“Come on,” said another voice, and John turned to find a clean and still-breathing Jibril behind him, reaching for his hand, beckoning him into the traffic. “First one across gets to go.”
“Go where?”
Jibril, with a smile on his face, was already running.
He sat up, trying to orient himself in the stuffy darkness. It was evening. His cheek and the arm of the sofa were wet from saliva. His stomach cramped, gushing acid into his throat. When the banging started again, he heard a voice, too: “Wake the fuck up, John.”
He got to his feet and with his first step kicked the whisky bottle across the room. It clattered against the legs of the TV stand but didn’t break. He reached the far wall and slapped until he found the switch, filling the room with light.
“Hurry up, John.” Three more sharp bangs against the door.
He wiped at his face, then wiped his hands on his jeans, wishing he had at least changed clothes. He could now see that there was a dark streak of blood down the side of his thigh, though it wasn’t his blood. He unlocked the door and stepped back, calling, “Come in,” as he continued to the bathroom, where he sat on the toilet and urinated, watching Harold Wolcott walk in warily, look around, and finally catch sight of him.
“Is this smell coming from you?”
“Maybe.”
“Can’t you take a shower?”
“I wasn’t expecting guests.”
Harry spotted the Glenlivet on the floor. He stooped to pick it up, then placed it on the coffee table. John flushed and washed his hands and face and neck in the cracked mirror. He looked as bad as he smelled. Harry’s voice: “You’re going to talk to me?”
“In a minute.”
He toweled off and went to the kitchen, where he found a large bottle of water in the fridge. He gulped at it, took a breath, then drank more with a handful of aspirin. Glancing through the doorway, he saw Harry standing at the low bookshelves, reading spines—Stevens, Pound, Moore, Cummings, Eliot, and a translation of Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet
. John lowered the bottle. “I hope you’re not going to express your surprise,” he said.
Harry looked over his shoulder, frowning. “That a mercenary reads poetry? Never even crossed my mind.”
“It gets old, people being shocked by your literacy.”
Harry grunted, turning back to the books.
Food,
John thought as he returned to the kitchen shelves. He hadn’t eaten since Marsa Matrouh, a day and a half before. He grabbed some old bread and stuffed slices into his mouth.
Harry wandered into the kitchen, holding a collected Cummings. He was a tall, very white man, early fifties, with a permanently sunburned neck. He was known for his addiction to mint-flavored gums that snapped when he chewed in the embassy, since smoking was not allowed. He was also the Cairo station chief, and he had never visited John at home before. Unlike some Agency employees, he was too professional to broadcast his disdain for contractors, but John could smell it on him in the way he could catch the whiff of bigotry or religious intolerance in others.
Harry said, “I hear from Stan that it didn’t work.”
“No, sir, it didn’t,” John answered through a mouthful of bread, then opened a cabinet and pulled out the Saiidi tea tin.
Harry set the Cummings on the refrigerator, right next to the cookie jar, before accepting the items. He flipped absently through the passport and glanced into the wallet. “Empty?”
“Right.” John took out his own wallet and handed over what was left of Jibril’s money. “It’s about three hundred euros shy.”
He looked at John, but not worried about the cash. He was just waiting for more. “Well?”
John raised a finger, swallowed, and said, “To the bathroom?”
Harry sighed. Despite his position, he’d never made a secret of his impatience with security procedures. Harry Wolcott was an oxymoron.
John went first, squeezing past him and turning on the bathroom fan, then the shower. He sat on the edge of the tub, a fresh slice of bread in his hand, and kept to a whisper: “We took the desert road from Tubruq. He met someone in Al `Adam.”
“Who?”
John shrugged. “Dressed like a Bedouin. Acted like an old friend,” he said, careful to avoid mention of the hand-off—for while he still wasn’t sure he would burn it, he couldn’t shake Jibril’s conviction that
no one
should get the names of his contacts. “We headed across the desert and after about an hour ran into a crew of five Gadhafi supporters who wanted our fuel. They may have just been bandits, I don’t know. It became a firefight. Aziz was shot in the face. So I turned around and called Cy. He checked with Langley, and they, I assume, sent the guy who showed up to collect the body. He has those three hundred euros. I crossed back into Egypt alone and left the car in Heliopolis. Might want to send someone to pick it up. I’ve got the street on my phone.”
