The Hidden Oasis (23 page)

She loved it here, just as she knew Charlie would have loved it. There was something about the tatty simplicity of the place: the faded frescoes, the threadbare rugs on the floor, the cool, musty smell of damp and dust and stone. It seemed to transport her right the way back to the very earliest days of Christianity: days when the faith was still young and pure, innocent, free of the terrible moral quandaries with which it had subsequently become burdened. Once, it seemed to her, to be a Christian had simply been a matter of love and belief, an acceptance that the goodness of Christ was all that was needed to cure the world’s ills. That’s how her Charlie had seen things – a simple, almost childlike conviction that if you had sufficient faith, trod as closely as you could in Christ’s footsteps, then everything would turn out all right in the end, that good would triumph over evil.

But Kiernan knew that things were more complicated than that, more confused, as Charlie’s death had proved. As everything these days seemed to prove. The Lamb of God was beset on all sides by jackals, and love alone was no longer enough to see you through. Long ago she had accepted that to be a Christian you had to walk a tightrope, find ways of living in Christ while at the same time standing firm against the evildoers. Meekness and strength, faith
and conflict; it was all so very difficult, so very painful and troubling. Which is why Kiernan liked to come here. To lose herself, if only for an afternoon, in the cool, uncluttered simplicity of this beautiful ancient building. Just her and God and Charlie, united in silence, removed from the dilemmas with which her everyday life was choked.

She sat back and clasped her hands in her lap, gazing around the church, taking in the marble columns to either side of the central aisle, the exquisitely inlaid iconostasis at the head of the nave, the huge brass chandelier suspended overhead, all the while thinking of Charlie and their life together. All that they had shared in that too-brief time. All that she had lost.

They’d married late, both of them in their thirties. She was working for the government, he was a pastor with the 1st Battalion 8th Marine Regiment. She’d all but given up hope of finding anyone by that point, accepted that her work was going to be her life, spinsterhood her destiny. But the moment she’d clapped eyes on him standing beside her in the National Gallery of Art in Washington – in front of, appropriately, Carpaccio’s
The Flight into Egypt –
she’d known instinctively that he was the one. The man she’d been waiting for all these years. They’d got talking, he’d asked her out, six months later they were engaged and five months after that they had married. There had been talk of children, of trips they would take, of growing old together – she had been so very, very happy.

Less than a year after their wedding, however, Charlie’s battalion had been posted to Lebanon, as part of the international peacekeeping force. They’d had a final, magical fortnight together, and then one morning she’d made
him his breakfast – bacon, eggs, grits, waffles, blueberry jam – he’d kissed her on the cheek and given her the cross she still wore around her neck and hefting his kitbag onto his shoulder, had walked out into the dawn. That was the last time she ever saw him. A month later, on 23 October 1983, news came through of an explosion in Beirut, a suicide bombing, marine barracks, massive casualties, and she’d known instantly that her Charlie was gone. Two years, that’s all they’d had. Just two short years. The very best of her life.

A babble of voices interrupted her thoughts as a crowd of Italian tourists came trooping into the church, their guide ushering them into the seats around her, forcing her to move along to make space for them. They were young and seemed to have no interest in the place, no concept of its sacredness. Talking loudly amongst themselves, eating crisps, one of them was even playing with his Game Boy. She tried to ignore them, but then another group came in, Japanese this time and the church filled with an incessant strobe of camera flashes. Their guide’s voice seemed to fill the entire space as she jabbered at them through some sort of portable amplifier. Unable to bear it – why couldn’t they just be quiet, leave her to mourn in peace? – Kiernan stood and pushed her way out of the pew. As she came into the aisle a Japanese couple blocked her path, holding up a camera, grinning, bowing, asking if she would take a picture of them. She snapped.

‘What’s wrong with you people!’ she cried. ‘This is a church! Don’t you understand that! Show some respect! Please, just show some respect.’

She rushed past the couple and out of the door,
stumbling up the steps and onto the narrow street above, eyes blurring with tears.

‘I need you, Charlie,’ she choked. ‘I can’t do this on my own any more. Oh God, I need you. My husband, my darling precious husband.’

It was past 1 p.m. when Freya eventually reached the outskirts of Cairo, and a further forty minutes before they had crawled their way through a crush of near-stationary traffic into the centre of the city. The tanker driver pulled over at one end of an enormous open square beside a swathe of litter-covered grass dotted with palm trees.

‘Midan Tahrir,’ he informed her, ignoring the toots of protest from the cars behind.

It had taken them the best part of sixteen hours to get here from Dakhla, an interminable journey made even more interminable by the driver’s insistence on stopping off at what felt like every roadside café
en route
for tea. More than once Freya had contemplated ditching him and trying to hitch a lift with someone else. She had decided against it, paranoid that the men from the oasis might have colleagues out looking for her and that she would fall in with the wrong people. Slow he might have been, but at least the tanker driver seemed trustworthy.

She had dozed fitfully during the journey, an hour here, forty minutes there, but for most of the time she had been awake. Occasionally she had opened her knapsack and stared down at the camera, film roll and compass nestled inside. Mainly she had just gazed out of the window at the
endless expanse of desert, watching as the mile markers counted them slowly through al-Farafra, Bahariya and on towards Cairo.

And now, at last, they were here.

