The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  Sarah came in with a tray of small cups of strong coffee, some sliced fruitcake, and honey cookies. “Will this be enough?” she asked. “I didn’t know if you had eaten. There is more if you are hungry.”

  “I’m fine,” Stephanie said.

  Mel raised a hand. “I ate twice on planes.”

  Sarah passed out the cups and sat down at the remaining chair to join them. Kemmel reached under the sideboard to lift one of the kittens onto his lap and began fondling it with the fingers of a hand that could have squashed it to pulp. “So you’ve only just arrived in Egypt,” Sarah said.

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t have seen much yet.”

  Mel caught Stephanie’s eye. “Well… as a matter of fact I’m already finding it quite exciting,” he replied. Sarah met Kemmel’s eyes with a knowing look. Kemmel beamed back at her good-naturedly and shrugged.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sarah said. “Please carry on.”

  “To get to more immediate matters,” Kemmel said. He looked at Stephanie. “You, Eva, must go back to Shepheard’s tonight, to reappear fresh and bright for work in the morning as if nothing had happened.” He turned to Mel. “Do you know if she was missed?”

  “Missed? It was like Fort Knox had been robbed. That’s probably why all those police cars showed up just as we were leaving. ” Across the table, Sarah raised her eyes momentarily toward the ceiling.

  “So,” Kemmel said to Stephanie, “we work out an alibi for you, and you stick to it. You weren’t seen leaving Shepheard’s, and you won’t be seen going back. Where were you supposed to be?”

  “I told the security guard I was going down to the hot tubs.”

  Kemmel shrugged. “They probably looked in the pool area, but so what? You changed your mind and went into the sauna. They must have missed you. You went back up and went to bed, and that’s all you know.”

  “Er, I think the concierge saw her leave,” Mel said. “So did the doorman.”

  Kemmel shrugged again. “How could they have done? She never left. Mistaken identity. They must have seen one of the high-class hotel hookers. They’re in and out all the time.”

  Mel nodded. “How do we arrange it?”

  “I will telephone Mr. Slade and arrange to meet him somewhere,” Kemmel said. “I want to find out the rest of the story before I reveal where you are. If things sound okay I bring him back here, and he takes Eva back to Shepheard’s and gets her inside invisibly.”

  “Sounds good,” Mel said. He looked inquiringly at Stephanie.

  She nodded. “What about…” she hesitated for a moment and glanced at Mel, “Mohican?”

  “You must stay out of sight,” Kemmel told him. “You were seen at Shepheard’s and at the desk at the Omar Khayyam. Although little of this will probably get into the papers, there will be eyes on the lookout for someone of your description all over Cairo by tomorrow.. Also, you’ll be a dead duck the moment you try passing through an airport.”

  “You were seen too,” Mel pointed out.

  Kemmel smiled. “True, but I am used to it. I know the city, where to go and where to stay clear of.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Mel asked.

  “As you know, I have connections with Mossad. I think we keep you lying low until we work out a way to get you out of the country unofficially, and into Israel. Then you can rejoin your own people in Jerusalem and become their problem. That’s one of the things I want to talk about with Mr. Slade, and why he should come back here tonight.” The kitten purred loudly as Kemmel tickled it under the chin. “What do you think?” he asked. “Have we overlooked anything?”

  Mel sipped some of the hot, rich coffee, nibbled a piece of the cake and went over it in his mind. “Just one thing,” he said at last.

  Kemmel looked surprised. “Oh, really? What?”

  “My suitcase. It’s still in the lobby of Shepheard’s somewhere.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we can take care of that,” Kemmel promised.

  CHAPTER 57

  Kemmel left shortly afterward to telephone Slade and arrange a middle-of-the-night appointment. He warned that he might be gone for a couple of hours. Sarah had some business to take care of on the other side of the city early the next morning, and Stephanie urged her to get back to bed and not lose any sleep on their account.

