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

by John Birmingham

“Excellent. You will require surveillance of course, Mister…?”

  “St. Clair. And yeah anything we could get would be‌—”

  Mister al Nouri clapped his hands twice.

  “It is done. Room 626 is one of those reserved for Mr Hilton’s most valued guests. Cairo can be a dangerous city, as you have seen today, and it behooves Mr Hilton to take all necessary precautions to safeguard the personage and interest of his most valued guests by…”

  Harry was smiling and Viv nodded along with the PR.

  “Surveillance is already in place then?” Harry asked.

  “We prefer to think of it as enhancing guest security, Your Highness.”

  Harry grinned. The first genuine smile Julia had seen on his face since he entered the lounge.

  “But of course. Perhaps we could reroute the surveillance cover to here?”

  Mister al Nouri frowned, but only because he did not quite catch the meaning.

  “Can you access the hidden cameras and microphones from here?” Julia explained. “Or will we have to go to a bunker somewhere?”

  Comprehension and sunshine returned to the security man’s expression.

  “The hotel is fully covered by a fiber optic network, Your Highness. It will be a trifling matter to give you access to the security enhancements in the professor’s suite.”

  Bremmer watched the exchange, his head going back and forth.

  “My room was bugged?” he asked.

  ###

  “Remind me never to stay here,” Harry said as they clustered around the laptops displaying four separate audiovisual streams from Room 626. The laptops were augmented technology, contemporary builds by Hewlett-Packard. To Harry they looked blocky, cumbersome and heavy, but he reminded himself, as he did so often, that kit like this hadn’t been available in his timeline for another forty years.

  “It would save us the hassle of making all those sex tapes,” Julia teased.

  “Darling, please, not in front of the servants.”

  “Fuck off,” Viv said out the corner of his mouth, only half attending to their banter. They were all following the action on screen. The feed was not what Harry would call high definition, but everybody was recognisable. Bremmer, still bandaged here and there. Mister al Nouri at the entrance to the suite, rubbing his hands together like some Dickensian bank manager. And the Stasi or NKVD agent, the woman passing for Ernst Bremmer’s wife. It was a remarkable likeness, Harry had to concede, and the low-res surveillance technology only amplified the effect.

  al Nouri played his role well, delivering the injured guest back into the care of his family. Bremmer did not so much play his role as live it, appearing sullen and downbeat and complaining of his wounds. Frau Bremmer was a thorough professional, fussing over her “husband” while al Nouri was with them, but turning on him like a snake a few seconds after the door was closed.

  Harry’s German was not great, but Julia provided a quick and dirty translation.

  “She’s pretty pissed with him,” she said. “She’s been getting grief from… From her handlers, I presume.”

  “Any mention of a geezer called Skarov?” Viv asked.

  “No,” Julia said. “She hasn’t mentioned anybody by name. But she is talking about her overwatch team for sure. Saying there’ll be shit and hellfire if they’re not happy. Bremmer is apologizing, but she is saying it’s too late for that. They have to move now. Sorry,” she corrected herself, “they’ll go as soon as she has clearance.”

  Harry watched as the two adults bickered while their children watched on. He shook his head. They weren’t Bremmer’s children, just extras. It was early evening outside, and most of the emergency service vehicles had left at least half an hour earlier. The windows had pulsed with the blue light of their turning strobes when the sun went down. It was still busy, almost chaotic, downstairs, but the hotel grounds now swarmed with workmen cleaning up the mess.

  Viv’s crew ate sandwiches and drank tea and coffee while they watched the surveillance. Four of al Nouri’s men now stood guard over the room, but only one of them, “The Turk”, as his boss referred to him, watched the laptops with Harry and the others.

  The Turk stood down when al Nouri returned.

  “How’d that go?” Harry asked. “Do you think she bought it?”

  al Nouri appeared to give the question his full consideration.

  “I believe so,” he said. “She was very convincing. What has happened since I delivered the professor?”

