The Midnight House

“I told you, Poteat wasn’t part of the squad. The colonel’s in Afghanistan. Jerry’s dead.”

“What if he’s not?”

The question stopped Murphy. He ran a hand down his tie, flipped up the tip, looked at it as if the fabric might hold the answer. “Jerry had a temper. And he was having problems with his wife, we knew that. And he thought he deserved a promotion. He quit when he didn’t get it. But I don’t see him taking it out on us.”

Murphy pushed himself back from the table. “Mr. Shafer. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. I have to get to work. I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”

“Before you go,” Shafer said. “Tell me about the C-one drop.”

“What about it?”

“Eight million for ten guys for sixteen months? Nice work if you can get it.”

“Two hundred grand a month to the Poles to rent the barracks and the guards. Payments whenever we landed a jet. A million for coms gear that we bought over there. Charter flights.”

“You keep receipts?”

“Of course. We wanted to leave a nice long paper trail for all those congressional investigators. And the Justice Department.”

“I take it that’s a no.”

“You take it correctly.”

Shafer leaned forward in his chair, flared his nostrils like a terrier on the scent of a rat.

“Let me make sure I understand. You worked for a guy who stole one-point-two million dollars in Iraq. This squad, you’re in charge of eight million. And you don’t keep receipts.”

“I got verbal approval for anything over twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“From who?”

“Somebody in Sanchez’s office, usually.”

“Anybody keep records of those conversations?”

“Colonel Terreri knew where the money was going.”

“Terreri. He’s not dead yet, right?”

“You have something to ask, ask it,” Murphy said. The vein on his forehead had popped out again, visible proof that Shafer’s bluff had scored.

“Maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow, when the Feebs come to town.” Suddenly, Shafer understood. Every so often he had a flash like this, the pieces fitting together all at once. “Six-seven-three was your career saver? Guess again. You put in for it figuring on the unrestricted drop. Figuring you could skim. You saw Gessen’s mistakes. And you would have gotten away clean, if not for the murders.”

“Only one problem with that theory. It’s been investigated. And I’ve been cleared. No evidence of wrongdoing, and that was that. I’ve got it in writing. Now, you want to talk to me again, you call my lawyer.”

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

CAIRO

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