A man with things on his mind.
He knew too little, and as he dwelled on the few facts in front of him he remembered Harry’s expression from the day before, when he’d asked about John’s under-the-table job: the forehead suddenly full of wrinkles, as if it had been slapped. He remembered it because it was the same expression he had seen when he’d brought evidence of Emmett’s crimes to Harry the previous year, asking that it be passed on to Langley. That expression had shrunk Harry’s face, and after a long moment of reflection he’d said, “I’m not giving those smart boys back home an excuse to reshuffle my station. We take care of this on our own.” Taking care of it on their own, it turned out, had simply meant sending a bad apple to another orchard.
Zora Balašević had told Dragan Milić that Emmett hadn’t leaked information. Dragan was right to doubt this—for why else would the Egyptians have hired her? But what if she’d been telling the truth, and she had found another embassy source? Harry? Could Harry have been the leak, using Emmett to cover his tracks?
We take care of this on our own
.
Or was Stan growing paranoid? By then it was after two in the morning, and he was lying beside a woman who filled him with cannibalistic desires. How could he think of trusting himself?
He remembered a single piece of advice his father had given him toward the end of his life, when he was confined to a hospital bed, tubes poking out of every orifice:
Stan, when you live in a house of mirrors, the only way to stay alive is to believe that every reflection is real. The downside is that this can cost you your sanity.
Then it was Saturday morning. Coffee, fresh orange juice, and bagels that the embassy shipped in from America. With cream cheese on her lip, Sophie tapped at the surface of her iPad, checking mail over his Wi-Fi. “Thirty-two messages,” she groaned.
“Ignore them.”
“His parents want to know why I’m not with his body.”
“Ignore them,” he repeated. “Or tell them you’re fine but don’t give details. In fact, don’t tell anybody you’re here.”
She frowned at him. “I’m here now—no one stopped me. So it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” he said, “and we might as well not contradict each other.”
Briefly, a look of understanding flashed across her face, but just as quickly it faded away. “Why am I a secret?”
“I told you before: Harry will want to handle you. If he knows you’re in town, he’ll figure out you’re staying with me, and he won’t be as open with me as he would otherwise. I’m just trying to buy us some time.”
“You think he knows?”
“What?”
“About us.”
Stan smiled. “If he didn’t before, he’ll figure it out once he knows where you’re staying.”
“And that would be a problem for you.”
“I suppose,” he said, as if he hadn’t thought of that already. The fear of exposure had ruled his life last year, and now that she was back in his life the fear had returned. “It’s not like you coming here is a secret—your passport left Hungary and entered Egypt. The Budapest embassy should know where you are. Soon enough, they’ll call Harry just to let him know you’re around. They’ll probably say you’re unstable. Let’s give ourselves the weekend before going to Harry.”
She nodded, finally understanding. “Do you think I am?”
“What?”
“Unstable.”
He walked to the sofa, leaned close, and kissed her forehead. “You just want to understand. There’s nothing unstable about that.”
She looked up at him and, after a moment, nodded imperceptibly. Then she reached into her pocket and removed a folded sheet of paper that was crumpled and misshapen, as if it had been read and refolded many times. She held it out for him, and he took it.
“What’s this?” he asked as he saw what it was—a classified cable.
She said, “Tell me about Stumbler.”
He knew he was reddening, but he played along, reading the message and seeing, right there, Jibril Aziz’s name. Stan knew about Stumbler, but he’d never known that it had originated with Aziz.
She stared at him, waiting, and so he sat across from her and began to explain.
Stumbler had been one of twenty or so ideas that crossed their desks in 2009. Young, creative, sometimes brilliant analysts at Langley’s Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis sat around wondering how to make the world a safer place for American enterprise, and when they had their eureka moments they spent a few weeks researching the plausibility and real-world applications of their plans, the repercussions and risks and rewards. But the Agency had long ago learned that a plan half-baked is worse than no plan at all, and so eventually the plans were taken from the analysts and sent around to regional experts to further assess risks and rewards and, additionally, to spread the responsibility. If ten different regional experts agreed that a plan was solid, when it later fell apart their signatures could be used as references. “But in the real world, it means that everyone’s covering their asses, and very few plans get past the assessment stage.”
