Countdown in Cairo

by Noel Hynd

  THIRTY-TWO

  Alex passed through Egyptian customs, then immigration. The Egyptian security officer scanned her passport. He waited for something on a computer screen, and so did she.

  Whenever she traveled on a fake passport, immigration unnerved her. She watched everything the agent was doing and observed every facial gesture carefully. She even watched his eye movements as he looked at his computer screen. She felt her heart race and felt her blouse moisten with sweat.

  Then the agent closed her passport, handed it back, and nodded to her. He smiled. “Welcome to Egypt,” he said in English.

  Moments later, she retrieved her baggage from a clanking, outdated carousel and soon found a young man from the US Embassy holding a piece of paper with her new name on it. She approached him, smiled, and identified herself.

  They shook hands. As it turned out, there had been one other passenger on her flight who was attached to the US diplomatic section in Cairo. He was a man about ten years older than she. The driver was also waiting for him. Once he had found both travelers, the driver took Alex’s bags and carried them to a waiting van.

  “I’m Mo,” the driver said as they piled into the van.

  “Short for Mohammad, I assume,” Alex answered.

  “Mo is fine,” the man said without humor.

  “Well, at least they didn’t send Larry or Curley,” the other traveler said sotto voce to Alex, who had to suppress a smile.

  Mo and Cairo traffic were perfectly suited to each other. The ride into the city was crazy, with hyped-up drivers often passing between two other cars in the actual lanes, as a static-filled radio filled the van. It was not usual to be in a stream of traffic four-cars-across on a two lane highway at sixty miles per hour. Alex and the other American in the van exchanged another glance. She checked that her seatbelt was tight. The driving was worse than what Alex remembered from some of her trips to Central and South America. The only worse traffic that she could recall was during her trip to Lagos two years earlier, where there seemed to be no rules at all.

  “I wish I had a helmet,” she said to the other man.

  He laughed and shook his head.

  “Me too,” he said. “And maybe some extra life insurance.”

  Mo either couldn’t hear them or chose to ignore them.

  The highway passed through several upscale blocks in the northern fringe of the city. Alex noted a number of satellite dishes on buildings, most of them looking as if they hadn’t worked for the past twenty years. Gradually the new buildings gave way to some very old ones, and she knew she had arrived in an ancient and picturesque city, a city she read about so many times in her life.

  Cairo. Al Qahirah, as it had originally been called. The Triumphant City, so named for all the invading armies that had conquered it and then left, defeated by the quirky eccentricities of the city itself. The ancient was intermingled with the new on endless blocks. And even after the highway, traffic was a nightmare.

  Their van pulled up in front of one of the better hotels, the Metropole Cairo. The Metropole was a bright modern building with several guards around it, many with heavy weapons. There was a display of foreign flags above the entrance arcade. Alex nodded a good-bye to the other passenger, and she stepped out. A porter picked up Alex’s one piece of luggage from the rear of the van.

  Alex tipped Mo with an American ten-dollar bill. He grunted in response.

  The Metropole stood impressively by the River Nile. The lobby was modern. It gleamed with new furniture and artwork in an Egyptian motif. Alex checked in easily, and a second porter took her to her room.

  The room was a small suite, actually, more like a room and a half, a sitting area, and a sleeping area. It was thoroughly air-conditioned and had numerous amenities—multiple telephone lines, internet access, satellite television, a small refrigerator, and a polished marble bathroom with separate showers. It afforded a spectacular view of the Nile as well as a hotel pool. It was obviously designed for diplomatic and business travelers, a fine base for conducting business or exploring historic Cairo. She had heard the Metropole was considered one of the best business hotels in the Middle East, and her impression on arrival did nothing to undermine that premise.

  She knew from her previous “official” visits to Nigeria and Ukraine that every US Embassy provided arrival kits for guests, including maps of the city and phrase books. She found such a kit waiting for her with a card from a political officer at the Cairo Embassy. His name was Richard Bissinger.

