Countdown in Cairo

by Noel Hynd

  “Is Mr. Federov awake yet?” she asked.

  “He had a difficult night,” Nick said sullenly, removing the ear buds from his ears. “He won’t be up for a few hours.”

  “Medication?” she asked.

  Nick grunted. He stood.

  “Could you get me a taxi?” Alex asked.

  “I’m told to keep watch on you,” Nick said.

  For a moment, Alex interpreted that to suggest that she wouldn’t be allowed to leave. Then Nick refined what he meant. “If you need airport, I drive,” he said.

  “That would be excellent,” she said. “Thank you.”

  She did not see Federov that morning. She was out the door in another fifteen minutes, at the airport within sixty. She exchanged her ticket for the next flight back to Cairo.

  Two hours after that, her flight broke through the heavy cloud cover of central Europe, hit the sunshine, and began a smooth flight back to Egypt.

  FIFTY

  The man traveling under the Russian passport of Benjamin Schulman put his paperback novel across his knee as his El Al flight descended into Istanbul. He could have caught a direct flight to Cairo, but precaution ruled against it. Anyone moving back and forth on El Al between the Egyptian capital and the Israeli capital drew extra scrutiny, and extra scrutiny he did not need.

  He still sensed something strange about Boris’s email and Colonel Amjad’s mildly garbled phone call. But he also knew that he had to take some chances. Some days, everything was a chance. He had placed a price tag of two million dollars on the merchandise he was currently peddling, and for two million bucks and a cozy retirement in Paraguay or Argentina, well, why not? Besides, for anyone to know who he really was or what he was about would mean that his passport numbers were blown. And how could that be?

  He had ninety minutes of turnaround time in the airport in Istanbul. He watched his own back carefully, spent time in shops and in the washrooms. He didn’t expect trouble in Turkey, but if he had a tail or any sort of surveillance, this was where he could pull out a second passport and board a plane to a safe third country. Syria, for example, was just two hours away.

  Schulman, or Cerny, knew that the law-enforcement bastards behind the two-way mirrors and the digital surveillance cameras were busy and active even though he couldn’t see them. But he saw no street-level activity to suggest he was being followed. So he continued to the boarding gate for Kuwaiti Air and continued his trip.

  Benjamin Schulman on Kuwaiti Air. He enjoyed his little joke.

  The Kuwaiti Airbus arrived punctually at the gate in Cairo at 6:15 in the evening. The airport was busy. Like the rest of Cairo, it was noisy and overcrowded.

  Cerny proceeded from the exit ramp to the baggage carousel and waited. The delivery of baggage to disembarked passengers was bad enough in the First and Second Worlds, Cerny grumbled to himself. In the Third World it was an instrument of psychological torture.

  He wasn’t that fond of Arabs. Of the Middle Eastern people he knew, he vastly preferred the Jews, which is why he was always willing to do business with them—or at least offer to. They were smart, modern, and learned, and they paid well. What more could he want? The best that could be said for Arabs, in his opinion, is that they hadn’t adapted very well to the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first. So he was often standoffish when Arab men crowded too closely to him, as they did here in the baggage area. He kept finding himself pulling away and repositioning himself.

  Arab women were different, however. He liked the demure mystery of the veil on younger women. He had no objection, in fact, when one particular woman stayed close to him at the carousel. He turned and looked at her eyes. She looked away quickly, as Islamic women often do. He liked to pursue them, so when she stepped a bit farther away, he moved closer to her.

  She wore a headscarf of blue, gold, and green silk. A very pretty new one. He gave her an eye-to-eye gaze again and then a smile. She looked away. He loved this cat-and-mouse game. She was wearing an Islamic gown over Western clothing. It was a shame to him that all the very pretty Islamic females were so prudish, but maybe this one, with some Western habits, could turn into some fun.

  He dismissed his desires. His thoughts returned to business. He spotted his bag and plucked it from the carousel. Good luck—none of the crooks in baggage handling had broken into it. It was his lucky day.