  “Perhaps you two should try to get some rest also,” Sarah said. “Something tells me that you have had a trying evening.” Not once had she pressed to find out what had happened. Her mouth twitched in a faint, Gioconda-like smile. “Sometimes Hamdi’s ‘couple of hours’ can be a little more than that. Come.”

  She led them up the stairs and showed them into a back room, as jammed with furniture as the rest of the place, and as nineteenth century looking. It had a miniature but splendid four-poster bed, red-cushioned Ottoman couch, and heavy, carved wardrobe, chests of drawers, low coffee table, small round table, and two upright chairs. “Hamdi has many guests,” Sarah explained. She squeezed between the bed and the chest of drawers to get to the other side of the room and drew aside the floor-length drapes. Behind was a set of French windows, which she opened, revealing a wooden veranda overlooking the Nile. “A little air,” she said. “Close them if it gets chilly.” She crossed back to the door. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Mel moved into the room and stood looking around. “I didn’t know people lived in museums,” he said. Stephanie didn’t answer. He stepped around the table and stared out over the veranda. The river was wide, its slowly rippling surface glittering with reflected city lights from the far bank. There were many boats moored closer in to the shore, and a large, sleek motor yacht, its windows lit up and mast strung with colored lights, was moving slowly downstream farther out in the channel. “It’s prettier out here,” he said. “How far would you say it is across to the other side there?”

  “I don’t know.” Stephanie’s tone said she didn’t especially care.

  “I wonder what kind of a job you have to have to own a boat like that. It sure doesn’t come with being a lawyer, whatever else they tell you.”

  At that moment, Sarah came back in. She had some linen and blankets draped over her arm and was carrying two small glasses in her hands. “Perhaps you would like these,” she said. “I think you call it a nightcap, yes? Cognac. I’m told it steadies one’s nerves. We don’t drink alcohol, but we keep some for visitors.” She put the glasses down on the small table and the blankets on the ottoman. “Those are there, if you want to use the couch…” She left the sentence unfinished, giving a slight shrug and a tossing of her head in a way that said it seemed silly to her, but one never knew with foreigners. “There is a bathroom up one more flight of stairs, on the right. Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stephanie said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “I will say good night then. And in case I don’t see you again, Eva, good luck.”

  “I guess I’ll probably still be around tomorrow,” Mel said. “Good night until then.”

  Sarah left, closing the door. Mel picked up one of the glasses and turned to take it out onto the veranda and let Stephanie get settled. Equality being what it was, he assumed he was on the ottoman. He rested one hand on the rail and sipped from his glass in the other as he stared out across the river. The liquid ran down his throat, warm and mellow with just the right kick. He felt the tension draining out of him, and downed some more.

  He was still waiting for the reaction to hit him, now that the adrenalin charge had died away. Knowing fully what he was doing, and quite deliberately, he had just, bloodily and violently, killed another human being. It violated what was supposed to be one of the great taboos of his cultural programming.

  The mysterious rationale was something that he and Eva had talked about. Soldiers went through the same programming, supposedly, for eighteen years, and were then expected to be able to switch it off at will, simply because somebody pronounced the mass killing of people th
ey had never seen before “just,” after consulting an all-merciful, all-powerful God who had botched the job by creating imperfect men, and then had to have his only son tortured to death to remedy it. It was just as well that humans made better parents, Mel had often thought. But exercising discrimination and killing for a reason was not okay—except when it was carried out ritually to extract vengeance on behalf of the same all-merciful God.

  So, what form would the reaction take? he wondered. Would it develop as a trauma that would haunt him for life now? Remorse? Guilt? Self-loathing?

  But he felt none of those things. He felt curiously liberated. He felt calm, at peace, and perhaps truly for the first time ever, fully in command of himself and his faculties. It was as if all of the other taboos and delusions that had been weighing him down all his life had shattered along with it; as if he had broken out of a prison that he hadn’t even recognized, and only now, from the outside, could look back and see as a product of his own mind. It was their willingness to accept guilt that put men in bondage to others. There could be no form of slavery without there first being slavery of the mind. He felt whole, somehow. Now he understood what Eva had tried so many times to tell him.

