above the desert. Khufu had ruled Egypt twenty-five centuries before Christ from 2589 to 2566 BC.

As they approached it on horseback, the tone of Voltaire’s voice changed. “I suppose we should talk business,” he said.

“Please do.”

“A few weeks ago this young American girl, the one you know personally …”

“Janet,” Alex said. “She’s the niece of a friend of mine.”

“Apparently she was here in Cairo with a boyfriend. They made an unfortunate discovery,” Voltaire said. “A former agent had gone to ground here. Michael Cerny, he was known as, though he seems to like his own code name of Ambidextrous.”

“That name was mentioned back in my briefing at Langley,” she said.

“Ambidextrous. Judas. Cerny. Whatever we wish to call him,” Voltaire said. “He has a past so complicated that to recall it or understand it would be like attempting to memorize a chess game and re-create it in reverse. Suffice it to say that he was supposed to be listed as dead and continuing to operate for our side. Instead, your Janet and her boyfriend happened across him while he was trying to do a deal with the Russians.”

“An officially sanctioned deal?” she asked. “Or his own deal?”

“As it turned out, his own,” Voltaire said. “And she and her guy just about queered a major financial score for him.”

“In what way?”

“Mr. Cerny had no brief to be dealing with any Russians,” Voltaire said. “Not after the Kiev fiasco. The Agency sent him here to do some business with Arabs. But he got greedy. Oh, I’m jumping ahead. When Cerny knew he had been spotted by a couple of young Americans who recognized him, he realized that his whole charade was compromised. Or, he reasoned, it was compromised if Carlos and Janet lived long enough to get back to their employers in the United States and file a convincing report of what they had seen.”

“So the bomb here was meant to kill them both,” Alex said.

“That appears to be the case,” said Voltaire. “But the bomb failed. Or, on the other hand, it was only fifty percent successful. Janet gets picked up by the police here, who didn’t know what to do with her. She’s an American citizen, so they go easy on the rough stuff and just make sure she gets out of the country. Plus, by now she’s too high profile for them to just make her disappear.” He paused. “The Egyptian police are a curious bunch of apes, as you’ve probably already noticed. Their job is not to protect the innocent or even apprehend the guilty. Their mission is to protect the dictatorship. The most fundamental tenet of Anglo-Saxon justice, habeas corpus, is considered a quaint indulgence of the British and the Americans. Nonetheless, the Egyptian police don’t know what to do with Janet, so they pack her up and send her back to Washington.”

“And she starts telling people in Washington and Langley what she saw,” Alex said, picking up on it quickly. “But Cerny is supposed to be in deep cover. So they can’t admit to her that what she thought she saw was exactly what she did see.”

“That’s correct,” Voltaire said. “And even worse, she reported to Langley that Cerny was speaking Russian to a couple of men in towel-style headdress. You can imagine how that had hearts fluttering in Langley.”

“I can imagine,” she said.

“Cerny’s brief was checked, his logs were examined, his cell phone and home phone records were destabilized and decoded. His emails, official and personal, were downloaded and analyzed. They found Russian contacts and Israeli contacts. This place, Cairo, is crawling with spies and various other intelligence and counterintelligence agents the way Casablanca was during World War II, like Berlin was in the 1960s, like Warsaw was in the 1980s. So then the geniuses in Langley do a reverse search on all of the directories and e-files that Cerny has had access to in the last five years, and they come out shaking their heads. Aircraft, warheads, fighter planes. The man was saving up files for a rainy day, and you know what? To him, it’s suddenly monsoon season. He must have downloaded fifty thousand pages of sensitive military documents onto a box full of flash drives, and he’s running his own flea market. You read about the Jonathan Pollard case?”

“This morning, yes.”

“Do you remember it when it happened?”

“I do. But I was still in grade school.”

Voltaire gave her a double take and shook his head. “Yes, of course,” he said.

He laughed. So did she.

“You know, Josephine,” he said, “if I were thirty years younger I’d put another move on you. But I can’t imagine what a fifty-nine-year-old man—even a fit one—looks like to a twenty-nine-year-old. The ruins of Pompeii? Vienna after the world war? Stonehenge?”

“Maybe the Sphinx’s younger brother,” she said. “But keep in mind I’m traveling a long distance to see such a sight. So be consoled. There’s hope for you yet.”

“Ouch,” he said. “Well, anyway, think of Cerny as another Pollard case, except on steroids and even worse.”

Farther on, coming into view, was the second of the three Great Pyramids, that of Khafra. As Alex eyed it, it looked taller than the first pyramid, but she realized that was because it had been constructed on a hill.

