“What about you?” Stan asked. “Should we be careful putting our representatives in the same room with you?”
Busiri raised his eyebrows. “Omar is passionate; I try not to be. I believe that things are very complicated. I believe that in the end this has little bearing on the security of Egypt, and so perhaps I shouldn’t care.”
Stan was hot, sweating inside his shirt, distracted by the wrong question: Was the Agency trying to hijack a popular revolution in Libya? And if so, what would this mean? He was losing track of the smaller threads, the ones he had requested this meeting to discuss. Busiri’s cigarette had gone out; the Egyptian noticed this and tossed it away, irritated, then stood.
Stan got to his feet as well. “Why did Aziz meet with Emmett Kohl a week before his murder in Budapest?”
“Do you want to know what Omar believes?”
“Yes.”
“Use your imagination.”
Busiri’s eyes were weary. He wasn’t goading Stan; he simply wanted him to do a little thinking for himself, so Stan spoke aloud as it came to him. “Aziz was going in to undermine Stumbler. Emmett was working with him.”
With a look of scorn, Ali Busiri clapped silently, then glanced up at the clouded night sky. “Allah tells us it’s time to go.”
“Wait,” Stan said as a new thought came to him.
The Egyptian frowned with impatience.
“Did you really try to defect?”
Busiri’s eyes widened. “What?”
“I was told that you tried to come to our side.”
Busiri sighed, then glanced at his watch, a Rolex. He glared at Stan. “Who told you this? It’s ridiculous.”
“So you’re denying it.”
“Absolutely.”
Someone was lying, but Stan wasn’t sure who.
Busiri stepped forward and, in an unexpected sign of kindness, put a hand on Stan’s shoulder and squeezed. “You and me, we love our countries. My country may be different now, but do we lose our love for a woman because she has matured?”
“Are you going to tell me who Balašević’s source was?”
Another pat on the shoulder, and this close he could see all the haggard lines in the old spy’s face. “It’s time for you to tell me where Jibril is.”
Stan hesitated, but Ali Busiri was through sharing his information. “Dead. I don’t know where, but he’s dead.”
Busiri withdrew his hand. “How?”
“I don’t know. But I was told he was dead.”
“By whom?”
“My station chief.”
“Harold Wolcott.”
Stan nodded.
“Do you believe him?”
“I think I do.”
After a moment, the Egyptian said, “I suggest you put some thought into your career path, Mr. Bertolli. Remember: Love makes us blind.” He raised a hand in farewell and, before turning to leave, added, “The answers are always in front of us.”
As Stan walked back through the darkness toward his car, he still felt the weight of Busiri’s hand on his shoulder. There had been times when, after reading some journalistic revelation or other, he had questioned his choice of employer, but those moments were rare. What he knew, because he’d been there, was that the people who clocked in each day at Langley were essentially decent. They tried, through whatever means necessary, to assure that their country remained safe. He’d never questioned that fact. The problems occurred when it came to the details, the how—that was when things became dirty. It was true of everything. Even so, the Agency tried to maintain a certain standard of morality—not for the sake of morality itself, but in order not to be caught with blood all over its hands.
Would Langley back a plan to put a friendly government into Tripoli in the middle of a popular revolution? Maybe. There were huge risks, but they weren’t insurmountable. More likely, though, Langley would follow the path of least resistance: Wait until the dust had settled, take a look at the situation, and then make its decisions.
Someone like Omar Halawi believed otherwise. He was influenced by the same misinformation the Agency had done too little to combat, the failed operations and occasional misdeeds that painted the Agency as a monster that needed to be kept caged if the world wanted its sons and daughters to remain safe. To people like Omar Halawi—and, perhaps, Busiri—CIA was part of a vast conspiracy to turn the planet into drones friendly to American business.
He was near the entrance to the park when he paused beside a palm tree. Busiri’s final words came to him. The answers are always in front of us. Before that: Love makes us blind. He closed his eyes and squeezed the dome of his forehead against another impending headache. Ali Busiri wasn’t talking about the CIA. He was talking about …
He said “No” aloud. He held on to his stomach.
For a year he’d had all the facts in front of him, everything pointing in the same direction, yet he’d been blind to the obvious conclusion. He thought back, raising the puzzle pieces and refitting them, and … there. He saw with despair just how well the pieces meshed. Not all of them, no, but the mystery of the leaked information. It was right there. It had always been right there.
It took a few minutes for him to recover, but it was only a partial recovery. He straightened, fighting against the pounding in his head, and dialed her number. No surprise: She was unreachable. He stared at the phone in his hand. In an instant, she had become someone different. A stranger.
What would his father do?
His father would slink off in order to live another day, but Stan wasn’t his father, and he never would be. He would find Sophie. He would withhold judgement until they had spoken, because Harry was right: Until he knew everything, he didn’t know anything.
He jogged the rest of the way to the Passages Insaid al-Azhar Garden, along the line of dark cars until he reached his own. He unlocked the door and climbed inside, thinking alternately of Sophie Kohl and of revolutionaries fighting in Libyan streets. Dying, so that they, and no one else, would control their fate.
The inside of the windshield was foggy, and he wiped at it with his sleeve. It took a moment, him sliding the key into the ignition, before he noticed the smell in the car: garlic. A strong stink of roasted garlic. Then he thought: The glass is fogged. He looked up at the rearview mirror, and from the darkness of the backseat he saw a nose, eyes dark above them, and a bar of light shining across a large ear that—why?—had a tip of blue rubber sticking out of the canal. All of these details so close he could touch the face rising from the gloom. It was a face he’d seen before—a light-skinned Egyptian—and as the fear swelled (he now understood why the man wore earplugs) the recognition followed. On a computer screen, sitting down in Frankfurt Airport, glancing up at a passing security guard. Stan said, “Who the hell—”
John
1
Saturday night he stayed in. He poured himself only one glass of whisky and sat in front of the television. On BBC the news of the dead deputy consul in Budapest had been supplanted by more important events, and through their cameras John watched Libya erupting. He listened to talking heads pronounce the end of an era, and the ecstatic voices of revolutionaries proclaiming the beginning of something wonderful. But he remembered those protesters in Tahrir Square who, nearly a month ago, had attacked an American TV journalist, an angry tangle of men descending on one terrified woman, groping angrily at her breasts and groin, an assault that went on until a crowd of Egyptian women and soldiers broke it up. There were no saints in North Africa, because there were no saints anywhere. There could be no new world, John believed, because the people who filled it would be the same ones as yesterday.