2
Where was she? Where had her decisions brought her? Clutching the iPad, she passed anxious tourists and drowsy businessmen in the lobby of the Semiramis as she found her way to Café Corniche, a cramped gathering of marble-topped tables and elegant straight-backed chairs. She had to work her way around an old Australian couple and a young family camped, with bags, at a table, before settling near the glass cases full of sweets. She ordered espresso from a white-clad waiter, and as her heartbeat gradually settled she wondered if she could go back to her life. She had reserved the plane home, after all—in the morning she would be heading to Boston. With the optimism that is an American’s birthright, she believed for a moment that everything could be left as it was. Just go.
After finishing the coffee, she opened the cover on her iPad and began for the first time to read the backlog of e-mails she’d been too anxiety-ridden to look at before. Sixty-two: friends, family, the Budapest embassy, journalists. Glenda was terrified; Ray was official. Her parents simply wondered why she hadn’t gotten in touch yet, and asked what was wrong with her phone. No word from Emmett’s parents, and she wondered if their silence was a kind of recrimination. Droves of people, some of whom she couldn’t recall, wanted to give their condolences. And a short note from Reardon—whose first name was George: “Ms. Kohl, please contact me at your earliest convenience for some follow-up questions.”
So many questions to answer. There wasn’t really any choice—was there? She had to fly home and assure everyone by her presence that she was all right. Then, later, she could return and work to uncover the mystery of Emmett’s murder. That was the proper way of going about it. Anything else, she felt all at once, was patently unbalanced.
She even put the iPad to sleep and looked around for her waiter, prepared to abandon the meeting, but that was when her contact arrived, squeezing past the family with all the bags, looking sternly at her.
He was older than she had expected. Elderly, even, though she had trouble discerning the ages of Egyptian men. Tall, lanky, with at least a couple days’ worth of white hair on his cheeks and chin, yet well dressed in a mud-colored suit. He was walking heavily, as if his bones hurt. He didn’t offer a hand, but came close, leaning over the table, and whispered “Mrs. Kohl?” in a heavy accent that turned Kohl into Kowuhl. She nodded. “And you are?”
“Halawi. Omar Halawi.”
She gave a smile of welcome and opened her hand to the free chair. “Please.”
Before sitting, he looked around, as if worried someone might catch him joining a Western woman, or perhaps he was worried about more sinister things. Once he was seated, he said, “I will be honest with you, Mrs. Kohl. I do not like this.”
“This?”
“This,” he repeated, then placed ten fingertips on the surface of the table. “If Inaya did not call me herself, I would not be here.” He cleared his throat. “We may be watched.”
She looked around, suddenly worried, suddenly knowing that this had been a mistake. How quickly could she get back to Stan’s place? “Who’s following us?”
His lips pressed tightly together as if in preparation for an elaborate explanation, but all he did was shrug.
“You’re confusing me, Mr. Halawi. You’re saying that someone may be following us, but you don’t know who they are?”
“I don’t know.”
She didn’t like the sound of this. “I have a room,” she said. “Upstairs, number 306. We can talk in private.”
When a look of terror crossed his face, she understood that she’d stepped over a line. He wasn’t some halfhearted Muslim who would head up to a woman’s hotel room unchaperoned.
Enough.
“Look, Mr. Halawi. Inaya told me I could trust you. She said you could help me. If that’s not the case, then fine. You go, and I’ll return to where I came from.” This statement came out of her quickly, and once it was out in the air she felt as if a weight had lifted. Give up. There you go. She saw a boy on a bridge sticking his tongue out at her. Stop pretending you’re anything but a scared little woman.
It could have happened, and much later she would wish that it had. He could have accepted her suggestion, given her another little nod, and simply left. Instead, he stared at her empty espresso cup, weighing options, then pursed his lips again. “Yes,” he said finally, then looked into her eyes. “For Jibril.”
And that was that. Her course was now determined. “For Jibril,” she agreed, though she was thinking of Emmett.
With this settled, he relaxed, but when a waiter drifted by and looked at him he tensed again, shaking his head angrily. To Sophie, he said, “Inaya told me some things, but I am not sure I entirely understand your position. Your husband spoke to Jibril before he was killed. Yes?”
Killed—it was a word no one around her had wanted to say. “Yes.”
“You learned of this, and so you came to Cairo to find Jibril.”
“Yes.” He was staring at her, waiting, so she went on. “Jibril came up with a plan for the embassy. For regime change in Libya.”
“Stumbler,” he said, waving it away. “I know of this. Go on.”
Who was this guy?
She said, “Emmett used to work at the Cairo embassy. I know people there. I thought they could help.”
“Have they?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Yes,” he said, but was shaking his head no. “They would not. Do you think that they know about Jibril?”
“He’s a government employee—I suppose they know plenty about him.”
Again, he shook his head, this time with impatience. “The book—do they know about his book?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The names. Do they know about the network?”
“Maybe …” she began, then stopped. “Look, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Halawi leaned back and scratched at the hair on his cheek with the fingers of his right hand, again considering her. He said, “Who else were you seeking in Cairo?”
Wasn’t she supposed to be asking the questions? “Stan Bertolli. I thought he could help.”
Voice lowered, Halawi said, “I don’t mean your lover, Mrs. Kohl.”
He said that with a touch of disdain, and her impulse was to throw coffee into his face, but her cup was empty. “Then who do you mean, Mr. Halawi?”
There was little movement in his features as he said, “Your controller, Zora Balašević. Were you also looking for her?”
Her anger was quickly replaced by a deep-in-the-gut sickness; her head tingled. “I … don’t …”
He tipped his head closer. “She controlled you; we controlled her. At least, we tried to control her. I don’t think she was that easy to control.”
It was as Stan had said. Zora had been reporting directly to the Egyptians. They knew everything about her affair, for Zora had told them about it. They knew each megabyte of information she’d vacuumed off of Emmett’s laptop, because Zora had given it to them. Not they, necessarily, but he—this stoic, old Egyptian in front of her. He knew everything. For the first time in a long while, she was in the presence of someone from whom she had no secrets. It was terrifying.
“I wanted to get that into the open,” he said after a moment, the fingertips of one hand now touching the fingertips of the other.
She tried to control the pitch of her voice. “Yes, I was looking for her as well, but she’s not here.”