Countdown in Cairo (11 page)

He had his pistol tucked under his sweatshirt. It was at the small of his back with the safety catch on. He knew if someone looked out of one of those pesky peepholes and saw a man with a gun, the DC police would be called. There was a chance that the police would respond to the call, and then his whole assignment would be compromised. As it was, he was in the country illegally. They would do a background check, and who knew where he would land? So, literally, better not to show his hand until he was ready to use it.

He arrived at the apartment he wanted. Fortune smiled. The door to 506 was at a bend in the hallway where the corridor took a turn in a different direction. So he could lurk in the corner and none of the other peepholes could view him.

He stooped down and took a reading on his situation. Under the door to 505, there was darkness. Under the door to 506, the same. No music, no voices, not even the sound of a distant footfall. As he cocked his head, all he could hear was the distant steady rumble of Washington traffic.

He stood. He reached behind his back and pulled out his weapon. He wondered how much effort it would take to kick the door in. He theorized: if the young woman he wanted to kill was with a man—who knew?—maybe the man would have a gun and come out shooting.

Nagib did not know the layouts to these apartments either. If only his victim would step out quietly, Nagib could just stick his gun to her face and finish her with one pop.

But he knew better than to count on wishful thinking.

He looked at the doorknobs, first the one to 506, then to 505. They were solid-looking knobs. The building was maybe fifty years old, he reasoned, but the closing and locking apparatus was much newer.

Nagib had once killed a man in Egypt whose door could be pushed in with a steady shoulder. In Munich, he had once gone into a dissident Iranian’s apartment as part of an execution team. The victim had piled furniture against the door from the inside, but the locks had given up virtually the moment Nagib and his team looked at them.

He hoped for the same here.

He put one powerful hand on the knob to 506 and gripped it. Then he turned. He held the pistol aloft in his other hand, the safety catch off. He squeezed the knob hard and twisted it. He turned it hard. He turned it with all his strength and waited for the snap that would be like music from heaven, a sign from God. He squeezed and turned so hard that the veins started to pulse on the side of his neck.

He wanted to hear the snap. Where was it?

It wouldn’t come.

He cursed. The lock had held.

He released the knob from his hand.

He withdrew slightly. He looked in all directions. The coast remained clear.

He reached to his sleeve where he hid a burglar’s picking pin in the material of his sweatshirt just above his right forearm. He pulled the pin out, crouched down, and went to work picking the lock. If he could just get one or two of the tumblers within the lock to cooperate, he was home free.

The sweat poured off him as he worked. The hallway remained quiet. He attempted to pick the lock for several minutes. It was so quiet that he could hear the soft rattling and scratching from within the lock. He heard a couple of faint clicks, two and maybe even a third. A good sign.

He stood and tried the knob again.

He tried with all the strength in his hand. Then he tucked the gun into his belt and tried with two hands.

Still nothing. The lock held. He sighed. He cursed to himself. He stepped back.

Then, about fifty feet behind him down the hall, a door opened. Nagib heard music and voices. Two men, two women, laughing, talking loudly, as if a social gathering was breaking up.

Then they were joined by more.

He turned away from them and away from the doors where he stood. He walked in the opposite direction, keeping his head low so no one would see his face, and one hand on his pistol in case someone did.

He arrived at the door that led to the emergency staircase. He ducked into the stairwell and hurried back down. He was sure no one had seen him. But he wasn’t sure whether he’d be back again that night.

Two minutes later, Nagib was downstairs in the garage. He listened to his own footsteps echo as he walked to the automatic door. He used his remote clicker to open it and walked outside.

His assistant sat in the car, waiting, the engine running. Nagib slid into the passenger’s side in the front seat. The door had been unlocked. His cohort looked to him, unable to tell by his expression whether he had killed anyone or not.

“I can’t get into the apartment,” he said. “Next time we see her on the street, we take her out then.”

Rashaad maintained a steely expression. He let a minute pass and didn’t move.

“She’s there tonight,” he said softly. “I saw her go in.”

Nagib drew a long breath and exhaled.

“It’s quiet down here; it’s a rainy night,” Rashaad said. “It’s perfect.”

