The currency he’d worked with for so many years would be discredited at once, he realized — the moment he tried to work outside the peculiar circumstances which alone gave it a value. No single organization could trust him now, not with his long history of work with that organization’s enemies. Each side had trusted him so long as he remained in the middle, like a reliable news agency, giving them all the news. But for one side to give him sanctuary would not only be valueless to them, it would be dangerous too. For how could they be sure it wasn’t a trick, that he wasn’t a Trojan hen come home to roost? Williams had put him quite beyond trust and he cursed him for it. His deceits in the past seemed like honesty now — by comparison with the future, which he’d thought of as the beginning of that state at last. The dacha in the Moscow suburbs wasn’t really on, he saw. Or the hot toddy.
4
Williams’s dinner with his mother had gone off rather well in his house in Flood Street: they’d reached the coffee before she’d embarked on the condition and position of her daughter-in-law.
“How is she — where is she, Charles? I never hear of her. Why all this mystery?”
“Alice is in Devon. You know that perfectly well. There’s no mystery. She’s been there since Christmas.”
And just then the telephone had thankfully gone. It was Marcus. “Just to confirm his movements, I’ve had word from Heathrow: he’s on his way.”
“Good, Marcus. We’re under way then, too. Now there’s only Marlow to send packing.”
“We’re seeing him tomorrow afternoon. It shouldn’t be too difficult. They were close friends after all.”
Williams put down the receiver and blew his nose. A minute sliver of the chicken fricassee they’d had for dinner had lodged somewhere in the back of his throat and he felt the need to clean his teeth.
He’d like to have left his mother at once and gone back to the office. There was so much to do. There was no denying it — his plan was shaping well.
5
Edwards assumed there’d be one of his section officers checking on his arrival at Cairo. There usually was, though he never knew who, and certainly Williams would want to know in this case, so he left the aircraft with Yunis, ending a conversation with him about Egypt’s balance of payments problem as they walked down the steps to the apron, before Yunis was swallowed up in a crowd of party hacks and photographers who had come to meet him. The thing was to keep London happy for as long as possible, let them think he was going through with their plan, whatever it was, until he could get his bearings in Egypt, decide what to do and then dump the whole thing.
And surely Bridget would have some ideas, he thought.
Things, in fact, worked out rather better than he’d expected. He must have made more of an impression on Yunis than he’d realized, with his talk of World Bank loans (he’d said he was going to Egypt to do some articles on their hard currency crisis) for from the middle of the crush of well-wishers Yunis turned back towards him and offered him a lift back into the city — turned round like a friend recognizing him in a crowded street and suggesting lunch. How easy it was, Edwards thought, to lead an ordinary life, to make up one’s day with meetings and activities that one enjoyed. He thought of Yunis’s sweets and found he didn’t resent his greed any longer. The two men pushed their way through the crush to the passenger exit. A big government Mercedes was humming by the kerb. They got into it like minor royalty and drove off towards the city.
6
The rather distinguished-looking Egyptian eased the collar of his old-fashioned linen summer suit in the moist air of the airport’s main lobby. The lapels were far too wide. He knew that. The air-conditioning plant had long since broken down and he had spent some uncomfortable minutes pretending to make a phone call from a booth which looked out over the main passenger entrance before coming out on to the concourse, mopping his brow, breathless and perturbed. He nodded absent-mindedly towards a man in a suit of grubby blue cloth on the other side of the hall who at once left the building and disappeared after Yunis’s cavalcade in a small Hillman. An angry squabble of passengers were shouting and waving their arms on the baking pavement outside. The airport coach either wouldn’t start or, by arrangement, wasn’t leaving then, and they’d been left to the mercies of the rapacious taxi drivers who had started to move in among them, hawking their broken down American cars for a trip to the city. An American woman it was who had supposedly been raped in one of these taxis several months before, the man in the summer suit remembered, at night on the old road back into Cairo past the City of the Dead; appropriate. The incident had come up to him in Military Intelligence: someone in the city police, as a way of avoiding responsibility for the investigation, had suggested that the woman was an imperialist spy and the taxi driver had only really been doing no more than his patriotic duty.
The man in the summer suit dealt with spies, as head of Egyptian Counter-intelligence. He finished tidying himself up, tucking away a large spotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. It was frayed at the edge, but you’d have to be close to notice it. Too much laundering, for too long. That’s the only thing they’re really good at. Nothing else works here, he thought, with unusual impatience. Everyone is a liar, all of them — absolute rogues. But then that was exactly what he had always liked about the country, he remembered, trying to calm himself: he’d never cared for efficiency or skill in those he worked with; it cramped his own effectiveness in that sphere. He could pretend, as he had for a long time, that he was slipshod and vain like the others, knowing that he wasn’t. That was his pleasure, which Egypt gave him every day of his life: the confirmation of another secret, inside the secret of his work.
But now someone from outside had come up with a mystery, something he wasn’t in on, and it had thrown him completely. Until then he’d known about everything, everybody else — he had been in the middle of the web — but what was Henry Edwards doing with Mohammed Yunis? Nothing, nobody, had prepared him for that.
Colonel Hassan Hamdy thought about it all over a cup of sweet coffee with the airport’s Chief Security Officer in the stuffy little room on the second floor of the passenger building. He hadn’t in the least wanted to see Selim but it might have looked odd if he’d not put in an appearance. Home Security expected that sort of condescension from the senior military branch of the service and the Colonel had never failed to supply it — to play the arrogant role whenever necessary, as it so frequently was — in his twenty-three years with Egyptian Intelligence.
Selim was both annoyed and pleased to see the Colonel — unable to decide whether the honour of seeing him at the airport outweighed the implications of his having felt it necessary to come there in the first place. Had not His Excellency’s arrivals always gone off exactly to plan? — without interference from the military branch? Unfortunately, though Selim continually thought about such real or imagined slights, he knew he could never voice them, so he proceeded instead to welcome the Colonel with an effusive, elaborate courtesy.
“Salaam alaikum … ’am di’illah, Colonel …”
The Colonel listened to the usual succession of God-be-with-yous and other invocations to the deities while carefully adjusting the small fan on Selim’s desk so that it favoured him rather than Selim. They expected that sort of thing too, he reminded himself, they really enjoyed being cast down, and now of all times it was important to behave just as usual. Was he behaving a little nervously? Selim’s next words made him think he might be.