Countdown in Cairo

“I’m sure,” he said. “Most people never do.”

“How did Amjad take it?” she asked.

“I’d say he bought it completely,” he said. “But who knows?”

Throughout the following days, returned to Cairo and ensconced in a new hotel under a new name, Alex sought to recover from her own death. She stayed off the streets and emerged only in a veil. She dined with Rizzo one night and with Voltaire at his home the next. She met Voltaire’s wife as well as his two young children. His wife, it turned out, was a stunningly beautiful Japanese woman named Mieko. She was his third wife, he said, and was about thirty. The family brought Alex no closer to figuring out Voltaire’s origins than she had ever been. Alex wondered if even his wife knew.

But that was neither of the questions that raged before her.

In her quiet moments, in the many hours that she spent alone, she wondered two things. First, had their gambit been successful in feigning her death, and would the man she had known as Michael Cerny now emerge from whatever cover he was under? Would he attempt to finish his deal with the Russians or the Israelis or whoever was buying these days? She waited for a signal from Bissinger at the embassy in Cairo that would alert her of such movement. Alex would need to be present for the identification and the apprehension.

But then second, there was the larger enigma. Mentally shaking the pieces of the larger puzzle, she kept trying to work Yuri Federov into the equation of all that had transpired in the last year. There was a connection somewhere between Federov and Cerny, but no matter how much she racked her brain, she couldn’t locate the proper geometry of it. No matter how much she rearranged the angle and the pieces, she couldn’t nail the logic.

She went out for lonely walks as days passed. She kept her own counsel. Rizzo returned to Rome by way of Monte Carlo, Mimi in tow, where they tried their devious hands at chemin de fer and, according to an email, apparently came up big winners.

And all this time Alex remained in Cairo, laying low. A week passed. Then part of another. On instinct, she started again through the minefield of her laptop, accessed everything, backtracked, and marched forward. She reviewed all the salient events of the last year, ranging across Kiev, Paris, Venezuela, Spain, and Switzerland.

Then, expanding the venues somewhat, she started a handwritten list of all the places that had figured into her three operations. When she included the previously overlooked, Novo-Ogaryovo, Vladimir Putin’s suburban estate outside Moscow, there was a flash of light, almost like a little flare of ignited gas.

Suddenly she had it.

Words from William Quintero, the CIA case officer she had met with most recently before embarking on this trip, came back to her.

“Notice the Christmas tree. Nice homey touch, huh?” he had said.

Homey, indeed!

She reopened her laptop and went to the internet.

Yes, indeed. Alex was certain now. She had it.

She booked a flight to Switzerland immediately to seek corroboration of her final theory.

FORTY-EIGHT

When her flight landed in Geneva, rain was falling. She noticed the drops on the window of the aircraft when it taxied to a halt and then again on the windshield of her cab as she took it to her destination.

She didn’t go directly to Federov’s house. She knew better. She was traveling light, with only an overnight bag that was good for three days maximum. Worse, she had had to leave her gun with Fitzgerald in Cairo.

To the cab driver, a Senegalese in a camo field jacket, she gave as an address one that Federov had given her over the phone. It was a corner in one of the better residential districts of Geneva, a corner that led to a quaint cul-de-sac of lavish homes behind high walls and gates. She was tempted to think of it as a gated community, but then again the entire Swiss confederation was a gated community. She put that thought out of her head and stepped out of the cab.

The cab pulled away.

Two children on bikes glided easily past her in the mist. She hung her overnight bag over her shoulder. Across the street a sturdy young man was standing at a rare phone box, appearing to be in conversation, and down the quiet street there were two men walking.

More importantly, she had no followers.

The man at the phone box hung up and again Alex waited. She looked back and forth in each direction. Then, about a hundred feet ahead, maybe more, she saw a hulking figure all in black, standing in the road in the twilight. The man was wearing a cap and a scarf, and something about him looked very Russian, even from a distance. Then again, she decided, from three thousand miles away, the man would have looked Russian.

He raised a hand and waved to her. She turned toward him and waved back. The man at the call box walked in a different direction without ever directly looking at her.

The man in black stood his ground. Alex walked toward him. It wasn’t Federov, she knew, but one of his entourage, one of the tough boys whom he kept employed around the clock. That was fine. She figured he was armed, and, for that matter, she felt better that he was.

