Stalin's Hammer: Cairo: A novel of the Axis of Time

by John Birmingham

  Harry conceded the point with a lift of the shoulders, but he remained unconvinced. “Who knows, Viv? Fact is, we’re here. So let’s have a look at old Ernst, shall we.” He took up his phone and flipped through to the overwatch diary of Professor Bremmer’s movements since he’d arrived in Cairo and was picked up by St. Clair’s watchers.

  “Been hitting the piss pretty hard then?”

  Viv sat back down again. “Like a champion, guv. He’s been doing his guest spots at the conference, but keeping to himself outside of those. Mostly staying in his room while the kids kick it around the pool. At least they’re having fun. Every afternoon, about five o’clock, Bremmer turns up at the bar, takes a seat at the end, grabs a bowl of peanuts, and starts murdering one beer after another. He’ll chat with whoever turns up, but so far it’s all been other peace activists. People he knows. The usual conference schmooze.”

  “Not that usual,” said Harry. “I don’t recall him being much of a drinker. Lord knows he had the chance, we spent three days holed up inside a wine cellar in Magdeburg at one point. We had his kids with us, a newborn and a toddler then, and I’ll tell you what, keeping them quiet while the Commies and Krauts were looking for us was enough to drive a man to the bottle. Does he look like he’s waiting for anybody at this bar?”

  “Could be,” said Viv. “He takes the same bar stool every night and he’s got the air of a geezer waiting for the axe to fall. But our brief was clear. We stood watch, but we didn’t approach. That’s down to you, guvnor.”

  Harry nodded, lost in his own thoughts.

  “You’ve actually seen the wife and kids?” he said at last. “Laid eyes on them?”

  St. Clair nodded.

  “Yeah, boy and a girl, looks like about ten and twelve. Pretty independent. They spend a lot of time on their own, in the hotel pool, like I said, right. But then kids are independent here, aren’t they?”

  “What, in Cairo?”

  St. Clair smiled. “No, you inbred tosser. I meant now, here and now. Kids are pretty much left to get on with it. Fuckin’ helicopter parents haven’t even been invented, eh? I’ve had someone watching the boy and girl, just in case they were a pressure point, but that’s a dead end, I reckon. Anyway, the Sovs already tried that one, didn’t they? Grabbed up a sister and a cousin at the end of the war, tried to get Bremmer to come take a long working holiday in the workers’ bloody paradise.”

  “A sister and two cousins, according to Eden” said Harry. “And the cousins were like sisters to him, apparently. But you’re right, he cut them loose. Still, different thing when it’s your own kids…”

  He thumbed through the file on his phone, looking for the surveillance photos of the two children. Viv was right. They were getting in a lot of pool time. They seemed happy enough in the photographs. “Is the mum in any of these shots?” Harry asked.

  “Got a couple of her checking into the hotel,” said St. Clair. “And popping out to the shops on her own. But she’s keeping to herself. They take most of their meals in the room. You know, except for the peanut bowl at the bar, and a packet of crisps for the kids down at the pool. If this Skarov villain has something over Bremmer, it’s not the family.”

  Harry had to agree. If Bremmer was worried about his wife or kids he wouldn’t be letting them out of his sight. He found the photos of Frau Bremmer in the file but they were unremarkable, except for the fact that she looked fit and healthy now rather than the starving, filthy, crazed with fear woman he’d last seen in Magdeburg.

  Harry turned off the phone. He’d review the whole file properly later on, probably this afternoon, but Viv’s people hadn’t turned up anything yet that pointed to an explanation for why Bremmer had been talking to the NKVD man, why he’d blown off all those commitments on the first day, or what was eating him up.

  “So what are you going to do, guv?”

