anyone. After no more than a second he let it fall back in place.
Rogers groaned and bit his lip. He turned to Jamal and spoke in an eerily calm voice.
“My friend,” said Rogers. “Your problems are just beginning.”
In an apartment across the way, Rogers had seen the same man he had glimpsed before. Still in the same spot, still pretending to read a newspaper. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t Rogers realized it before? The man across the street was a watcher, and he was watching the safehouse. Somehow, despite all the precautions, the Egyptian Moukhabarat had them under surveillance.
Rogers took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He turned to Jamal.
“There is an escape plan,” Rogers said coolly. The apartment had been provisioned with this sort of contingency in mind. He led Jamal to a bedroom and pointed to the simple business suit and broad-brimmed hat that were in the closet.
“Put them on as quickly as you can,” said Rogers.
The Palestinian wordlessly obeyed.
“There are sunglasses in the pocket of the jacket,” Rogers said. “Put them on.”
Rogers looked at his feet and saw that he was still wearing the peasant sandals. There were no shoes in the closet. Never mind. It would have to do. Rogers led the Palestinian toward the front door.
“Listen to me carefully and do exactly as I say. If you follow these instructions precisely, there is no reason that anyone should identify you as having been here.
“Take the stairs down two flights to the basement. At the bottom of the stairwell is a door. Open it. The door leads to a tunnel that passes underground to the basement of the next building. When you come out of the tunnel, walk calmly up the stairs to the front door. It opens on a busy street where the Heliopolis streetcar line makes a stop. The stop is thirty yards from the building. Wait in the doorway until you actually see the streetcar coming. Then walk out quickly and catch it.
“When you get downtown, take a bus from Tahrir Square toward Giza. Stop at one of the clubs along the Pyramids Road where the whores work all day long. Go in and stay with one of the girls as long as you can. Give her a big tip so she’ll remember you. There should be some money in the jacket.
“When you get back to Beirut, Fuad will make contact with you. In the meantime I’ll try to find out what happened here.
“Any questions?”
Jamal looked at Rogers as if for the first time. He shook his head silently. In his eyes was a look of professional respect and deference, the look of a junior officer obeying his superior. Rogers opened the door quickly and peered down the corridor. There was nobody.
“Move!” he said, and Jamal was gone.
Rogers waited fifteen minutes and repeated the same escape procedure himself. Except that he didn’t go to the whorehouse on the Pyramids Road for his alibi. He went to the U.S. Embassy.
Four days later, the Cairo station managed to debrief its best agent within the Egyptian Moukhabarat about the incident in Heliopolis. The damage was less than Rogers had feared. It was the apartment that had been under surveillance, not Rogers or Jamal. Because of a lapse on the part of the Cairo station, the “safehouse” wasn’t so safe.
The Moukhabarat had photos of everyone who had gone into the building. They had made a tentative identification of Rogers, who the Egyptians remembered from the old days in South Yemen. But they were having more trouble with the other person who had been dressed in simple Arab garb and shielded his face. The pictures of him were fuzzy.
The Egyptians had tentatively concluded that Rogers had been meeting with a member of the “Ikhwan Muslimin,” the Moslem Brotherhood that bitterly opposed the Nasser regime. A half-dozen members of the the Ikhwan had been arrested in the last twenty-four hours in Cairo and Alexandria. They were being tortured for information about the group’s contacts with the CIA. Several had died protesting their innocence.
Rogers didn’t like mistakes. The botched meeting in Heliopolis wasn’t his fault, but that was little consolation. He had been unlucky. Rogers, who believed in luck, didn’t like feeling accident-prone.
The worst part about a botched operation was the postmortem that inevitably followed. The Heliopolis incident produced a string of inquiries, memos, and recommendations. Marsh himself flew to Beirut and Cairo and spent a week querying and admonishing everyone in sight. The counterintelligence staff sent its own man to conduct a separate investigation. He was a tall, cadaverously thin man who was unusually secretive and kept talking at odd moments about trout fishing. It was assumed that he prepared a report of his own, but nobody ever saw it.
By late May, the dust had begun to settle. The damage was considerable, but Rogers hoped it wasn’t enough to kill the operation.
The first question the specialists addressed was whether Rogers’s own usefulness as a case officer had been destroyed by the tentative identification of him in Heliopolis. The answer was no. The Egyptians and Soviets had tagged Rogers years ago as an intelligence officer; now they simply had more evidence.
The second question was whether Jamal’s contact with the CIA had been exposed. Every bit of evidence the agency could gather indicated that the Egyptians genuinely believed Rogers had been meeting with a member of the Moslem underground in Egypt. The Moukhabarat’s inability to find confirming evidence of the relationship only seemed to make them more worried about it.
The third question was how the location of the safehouse had been blown. That was Cairo’s mistake. Bad tradecraft. An Egyptian support agent had rented the apartment, it turned out, from a man who had a cousin in the security service. A junior officer under commercial cover in Cairo, who had supervised the rental of the safehouse, was rumored to be packing his bags.
Rogers didn’t escape criticism. He even provided his inquisitors with the evidence they needed. As he fled the apartment in Heliopolis that day, he had grabbed the tape recording of his aborted session with Jamal. During a postmortem in Cairo, Marsh played the tape over and over, especially the brief passage at the end when Rogers proposed the bugging operation.
“You sound almost apologetic,” said Marsh as he listened to the tape. “You don’t have to make any excuses about asking someone to work for the United States! This is a hard-nosed business and there’s no room for sentimentalists.”
Rogers kept his mouth shut. But he winced, later, when he heard Marsh, dressed in a seersucker suit, repeat one of Hoffman’s favorite lines.
“It is time to grab this Palestinian by the balls and start squeezing!” said the man from Langley. Coming from Marsh, it sounded nastier, and also less believable.
Rogers couldn’t quarrel with Marsh’s basic point: an effort to plant a bug had failed because the case officer didn’t have control over his agent. The agent felt free to say no!
Rogers urged a few more months of patience. “We need to wait for the scars to heal,” he told Marsh. “The relationship needs time to ripen. More pressure now may sever it altogether.”
But Rogers was becoming bored by his own arguments. He had made them a dozen times already. By now, they sounded weak and ineffectual even to him. Admit it, he told himself. You’ve failed.
Marsh listened with the aggravating politeness of someone who knows that he has won his bureaucratic battle and doesn’t need to gloat.
You bloodless bastard, thought Rogers, as he listened to Marsh thank him politely for all his time and hard work building the foundations of the case.
Eventually Stone cabled the bad news. The evaluation of PECOCK would be frozen temporarily, pending a review by senior staff of the Near East Division and the DDP. They would handle further development of the case.
The next step would be a meeting between the agent and a senior member of the NE Division staff. Beirut should handle the arrangements. The meeting should take place in a controlled environment, preferably a NATO country. The case officer involved in the initial phase of the case-meaning Tom Rogers-would not be present at the next meeting with PECOCK.
