wasn’t yet rich enough to turn away customers, especially those who looked well-off enough.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” Gemici said in Egyptian Arabic. “Misae el kher.”
“Ahlan bik,” the man said in response, in stilted but passable Arabic with an American accent. “Enta bititkallim inglizi?”
“Yes, of course, I speak English,” Gemici replied. “Welcome to my place of business. How may I be of service?”
“I apologize for the late hour,” the man said. The woman, who had been unobtrusively hanging behind the man, walked off and began looking at the pictures of cargo vessels on the walls in front of the secretary’s desk.
“Not at all. Please come in and sit.” The man came into Gemici’s office; the woman stayed outside. “I am Yusuf Gemici, the owner of this business. I shall make coffee, unless you prefer water? Juice?”
“Water, min fadlak.”
“Of course. You Americans are not accustomed to ahwa turki.” He retrieved bottles of mineral water from a small refrigerator next to the secretary’s desk, along with a bowl of half-melted chips of ice and a couple small glasses. The woman stayed outside, as a woman who knew her place should always do. “I do not forget how much you Americans like your ice cubes.”
“Shukran,” the man said.
“Afwan.” Gemici kept the door to his office partially open. The woman was still looking at the pictures of various ships on the wall—she hadn’t said a thing, unusual for a Western woman. “We do not see many Americans here in our little city, except for the oil workers and tourists taking the felucca tours. Have you been on the Mouth of the Nile tour?”
“No, not yet.”
Gemici gave the man his business card after scribbling some Arabic on the back. “My brother runs the Timsaeh tour company. The best boats on the Mediterranean. Show him this card and he will get you a bottle of Omar Khayyam wine for your sunset cruise.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Pleasantries over, Gemici leaned back in his chair expansively. “How may I help you, sir?”
“My company is in the process of negotiating a sale of newly designed natural-gas metering equipment to the Egyptian General Petroleum Company,” the man said. Gemici’s eyes widened. The Egyptian General Petroleum Company was Egypt’s second-largest petroleum consortium, with an immense presence in the area because of its development of several natural-gas fields near Port Said, on the other side of the Gulf of Dumyat. “The Point Fouad project is ready to expand, and my company has a contract to provide new equipment to be shipped from Newark, New Jersey, to Dumyat.”
“Very excellent,” Gemici said. “I am glad you chose us. We have a very fine vessel to move your equipment.” He stood and went over to a large photograph of a ship on his office wall. “My pride and joy: the King Zoser, named after the man who united the two desert kingdoms into one nation which became Mi?r, or modern-day Egypt,” he said. “She is fast, reliable, efficient, fully inspected and certified by the U.S. Coast Guard, and specially designed to safely and securely handle outsized and delicate machinery such as computerized field equipment. We require very little handling equipment at the pier, so we routinely go into smaller ports which is often much more convenient for our clients. We can even offload outsized equipment directly onto offshore platforms if necessary without the use of helicopters.”
“The crew is especially important to this shipment, sir,” the man said. “To cut costs, I would like to know if the crew has any experience handling equipment such as ours. We would like to avoid sending a number of engineers on the ship if at all possible.”
“But of course!” Gemici said. “As I said, we specialize in serving the oil and gas exploration industry with safe, secure, and professional transportation support.”
“Excellent,” the man said. “In fact, I believe it was one name in particular from your company that came very highly recommended: Gennadyi Boroshev.”
Gemici kept his smile in place, but he could feel sweat start to pop out around his collar and in the soles of his feet. “I am sorry to inform you, sir, that I do not know of any such man. He does not work for my company.”
“Then maybe you can tell us where to find him, Mr. Gemici.” The woman had come into the office, followed by two younger men with obvious gun bulges under their sportcoats. He noted the shades in the windows in the outer office were all closed and the lights turned out. The woman held up a wallet and showed a gold badge. “Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, FBI,” she said. The men with her closed the rest of the blinds in Gemici’s office and started going through his file drawers. “Gennadyi Boroshev. Where is he?”
Gemici closed his eyes as his heart sank through his chest into his bowels. Shit, he knew this was going to happen. But he still motioned to the agents rifling his file cabinets. “Do you not need a search warrant to do that, Special Agent DeLaine?”
“Do you want me to get a warrant, Yusuf?” Kelsey asked. “Would you like me to call the Mubahath el-Dawla? I’m sure they’d want to know what you’re up to.” The Mubahath el-Dawla, or State Security Investigations, was the Egyptian internal intelligence force, the secret Gestapo-like unit that provided information to the President and the Ministries of the Interior and Justice—any way they could, in whichever way the ministries wanted it, or so their reputations suggested.
Gemici’s eyes were darting around the room now in confusion, but he was still trying to bluff his way out of this, waiting to hear exactly how much information they had or if they were just on a fishing expedition. “Boroshev…Boroshev…”
“He was on board your vessel for several weeks on your last North and South American cruise,” Kelsey said. “As far as we can tell, he was on board all the way from Damascus to Richmond and all the way back to here. You don’t remember him?”
Crap, Gemici thought, they had everything…“Ah! You said Boroshev! Your accent is difficult for me,” he said, smiling and bobbing his head. “Of course I recognize him. Russian. Ugly. Sickly. A drug fiend, if I remember correctly. I do not know where he is.”
“Got the crew files, Kelsey,” one of the agents searching his file drawers said.
“Boroshev was not a crew member,” Gemici said. “He was a courier, a messenger boy. We paid very little attention to him.”
“Wall safe,” the other agent said, moving the large photograph of the King Zoser aside. He immediately started searching around the area of the picture, especially in dark, out-of-the-way places.
“That is the owner’s safe,” Gemici said.
“I thought you were the owner, Yusuf.”
“I am just a lowly ship’s captain,” he said. “I am not allowed to touch it. I do not have the…”
“Got it,” the second agent said. He copied a combination from the very edge of a piece of trim around the photograph on his notepad and then entered it into the wall safe, and the door popped open.
“You men are all alike—you can’t remember combinations so you write it on something nearby, thinking no one will ever find it,” Kelsey said. The second agent withdrew another batch of personnel files.
“I told you, Boroshev was a courier, a representative of a client,” Gemici said. The second agent flipped quickly through the personnel files, then went back to the open wall safe. “I have no records on him whatso…
“False bottom,” the agent said. He removed a piece of carpet from the floor of the safe, then a piece of metal.
“I’m afraid I must insist that I call the harbormaster and local police,” Gemici said. “This is getting quite…”
“More files,” the agent said, withdrawing another handful of folders from the bottom of the safe.
“This is outrageous!” Gemici said, his eyes bugging out in panic. “This is illegal! I shall report you to the ministry of justice in Cairo! You have no right to—”
“Got it,” the agent said, handing Kelsey a folder.
“Right on top—must be an important person, eh, Yusuf?” Kelsey said, flipping through the file. “Bottom note here says something about two million. Dollars? Egyptian pounds? Is this what Boroshev got paid to bring a nuclear weapon into the United States?”
“Nuclear weapon?” Gemici cried. “I know nothing of this! Nothing!”
