Countdown in Cairo (Russian Trilogy, The)

by Noel Hynd

  “A lot of men wouldn’t think so,” Alex said.

  Abdul disappeared around a dim corner. Voltaire suddenly grabbed Alex by the arm.

  “Tiens! Attends un moment!” he said. Wait a moment.

  He cocked his head, as if to listen for danger. They held their ground; then, when nothing happened, Voltaire indicated with a nod that they could proceed. Alex and Voltaire turned the same dark corner a few seconds later.

  Abdul had already vanished. They were in a black dead-end alley. Alex and Voltaire stood for a moment. There were a few doors, back entrances to homes, Alex thought. The doors were wooden and shabby. Somewhere a big dog was barking. Abdul had disappeared through one of the doors, Alex guessed. The only light was a bluish hue from an overhead window, either a florescent bulb or an old television. Sounds of second-story conversations tumbled down into the alley. Somewhere a man was snoring loudly. Alex couldn’t tell where.

  Alex glanced at Voltaire and wondered if she had been set up. “Are we all right?” she asked.

  “We’re fine,” Voltaire whispered. “Just another few seconds.” He shot back to his civics lesson. “Anyway, the influx of wealthy émigrés allowed the fundamentalist mullahs to gain even more influence,” Voltaire said. “Not with the government, but with the unwashed masses. Look, one fundamentalist preacher wanted zucchini to be banned from Cairo markets because of its phallic shape. Another one claimed that the Cairo Tower, a big, new, long, narrow building that rises out of a newly greened parkland, should be destroyed. He claimed that its size and shape might sexually arouse a generation of young Egyptian women.”

  “And people took that seriously?” Alex asked.

  “Educated people? No. Of course not! But one Egyptian journalist, a headstrong chap named Farag Foda, was indelicate enough to make fun of that idea and some others at the Cairo book fair one year. The book fair, pour l’amour de Dieu! You’d think he would have been speaking to people who were at least somewhat enlightened. Instead the mullahs declared him ‘a foe of Islam’ and he was assassinated. And a local Islamic scholar, a witness before the court, testified that the killers had done nothing wrong since there was no sin in killing a foe of Islam. He said that the murder of Farag Foda was an apostate’s punishment that the local imam had failed to implement. The killers were eventually executed, which only made their cause more sympathetic to their followers. It was a time, not unlike now, when assassination was not uncommon. And it wasn’t carried out by geniuses, either. A squad of gunmen on motor scooters once assassinated the speaker of the Egyptian parliament right in front of a new Western hotel. No one could figure out why they had hit this guy because he was middle level and not even disliked by the radicals. It turned out later that they mistook him for their real target, Mubarak’s minister of the interior, who tended to pass by the same place every day. It was typical. The killers were reckless and ignorant, but they didn’t lack for aggressiveness, and they were bent on shooting someone, anyone. So they did.”

  There was a noise above them as Voltaire concluded. Alex ducked and cringed. Then she raised her eyes to the window from which came the bluish light. A head appeared, silhouetted by the back light. Someone—a pudgy woman in a head scarf—looked down at them and said something in Arabic.

  Voltaire gave a smile and waved. He answered in Arabic. The head disappeared.

  Then one of the doors opened and Abdul stepped out. He stood in the half-open doorway and motioned for them to join him. Voltaire allowed Alex to go ahead of him.

  They stepped into the back of a building. Alex had the sense of being in a private home, but they seemed to be in a storeroom of some sort. There were several packing crates and empty burlap bags. There were boxes of canned food stacked up, as well as a collection of knives and small saws. There was one electric drill that could be converted into a saw. What she was looking at, it occurred to her, were implements for either commercial cutting or the disposal of a corpse.

  Or both.

  From the next room came a conversation in Arabic—all male voices—and the heavy stench of non-American cigarettes, the type of cheap Bulgarian crap that Russians and Middle Easterners smoked.

  Abdul quietly closed the door behind her. He gave a nod to Voltaire. Alex felt trapped, apprehensive. If she had been set up there was no way out. Voltaire took her hand. She didn’t like that because it was her gun hand, but at this point she had to go with it.

  “We’re here,” Voltaire said, switching back into English. “Come along. No way to chicken out now.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The evening maid was the first member of the break-in team at the hotel. No point to break down a door or pick a lock when one has access to a key. The maid was a friendly old Arab woman named Mellilah, underpaid as most of the hotel staff were, and went about her evening duties as usual.

  Well, almost as usual.

  She entered Alex’s room at 8:30. She refreshed the bathroom with new towels and new soaps. She tidied the wash basin. In the living room she provided a new note pad near the phone, and she emptied all the wastebaskets in the suite.

  In the bedroom, she made down the bed and pulled the shades. She fluffed up the pillows and left mints at the bedside. She turned down the top cover and the sheets and adjusted the air-conditioning for overnight sleeping.

  She was finished within five minutes. When Mellilah left, she pulled the door almost completely closed. The door touched the frame of the doorway but did not click shut. She moved along to the next room.

