| |
The Presbyterian church beside the residence was swimming in darkness as Hector passed it on his way to Prinsep Street’s intersection with Middle Road. He walked by a Subway, a sushi bar, and a couple of pubs, before the intersection loomed. There was roadwork there, the workers helmeted and vested in phosphorescent orange. They were eight workers in all: A Malay, two Indians, and five Chinese. Pulau’s demography in a nutshell. The mother of all politics.
Across the road, Hector recognized a cavansite-blue Mercedes beckoning to him with its four-way flashers. He approached the car and opened the right back door.
The car instantly set out on its journey.
* * *
A fragrance tickled Hector’s nose. Soap with orange and bergamot notes. Only one son of a dandy he knew worshiped Neroli Portofino to such a degree the perfume seemed to percolate through his skin. But it couldn’t be. Could it? Hector twisted his neck and glared at the ghost seated beside him.
The ghost was in his early fifties now, his head buzzed, his ears big and flappy, and the veins in his forehead gorged like serpents. He was decked out in an off-white, double-breasted Soho suit, which did justice to his shredded Grecian physique. His eyes were still narrow and blue, lupine, but they looked more muted than Hector recalled.
Ozgur was a former wasp from the CIA’s Special Activities Division. His job title was forever vague, but it was assumed he cleaned the Cardinal’s table. Assassinations, rescues, interrogations, groceries, you name it, he was the man for it all. When the Cardinal had transferred to the White House in January 2009, Ozgur had shortly disappeared. Then word came he’d been torn to pieces in an explosion in the Turkish province of Kilis in April 2010. At his funeral, Hector had shared memories of Ozzie’s “holy coffee grail,” his outlandish birthday presents (think of a Beretta Cheetah handgun shipped via FedEx), his blonde-a-year dating ritual, his stale breath. All was improvised on the spot because nobody—not even Ozgur himself, apparently—had taken his death seriously.
Still, it was eerie seeing him after all this time.
“Well, well, well,” Hector said. “Look who’s got a new coat. Oh, is it you, Mr Turncoat?”
“Too much perfume,” justified the deserter of Vienna of 2008, pointing at his midsection for some reason.
“What are you two talking about?” asked the driver.
“Nothing,” said Ozgur.
“And what’re you doing here?” Hector inquired of the driver. “Thought this was a solo job.”
“You know, Hickey, sometimes I amaze even myself,” Fabio said, wrestling with the wheel from his ectopic right-sided driver’s seat.
“Well, don’t get too amazed there, Han Solo,” Ozgur said. “They put people behind bars for breaking the speed limit here.”
“It’s like Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Fabio made too wide a right turn at the next intersection. “Dimensions are all gone, man. Goddamn.”
“The Brits have their fingerprints all over this place,” Ozgur said disdainfully.
The car climbed onto an overpass. And with the nightmarish overview of a city drowning in the haze, Hector grew strangely relaxed. He’d not been in a real operation in nearly four years. This one, with its first passel of surprises, augured well.
* * *
The car shot through the nightlife of Pulau. Despite the tyranny of the haze, the city lived up to its reputation. Dazzling lights enlivening its streets and adorning its billion trees. People as plentiful as fish. Gooseneck lampposts bowing in alternating arabesques on the sides of the winding roads. Casinos and eateries battling to steal your attention. Skyscrapers reclining like sumptuous women in a Turkish bath. And a sky that was leaden, ominous, exquisite.
Slowly the roads closed in, and the car descended into a tunnel. What came on the other end was the necessary part of every city. The fleshpots were three miles south of the US naval base at the island’s northern tip, which Hector suspected was their final destination. Hundreds of wooden shacks nursed a smattering of cloth-covered souqs, where Squids in their khaki uniforms laughed and brawled, prostitutes slouched in dusty doorways, and street vendors shouted their stir-fried noodles and dumplings.