  She knew from experience that the political officer was often more than simply that. For better or worse, Bissinger, or whatever his real name was, was her CIA contact.

  On one of the maps was a notation as to where the embassy was. It wasn’t far. She had also noticed on arrival that the entire neighborhood was well policed, even beyond the weapons-toting guards that ringed the hotel. Also within the kit was a cell phone, new and presumably secure.

  Alex changed into a knee-length tan skirt, a conservative light blue blouse, and shoes that would allow her to walk or run as needed. She had a linen jacket and threw it over her arm. She carried an extra silk scarf but tucked it into a jacket pocket. She knew that if she wished to enter a mosque or any Islamic holy place, she would need her neck and arms covered. She memorized the short walking direction to the embassy and set out on foot, ready for anything, not wishing to consult a map or guide book and look conspicuously like a tourist.

  What struck her immediately on her way, in addition to the remorseless heat, was the din of the city—a confirmation of what Rizzo had mentioned. There was an unyielding background noise to every block. Motor vehicles jammed the streets. The drivers had one hand on the horn and a rules-free way of attacking any intersection. Trucks and cars ducked up onto the sidewalk to pass. Many seemed to have won an uncontested divorce from their common sense as well as their mufflers. Vehicular anarchy reigned. Alex regretted having not taken Rizzo’s advice about the earplugs.

  Big trucks rumbled by. Pickup trucks hit their air horns at each other. Battered black-and-white taxis honked, and their drivers exchanged profanities with each other. She was secretly pleased she didn’t understand Arabic, at least not right now. Men worked on cars in the street. Vendors hawked newspapers, snacks, water, fruit, and bootlegged DVDs from tables on the streets. Butchers hawked meat in stands that overflowed out onto the sidewalks. They blasted radios and cranked up the volume on television sets. As she walked, muezzins’ calls to prayer wailed from loudspeakers in the minarets of thousands of mosques in the city, as they would five times every day.

  Forewarned, Alex could still not believe the din. People in private conversations shouted to be heard. Some blocks were only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer. She wondered how people could live here. It was unlike New York or London or Madrid or Moscow or any other internal-combustion-engine-choked metropolis that she had ever experienced. This was like living next to a lawnmower.

  To her relief, she was at the embassy in fifteen noisy minutes.

  The American Embassy was a green high-rise of about a dozen stories, next to the Japanese Embassy. Like her hotel, it overlooked the Nile. Ten minutes after arriving in the lobby, she sat in the office of Richard Bissinger on the third floor of the embassy, savoring the silence within the American enclave.

  There she waited.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Bissinger entered several minutes later. He was a thick, compact man of about five-eleven, with slicked-back hair. His brow jutted, his eyes were dark, and his chin receded sharply into his body. He looked like a prize-fighter who’d been knocked out several times but lived to fight again.

  “Well,” Richard Bissinger said, “welcome to Egypt.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  “So who are you?” he asked. “Other than who you really are, I mean.”

  She handed him her passport. He opened it, studied it for a moment, curled a lip, gave her a bemused smile, and slid the passport back.<
br />
  “Nice work, the passport,” he said.

  “Latest thing, in more ways than one.”

  “Josephine, huh?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Well, I read your c.v. this morning, Josephine. You’ve been busy in the last two years. Lagos. Ukraine. Spain. Points in between.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “Either a dark cloud follows me or I’m following it.”

  Bissinger nodded. “That’s how most of us feel,” he said. “Welcome to the club.”

  “You know why I’m here,” she said. “Reports about a Michael Cerny.”

  “I know all about that. Transcripts from Langley. Plus local activity. This is a headache. Need to get this wrapped up quickly. Make Cerny disappear and everyone who sails with him. You used to work for him? Cerny?” “He was my case officer when I was on the Ukraine assignment. He was involved in a gunfight in Paris in June, and I thought he was shot to death. So did the Agency. Now we’re getting sightings.”

  “Like Elvis,” said Bissinger. “Only more radioactive and not in a Walmart.”

