by Paul Sussman
The lift arrived, juddering slightly as he stepped in. He pressed the button for the 27th floor and moved back to make way for a group of elderly ladies in matching red T-shirts who between them pressed almost every other button on the panel.
‘I’m afraid we’re making it very slow for you,’ one of them apologized as the doors closed and they started to rise, her accent pure Texas.
‘The slower the better,’ Angleton replied with a cheery grin. ‘Gives me more time to enjoy you ladies’ charming company.’
They clucked with pleasure, chattering away at Angleton, who really laid on the Southern charm, quipping and joking with them while at the back of his mind he mulled over his morning visit to the USAID building down in New Maadi, where Molly Kiernan worked and where he’d spent most of the day so far.
A large modernist structure of dark glass and polished steel, it sat in a gated, heavily guarded compound at the top end of Ahmed Kamel Street, looking out over an expanse of dusty, rock-strewn wasteland. Angleton had set up a meeting with the director, spinning him a line about how he was new in Public Affairs and believed they should be doing more to promote USAID’s excellent work, greater synergy, added value, paradigm shift moving forward. A load of meaningless management guff which the director had absolutely lapped up, treating Angleton to an extended tour around the building, telling him everything he could possibly want to know about the organization, its employees, the various programmes it was involved in.
None of which remotely interested Angleton. He’d played along, though. He couldn’t very well come right out and say: ‘Tell me everything you know about Molly Kiernan.’ Give the fish some line before starting to reel him in. And so he’d wandered around feigning interest, enthusing about the ground-water drainage projects and school exchange programmes, gaining the director’s confidence before ever so slowly and ever so subtly nudging the conversation in the direction he wanted.
Kiernan was the hub, of that he was certain. Flin Brodie, Alex Hannen – they were both important, but it was Kiernan who was the key to Sandfire. He’d already been through her bungalow, one of his first ports of call when he’d got the brief, but it was clean, as he’d known it would be. She was too clever to leave anything lying around, too careful.
He hadn’t got a whole lot more out of the director, which was in itself instructive. It confirmed what all his other lines of inquiry had indicated: that Molly Kiernan played her cards very close to her chest. She was one of USAID’s longest serving employees, had been based in Cairo since late 1986, heading up various programmes out in the western desert: a family planning clinic in Kharga, an agricultural school in Dakhla, some sort of scientific research project over in the Gilf Kebir. The director wasn’t entirely sure of the details.
‘To be honest, Molly tends to get on with her own thing,’ he had told Angleton. ‘She files a six-monthly report and that’s about it – no point in micro-managing someone that experienced. We just leave her to her own devices. Hey, how about I show you the new sewerage system we’re funding down in Asyut? I’ve got a Powerpoint presentation back in my office.’
‘Bring it on,’ said Angleton.
As anticipated, the presentation had been mind-numbing. Fortunately he’d only had to sit through it for a few minutes before, as planned, the director had received a call from a journalist friend of Angleton’s requesting a telephone interview. He’d waved away the director’s apologies, said he’d just take a little wander around if that was OK, get a feel for the place. And headed straight down to Kiernan’s office. It was at the end of a corridor on the third floor, locked of course, but he’d picked his way in, had a good rummage – nothing, absolutely nothing. He was out and back in the director’s office before the latter had finished his interview.
Which had been the sum total of his visit. No new leads, no new information, a great big blank. Pretty much what he’d been expecting, although he’d had to make sure. He’d crack her in the end, of course, always did – that’s why they employed him – but it wasn’t going to be easy. Molly Kiernan and Sandfire, it seemed, were shaping up to be one of his biggest challenges.
‘This is us,’ said the last two ladies in T-shirts as the lift doors opened on the 24th floor. ‘It’s been a real pleasure meeting you.’
‘The pleasure’s been all mine,’ replied Angleton, pulling his mind back to the present. ‘You ladies have yourselves a good holiday. And remember, go easy on the belly dancing.’