The car whizzed past. After a while, Hector realized they weren’t headed for the naval base.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“You’re getting angsty, Hickey.” Fabio swerved onto a highway that wound a steep path around Mount Victoria. And a few minutes later, he landed the car along the island’s west coast.
There were silent fences there. A few were factory warehouses, but most belonged to the National Army barracks. The water looked like over-brewed coffee, muddy brown and vapory. Across the other side, a lively civilization was visible, about three miles away. Hector made out the outlines of skyscrapers, minarets, and a star-topped tower. A few military launches cruised the water, and Hector followed their trajectories. And it wasn’t long before he visualized it. What his academic life was all about. The invisible wall. The international border.
The city across the water must be Kuantan, Hector judged, the capital of the Malaysian state of Pahang which gave this water passage its name: the Strait of Pahang. Here the first East India Company ship had landed, nearly three centuries ago. Yet because of Pulau’s rocky nature and harsh weather, it was dismissed as a geographical glitch, a funny joke from God.
It wasn’t until Sir Robert Fullerton, governor of the Straits Settlements at the time, had had a series of dreams featuring a circus—in another version, a mermaid—here, on this piece of rock, that Pulau’s modern history began. Sir Fullerton established the port on the east coast, naming it after his king. He built schools, hospitals, opera houses, churches, mosques, transforming Pulau into the Switzerland of the Malay Archipelago. He breathed life into it. And insofar as Hector was aware, the Pulauis were still grateful.
Hector rolled down his window. The haze was light and, indeed, breathable. So it’s true, he thought.
Malaysia exported natural gas and drinkable water to Pulau. Yet this arrangement was hit-or-miss on the best of days. Only last October, the Malaysian president had publicly ridiculed Pulau as this “red spit of dust” that, without their help, would “parch to death.” And the Pulauis had been outraged.
But then came the death of Pulau’s long-term leader and independence hero, Fei Guo, in December. The Malaysian president attended the funeral himself and gave a historical eulogy for Fei Guo. Fei Guo had been his “rival and conscience,” he said. “Looking back, I see one man riding the stallion of our modern history. Not me. No. Allah may continue to bless me with humility. But Fei Guo. Yes. Without Fei’s foresight, his good heart, his tenacity for the peace and progress of Southeast Asia, we would have continued to bicker ad infinitum, as the West pointed its fore-talon at us and guffawed.” There had been plenty of weeping and hugs. We’re neighbors and kinsmen, after all. And the Malaysian flags were lowered for three days, because Fei Guo was himself, by birth, a Malaysian.
Yet soon, another tribute came from Indonesia, this leviathan of the Archipelago, that drove a wedge into this whole reconciliation soap opera.
Hector recalled what he’d read about the subject with guilty delight. Even though the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sulawesi were the main sources of the haze, Sumatra—the Titanic-shaped island across from the Malaysian state of Malacca—was a furnace in its own right also. This year, however, the incineration of the forest was put on hold there. A year of silence to honor Fei Guo’s cremation, the Indonesians said. Let his ashes swirl highly and fill the atmosphere, tweeted one Indonesian poet, hover, unadulterated, over Malaysia, the country of his birth that rejected him, stranded him on a “spit of dust,” which before him wasn’t worth a shilling.
* * *
Hector fixed his eyes on a launch that kept pace with the car. Ozgur leaned over his shoulder and saluted two Pulaui officers in olive-green uniforms. The officers looked straight at them, but did not requite the salute.
“Pawns.” Ozgur crinkled his nose.
“Can’t tell a friend when they see one,” added Fabio.
“Where’re we going?” Hector demanded.
“Right over there.” Fabio indicated a gated edifice drawing near.
Hector recognized the place right away. Yubi had shown him its picture in her Lonely Planet book and said it’d been one of the fewest relics that’d survived the Japanese invasion of ’42 and the purge that’d followed Pulau’s independence.
Hector whistled. “It’s not open to visitors. Is it?”
“You’d make a perfect spy, Hickey,” Fabio said. “It is not.”