He seemed larger as she approached. He stood maybe six-four, a block of granite, with beautiful facial features: a Slavic Adonis. And idly-not that it mattered currently-Alex wondered whether he was one of the men who had so unceremoniously abducted her from Federov’s hotel a few months earlier. If he was, he gave no such indication.

“Hello,” he said, managing half a smile as she drew within a few paces.

She answered in kind. “Dobry den’! Dobry den’! Ya govoryu po roosskie. Hello. I speak Russian,” she said.

He looked at her, grinned, and sniffed.

“I speak Russian too,” he said. “Follow me.”

He said his name was Nick but didn’t say much beyond that. Nor did Alex ask for more. Nick led her for a block and then turned down another side street. They followed a high brick wall until they came to a gate. There was no number outside, no name, no marking, but Alex recognized it from her previous visit. Beyond the iron gate stood Federov’s house, window shades drawn in every room, lights blazing almost everywhere. Sometimes she thought the whole world was unmarked to her, a series of ominous enigmas to be decoded as she went along.

The man in black pushed a buzzer and waited. A voice came on in Russian. Alex’s escort mumbled something into a speaker. The two doors of the gate came heavily apart. The mist was thickening to a light rain and flirting with becoming sleet. Welcome back to winter and the darkness of a European November. Thank heaven they were at Federov’s doorstep and on their way indoors.

She remembered quite well the first-floor landing of the house, the grand entrance hall, the study to one side, the living room to the other. Nick unwrapped the scarf around his neck and Alex unwrapped hers. He led her to the salon, a room she had been in before, and Alex was thinking how different her arrival was here this time as opposed to last.

Inside the room, Federov sat in a leather chair in a corner, a light blanket upon him. Logs were burning in a fireplace. Yuri smiled at the sight of her and got to his feet with an effort.

“Hello, Yuri,” she said.

“Ah, my angel,” he said. Raising himself to his feet, she realized suddenly, was more of a struggle than it should have been. He had a heavy steel cane nearby on his left side. For a moment she needed to stifle a gasp. He looked maybe ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when she had last seen him in New York.

When she was near to him, he took her arm. His grip was nowhere nearly as strong as when they had first met. In the nightclub in Kiev, his arm had been like a vice, the strongest and most ominous arm that had ever wrapped around her shoulders. Since then there had been others, but she would never forget his strength that first night in Kiev. Tonight, his grip was tentative.

He drew her closer. She allowed him to kiss her on both cheeks, gallantly in European style. Then she drew back and he released her. There was a thin line of sweat across his brow. The room was cool, even though the fire was going nicely in the fireplace.

“You’re not well,” she said in English. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

At best, he was a man in recovery; at worst, a man in steep decline.

“Ah,” he said, raising a hand dismissively. “I had some bad elements inside me. Not just my personal nature, my soul, but my body too,” he said, trying to make light of it. “I had some surgery and am having some treatments. The doctors. Russian. American. French. In the end, what do they know, what can they do? If they’re not treating you like a pincushion with their needles, they cut you up like a piece of meat.”

He slid back into the chair, landing heavily.

“Will you be all right?” she asked.

“I will be fine. No disease is stronger than Yuri Federov.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said.

“You’ve traveled far. Would I lie?”

“Yes, you would. May I ask you what’s wrong?”

“You may ask, but I will choose not to answer. We can talk today of many things, and I will answer honestly. But my physical condition is off limits, hey. Maybe at a later date. So now, what else?”

A woman appeared in modest uniform. Yuri introduced her. Her name was Marie-Louise. She looked very Swiss in a white blouse and a trim black pencil skirt that went to just above the knee. Not surprisingly, Marie-Louise was very pretty. She seemed to be Federov’s housekeeper and her obligations were probably limited to only that because these days he didn’t look fit enough to be keeping a live-in paramour.

In fact, Alex hated to admit, he looked like a shell of himself. She reckoned if it wasn’t from illness, it was from medications. Heavy ones. She had always thought of him primarily as an evil man, perhaps beyond forgiveness, but now she felt sympathy and sorrow. Sometimes she didn’t understand her own