They giggled and stepped out into the hall. The doors closed and the lift rose silently to the 27th floor, where Angleton exited. He walked along a carpeted corridor, its walls hung with prints of nineteenth-century watercolours – camels and pyramids and men in turbans, typical tourist stuff – and stopped in front of a white wood door with a brass plate on it: room 2704. He gave five knocks – three swift, two slow – inserted a plastic card-key, opened the door and entered.
Inside everything was a chaos of technology: wires, cables, recorders, servers, computers, modems. The room’s regular furniture had been shunted to one side to accommodate it all. Mrs Malouff sat at a desk against the far wall, one hand holding a pair of earphones to the side of her head while with the other she adjusted the dial of a large amplifier. A plump woman in her late forties, she sported an overly tight black cocktail dress and too much make-up, in keeping with her cover as a lady of the night, although in Angleton’s opinion it would have to be a very dark night indeed before anyone found her remotely attractive. She gave him a sour-faced nod and, reaching across the desk, handed him a sheaf of transcripts of the day’s recordings. He took them and went out onto the balcony. The Giza Pyramids were just visible in the distance, hazy triangles hovering right on the very edge of the city. He didn’t give them so much as a glance. Instead, sitting down on a chair beside a large satellite dish, he started working his way through the papers. Various calls to and from Brodie, most of them university business; a couple of anodyne messages on Kiernan’s home answerphone, some stuff from the other taps he had in place, e-mails – none of it of any real use.
‘This is it?’ he called.
‘Kiernan just had a call on her mobile,’ replied Mrs Malouff. ‘I haven’t had time to transcribe it yet.’
She sounded harassed.
‘Just play it to me.’
There was an annoyed hrumph followed by the click of buttons being pressed. A momentary burst of sound – high-pitched, gabbling, as the tape was rewound – then a female voice, tight, breathless, with a faint fanfare of car horns echoing in the background:
‘Molly, it’s Freya, Freya Hannen. I’m calling from a pay-phone. Something’s … I need help. Someone tried to … I think they killed Alex …’
Angleton sat motionless, barely breathing, his eyes narrowing to slits as the message played itself through. When it was finished he instructed Mrs Malouff to rewind so he could hear it again.
‘I’m outside the American University. I’m going to go in and try to find Flin Brodie. If he’s not there I’ll go to the Embassy. I think I’m in danger, I need to—’
A soft click as the recording ended. For a moment Angleton was still, exhaling slowly. Then, smiling, he fumbled in the box from the pâtisserie downstairs, removed an éclair and bit into it.
‘Nice,’ he murmured, small tongues of cream oozing from either side of his mouth. ‘Very nice indeed.’
CAIRO – THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
The great temple complex of Iunu (the ‘place of the pillars’), or to confer upon it its Greek name Heliopolis (the City of the Sun) was perhaps – nay, sans doubte! – the most important and top-hole religious scene in the whole of ancient Egypt. Today little retains of this glittering location, its once-paramount temples and shrines now obliterated into dust, interred profoundly beneath the Cairo suburbs of Ain Shams and Matariya (except for a single solitary obelisk of Senwosret I, so sad, so evocative). Hard it is to credit that for three whole thousand years, from the misty days of the Late Predynastic t
o the final advent of the Graeco-Roman, this unprepossessing joint was the pre-eminent cult-centre of the great sun-God Ra, home to the holy Ennead, worship-place of the Mnevis bull, the Benu bird, the mysterious and whacky Benben …
‘For God’s sake.’ Flin Brodie let out a weary sigh and threw the essay onto his office desk. It was the first in a tall pile of papers he was due to mark by the following morning (’Explain and discuss the significance of Iunu/Heliopolis to the Ancient Egyptians’). As always with his students’ work, they employed florid, antiquated prose to make up for the fact that English was not their first language. Thirty-three papers, each a minimum of four pages long. It looked like he was in for a long night.