  Two minutes later, in the uniforms of porters at the hotel, two men named Hamzah and Mamdouth followed her path.

  Hamzah was the hardware man and the lookout. He carried a steel suitcase and entered Alex’s room first. He set down the suitcase and stayed near the door. Mamdouth showed up a few seconds later, sliding into the room and closing the door behind him.

  They moved quickly to the bedroom. This was a routine job as long as Alex didn’t return and no one in the hotel caught them. They set to work.

  In Alex’s sleeping area they went to the bed and lifted the mattress off its box frame. They eased it onto the floor. Then Hamzah and Mamdouth donned special masks and gloves. Hamzah opened the steel suitcase. The sides of the suitcase were enormously thick, exactly what was needed to carry heavily radioactive material.

  They donned goggles and headgear. They wore other protective garments underneath their clothes. Mamdouth stepped back. Hamzah reached within the suitcase and removed a cylindrical container. It looked like an elaborate thermos and was the size of a quart of milk. Mamdouth withdrew to the next room to stay as far away from this part of the operation as possible.

  Hamzah opened the insulated container. It contained a mixture that looked like heavy-grained sea salt. It was white with a bluish tint, but Hamzah didn’t spend much time looking at it. In fact, he didn’t want to look at it at all. He had read about the stuff that he was assigned to plant. It scared him. He had seen what it had done to people. It attacked their immune system and made people violently ill after a few days. Given close exposure—and that’s what they were lining up for this Canadian woman—it would kill her in anywhere from five days to two weeks. It was a cruel and vicious tool. Hamzah liked the idea of using it to attack the enemies of Islam.

  He leaned forward quickly. Touching none of the crystal directly, he sprinkled them onto the box frame that held Alex’s mattress. There was about a cup of the stuff in the thermos and he scattered it evenly. A few hours sleep at night would give just the right lethal exposure. He was clear on what his boss had ordered. No way this Western woman was going to complete her assignment in Cairo.

  Then he moved to the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom. He unscrewed the shower head and sprinkled some small crystals into the head. He replaced it. Then, in a moment of inspired venality, he opened Alex’s medicine kit and found her toothpaste.

  He opened the tube and pressed several crystals into it. Then he found a Q-tip and pressed the crystals down in
to the paste. He worked the crystal into the paste so that it would dissolve. He closed the tube again, careful not to allow any sign of tampering. He smiled. If this stuff was as mean as he understood it to be, a simple ingestion of the toxic substance would lead to an agonizing death within a few days. It would start with head pain and stomach discomfort and quickly deteriorate from there.

  Inch’allah. As God willed it, he told himself.

  Hamzah stepped back, breathing heavily within his mask, while Mamdouth continued to watch the door in the living room. The worst thing that could happen would be if the Canadian woman came home early.

  There! Done!

  “Mamdouth!” he called.

  His associate quickly came back into the room. They lifted the mattress back into place and settled it on top of the bed. It settled on perfectly straight, just the way old Mellilah had left it.

  They packed up the thermoslike canister and put it back in the suitcase. They clamped the suitcase shut. They walked quickly to the next room and pulled off their masks and gloves.

  Mamdouth opened the door a sliver. He looked out and then ducked back quickly. He recognized a nasty-looking figure in khaki.

  It was Colonel Amjad, strolling up and down the hall, looking at doors.

  Mamdouth indicated to Hamzah that they should wait. They did, Mamdouth’s hand remaining on the doorknob.

  Then the colonel was gone. Mamdouth poked his head fully into the hall. No one. Perfect. They stashed their garments and stepped out. They pulled the door shut. It clicked and locked behind them.

  They went down the back stairs wearing their hotel uniforms. The Metropole was a big hotel, and security was nowhere as good as Western guests thought it was. Plus, they had bribed the rear guard, who was a brother in Islam.

  They were out the gate within two minutes. This was even easier than planting a car bomb. They were away in a waiting car in four minutes.

  It was neater than a car bomb too. The poison wasn’t messy for anyone unless you were the victim who slept on it or someone who had inadvertently been exposed to it for several hours. If that was the case, it would be living hell and a horrible death.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Voltaire led Alex to the next room, which was a smoky sitting area—a shabby chamber with peeling paint, a pair of rundown sofas, some extra tables and chairs. There, a group of three men sat around a small table, on the sofa and on a cushion on the floor. They wore Western shirts and pants and white Arab headgear. They turned toward Voltaire when they saw him, and their faces illuminated in smiles. One man was cleanly shaven, two had bushy first-growth beards. Their gaze jumped quickly from Voltaire to Alex, and all three faces broke with even broader smiles and greetings in Arabic.

  They stood. They liked Voltaire, whoever they thought he was, and they liked the idea of a female guest. Voltaire introduced her as a family friend who was visiting Egypt and the Holy Land on holiday.

  They switched into English. The men around the table could not have been politer. Alex already knew that men in Cairo tended to be very polite, unless they were trying to assault or kill you.