The double, harp-shaped gate opened for the car, then closed automatically when it passed. The Mercedes threaded its way on a stamped concrete driveway through a thick garden of plum, mango, and palm trees.
Finally, the car stopped next to a seahorse fountain made of black stone. And standing before the fountain was the historic monument. It was a three-story Georgian edifice of limestone and wood, complete with side gables, pilasters, and freshly painted quoins. Rifled security guards in deep blue uniforms stood before its double wooden doors, which had fancy iron grilles and transom windows.
“Gentlemen,” Fabio exulted, “welcome to the US Embassy. Formerly, the Fullerton Palace.”
* * *
Fabio closed the door and took four quick paces to sit at the head of the table. It was an aged teak table situated, mercilessly, under a candelabrum hanging too low over their heads. The lighting was wane, and it gave the room a macabre feel. Over the mantelpiece, Sir Fullerton—gold-buttoned, neckclothed, disdainful—glared down at the three Americans.
And the Cardinal looked the bygone master back in the eye. “Victorians were funny people,” he said. “They had all those portraits and mirrors to keep looking at themselves.”
Hector felt like informing the Cardinal that Sir Fullerton was not “Victorian,” but thought the better of it and remained silent.
The Cardinal was dressed in a blue twill shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He picked his teeth with a pencil and turned to Hector. “What do you make of this place? Two billion bucks for this hen house.”
“It isn’t a hen house if it’s two billion.”
The Cardinal nodded and raised his hoary eyebrows in approval.
By which time, Fabio had opened a leather Gucci briefcase: It contained a few paper files and a MacBook. The Cairo deputy kept the MacBook, then sent the briefcase skating to his director.
The Cardinal picked a slim maroon file from inside the briefcase and passed it to Hector with a relaxed grip. “Simple logic. You’re a smart guy, and it won’t take you five minutes to get the gist of it. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”
Hector shook his head. He still couldn’t shake his confusion. He had correctly decoded a message about a meeting with the Cardinal. But up until ten minutes ago, he’d assumed he would meet with a dispatcher from the NCS or a local operative from the Far East Division. Not the CIA director himself, again. This was unnecessary, if not outright illogical. Even Fabio’s presence, which had surprised him in the car, seemed now overblown, ominous. As for the resurrected Ozgur, why he’d desisted from taking part in this meeting was a mystery unto itself.
Hector began reading the maroon file. It was the slimmest operation dossier he’d ever seen, three pages in all, all grainy photocopies of US EYES ONLY documents. The first page was a feasibility forecast, putting the success rate of “Operation C.O.R.O.N.A” at eighty-six percent. The second and third pages detailed this weird-sounding operation, and they boiled down to this:
To safeguard against the reversal of democracy in volatile, post-Revolution Egypt, Mr Ibrahim Noman’s daughter had to be “comforted.” Comforted how? That was Hector’s job, his babysitting duty. So “Agent Starry Night 03”—Hector—would work on Fatima’s millennial agnosticism to reprogram her, show her the underbelly of this benevolent dictatorship called Pulau, impress upon her pliant head the Kantian tenet that democracy was a categorical imperative, a rule both universal and good, never to be broken.
In other words, in order to prevent one man from turning against democracy, his daughter needed to hate a rich dictatorship? That didn’t make any sense! And a fiasco like this could only have come from a brain with generic, template ideas, a bureaucrat’s, such as Fabio’s.
Hector was now livid. All his hopes for an Armageddon to restore his name had been squashed. How could he be so gullible? Langley didn’t accept penitents. She fed on your guilt, dismissed your exploits like a toxic lover. Never celebrate successes, never explain failures, thus went her ignoble motto. And she lived up to it, Langley. One fat mistake, and you’re out, Hector. No purgatory. And you’re lucky enough if offered a spot in a theoretical limbo called AIMES. If anything, it kept you complacent, within the fold but not part of the clergy.
Never part of the clergy.