“And Stumbler?” she asked.
“You can read it right here,” he said, holding up the cable. By then he’d seen the address line at the bottom of the printout and knew she’d gotten it from WikiLeaks. This wasn’t the first headache that site had caused, and it wouldn’t be the last. “No one in the Cairo embassy wanted to sign off on it, and Harry passed on our assessment.”
“But what was it?”
“Regime change in Libya,” he told her, for it was a dead plan, and there was little risk in sharing. “This analyst—”
“Jibril Aziz.”
“Apparently, yes. He had cobbled together a network of Libya-based groups and tribes that he thought we could bring together. That was the first thing we doubted. Getting various factions in a place like Libya to work toward a common goal is damned near impossible, and it’s one of the reasons Gadhafi has remained in power so long—it’s why he’s still holding on to power right now. Aziz saw signs of the regime’s instability wherever he looked, but he chose not to look at anything that contradicted his vision. That was obvious from his report.”
“Are you saying he was delusional?”
Stan rocked his head. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. Let’s just say he didn’t seem perfectly reliable. Also, Stumbler required—if I remember right—a couple hundred of our own troops to act as the axle around which the tribes would roll. That’s what killed it. If something like this were to become known, that we’d had an active hand in regime change there, the political fallout would be immediate. I’m talking about riots throughout the Middle East, worse than what’s actually going on now. Leaders we support would suddenly be branded American puppets. Our business interests in the region would be open to attack. That scared the shit out of us, but Aziz considered it a minor issue.
That
was delusional. So we nixed it. You can see it right here, Harry’s words. We suggested continuing our present line: funding the groups we were already funding, perhaps increasing their share a little, but essentially doing nothing.” He paused, reflecting on what was going on now in Libya. “Of course, time has proven Aziz right in many ways, but two years ago there was no way for us to know any better.”
He hadn’t told her much that she couldn’t have gleaned from reading between the lines of the cable. She sipped at her coffee, thinking about this, and said, “What about Emmett? Was he part of the assessment group?”
Stan shrugged. “Harry might have pulled him aside for a question or two—part of the argument for regime change was economic, and that was Emmett’s specialty. I’d be surprised if he told Emmett the full plan.”
“Then why was Aziz meeting with him?”
“If I knew, Sophie, I would tell you.”
“We have to find Aziz.”
“I’ll go in and see what this leads to.”
“Does he have a phone number?”
“Who?”
“Jibril Aziz.”
“I’ll find one,” he said, straightening and pocketing the cable. “I should have most of the floor to myself today. I’ll call you—is your phone on?”
“No.”
“Good. Take this,” he said, stepping into the kitchen. From a drawer full of batteries and twine he took an old cell phone and charger. He plugged it in on the counter and then powered it up. “I’ll call you on this, and if you run into something you call me and I’ll follow up on the Agency database. I’ll try to meet with Harry, too, and this afternoon we’ll compare notes.” He gave her his serious look. “Sound good?”
She thought about it a few seconds, then shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”
“It’s certainly that.”
He gave her a kiss before leaving, and the desire for consumption returned. He packed up his laptop and went downstairs, pausing briefly to check the empty sidewalk. Dragan’s boys were nowhere to be seen. He got into his car, but before starting up he called Harry, who was at home over in Zamalek, helping his wife with preparations for an embassy event that apparently required an enormous number of lilies. He appreciated the interruption. “Can we meet?” Stan asked.
“When?”
“Now.”
“You’ve obviously never been married, Stan. Be reasonable with your demands.”
“An hour?”
“Four o’clock,” Harry said. “The Promenade.”
2
When he reached the fifth floor of the embassy, he was surprised to find, at the computer terminal outside his office, a large black man hunched over the keyboard, typing rapidly with two fingers. “John,” he said, and the man looked up, blinking.
“Hey, Stan,” said John Calhoun.