  He proceeded to immigration. When he got there, he noticed that the same woman had fallen into line just in front of him. He watched her progress as she went through the line. He eyed her carefully. Under all that clothing, she had a nice shape.

  The strangest thing, he noticed as she passed through immigration, was that she had a Canadian passport. Who would have guessed?

  He lost track of her as he passed through immigration himself. Everything went smoothly. It was time to look for a cab. He went through the glass doors that led outside to the taxi stands.

  He joined the line. There was some sort of commotion going on where the cabs were being routed to the end of the line. He became wary. Anything unusual put him on alert. But he settled himself and stood in line with his bag. He tried to discern what was going on.

  A sense of paranoia gained on him.

  Then a Cairo taxi, a van with its off-duty sign turned on, pulled out of the regular cab line and, with the assistance of the local police, pulled up to the line of waiting passengers. It stopped right in front of Cerny. The rear door opened. What was this? he wondered.

  Cerny felt a tap on his shoulder and heard a woman’s voice.

  “Michael?”

  He felt a flash of anxiety. He turned. It was the woman in the veil again, the same one that had been at the luggage carousel, the shapely woman in Islamic garb over Western clothing.

  “Nice to see you again,” she said.

  Cerny stared. He didn’t like this. Not at all.

  Alexandra LaDuca reached to her veil and removed it quickly so that he could see her full face. She could see the look of horror when he recognized her. In that instant, Michael Cerny knew that his operation had crashed.

  Cerny threw a fist at her. But she parried it expertly and threw her own shot into his face. She nailed him directly in the nose. He staggered and would have fought more, but four powerful hands came out of the back of the van. They hauled him backward. He shouted profanely, but no one came to his rescue. Struggling and shouting, he was pulled into the van.

  People in line yelled, screamed, and broke away as the commotion spread. But as usual, the police protected the public order. Inside the van, a cloth rag wrapped across Cerny’s face and smothered him. He felt an incipient buzz. Then he felt a needle in his shoulder.

  Alex picked up his bag and threw it in.

  She climbed into the van with him and pulled the doors shut. Tony pulled away, the police clearing a corridor for them to escape.

  FIFTY-ONE

  On the third day after Cerny’s apprehension, Alex’s cell phone rang in her room at the Metropole. She answered quickly, thinking it was her arrangements to return to America. She had an evening flight that day and was anxious to get home.

  But the call had little to do with travel. It was Bissinger at the embassy. Her request had been granted, Fitzgerald told her, and she could have thirty minutes to speak directly to Michael Cerny, one-onone in his cell. But he was about to be moved, Bissinger explained, so it would have to be today.

  “Moved to where?” she asked.

  “Just moved,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Right. When do I get to see him? I have a flight tonight to Rome.”

  “Now,” Fitzgerald said. “There’s a man in the lobby waiting for you. You’ll recognize him.”

  “Thank the powers that be for me.”

  “Personal courtesy of Voltaire himself,” Fitzgerald said. “Call it professional courtesy. The best of all possible worlds.”

  “I’ll thank him when I see him.”

  “You won’t see him. Unless you do. But I’m told you’ll se
e his handiwork—and have some closure.”

  For some reason that gave her a little cringe. “Why does that sound so ominous?” she asked.

  Bissinger ignored the question. “It’s a rough place where you’re going. Proceed accordingly,” he continued.

  “Is my visit with the prisoner official or unofficial?” she asked.

  “Unofficial. No notes. No recording devices. It’s strictly off the books. Don’t sign in. There’s a window of twenty minutes. The prisoner is supposed to be alone in his cell; you’re going to keep him company.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “I hope so.”

  “Gun?” she asked.

  “Bring it along, but you’ll have to check it before you go onto the dance floor. I need it back here anyway, and you can’t take it on the plane no matter who you know or work for.”

