“I’m afraid so,” Omar said. “Rashid executed Stanley Bertolli. About an hour ago. That murder was witnessed.” He paused. “You can see that he has to be stopped.”
Busiri was scratching at his rough cheek. “Yes, I can see that.”
“Do you know where Rashid is?”
Busiri opened his mouth, then shut it. “I’ll call him. My phone’s in the house.”
“Wait,” Omar said, placing a hand on his knee. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out.”
Unsure, Busiri turned to face him. “What’s that?”
“Where is Jibril?”
“He’s in Libya. Isn’t he?”
“He hasn’t gotten in touch with anyone. I’m beginning to fear he’s dead.”
Busiri shook his head, as if this weren’t to be believed, but said, “Stanley Bertolli believed this as well.”
“He told you Jibril was dead?”
“Yes, but Rashid couldn’t have killed Aziz, too.”
Omar closed his eyes, absorbing this terrible news, then said, “If Jibril is dead, and it wasn’t Rashid, then who? Was it the Americans? If so, then why would they have let him go into Libya in the first place?”
“You told me,” Busiri said, his voice warbly now. “They wanted his contacts.”
“Maybe,” Omar said. “But what if they didn’t care about them? What if Rashid, panicking, made a final call to Tripoli? Told them someone was coming in to organize his old networks and whip the revolution into a frenzy? Told them, too, that if they got this man they would also get his whole network? All it would take was a phone call, or a meeting in a park to discuss it with someone from the Libyan embassy.”
Busiri was chewing the inside of his cheek.
Omar said, “Gadhafi must be paying him a lot of money to be worth all these corpses.”
Busiri didn’t say anything.
Omar let the silence linger for a while, then turned to take in the broad expanse of his boss’s home. “That’s a very nice house. How much did it cost?”
Busiri reached for the door handle.
“Mahmoud,” said Omar, and the big man emerged from the backseat, a leviathan rising from the shadows, his hands already fixing onto Busiri’s shoulders.
If Omar expected surprise, he was disappointed. Busiri gave a single futile push, then dropped back into Mahmoud’s embrace. The big man reached over to make sure the passenger door was locked, then brought out a Helwan 9 mm pistol and made sure their boss got a good look at it. Omar started the car.
“Where are we going?” Busiri asked.
“To a place of conversation,” Omar said.
As they started to move, the door to Busiri’s house opened. The tall silhouette of his wife watched them drive away. After a moment, a phone began to ring. “May I?” Busiri asked.
“I thought your phone was in the house,” said Mahmoud.
Omar said, “Give it to Mahmoud.”
Busiri did so, the light of the phone briefly basking them all in blue, and Omar said, “Get rid of it.”
Mahmoud rolled down his window and tossed out the phone. It clattered against the irregular pavement, cracking down the middle, but continued to ring. Ten minutes later, the wheel of a moving truck pulverized it.
PART IV
THE NEW YEAR
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
1:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time (Boston)
8:30 P.M. Eastern European Time (Cairo)
1
She had been in America, beyond passport control, for thirty minutes, still wearing Fouada Halawi’s dress, and she was overcome by the feeling that she’d entered a world of pale, oversized children. Pudgy white-haired men in T-shirts and padded, primary-color jackets wandered around poking at cell phones; wives and mothers in practical shoes and sneakers lounged at café tables, curbing their well-dressed children. The airport stores shone so brightly, drunk with colors, each storefront flashy and bold, something shiny to attract attention. Compared to Budapest and Cairo, Logan Airport felt like a candy-colored land of enterprise, the filtered air clean and smoke-free. How, she wondered, can anyone be afraid of us?
Then she stiffened inside as one of the children—a boy of seven, maybe, or eight—leaned back against a huge window overlooking the parked airplanes and watched her pass. His face looked so old, his expression so intense, that she hurried her pace, wanting to run from his accusing stare, but at the same time telling herself to calm down. That boy was American, not Czech.
She’d had enough of thinking about herself and what she’d done. She had dreamed about a gun and a wailing man who was at one moment Egyptian and the next Croatian, and when she woke up ten hours later in John Calhoun’s wrecked apartment she had seen it all again in the twilight as yet another call to prayer filled the city. She’d been alone when she woke, and in that quiet time leafed through modernist poets until Calhoun returned from some errand and tried, once or twice, to speak to her, but she hadn’t been up for it. He’d looked so uncomfortable. She told him she liked his books, and he seemed to blush. He answered a phone call and spoke quietly for a moment, then told her Harry was coming over. “Okay,” she’d said, before going back to the mess of his bedroom.
Harry had been confused. “Look, I don’t have it straight yet, but John has filled in some details, and tomorrow I’m meeting with the Egyptians to sort out the rest. Maybe you want to help me out in the meantime?”
“Is Stan really dead?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“Are you meeting with Omar Halawi?”
Again, he nodded.
“He’ll explain it,” she said, for she didn’t want to explain anything to anyone anymore. She was sick of the act of conversation, but primarily she was terrified that, were she to start speaking she would tell him everything, and he would not let her leave.
On the second plane, which left from Amsterdam, she’d sat beside a nervous woman who, twice during the flight, took out a prescription bottle and dry-swallowed a little blue pill with a K-shaped hole in the center. The second time, the woman—Irish, by her accent—self-consciously explained. “Klonopin. Modern pharmaceuticals are a godsend.”
Now, as she lifted her shoulder bag higher and wandered through the crowd, following signs toward the exit, Sophie thought that she could use a godsend. Prayer had never been her bag, as Zora put it. A blue pill might do the trick. To go. To see. To experience. Enough of that. Get thee to a nunnery, she thought. To a cathedral of pharmaceutical revelation.
John Calhoun had driven her in silence to Cairo International at three that morning. He’d been quite the gentleman, carrying her bag for her and talking for her at the check-in desk, gathering the boarding pass and walking her all the way to security, where she was scanned. Appropriately, she set off an alarm, but it turned out to be only a hair clip left in a hidden pocket of Fouada Halawi’s dress.
On the other side, she looked back to see John Calhoun, massive in the crowd, still watching, a phone to his ear, reporting her successful exit. Then, as she wandered to the gate, she saw Omar’s young man, Sayyid, waiting at her gate, hanging up his phone. He smiled at her but didn’t kiss her cheeks as he’d done with Fouada. After what they’d been through, this was a disappointment.
He asked how she was feeling and told her what her gates would be in Amsterdam. When she asked after Fouada, he shrugged. “She is good. She says you can keep the dress.”