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Shortly after the Mercedes had taken off from the naval base, Agricultural Attaché, in the driver’s seat, tossed Hector his stuff in the backseat—the iPhone, the black leather wallet, the keys, and the wristwatch, all contained in a large zipper bag—while Ozgur related the story of the CIA’s overnight success.
“Imagine a plan so devious, so perfectly aware of human insecurities, its main strength—and defect—was the seduction of fear. Fear of everything. Of leading an entire life as a kaffir in the Kenanah of Allah. Of being the bane of your family. Of losing love.” Ozgur raised his hoary eyebrows, the car speeding through the hazy streets. “Once upon a time, there was a Copt. Like all Copts, he was persecuted in his home country from day one. So when he grew up, he was determined to do anything to flee. Your Copt wasn’t rich, or handsome, or religious—tragedy is easier for the religious—but he was good in school. And after thanaweya amma he became a doctor. Which was a profession he hated. So picture him. Miserable, neurotic, lost in dreams beyond his grasp. Then—bada-boom!—he’s a literary sensation. Poor kid, he lost his head in the spotlights and the cameras. He thought he’d become someone he wasn’t. Someone who actually could flee. But that’s not how life works. So our Copt goes to the US Embassy and applies for a visa. Rejected. He sucks it up and tries again. Same result. Show me your passport, Mr Mikhail. How many visas have you garnered so far? None! Hand me your bank statement. Umm. Not a penny! So you told me you were a doctor? Do you have an apartment? A car? A wife? Oh, I don’t understand the Egyptian economy. Please try again later. Bye.”
Hector tried to power his iPhone on, but it had to be recharged. So he handed it to the driver, who hooked it up to the car’s charger. The car was now easing into the tunnel under Mount Victoria, which led out to the Central Business District.
Ozgur scratched an itchy point on his shin and continued his tale:
“It was then that he flashed on the Russians’ radar. On his fourth visa rejection, the kid made quite a scene at the Embassy. He yelled and demanded to meet with the ambassador himself. So the security guards—Egyptians, all of them—threw him out. The famed genius, Egypt’s Chekhov, was humiliated beyond measure. The guards saw him weep outside, waddle in his country’s dirt. And then, was Paris—thanks to you. You see, Hector, they got to him under your nose. It was in the City of Light that Kero met his mysterious spymaster: a man who promised him a panacea for all his suffering. Need a pass to freedom, Kero? Free sex with your girlfriend? Escape Islam for good? Come to Umarica! All you need to do is prove your loyalty, pass the Patriotism Aptitude Test. One little thing you’ll do for us, and your asylum is granted.
“I verified the details myself. One perk of living in Paris is that you get to hang out with a lot of DGSE vets. My source confirms the recruitment started at Shakespeare and Company. Our writer met a man who promised him a first edition of A Moveable Feast. He had to lose Fifi at Amorino—the ice cream shop—to continue his transaction aboard a small boat in the Seine. The cameras of Notre-Dame recorded only snippets of their forty-minute rendezvous. But they were enough. You don’t like what you see happening in the Arab region, Kero, do you? The violence. The rise of political Islam. The cannibals in Syria. God, Kero, how savage! How have we come to this? We Americans are naïve. We believe people. But not anymore. This sweeping madness must stop. And we need you, Kero.
“Soon, Ernest Perkins-bin Hakam was brought into the dialog. This half-blood Saudi royal is dangerous, Kero. Don’t let him fool you. He’s not who you think he is. He’s pro-Islamist. Yes. We, the CIA—now you know!—have been monitoring him for years. He’s a loony leftist, you know. A nihilist. A multicultural ideologue. He came to Cairo to do no good, and he’s no good. We want to rid the world of him, use him as leverage to stop his father from supporting the Islamists in Egypt and Syria and everywhere. Would you be so kind as to help us? Again, this is an aptitude test to prove your loyalty. So here’s what to do.”
There was a red sign. The driver braked suddenly. Hector looked at the weekend gaiety outside. In this green dystopia, this suffocating haze, Pulauis still managed to enjoy themselves. Colored masks and winking eyes and sprightly old couples. Children flying balloons in the smog—which looked like dialog bubbles in comic books. Palms canting over the bustling roads. Ferns tickling the car’s roof.
