Ken Follett: Triple (1991)

OBSERVE AND FOLLOW PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH SCHULZ ARRIVING CAIRO FROM MILAN WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 1968 FOR SEVERAL DAYS. AGE 51 HEIGHT 180 CM WEIGHT 150 POUNDS HAIR WHITE EYES BLUE NATIONAL. ITY AUSTRIAN COMPANIONS WIFE ONLY.

The passengers began to Me out of the aircraft, and Towfik spotted his man almost immediately. There was only one tall, lean white-haired man on the flight. He was wearing a light blue suit, -a white shirt and a tie, and carrying a plastic shopping bag from a duty-free store and a camera. His wife was much shorter, and wore a fashionable mini-dress and a blonde wig. As they crossed the airfield they looked about them and sniffed the warm, dry desert air the way most people did the &at time they landed in North Africa. The passengers disappeared into the arrivals hall. Towfik waited on the observation deck until the baggage came off the plane, then he went inside and mingled with the small crowd of people waiting just beyond the customs barrier. He did a lot of waiting. That was something they did not teach you-how to wait. You learned to handle guns, memorize maps, break open safes and kill people with your bare hands, all in the first six months of the training course; but there were no lectures in patience, no exercises for sore feet, no seminars on tedium. And it was beginning to seem like There is something wrong here beguming to seem Lookout lookout beginning to-- There was another agent in the crowd. Towfik's subconscious bit the fire alarm while he was thinking about patience. The people in the little crowd, waitIng for relatives and friends and business acquaintances off the Milan plane, were impatient. They smoked, shifted their weight from one foot to the other, craned their necks and fidgeted. There was a middle-class family with four children, two men in the traditional striped cotton galabiya robes, a businessman in a dark suit, a young white woman, a chauffeur with a sign saying FORD MOTOR COMPANY, and- And a patient Like Towfik, he had dark skin and abort hair and wore a European-style suit. At first glance he seemed to be with the middle-class family-just as Towfik would seem, to a casual observer, to be with the businessman in the dark suit. The other agent stood nonchalantly, with his hands behind his back, facing the exit from the baggage hall, looking unobtrusive. There was a streak of paler skin alongside his nose, like an old war. He touched it, once, in what might have been a nervous gesture, then put his hand behind his back

question was, had he spotted Towfik? Towfik turned to the businessman beside him and said, "I never understand why this has to take so long." He smiled, and spoke quietly, so that the businessman leaned closer to hear him and smiled back; and the pair of them looked like acquaintances having a casual conversation.