Harry rubbed his eyes and looked, briefly, as if he were going to slap John. Then the look was gone. “What about those bandits?”
“I think I killed four of them.”
Harry inhaled loudly. “Sounds like a mess.”
“It was, sir.”
“Why that road?”
“Aziz claimed the coastal road was gridlocked, and maybe it was, but he obviously wanted to make his meet in Al `Adam.”
“What did they talk about?”
“Well, they didn’t talk in front of me.”
“And you say we took the body?”
“The undertaker and I didn’t discuss our employers. Langley didn’t call you about this?”
If Langley wasn’t telling him things, John was the last person Harry would share this with. “How are you feeling?”
“Some more sleep would help, and some food.”
“And a bath?”
“And a bath. But if you’d like, I’ll write up the report tomorrow.”
Harry considered that, finally nodding. “Direct to me. I don’t want Stan seeing this—he wasn’t part of the operation.”
“Of course.”
Harry seemed pleased by his acquiescence. He said, “How long have you been with us, John?”
“Three months, give or take. Got a month left.”
“You took over from Amir Najafi. Finishing his contract.”
“Yes.”
“How’s it working for you?”
Were he an honest man, John would have admitted that he didn’t know. The pros and cons of his job seemed nearly balanced. But he had little interest in being honest at the moment, so he said, “It works for me. Just don’t keep sending me into the desert.”
Harry nodded. “You’re from Virginia, right?”
“Richmond.”
“My son’s studying at William and Mary. Loves it.”
John wasn’t sure what to say.
“Must’ve been hard,” said Harry.
“Excuse me?”
“Libya.”
“Well, I think it was harder for Jibril Aziz.”
Harry raised an eyebrow.
“Where was he coming from?” John asked.
The question seemed to confuse the station chief.
“Look, he hadn’t been in Libya for six years. He told me that. He wasn’t even sure who would still be around. Was he retired? Based somewhere else?”
“Sounds like he told you a lot.”
Harry said that with an edge, perhaps irritated that Jibril had shared anything with a contractor. He had shared a lot, but John wasn’t going to admit it. “Other than telling me he hadn’t been back in six years, he was a cypher.”
“Truth is,” Harry said after a moment, “I don’t know anything about him. All I know is that Langley trusted us to send him over, and it didn’t work out. The other thing I know is that it doesn’t matter who he was.”
“Of course it doesn’t. But I was supposed to take care of him. I’d just like to know a little more about the man I let down.”
Harry sniffed, then rubbed at his nose. “John, once you’ve been in the business a while the number of people you’ve let down will add up to something terrible. It’s not a sign of your incompetence, or even your agency’s incompetence, but a sign of how slipshod the entire business is. Intelligence is a pseudoscience, like astrology. Sometimes the outcome seems to prove that your methods and techniques are infallible. Other times, it proves the exact opposite. Don’t beat yourself up over it. And trust me: The last thing you want is to get to know the corpses you’ve left behind.”
Again, John didn’t know what to say, or if any words were required of him. If Harry had meant to make him feel better, he had failed, and if he thought he was teaching John something he didn’t already know, then he was wrong. There wasn’t much John didn’t know about letting people down.
Finally, he motioned at the shower. When John turned it off they could hear the hypnotic call to Isha prayers broadcasting from the nearby Al Zamalek Mosque, which meant it was after seven. He followed Harry into the living room and handed over the keys to the Peugeot. Rather than head for the door, though, Harry walked to the far wall and pulled back a bit of curtain that covered the glass doors to the terrace. With his other hand he crooked his finger to beckon John over, then pointed through the trees down to Ismail Mohamed, its cobbled sidewalk lit by the Hotel Longchamps across the street, where occasional pedestrians passed. But Harry was pointing at two Egyptian men standing beside a newspaper kiosk, one smoking; the other, who was mustached, had nothing in his hands. Unlike everyone else on the street, they weren’t going anywhere; unlike many Egyptians, they weren’t supplicating themselves in prayer.
“Who?” John asked.