He rubbed his eyes and stood. Crossing to the window, he gazed down at the university gardens where a group of students were lounging in wicker chairs, smoking and chatting. He could do with a drink – several drinks – but fought back the urge. The days when he used to keep a bottle of Scotch stashed away in the top drawer of his filing cabinet were long gone and, despite his lapse the other night, he intended to keep it that way.
Below, Alan Peach trotted into view, the students in the wicker chairs making yawning gestures as he passed, which annoyed Flin, even though he himself always joked about how boring Peach was. He watched his colleague disappear round a corner, then returned to his desk. He sat down, folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.
He felt anxious, and it wasn’t just at the prospect of having to mark thirty-three unreadable essays. Not full-on anxious – the sort of trembling, panic-ridden anxiety with which he was occasionally afflicted, when his guts would turn to lead and his entire world seemed to fold in on itself, crushing him beneath the unbearable weight of his past. No, this was a lesser order of worry, more a sort of carping background unease, a sense that something wasn’t quite right. Although with the whole Sandfire thing nothing was ever going to be a hundred per cent normal.
The anxiety had been there since the other night, since that fat American had come up to him in the Windsor Hotel and made those pointed remarks about the Gilf Kebir. He felt in his jeans pocket and pulled out the card the man had given him: Cyrus J. Angleton, Public Affairs Officer, Embassy of the United States, Cairo.
If it had just been that one instance he would probably have dismissed it. The thing was, he had seen Angleton a couple of times since. Once, the day before yesterday, wandering through the grounds of the American University, and then again yesterday evening, in the stands of the Gezira Sporting Club where he went three or four times a week to train on the running track. The first of these could be explained away – there was nothing innately extraordinary about an American official visiting an American university. The Gezira sighting was more troubling. Admittedly he had only caught a brief glimpse of the man, way up at the back of the stands, and he’d disappeared as soon as Flin had started jogging towards him, but he was certain it had been Angleton. Same cream-coloured jacket. Same obese frame. There was no reason for him to have been there, none at all – as far as Flin was aware he was one of only a handful of westerners who ever used the club – and the fact that he had been was at the very least … unsettling.
Something else. It sounded crazy, but when he’d got back to his apartment yesterday afternoon, after returning from Alex’s funeral, he’d had the curious feeling someone had been there. Nothing was missing or out of place. There were no obvious signs of intrusion, no disturbance of any sort to back up his suspicions. But a sixth sense had told him someone had been nosing around, and that someone had been Angleton. He’d gone downstairs, confronted Taib the caretaker about it. He’d denied all knowledge, although he’d had a furtive, guilty look about him. Then again Taib always had a furtive, guilty look about him so that wasn’t in itself evidence of anything.
It was all wholly insubstantial, whispers and shadows. The anxiety was there nonetheless, and the fact was that nine times out of ten this sort of anxiety turned out to have some basis in reality. Maybe he was imagining things, maybe not. Either way he was keeping his eyes open, being even more cautious than usual. Maybe he should mention it to Molly, see what she thought.
He sat for a while longer. Then, giving his head a good shake as if to shunt his suspicions to the back of his mind, he leant forward, retrieved the essay and started to read again. He had managed only a couple of paragraphs before he was interrupted by a knock on the door.
‘Could you come back later,’ he called without looking up. ‘I’m marking.’
The person obviously didn’t hear him, because there was another knock.
‘Could you please come back later,’ he repeated, louder this time. ‘I’m marking papers.’
‘Flin?’ The voice was hesitant, uncertain. ‘It’s Freya Hannen.’
‘Good God!’ He threw the essay onto the desk, strode across the room and flung open the door.
‘Freya, what a wonderful surprise! I didn’t think you were in Cairo for another …’
His voice tailed off as he clocked her mud-spattered jeans and trainers, the scratches on her arms and neck.
‘Are you OK, Freya?’
She didn’t speak, just stood there in the doorway.