  “What else can you tell me?” Alex asked.

  “Not much good,” he said. “We’ve had a lid on Egypt for several years. The place is out of control but under control. Know what I mean?”

  “We means the CIA?” she asked.

  “The CIA. The United States. Western Civilization. All of the above. Right now Egypt is our type of place. Thank God they don’t hold free elections here or we’d all be out on our butts.”

  “Not to split hairs,” she said, “but from what I’ve observed over the last couple of years, you wouldn’t be out on your butts so much as you’d be forced to work the same operations with much deeper cover. Am I not correct?”

  Bissinger looked at her first with skepticism, then shook his head with approval. “Are you as good in the field as you are with words?” he asked.

  “I like to think so.”

  “I’d like to think so too,” he said. “If you are, you’re going to like it here. The stated goal is to apprehend Mike Cerny and bring him back in. He looks like he’s about to do a deal with some Russians, and we can’t allow that to happen. So everything is on red alert here, no pun intended. Speed is important. We have an operation planned, and you’re the essential part.”

  “What’s he selling?” she asked.

  “Technology.”

  “Whose?” “American.”

  “To the Russians?”

  “Maybe to a third party, brokered by some Russians.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Alex asked.

  “Show yourself, maybe lure some disgusting Russian thug into a bedroom overnight for some really ugly and abusive sex, be vulnerable, maybe get naked and get slapped around a bit and eventually get killed,” he said without any glint of humor.

  “Just another day at the office,” she answered, going with it.

  “Yeah, except I’m not kidding.”

  After a few seconds, “What?” she finally said.

  She stared at him. CIA people I have known, she thought to herself. Where did the Agency recruit these people? From the loony bins of the world?

  “Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said off her stare. “You’ll catch on. I’m going to put you in touch with the main people we have on the streets here,” Bissinger said. “As you might imagine, our best sources aren’t American. The person you really want to talk to is a Jordanian named Voltaire.”

  “Voltaire?”

  “Rarely see the man, myself,” Bissinger said. “Voltaire is what he goes by. I’m going to give you the name of a café in old Cairo. It’s a place called Fishawi’s. Go there tomorrow evening around 7:00. There will be two local women sitting at a table in the rear. They’re local assets. One of them will be named Artemiz. They’ll have a bouquet of roses on the table. If the roses are upright in a vase, you should present yourself to them. They speak English. Not the roses, the women. If the roses are turned over, lying flat, security isn’t perfectly in place and you should leave. If that happens, come back here the next morning. If the roses are upright and it’s a ‘go’ for the evening, the women will then guide you to meet Voltaire. When he approaches you, he’ll make a reference to the Zodiac. If you feel ill at ease with anything, don’t respond to it. Tell him he’s mistaken and reject the advance. If you’re comfortable, pursue the Zodiac reference. You okay with all this?”

  “I know how the game is played,” she said.

  “Need me to repeat it?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Voltaire is your key guy. He runs our streets but behind the scenes. His information is impeccable. He’s expensive, but we work with him. Think of me for your white intelligence, Voltaire for the black stuff. Dark, dark black. If any shooting starts, duck. It won’t necessarily be you they’re trying to take out; it’ll be Voltaire. The Islamic fanatics would have killed Voltaire years ago if they were smart enough to figure out who he is and if they could shoot straight, two qualities that they have lacked historically, fortuitously for us.”

  “So I hear.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You just took a few stitches in your arm. How’s that holding up?”

  “The scab itches.”

  “Most of them do,” he said. “By the way, you never mention my actual name, either, the one you see on my business card. In any conversation with Voltaire or anyone else on this operation, I’m Fitzgerald.”

  “Fitzgerald?”

  He nodded. “I’m an educated sort of swine,” he said. “My father was in this same line of work. And in my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice. He said always use a nom de guerre that you respect and that you’ll remember. That way you won’t get a bullet in your back some night.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “Again, good. How do you like Egypt so far?”

  “I just got here.”

  “So? No opinion yet?”

