“Sure.”
“Did she say who was investigating it?”
“I didn’t think to ask.”
Harry grunted. “Next time, think.”
2
Stan didn’t need to tell anyone about the murder, for when he arrived at the embassy it was already on everyone’s lips, having been an easy splash in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It was the only subject his five agents—Ricky, Tim, Klaus, Mike, and Paul—wanted to discuss. He allowed them a few minutes of conjecture before steering them back to the agenda they were obliged to deal with during their Thursday morning meetings: their sources, and how to handle them. Paul was having trouble with his primary source in Egyptian intelligence, RAINMAN, who had recently dropped off the radar and wasn’t answering his requests to meet.
They had various explanations for this—Ricky thought he was trying to prove his worth before hitting them up for a better deal; Tim was more generous, believing that since Mubarak’s fall RAINMAN’s position was less secure, so he was simply watching out for himself. Ricky’s cynical take was unlikely, for RAINMAN had come to them last year—not the other way around—and they had accommodated most of his requests for help getting business associates into the American markets. Tim’s felt more likely, as the end of Mubarak’s reign had thrown everything into disarray. While the military leadership running the country wasn’t interested in overturning the entire security apparatus, everyone knew that once the elections came around all bets were off.
“Maybe his superiors discovered he’s our friend,” said Klaus.
Stan shook his head. “If Ali Busiri knew, then RAINMAN would be locked up or dead. Yet we see him in all the usual places.”
“Send John” was Ricky’s suggestion. “Scare him into shape.”
That earned a few laughs. John Calhoun was their sole contractor, a huge Global Security tough who’d been around since late November. He wasn’t around today, though. Harry had borrowed him for a job. “Where is the dark knight?” asked Klaus.
“Boss isn’t sharing,” Stan told him.
Nancy, the pool secretary, tapped on the door and summoned everyone to Harry’s office.
They piled in, joining the embassy’s entire Agency presence—twenty-five or so people—and Nancy closed them inside. Harry stood behind his desk, white hair brushed so meticulously that it looked like a rug, hands deep in his jacket pockets. Though he had a great view that included a small slice of the Nile between other Garden City buildings, Harry kept his venetian blinds closed. He was chewing on gum when he said, “Folks, I’ve got some bad news.”
He told it in his measured, heavy voice, the one reserved for Statements of Importance, and Stan learned that by the time Sophie had called him the list of suspects had already been narrowed down to a single individuaclass="underline" Gjergj Ahmeti—a.k.a. Dumitru Cozma, Lajos Varga, and Andrzej Wójcik. Jennifer Cary asked the obvious question: “Sir, how did we verify this guy?”
“Hungarian police cameras. One down the street from the restaurant ID’d his car, which he left in a train station lot, then cameras inside the station saw him catch a EuroNight to Munich. One of our guys in Budapest, George Reardon, tells me that by the time they stopped the train to search it, just inside the Hungarian border, he was gone.”
That earned a collective sigh.
Harry shared an enormous rap sheet on Gjergj Ahmeti that included, among other things, two bank robberies in his native Albania, time in a Belgrade prison for multiple homicide, connections to two murders in Marseilles, and star billing on two “persons of interest” lists, in Yemen and Brazil. The man got around.
“But who does he work for?” asked Dennis Schwarzkopf.
With his index finger, Harry drew a question mark in the air. “Interpol’s spent a lot of time on his case, and there’s a file a few inches thick, but no one even knows for sure if he’s freelance. Looking at his sheet, though, I think he must be. There’s no single organization we know of that could account for the variety of places he’s worked.”
“Except us,” said Jerry, one of Jennifer’s agents. A couple of polite chuckles, until they saw the look on Harry’s face.
“Jerry,” he said, “I don’t want to ever hear that joke again.”
Jerry nodded, flushing immediately.
To the rest of them, Harry said, “Many of you knew Emmett. He was a good man, as well as a friend. I want everyone beating the bushes. If his murder has anything at all to do with Cairo, then that information belongs on my desk immediately. Any questions?”
As they were clearing out, Harry asked Stan to stay behind, and once they were alone Stan closed the door. Harry settled in his chair, popping a fresh ribbon of gum into his mouth. “So what do you think, Stan?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Harry waved a hand, irritated. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Stan approached the desk, considering it. “As far as I know, he had no contact with Balašević after I brought my case to you. So it doesn’t make sense. Why would the Serbs wait a year and then get rid of him in another country?”
Harry rocked back in his swivel chair. Behind him was a portrait of the president, smiling. He said, “Maybe they tried to recruit him again.”
“They had to know he was already blown. It would be shockingly amateur.”
Harry nodded at that, as if the possibility of an intelligence agency acting stupidly weren’t commonplace, then said, “Just check on what you can, but keep it quiet. I’m not interested in slandering a dead man.”
“He was a traitor.”
A look crossed Harry’s face, a flicker of anger. “You never proved it. Not conclusively.”
“How often are we able to prove anything conclusively?”
“Often enough that I wasn’t going to ruin a man’s life. Often enough that we’re not going to smear a dead man’s name.”
Though they rarely brought it up, the disagreement had colored their relationship, lurking beneath the surface of all their conversations for the past year. Stan wondered—not for the first time—if Harry already knew about Sophie, and if he had suspected ulterior motives when Stan had demanded that Emmett be taken into custody. Whatever Harry knew or suspected, right now he just opened his laptop and said, “Go get me some results, all right?”
He collected his agents again. RAINMAN was on the back burner, and Stan was finally free to discuss what had been on his mind since three in the morning.
They ran through their contacts, finding seven who’d had even a distant connection to the business affairs that Emmett had spent most of his time dealing with in Cairo. Each agent received his assignments and headed out to make calls and schedule meets. Once they were gone, Stan called the Serbian embassy and asked to speak with Dragan Milić.
Stan and Dragan had had plenty of informal conversations, that tit-for-tat between agencies that keeps intelligence in motion, and so he took the call quickly. When asked if he’d heard about Emmett Kohl, Dragan gave an exaggerated sigh. “My condolences, Stan. Yes, of course I heard about that.”
“Are you free for lunch?”
“For you?”
“Yes, Dragan.”
“Of course, my friend.”
They met halfway between their embassies, Stan walking to clear his head, and it took a half hour to weave through the crowds toward the 15th of May Bridge, where he crossed to Gezira Island and finally reached La Bodega Bistro on the 26th of July, in the old Baehler’s Mansions Building. It was a good walk, refreshing despite the stink of the Nile and the traffic backed up along the Corniche El Nil, and he took in the hijabbed women walking in pairs and trios, the gaunt men in sweat-dyed shirts, smoking. Arabic pop music, as ubiquitous as prayers, blared from cars, drowned out at times by the buzzing of mopeds and the choking roar of old, barely functioning pickups. At one point just before the bridge, he saw two men taking off their shoes and laying towels on the ground in preparation for midday Dhuhr prayers.