Harry said, “I’d be careful about what Ali Busiri says. He’s a sneaky bastard.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do. About a month ago, when things fell apart for Mubarak, do you know what he did?”
Stan shook his head.
“He called me for a meeting. In a hotel room. He was pouring martinis. Made me wait forever before he got around to it—he wanted to come over to us.”
Stan frowned, but waited.
“He was scared. Terrified. He thought he was going to end up with a bullet behind the ear, and so he made me an offer. We give him a nice house in California and new names for him and his wife, and he gives us everything.”
“Everything?”
Harry nodded.
“But you didn’t take him up on it.”
Harry shook his head. “When you’ve been neck-deep in it for as long as I have, you learn to smell who’s bullshitting you. I smelled it—that hotel room was lousy with it.”
“Did you tell Langley?”
“How well can they smell from five thousand miles away?”
Despite his anxiety, Stan grinned. “But he survived the changes.”
“So far he has,” Harry said. “My only point is that you should take Ali Busiri’s intel with a grain of salt. The same’s true of his employees, like Omar Halawi.”
They both thought about that a moment until Harry said, “Does Sophie have a theory?”
Stan blinked. “When she called me, she was in shock.”
“But certainly she shared some kind of opinion with you. After all, you were lovers.”
Stan said nothing.
Harry smiled softly, then waved at him. “Did you think I didn’t know? You kept using the same hotel room—bad security.”
Now Stan was the one rubbing his face. Yes, it had been bad security, and of course Harry had known. He was surprised that Harry had never brought him in for a talk, but now that it was out in the open he felt anxiety falling off his shoulders.
“This,” Harry said, “would be the other reason I didn’t haul Emmett off in chains. You can see the conflict of interest, can’t you?”
Stan could see it very clearly.
Harry covered his mouth again and looked at the ceiling, as if it were turning brown from the rain. “So let me ask you again: Do you know where she is?”
Stan remembered her words: Do men really think that the only thing women want is protection? “I have no idea,” he said, and that, at least, was true.
The desk phone buzzed. As Harry answered it, Stan considered asking for help tracking down Sophie. Harry knew, after all, about the affair—that obstacle had been taken away, yet Stan wasn’t ready to ask for help. Why?
It was because of a single gesture, that forehead, which seemed to cover up a whole world of secrets that he could not even guess at. If you’re missing some crucial piece of information it’s best to assume you don’t know anything. There was enough missing here that he couldn’t even assume he could trust Harold Wolcott.
Stan waited as Harry listened on line one; Nancy was talking to him. Harry’s face changed again. His mouth hung open, and unconsciously he touched the nick on his chin. “Okay,” Harry said into the phone. Then he hung up and met Stan’s gaze squarely with his own. “Look at the ceiling.”
Stan did so, and it looked the same as it always had.
“When it shits, Stan, it pours. Sophie Kohl is in Cairo.”
“Where?”
A heavy shrug. “The Hungarians finally told us where she went. The Egyptians haven’t verified it for us yet, but I assume they will eventually.” He frowned. “Question is: Why hasn’t she gotten in touch with us?” He wiped at his nose. “You’d think she didn’t trust us.”
7
Stan returned to his office and called Paul, who had spent the whole day in room 306. “Nothing,” he told Stan in the midst of a yawn. Hope was bleeding away. “You want me to leave?”
“No,” Stan told him, then hung up. He settled back in his chair, again looking at the Stumbler memo, and rubbed at his eyes. He thought back to a year ago, to the dour Langley man telling him of intercepted communications from the Syrian, Libyan, and Pakistani embassies. Pretending to be giving him the whole story. Had Langley really not trusted him, or Harry? Had—
His desk phone rang, breaking his wandering thoughts. He picked up. “Stan Bertolli.”
“My man,” said Saul, his voice rough from a lingering cold. “I got your name.”
Briefly, Stan didn’t know what he was talking about, then it came to him—the video still from Frankfurt, Balašević with a man. “Tell me.”
“Michael Khalil, American.”
“American?”
“So his passport says.”
“What do you say, Saul?”
“I say it’s fake because his passport number matches a guy who died of a coronary in 1998. He can’t use the passport to get into Fortress America, but he’s used it to visit other countries. We’re running his face through the recognition software, but God only knows how long that’ll take.”
“Where’s he been recently?”
Saul hummed as he read through his information. “The Khalil passport spent a week in Tripoli last year, but the rest of that year it was in your town—except for that one-day visit to Frankfurt. Then last week he visited Germany. Munich.”
“For how long?”
“Three days, March 1 to March 3. Then he flew to … well, why don’t you take a guess?”
“Cairo,” Stan said.
“I don’t care what anyone around here says, Stan. You’re one smart kid.”
Stan closed his eyes, thinking about that flight in and out of Munich. After murdering Emmett, Gjergj Ahmeti had been tracked to a train heading from Budapest to Munich. Emmett was killed on March 2. Khalil could easily have flown in and out of Munich for a visit to Budapest to oversee the killing—what other way could he interpret it? Which meant that the man Zora Balašević had met in Frankfurt—her Egyptian or Serbian client—had been behind Emmett’s murder. Not the United States of America.
Stan stared at the dead phone still in his hand, then checked with Nancy: Harry had stepped out again, destination unknown. He was overwhelmed by the feeling that he was playing catch-up, yet he didn’t know what he was trying to catch up to. It was getting late.
He called Paul. “Close it down. Go home.”
“Need me in the office?”
“Just get some sleep. I’ll call you later if I need you.”
“Yes, sir,” Paul said, evidently pleased.
8
The low sun was hidden behind clouds as he drove to al-Azhar Park on the east side of town. He parked along a quiet section of the Passages Insaid al-Azhar Garden, near the main road, then locked up and headed into the vast, sculpted park. As he moved forward, he assessed (as Paolo Bertolli might) everything he saw: a long line of empty cars parked down the curb, a couple taking a relaxing stroll toward the enormous cafés on the man-made lake, two old men on a bench talking over a hand of cards, a woman in a hijab watching three children dance to a transistor radio playing Arabic pop. He followed a cobblestone path deeper into the park, where it opened up and palm trees were aligned geometrically and marble bridges crossed over little streams. It wasn’t busy here—most families were preparing for dinner—and he saw a couple with a teenaged girl packing up a picnic and heading out. He settled on a bench, gazing across the lake with its fountains and restaurants and sunken garden on the other side, a spot of tranquility in the clogged mess of Cairo. As he waited, the clouds released a sprinkle of welcome rain that dimpled the lake and misted his hair, but only briefly.