The hurt was taking residence in her features. She nodded almost imperceptibly, but it was a nod, then she said, “Go on.”
He cleared his throat and wiped his lips with a napkin. “When I discovered it, I confronted him. I told him to cut it out. Do that, and no one need ever know. But I think he was more scared of whatever Balašević was holding over his head. I could have just reported to Langley, but that would have ended in disaster. Instead, I brought it to Harry.”
After a while of staring, she said, “He told me this. Before. It.”
He frowned. “About me, too?”
She nodded again, and the understanding flooded into him. This was the secret she’d been carrying the previous night, the distance he’d felt between them. She’d known from the start that he was holding back, and she’d been waiting for this moment. He’d been right to open up to her. He watched her get up from the dining table and sit on the sofa, where she’d apparently spent most of the day. She said, “Where is Zora?”
He followed her and settled down beside her. “Serbia. She went back home in September. Since Emmett was gone there was no reason for her to stay.”
Sophie blinked, taking this in. He waited for her to ask more, for the questions had to have been numerous, but she didn’t push yet. He said, “She told Emmett she was working for the Serbs. That was a lie.”
She raised her head to look squarely at him, squinting. “What? Are you sure?”
“My Serb contact says that by then she was working for the Egyptians.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t believe anybody.” After a lengthy silence, he added, “But, yes, I suppose I do believe him.”
Her gaze wandered around the room before returning to him, eyes moist. “He told me he was innocent. Emmett.”
“He told me that, too.”
“Why didn’t you believe him?”
Stan sighed. “Because he met with her.”
“How often?” she asked, interest now in her face.
“Just once that we verified. But we had a look at his computer—he took home the same files that were leaked.”
She nodded at that, and while she looked as if she might cry, she also looked as if she believed him, so he didn’t bother saying that Balašević also claimed that Emmett had been innocent. What was the point? Finally, she said, “What kind of disaster?”
“What?”
“You said that if you’d brought Emmett’s crime to Langley, it would have ended in disaster.”
“Right.”
“Well?”
He paused. “They would have taken him out of Cairo. He’d have been ruined.”
“But he was giving away secrets.”
“The disaster is that you would have left, too.”
She drank some wine, giving him no sign that she understood the sentimentality of his statement.
He said, “What did Balašević have on Emmett?”
She sighed loud and long, then leaned closer and laid her head against his chest. He raised an arm to hold on to her, wondering where this sudden tenderness was coming from. Exhaustion? Was the tenderness real, or did she feel she owed him? Did she believe she had a choice?
That was a question. What choices did Sophie Kohl have in Cairo, and who was in control when Stan kissed her neck and stroked her leg, making his desire clear? When she responded with a hand on his thigh, then raised her face so that he could reach her lips, what was motivating her? A widow fresh off her husband’s murder wasn’t expected to reciprocate like this—but what did he really know about widowhood? He suspected there was a whole world of complications and motives inside of Sophie that he would never get in touch with, so that it would always be impossible to say precisely what bent her to his will at that moment.
That night, though, he set aside these concerns. She was with him, finally, and his appetite rose. They were out of most of their clothes while still in the living room, and then she—she, not he—led him to the bedroom, where she allowed him to finally have her.
Afterward, he watched her drift into sleep, feeling possessive and eager and childlike. It was so much better than it had been before, and in that postcoital glow he resolved to put all his efforts into taking care of her. Clear up the mysteries around them and quell her fears and confusions. She was so still that he held a hand under her nose and waited to feel her warm exhale; then he rested a hand on her hip under the covers, and closed his eyes. He had no answers, but some things are better than answers.
4
On Sunday morning, he found it impossible to leave. He was tired, but after a shower they made love again on the sofa. It was different between them. Different from the standoffishness of the last couple of days, and different, too, from the illicit attraction of the previous year. It felt fresh and new, and not unlike empathy. Why would he walk out the door when this was in his home?
She felt otherwise. By eleven she said, “Don’t you need to go track down Aziz?”
“Right.”
He dressed and gave her a kiss that she returned with wrists linked behind his neck.
He said, “You can stay here, you know.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning on a hotel.”
“I mean longer. As long as you want.”
From her face he could tell she understood, but being perceptive didn’t mean that he had the faintest notion of what was going on in her head, for her words at first baffled him: “They’re burying him today.”
He first thought of Jibril Aziz, but she was talking about Emmett. “Yes, of course. Boston?”
“Amherst.”
“You wish you’d gone?”
She thought about that, then shook her head. “Funerals aren’t much use.”
He gave her another kiss, chaste, and headed out the door. It was the last time he would ever see Sophie Kohl.
Since he lived close to the embassy, he left his car behind and walked, buoyed by the change in his fortunes—smiling, even. When he got to his office and found an e-mail from Saul, fortune seemed to still be on his side. He didn’t know what connections Saul was using, but his results were swift. He had tracked down the September 4 footage from Frankfurt International, which he had uploaded to one of the Agency’s secure servers. Six hours of Zora Balašević wandering the corridors of the airport, from a variety of angles, in a total of seventy-nine video files with time code embedded. He started to download them and, as soon as the first file was completed, began to watch.
Balašević was five-six, five-seven, and despite the wear on her face she moved like a healthy forty-year-old, though she was a decade and a half older. Her hair was tuned to a pitch black common to the Balkans, and there were signs that either she worked out or her lifestyle demanded a lot of her physically. She wore a knee-length skirt with high black heels. She walked with confidence. She didn’t look around for watchers, nor did she hesitate when faced with gun-toting airport security. She carried a leather shoulder bag—large, with a vertical brown stripe as decoration, perhaps a laptop bag.
The footage began with her entrance into the airport around 9:00 A.M. in Terminal 1 and rolled along in files ranging from thirty seconds to twenty minutes. Stan watched her enter shots and shrink as she headed out of them, sometimes in the thick of a crowd, sometimes alone. She went first to a functional little café for some caffeine, then headed to the toilets. Inside, she used a stall briefly, then washed her hands and moved on, the bag always very close.
Though she didn’t come across in the video as aimless—she headed to each rest stop as if to an important meeting—it soon became clear that she was just killing time. She would double back to a café she had been in an hour earlier, or sometimes sit at the same gates she had visited before, thumbing messages into her phone. But with her purposeful demeanor, no one in that airport would have thought that she was solely waiting around; everything she did absorbed her entirely.