Countdown in Cairo

by Noel Hynd

  “Mrs. Rothman down the hall has gone complete daffy,” Don Tomás said as explanation. “Poor old woman burns food at all hours. Puts stuff in the toaster and forgets. One of these days an onion bagel is going to turn this whole place into an inferno.”

  They entered Don Tomás’s apartment and closed the door.

  SEVENTEEN

  Alex hadn’t been in this apartment for some time, not since having had a pleasant brunch there almost a year earlier with Robert. Now her presence keyed the bittersweet memory. For a moment she struggled to get past it.

  Don Tomás threw a second bolt on his door. Alex looked at the bolt. It was newly installed and top-of-the-line with steel plating underneath which would make a push-in almost impossible.

  “I’ve stepped up my own personal security in here,” he grumbled. “One of those blue-haired old ladies downstairs got burgled the other day, did you hear?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Alex said.

  “Or she said she did anyway,” he said. “Who knows? She’s as deaf as a haddock and as senile as I’ll be in another few years. But at least now it will take someone a full minute to break in, as opposed to the ten seconds it probably would have taken before. You might consider doing the same.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Alex answered.

  “Oh, I know, I’m being a cantankerous old goat,” the retired diplomat grumbled, “but my niece has been staying with me recently. You never know who’s hanging around the hallways these days. And the idiot doormen are usually busy getting off on American Idol or whatever they watch.”

  Don Tomás was a nineteenth-century man trapped in the small quotidian horrors of the twenty-first century. It was what Alex liked about him.

  “Anyway,” he continued as he trudged heavily to his living room. “Tonight’s not about me; it’s about my niece. You know each other?”

  The two young women eyed each other as they walked.

  “Alex, meet Janet. Janet, meet Alex,” Don Tomás said. “There! Now you’re old friends.”

  “I think we’ve passed in the elevators,” Alex said.

  “Well, thank God the elevator wasn’t plunging from this floor to the sub-basement at the time,” Don Tomás said. “I take the stairs myself. I’d take them three at a time, but I’d give myself a heart attack after one flight. Anyway, the steps are healthier.”

  “Healthier,” Alex said as they walked past Don Tomás’s ample bar and impressive collection of cigars inside an elaborate glass humidor. Janet led them to the sitting area in the living room and, with a gesture of exhaustion, eased onto the sofa.

  The distinctive prints remained on the living room walls, mostly art deco originals from the twenties and thirties, stylized prints of beautiful women in most cases, including some brilliant works by the French Sapphic artist Tamara de Lempicka. In a further bizarre decorative touch, Don Tomás had added an antique print of a racehorse that bore his name, a gift, he explained, from a friend on his recent fifty-fifth birthday.

  “My great-great-great grandfather was a Confederate cavalry captain in the Civil War,” Don Tomás explained. “Those of his men whom he didn’t get killed seemed to be rather fond of him after the war. So they named a racehorse after him.”

  “Apparently,” Alex said, eyeing the print.

  “It was a gelding,” Janet said.

  “It was not!” Don Tomás insisted. “And it must have been a pretty good old nag—it won the 1875 Preakness and was later put out to stud.”

  “A little before my time,” Alex said.

  “Just a bit before mine as well,” Don Tomás added, “despite what you might think. I can honestly say I’m closer to sixty than a hundred and twenty-five. Would you like a drink, by the way? I have a new bottle of thirty-year-old single Malt Balvenie, speaking of graceful aging.”

  “I’d love a short glass,” Alex said. “Where on earth did you find a thirty-year-old Balvenie?”

  “Oh, I have my sources,” Don Tomás said, pouring a shot of the single malt into a whiskey glass. “Plus, it’s not where I got it; the amusing detail is what I spent for it. Middle range of three figures.” He poured an ample portion for himself. “Janet? Can I get you something? Or would you like to stick to a carcinogen-laced diet soda or perhaps a beer, I hope?”