  “Well, you make it sound quite charming.”

  “I live here. I know how it works.”

  “I couldn’t believe the noise on the street,” she said.

  “What noise?” he asked. “It’s a quiet place.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Ah, you get used to the brutal sound effects, and it’s the least of our problems,” Bissinger said. “People here shout to be heard and shrug because they say there is nothing they can do but join in. That’s the biggest city in Africa outside this embassy. In some areas, the density of people is ten times what it is in New York. People here honk, bang, scream, howl, or whatever they need to do to make it through the day or across the street. The noise is the cause as well as the reaction. Fire a gun and maybe no one will notice. If you don’t like it, shout back at them. If you’re here long enough, you’ll get used to it and you’ll shout at everyone. But there’s an upside: every other place in the world will sound quiet after you leave.”

  “I’m also not wild about the part where I’m supposed to get killed,” she said, backtracking.

  “What part was that?”

  “What you just mentioned.”

  “That’s good. I was afraid the part about the ugly overnight with the Russian would have you walking out of here.”

  “When do I hear what the real game plan is?”

  “When you meet Voltaire, but what I outlined above isn’t far off. So I’ll ask again, how do you like Egypt so far?”

  “Want to help me form an opinion?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then give me a quick overview.”

  “Fair enough. Current history begins with the Gulf War of 1991. Egyptian infantrymen were the first Arabs to land in Saudi Arabia to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Know why? The US government paid Egypt half a million dollars per soldier that Egypt sent into the fight. This is all unofficial, of course. But the program worked. When the United States formed alliances to kick Iraq out of Kuwait, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was the first to join. Be
cause Egyptians were some of the first to move into Kuwait during the liberation, Egypt suffered more casualties than reported. But after the Persian Gulf War was a success, Mubarak’s reward was that the United States, the Gulf states, and Europe forgave Egypt around twenty-billion-dollars’ worth of debt. It turned the Egyptian economy around overnight.”

  “And the average Egyptian doesn’t know this?”

  “Of course not. There are rumors. Mutterings in cafés. But the government controls the press. Hell, the average American doesn’t know it, and we have a free press, so why would the average Egyptian?”

  “Point,” she said.

  “Corruption within the police departments and the Ministry of Interior is rampant here. Don’t trust anyone within the Egyptian government or any state agency. As a woman in the Arab world, you’ll not only get a hand under your skirt but you’ll get a knife in your back or worse. The state security agencies operate unchecked. They execute criminals without trials when they want to, and there are maybe about ten state prisons hidden out in the desert that exist off the record. Any individual police officer can violate any citizen’s privacy or rights. They can make unconditioned arrests whenever they want. You run into a police lieutenant or captain, it’s a sign of danger, not safety. So if you have to rely on anyone here, use one of us, never one of them.”

  She listened with close attention.

  “As for the president of the country,” he said, “Mubarak has been in power for almost three decades. He’s survived at least six known assassination attempts and maybe a couple dozen more that got nipped before a shot was fired. Islamic fundamentalists. They don’t like him for exactly the reasons we do like him. He cozies up to us and feels he can live with Israel, his public anti-Zionist yammering notwithstanding. Look at his history. He works both sides of the street. He went to their air force academy half a century ago and became a bomber pilot. Part of his flight training he received at the Soviet pilot school in Bishkek in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. In 1964 he was appointed head of the Egyptian Military Delegation to the USSR. So he started out his career as a Soviet guy. In 1972 he became commander of the air force and deputy minister of war. In October 1973, following the Yom Kippur War, he was promoted to the rank of air chief marshal. In April 1975 he was appointed vice president of Egypt, and following the assassination of Sadat by militants in 1981, Mubarak became the president. For half a dozen years he was a loyal guy for the Russians. Then the Soviet Union collapses, and it’s all roses and valentines between him and Washington. Suddenly he’s our guy. Do we object? Hell no. He might be a hooker, but he’s a hooker who knows how to keep us happy, and we can afford him.”