‘Freya?’ He sounded concerned now. ‘What’s happened?’
Still she said nothing. He had just started to ask her a third time when the floodgates burst.
‘Someone killed Alex,’ she blurted out. ‘And they tried to kill me too. Last night, in the oasis, a group of them, there were twins, they came in a helicopter and were torturing …’
She broke off, biting back tears, fighting to stay in control. Flin hovered a moment, not sure how to react, then stepped forward, wrapped an arm around her and drew her into the room. Nudging the door closed with his foot, he led her over to a chair and sat her down.
‘It’s OK,’ he said gently. ‘Calm down. You’re safe.’
She wiped at her eyes, shrugging his arm away, a little too aggressively perhaps, but she was ashamed of her weakness, needed to assert herself. Flin stared down at her; Freya kept her eyes firmly on the floor as she struggled to regain her composure. Then, excusing himself, Flin left the room. He returned a couple of minutes later with a flannel and a steaming mug.
‘Tea,’ he said. ‘The English solution to everything.’
She seemed to have calmed down a bit and gave a wan smile, accepting the cloth and dabbing at her bare arms.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …’
He held up a hand, indicating that no apology was necessary. Placing the mug on the corner of the desk he dragged his chair round so that he was sitting in front of her. He gave it a few moments before again asking what had happened.
‘Someone tried to kill me,’ she said, her voice firmer now.
‘Last night, back in the oasis. They killed Alex too, it wasn’t suicide.’
He half opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it, letting her tell the story in her own way, in her own time. Freya laid aside the cloth, picked up the mug and sipped, gathering herself. Then she began to talk, going through everything that had happened the previous day, starting with Molly Kiernan’s revelation about the morphine injection and moving on from there: Dr Rashid, the police station, the mysterious canvas bag, the twins, the chase through the oasis – everything. Flin sat listening, hunched forward, eyes narrowed in concentration, offering no comments, appearing outwardly calm although something in the intensity of his gaze, the way his hands were trembling slightly suggested her tale was affecting him more than he was admitting. When she had finished he asked to see the objects she had brought with her. She hefted her knapsack onto her knee and opened it, passing the items across one by one: camera, film canister, compass. Flin took each in turn, examining them.
‘They killed Alex,’ Freya repeated. ‘And it’s something to do with the man out in the desert and the things in his bag. Rudi Schmidt, that was the name in the wallet. Does that mean anything to you?�
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Flin shook his head, still staring down at the camera, not meeting her eyes.
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Why would Alex be interested in his things? Why would someone kill her for them?’
‘We don’t know for sure that someone did kill her, Freya. We shouldn’t jump—’
‘I know,’ she insisted. ‘I saw them. I saw what they were doing to the old farmer. They murdered my sister, they injected her. And I want to know why.’
He looked up, holding her gaze. He seemed as if he was about to say something, but again thought better of it and just gave a reluctant nod.
‘OK, I believe you. Someone killed Alex.’
Their eyes remained locked a moment, then he resumed his examination of the objects. He placed the camera and film on the desk and opened out the compass, sighting through the lens, tweaking its snapped brass sighting wire.
‘Tell me about the other things in the bag again,’ he said. ‘The map, the clay obelisk.’
She described the mysterious symbols on the obelisk, the distances and compass bearings on the map. All the while Flin fiddled with the compass, appearing only to half listen to what she was saying although as before the barely perceptible trembling of his hand and the brightness of his eyes seemed to betray a greater degree of interest – of excitement, even – than his nonchalant manner was letting on.
‘I think this Rudi Schmidt was trying to walk from the Gilf Kebir to Dakhla,’ Freya said, staring across at the Englishman, trying to read him, work out whether or not he was taking her seriously. ‘I know Alex was working in the Gilf Kebir, she told me about it in her letters. There’s some connection between the two of them. I don’t know what it is but there’s definitely a connection and that’s why she was killed.’