  “Good point,” she said.

  She threw on a pair of jeans and a jacket, kept her Beretta in her shoulder bag, stuffed the rest of her belongings in a travel duffel, and went down to the lobby. An SUV was waiting for her. She recognized Tony, who had by now become her favorite chauffeur in all of North Africa, and possibly the entire continent.

  Tony drove her to yet another seedy area of the city, and soon they were going through checkpoints—first police, then military. Before long they were going down a remote highway through the sand, the scorching road seeming to go from nowhere to nowhere.

  Along the sides of the road were trenches, with wire and an occasional sentry post. They were in a no-man’s-land of some sort, and Alex was already looking forward to leaving. Scenes like this made her love America and its freedoms all the more.

  Then they arrived at a final gate, which was manned by soldiers. Tony seemed to know them. Alex looked at them carefully. She saw rank and insignia on their uniforms, and they appeared to be Arab. But she couldn’t tell exactly what they were, and she knew better than to ask. They were on a paramilitary site of some sort, one of those official unofficial brigades one finds in certain nondemocratic countries.

  Everyone, everything, was unmarked. There were sentries and soldiers all over the place. Most of the buildings looked like guardhouses, tan walls set on sand with high barred windows. It looked like something from the cold war, but when the SUV pulled up to a stop and she stepped out, it wasn’t cold at all. It was easily a hundred and ten degrees in the broiling sun.

  Tony said little, though he did ask her for her gun. She handed it over, holster and all.

  “Can you have it returned to Mr. Fitzgerald at the embassy?” she asked.

  “I’ll give it to my boss,” he said. “I think that would put it in the right channels.” His “boss” meant Voltaire.

  “I think it would,” she agreed.

  He walked her to one of the guardhouses and knew exactly where he was going. He led her past three guards with automatic weapons, into a building where a distant air-conditioning unit rumbled and kept the heat down to about ninety, plus the humidity. The architecture reminded her of the morgue where she had posed as dead. She cringed.

  She went through two more locked gates and then into a cell where Michael Cerny was sitting on a cot. There was a steel table bolted to the floor, a plastic chair, and a pair of rings on the wall that could accommodate wrists. The area below the rings was stained. Alex had to tamp down her disgust when it dawned on her that the stains were from many years of blood.

  Cerny saw her. First he looked at her in surprise, then fear.

  Alex sat down on the chair.

  Cerny continued to stare at her. He was sweating as if someone had opened an invisible faucet above him.

  “Hello, Michael,” she said.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “I don’t know why you came.”

  “I’m here to talk anyway,” she said.

  “It’s not you who worries me,” he said.

  “Maybe it should.”

  “It still doesn’t,” he said. After another empty moment, he said. “I understand they’re moving me.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

  “Where to? Do you know that?”

  She shrugged.

  “Figures,” he said.

  She had been thinking, as she entered this chamber, on what she really had to say to him—how she might have lectured him on a sense of decency or blamed him for the death of her fiancé. But none of those words came to her, and the clock was ticking from the time she sat down.

  “Quite a difference between here and when we first met, isn’t it?” she asked. “Or even between here and the last time we saw each other.”

  “Nothing personal, you understand,” he said after several distant seconds.

  “No. Of course not,” she said. “And I’m not an official inquisitor. The local man allowed me a few minutes with you, just to satisfy myself.”

  “Pretty generous of him,” Cerny said. “What did you have to do in return?”

  “Ask nicely,” she said, dishing it back. “What occasions this is that I saw an old friend of yours the other day. And after a conversation with him, almost everything fell into place.”

  “What old friend?” he asked, as if surprised to learn that he had any.

  “Yuri Federov.”

  Cerny shook his head.

  “He’s still alive? I’m surprised.” He snorted.

