Countdown in Cairo

mass of people that they weren’t doing anything wrong. The problem was the Egyptians who had become Westernized and fallen away from Islam faith, the mullahs said. The people who had returned with wealth and Western wives and cars and credit cards, they were the big problem in society. You’d see graffiti all over the city that said, ‘Islam is the Solution.’ And as an example of proof of Islam being the solution, they held up Saudi Arabia.”

“Why Saudi Arabia?”

“Saudi Arabia is one of the most piously conservative countries in the Arab world. Never mind the hypocrisy. Ignore the fact that all the ne’er-do- well Saudi princes go on debauched trips to Europe and America and dissipate themselves in the nightclubs and the whorehouses. We’re talking about official Saudi policy and society. It is a tenet of Islam that Allah will take care of the truly devout. Well, the Saudi sheiks from the bloody House of Saud park their camels and their Rolls-Royces right on top of the world’s greatest petroleum reserves. What better proof is there of Allah’s favor than that? So if you were a traditional young Egyptian, you were impressed by your devout friends who went, not to Europe and got corrupted, but to work in the Gulf in the oil business. They’d do it for three to five years and then come back with a car, gold jewelry, a fat bankroll, and a veiled teenage wife that to all intents and purposes they owned, some poor girl not destined to get an education or a breath of free air in her entire life. But that’s just my opinion. Not a bad reward in this life for keeping the faith, is it?”

“A lot of men wouldn’t think so,” Alex said.

Abdul disappeared around a dim corner. Voltaire suddenly grabbed Alex by the arm.

“Tiens! Attends un moment!” he said. Wait a moment.

He cocked his head, as if to listen for danger. They held their ground; then, when nothing happened, Voltaire indicated with a nod that they could proceed. Alex and Voltaire turned the same dark corner a few seconds later.

Abdul had already vanished. They were in a black dead-end alley. Alex and Voltaire stood for a moment. There were a few doors, back entrances to homes, Alex thought. The doors were wooden and shabby. Somewhere a big dog was barking. Abdul had disappeared through one of the doors, Alex guessed. The only light was a bluish hue from an overhead window, either a florescent bulb or an old television. Sounds of second-story conversations tumbled down into the alley. Somewhere a man was snoring loudly. Alex couldn’t tell where.

Alex glanced at Voltaire and wondered if she had been set up. “Are we all right?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Voltaire whispered. “Just another few seconds.” He shot back to his civics lesson. “Anyway, the influx of wealthy emigres allowed the fundamentalist mullahs to gain even more influence,” Voltaire said. “Not with the government, but with the unwashed masses. Look, one fundamentalist preacher wanted zucchini to be banned from Cairo markets because of its phallic shape. Another one claimed that the Cairo Tower, a big, new, long, narrow building that rises out of a newly greened parkland, should be destroyed. He claimed that its size and shape might sexually arouse a generation of young Egyptian women.”

“And people took that seriously?” Alex asked.

“Educated people? No. Of course not! But one Egyptian journalist, a headstrong chap named Farag Foda, was indelicate enough to make fun of that idea and some others at the Cairo book fair one year. The book fair, pour l’amour de Dieu! You’d think he would have been speaking to people who were at least somewhat enlightened. Instead the mullahs declared him ‘a foe of Islam’ and he was assassinated. And a local Islamic scholar, a witness before the court, testified that the killers had done nothing wrong since there was no sin in killing a foe of Islam. He said that the murder of Farag Foda was an apostate’s punishment that the local imam had failed to implement. The killers were eventually executed, which only made their cause more sympathetic to their followers. It was a time, not unlike now, when assassination was not uncommon. And it wasn’t carried out by geniuses, either. A squad of gunmen on motor scooters once assassinated the speaker of the Egyptian parliament right in front of a new Western hotel. No one could figure out why they had hit this guy because he was middle level and not even disliked by the radicals. It turned out later that they mistook him for their real target, Mubarak’s minister of the interior, who tended to pass by the same place every day. It was typical. The killers were reckless and ignorant, but they didn’t lack for aggressiveness, and they were bent on shooting someone, anyone. So they did.”

There was a noise above them as Voltaire concluded. Alex ducked and cringed. Then she raised her eyes to the window from which came the bluish light. A head appeared, silhouetted by the back light. Someone-a pudgy woman in a head scarf-looked down at them and said something in Arabic.

Voltaire gave a smile and waved. He answered in Arabic. The head disappeared.

Then one of the doors opened and Abdul stepped out. He stood in the half-open doorway and motioned for them to join him. Voltaire allowed Alex to go ahead of him.