“Is Cerny selling to Israel?” she asked.

“Possibly. But we don’t even know,” he said. “He has contacts with the Israelis as well as the Russians. The two Russians he was dealing with are freelancers also. They’ll make deals with the Putin government, and they’ll make deals with Tel Aviv, and they’ll be very happy to have their little brown brothers, the Arabs, help them murder anyone who gets in the way.”

“Okay,” she said. “I follow it.”

“All of that leads us to here. You and me, on a couple of pathetic old horses, in the cradle of civilization. And our assignment is to apprehend Mr. Cerny before he can complete any transactions, or any further transactions, and make sure his Russian friends go home empty-handed.”

“Who were the Russians?” she asked. “Do you have names?”

“Boris Zharov and Victor Kharniovski,” he said. “Nasty couple of characters, every bit as foul as that disreputable retiree you hang out with in Switzerland.”

“I consider Yuri Federov one of my assets,” she said.

“And a wonderful asset he is. But here’s the thing on Zharov and Kharniovski. Kharniovski isn’t our problem anymore. Victor took a silk rope around his throat in a back alley in old Cairo two weeks back, courtesy of Abdul, Tony, and a few of their friends. Careless of him, don’t you think? You should never step into an alley in this city with someone you don’t know.”

“I did that with you the other night.”

“Oh, but I’m okay,” he said blithely. “But at least it’s a mistake Kharniovski won’t make twice. And we managed to keep it out of all the newspapers so Boris doesn’t know. He thinks his Kharniovsky buddy is back in Moscow selling the deal.”

“Then what
about
Zharov?” Alex asked

“Staying at the Radisson Cairo,” said Voltaire, “under the name of Engstrom. He’s waiting for his dead associate to return from Moscow, and then he can get Cerny to come forward and close the deal.”

“Why don’t you just go in and grab him?”

“He’s wary,” Voltaire said. “He’s heavily armed. And he knows who all of our supporting cast is here in Cairo. And there’s no room for a slip. But like any Russian, he has his weaknesses. So this is where you come in. Follow?”

“Follow,” she said.

They continued to Menkaure Pyramid, the smallest of the three, and by this tomb there were three smaller pyramids, those of Menkaure’s children. Alex tried to conceptualize how long five thousand years was. When they reached the three smaller tombs, Voltaire turned to her again. “Want to go in?”

“In where?” she asked.

“The Great Pyramid,” he said, turning and pointing, indicating the first and largest of the three. “This is as far as we go. Have to go back, anyway. Not much in it. A lot of stone. Unmarked walls. The mummies and the treasures have all been removed to the museums. But it’s still an experience.”

“I’m game,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Now let’s be tourists for a few minutes.”

She pulled the horse’s bridle to the right, and they turned their mounts together. They rode back to the tallest of the three pyramids. There was another Bedouin with a hitching post near the Pyramid of Cheops. They turned in their horses. Alex had to stretch out her legs to feel right walking again.

They walked from the hitching posts and stood in line. Alex put her hand to the exterior stones and found them cool, like a bottle of chilled water, even though they had been baking in the sun all day. Then she and Voltaire entered the massive edifice of stone. They began to walk down a short descending corridor and then followed a steep passageway up into the center of the pyramid. The tunnel was narrow and short. With a tremor, she flashed back to her experiences in Madrid and the claustrophobic fear from when she had been pinned in an old passageway under the city. But her movement here was free, even though she needed to proceed single file and a bit bent over. She followed Voltaire, who had made this trek many times before, he said. And the place hadn’t caved in on him yet.

The passageway was about a hundred feet long and led to what the guide called “The Grand Gallery,” a vaulted and arched staircase of about the same distance that led to the King’s Chamber. The chamber was empty. Below it lay the Queen’s Chamber. No king, no queen, either. Not even a bishop, a knight, or a rook.

They were in a small group of people climbing up into the pyramid, following one of the guides who must have made this trip a hundred times per week. From somewhere, Abdul, Voltaire’s bodyguard, had reappeared. A German woman behind Alex became claustrophobic and insisted the walls were closing in on her. She insisted on turning back and did. Alex was sympathetic but continued onward and downward.

The inside of the pyramid was undecorated. No reliefs, no carvings, and other than small graffiti from modern-day vandals, no marks at all. High up on the walls above the King’s Chamber, however, there were hieroglyphics about the work gangs building the pyramid. The guide attributed it to Cheops, who had conceptualized his own tomb.