Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

"The carpet bazaar," Chace said. "Which way is it?"

The man smiled, pointed back toward the west and south. She thanked him and wished him a good day.

"Inshallah," the man said with a smile, and continued on his way.

Chace started in the indicated direction, heading for the Al-Ghouri Complex, the combination mausoleum-and-madrassa with its red-striped minaret. Across the street from it, on Sharia Azhar, she found the first of the possible locations Borovsky had proposed, a narrow cafe, just opening for the day. She stepped inside and ordered herself some tea, sitting at a narrow table on an even narrower bench to drink it, while taking in the location.

There was no sign of el-Sayd, but she hadn't expected there to be. She had serious doubts about her ability to find the man at all. Cairo was one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and even with her choice of three possible locations, the chances of el-Sayd being in one at the same time as she was seemed ludicrous at best. Worse, he could be present, in the back or on a floor above, and she would never know it. Asking the staff if they had seen the man wasn't likely to be of much help, either.

She finished her tea, then checked her watch, saw it was only half-past nine. She headed back out onto the street, up to Sikket al-Badestan, heading west, stopping occasionally to peer at the items on display in windows and at stalls. If she'd exposed herself by stopping for tea, there was a chance she'd acquired a watcher, especially if Borovsky's intel was to be trusted, and the locations were hot spots for the EIJ.

But Chace saw no one who alarmed her.

The next stop was an Internet cafe, surprisingly busy, eighteen terminals in two rows of nine, all of them occupied by young men gulping down coffee, tea, soda, snacking on chocolates and nuts and fruit. Every last one of them seemed to be doing two or three things at once, chasing hyperlinks as they carried on conversations with their neighbors, tapping away at e-mails as they listened to the pop music playing from the radio behind the cashier's counter. Chace chose a seat near the door, ostensibly to wait for an opening at one of the computers, took out her copy of the Cairo Times, pretending to read.

There was no sign of him here, either.

Chace tried to keep her thoughts productive, tried to formulate a plan, but the sad truth of the matter was that this was the plan, and she didn't think it was a very good one. There was a reason el-Sayd had managed to survive for twelve years on the Mossad's hit list, and it wasn't by accident. If Borovsky had truly known where the man was, Landau would have sent one of his Metsada boys after him long ago. That they hadn't, meant that what Borovsky had given Chace was their best guess, but for all any of them knew, el-Sayd could have been holed up at Heliopolis or Giza or somewhere else entirely, perhaps even out of the country.

These were her thoughts and they infected her mood, and she was beginning to brood when she realized that the music had stopped and a man's voice was now speaking somberly on the radio. At every workstation, hands became idle, heads turned to better hear the sound. One of the young men present called out to the man behind the counter, and Chace's weak Arabic couldn't keep up, but she guessed he'd asked that the radio be turned up, because that was what happened next.

She leaned forward to the nearest person, a man no older than eighteen, trying to sport a mustache. "Min fadlak, law samahti. Hal tatakalam engleezee?"

He turned from the direction of the radio, reluctant, still listening. "English? Naam, a little."

"Has something happened?"

The teen frowned, shook his head. "They are saying a, what is it? A bomb? A bomb has gone off near the American Embassy."

"Oh, no," she said, convincingly horrified. "That's awful."

"Yes, the police, they are looking for the ones who did it."

"Good, that's good."

Chace sat back in her seat, taking in the room with new eyes. The reactions seemed to be much along the lines of the young man she'd just spoken with, but not all of them, and it struck her that if, in fact, el-Sayd had connections to the owner or employees here, the news might force them to move. Not the bombing itself, but perhaps the threat of the police. Cairo thrived on tourism, and the EIJ attacks on the tourists at Luxor in 1996 had hurt.

The police would respond quickly, trying to keep that financial disaster from happening again.

But none of the men at the workstations seemed to be looking to leave. If anything, they were at the computers with renewed enthusiasm, trying to glean news from the Internet. Chace looked past them, saw that the man behind the counter was speaking on the telephone. Beyond him there was a door, presumably to a back room, and Chace wondered if there was a back door as well.

She got up and stepped outside, crossing the street and buying a pair of very cheap but surprisingly good-looking sunglasses from a vendor, all the while keeping one eye on the cafe door. One of the young men from inside emerged as she was haggling on the price and headed west along the street. Chace handed over an Egyptian five-pound note and started off in pursuit, taking her time, sticking to her side of the street.

Her initial uncertainty vanished when she realized she was having to almost jog to keep up. The man was clearly in a hurry to get someplace, and although he didn't seem to be even remotely concerned with possible tails, his haste and the traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, were enough that Chace twice lost sight of him altogether, before he veered south off the street into a narrow alley crammed with stalls.

She lost sight of him for a third time around a bend that made her think back to the dogleg in Lambeth, where she'd tried to flush Box. She stopped abruptly, turned, feigning vague interest in a collection of bootleg CDs offered at the nearest stall, counting the seconds in her head.

He didn't come back.

Chace continued around the bend, hoping she hadn't lost too much time, hadn't lost him, and nearly cursed when she couldn't immediately find him. The alley dumped out onto Sharia Muski, heavy with traffic.

She couldn't see him and swore aloud.

Then she heard sirens, turned to look up the street, seeing three police cars, blue lights flashing, attempting to make their way in her direction through the clutter on the road. Chace looked back to the storefronts, seeing shops, restaurants, cafes, stall after stall, and people were looking at the oncoming cars, staring and wondering, and among them she saw her man, his reaction giving him away, moving while others stood still, ducking through the narrow door of a tattered shop.

Chace hurried forward to follow, feeling the pain in her knee return with a gentle thrum, as if cautioning her. As she had done with every other warning she'd received in recent memory, she ignored it.

The cafe was easily the most cramped and smoke-filled establishment she had ever been inside in her life. Perhaps a foot of clearance ran between the tables on the one side and the wall along the other, and with patrons seated, the room to move was halved again. Two sets of doors stood at the rear of the room, one on the far right wall, the other directly ahead of her.

As soon as she entered, every eye went to her, staring, and most of them were overtly hostile. The door at the back opened and a middle-aged man shaped like a tree stump emerged, carrying a tray, and at almost the exact same time the other door opened, on the right, and the man she'd been following emerged, looking much relieved.

The sirens outside were very loud, the cars coming to a stop.

That was what did it for her, what threw the switch, made Chace certain this was the place. Somewhere on the other side of that door on the right was el-Sayd, but he wouldn't be for long, and she had to move, and she had to move now.