Traffic unjammed, and the Mercedes moved on. Ozgur said:
“Our spymaster offered a simple plan, generic but reliable. Kero would contact Ernest and somehow persuade him to leave DC. We didn’t catch their final words. Both Kero and his recruiter were gone by the time the cameras zoomed back to the boat. But we hacked the kid’s laptop at the res. And this is what we’ve put together. For weeks, Kero chatted with the lonely prince in DC, allowing him to vent his frustration with his father and the entitled millennials he met in America’s passionless capital. All with Fifi’s stupid help, for she was closer to Ernest than Kero. Then Kero took over. You should read the texts. This kid wasn’t Ibsen, but his manipulation is worthy of respect. Grass is always greener on the other side, he wrote to Ernest. Here in Egypt the people have gone all fanatic, either radical left, radical Islamist, or radical anti-Revolution. And we miss you, buddy. Even the professor is asking about you all the time. Why not come hang out with us? There is this trip that’s coming up and you can see Dr Kane and Yubi and all of us. A reunion party! A surprise! How about that? Don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul. That’s our little secret.
“Everything went as planned. Ernest landed in Pulau on May fifteenth, at seventeen-fifteen. He checked in to his fancy hotel around eighteen hundred hours. He showered and waited for his buddy to pick him up. But only the Chinese came. They served him up to the Russians on a golden platter. He was taken, as the hotel’s security cameras show, in under an hour after his arrival.”
The car got stuck in the traffic again. Hector looked out his window and saw the white domes of the Royal Botanic Gardens afar like giant airbrushed bees. “But how does Yubi fit into this?” Hector asked.
“Well, that’s a Russian classic. We got in touch with our old prince. The Russians wrote a script for him. I’d suspected that myself when you recounted that call that ticked you off. Think about it. Without this call, you wouldn’t have gone after the Russians at all. They knew we were digging for their Buratino, so they framed you to mislead us.”
“But I checked,” Hector said. “Yubi’s name was registered there at the hotel, as a guest.”
“And I made further checks,” Ozgur said. “The suite was booked to a ‘Mr Ernest Perkins,’ paid for by his daddy’s Dubai First Royale Mastercard. Obviously, the prince cared for his son more than he ever let on. Only two hours after his son was taken, the prince called the hotel and added a ‘Mrs Yubi Kane.’ Next thing he did was call you. And you swallowed the bait like a stupid fish. Any husband would have done the same. Their plan was airtight. We probably wouldn’t know anything if it weren’t for a tiny glitch—something even the best minds of the GRU missed in their calculations.”
The driver now let out a muffled chuckle. Hector hadn’t, up to this point, bothered to ask the so-called “agricultural attaché” about his true identity. But something about this chuckle—its conference with the car’s rapid climb onto the concrete bridge over the Disraeli, the head-shake that followed—prompted him to ask. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
The driver said, “Derek, sir.”
“And who is ‘Derek, sir’?”
There was a pause, before Derek replied, “Agent Derek Moore, sir. Far East Division.”
Hector crinkled his nose. “Daddy’s boy?”
Daddy’s boy slugged his wheel. “More like a taxi driver right now.”
“And if he wants to keep his job,” Ozgur said, looking at Daddy’s boy, “he’d better hurry up.”
The car lunged forward with a screech. The two men in the backseat cursed.
Hector then turned to Ozgur. “You haven’t told me about their ‘glitch.’”
“We believe that what tipped the balance of their scheme,” Ozgur said, “was its main selling point. Fear. They simply didn’t know about the kid’s fear of heights.”
“But the Chinese knew.”
Ozgur’s lips stretched into a wolfish grin. “Exactly, mon ami. Which is to say, our MSS sidekicks screwed the Russians over on that. Whether it was on purpose or by lack of proper communication, they’ll have to make it up to the Russians somehow.”
“How did it happen?”
“This was after we arrested you at the Gardens. Baxter went to tell your students and wife that you’d been invited to a ‘private dinner’ with Richard Fei. You would catch up with them later at the theme park. So off they went, those innocents. Kero, in particular, was so excited about it. He wanted to clear his name of his latest scandal on the skyway. He would go for it again, soar in the air, prove his mettle to his girl. But his girl had actually broken up with him—before she would break up with him, if it makes sense. She’d thought it out and decided she wasn’t eloping to Umarica with him. No way, bro. She was going back to her loving puritanical father in Cairo. The New World was the future, not a place. She was going to pour it all out to him, ditch him up in the air—if only the bugger would muster his courage and get onto the bloody ride. It was a Greek monsters kinda ride, and Kero’s seat was the cyclops. Fifi made fun of him and called out to Baxter to replace him. And Baxter jumped right in, kissing her on the cheeks. But even that wouldn’t get Lover Boy on the ride. The ride was about to leave. But then... something interesting happened.”
“Very,” emphasized Derek.