  Janet had already retrieved a bottle of Budweiser from the refrigerator and plopped down on a chair before the sofa. She swigged from the bottle as Don Tomás and Alex savored the complexities of Caledonia. After two swigs, Janet embarked into some backstory that also had some complexity also.

  “Okay,” she said, turning to Alex, “I have a lot of crap that I need to bring you up to speed on.”

  “Then let’s start,” Alex said.

  According to Janet, she had been one of those pretty but geeky girls in high school who had been a computer and electronics whiz. “My brain was so right-sided that the joke was that I might tip over,” she said. She had parlayed her straight A’s in computer sciences, physics, and math into acceptance with an academic scholarship to Georgia Tech, even though her real interests had been music and composition, the heavier the metal the better. She hung around Savannah for an extra year, picked up a master’s degree in computer science, and then followed a boyfriend to Washington.

  The boyfriend didn’t work out and neither did her first couple of jobs. Then she answered a few newspaper ads for techie positions. One thing led to another, and the next thing she knew she was interning in the evenings at a cramped, smelly office in Alexandria, Virginia. There she was trained with surveillance equipment and how to do a quick drop in an apartment.

  One more thing led to another one more thing. Janet partnered with a couple of different guys and did a string of trial drops for a local police agency.

  “I got real good real fast,” Janet said. “For some reason, most of the partners I worked with dropped surveillance devices in cars, offices, houses, and apartments. It was always male-female teams. The guys did the dumb work of breaking and entering and watching the street. The girls were the ones who really put our butts on the line, going into people’s homes and setting up the electronic ears. It just seemed to work that way.” She paused. “Once I bugged a guy’s golf bag while he was putting.”

  “How’d you manage that?” Alex asked.

  “Me and this other girl, we bribed the attendant to partner us up in a foursome where our mark played golf. The other girl never wore a bra. She kept the guys distracted with her T-shirt and size-six shorts while I put an ear into the guy’s bag.”

  “Good work,” Alex said.

  The company Janet worked for was one of those incorporated-only-on-paper concerns, she continued. It was technically a private contractor. But there wasn’t much doubt as to where the big boss was: Langley, Virginia.

  Eventually, she partnered with a dude name Carlos, she said, first at work and then in the off hours.

  Don Tomás intervened. He spared his niece the agony of plodding through the most painful part of her past history, the way Carlos had been obliterated by a car bomb in Cairo. He summarized that as quickly as possible and brought Alex up to present day on the sighting of a former boss in Cairo, Michael Cerny.

  “He was kind of my everything,” Janet said. “My Carlos.”

  “I’m really sorry. But I can relate,” Alex said.

  “Yeah. I know,” Janet said. “Like I said, I know who you are. You just didn’t know who I was.”

  “That seems to be changing,” Alex said.

  “We used to talk a lot because we worked together,” Janet said. “Carlos and me. We were both interested in seeing the sights in the Middle East. You know, the pyramids, the Holy Land, Jerusalem. I didn’t have anyone to go with and neither did he. But we had some vacation time. So we saved up some bread and put a trip together.” She paused. “Single girl, traveling alone in that part of the world can’t be too careful, can she?” she asked. “I didn’t want to be sold into a harem or something. I mean, much safer to have your guy
with you.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Alex said. “Seriously. The last time I was in North Africa the whole delegation nearly got killed. I have no desire whatsoever to set foot in the place again for a good long time.”

  “Understandably,” intoned Don Tomás. “Where exactly were you in North Africa?”

  “Lagos. Nigeria.”

  “Ah,” he said. “One of the great hellholes of the world. That area is hardly safe for any American traveling alone,” Don Tomás chipped in with his usual cynical charm, based on a quarter century in the diplomatic corps. “Much less a young woman.”

  Alex turned back to Janet. “Here’s what I’m having some initial trouble with though. I worked with Michael Cerny in Paris. The last I saw of him he was slumped low in the front seat of a car, blood on his body, with a broken windshield and a bunch of bullet holes in the glass.”

  “He’s alive,” Janet said. “Sure as I’m sitting here, he’s alive and I saw him.”

