Noel Hynd - Countdown in Cairo

He joined the line. There was some sort of commotion going on where the cabs were being routed to the end of the line. He became wary. Anything unusual put him on alert. But he settled himself and stood in line with his bag. He tried to discern what was going on.

A sense of paranoia gained on him.

Then a Cairo taxi, a van with its off-duty sign turned on, pulled out of the regular cab line and, with the assistance of the local police, pulled up to the line of waiting passengers. It stopped right in front of Cerny. The rear door opened. What was this? he wondered.

Cerny felt a tap on his shoulder and heard a woman’s voice.

“Michael?”

He felt a flash of anxiety. He turned. It was the woman in the veil again, the same one that had been at the luggage carousel, the shapely woman in Islamic garb over Western clothing.

“Nice to see you again,” she said.

Cerny stared. He didn’t like this. Not at all.

Alexandra LaDuca reached to her veil and removed it quickly so that he could see her full face. She could see the look of horror when he recognized her. In that instant, Michael Cerny knew that his operation had crashed.

Cerny threw a fist at her. But she parried it expertly and threw her own shot into his face. She nailed him directly in the nose. He staggered and would have fought more, but four powerful hands came out of the back of the van. They hauled him backward. He shouted profanely, but no one came to his rescue. Struggling and shouting, he was pulled into the van.

People in line yelled, screamed, and broke away as the commotion spread. But as usual, the police protected the public order. Inside the van, a cloth rag wrapped across Cerny’s face and smothered him. He felt an incipient buzz. Then he felt a needle in his shoulder.

Alex picked up his bag and threw it in.

She climbed into the van with him and pulled the doors shut. Tony pulled away, the police clearing a corridor for them to escape.

On the third day after Cerny’s apprehension, Alex’s cell phone rang in her room at the Metropole. She answered quickly, thinking it was her arrangements to return to America. She had an evening flight that day and was anxious to get home.

But the call had little to do with travel. It was Bissinger at the embassy. Her request had been granted, Fitzgerald told her, and she could have thirty minutes to speak directly to Michael Cerny, one-onone in his cell. But he was about to be moved, Bissinger explained, so it would have to be today.

“Moved to where?” she asked.

“Just moved,” Fitzgerald said.

“Right. When do I get to see him? I have a flight tonight to Rome.”

“Now,” Fitzgerald said. “There’s a man in the lobby waiting for you. You’ll recognize him.”

“Thank the powers that be for me.”

“Personal courtesy of Voltaire himself,” Fitzgerald said. “Call it professional courtesy. The best of all possible worlds.”

“I’ll thank him when I see him.”

“You won’t see him. Unless you do. But I’m told you’ll see his handiwork-and have some closure.”

For some reason that gave her a little cringe. “Why does that sound so ominous?” she asked.

Bissinger ignored the question. “It’s a rough place where you’re going. Proceed accordingly,” he continued.

“Is my visit with the prisoner official or unofficial?” she asked.

“Unofficial. No notes. No recording devices. It’s strictly off the books. Don’t sign in. There’s a window of twenty minutes. The prisoner is supposed to be alone in his cell; you’re going to keep him company.”

“Got it,” she said.

“I hope so.”

“Gun?” she asked.

“Bring it along, but you’ll have to check it before you go onto the dance floor. I need it back here anyway, and you can’t take it on the plane no matter who you know or work for.”

“Good point,” she said.

She threw on a pair of jeans and a jacket, kept her Beretta in her shoulder bag, stuffed the rest of her belongings in a travel duffel, and went down to the lobby. An SUV was waiting for her. She recognized Tony, who had by now become her favorite chauffeur in all of North Africa, and possibly the entire continent.

Tony drove her to yet another seedy area of the city, and soon they were going through checkpoints-first police, then military. Before long they were going down a remote highway through the sand, the scorching road seeming to go from nowhere to nowhere.

Along the sides of the road were trenches, with wire and an occasional sentry post. They were in a no-man’s-land of some sort, and Alex was already looking forward to leaving. Scenes like this made her love America and its freedoms all the more.

Then they arrived at a final gate, which was manned by soldiers. Tony seemed to know them. Alex looked at them carefully. She saw rank and insignia on their uniforms, and they appeared to be Arab. But she couldn’t tell exactly what they were, and she knew better than to ask. They were on a paramilitary site of some sort, one of those official unofficial brigades one finds in certain nondemocratic countries.

Everyone, everything, was unmarked. There were sentries and soldiers all over the place. Most of the buildings looked like guardhouses, tan walls set on sand with high barred windows. It looked like something from the cold war, but when the SUV pulled up to a stop and she stepped out, it wasn’t cold at all. It was easily a hundred and ten degrees in the broiling sun.

Tony said little, though he did ask her for her gun. She handed it over, holster and all.

“Can you have it returned to Mr. Fitzgerald at the embassy?” she asked.

“I’ll give it to my boss,” he said. “I think that would put it in the right channels.” His “boss” meant Voltaire.

“I think it would,” she agreed.

He walked her to one of the guardhouses and knew exactly where he was going. He led her past three guards with automatic weapons, into a building where a distant air-conditioning unit rumbled and kept the heat down to about ninety, plus the humidity. The architecture reminded her of the morgue where she had posed as dead. She cringed.

She went through two more locked gates and then into a cell where Michael Cerny was sitting on a cot. There was a steel table bolted to the floor, a plastic chair, and a pair of rings on the wall that could accommodate wrists. The area below the rings was stained. Alex had to tamp down her disgust when it dawned on her that the stains were from many years of blood.

Cerny saw her. First he looked at her in surprise, then fear.

Alex sat down on the chair.

Cerny continued to stare at her. He was sweating as if someone had opened an invisible faucet above him.

“Hello, Michael,” she said.

“I have nothing to say to you,” he said. “I don’t know why you came.”

“I’m here to talk anyway,” she said.

“It’s not you who worries me,” he said.

“Maybe it should.”

“It still doesn’t,” he said. After another empty moment, he said. “I understand they’re moving me.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” she said.

“Where to? Do you know that?”

She shrugged.

“Figures,” he said.

She had been thinking, as she entered this chamber, on what she really had to say to him-how she might have lectured him on a sense of decency or blamed him for the death of her fiance. But none of those words came to her, and the clock was ticking from the time she sat down.

“Quite a difference between here and when we first met, isn’t it?” she asked. “Or even between here and the last time we saw each other.”

“Nothing personal, you understand,” he said after several distant seconds.