  Harry shrugged. “Thought I might go have a drink with him this evening.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Harry and Julia shared a cab from the Marlowe along Abou Al Fada as it swept around the eastern side of the island. The colonial architecture, long gone in their time, was disconcertingly European. They could have been out for a drive through St. James, or one of the more pleasant arrondissements of Paris. Julia knew that in a city of three to four million people‌—‌the government had not carried out a decent census since the end of the war‌—‌there would be much poorer, meaner slum districts, but here in one of the old centers of the city she felt herself gliding through a rare and privileged enclave.

  Cairo had always had its elites, of course, going back to the days of the pharaoh. There had always been great wealth and power concentrated here on the verdant banks of the Nile. But the end of the war had seen the city transformed, or perhaps just returned, to one of those cities on the border between great, contending empires. The French, the British, the Ottoman Turks, the Egyptians themselves, the Romans, they had all at one time or another planted flags and standards here, and declared themselves masters of the known world. It put Julia in mind of the poem by Shelley.

  “The lone and level sands stretch far away,” she said to herself.

  “What’s that?” Harry asked as they swept past the yacht club. A valet was parking what looked like an MG. She was pretty certain it was an analog copy. She associated that style of car with the late 1960s.

  Turning to Harry she smiled. “My name is Ozymandias,” she said. “King of Kings.”

  He finished the quote for her, “Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair… Coming over a bit maudlin aren’t you, Jules?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. I’m just trying to get my head around this place is all. If I do end up writing something about it, I don’t want to look like a tool. I’m just having a bit of trouble separating my memories of Cairo from this fucked-up reality.” She gestured out of the window.

  It was not just the city that was different. Egyptian history, the narrative of the whole region, had been knocked off course by the Transition. Some changes were personal, individual, as Gamal Abdel Nasser had discovered to his cost a few weeks after Midway, when King Farouk’s security apparatus disappeared him in the middle of the night. He was executed for treason three days later. Across Egypt, down through the Gulf, up into the ancient strongholds of Mesopotamia, future history was rewritten with assassins’ blades, the hangman’s noose and months, years of midnight knocks at the door. Whole families, whole tribes disappeared into lost history. Nobody really knew how it would all play out, just that things would be different.

  Here, in Cairo, King Farouk sat securely upon the throne, forewarned and forearmed, attending to his realm, his subjects, and most importantly his generals with much greater care than he would otherwise have done. On the Arabian Peninsula, the House of Saud, having only recently consolidated its hold on power, was behaving exactly as it had done in Julia’s history books. An alliance with the United States, an open door to the technologies and expertise of British and American oil companies, all while cleaving to the same old medieval superstitions.

  And, of course, there was Israel and Palestine. There would always be Israel and Palestine.

  “So you’re good to look after yourself for a couple of hours while I see this bloke?” Harry asked, interrupting the line of her thought. Julia dragged herself back to the present.

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s just a talk, right? It’s not going to be like last time when you turned up three days late, covered in bandages?”

  A soft smile crinkled the corner of Harry’s eyes.

  “I hope not.”

  It was enough to tell her that the meeting was not just a catch-up with someone like St. Clair, an old army buddy. She’d met Viv twice back in London and his presence in Cairo told her that some epic misadventure was in the wind.

  “Will Viv be there?” Julia asked.

  Harry shook his head, but by his expression she knew he didn’t mean ‘no’, but rather that
he couldn’t tell her. She did her best not to roll her eyes. They turned west on to the main boulevard, four lanes cutting across the middle of the island. Buses and taxis comprised most of the traffic, with only a few private cars jockeying for position. Most of them, she noted, appeared to be driven by chauffeurs. The public vehicles, while not ancient, had obviously been on the road for more than a few years. They were all older models, with no sign that the design or engineering had been in any way influenced by uptime technology. Some of the private cars, however, especially one stretch limousine, looked like bespoke commissions. The indulgences of very wealthy men. They looked sleeker, lighter and altogether more comfortable than the forties era Dodge taxi in which they were riding.

