Finally, he motioned at the shower. When John turned it off they could hear the hypnotic call to Isha prayers broadcasting from the nearby Al Zamalek Mosque, which meant it was after seven. He followed Harry into the living room and handed over the keys to the Peugeot. Rather than head for the door, though, Harry walked to the far wall and pulled back a bit of curtain that covered the glass doors to the terrace. With his other hand he crooked his finger to beckon John over, then pointed through the trees down to Ismail Mohamed, its cobbled sidewalk lit by the Hotel Longchamps across the street, where occasional pedestrians passed. But Harry was pointing at two Egyptian men standing beside a newspaper kiosk, one smoking; the other, who was mustached, had nothing in his hands. Unlike everyone else on the street, they weren’t going anywhere; unlike many Egyptians, they weren’t supplicating themselves in prayer.
“Who?” John asked.
Harry shrugged and said, “Watch your back,” then patted his shoulder and left.
4
As he toweled off after his shower they were marching, demonstrating for or against something. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them farther down Gezira Island, perhaps by the stadium, chanting something that rose over the rooftops and filtered down through the trees as he ate a dinner of scrambled eggs and toast, finishing it beside the terrace doors, watching his shadow (one of them remained) waiting indifferently for orders, or for him.
With a corpse—no, five—on his conscience and a shadow waiting on the street, he wondered how he’d ended up here, but he knew the answer well enough to know the question was pointless. You cruise through life, knocking against obstacles and decisions along the way until, eventually, you’ve got blood on your pants and paranoia digging into your shoulders.
As he washed the dishes he remembered a young John Calhoun growing up in Jackson Ward—single mother, hardscrabble friends—with an interest in verse. Though he enjoyed the flow and beat his friends would break out on the sidewalk, listening to Melle Mel and Run-D.M.C., he found himself more entranced by the words cobbled together in the distant past: Cummings, Pound, Yeats. Once he even tried, with disastrous results, to put some of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson poems to hip-hop. Humiliation grew into withdrawal, and those long-dead white men became his private vice. He’d loved the caress of the words and how they could make him feel, if for only a moment, that something important hid just behind the flat facade of his black-and-white world.
He’d brought those sometimes puzzling yet inspiring verses with him to the army, and to the ranges at the Fort Benning sniper school. He’d even brought them across the ocean to the Hohenfels Combat Maneuver Training Center in Germany, but their cryptic wisdom hadn’t been enough to make him wise: In 1995, late into a whisky-soaked evening, he beat a Bavarian to a pulp. He still barely remembered the fight, which had put the fat, virulently racist Bavarian into the hospital for nearly a month, one arm broken, four ribs cracked, and one lung punctured. He was lucky to be sent home with a dishonorable discharge, his CO told him, for the locals wanted his “black ass taken to the butcher’s.”
As he toweled off his hands he remembered the Langston Hughes his mother used to recite like a mantra:
God in His infinite wisdom
Did not make me very wise—
So when my actions are stupid
They hardly take God by surprise
Lines like that could help a man through his day.
By the time he dressed it was nearly eleven. The headache he’d brought with him from Libya still lingered, but it had cleared enough to convince him that he could handle whatever the man downstairs wanted to give him. Or perhaps this was a sign that he hadn’t recovered, and he was still crippled by Danisha’s prognosis. Did he really not have the sense to flee from danger? Maybe, but the army had taught him a thing or two about preparedness, so he returned to the kitchen and dug through the pots in the low cabinets until he’d unearthed another tin box, one that had once been used to hold nougat bars and now held an old Glock, filled to capacity with seventeen rounds. It was, as had been explained to him his first day in Cairo, against Agency rules to keep firearms in one’s own house—to do so would have required permits from the Egyptian Interior Ministry, helping it to ID Agency employees—but once they were outside the confines of the embassy Stan had given him the name of a supplier in New Cairo who continued a long tradition of supplying nervous embassy employees with peace of mind. He slipped the pistol into a beaten shoulder holster, stretched into his jacket, and headed downstairs.
At Global Security’s training facility, a decommissioned army base about thirty miles north of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he’d been told, They’re going to watch, so let them watch. During their trips into town to spend an afternoon trailing random locals through their daily routines, it had seemed possible to live without anxiety while under surveillance. But that had been a game; Tuscaloosa was not the rest of the world.
He’d been followed before. During a six-month stretch in Nairobi, thin young men with bashful smiles used to circulate through crowds as he made his way through the markets. In Lisbon they’d been lazy, sitting whenever possible in café chairs, on the rims of stone fountains, on front stoops. During a brief tour in Afghanistan, children had kept tabs on him and other Global Security grunts as they made their rounds through villages. The kids would shout up and down the streets to the next checkpoint, and though this steady procession of underaged surveillance operatives frayed their nerves, the fact that it was out in the open and so obvious had helped them. It made things predictable; it taught them when to keep their eyes open for IEDs and irregular roadblocks.
In Cairo, things were different. It was a crowded city, the most populous in the Arab world, and it defied predictability in the best of times. Before the revolution, John had gotten used to the constant intrusion of security personnel hanging around, whatever path he took. During the revolution, though, they’d had bigger things to deal with than a low-level embassy hand, and now, with sections of the hated security apparatus in disarray, when a shadow came he was one of the awkward, fumbling rookies who knew the neighborhood but wouldn’t know tradecraft if it slapped him in the face. So when John headed out and almost immediately lost track of his shadow, he was worried. The man tracked him for one block before fading into the crowd, and when John took a couple of detours between apartment buildings he wondered if he’d lost him. But no—a block short of Deals he spotted the mustached one again, which suggested he wasn’t alone. What had John done to deserve these man-hours? He hoped that it had to do with something innocuous, like one of the numerous meets he’d observed, but with the headache still scratching at him he knew it was not.
Yet he moved on. Though a part of him wanted to, he didn’t take evasive maneuvers and double back to find out how many there were. Nor did he sit in wait to snatch one off the street, because there was the other part of him, the stronger part, the same part that told him not to burn Jibril’s secret list, and now it was telling him that his shadows could be taken care of tomorrow. It told him that tonight all that mattered was to get everything out of his aching head as quickly as possible.
So he walked ahead, feeling their breaths on his collar, and reached Said el-Bakri Street without any taps on the shoulder or throat clearings or excuse-me-Mr.-Calhouns. He trotted down the stairs and opened the door to the bar and didn’t even look back as he lowered his head to avoid hitting the overhang.