‘Midan Tahrir,’ repeated the driver.

‘Phone,’ she said, miming holding a receiver to her ear. ‘I need to make a call.’

He frowned, then smiled and pointed past her to a green and yellow public payphone.

‘Menatel,’ he said, rummaging in a locker under the dashboard and producing a disposable phonecard which he handed to her, waving away her offer of money. She thanked him, both for the card and the ride and, swinging her knapsack onto her back, dropped out of the cab onto the pavement. The driver gave a final cry of ‘Boos Weelis. Amal Shwassnegar!’ and moved off.

For a moment Freya stood there, exhausted, taking in her surroundings: the swirling traffic, the ant-like droves of pedestrians, the high dirty buildings capped with giant hoardings advertising Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Sanyo, Western Union. For all the infuriating slowness of the journey, there had been something secure and comforting about the inside of the tanker cab. Now, suddenly, she felt very alone and very exposed, like a snail whose shell has been torn away. At a nearby set of traffic lights a taxi driver was talking on his mobile. He seemed to be staring straight at her. So did an old woman selling lighters off an upturned crate just a few metres away. Dropping her head, Freya hurried over to the payphone, fumbling in her pocket and pulling out the card Molly Kiernan had given her when they had first met. She slipped the phonecard into the slot, selected the
English language option on the digital display and, cradling the receiver in the crook of her neck, tapped Kiernan’s mobile number into the keypad. Silence, a ringing tone, then, to Freya’s frustration, a voicemail message: ‘Hi, this is Molly Kiernan. I can’t take your call right now. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

‘Molly, it’s Freya,’ she said the moment the record tone sounded, her voice tense, urgent, ‘Freya Hannen. I’m calling from a payphone. Something’s … I need help. Someone tried to … I think they killed Alex … They were … This man came to the house yesterday with a bag … there was a camera … he said he found them in the desert …’

She broke off, aware that she was gabbling and should have thought through what she was going to say before she called. Better to keep things short, explain it all face to face.

‘Listen, I’m in Cairo,’ she said. ‘I need to see you. I’m in …’

Again she broke off, trying to remember what the driver had told her.

‘… Midan something … it’s a big open space …’

She looked around, searching for landmarks.

‘There’s a Hilton hotel, and some sort of fast food place called Hardees, and … and …’

Her eyes fell on a large, Ottoman-style building on the far side of the street. All arched windows, intricate wooden screens and ornate cornicing, it was surrounded by railings and a high dusty hedge. Emblazoned across the top of its façade in blue letters were the words
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO.
Wasn’t that where … ? She fumbled in her pocket again, um-ing and ah-ing into the phone,
apologizing for the delay, removing the card that Flin Brodie had given her: Professor F. Brodie, American University in Cairo. She started to speak again, her voice more assured now.

‘I’m outside the American University,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go in and try to find Flin Brodie. If he’s not there I’ll go to the Embassy. I think I’m in danger, I need to—’

The line went dead. The phone’s digital display showed that she had no more credit left. She cursed, hung up and stepped back out onto the pavement. Pedestrians jostled past all around her. The taxi driver with the mobile had by now driven off, although the old woman selling lighters was still gazing fixedly in her direction. For a moment Freya wondered if it wouldn’t be better just to go direct to the US Embassy, to seek some sort of official protection, but the prospect of having to deal with a load of bored bureaucrats and go through her whole story from the beginning dissuaded her. What she needed right now was a familiar face, someone she could trust, someone who would take what she was saying seriously. Admittedly she hardly knew Brodie, had only talked to him for a few minutes, but he had been a friend of her sister’s and that was good enough for her. The Embassy could wait. Flin Brodie would help her, she was certain. He’d know what to do.

She patted her knapsack and threw a quick glance towards the lighter vendor, who continued to stare, her gold teeth glinting in the afternoon sun. Then, spotting a gap in the traffic, Freya jogged across the street and followed the fence round the side of the university building, anxiously looking for the main entrance.

They had some extremely advanced listening and surveillance facilities in the US Embassy, and some extremely skilled people manning them. Since his secondment was to Public Affairs, it wasn’t feasible for Angleton to avail himself of those facilities. Not without all sorts of awkward questions being asked. He could have stuck his neck out, pulled strings, wangled the necessary permissions – might still have to do that – but for the moment it was easier for him to improvise. He didn’t want to be giving the game away. Not yet at least.

And so he’d kitted out his own listening station, off campus, in a suite way up at the top of the drab orange tower of the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel. The gadgetry wasn’t as high tech as the kit they had back at the Embassy, and Mrs Malouff, who manned the station on a day-to-day basis, was competent rather than expert. But it did the job, allowing Angleton to listen in on phone calls and, with his insider knowledge of the various codes and passwords that were in use, hack into voicemails and e-mail accounts, building up a picture of who was saying what to whom and how they were all connected. He almost certainly wasn’t getting the full story, there would be communication channels of which he was as yet unaware, but for the moment it was enough. Piece by piece by piece.

Angleton arrived this afternoon in a taxi; he went everywhere by taxi, never walked. Passing through the hotel’s grand foyer, he stopped off at the ground floor pâtisserie and purchased two éclairs and some sort of outsize
meringue with a slice of caramelized lemon on top, then headed towards the lifts.