  Getting a further grip on where she was, Alex realized that they were in a small café and storefront that was part of someone’s home, a common setup in Cairo, much as it is in Central and South America. The front of the place opened onto the street, and there were four other tables, though all of them were empty. The small group that she and Voltaire had joined were the only customers. It was just past midnight now. Abdul, who had led them there, seemed to have disappeared. Alex didn’t question his absence.

  A waiter appeared. Voltaire ordered in Arabic before Alex could speak. The waiter addressed him as “Monsieur Lamara.” Two more teas arrived. And then, before she could object, a hookah.

  She looked at him in astonishment.

  “When in Cairo, do what the locals do,” Voltaire said with a wink.

  A single hookah with a double hose sat before them. It was a giant water pipe, decorated in gold and blue, that stood about three feet off the ground. The waiter gave Voltaire and Alex fresh plastic mouthpieces. Alex looked at the substance being packed into the bowl of the pipe.

  “What’s in this?” Alex asked.

  “Not what you think,” Voltaire said. “Maybe not even what you’re hoping for.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Ever smoked one of these?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re about to, my Canadian friend,” he said. “I ordered something called ma’sal. It’s special hookah tobacco. Ma’sal is tobacco with honey and other sweeteners added.” He paused and seemed to be enjoying this. “You know what the original Voltaire once wrote? ‘Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.’ ”

  The Egyptian men watched her with smiles and amusement. In turn, she watched as the waiter packed a damp sticky brown substance into the bowl.

  “I don’t smoke,” she said.

  “Tonight you do,” he said.

  “Unhealthy,” she said.

  “So is our line of work,” he countered. “So don’t insult my friends.”

  “I want to see you smoke it first,” she said.

  “Oh. With pleasure.”

  There was a small amount of a special charcoal in the bowl, burning black and red. Voltaire nurtured the flame and drew in a breath. The smoke filtered and cooled through the water. The conversation around the table resumed as Voltaire held the smoke in his mouth and exhaled. The aroma that drifted toward Alex was more suggestive of a fruity pipe tobacco than anything else.

  Deftly, Voltaire steered the conversation to politics and to the new American president, who was a great improvement on the world stage the men at the table agreed. But then Voltaire inched the conversation a few years farther back, to the previous administration and the attacks on New York and Washington in September of 2001. Around the table, it was common currency that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were not responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. The United States and Israel, according to the general opinion put forth, had to have been involved in the planning and execution of the attacks.

  “I don’t believe what the American government says,” one man at the table said. “They don’t tell the truth, the Americans. The United States did 9/11 to itself with its own airplanes so that they could invade Iraq for the oil.”

  There were nods all around. Voltaire gave Alex a conspiratorial glance. He picked up the second hose and handed it to Alex. With some reservation, she put it to her lips.

  “Don’t inhale into your lungs,” Voltaire said, softly and outside the conversation around the table. “Just hold it in your mouth, get the flavor and the relaxation. Then exhale slowly.”

  “Like Bill Clinton?” she asked.

  Voltaire laughed.

  “The attacks were part of a conspiracy against Muslims,” said another man, who turned to Alex, hoping for agreement. “I do not believe that a group of Arabs could have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. We are not smart enough. We are not powerful enough.”

  “But the hijackers were Saudis,” Voltaire reminded them.

  “Ah, but look at Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy!” the first man countered quickly. “It proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq.”

  There were nods all around. Alex drew some soft, sweet smoke into her mouth. She was convinced that she was going to cough, but didn’t. There was a further glimmer of amusement in Voltaire’s eyes and a sparkle in the eyes of some of the other men.

  There was also a sparkle in the ma’sal concoction. It was infused with honey, possibly with a hint of raspberry also. Alex exhaled the smoke in a long, steady stream. She felt like the smart-ass self-satisfied caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. Oh, if her friends back home could see her now, she thought.

  One of the men couldn’t take his eyes off her. When his gaze caught hers, he motioned to her headscarf. �
�Are you a follower of Islam?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not,” she said.

  “Then …?”

  Thinking quickly. “I am a guest in your country,” she said. “So I wear this out of respect for your customs.”

  Good answer, she thought to herself.

  “That is gracious of you,” he said. There were nods all around. She was okay, they decided. She took a second draw on the hookah pipe and blew out the smoke gently and soothingly. Nothing extraordinary happened. She took another drag and didn’t mind it at all.

  Voltaire gave her a wink. Tonight, she was one of the boys.

  “Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs,” said a third, younger man, joining in politely. “But it had to have been organized by other people. The Israelis, the Americans,” he said. “The Mossad. The CIA. Zionist businessmen.”

  “Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center on that day,” the first man insisted, finding a further thread of agreement.

  “Yes. Why is it that on 9/11, the Jews did not go to work in the building?” said the second man. “Everybody knows this. I saw it on TV. Everyone discusses this. It is evidence of Zionist involvement.”