ARAB (2 page)

“So,” he said, turning toward Nick, sinking his hands into the pockets of his dark blue lounging robe, rising on his toes as though to improve his stature, a man about the same height and age as the late Hussein of Jordan. A picture of him standing next to the king hung on the wall behind his desk. Like Hussein, Aziz had the easy smile and gentle manner that apparently made him, to quote the newspapers, “indispensable” to President Mubarak, who was a distant cousin and close friend.

Nick had dropped into the leather-covered sofa and leaned back, his legs outstretched, ankles crossed.

“You look tired,” he said.

Aziz nodded amiably, “Not surprising,” going back to his chair. “I am tired.”

“Well, you have a heavy load to carry.”

“You’ve been reading too many newspapers,” Aziz said. “They exaggerate my function.”

Nick, while in Afghanistan preparing for this mission, had been provided a variety of descriptions of “his function.” None of them matched what Aziz had said about his job. When the family first returned to Egypt, he had worked closely with the Minister of Interior. But with the rising intensity of Islamist extremism and general unrest, he had been called on more and more to deal directly with the militant fundamentalism that had become increasingly a threat to the stability not only of Egypt but of the entire region and now, since the American invasion of Iraq, of the entire world. “It’s a criminal abuse of religion,” Nick had heard him say. “It’s nothing more than hatred of a culture that is forcing changes on Islam, forcing Islam to grow up, to educate its people in the ways of the modern world. It’s this idiotic notion that Islam is weak because of corruption from the West. It’s a refusal to recognize that Islam is a victim of its own complacency. And they’re trying to turn that refusal into war.”

“And you don’t have the personality to fight that kind of war,” Nick remembered hearing Sana, Aziz’s wife, say. “It’s tiring you all out. You’re just too close to it, Aziz. We should get away. You would be so much happier viewing all this from a distance. Cairo is a metaphor for everything that upsets you—the poverty, the indebtedness, the bulging population, the extremism. You should go back to the university. We were so happy in London, Aziz.”

“I wish I could go back. But I can’t.”

“Cairo is Cairo, Aziz. It’s never been anything else. It never will be anything else. It’s a cemetery waiting for the funerals of people who try to change it. You’ve done more than he’s asked you to do, more than he has a right to expect of you.”

“I’ve done very little.”

Remembering these bits of conversations, Nick followed Aziz down a long hallway under soft lights imbedded in the ceiling. Aziz held a finger to his lips as they passed Sana’s room. In the kitchen, Aziz brewed two cups of coffee. They sat at a table near a window overlooking a small enclosed roof garden protected from the street by a high wall. Nick had sat out there many times with Amina.

“When does she move from Maine to Cambridge?”

“When classes start … sometime the first of next month, I believe.”

“You must miss her.”

“As I would the sun if it stopped shining. But her aunt will take good care of her. She’ll do all right over there.”

They reminisced for a while about their days in London, where Nick had first met the family. He had been a young Marine officer attached to the American embassy. Now he was a lieutenant colonel, temporarily on leave from his combat assignment in Afghanistan.

“So she wants to be a doctor.”

“So she says.” Aziz smiled. “But let’s talk about this Shkaki. Exactly where did you leave him?”

“In a holding cell at the army camp in Helwan. We said the police would pick him up.”

“What do they know about him?”

“There was only the duty officer. I’m sure he’d never heard of him, and I didn’t tell him anything.”

“But you’ve notified Yousef?”

“Not yet. I wanted to ask you….”

“It’s perfectly all right, Nick. We can trust Yousef. He may be an ardent Islamist, but he’s loyal to his oath. The president trusts him.” He paused, changed the subject. “Have you finished with this Shkaki?”

“He’s all yours,” Nick said.

“And he doesn’t know where this Bashir Yassin can be found?”

“Claimed he never heard of him.”

Aziz pondered that for a moment. “I wonder why this Yassin is proving to be so elusive. Could he know you’re looking for him?”

“I hope not.”

Aziz sighed. He caressed the cup with his thumb. “If my fingerprints are found on any part of this, I’m in trouble. But you know that.”

“With the president?”

“Oh, no. He enjoys doing favors for Americans. He just doesn’t want to be caught doing a favor for the Israelis….”

“Everything is politics.”

“I live on a tightrope of politics. But let’s not dwell on that.”

“Have the Israelis ever made a formal request for extradition?”