  He sensed a presence close to him and turned his head to find that Stephanie had taken off her coat and was standing just inside the French windows. “Hi,” he said, surprised. “I thought you were getting tucked in.”

  She said nothing, but moved out to him, slowly but deliberately, watching his face, talking with her eyes and her movement. He could feel her warmth, smell her nearness. He turned fully to face her, alive now to what she was saying. He touched her shoulder, and she moved unresistingly into his arms. They kissed lightly at first, both in a strange, curious way as if neither of them was sure this was really happening; and then harder, hungrily, as the tension which the events of that evening had left in both of them craved for release in each other’s bodies. He tightened his arms around her and pulled her against him, feeling her breasts pressed eagerly on his chest, himself thrusting against the firm mound beneath her skirt, and her responding.

  Yet at the same time there was a part of him that said it shouldn’t be like this: a hurried, stolen hour. It should be when all this was over. He drew his head back, held her shoulders, and stared into her face in the lights from across the river.

  “I want to…” she whispered before he could say anything. “So you’ll know that it doesn’t make any difference to anything… what happened tonight.” She was telling him that she wanted to accept him as he was, in the only way that would set him apart from what he had been. She lowered her hands and unfastened her skirt, letting it fall to her feet, then stepped out of it and pressed herself to him again. He ran his hands up over her body underneath her top, and slid it up over her arms.

  And for this one time, it was she: the wantonness of Eva, the tenderness of Stephanie, fused into one person. He finally consummated his impossible love for both of them. It was complete. And he, too, now, was complete.

  • • •

  They were still clinging to each other in the four-poster when a tapping on the door woke them and let them know that Kemmel was back. He had been gone for three hours. They dressed and went downstairs to find that Slade was there with him as planned, and had brought Mel’s suitcase.

  Back around the table in the downstairs parlor, they reviewed the situation with him, much as they had gone over it among themselves earlier. There seemed to be no reason to change the plan that Kemmel had proposed. The news was that the police had not linked Stephanie to the killing at the Omar Khayyam, and the concierge and doorman at Shepheard’s had agreed that they might have been mistaken about the girl they had seen leaving. If Stephanie reappeared as normal in the morning, everything would soon smooth itself over.

  From other inquiries that Kemmel had made, the police were taking the official line that the woman who was killed had been a womanfriend of Talaat Ali’s—it had happened in his suite—and that the minister next door had been sedated all through and had nothing to do with it. In fact, the police had their own private doubts about that, but nobody was interested in delving further. Descriptions of Mel and Hamdi Kemmel were being circulated, however. It was all virtually just as Kemmel had anticipated.

  Mel told of his conviction that it had been the woman at the Omar Khayyam who had killed Eva. Stephanie, it turned out, had felt the same thing.

  Finally, Stephanie left with Slade in a cab to return to Shepheard’s. She and Mel would not see each other again until he joined McCormick’s group in Israel.

  Exhaustion overcame Mel at last, and he slept soundly until late the next morning. The bed smelled of Stephanie. When Sarah returned from across the city and woke him finally, it was almost noon. She nodded approvingly to herself as she carried out the blankets from the couch, still folded. Mel washed and went downstairs to find that she had prepared a breakfast of sausage, bread, and a spicy egg dish. He ate hungrily but without rushing, thinking back over everything that had happened. Then he went out onto the veranda and stood leaning against the rail, watching the river.

  Kemmel reappeared late in the afternoon. He had left his red fez at home, Mel noticed, and was wearing a flat black cap. “Have one thing that stands out, which everyone will remember,” Kemmel said when Mel remarked on it. “And then when it’s not there, they’ll be unable to recall anything else. Anyway, everything went okay at Shepheard’s this morning. Eva is back at work today, and there have been no questions. Everyone there accepts that she never left the hotel.”

  “Is there anything in the papers about the Omar Khayyam?” Mel asked him.