  Harry waved a hand at the screen.

  “She’s given him a right bollocking,” he said, and al Nouri seemed to understand what he meant.

  “I do not believe that was part of her act.” The Egyptian smiled.

  “Guv, look,” Viv cautioned.

  “What’s happening?”

  “She’s asking him about you,” Julia said, and Harry did indeed think he heard his name spoken in heavily accented German. The gathering around the little nest of laptops grew tense and even quieter.

  “What’s she asking?” said Viv.

  “She wants to know what you were talking about. She wants to know if it was a chance meeting. She…” Julia waited and listened to a few moments of dialogue, “she wants to know what you did after the Zionists attacked.”

  Harry jumped as al Nouri clapped him on the back, “His Highness killed the filthy dogs, that’s what he did.”

  “Is Bremmer giving her the story?” Viv asked.

  “He is. He says you got him out of the bar but he doesn’t remember anything else because he passed out. He was wounded. He woke up on a stretcher. He was covered in bandages, yada yada.”

  “Here we go then,” Viv said.

  Four separate images of the woman pushed Bremmer down onto their bed. Part of Harry wondered whether they had actually shared it. She appeared to tell him to sit still while she fetched a shoulder bag from the cupboard by the entry. That took longer than it should have.

  “She is opening the room safe,” al Nouri explained. “I have the combination she used if you need it.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Mister al Nouri,” said Harry, “but I think we’ll be okay for now.”

  “What do you reckon, Angus?” Viv asked, as the woman produced a piece of equipment from the bag and waved it over Bremmer. It looked like a hair curling wand plugged into an old cassette recorder. “Any chance of her tumbling to us with that thing?”

  “We’re sweet, guv,” said Angus Fontaine. “Looks like she’s rockin’ a Blaupunkt 2420 there. It’s a nice piece of kit. It’ll pick up the transmitter we put in the lining of his jacket, but it won’t get a sniff of the pellet in his neck or under the stitches in his arm.”

  “What about your stuff, al Nouri? The fiber optics and the microphones?”

  al Nouri waved off Viv’s concern.

  “That is not the first time I have seen a detector unit in the hotel. Do not worry yourself with it. Our equipment is top shelf. The emissions are minimal and shielded.”

  “Nice work,” Harry said, noticing how closely al Nouri watched the video take, even as he spoke. No doubt everything would be going into a report to his cousin or his brother or some uncle somewhere in the country’s security apparatus. He would tell them as much as he could surmise about the micro implants Viv had used on Professor Bremmer. It was always a shame when you had to let the temps have a peek behind the mirror, but the capability difference between genuine 21st technology and the local augmented stuff was still an impossible hurdle to cross. The Egyptian would take away the fact that the uptimers had super-advanced surveillance bugs which they could plant on the targets and which were virtually undetectable unless you knew what to look for and where to look. But they had also given him to believe that the bugs had to be planted just under the skin. They didn’t. They could be buried deep inside the body mass and still transmit a perfect signal.

  al Nouri was helping them now, but that might not al
ways be the case, and if so they could use that piece of disinformation against him.

  The agent‌—‌Harry assumed she was East German secret service because of her nationality‌—‌pulled Bremmer’s jacket from his shoulders with a savage tug. They all watched as she tore the lining of the coat and pulled out a tiny object they could not see on the relatively low-res screens. But he knew what it was; a moderately sophisticated tracker of contemporary manufacture. A unit like that would need three points of triangulation. The pellets did not.

  “She’s demanding to know what it is,” Julia told them.

  “She knows what it is,” said Viv. “She’s just griefing the poor bastard.”

  “He plays his role well,” said Mister al Nouri, and he was right. Bremmer was due an Oscar for his performance as a clueless git who had no idea how that thing had got in there.

  The woman slapped him, a vicious backhander that snapped his head around and left him cringing at the foot of the bed.

  “Method acting,” said Fontaine.

