He established eye contact with Alex. Then he walked to her, calmly, without menace, and with great confidence. Alex checked his hands. They were empty. She looked for a bulge under his jacket and found it on the left side.
He came up directly to her table, stood politely but assertively, and looked down at her through keen but saddened eyes. Then he grinned and his face became ten years younger.
“May I join you, my dear?” he asked.
“It depends on who you are and what you want,” Alex said.
“I’m a Sagittarian,” he said. “Does that make it any better?”
“It might,” she said. “I’m a Capricorn.”
“So was Sadat, so was Stalin, so is Dolly Parton, and so was Jesus. So maybe then I should sit down,” he said.
“Maybe you should.”
A moment passed, and a small wave of relaxation washed over her. “So good of you to come to Cairo,” he said in perfect English that could have been from anywhere. “You see, we have a crisis here with someone you used to work with. You might want to consider becoming totally obsessed with it. I know the rest of us are.”
“Talk to me,” Alex said, settling in.
The spy known as Voltaire reached easily into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Filthy habit, smoking,” he said. “I wish I could kick it. Then again, like a lot of my filthy habits, I rather enjoy it.”
He offered one to her.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“Not even one?”
“Not even a puff of yours,” she said.
“Smart,” he said.
But he lit one and blew out the smoke. Then, just as easily, he began to talk.
THIRTY-SIX
You’re going to help us bring home a renegade intelligence agent,” Voltaire explained. “That’s why you’re here. But part of the way I work is to be seen as little as possible by anyone who knows exactly what I do. So for our purposes here, you’re going to be the point person, the person who’s on the front line to bring in Michael Cerny. Does the operation make sense to you so far?”
“From what I know of it, yes,” she said.
“This operation has more than one goal, as you’ll discover. I’ll tell you right now that there’s more going on here than you already realize or than you’ll perhaps ever know.” He paused. “Think of yourself as a colonel in artillery in the D-Day invasion. You have authority, but do you really know what the generals are doing? Of course not.”
Alex watched him, his steady gaze, his steady hands, and said nothing.
“I’m not planning to give you a thorough briefing today. We have a little window of time before we close a trap on the individual in whom we have an interest. ‘Judas,’ I’d like to call him,” Voltaire said.
“Judas,” Alex answered. “Very good.”
“I operate under the assumption that you’re fully up to an assignment like this, mentally and physically,” he continued. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been sent, nor would you have persevered to find this place. If you had any last minute trepidations, you would have disappeared in the alley. So I won’t even ask if you have second thoughts. You wouldn’t be sitting here if you did. My condolences on your loss in Kiev, your fiance, by the way. I know the whole story.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“I spoke to our mutual friend at the office in Cairo, the gentleman who directed you here. Fitzgerald.”
Alex nodded.
“He’s your guy for background information, what has already happened. One doesn’t understand the present without understanding the past,” Voltaire said. “But I’m your person for what we’re going to do, what will happen. Are you ready to get killed?”
“Not really.”
“Me, neither. That’s good. And I like you,” he said. “But if there’s a choice between one of us getting killed, I’ll choose you in a heartbeat. I’d expect you to do the same. Are you a religious person?”
“I am,” she said. “A practicing Christian.”
“I’m not anything.”
“I can tell.”
“That damns my soul to hell, doesn’t it?” he asked.
“It’s a theory,” she said.
He laughed. “You’re good. Sharp. Hungry?”
“A bit. Is food an option?”
“Sometimes.” He signaled a waiter. The establishment had kebabs, a chicken couscous, and something called a
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a flaky pastry concocted from almonds, dates, and pigeon.”
“
“Very similar. Hemingway survived on them when he was struggling in Paris after World War I. Try one.”
“I’m not struggling, I’m not in Paris, and I’ll have a kabob,” she said. “Lamb, not mutton, right? And with rice.”
“As you request,” Voltaire said. “If they bring salad, don’t touch it. That’s how you get dysentery.”
To be clear, Voltaire translated the order into crisp Arabic. The waiter nodded, smiled, and disappeared.
“Very good,” Voltaire said. His eyes swept the room. “You’ve got some sass to you too. That helps. How do you feel about seducing a man you’ve never previously met.”
“Depends on who he is, what he looks like, and where we are.”
“Good answer,” he said. “I was in the military for six years. Not with the Americans but with a Western power. I was in a branch equivalent to your US Marines. Whenever one was asked a question of logistics and wanted to hedge on the answer, one would say, ‘It depends on the situation and the terrain.’ That’s the answer you just gave.”
“This ‘seduction’?” she asked. “This ties in with an overnight with a Russian that Fitzgerald mentioned?”
“It might.”
“This seems to be emerging as a sub-specialty of mine,” she said facetiously.
“We all have our moments and our skills,” he said.
“What are yours?”
“You’ll find out as we go along,” he said. “As you need to know. But think of me as a Swiss Army knife. I have a lot of functions other than just cutting throats.”
“Which armed forces were you with?” she asked.
“If I wanted you to know that, don’t you think I would have just told you?”
“Of course,” Alex answered. “But I figured I’d give it a try.”
“You look like you’d be a real pleasure in bed,” Voltaire continued. “Sleep with me later tonight, and I’ll tell you about my army career.”
“I don’t need to know that badly. In fact, I don’t really care.”
“Good response. How many languages do you speak?” he asked.
“You’ve seen my file. You know the answer,” Alex said. “English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and I can get by in Ukrainian. I have a limited reading knowledge of German and a familiarity with Portuguese almost by default because it overlaps so often with the other Romance languages.”
Voltaire nodded. “I speak the same languages as you do, plus Greek and Arabic, obviously, but without the bloody Ukrainian. I mention all this in case it becomes an element in our communication over the next few days.”
He paused.
“The German I speak with considerable ease,” he said. “My parents were Nazis. My father and both of his brothers were in the SS.”
He looked her up and down.
“Are you shocked?” he asked.
“Shocked? No. I’m not even surprised. And I’m certainly not impressed.”
“One of them was the commandant of a labor camp in Poland,” he said. “Very nice man as long as you weren’t a Jew, in which case he was a monster. He escaped here after the war. I rather liked Uncle Heinz, murderer though he was.”
“That’s for you to live with, not me,” she said. “Assuming there’s even a grain of truth to any of that, which I suspect there isn’t.”
He kept a tight gaze upon her, eye to eye. Then he relented and smiled. “All right,” he said. “You passed.”
“I passed what?”
“Until right now I could have rejected you as a working partner. You didn’t know that?”
