Then, at 11:08, two hours into her wandering, she sat down at Gate 32 and pushed the bag under her seat. Then she straightened and used her left heel to push it deeper. She took out her phone and started fooling with it again.
At 11:16, a man crossed between the camera and Balašević, an identical bag on his shoulder, and took the seat behind Balašević, so that they were sitting back-to-back. After placing his bag on the floor beside his chair, he also took out a phone and worked at it. His mouth, though, was moving. So was Balašević’s.
He was younger than Balašević, a light-skinned Arab in a pricey business suit. Long nose, thin lips. Just another traveling businessman in an airport full of men like him. At one point he glanced up at a passing security guard, his hard face full and well lit.
Their conversation took all of four minutes before Balašević checked her wristwatch and got up, taking the man’s bag with her. Though he knew the man would also leave soon, reaching under the seat to retrieve Balašević’s bag, Stan didn’t see him do this because the video ended and picked up with Balašević heading to her next pointless destination.
There were nearly four hours of footage left, but he didn’t bother watching any more. He replayed the video of the meeting, a file called 93-040911-394294-P.mov, and returned to that man looking at the security guard, at 11:18:23. He zoomed in and froze it, then exported the frame as an image.
He mailed the image and a link to the video file back to Saul and asked him to track down the identity of the man meeting with Balašević. This was simply a matter of following the man to his own departure flight and checking the airline’s ID scan at the instant his passport went through it. With that name, he might be able to untangle a few threads.
For the moment, though, he was stuck. Ali Busiri had not answered his request for a meet, and the dead Aziz had no means of answering his mail. He sent an e-mail to Jake Copeland, Aziz’s direct supervisor, asking where his analyst was, and, thinking of his lie the previous night, he queried a Libya watcher based in Langley, asking for any chatter among the exile community about Aziz. He returned to the database, thinking of Aziz’s four-year tenure in North Africa, from 2001 to 2005, and searched agent reports on Libya. During that period, most agent communiqués dealing with the region had come not from Tripoli but from Cairo station, and as he went through reports he followed a hunch, cross-referencing them with Harry Wolcott’s name. This was how he came upon reports of an agent known by two names, the cryptonym ASHA and the legend Akram Haddad.
Though heavily redacted, there was enough here for Stan to put together a narrative that matched Jibril Aziz’s resume almost perfectly. A young agent who arrived in Cairo in 2001, taking a small apartment in New Cairo, from where he traveled with increasing frequency across the border into Libya to connect with locals, garner intelligence, and build networks until, in 2005, he was blown and barely escaped Libya with his life. Each and every ASHA report was forwarded to Langley by Harry Wolcott, Cairo station chief, who met ASHA in his apartment after each Libyan visit in order to debrief him and collect his reports.
Stan rubbed at his eye sockets until they hurt. Harry hadn’t just read and turned down a proposal by Jibril Aziz—he had run Aziz for four years. Why hadn’t he admitted this? What was he hiding?
His inbox dinged for his attention. Two sentences from Jake Copeland: “Mr. Aziz is on personal leave. I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you were he is.”
As he was considering a reply, some diplomatic way to push Copeland for more, his phone buzzed. When he recognized the number, he cursed. She was calling from her Hungarian phone. “Hey,” he said.
“Stan.” For an instant, he thought that a stranger had taken her phone. It was in her voice, a coldness. As if she had become someone else.
“What’s up?”
“You’ve been lying to me, Stan.”
How could he reply to that? He said, “About what?”
“Jibril Aziz, Stan.” He didn’t like the way she was repeating his name.
“What about him?”
“His wife, Stan. You told me very definitely that he didn’t have a wife.”
“It didn’t seem important,” he said, suddenly confused.
“Didn’t it?”
“You’re right, Sophie. I’ve been holding back.”
“You’ve been lying.”
“I’ve been trying to protect you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Do men really think that the only thing women want is protection?”
“I’ll be home in fifteen minutes,” he told her, using his commanding voice. “Wait for me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“Everything?”
“Yes,” he said, because he was tired of lying. Perhaps she would walk out on Cairo, but the rules of espionage ought not apply to those we love. He needed at least one relationship in his life that was clear and clean.
“I don’t know, Stan.”
What didn’t she know? “Just wait. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He waved at Eric as he burst out the front doors and ran across the grounds, out the gate, and through Garden City’s winding streets. It took him only seven minutes to get home, so it was more than a shock when he found the apartment empty—it was devastating. He felt it in his legs, which had once brought on his desire, and were now bringing on cramps. Unself-consciously, he held on to himself, arms around his stomach, and moved from room to room, finding only empty spaces. He was confused, angry, and in love, but he didn’t really know what pain was until he reached the bathroom, with its marble sink and large, unframed mirror where, scrawled across the glass in Sophie’s burgundy lipstick, was a single word, underlined.
LIAR
5
Though he would never see her again, Stan never considered this possibility. She might have walked out on him, but she was in his town. He was, at heart, an optimist, and he believed—he knew—that within hours or days they would be together again. Ragged, perhaps, a little scarred, but together.
By ten that evening, through a call to a contact in Egyptian security, he learned that she had checked into the Semiramis InterContinental, just around the corner from the embassy. While his first impulse was to follow her there, crash through her door, and smother her, he knew that she needed space. Once her anger had passed she would come around, for who else did she have in Cairo? He was the only one who truly wanted to help her.
Patience, his father once told him with typical exaggeration, is the only worthwhile tool in an agent’s arsenal.
His one concession to his desire was to ask Paul to sit in the Semiramis lobby to watch out for her.
“Sophie Kohl?” Paul asked over the line, incredulous. “What’s she doing here?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Stan said as coolly as he could manage. “Don’t make any approach. Just make sure she doesn’t get hurt, and if she leaves, you call me and keep track of her. Once we have some answers, I’ll take it to Harry. In the meantime it’s between us. Got it?”
Afterward, he lay down but couldn’t sleep. He was too disorganized, too muddled, his mind flickering over the tangled mess of things he knew and didn’t know, so he got up again, swallowed two Tylenol with a glass of water, and tried to think back to Thursday, before Sophie had arrived to scramble his thinking. What had he learned?