Noel Hynd - Countdown in Cairo

“I’ve stepped up my own personal security in here,” he grumbled. “One of those blue-haired old ladies downstairs got burgled the other day, did you hear?”

“No, I didn’t,” Alex said.

“Or she said she did anyway,” he said. “Who knows? She’s as deaf as a haddock and as senile as I’ll be in another few years. But at least now it will take someone a full minute to break in, as opposed to the ten seconds it probably would have taken before. You might consider doing the same.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Alex answered.

“Oh, I know, I’m being a cantankerous old goat,” the retired diplomat grumbled, “but my niece has been staying with me recently. You never know who’s hanging around the hallways these days. And the idiot doormen are usually busy getting off on American Idol or whatever they watch.”

Don Tomas was a nineteenth-century man trapped in the small quotidian horrors of the twenty-first century. It was what Alex liked about him.

“Anyway,” he continued as he trudged heavily to his living room. “Tonight’s not about me; it’s about my niece. You know each other?”

The two young women eyed each other as they walked.

“Alex, meet Janet. Janet, meet Alex,” Don Tomas said. “There! Now you’re old friends.”

“I think we’ve passed in the elevators,” Alex said.

“Well, thank God the elevator wasn’t plunging from this floor to the sub-basement at the time,” Don Tomas said. “I take the stairs myself. I’d take them three at a time, but I’d give myself a heart attack after one flight. Anyway, the steps are healthier.”

“Healthier,” Alex said as they walked past Don Tomas’s ample bar and impressive collection of cigars inside an elaborate glass humidor. Janet led them to the sitting area in the living room and, with a gesture of exhaustion, eased onto the sofa.

The distinctive prints remained on the living room walls, mostly art deco originals from the twenties and thirties, stylized prints of beautiful women in most cases, including some brilliant works by the French Sapphic artist Tamara de Lempicka. In a further bizarre decorative touch, Don Tomas had added an antique print of a racehorse that bore his name, a gift, he explained, from a friend on his recent fifty-fifth birthday.

“My great-great-great grandfather was a Confederate cavalry captain in the Civil War,” Don Tomas explained. “Those of his men whom he didn’t get killed seemed to be rather fond of him after the war. So they named a racehorse after him.”

“Apparently,” Alex said, eyeing the print.

“It was a gelding,” Janet said.

“It was not!” Don Tomas insisted. “And it must have been a pretty good old nag-it won the 1875 Preakness and was later put out to stud.”

“A little before my time,” Alex said.

“Just a bit before mine as well,” Don Tomas added, “despite what you might think. I can honestly say I’m closer to sixty than a hundred and twenty-five. Would you like a drink, by the way? I have a new bottle of thirty-year-old single Malt Balvenie, speaking of graceful aging.”

“I’d love a short glass,” Alex said. “Where on earth did you find a thirty-year-old Balvenie?”

“Oh, I have my sources,” Don Tomas said, pouring a shot of the single malt into a whiskey glass. “Plus, it’s not where I got it; the amusing detail is what I spent for it. Middle range of three figures.” He poured an ample portion for himself. “Janet? Can I get you something? Or would you like to stick to a carcinogen-laced diet soda or perhaps a beer, I hope?”

Janet had already retrieved a bottle of Budweiser from the refrigerator and plopped down on a chair before the sofa. She swigged from the bottle as Don Tomas and Alex savored the complexities of Caledonia. After two swigs, Janet embarked into some backstory that also had some complexity also.

“Okay,” she said, turning to Alex, “I have a lot of crap that I need to bring you up to speed on.”

“Then let’s start,” Alex said.

According to Janet, she had been one of those pretty but geeky girls in high school who had been a computer and electronics whiz. “My brain was so right-sided that the joke was that I might tip over,” she said. She had parlayed her straight A’s in computer sciences, physics, and math into acceptance with an academic scholarship to Georgia Tech, even though her real interests had been music and composition, the heavier the metal the better. She hung around Savannah for an extra year, picked up a master’s degree in computer science, and then followed a boyfriend to Washington.

The boyfriend didn’t work out and neither did her first couple of jobs. Then she answered a few newspaper ads for techie positions. One thing led to another, and the next thing she knew she was interning in the evenings at a cramped, smelly office in Alexandria, Virginia. There she was trained with surveillance equipment and how to do a quick drop in an apartment.

One more thing led to another one more thing. Janet partnered with a couple of different guys and did a string of trial drops for a local police agency.

“I got real good real fast,” Janet said. “For some reason, most of the partners I worked with dropped surveillance devices in cars, offices, houses, and apartments. It was always male-female teams. The guys did the dumb work of breaking and entering and watching the street. The girls were the ones who really put our butts on the line, going into people’s homes and setting up the electronic ears. It just seemed to work that way.” She paused. “Once I bugged a guy’s golf bag while he was putting.”

“How’d you manage that?” Alex asked.

“Me and this other girl, we bribed the attendant to partner us up in a foursome where our mark played golf. The other girl never wore a bra. She kept the guys distracted with her T-shirt and size-six shorts while I put an ear into the guy’s bag.”

“Good work,” Alex said.

The company Janet worked for was one of those incorporated-only-on-paper concerns, she continued. It was technically a private contractor. But there wasn’t much doubt as to where the big boss was: Langley, Virginia.

Eventually, she partnered with a dude name Carlos, she said, first at work and then in the off hours.

Don Tomas intervened. He spared his niece the agony of plodding through the most painful part of her past history, the way Carlos had been obliterated by a car bomb in Cairo. He summarized that as quickly as possible and brought Alex up to present day on the sighting of a former boss in Cairo, Michael Cerny.

“He was kind of my everything,” Janet said. “My Carlos.”

“I’m really sorry. But I can relate,” Alex said.

“Yeah. I know,” Janet said. “Like I said, I know who you are. You just didn’t know who I was.”

“That seems to be changing,” Alex said.

“We used to talk a lot because we worked together,” Janet said. “Carlos and me. We were both interested in seeing the sights in the Middle East. You know, the pyramids, the Holy Land, Jerusalem. I didn’t have anyone to go with and neither did he. But we had some vacation time. So we saved up some bread and put a trip together.” She paused. “Single girl, traveling alone in that part of the world can’t be too careful, can she?” she asked. “I didn’t want to be sold into a harem or something. I mean, much safer to have your guy with you.”

“Makes sense to me,” Alex said. “Seriously. The last time I was in North Africa the whole delegation nearly got killed. I have no desire whatsoever to set foot in the place again for a good long time.”

“Understandably,” intoned Don Tomas. “Where exactly were you in North Africa?”

“Lagos. Nigeria.”

“Ah,” he said. “One of the great hellholes of the world. That area is hardly safe for any American traveling alone,” Don Tomas chipped in with his usual cynical charm, based on a quarter century in the diplomatic corps. “Much less a young woman.”