“I hope His Excellency the Secretary General had a successful mission. I believe our security arrangements for his arrival were satisfactory?” Selim made his inquiry with just a hint of directness and dissatisfaction, as though he’d suddenly become aware of a certain unusual vulnerability in the Colonel.
“Yes, Selim, they were all right” the Colonel retaliated, emphasising the words so that they suggested a doubt rather than a recommendation. “I think the car should have met His Excellency on the apron and not at the passenger exit. There’s a risk — in his walking between the two, through the corridor, other passengers and so on. The press and film people in the main lobby, like chickens round a corn sack. Anything could have happened.”
“But His Excellency insists on meeting them. And the film people told me they don’t have enough cable to reach the apron for their cameras — the power connections — ”
“Don’t they have batteries?”
“Ah, not these days I’m afraid, Colonel. As you know yourself we can get very little imported material now. And our own batteries, I’m afraid …” Selim shrugged his shoulders, raised both hands briefly, policing the air, and began to chatter again about the Will of God and about the lack of even the smallest comforts in Egypt today, and the Colonel nodded in agreement, thinking what a liar Selim was, knowing that he and all his more cherished friends got everything they wanted from the tax-free airport shop downstairs. When would they stop lying? the Colonel thought again. When? But then he remembered his own life-long deception and tried to think of something else. He couldn’t.
How and why had Edwards met up with Yunis? This meeting was just one more query in a succession of inexplicable events which had plagued the Colonel for the past twenty-four hours, another part of the mystery, which was something he had always rigorously avoided in his work. When he sensed it he was like an animal downwind of the gun and he had to fight the panic that came over him, the need he felt to run.
Someone, for once, knew more about what was going on than he did — was arranging things behind his back, manipulating people, had him in his sights perhaps as well. He had to force himself to stay where he was, do nothing, behave normally. And Selim’s grubby, anonymous little office was the ideal cover for his mood. He could bury himself in the idle bureaucratic chatter, use it as a camouflage. Selim’s venal pursuits, which he had despised before, were part of a safe world he wanted to belong to now.
“They’ve recently had a very fine consignment of Japanese transistors downstairs. I’ve put in for one on our allowance. You might like to look at them … My wife wants to go to Ras el Bar for the summer … Hate the place myself — the girls, you know, they put the price up … It’s impossible. Yes, I’d like to see him get promotion but his father’s a complete farmer …”
The Colonel nodded his head and said “Yes” and “No” and “Of course” and sipped his coffee. And he thought about Edwards.
Where was the trick? There must be one. What was it? The first part of the problem made sense, or might do: the message which he had received the day before from his Control in Tel Aviv: that Edwards, a British SIS man in their Mid-East section, was a KGB double and was on his way back to Moscow via Cairo, with the names of a group of Israeli intelligence men in Egypt. And the message had been crystal clear: stop him immediately, at the airport if possible — kill him with the utmost dispatch; the security of the entire Tel Aviv circle in Egypt depended on it.
There was a slight problem in this, of course, which Tel Aviv didn’t know about: Edwards was one of his own men, an Egyptian agent, doubling in Holborn — had been for seventeen years. It was an essential part of the Colonel’s cover with Egyptian Intelligence that he form his own quite separate network of people working genuinely for Cairo and that these people should never be known to Tel Aviv. It was a problem he could rise above, the Colonel thought. It was easier after all to kill someone face to face, rather than at a distance, with pills or silencers: the close approach — sighing in the man’s ear, turning the knife delicately between the ribs — that was far easier. But Mohammed Yunis had got in the way of all that.
How — and why — had Edwards met up with him? the Colonel wondered again. What purpose could they have had other than that of swapping notes? The puzzle began to fit then: Moscow would give Yunis the names of the Israeli circle in Egypt in return for his co-operation in toppling the President. With those names Yunis would be in a nearly unassailable position of power: he would be able to expose the President and his intelligence services as bumbling fools, save Egypt from dishonour and emerge as the natural successor and hero — and Soviet puppet.
It was for just such reasons that Yunis, at this moment, on instructions from the President, was on his way to an unexpected appointment in Heliopolis: he had been chattering too much in Moscow already. And it was no more possible to stop him talking now than it had been to do away with the messenger who had accompanied him. The two men had taken the precaution of sticking together all the way, one protecting the other, on the plane and through the airport welcome. The only way of separating them was to risk going to Heliopolis himself, hoping that neither of them had talked yet. Edwards, after all, was his own man — with Military Intelligence, not Home Security. There was just a chance he hadn’t opened his mouth about the Tel Aviv circle in Egypt. If he could get him away, he would ensure that he never did.
“Tell me, Colonel, would you like to take a look at one of these transistors? They fit in your pocket …”
Selim interrupted the Colonel’s calculations so that he looked up and said “Yes” before he knew what he was doing.
7
Edwards began to enjoy being with Yunis, not so much for his chatter about Egypt’s economy — he couldn’t in fact, understand why, after so many visits to the country in the guise of journalist and the fruitless attempts to see people like Yunis for his articles, the man should suddenly now have taken an interest in him — but because he knew that as long as he stayed with him he was safe. No one was going to pick him up — or off — in the big Black Mercedes with its electric windows, glass partitions and bullet-proofing.
It was a pity though, he thought, with the windows shut, in the false air — there was not that real sense of his coming back to the country which he always looked forward to, the sudden overwhelming indication that he had really come home: the dry chalky smell of baking concrete and lime dust, the sharp breath of paraffin and rotting newspapers swirling up from the rissole carts in the back-streets of Heliopolis which they were passing through. Before, on every other journey, this had been the unmistakable evidence that he’d come back into his own world — that, and seeing Bridget again. The two had so often gone together in the past, when she’d met him at the airport and they’d driven back, taking the old road into the city past the City of the Dead, to the warm cedar smell of the house in Maadi where she lived alone.
This time she hadn’t come; he hadn’t told her. He was supposed to be defecting. If only it had been as simple as that.
Yunis had been talking all the time — about Egypt’s economic problems and the price of rice and what the Arab Socialist Union was going to do about it all if they could manage another loan from the World Bank — and Edwards had barely heard him.