  Jules swallowed her frustration, reminding herself that whatever Harry was doing, it had all happened very quickly and very recently. She held on to the fact that he had brought her along. Had insisted on it. Surely that meant something; that he wasn’t just using her for protective camouflage.

  She felt his hand close over hers. His fingers were large and powerful, the skin of his palm rough from years of hard use in the field. But then her own hands weren’t much better, despite years of expensive manicures. It simply wasn’t possible to work as an embed for nearly a decade and maintain all of the feminine graces. She’d grown her nails out when she left the field after the war. While she was still writing regularly, she had preferred to use dictation software. Luckily she had an old, stable version of Dragon loaded on her MacBook, from before Apple had bought what was left of Nuance and folded their software into the operating system.

  They motored along the boulevard with the sports club she’d spied from the air passing by on the right. It was a vision from a colonial dream, all plump palm trees, vintage Rolls-Royces, even a man in a pith helmet, she was sure. She turned around in the back seat of the cab, after catching him out of the corner of her eye, but he was gone.

  “We should have a talk,” said Harry, surprising her.

  “Is this like a ‘we need to talk’ talk?” Julia asked, suddenly nervous. “Because you brought me a hell of a long way to dump me.”

  The one-time prince seemed alarmed by the very suggestion.

  “Fuck no,” he said quickly. “That’s not what I mean at all. No, I meant that when we get back to London in a couple of days, I’d like to talk about you and me. We’ve been seeing each other for a while now. We’re both grown-ups, Julia. But sometimes I feel as though we’re living like a couple of Gen Y nuff nuffs.”

  She snorted at that, a genuine laugh.

  “Generation Y hasn’t even been born yet, Harry. Not here anyway. And back home they’re all going bald and getting fat and whingeing about their mortgages. That’s not us.”

  “No, hardly, and I’m not saying it should be. But I do wonder sometimes, Julia, whether we should be more serious. Whether we should get serious.”

  “Holy shit, Harry. Are you proposing? Do you remember the last time a Prince of the Realm wanted to marry an American?”

  Then she laughed. A reaction to the look of horror on his face. When she had calmed down enough to catch her breath, she patted him on the thigh. “Chill out, baby. I’m not trying to get the hooks into you. Just… Oh man, the look on your face. What are you trying to say, Harry?”

  He was blushing. The curse of the redhead. But she had to admire him. He didn’t get angry at being teased, he just manned up.

  “What I’m trying to say, Jules, is that I think we should talk about getting a place together. Moving in. Would you be cool with that?”

  She leaned over and kissed him, much to the consternation of the driver, judging by the evil eye he gave her in the rear-view mirror. Well fuck him and the medieval horse he rode in on. Julia ignored the misogynist prick.

  “I would be very cool with that,” she said. “What about your family, and the press, and this new job of yours? Is any of it going to be a problem?”

  He brushed off the idea.

  “If they hadn’t cut me out of the succession, yes, it would probably be a huge fucking problem. But they did cut me out, and I’m glad of it. I’m not exactly a private citizen, but my life is a hell of a lot more private, a hell of a lot more my own, than it was back up home. It would be good manners if we told Grandma Liz and, I don’t know, maybe some knob from the government. But I don’t see a real problem. And if there is a problem, fuck ‘em. They had to cope with Uncle Andy dating that stripper, and you’re much classier than her,” he teased.

  “I can work a pole when I have to,” she deadpanned. “So yeah, let’s talk when we get back. You’re doing a good impression of the man who can’t say much about anything right now. Besides, we’re here.”

  ###

  Julia left Harry in the grand entry hall of the Cairo Hilton. Another new hotel, its three glass towers were reminiscent of the sails of an old clipper ship racing up the Nile for the waters of the delta. The Hilton had been built on the approximate site of the huge Marriott complex from her day. True to his corporate philosophy of burying socialism by example, Conrad Hilton had commissioned the young Danish architect Jørn Utzon to build him not just a hotel, but a statement of intent here on the banks of the Nile.