  “I think it’s working, though,” said Julia. “She’s ordering him to get his shit together, telling him he’d better be ready to go.”

  The agent did this while running the wand over the rest of his body. Harry couldn’t help but bite his lip as it passed over the bandages and sutured wound where they had hidden the actual trackers. She found nothing. The children watched on passively, showing no sign of distress or empathy for Bremmer. Psychopaths in the making. Harry felt a shiver getting ready to run up his spine. If it came down to it, would he be willing to put a bullet in them?

  That was a question which answered itself. The beards had sent kids in bomb belts after them in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. They’d learned the hard way that you had to pull the trigger.

  “She’s telling the kids to get ready. Asking if their bags are packed.”

  The audio quality was not great, but their answers were clear.

  “Ja.”

  “Ja.”

  They disappeared off screen, returning a few moments later with tiny backpacks. Another ripple of the Transition; once upon another time they would have carried everything in tiny cardboard suitcases.

  The East German agent left Bremmer alone for a moment while she packed away the Blaupunkt unit. Bremmer lay still, prompting Viv to mutter, “Better get a hurry along, Professor, or she’ll give you another seeing too.”

  “Ha,” Julia said, without humor, “she just told him pretty much the same thing.”

  The rocket scientist picked himself up from the end of the bed and pushed himself over to the closet where he began the desultory task of taking his shirts and pants from their hangers.

  Nothing out of the ordinary happened for the next few minutes, just four people packing up their hotel room, preparing to disappear into the night.

  “I assume you will be requiring the assistance of al Nouri when they leave,” said Mister al Nouri.

  Harry and Viv exchanged a quick glance.

  “Well of course we would be grateful for any…”

  The dapper hotel functionary clapped his hands, a sound as loud as two pistol shots.

  “Then it is settled. I will alert my men to take them under observation. We will‌—”

  Harry interrupted him.

  “I am sorry, Mister al Nouri. Perhaps I wasn’t clear. While we would be very grateful for any assistance, I worry that we have inconvenienced you too much already. After all, it is partly our fault that all of this unpleasantness has occurred at your hotel. We should see to cleaning up our own mess.”

  The Egyptian waved him away.

  “Oh no, no, no, Your Highness. I will not have it. This is not my hotel, it is Mister Hilton’s. And it does not matter that you were to blame for the mess, the bloodshed and the violence and the chaos and the damage. What sort of hosts would we be were we to hold such things against you? No, sir. Think nothing of it. Simply allow me to further assist you, in addition to all of the assistance I have already provided, that you might locate the foreign devils who came into my city to offer such a grave insult. Please. I insist.”

  Mister al Nouri’s men, previously all but invisible, seemed to loom over the small group gathered around the laptops. They did nothing so gauche and obvious as reaching into their suit jackets for weapons, but they didn’t need to.

  “It’s their city, Harry,” Julia said.

  “Might be useful to have the locals on side,” Viv offered, though he didn’t sound convinced of the idea.

  “We would of course welcome any assistance you might find yourself able to offer, Mister al Nouri,” said Harry, pivoting gracefully.

  “Then we should be about our business,” al Nouri said, indicating the nearest screen, where Bremmer’s minder had gathered the children by the door and ordered the German scientist to stop packing his suitcase and take one small backpack that she held out to him.

  They were leaving.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The drone was a late model Kestrel, a BAE Systems recon unit which had come through the wormhole on HMS Trident. It was not weaponized, but it was equipped with twin fuel cells for long range ops, and a modular sensor suite that could be re-configured as needed. The fact that Section 6 had released the equipment to Viv’s freelance crew spoke to the importance of this mission.