  Following the two days she had had in New York, meeting Paul Guarneri, spending time with Yuri Federov, and interviewing for a new job, Janet’s assertion had a kooky Twilight Zone ring to it. Alex felt a strange rumbling in her stomach and didn’t know if it was nerves or fear or just outright disbelief.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you want to tell me, Janet,” Alex said.

  Janet led Alex through the story of what had happened in Egypt, how they had gone from their hotel one night to the Royale, the joint with the crunchy floors, the stinking cigarette smoke, the fake luxury scotches, and the Cerny clone with his two friends, one of them named Victor.

  Then there had been the trip to the men’s room, a few days of peace while they speculated on the sighting, and then the explosive device that killed Carlos.

  Janet finished. Alex gave her a moment to recover. Janet used the time to fetch herself another beer. The room was silent for several seconds, aside from the refrigerator closing and the cap from a beer bottle coming off.

  Alex turned to Don Tomás. “If my apartment is bugged, how do you know yours isn’t?” Alex whispered.

  “Janet checked,” Don Tomás answered. “She has some equipment on permanent informal loan from her former employers.”

  “I get it,” Alex said.

  Janet returned and sat down.

  “This bomb that went off,” Alex inquired gently to Janet. “You think it was intended for the two of you?”

  “Absolutely,” Janet answered.

  “Might it have been intended for Carlos alone?”

  “We were with each other the entire time. If Carlos had enemies from here, why would they trail him all the way to Cairo? It was in response to what he’d seen, what we’d seen, in Cairo. At the Royale.”

  “Did the police tell you anything about the bomb? In Cairo?”

  “No. They treated us like a couple of dumb young Americans who’d brought trouble on themselves. They accused us of dealing drugs and all sorts of things. I was scared. Real scared. I got out of the country as soon as I could.”

  “Janet phoned me from Cairo,” Don Tomás said. “I arranged for one of the consular officers to come see her at the police station. Otherwise, they might still be holding her.”

  “And what happened when you returned to America?” Alex asked.

  “The people I worked for debriefed me for hours,” she said. “Even the evening after the memorial service for Carlos. I told them what I knew; I told them what I thought. They told me I was crazy. They told me that Mike Cerny being alive was the most preposterous thing they’d ever heard.”

  “That’s my initial reaction also,” Alex said. “But that’s also a rather strange approach on their part.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Janet said, angry and defiant.

  Mystified, Alex took a moment to catch up with her own thoughts. “I’m losing you a little here. Who did the ‘debriefing’?”

  “CIA,” she said. “CIA?”

  “That’s who we worked for, once removed.”

  “Do you have any names?”

  Janet gave some. Alex was suckered in by now. She glanced around for a notepad. When she didn’t see one, Don Tomás provided one, plus a pen.

  “They treated me like a hysterical woman,” Janet said. “It was as if they had an agenda, you know? The longer it went on, the longer they kept trying to tell me that I was mistaken, that I couldn’t possibly have seen Mr. Cerny. First, they were patronizing. ‘Really, Janet,’ they said. ‘You mustn’t make up stories like that.’ ‘Really, you’ll start all kinds of trouble if you start going around Washington saying things like that. People will think you’ve lost it.’ I know how the head games work. They were trying to see if they could convince me that I’d been mistaken. I mean, I was traumatized and vulnerable. So they were trying to get inside my head and move the mental furniture around. Then within a few days, the tune had changed. I got another team of interrogators. The lead guy, he was almost threatening. Check that, he was threatening,” Janet said. “He told me that Michael Cerny was buried in a family plot in Muncie, Indiana, and his wife had moved back there with a generous widow’s pension. He told me that obviously I was under great stress from having lost my fiancé, but that made no difference. If I kept saying things like that, they were going to invoke one of the psychiatric codes on me and have me locked up. ‘For your own good,’ he said. He floated the idea of sending me back to Egypt and letting the local police take care of me. I said he couldn’t do that and he laughed and said he could do anything he wanted to. Patriot Act. National security. By this time, my head was really spinning. He even claimed at one point that he was a shrink and he could have me committed to a mental cracker box on the spot and then sent to Egypt. Well, bull! This guy wasn’t any shrink. I could tell. I’ve been to shrinks and they’re not like this guy.”