He was enormous, the kind of man one could easily misjudge as a stupid brute, but Stan had read his reports—John’s English was better than any of his agents’. Today, though, he looked exhausted, his dark skin splotchy and both eyes bloodshot. “Harry putting you through the ringer?”
A shrug.
“That the report?”
John nodded but said nothing, so Stan continued to his office, closing the door behind himself. Soon John was getting up and leaving, his report finished and sent, and he gave Stan a mock salute as he lumbered toward the elevators.
Stan logged on to the secure server and retrieved the file on Jibril Aziz. He learned of a wife, Inaya Aziz, and found an Alexandria, Virginia, phone number, which he wrote down. There was some background on his family—Libyans who immigrated in the nineties, with a father killed by the Gadhafi regime in 1993. Then he followed Aziz’s career from the National Clandestine Service (Regional and Transnational Issues), where for four years, from 2001 to 2005, he had been based in North Africa, presumably focused on Libya, to the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. A few pages in, Stan found a chronological listing of trips he’d taken in the last five years on the Company dime for Collection Strategies. There was no mention of Budapest, or even Cairo. That didn’t mean he hadn’t made those trips, just that he hadn’t arranged them through the Agency’s travel office.
Considering that Aziz was only thirty-three years old, it was a packed CV, yet it told him little that might connect to Emmett’s murder.
There were two e-mail addresses listed for Aziz, and he sent off brief messages asking him to get in touch. Then, around three o’clock, eight in the morning in Virginia, he tried Aziz’s home number. The answer was immediate, an excited female voice. “Hello? Jibril?” Inaya Aziz, he assumed.
“I’m sorry, no,” he said. “I was actually looking for him. I’m from the office.”
He could hear the deflation in her voice. “No, I—I’m … no. He’s not here.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
She paused, as if his question were out of line. Then, suspiciously: “What’s your name again?”
He didn’t like her tone, so he hung up. She was on edge and—a little more digging told him—seven months pregnant. He pulled at his nose, thinking. She’d said little, but enough to tell him that she had no idea where her husband was.
At three thirty, he packed his laptop and powered down his desktop, then left, nodding at the on-duty marine and saying farewell to Eric at the front desk, as well as the Egyptian guard at the gate. Life in administration had taught him to be a little more congenial than he naturally was.
He drove west, crossing into Zamalek on the 15th of May Bridge, then parked a block away from the monstrous Cairo Marriott before finding his way to the Garden Promenade restaurant, one of Harry’s regular haunts. The station chief was already at a back table, drinking what Stan knew was gin and tonic from a Collins glass. He caught a passing waiter and ordered the same. “You’re running around on a Saturday?” Harry asked.
“Just pulling at some loose threads.”
“You need a wife, Stan. She’ll give you balance.”
In recent months Harry had started using words like “balance” and “equilibrium” as if they were concepts he’d only just stumbled across.
Before Stan could begin, Harry scratched at his cheek and said, “Have you talked to Sophie Kohl since that phone call?”
Like the mention of Zora Balašević, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Instead of lying directly, he said, “Why?”
“Seems she’s gone missing.” There was no sign of guile in Harry’s face, just curiosity.
“Missing?”
“Damnedest thing,” Harry said, reaching for his glass. “Stepped out of her life yesterday, before her flight home. Not answering her phone. Just gone.”
What, Stan thought, would an innocent man say in this situation? “She wasn’t kidnapped, was she?”
“No, no. She was spotted at the airport. Flew somewhere, but the Hungarians aren’t sharing that information with us.”
“Why not?”
“Have you dealt with the Hungarians lately? They demand payback for everything. This new administration is a real ball-cruncher.”
“I didn’t realize,” Stan said.
Harry took a sip. “Well, if she
does
get in touch with you again, let me know. Budapest station is starting to get frantic.”
“Will do.”
Harry set down his glass. “What do you need?”
There were many possible questions he could pose, but he had decided to begin with the fresh piece that Sophie had brought to the table. He said, “I need to know about Jibril Aziz.”