7be businessman said, "The formalities take longer than the fliOV Towfik stole another glance at the other agent. The man stood in the same position, watching the exit. He had not attempted any camouflage. Did that mean that he had not spotted Towfik? Or was it just that he had second-guessed Towfik, by deciding that a piece of camouflage would give him away? The passengers began to emerge, and Towfik realized there was nothing he could do, either way. He hoped the people the agent was meeting would come out before Professor Schulz. It was not to be. Schulz and his wife were among the first little knot of passengers to come through. The other agent approached them and shook hands. Of course, of course. The agent was there to meet Schulz. Towfik watched while the agent summoned porters and ushered the Schulzes away-, then he went out by a different exit to his car. Before getting in he took off his jacket and tie and put on sunglasses and a white cotton cap. Now he would not be easily recognizable as the man who had been waiting at the meeting point. He figured the agent would have parked in a no-waiting zone right outside the main entrance, so he drove that way. He was right. He saw the porters loading the Schulz baggage into the boot of a five-year-old gray Mercedes. He drove on. He steered his dirty Renault on to the main highway which ran from Heliopolis, where the airport was, to Cairo. He drove at 60 kph and kept to the slow lane. The gray Mercedes passed him two or three minutes later, and be accelerated to keep it within sight. He memorized its number, as it was always useful to be able to recognize the opposition's cam The sky began to cloud over. As he sped down the straight, palm-lined highway, Towfik considered what he had found out so far. The cable had told him nothing about Schulz except what the man looked like and the fact that he was an Austrian professor. The meeting at the airport meant a great deaI, though. It had been a kind of clandestine VIP treatment. Towfik had the agent figured for a local: everything pointed to that-his clothes, his car, his style of waiting. That meant Schulz was probably here by invitation of the government, but either he or the people he had come to see wanted the visit kept secret. It was not much. What was Schulz professor of? He could be a banker, arms manufacturer, rocketry expert or cotton buyer. He might even be with Al Fatah, but Towfik could not quite see the man as a resurrected Nazi. Still, anything was possible. Certainly Tel Aviv did not think Schulz was important: if they had, they would not have used Towfik, who was young and inexperienced, for this surveillance. It was even possible that the whole thing was yet another training exercise. They entered Cairo on the Shari Ramses, and Towfik closed the gap between his car and the Mercedes until there was only one vehicle between them. The gray car turned right on to the Comiche al-Nil then crossed the river by the July Bridge and entered the Zamalek district of Gezira island. There was less traffic in the wealthy, dull suburb, and Towfik became edgy about being spotted by the agent at the wheel of the Mercedes. However, two minutes later the other car tamed into a residential street near the Officers' Club and stopped outside an apartment block with a jacaranda, tree in the garden. Towfik immediately took a right turn and was out of sight before the doors of the other car could open. He parked, jumped out, and walked back to the corner. He was in time to see the agent and the Schulzes disappear into the building followed by a caretaker in galabtya struggling with their luggage. Towfik looked up and down the street. There was nowhere a man could convincingly idle. He returned to his car, backed it around the corner and parked between two other cars on the same side of the road as the Mercedes. Half an hour later the agent came out alone, got into his car, and drove off. Towfik settled down to wait.

It went on for two days, then it broke. Until then the Schulzes behaved like tourists, and seemed to enjoy it. On the first evening they had dinner in a nightclub and watched a troupe of belly-dancers. Next'day they did the Pyramids and the Sphinx, with lunch at Groppi!s and

dinner at the Nile Hilton. In the morning on the third day they got up early and took a taxi to the mosque of Ibn Tulun. Towflk left his car near the Gayer-Anderson Museum and followed them. They took a perfunctory look around the mosque and headed east on the Shari al-Salibah. They were dawdling, looking at fountains and buildings, peering into dark tiny shops, watching baladi women buy onions and peppers and camers feet at street stalls. They stopped at a crossroads and went into a tea-shop. Towfik crossed the street to the sebeel, a domed fountain behind windows -of iron lace, and studied the baroque relief around its walls. He moved on up the street, still within sight of the tea-shop, and spent some time buying four misshapen giant tomatoes from a white-capped stallholder whose feet were bare. The Schulzes came out of the tea-shop and turned north, following Towfik, into the street market. Here it was easier for Towft to idle, sometimes ahead of them and sometimes behind. Frau Schulz bought slippers and a gold bangle, and paid too much for a sprig of mint from a haff-naked child. Towflk got far enough in front of them to drink a small cup of strong, unsweetened Turkish coffee under the awning of a cafe called Nasif 9. They left the street market and entered a covered souq specializing in saddlery. Schulz glanced at his wristwatch and spoke to his wife-giving Towfik the first faint tremor of anxiety-and then they walked a little faster until they emerged at Bab Zuweyla, the gateway to the original walled City. For a few moments the Schulzes were obscured from TowWs view by a donkey pulling a'cart loaded with Ali-Baba jars, their mouths stoppered with crumpled paper. When the cart passed, Towfik saw that Schulz was saying goodbye to his wife and getting into an oldish gray Mercedes. Towflk cursed under his breath. The car door slammed and it pulled away. Fran Scbulz waved. Towfik read the license plate-it was the car he had followed from Heliopolis-and saw it go west then turn left Into the Shari Port Said. Forgetting Frau Schulz, he turned around and broke into a run.