  “What was this interrogator’s name?” Alex asked.

  “Evans,” she said. “That was the name he gave. John Evans. But with those people, who knows? I figured it was a fake.”

  “What about the other ones? The previous interrogators?”

  “The first one called himself Fisher,” she said. “Mr. Fisher. Like in ‘Fisher of Men.’ He was a rude bastard,” Janet said. “In a way the first guy wasn’t as bad as the ones who followed. But probably none of them used their real names.”

  “Would all of those be fake names?” Don Tomás asked.

  “Most likely,” Alex said with a sigh. “That’s how these creeps work. The scotch is excellent, by the way.”

  “I’m glad you like it.”

  “Worth every dime of the five hundred dollars.”

  “Let’s try not to drink the whole bottle this evening,” Don Tomás said. “It’s always nice to have some left over for breakfast.”

  Janet forged on. “They kept asking if I had seen him myself, Cerny, if I could pick him out of a lineup, for example.”

  “And what did you tell them, Janet?” Alex asked.

  “I said I could.”

  Alex was still processing the bulk of this when Janet sent the dialogue in a different direction. “I’d like to show you where the listening devices are,” Janet said. “The ones in your apartment. I remember when we dropped them on you. Did you ever discover them?” she asked.

  “No. I had no idea there was anything in there. How do you know if they’re still there?”

  “Most likely they are,” Janet said.

  “Keep in mind I’ve been away from Washington for several months over the last year,” Alex said.

  “I know. I know all about you,” Janet said.

  A feeling of indignation washed over Alex, first being bugged by the very people she worked for. Second that this girl, Don Tomás’s niece, knew all about Alex and Alex knew nothing about her in return. And third that the devices were still there.

  “How do you know they might not have been removed?” Alex asked.

  “They normally send the same team back to do the retrieval,” Janet said. �
�We never got sent. But with Mr. Cerny’s disappearance, ‘retirement,’ death, or whatever you want to call it, assignments got confused and overlapped. But they still might have sent …” Here her voice trailed off and cracked. “They still might have sent Carlos and me here to take the bugs out. But they didn’t. Still, I hear stuff from the other teams we work with. We’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re not even supposed to know the people in the other teams. But we do. Most of us know each other. The bosses are careless. The whole operation is careless. And we all talk. Covering our backside, know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” Alex said. “Exactly.” She thought for a moment. “If the devices are still there do you think they’re working?”

  “Oh, sure. They’d be working. The audio feed is going into somewhere. I don’t know where, but it’s most likely being stockpiled and inventoried somewhere. Maybe by computer. They have somewhere they can download it into a written translation, and there’s probably someone who reads the stuff every day. If nothing else, just for kicks.”

  “For kicks,” Alex agreed.

  Janet nodded. “You know? To see who’s in who else’s bedroom who shouldn’t be. Never know who you’re gonna catch in that net.”

  “On the taxpayer’s dime,” Don Tomás said. “And by the way, I’m really sorry about this, Alex.”

  “No, no. I just thank you that you called it to my attention.”

  “I just learned about this two days ago. I knocked on your door yesterday,” he said.

  “I was in New York.”

  “As you can see, Janet is quite frightened.”

  “Of course,” Alex said.

  “I’ve been hanging with friends,” Janet said. “I’ve been afraid to go to work. Never sleep more than three days in a row in the same place, don’t go to any of my usual stores. Nothing. They questioned me for five days. It was like Guantanamo North. I didn’t have a lawyer there, and I never felt like I was free to go when I wanted. They kept insisting I was wrong, wrong, wrong! Like they were suggesting that I change my mind. Why would they do that if they weren’t hiding something or if I wasn’t onto something?”