Which meant that their promise of a Cairo deputyship was just a dirty lie, a ruse to drag him here and make him partake of whatever plan they didn’t deem him worthy of knowing.
He was just a pawn to them.
“You think you can do that?” the Cardinal said, studying his face. “It’s not much, and she and her family trust you. I’ll give you that, you’re a trustworthy guy. That’s why we need you, Hector. Any questions?”
“Sir, I have to tell you,” Hector said, rising, his lips quivering, “you’re full of shit.”
And he walked out.
* * *
Hector knew his way. The corridor ended in a high-ceilinged foyer, which led out to the garden. But how on earth would he get back to the res?
He was thinking about this as he shot past Ozgur, who was seated on a padded chair between two big vases across from the door. Ozgur called out to him, and when he caught up with him, in the vaulted corridor, he took hold of Hector’s elbow and whispered into his right ear, “We’ll take a walk.”
In the foyer, a group of people was gathered at the bottom of a sweeping red-carpeted staircase leading to the palace’s upper two floors. Hector didn’t establish eye contact with any of them, fixing his eyes on the curlicued grilles of the front door. Yet a vague impulse—maybe it was the decrescendo of the mirth as they passed by, or a particular laugh, sharp and guttural—made him turn his head.
And he was obliged to make a stop.
They were five people. One was a British diplomat who excused himself politely the moment Hector and Ozgur approached. The others were two girls and two lusty-looking men. One of the girls was the same French blonde—the environmentalist—Hector had flirted with this morning. She wore a revealing red halter dress and held a half-empty glass of white wine in her left hand. He’d forgotten her name, yet—both to his dismay and delight—she remembered his.
“Hector, howdy?” She high-fived him with a slender, diaphoretic palm.
The other girl was a petite black girl in a white cashmere blouse and pale denim tights. She introduced herself quickly, in Louisiana Creole, as a public affairs student at the National University, fiddling with a goldenrod pendant over her bosom and fixing Hector with a smile that made him uneasy. The two men were white Americans. One of them looked to be in his early thirties, with trained pectorals and prominent facial bones and, overall, looked vaguely familiar: Something about his beaming face, as he stated his designation—“I’m the Embassy’s agricultural attaché”—suggested a spook or, more specifically, the idea of a spook. The other man was in his forties or early fifties, haggard (or inebriated), and authoritative in tone. He introduced himself as “the visa clerk,” adding slyly, “keeping the Chinese at bay,” with a wink.
The French environmentalist wobbled on her wedged heels and talked at length about her job. Hector found her, at length, tedious. But Ozgur seemed to enjoy her hoity-toity ramble.
“The Pulauis are so stupid,” she said. “All those sycamores, locust trees, and oaks, they release VOCs—”
“VO-what?” Ozgur said, a grin swallowing half of his face.
“Volatile organic compounds. The moment a VOC meets nitrogen oxide, what d’you get?”
“Babies!” Ozgur boomed.
The girl giggled. “Ozone, stupid.”
“That sounds like my name,” Ozgur said.
“The haze is of their own making,” the French girl went on. “Trees aren’t always benign as you may think. This jungle they built, it’s crazy, it’s killing them.”
“But I thought...” Hector chimed in, then changed his mind.
“His wife is very pretty.” The girl took a long sip of her wine. “She came up to me and she was like, ‘Why’re you flirting with my husband?’ And I was like, ‘I’m not flirting with anybody.’ So she was like, ‘You’re so pretty.’ And I was like, ‘No, you’re so pretty.’ So pretty. We’re friends on Facebook now.”
The conversation meandered for another twenty minutes. It went through subjects as banal as cheap hotels in Kuala Lumpur and as serious as the People’s Liberation Army’s naval capabilities. Eventually, it slowed down and it became convenient for Hector and Ozgur to excuse themselves.
Hector realized only then that, despite having chatted with these people for nearly half an hour, none of them had offered his or her name.