They stepped into the back of a building. Alex had the sense of being in a private home, but they seemed to be in a storeroom of some sort. There were several packing crates and empty burlap bags. There were boxes of canned food stacked up, as well as a collection of knives and small saws. There was one electric drill that could be converted into a saw. What she was looking at, it occurred to her, were implements for either commercial cutting or the disposal of a corpse.

Or both.

From the next room came a conversation in Arabic-all male voices-and the heavy stench of non-American cigarettes, the type of cheap Bulgarian crap that Russians and Middle Easterners smoked.

Abdul quietly closed the door behind her. He gave a nod to Voltaire. Alex felt trapped, apprehensive. If she had been set up there was no way out. Voltaire took her hand. She didn’t like that because it was her gun hand, but at this point she had to go with it.

“We’re here,” Voltaire said, switching back into English. “Come along. No way to chicken out now.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

The evening maid was the first member of the break-in team at the hotel. No point to break down a door or pick a lock when one has access to a key. The maid was a friendly old Arab woman named Mellilah, underpaid as most of the hotel staff were, and went about her evening duties as usual.

Well, almost as usual.

She entered Alex’s room at 8:30. She refreshed the bathroom with new towels and new soaps. She tidied the wash basin. In the living room she provided a new note pad near the phone, and she emptied all the wastebaskets in the suite.

In the bedroom, she made down the bed and pulled the shades. She fluffed up the pillows and left mints at the bedside. She turned down the top cover and the sheets and adjusted the air-conditioning for overnight sleeping.

She was finished within five minutes. When Mellilah left, she pulled the door almost completely closed. The door touched the frame of the doorway but did not click shut. She moved along to the next room.

Two minutes later, in the uniforms of porters at the hotel, two men named Hamzah and Mamdouth followed her path.

Hamzah was the hardware man and the lookout. He carried a steel suitcase and entered Alex’s room first. He set down the suitcase and stayed near the door. Mamdouth showed up a few seconds later, sliding into the room and closing the door behind him.

They moved quickly to the bedroom. This was a routine job as long as Alex didn’t return and no one in the hotel caught them. They set to work.

In Alex’s sleeping area they went to the bed and lifted the mattress off its box frame. They eased it onto the floor. Then Hamzah and Mamdouth donned special masks and gloves. Hamzah opened the steel suitcase. The sides of the suitcase were enormously thick, exactly what was needed to carry heavily radioactive material.

They donned goggles and headgear. They wore other protective garments underneath their clothes. Mamdouth stepped back. Hamzah reached within the suitcase and removed a cylindrical container. It looked like an elaborate thermos and was the size of a quart of milk. Mamdouth withdrew to the next room to stay as far away from this part of the operation as possible.

Hamzah opened the insulated container. It contained a mixture that looked like heavy-grained sea salt. It was white with a bluish tint, but Hamzah didn’t spend much time looking at it. In fact, he didn’t want to look at it at all. He had read about the stuff that he was assigned to plant. It scared him. He had seen what it had done to people. It attacked their immune system and made people violently ill after a few days. Given close exposure-and that’s what they were lining up for this Canadian woman-it would kill her in anywhere from five days to two weeks. It was a cruel and vicious tool. Hamzah liked the idea of using it to attack the enemies of Islam.

He leaned forward quickly. Touching none of the crystal directly, he sprinkled them onto the box frame that held Alex’s mattress. There was about a cup of the stuff in the thermos and he scattered it evenly. A few hours sleep at night would give just the right lethal exposure. He was clear on what his boss had ordered. No way this Western woman was going to complete her assignment in Cairo.

Then he moved to the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom. He unscrewed the shower head and sprinkled some small crystals into the head. He replaced it. Then, in a moment of inspired venality, he opened Alex’s medicine kit and found her toothpaste.

He opened the tube and pressed several crystals into it. Then he found a Q-tip and pressed the crystals down into the paste. He worked the crystal into the paste so that it would dissolve. He closed the tube again, careful not to allow any sign of tampering. He smiled. If this stuff was as mean as he understood it to be, a simple ingestion of the toxic substance would lead to an agonizing death within a few days. It would start with head pain and stomach discomfort and quickly deteriorate from there.

Inch’allah. As God willed it, he told himself.

Hamzah stepped back, breathing heavily within his mask, while Mamdouth continued to watch the door in the living room. The worst thing that could happen would be if the Canadian woman came home early.

There! Done!

“Mamdouth!” he called.

His associate quickly came back into the room. They lifted the mattress back into place and settled it on top of the bed. It settled on perfectly straight, just the way old Mellilah had left it.

They packed up the thermoslike canister and put it back in the suitcase. They clamped the suitcase shut. They walked quickly to the next room and pulled off their masks and gloves.