The Sphinx was the guardian of the pyramid of Khufu and remained the center of superstitions because of its mysterious appearance. Known in Arabic as Abu al-Hol, the Father of Terror, the statue was called the Sphinx by the ancient Greeks. He resembled their mythical winged monster with the woman’s head and lion’s body who posed riddles and killed anyone unable to answer them.
Voltaire grinned as a couple rode past them on a pair of camels, barely in control. The woman seemed to be hanging on for her life. Voltaire, genial soul that he was, shouted after them in Arabic and everyone laughed, whether they understood or not.
“When I was a kid,” Voltaire said in a revelatory moment, “I went to a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a few years. We had a schoolboy game. We would rename the airlines. British Airways at the time was called BOAC. The British Overseas Airline Corporations.” He paused. “We called it ‘Better On A Camel.’ To this day I can’t look at a camel without thinking of that.”
Alex laughed. “Any other good ones?” she asked.
“SABENA. The Belgian Airline,” he said. “ ‘Such A Bad Experience, Never Again.’ ”
She laughed harder.
“Here’s the best,” he said. “TAP, the Airline of Portugal. ‘Take Another Plane.’ ”
She laughed again.
The horses began a pleasant trot, which created a slight breeze. Alex’s stomach had settled and she felt good again about the world.
“Thank you for coming out here with me today,” Voltaire said. “I don’t like to talk business with walls and telephone lines around.”
“My pleasure,” she said. “As well as my assignment.”
He reached to a shirt pocket and pulled out a small device about the size of an iPod. It was common currency between them that it was an anti-bugging foil. He entered a code and replaced the device in his pocket. “There,” he said. “That should wound the fragile feelings of anyone who might try to monitor us.” There, in the open desert, under God’s blue sky, they were absolutely free of any possible electronic surveillance.
Alex savored the beautiful silence around them, the rugged natural beauty of the Sahara, and the sweep of the sky. The only sounds were from the horses, including the swish of hooves on the sand.
They came near the first pyramid, the tallest of the three, Khufu Pyramid, called Cheops by the Greeks. It rose to a summit of nearly five hundred feet above the desert. Khufu had ruled Egypt twenty-five centuries before Christ from 2589 to 2566 BC.
As they approached it on horseback, the tone of Voltaire’s voice changed. “I suppose we should talk business,” he said.
“Please do.”
“A few weeks ago this young American girl, the one you know personally…”
“Janet,” Alex said. “She’s the niece of a friend of mine.”
“Apparently she was here in Cairo with a boyfriend. They made an unfortunate discovery,” Voltaire said. “A former agent had gone to ground here. Michael Cerny, he was known as, though he seems to like his own code name of Ambidextrous.”
“That name was mentioned back in my briefing at Langley,” she said.
“Ambidextrous. Judas. Cerny. Whatever we wish to call him,” Voltaire said. “He has a past so complicated that to recall it or understand it would be like attempting to memorize a chess game and re-create it in reverse. Suffice it to say that he was supposed to be listed as dead and continuing to operate for our side. Instead, your Janet and her boyfriend happened across him while he was trying to do a deal with the Russians.”
“An officially sanctioned deal?” she asked. “Or his own deal?”
“As it turned out, his own,” Voltaire said. “And she and her guy just about queered a major financial score for him.”
“In what way?”
“Mr. Cerny had no brief to be dealing with any Russians,” Voltaire said. “Not after the Kiev fiasco. The Agency sent him here to do some business with Arabs. But he got greedy. Oh, I’m jumping ahead. When Cerny knew he had been spotted by a couple of young Americans who recognized him, he realized that his whole charade was compromised. Or, he reasoned, it was compromised if Carlos and Janet lived long enough to get back to their employers in the United States and file a convincing report of what they had seen.”
“So the bomb here was meant to kill them both,” Alex said.
“That appears to be the case,” said Voltaire. “But the bomb failed. Or, on the other hand, it was only fifty percent successful. Janet gets picked up by the police here, who didn’t know what to do with her. She’s an American citizen, so they go easy on the rough stuff and just make sure she gets out of the country. Plus, by now she’s too high profile for them to just make her disappear.” He paused. “The Egyptian police are a curious bunch of apes, as you’ve probably already noticed. Their job is not to protect the innocent or even apprehend the guilty. Their mission is to protect the dictatorship. The most fundamental tenet of Anglo-Saxon justice, habeas corpus, is considered a quaint indulgence of the British and the Americans. Nonetheless, the Egyptian police don’t know what to do with Janet, so they pack her up and send her back to Washington.”
“And she starts telling people in Washington and Langley what she saw,” Alex said, picking up on it quickly. “But Cerny is supposed to be in deep cover. So they can’t admit to her that what she thought she saw was exactly what she did see.”
“That’s correct,” Voltaire said. “And even worse, she reported to Langley that Cerny was speaking Russian to a couple of men in towel-style headdress. You can imagine how that had hearts fluttering in Langley.”
“I can imagine,” she said.
“Cerny’s brief was checked, his logs were examined, his cell phone and home phone records were destabilized and decoded. His emails, official and personal, were downloaded and analyzed. They found Russian contacts and Israeli contacts. This place, Cairo, is crawling with spies and various other intelligence and counterintelligence agents the way Casablanca was during World War II, like Berlin was in the 1960s, like Warsaw was in the 1980s. So then the geniuses in Langley do a reverse search on all of the directories and e-files that Cerny has had access to in the last five years, and they come out shaking their heads. Aircraft, warheads, fighter planes. The man was saving up files for a rainy day, and you know what? To him, it’s suddenly monsoon season. He must have downloaded fifty thousand pages of sensitive military documents onto a box full of flash drives, and he’s running his own flea market. You read about the Jonathan Pollard case?”
“This morning, yes.”
“Do you remember it when it happened?”
“I do. But I was still in grade school.”
Voltaire gave her a double take and shook his head. “Yes, of course,” he said.
He laughed. So did she.
“You know, Josephine,” he said, “if I were thirty years younger I’d put another move on you. But I can’t imagine what a fifty-nine-year-old man-even a fit one-looks like to a twenty-nine-year-old. The ruins of Pompeii? Vienna after the world war? Stonehenge?”