* * *
The Fraternity Bridge was not far from the Embassy. It crossed the narrowest section of the Pahang Strait—2.7 miles—and rose some thirty feet above sea level. It looked like the mummy of a steel-and-concrete insect. The piers gleamed, sent colored ripples through the water when cars juddered on. Two pylons, cast in the image of the Mermaid, propped two cable fans. And once in a calculated while—as if on a timer—a border patrol launch would skid under the bridge then veer fifteen or twenty feet away from the two spooks lurking in the great shadow. Hector and Ozgur would wave their hands to the officers, but the officers would not wave back.
Ozgur picked a pebble and skipped it. It was hard to see if it bounced, but he cheered anyway. “A woman like that, giving you the eye, and you’re like, I’m married, here is my wife? What’s wrong with you?”
“Two marriages can do wonders to a man,” Hector said. “She took a shine to you, by the way. Go knock yourself out.”
Ozgur dropped his pebble and swiveled to face him. “What’s eating you, huh?”
Hector paused awhile. “Ozgur, what exactly is Operation Corona?”
“What’s anything? It’s all rhetoric.”
“Lisa was vague with me. ‘A one-man job,’ she said. ‘Operation Corona. It’s like a Mexican beer on a sizzling day.’” Hector looked listlessly back at the palace. The thin haze swirling around its gables. The serenity with which it had acquiesced to the new landlords. “She said it would all make sense here.”
“And it does. COunter-Revolution with uppercase C,O, and R; uppercase ON; Arrest. CORONA. Get it?”
Hector looked at the colored piers, hypnotized. “We had a fling once, Lisa and me. It should’ve worked, but I was in a rough place, a loser with a PhD. I drank. It helped for a while. I worked very hard. But the Company booted me out anyway.”
“I didn’t realize we did that,” Ozgur lied.
“Thirty-one months. It was the longest period of my life. I got married, had a kid, then lost him. You lose your mind if you live like other people. We’re not cut out for it, the normal life. I couldn’t stand it, the slow afternoons and the demons screaming in my head. I needed to get out.” Hector picked up a stone and lobbed it. It missed the launch only by a yard, and the officers did not look happy about it. “So when Lisa called, finally, you can imagine how it felt. It wasn’t like going back, but being born again.” They walked away from the bridge, and Hector sat down on a warm rock.
Ozgur remained standing. “And then what?” Ozgur asked.
“We met on a felucca. Thinking about it now, part of me wanted it to be a date. Her lipstick was red like blood, and her bubblegum smelled of peach. She smiled and toyed with her hair and she was rude at first, but I knew she was happy to see me. And she told me a funny story.”
“Story? What story?”
“There was an agent before me in Cairo. His name was Courtney. Courtney as in a guy called Courtney. In Sweet Home Alabama they bullied him, so he moved to Cairo thinking he would find peace there. And he was right, but wrong. Anyway, this Courtney, he got lost in Cairo. When Lisa recruited him, he was a teacher at a language school in Maadi, some elite thing for local consumption. Lisa wanted him because some of his filthy-rich students were being recruited by a jamaa Islamiya seeking out filthy-rich Muslim kids. At first, Courtney seemed like a godsend. He was passionate, fast, and he helped Cairo preempt a bomb at the British Council, sometime in twenty-O-five. But he ‘smelled like poop,’ as Lisa put it. Something wasn’t right about him. Her suspicion doubled when he refused to sip at the toast to the victory. ‘I don’t drink anymore,’ he said. So Lisa upped her game. She dropped by his Mohandeseen apartment and said she wanted to discuss a ‘secret project’ with him. He let her in, and she bugged the bathroom and the hall. ‘I brought you some milk,’ she said. ‘Water buffalo. Uh-unh. You got your last toast. This time, you have to work for it.’ And she stripped for him. But the bastard wouldn’t do it. He was in a long-distance relationship, blah-blah-blah. So Cairo monitored his apartment. No boys. And no prostitutes. No-thing. Not even porn. Something stood out, though. And guess what? Courtney was whispering in his dreams. They rewound and rewound the tapes, slowed them down, and it was everybody’s worst nightmare. Courtney was reciting al-Quran. Next, they got a visual into his apartment from the opposite rooftop. Courtney read Sayed Qutb and Anwar and al-Awlaki. He prayed five times a day. When Lisa interrogated him, he said he was indebted to Langley. Had they not recruited him, he wouldn’t have seen ‘the light.’ And therefore, he was loyal to America, as long as America let him practice his religion freely.”