“Baxter gets a phone call. And who do you think it is? Our Cairo deputy. Some bosh about Yubi trying to escape. Meanwhile, the ride is mysteriously waiting for Lover Boy. The tubby Chinese worker is looking at Kero with shame written all over his face. He wants Lover Boy to be the cyclops. Everyone wants Lover Boy to be the cyclops. So cyclops with reluctance he becomes. And before he has a chance to change his mind, the ride locks and takes off. It climbs the railway with a shuddering noise. Every creak is a tick toward the final hour. Finally, he’ll defeat his phobia, be a man once and for all. And as the lever continues to creak, and our cyclops mounts to the hazy sky, he’s sweating and his smile widens. Beside him Fifi is gasping and laughing in her Medusa seat, gripping her belt with terror. And then the ride drops. Fifty feet from up high at a twenty-degree angle. Shrieks burst out. But he, Kero, can’t breathe, can’t even cry. He doesn’t feel his face. He gasps, and the ride sweeps him up with a left tilt and he is relieved now. He whoops. He screams in ecstasy. He tears off his mask and gulps the toxic haze. Fifi is avoiding his hand. He tries to reach out to her, but this thick belt is restraining him. The ride yaws and slews. They reach down to the bottom, upside down. Then they shoot up a hundred feet or so for another plummet. Kero shouts to her, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And there she drops the bomb. She wants to break up and won’t go to America with him. The ride rises, and our cyclops is crying. It is then that his belt unlocks and he drops to his death. You should see the video. He didn’t even realize he was falling until he hit the ground.”
Hector’s heart was torn between grief and rage. How could Kero be such a perfect swindler and a dim bulb? Was it love? Hector himself must, then, be guilty of the same crime.
As the car neared the dreary intersection of Middle and Prinsep, Hector asked, “How about the girl? Is she alive?”
“She’ll be all right, Hector. We’re, in fact, indebted to her. Without her we wouldn’t know a scrap. She’s the one who clued us in on this whole Paris adventure. Kero had told her on the first day. He’d booked their flights to JFK without her consent, popped the question, and acted like a lunatic. When she pressed him, he cracked. He didn’t tell her the whole story, though. Nothing about Ernest at all. Just that he’d met a ‘very important man in Paris,’ who’d asked him to spy on the Muslim Brotherhood. For his ‘reporting prowess,’ Kero was then rewarded with a job in DC to fight terrorism. Huh. Poor girl. So—what’s the word?—clean, I guess. She had no idea what danger she narrowly escaped.”
“How about the virus?”
“That’s history. We gave her the antidote. Not because of our good hearts, to be sincere, but because her stress level messed up with her immune system. She was sneezing and coughing when the Cardinal and me interviewed her yesterday. She wouldn’t have made it to Cairo.”
Hector wanted to feel the triumph of good over evil, of life over death, but the victory felt tasteless. Earlier at the naval base, Ozgur had told him that Fabio’s body had been found floating in the Disraeli river this morning. The Russians had slugged his body with six .380 ACP bullets. The Cairo deputy had been a fugitive through the night, with the full force of an American naval base scouring the island for him. So it made sense the Russians had weighed the odds and decided to eliminate their man while they still could. Yet something else troubled Hector.
Ozgur noticed his silence. “What’re you thinking of?”
“You told me Buratino was a children’s book?”
“Uh-huh. A version of Pinocchio.”
“Why not Pinocchio? Why the knockoff, not the original?”
Ozgur frowned and thought about this for a moment. “People like to remake stories. The Russians baptized their man with a Russian name to make him theirs. We may never know for sure. It’s like Churchill said, ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’”
“Put yourself in Kero’s shoes. You meet a guy at a bookstore who claims to be a spy. What’s the first thing that pops into your mind?”
“That he is? A spy?”
“Seriously? Just like that? Even I—with my family background—didn’t buy a word of what you said in New York ten years ago. Not at first, and not without evidence. Remember?”
Ozgur took out his peppermints box and tossed two lozenges into his mouth. He ground them with haste. “Do you know why spies fail often? ’Cause they think too much. Go take a shower, man. Say hullo to the wife. We’ll visit you in Cayuga sometime.”
Hector got out of the car. He stood there awhile, in the haze, thinking. He waited for a closing line, an epiphany, something. But nothing came.
The Mercedes drove away.
And Hector walked toward the residence.
* * *
The concierge’s kiosk stood in the hazy gloom by the gate. It was dim and its damage not yet repaired. The acrid saxophone player had not even wiped the lipstick off his broken window—this mark of sadist criminality by the seven travelers from the American Institute in Cairo who’d wreaked irremediable havoc on this eco-utopia.
The sun rendered the haze coral in color. The day was exceptionally hot, and moments after Hector had left the car he was perspiring heavily. He had no mask and the haze felt stinkier and heavier. He was coughing as he stepped under the boom gate, alarmed as he walked inside, frightened as he saw Baxter running with his distinctive limp toward him.
Baxter was barefoot and wearing his boxers only.
“What’s going on?” Hector inquired.
“We better run, boss. This place is on fire.”
“What? Where?”
“Our building. Our floor. I was lucky I caught the smell before I became a turkey. Hey, boss, where’re you goin’?”