  Cairo was one of the great surviving capitals of the ancient world, but since the end of the war it had become a vast tableau upon which the future of the next century was being drawn. King Farouk had not simply learned from his own mistakes‌—‌so embarrassingly, but usefully recorded in the history books and data stores of Admiral Kolhammer’s fleet archives‌—‌he had learned from other people’s mistakes too. Conrad Hilton’s “statement” hotel, the giant American airport, the British-built port facilities at Alexandria, they were not evidence of Farouk declaring for the West. They were evidence of Farouk hedging his bets. For every American or British or French project underway in the city, the monarch could point to some monumental undertaking by Soviet and Eastern Bloc engineers. Cairo was not a free port, exactly, but it was an open city. Not in the way that Rome was open to the machinations and games of the great powers, because Rome suffered the occupation of its conquerors. In Cairo the great powers contended for favor, rather than demanding fealty and obedience. The great sweeping blue glass sails of the Hilton raised a challenge to the drab gray acres of concrete office boxes the Soviets had run up in the city’s administrative center.

  Julia smiled as she walked through the grounds and wondered what old Conrad had thought of his granddaughter, who would now almost certainly never be born. Oh, he’d have offspring, and they would breed, but like everyone else in this weird, altered timeline, Conrad Hilton could not hope to perfectly recreate the circumstances of a personal future that would have been. He might have a granddaughter. She might be named Paris. But she would not be…

  Julia shook off the thought. That was a rabbit hole down which you did not venture. Madness lay there.

  She found the conference tent on the lawns over by the tennis courts. It was big enough to cover a couple of courts, and diesel-powered air-conditioning units blew streams of chilled air inside for the comfort of the guests. It was odd, she thought, having a counterculture without having had the 1960s first. The peaceniks here had all of the tiresome earnestness of the anti-war, anti-meat, anti-everything protesters from back uptime, but they all presented themselves with the odious sobriety of campus Christians.

  More than half of them were Westerners, even though the Nonaligned Movement here, as it had been at home, was mostly a developing world thing. Despite the baking heat of late afternoon, the serious young men all wore suits and ties while their female‌—‌what, companions? Colleagues? It was often hard to tell‌—‌well, whatever they were, they hadn’t dressed for the climate. Long dresses, with lots of layering and inappropriately thick, heavy jackets and blouses. Duffy glided across the painstakingly manicured lawns, as cool as an alpine stream in her lightweight tank top and silk pants. A scandalous outfit in the eyes of the local fundament
alists, but also discomfiting for the conservative tastes of the temps.

  Well, fuck them in the neck. Farouk had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood underfoot. As a prominent, wealthy tourist she wouldn’t be bothered by any religious police on ‘dignity patrols’. That sort of foolishness would drive away all the lovely, Western money that had been gushing into Egypt. And as for the censorious and judgmental tendencies of the peacemongers, they could totally get fucked too. The women, in particular, were a grave disappointment, still clinging to gender roles they should have abandoned five minutes after they’d been exposed to some uptime feminist mojo.

  Lost in these thoughts, Duffy failed to notice the two men who had been following her since she waved Harry off towards the hotel bar.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Stepping into the foyer of the Cairo Hilton was like going‌—‌he had to say it‌—‌back to the future. The muted tones, the strangely Cubist furnishings which reminded him immediately of the many hours he’d wasted playing “The Sims” back uptime, and the way the architect Utzon had somehow created a vast cathedral space that gave the impression of both lightness of touch and a crushing sense of post-modern significance and soft power; Harry could have been stepping through one of Conrad Hilton’s 21st-century hotels. The fierce heat of the day had only just begun to wane outside, but the hotel’s climate control system stood guard against the city’s heat and dust. Harry felt himself step through an air curtain at the very threshold of the building. After a moment when his eyes adjusted to the darker vaulted space of the grand entry hall, the sense of temporal dislocation abated somewhat.