Murphy pulled open the conference-room door, walked out, slammed it shut behind him hard enough to leave a hairline crack in its porthole-shaped window.
“New construction,” Shafer said to the empty room. “Can never trust it.”
8
For two days, Wells cooled his heels at the Lotus, leaving only for a quick trip to the Intercontinental. The move was risky, but if his room stayed empty too long, the hotel’s managers might get nervous. Wells stayed an hour, long enough to muss his bed, take a shower, and have a brief conversation with Shafer on an innocuous Long Island number that routed through to the agency.
“Mr. Barber,” Shafer said. “How’s business?”
“I’m worried our client has another bidder. A local agency.”
“Maybe you should work together.”
“I think our needs are different.”
“You’re the man on the ground, so I defer to you.”
“Your man in Havana.”
“You’ve been reading again, I see,” Shafer said.
“Despite your warnings.”
“I recommend The Comedians. It’s excellent. Anything else I should know?”
“Probably, but I don’t feel like telling you.”
Shafer sighed. “Your honesty, so refreshing.”
“Have you learned anything new about my client?”
“No, but I did have an interesting talk with our friend Mr. Murphy,” Shafer said. “I’ll fill you in when you get back.”
“Something to look forward to. How’s Tonka?” After much protesting, Shafer had agreed to take the dog while Wells went to Cairo.
“She’s developed a taste for the rug in the living room. Aside from that, fine.”
“She miss me?”
“Without a doubt. Every day she leaves a note at my door asking when you’re coming back.”
“Good-bye.”
Wells left his air-conditioned room unwillingly. No question, he was getting soft. “A luxury once tasted becomes a necessity.” Wells didn’t know who’d popped that kernel of wisdom — someone richer and wit-tier than he, no doubt — but he had to agree. He needed to spend a few months in Haiti or Sudan, unlearn his bad habits.
Back at the Lotus he passed the time watching Al Jazeera and Lebanese soap operas. He figured he could wait a week, at most. If he was right and Hani was a mukhabarat agent, the Egyptians would put a tail on him soon enough — or just break down his door and arrest him. Part of him wondered why they hadn’t done so already. Probably because they didn’t want to scare him back to Kuwait, blow their chance at Alaa.
Or maybe Wells had gotten paranoid as well as soft. Maybe Hani was just what he seemed to be, a dedicated Islamist who had nothing to do with the police.
THE ENVELOPE APPEARED BENEATH his door on the third day, during the call to afternoon prayer. Inside, a single sheet of paper: 1 a.m. Northern Cemetery. Bring the camera. Nothing more.
Wells read the note twice to be sure he understood. The Northern Cemetery was a huge and ancient graveyard east of the Islamic quarter. Over the centuries, thousands of poor families had nested in the cemetery’s mausoleums and built one-room houses over its graves. Space was precious in Cairo, and the dead didn’t charge rent. Now, with fifty thousand residents, as well as paved streets and power lines, the cemetery was a city within a city, as crowded as the rest of Cairo. And so as an instruction for a meeting place, “Northern Cemetery” was strangely nonspecific, the equivalent of naming an entire neighborhood in an American city, like Buckhead in Atlanta.
Still, Wells had no choice but to obey and hope that the imam could find him. For dinner he had two plain pitas and two bottles of Fanta, the Egyptian version of his usual pre-mission meal of crackers and Gatorade, light and sugary and easy to keep down. And at 11:30, he slipped on his galabiya, tucked his camera into his backpack.
But at the door he stopped, took out the camera. He popped open the battery compartment and pulled out the flat black battery. Sure enough, a radio transmitter about the size of a nickel was taped to its underside. The bug was oldish, Russian, nothing fancy. Probably had a range of a few hundred yards, enough to help a search team track down a fugitive once he’d been treed.
Wells guessed that the mukhabarat had put the bug on the battery when he met with Hani and the imam. Wells was happy to be rid of it, happy his instincts were still sharp. Even so, finding it was a bad sign. For the first time since China, he was facing a professional secret police force. He reached a dirty fingernail under the tape and detached the bug. He’d toss it on the way to the cemetery, after he lost the tail that was surely waiting for him.
OUTSIDE THE LOTUS, the downtown streets bustled. Couples strolled side by side. A few even held hands. Discreetly, of course. A mother and a daughter, wearing matching pink head scarves, giggled as they bought Popsicles from a stooped man pulling an ice-cream cart. The lack of alcohol gave the streets a pleasant, relaxed feeling. The crowds were lively but not rowdy, the sidewalks free of broken bottles and shouting matches. And Wells walked, his hands at his sides, split from the ordinary lives around him by a wall only he could see. The curse of the spy, at once present and absent. He walked, and he wondered whether anyone was on him.
Build countersurveillance into your schedule. If you don’t have time for it, you don’t have time for the meet. Even if you don’t think anyone’s on you. Even if you’re sure no one’s on you. The life you save may be your own.
Guy Raviv, one of Wells’s favorite instructors at the Farm, had given him that lesson a lifetime ago. Raviv had striking blue eyes and a smoker’s hoarse voice and hair too black to be anything but dyed. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, though he could have been older. My children, he called his trainees. My precious, precocious youngsters. He’d been introduced to Wells’s class as a legend who had shucked whole teams of Stasi agents in East Berlin. Wells assumed that the story was exaggerated. Instructors at the Farm had a habit of embellishing their résumés, perhaps with the agency’s encouragement. Far better for new recruits to believe that they were learning from stars than from failed ops put out to pasture.
But whatever Raviv had or hadn’t done in East Berlin, he was a master teacher, as Wells learned firsthand when he and a team of recruits chased Raviv through the crowded streets of Philadelphia on a Saturday in July. Raviv lost them twice in two hours. He didn’t run—Please remember that anything more than a brisk walk is reserved for emergencies—but he had what Wells’s linebacker coach at Dartmouth called “quick feet,” the ability to change speed and direction almost instantly. Coming back from Philly, Raviv stopped at a McDonald’s on I-95 and distributed a full tray of bon mots along with his Happy Meals.
Your first goal is to make your pursuer show himself. He knows you. You don’t know him. Before you can lose him, you have to find him. And give yourself time. Listen to the wisdom of Mick Jagger, children: Time is on your side; oh, yes it is. More time equals more moves. More moves equal more chances to make your pursuer show himself. Will you be eating those fries?
In retrospect, Wells was shocked that the agency had allowed Raviv near them. Langley had always been a tribal place, unfriendly to oddballs. In the 1980s, the agency had become especially macho, spending its energy and money running guns to tinpot Central American dictators, operations that didn’t exactly match Raviv’s skill set. Wells supposed that Raviv had survived the Reagan years by bobbing, weaving, and staying low to the ground, skills as useful at Langley as in East Berlin. He’d become an instructor around 1990, and by the time Wells’s class of recruits arrived, he had his act perfected.