  “I’m going to describe to you my sense of the big picture,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ll want to comment, but I’m going to entertain you with it, anyway.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “It was the Russians who put you up to getting rid of Federov, didn’t they?” she began. “They sent you to the United States many years ago, back when Vladimir Putin was holding together remnants of the old KGB. Sell a little bill of goods here, another one there. You were Putin’s man in Washington and Langley—or more likely one of Putin’s men—going all the way back to the 1990s when you first appeared hawking your bag of tricks. Didn’t much matter who you were selling out to start with, did it? Langley was always buying the act. But then, as years went by, and the goals got bigger, every person you compromised was in some way inimical to Vladimir Putin.”

  He shifted on his cot. There seemed to be some swelling on the side of his head, and he kept touching it.

  “I even reviewed all the cases you worked, right up to the one about Dr. Ishraf Kerwidi, the fellow who went out the window in London. That served a whole host of interests, didn’t it, Michael? Putin. The Israelis. Maybe even the Americans.”

  “Kerwidi had it coming,” Cerny said.

  “By your way of thinking, I’m sure he did,” Alex said.

  “You might want to watch out for open windows yourself,” he added, “if you keep making enemies all over the place. Got to be people who think you have it coming too, Alex.”

  “Just like the people around here think you have it coming as well.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “I just wouldn’t want to be you right now,” she said.

  “Who would?” he asked with a final dash of irony. “Certainly not me.”

  “So then I would be correct?” she said, glancing at her watch and backtracking. “You were a Russian agent, going back at least a decade. And the whole operation in Kiev was put forth primarily to take Yuri Federov out of the picture for Putin. I talked to Yuri about this. He’s not well, by the way. Federov, by his own admission, had become too powerful following the Ukrainian gas crisis of 2005. So in a strange way, American interests and Russian interests—Putin’s interests—merged. He was on the US hit list for gangsterism, arms dealing, and tax evasion. But worse for him, he was on Putin’s hit list for just being too powerful. So you came to the CIA with a plan to take him out. First by an assassin in Rome who hit the wrong person. And then later in Kiev.”

  Cerny exhaled a long breath, one of resignation.

  “It was an easy sale,” Cerny said. “The CIA wanted Federov gon
e. Who really cared if Putin wanted him gone too?”

  “Poor me. Poor Robert. Poor everyone else who got killed in Ukraine that day. We were all caught in the middle,” Alex said. “Do you remember a Colombian cocaine lord named Pablo Escobar?” Alex asked.

  “Sure, I do,” Cerny answered.

  “Escobar once planted a bomb on an Avianca-jet—just to kill one specific person,” Alex said. “The plane blew up and eighty-six people died. Collateral damage. That’s what we’ve all been. Collateral damage for the games nations play.”

  “That’s how life is. You’d do the same if you were assigned to do it.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I’d like to think, in fact, that there’s a special place in hell for people who do things like that.”

  “Well,” said Cerny. “I told the inquisitors everything, so why shouldn’t you know too? So I serve a few years in prison. Putin’ll get me back. They always do. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “That’s all I’m going to ask,” she answered.

  By then, time was up and Alex had had quite enough. Two military men in blue berets were at the cell door. They clanked the door noisily and said something in Arabic that Alex didn’t understand. She was more than ready to leave. The door opened with a metallic groan.

  She left the cell without saying anything further. If Cerny had anything more on his mind, and she was sure he did, he wasn’t going to talk about it.

  FIFTY-TWO

  One of the guards accompanied her back down the hall. Alex had the impression that the guard spoke none of the languages she knew, so she didn’t attempt conversation. Tony was sitting on a desk in the entrance area, his jacket off, his shoulder holster and weapon exposed. Once again, Alex knew the drill. By this time, it seemed to her, she knew too many of the drills. Tony would continue on with her and deliver her to the airport. Operations were like that. As soon as one was rolled up, the CIA liked all the players out of the country as quickly as possible. Once she got back to Washington, there would be a lot to talk about. Yet most of it she wouldn’t be able to even mention—not to her friends anyway.