“What a strange story,” Ozgur said. “What’s your take on it?”
“Lisa said it was the air. Cairo’s air. ‘Seven thousand years of civilization, Hickey. The rot, the decay of two hundred generations. We’re breathing dead Pharaohs, Ptolemaic merchants, Roman soldiers, prophets, gods, Jews, Arabs. It’s a big tomb and we’re buried in it, breathing its curse.’ Her Maine Coon cat had gone feral after she’d moved to Cairo, she said, and it was then that she’d known. She thought she was going nuts, too.”
“So she went carpe diem on you.” Ozgur walked the orbit of his confessing friend.
“It didn’t work. The mood was off, for both of us. Lisa was annoyed about what was going on in Egypt. Two years after this big revolution, and people were protesting day in, day out. Nothing was getting done. Unemployment high. Power outages everywhere. And the country was going bankrupt. The Islamists had come to power by democracy, yeah, but the people weren’t happy about that. They hated the Ikhwan so much, they would’ve replaced the old tyrant on the throne if they could.”
Ozgur stood behind him and leaned over. “Bring it on, my friend. Keep going. It’s easier when you look your devil straight in the eye.”
A sudden movement by the pier stole Hector’s attention. For a second, he thought he’d seen a silhouette, a flicker under the bridge. But then the launch returned and with its strong headlamp, it dissolved the shadow. “I was recovering from Wayne’s death. My boy.”
Ozgur resumed his orbit.
“His anniversary was getting close. Two weeks after my rendezvous with Lisa, he would’ve been twenty months. Poor kid. Yubi hasn’t been the same.”
“Do you still love her?”
“I don’t know anything anymore. She’s been very strange lately.”
“In what way?”
“Stop right there and look at me!” Hector shouted. “What the hell is Corona? I must know!”
Only then did Ozgur stop. He considered his friend with a morose face, then said, “You have a lot of problems. You sure you wanna add to that?”
“What are you, my therapist?”
Sniffing the stench of the air, Ozgur raised his gray eyes to the leaden sky. “Knowledge is like medicine. It can cure, but it can also kill you.”
“Then I prefer to die.”
Ozgur nodded slowly. “Welcome back, Agent Kane.”
On their way back to the Embassy, Hector picked up a pebble and skipped it. It hit the side of the spying launch. One officer—the tubbier of the two—raised his fist in what the spooks took for a salute. So they saluted him back cheerfully.
* * *
With the extras in the foyer dismissed and half of a Hennessy bottle consumed by the Cardinal and Fabio—Sir Fullerton looked gloomier, his cheeks saggier, and a definite frown was visible on his brow—Hector received a presentiment of what was to come.
“You need a drink,” insisted a soused Cardinal, and Fabio poured half a mugful of the liquor.
Hector took his drink and seated himself on the nearest chair.
Fabio walked back to the far end of the table and returned with his MacBook. “Take your time.” He patted Hector’s shoulder.
It was a PDF file. Hector read...
February 6/2013
––––––––
MEMORANDUM FOR: George Moore, Director of Central Intelligence
FROM: Thomas Bolgers, Director of the National Clandestine Service
SUBJECT: Project C.O.R.O.N.A
––––––––
1. The purpose of Project C.O.R.O.N.A is to abort the Egyptian anti-democratic movement known as Tamarod. Since December 2012, Tamarod has gathered the signatures of over 25 million Egyptians, most of whom supporters of the deposed Mubarak regime. Tamarod seeks to annul the June 2012 presidential election, which has brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power by a narrow 51.7%. It also seeks to repeal the Constitution passed in December of the same year. Tamarod stands for Mutiny in the Arabic language. The campaign poses a serious threat to democracy in the Middle East. If democracy falls in the biggest country in the region, fledgling democracies in smaller Arab Spring states such as Libya and Tunisia will likely collapse as well.