Nagib eased back. “Okay. We wait a little. Then I’ll go in again.”

SIXTEEN

Alex was about to change and shower for bed when her doorbell rang. It gave her pause. Normally, visitors didn’t show up at the door unexpectedly, and they never did this late. Her friends normally knew better to drop in on her unannounced.

She glanced at her watch. It was a few minutes past 11:00 p.m. Who was in the hall?

An emergency of some sort?
She wondered.
A problem in the building?

She stood and walked to the door. She thought of taking her weapon with her. One could never be too careful in her line of work, but she decided against it, maybe out of pure laziness.

She arrived at the door and looked through the peephole. A little wave of relief swept across her. It was her neighbor, Mr. Thomas, the older gentleman she affectionately called “Don Tomás,” the retired diplomat. He was definitely a friend.

With him stood a young woman, a girl maybe a third his age.

Alex suppressed a mischievous smirk. Maybe the old boy wanted to borrow a bottle of champagne. Then she suppressed her smile, undid the latch, and opened the door.

Immediately, before Alex could speak, Don Tomás held up a finger to his lips to indicate silence. Then he spoke in a barely audible whisper.

“Good evening, Alex,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” His tone was serious. She picked up on it right away.

She shook her head to indicate that, no, he was not disturbing her at all.

“I have some new music that I downloaded,” he said, continuing a low tone tinged with a conspiratorial air. “I wondered if you’d like to come over and take a listen. Some of them might be of interest to you. I’d be glad to lend you a few of my bootleg CDs if you’d like to rip them.”

Alex was about to open her mouth to respond softly when Don Tomás moved his firm finger from his lips to a few inches in front of Alex’s. At the same time, the young woman held forth a note scrawled on the open pages of a writing tablet.

Alex glanced at it and her eyes widened. Her heart skipped as she read. The note said,

I used to work for the CIA
I once planted a listening
device in your apartment
I think it’s still there

Alex raised her gaze and looked into the girl’s eyes. The girl looked frightened and agitated, hunted, like a doe in deer season. Her appearance also rang a distant bell to Alex. It took a second, but Alex realized that she was Don Tomás’s niece. Her name was Janet; Alex had seen her from time to time in the building and had even been introduced briefly once in the hallway.

Abruptly, Janet turned the page of the writing tablet and presented a second written message.

I used to work for Michael Cerny
We need to talk

Alex blinked in surprise and looked back up. She saw more fear in the girl’s eyes.

Alex raised her own finger to indicate they should wait for a moment. She ducked back into her apartment, found her pistol, and clipped it to the right side of the belt on her jeans. Then she returned to her door and followed her neighbor across the hallway to his place.

As she crossed the hall, Alex saw no one other than Don Tomás and Janet. The corridor was as quiet as a tomb, although there was a strange scent of something cooking, or, more accurately, overcooking.

“Mrs. Rothman down the hall has gone complete daffy,” Don Tomás said as explanation. “Poor old woman burns food at all hours. Puts stuff in the toaster and forgets. One of these days an onion bagel is going to turn this whole place into an inferno.”

They entered Don Tomás’s apartment and closed the door.

SEVENTEEN

Alex hadn’t been in this apartment for some time, not since having had a pleasant brunch there almost a year earlier with Robert. Now her presence keyed the bittersweet memory. For a moment she struggled to get past it.

Don Tomás threw a second bolt on his door. Alex looked at the bolt. It was newly installed and top-of-the-line with steel plating underneath which would make a push-in almost impossible.

“I’ve stepped up my own personal security in here,” he grumbled. “One of those blue-haired old ladies downstairs got burgled the other day, did you hear?”

“No, I didn’t,” Alex said.

“Or she said she did anyway,” he said. “Who knows? She’s as deaf as a haddock and as senile as I’ll be in another few years. But at least now it will take someone a full minute to break in, as opposed to the ten seconds it probably would have taken before. You might consider doing the same.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Alex answered.

“Oh, I know, I’m being a cantankerous old goat,” the retired diplomat grumbled, “but my niece has been staying with me recently. You never know who’s hanging around the hallways these days. And the idiot doormen are usually busy getting off on
American Idol
or whatever they watch.”