  “Just a brief mention that there was a fire alert, which turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Okay… Any more on how I get out?”

  “Yes. They’re going to take you out by sea. I will drive you down through the delta to the coast, but that can’t be until tomorrow at the earliest, I’m afraid. So it looks as if you’re with us for at least another night.”

  Mel browsed through the books in the shop and found some in English to pass the time with. One of them was an English law manual from 1898. After dinner, he and Kemmel spent the rest of the evening playing backgammon. When he went to bed, he thought again of Stephanie. The delegation had left Egypt that evening, and she would already be in Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER 58

  Damascus is built amid deserts, in a two-hundred-square-mile oasis of trees and orchards fertilized by soil carried down by rivers from the mountains of Lebanon. It styles itself the oldest existing city in the world. Certainly men came there before their coming could be recorded, and if Jericho counted merely as a small town, then the claim could well be just, for Babylon and Nineveh were its siblings. The millennia have seen it conquered repeatedly by East and West—Egyptians, Ammonites, Philistines, Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Saracens, Crusaders, Mongols, Turks, French, British—and without being changed much by either, until latter-twentieth-century bad taste began submerging its defiantly irrational piles of architecture and twisting anarchies of alleyways beneath disciplined ranks of concrete cinemas, offices, factories, and parking lots.

  The Soviet embassy, and the Damascus residency of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, which it housed, was situated in the more fashionable district stretching to the northwest of the old city, near the Parliament and other government buildings, below the slopes of Mount Kassioun, where the better-to-do built their homes above the summer heat. The layout was to the standard Soviet pattern found the world over, comprising two plain, eleven-story buildings standing side by side inside a walled compound of lawns, trees, and shrubs. The embassy building contained regular rooms and offices in its lower nine floors, with the top two being highly secured, accessible to authorized personnel only, and reserved for KGB activities. The other building held the staff residential quarters and recreational facilities, and most of the occupants ventured out of it infrequently, and then usually on supervised sightseei
ng tours.

  But Major Yuri Brazhnikov had no thought in his mind of going to see the Great Ommayad Mosque, the Nureddine Tower, or the house where Cain was supposed to have killed Abel, as he crossed the compound to the main building on the morning of January 15. There was a strange concurrence of, things happening at once in different places, which his instincts told him was more than coincidence. Chelenko had felt the same thing even sooner, which was why he had approached General Goryanin to have Brazhnikov sent to Syria. First, the enigmatic American, Shears—whom agents in the U.S. had continued to keep an eye on, even though Brazhnikov had tended to dismiss him as the primary lead at the moment—had vanished suddenly three days previously. The Israelis were thought to be hatching something, although their security was first-class as usual, and nobody had any idea what. Satellite observations had shown activity around the mysterious PALP base to be increasing. And was it mere chance that right in the middle of it all, the American political deputation that was visiting the area should have arrived in Jerusalem last night? Something, somewhere, a feeling in Brazhnikov’s bones told him, was about to happen.

  He acknowledged the salute from the sentry at the main entrance and crossed the vestibule to the elevators. A huge, framed picture of Lenin watched as he pressed the call button and waited for the car to arrive. He was still shivering from the walk across from the residential block. The winter here wasn’t much warmer than Moscow’s.

  On the tenth floor, he came out into the lower level of the residency. A special key opened the armored outer door, and beyond it an inner door was opened from the other side by a security guard after checking Brazhnikov’s identity—Brazhnikov’s was a new face, and he could turn out to be more of a stickler for rules than some of the regulars. Inside, he went past the room where the case officers worked in their separate booths, and along a corridor to the small office that had been assigned to him and his two assistants on direct instructions from Moscow. Lieutenant Kugav, who had called him over from the residential building, was standing over a littered desk wedged into one corner with a data terminal, beneath a corkboard covered in pinned notes and messages. The other wall carried a large-scale map of the area between the east shore of the Mediterranean and western Iran. A red circle indicated the location of the enigmatic PALP base in eastern Syria, code-named Glinka, around which the whole operation pivoted.