  Harry watched the feed from the Kestrel in Low Light Amplification Mode on his phone. Although it was late at night, Cairo blazed with intense pallets of contending color and light. The richer quarters enjoyed comprehensive street lighting plugged into the city’s premium smart grid, a subscription service run by a French company which was building a civilian nuclear reactor under UN supervision twenty miles south of the city. The poorest neighborhoods glowed dimly with the weaker organic light of burning candles, reeds, oil lamps and the cooking fires of ten thousand street food vendors. And between them, all colors and shades of illumination, from browned-out slums and areas of total darkness to a soccer stadium burning with the fierce incandescence of a white dwarf. The Kestrel’s software did a sterling job smoothing out the peaks and troughs, but occasionally its sensors would still lose the visual fix on the car transporting Bremmer to his captors. At those moments Harry’s display switched to Google Maps and indicated the position of the car as a red dot. It wasn’t a great match-up. The maps data came from a different world.

  “I think they’re going for the river, guv. What d’you reckon?”

  “I think you’re probably right, Angus. It would make sense if they’re heading for Port Said.”

  They bounced around in the back of the laundry van, sitting on piles of folded sheets and towels. Harry and Julia, nursing her wounds, on one side, Fontaine directly across from them, Henderson driving. Viv and the other team members rode in a pair of anonymous sedans with Mister al Nouri and four of his men. They did not have access to the electronic surveillance cover guiding Henderson through the maze of old and new Cairo, but Viv had texted a couple of times via the Kestrel’s secure comm channel that they were doing just fine working the tail old school. Harry wasn’t surprised. This was al Nouri’s city after all, and his extended family seemed to infest its security apparatus like fleas.

  Julia leaned in for a closer look at Harry’s phone as it switched back to the low light display. The car carrying Bremmer, some sort of augmented contemporary model that Harry didn’t recognize, passed out of a brightly lit commercial area into a darker, less populated warehouse district perched on the edge of the Nile.

  “What happens when they get to the water?” she asked.

  Fontaine answered before Harry could.

  “Won’t matter, Ms Duffy. As long as those pellets are transmitting from inside the professor, we know where he is. Could be we’ll have to track alongside the water for a bit, but the nice thing about rivers and suchlike is they can’t take unexpected turns. Once you’re on them, your path is set until you get off.”

  “Look,” she sa
id, pointing at the screen where a blue dot had detached itself from the green icon indicating their location. “I think al Nouri is crossing over at that bridge we passed before.”

  A short encrypted message from Viv confirmed as much. They were splitting off to track the signal from the other side of the river in case the Smedlovs pulled up over there. They didn’t. Bremmer’s tracker lingered at the edge of the waterway for a few moments, before taking off again at a speed that surprised them all.

  “Shit,” said Julia. “Looks like they’ve got a cigarette boat or something out there.”

  “It’s certainly moving,” Harry agreed, “but not as quickly as it could in open water. They still have to navigate the river in darkness. Even if they have night-vision equipment for avoiding major obstacles like other boats, they’d have to worry about getting tangled up with all the crap floating around in there.”

  Sure enough, the initial burst of speed soon tapered off and whatever vessel Bremmer was now riding in proceeded downriver at a more reasonable clip.

  “You think you can keep up with them, Henderson?” Harry asked the driver.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem, guvnor,” he replied, throwing the comment back over his shoulder as he watched the road ahead. His profile was illuminated by the blue light of his own map display‌—‌another phone taped to the hub of the steering wheel. “I just keep the river on my right and my foot to the floor.”

  Henderson, as always, was good to his word. He stomped the accelerator, nearly toppling his passengers from their soft but unstable perches atop the piles of folded laundry in the back of the van.

  The chase settled into a pattern of long stretches of relatively high-speed driving broken by shorter, frantic efforts to reroute around dead ends and traps for the unwary. There were more of these in the newer parts of the city, slated for development, where wide roads with agreeably smooth modern tarmacs were as likely to peter out in open fields and construction sites as they were to carry the pursuers towards their goal. After the third such delay, Henderson suggested taking a bet on the port as their ultimate destination and simply laying in a course while continuing to track Bremmer’s position.