“They probably don’t know Bashir Yassin is in this country. As far as I know, they have no idea we’re looking for him. It’s your CIA and your embassy that asked permission to hunt for him. I think they were alerted by Yousef’s inquiries. We didn’t know he was here or who he was or anything about him. I’m surprised he got out of Israel. A man who has murdered three rabbis…. How did he escape?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said.

Aziz sipped at his coffee, lowered the cup. “Is Habib all right with delivering him to the Israelis? Does he know that’s what your people intend? Exactly what has he been told?”

“Only that Bashir is a wanted criminal who came into this country illegally. And that he’s to be deported secretly through American channels.”

“He knows who we’re giving him to?”

“He’s a good soldier, Aziz. Above all, he’s loyal to you and to the government. He would never betray us.”

“But he knows we’re doing America a favor by capturing Bashir for people who are perceived by many as our enemy.”

“It’s how my presence here has been explained.”

Nick gazed into the eyes of this good, dear, trusting friend and prayed that guilt did not show on his face although it hung like a stone from his heart. True, he intended to turn this murderer over to the Israelis. True, he had been honest about that. But the CIA, who had sent him on this mission, had other reasons for capturing Bashir, reasons Aziz was not to be told about, reasons Nick knew very little about and had experienced stabs of guilt when the CIA field officer had given him his orders.

*

 

“You’re not even to hint to Aziz that there’s another reason for tracking down this man,” Nick clearly remembered the field officer saying a few days ago while they sat at lunch in the coffee shop on the roof of the Fontana Hotel in Cairo. The man was pounding the table with a stiff forefinger intended apparently to scare Nick into taking his words seriously. The finger stabbing, in fact the man’s entire demeanor, suggested to Nick that the man thought he was dealing with a fool. Nick was a combat Marine, and he intended to be treated like one.

“Let’s cut out the fucking histrionics,” Nick said. “Just tell me what you want.”

“Okay,” the man said, a patronizing smile lingering in his eyes, not at all disturbed by this challenge to his authority. “When you have gained control of this Bashir, you are to turn him over to your assistant to hold, and then you are to call me.”

“And ask for Richard.”

“It’s not my name, of course. It’s a code. It tells my people who’s calling. You will join me here, and I will give you further instructions.”

“Why not tell me now?”

An air of disappointment touched the man’s expression. “As I’ve told you, Colonel, I’m not entirely convinced that this Yousef of the
muccabarrat
is sympathetic to our needs. I’m sure he intends to question you. It’s easier to say you don’t know when you don’t, than to say you don’t know when you do. Leave it at that.” He pondered the surface of the table for a moment, then looked up. “I don’t expect anyone to get rough with you. You have a powerful ally in Mr. Khalid. But you never know. This is a strange world.” He smiled and changed the subject. “Nick. That’s for Nicholas? You’re of Greek ancestry?”

“It’s from Dominic. My parents are Italian.”

“And Palermo. That’s where they’re from?”

“It’s my father’s name.”

The man smiled. “I would guess this is your first assignment of this kind. You seem uneasy with the subterfuge.”

Nick was but didn’t want to discuss it. “Are we done here?”

The man laughed and sat back. “Make it soon, Colonel.”

Nick strode past the cashier to the elevator, wondering how many spies were watching him. At the moment he didn’t give a damn. He hated this kind of work. He longed to get back to the mountains of Afghanistan, not to the killing of civilians or to the poverty, which sickened him, but to the suppression of the Taliban, to the actual fighting. Images strayed into his mind of wounds on women’s bodies from beatings inflicted because hair had shown on their foreheads. On the wall above his bunk in the officers’ quarters in Kartum, he had pinned a snapshot of a woman being whipped by a Taliban presumably for “failure to show him respect.”

*

 

“So how are your accommodations?’ Aziz asked, lifting Nick out of his reverie.

“Acceptable,” Nick said.

“I want you to know I’m grateful to you for capturing this man Shkaki. Having him out of the way makes Egypt more secure, and he should be a valuable source of intelligence.”

“You’ll have to pry it out of him with a crowbar,” Nick said. “He’s tough.”

“He’ll need to be, unfortunately for him. Unfortunately for all of us. I hate this war and what it’s done to us.”

Apologetic for having lost his composure, he said, “I find myself quoting your President Roosevelt, a great man.”