––––––––
2. Tamarod’s initiator, Mr. Ibrahim Noman, 72, is a former OPEC Secretary-General (1999-2007). He follows the Sufi method of Islam and is a vehement anti-vaxxer and anti-modern medicine. Our psychologists suggest that both his late religiosity and his reaction to science are results of his late wife’s death of pancreatic cancer in 1992. Mr. Noman’s NGO Haram was the main platform for political activism during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Egyptian revolutionaries have given Mr. Noman the title of “The Godfather of the Revolution,” but colloquially he is better known as “The Big No.”
––––––––
3. Former Agent Starry Night 03 is serving a stint as a professor of political science at the American Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in Cairo (AIMES) where Mr. Noman’s daughter (Fatima), 24, is a student. Agent S. N. 03 is to be reinstated into his last-held position at the Cairo Station. Agent S. N. 03 will arrange for Ms. Noman to enroll in a summer class and coordinate with the Pulaui Embassy in Cairo for a study trip.
––––––––
4. Agent S. N. 03’s duties are to Triple-Eye Ms. Noman: Isolate, Immunize, then Import her back to Cairo. Following the success of his mission, Agent S. N. 03 will be promoted to Deputy Chief of the Cairo Station. Our Pulaui partners will cover the travel costs and offer generous per diems. They will also arrange for Ms. Noman to be injected with KV-19, a coronavirus similar to SARS which the Pulauis have borrowed from the Chinese PLA laboratories at our behest. KV-19 causes severe respiratory symptoms after an incubation period of one to two weeks, by which time Ms. Noman should be back in Cairo.
––––––––
5. Once the symptoms occur, Mr. Noman will be contacted by our Cairo office and be offered medical help in exchange for his unswerving loyalty: as manifested, for the time being, in aborting his anti-democratic movement, Tamarod. Our agents in Asia and Cairo will endeavor to accomplish their missions without compromising the CIA’s core values of Service, Integrity, and Excellence.
On the drive back from the Embassy, Hector couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d pledged to do. He didn’t for a second doubt that democracy was a good force. He wouldn’t go so far as to believe that democracies didn’t fight, or that they made people rich. Democracy, in his opinion, wasn’t designed for that. What democracy offered people in principle was maturity: It made people the masters of their own destiny.
Which brought him back to his current dilemma. Which held more weight: one person’s life or the growth of millions?
He listened to Ozgur and Fabio’s testing jest, too profoundly confused to play along.
“Say, what’s a cold bite?”
“A frostbite.”
“Nah, a frost hickey. Hah hah.”
“Who killed the electric car?”
“Mercedes.”
“Uh-unh. OPEL with a C.”
“Huh. Good one. Take this—”
“No, take this. Guy gets the hook.”
“He’s depressed.”
“No, he’s married. Hah hah hah hah.”
Hector plummeted deeper and deeper into himself. He’d been there before: the day his parents had died, for example, and the day his baby Wayne had passed away. He did not like what he saw there, so the trip back to the surface had to be quick.
The Mercedes dropped him three intersections away from the residence, way back west on Dickens Road. He walked a few steps, then realized the car was making the walk with him.
“Wanna get sick or what?” Ozgur was holding his forgotten mask through the window, the tattoo on his wrist spelling retired in two spaced syllables: RE TIRED, and above the tattoo was the sword-and-shield emblem of the Special Activities Division.
Hector took the mask.
“Take it easy, Hickey,” Fabio said from the driver’s seat. “You have my number if you need me.”
Hector watched the Mercedes go to the end of the street, then vanish into the haze.
He wondered if the past two hours had been a dream.
If this island was a dream.