Harry shrugged and said, “Watch your back,” then patted his shoulder and left.
4
As he toweled off after his shower they were marching, demonstrating for or against something. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them farther down Gezira Island, perhaps by the stadium, chanting something that rose over the rooftops and filtered down through the trees as he ate a dinner of scrambled eggs and toast, finishing it beside the terrace doors, watching his shadow (one of them remained) waiting indifferently for orders, or for him.
With a corpse—no,
five
—on his conscience and a shadow waiting on the street, he wondered how he’d ended up here, but he knew the answer well enough to know the question was pointless. You cruise through life, knocking against obstacles and decisions along the way until, eventually, you’ve got blood on your pants and paranoia digging into your shoulders.
As he washed the dishes he remembered a young John Calhoun growing up in Jackson Ward—single mother, hardscrabble friends—with an interest in verse. Though he enjoyed the flow and beat his friends would break out on the sidewalk, listening to Melle Mel and Run-D.M.C., he found himself more entranced by the words cobbled together in the distant past: Cummings, Pound, Yeats. Once he even tried, with disastrous results, to put some of William Carlos Williams’s
Paterson
poems to hip-hop. Humiliation grew into withdrawal, and those long-dead white men became his private vice. He’d loved the caress of the words and how they could make him feel, if for only a moment, that something important hid just behind the flat facade of his black-and-white world.
He’d brought those sometimes puzzling yet inspiring verses with him to the army, and to the ranges at the Fort Benning sniper school. He’d even brought them across the ocean to the Hohenfels Combat Maneuver Training Center in Germany, but their cryptic wisdom hadn’t been enough to make him wise: In 1995, late into a whisky-soaked evening, he beat a Bavarian to a pulp. He still barely remembered the fight, which had put the fat, virulently racist Bavarian into the hospital for nearly a month, one arm broken, four ribs cracked, and one lung punctured. He was lucky to be sent home with a dishonorable discharge, his CO told him, for the locals wanted his “black ass taken to the butcher’s.”
As he toweled off his hands he remembered the Langston Hughes his mother used to recite like a mantra:
God in His infinite wisdom
Did not make me very wise—
So when my actions are stupid
They hardly take God by surprise
Lines like that could help a man through his day.
By the time he dressed it was nearly eleven. The headache he’d brought with him from Libya still lingered, but it had cleared enough to convince him that he could handle whatever the man downstairs wanted to give him. Or perhaps this was a sign that he hadn’t recovered, and he was still crippled by Danisha’s prognosis. Did he really not have the sense to flee from danger? Maybe, but the army had taught him a thing or two about preparedness, so he returned to the kitchen and dug through the pots in the low cabinets until he’d unearthed another tin box, one that had once been used to hold nougat bars and now held an old Glock, filled to capacity with seventeen rounds. It was, as had been explained to him his first day in Cairo, against Agency rules to keep firearms in one’s own house—to do so would have required permits from the Egyptian Interior Ministry, helping it to ID Agency employees—but once they were outside the confines of the embassy Stan had given him the name of a supplier in New Cairo who continued a long tradition of supplying nervous embassy employees with peace of mind. He slipped the pistol into a beaten shoulder holster, stretched into his jacket, and headed downstairs.
At Global Security’s training facility, a decommissioned army base about thirty miles north of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he’d been told,
They’re going to watch, so let them watch.
During their trips into town to spend an afternoon trailing random locals through their daily routines, it had seemed possible to live without anxiety while under surveillance. But that had been a game; Tuscaloosa was not the rest of the world.
He’d been followed before. During a six-month stretch in Nairobi, thin young men with bashful smiles used to circulate through crowds as he made his way through the markets. In Lisbon they’d been lazy, sitting whenever possible in café chairs, on the rims of stone fountains, on front stoops. During a brief tour in Afghanistan, children had kept tabs on him and other Global Security grunts as they made their rounds through villages. The kids would shout up and down the streets to the next checkpoint, and though this steady procession of underaged surveillance operatives frayed their nerves, the fact that it was out in the open and so obvious had helped them. It made things predictable; it taught them when to keep their eyes open for IEDs and irregular roadblocks.