Hector saw the few summer students scurrying away in terror. On the bridge, he blocked the way of one boy with long hair and asked him to lend him his mask. The boy looked defensive, so Hector snatched the mask off his face and ran on. The boy screamed after him, but then his roommates caught up with him and pushed him on.
Hector crossed the bridge and knelt by the glowing pond and immersed his mask therein. Then he rushed to save Yubi... if she was still alive.
The stench was closer. And the smoke too. It had the color and quickly dissipating form of a murder of crows. Hector rushed through the dorm’s entrance and up the stairs. The stairs were dense with smoke and he held his breath the longest he could. On the second-floor flight, he banged into a late survivor bumbling downstairs. Hector opened his mouth to ask him about the source of the fire, but an insuppressible cough prevented him.
He pushed himself up to the third floor with growing nausea. The fire was there in full bloom: vivid pumpkin, hot, hissing, and hungry. It’d caught the ceiling of the hallway, and the dead fumes were seeping from under Hector’s own door.
Unit 301, as it happened, was the nucleus of this inferno.
Hector coughed incessantly. He felt dizzy. But he managed to kick his door, and the smoldering wood fell without resistance. A tongue of fire pounced on Hector now, like a lurking nemesis. Hector retreated to the hallway, coughing and covering his masked nostrils with his sleeve. His eyes were burning. He looked at the glass windows of the hallway and tried to smash one of them. Yet the glass was too strong.
He swung his head toward his apartment and screamed, “Yubi! Are you inside?”
He walked back to the flames. The woodwork was a ring of fire, the blaze vehement on the left side. He peered through and saw his carpet and sofa ablaze. The curtain covering the wide glass window behind the sofa was the cradle of a growing baby of hell, which crawled to the ceiling before his burning eyes.
Something was keeping the fumes at bay, though, slowing their accumulation. The hallways and stairs, Hector realized, were overwhelmed by smoke because they were closed spaces.
And finally he spotted it. Above the sink there was a small hopper window that he’d never bothered to close even when the haze raged. And this small window made his heart rejoice. Hope!
Before his excitement paralyzed him, he charged through the door then to the sink, ouching and cursing all the way. He opened the faucet and quickly immersed his head and mask in the warm water. Then he took off his shirt and wetted it too. He spun around and scanned his burning residence. Yubi was nowhere to be seen.
“Yubi! Yubi! Where are you?”
No reply.
He wrapped his wet shirt around his trunk and maneuvered his way back toward the doorway. In the bedroom, he saw only fire. The bed, the dressing table, the curtains, the wardrobe, all coalesced into one giant blaze. This was the hub of the fire, its hellish womb. If Yubi was there, she was no longer among the living.
Hector felt like bawling. He coughed and rasped, “Yubi! Can you hear me?”
At length his cough got more strident and his nausea revisited him. He lurched back to check the one area of the apartment he needed to see last before he saved his wife—or perished with her.
The bathroom was on the southeastern side of the apartment. It had a folding plastic door, which had melted from the heat, and inside it was full of toxic smoke.
“Yubi, you there?”
Only the gases greeted him.
He closed his eyes, held his breath, and waded inside, fumbling for the sink on his right, then for the four pegs on the wall to his left. Then for the shower at the far-left corner. There he found her. He opened his eyes and saw her, lying on the shower base. She was holding a book close to her bosom, curling like a frightened child on a stormy night.
He dropped to his knees and held her. “Yubi, I’m right here, babe. Right here.”
She only moaned. She was alive but weak. Her face was sticky all over. He swung the faucet to the right side to let the cold water drench them. But cold was boiling hot. He quickly turned it off and heaved his wife away.
The hall was a veritable sitting room of hell now. The fire had grown out of the bedroom to overtake the whole apartment. The ceiling looked like a skyscape from the apocalypse. There was literally no square foot free of fire on the floor. The doorway was obliterated by the blaze, one with the wall. It was not visible anymore.
Hector hoisted his wife tightly in his arms and thought of an escape route. But there was none. Even the big window behind the sofa was covered by the burning curtain. It would take a lot of power to smash it, anyway. By which time both of them would be dead. And even if he managed to crack it, what awaited them was a free fall from forty-five feet—not a nice death.
The demonic pumpkin, masquerading as flame, drew nearer to his feet. Hector stepped back coughing, fighting to stay conscious. Yubi was getting heavier. His chest wheezed. The hot plastic stung his back, and he yawped with pain.
He stumbled back into the bathroom and laid Yubi on the floor. Through the melting door he saw the Pumpkin Demon laughing at him, its eyes hollow, its smirking face kin of Fabio’s. It had teeth made of white plastic, a maw dark with smoke. It drew nearer and nearer, and it licked his face with its toxic, serpentine tongue.
And then he was swimming in heavenly white clouds.