Don Tomás was a nineteenth-century man trapped in the small quotidian horrors of the twenty-first century. It was what Alex liked about him.

“Anyway,” he continued as he trudged heavily to his living room. “Tonight’s not about me; it’s about my niece. You know each other?”

The two young women eyed each other as they walked.

“Alex, meet Janet. Janet, meet Alex,” Don Tomás said. “There! Now you’re old friends.”

“I think we’ve passed in the elevators,” Alex said.

“Well, thank God the elevator wasn’t plunging from this floor to the sub-basement at the time,” Don Tomás said. “I take the stairs myself. I’d take them three at a time, but I’d give myself a heart attack after one flight. Anyway, the steps are healthier.”

“Healthier,” Alex said as they walked past Don Tomás’s ample bar and impressive collection of cigars inside an elaborate glass humidor. Janet led them to the sitting area in the living room and, with a gesture of exhaustion, eased onto the sofa.

The distinctive prints remained on the living room walls, mostly art deco originals from the twenties and thirties, stylized prints of beautiful women in most cases, including some brilliant works by the French Sapphic artist Tamara de Lempicka. In a further bizarre decorative touch, Don Tomás had added an antique print of a racehorse that bore his name, a gift, he explained, from a friend on his recent fifty-fifth birthday.

“My great-great-great grandfather was a Confederate cavalry captain in the Civil War,” Don Tomás explained. “Those of his men whom he didn’t get killed seemed to be rather fond of him after the war. So they named a racehorse after him.”

“Apparently,” Alex said, eyeing the print.

“It was a gelding,” Janet said.

“It was not!” Don Tomás insisted. “And it must have been a pretty good old nag—it won the 1875 Preakness and was later put out to stud.”

“A little before my time,” Alex said.

“Just a bit before mine as well,” Don Tomás added, “despite what you might think. I can honestly say I’m closer to sixty than a hundred and twenty-five. Would you like a drink, by the way? I have a new bottle of thirty-year-old single Malt Balvenie, speaking of graceful aging.”

“I’d love a short glass,” Alex said. “Where on earth did you find a thirty-year-old Balvenie?”

“Oh, I have my sources,” Don Tomás said, pouring a shot of the single malt into a whiskey glass. “Plus, it’s not
where
I got it; the amusing detail is what I
spent
for it. Middle range of three figures.” He poured an ample portion for himself. “Janet? Can I get you something? Or would you like to stick to a carcinogen-laced diet soda or perhaps a beer, I hope?”

Janet had already retrieved a bottle of Budweiser from the refrigerator and plopped down on a chair before the sofa. She swigged from the bottle as Don Tomás and Alex savored the complexities of Caledonia. After two swigs, Janet embarked into some backstory that also had some complexity also.

“Okay,” she said, turning to Alex, “I have a lot of crap that I need to bring you up to speed on.”

“Then let’s start,” Alex said.

According to Janet, she had been one of those pretty but geeky girls in high school who had been a computer and electronics whiz. “My brain was so right-sided that the joke was that I might tip over,” she said. She had parlayed her straight A’s in computer sciences, physics, and math into acceptance with an academic scholarship to Georgia Tech, even though her real interests had been music and composition, the heavier the metal the better. She hung around Savannah for an extra year, picked up a master’s degree in computer science, and then followed a boyfriend to Washington.

The boyfriend didn’t work out and neither did her first couple of jobs. Then she answered a few newspaper ads for techie positions. One thing led to another, and the next thing she knew she was interning in the evenings at a cramped, smelly office in Alexandria, Virginia. There she was trained with surveillance equipment and how to do a quick drop in an apartment.

One more thing led to another one more thing. Janet partnered with a couple of different guys and did a string of trial drops for a local police agency.

“I got real good real fast,” Janet said. “For some reason, most of the partners I worked with dropped surveillance devices in cars, offices, houses, and apartments. It was always male-female teams. The guys did the dumb work of breaking and entering and watching the street. The girls were the ones who really put our butts on the line, going into people’s homes and setting up the electronic ears. It just seemed to work that way.” She paused. “Once I bugged a guy’s golf bag while he was putting.”