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The first face he saw was Daddy’s boy’s. The prominent zygomata and the smug smile raised the blood pressure in Hector’s vessels.
Hector croaked, “What brought you back?”
“You’re lucky you’re old enough to forget your phone,” Ozgur said.
Ozgur came and dropped Hector’s iPhone on the bed beside his right hand. Hector noticed the intravenous line running a clear fluid into the back of his wrist. He tried to rise, but the pain in his left side overpowered him. He let out a curse and lay back in agony. Only then did he become aware a nasal cannula was hooked to his nose, breathing oxygen into his nostrils at a slow, almost imperceptible rate.
“You’re alive,” Derek pointed out.
“How’s Yubi? Is she alive?”
“You really wanna know?” Ozgur looked foreboding.
“I can take it.”
Ozgur chortled. “She’s okay, buddy. She had surgery to drain the blood out of her head. It’s like an ‘epidural hematoma,’ as the nurse said. They drilled a hole in her skull and sucked it all out. She’ll function as much as you want her to.”
Hector was silent awhile. He looked up at the bisque-colored ceiling, then asked, “What place is this?”
“A hospital?” Derek said, a little gigglish.
“Winston Churchill Hospital,” Ozgur said.
Despite his pain, Hector chuckled. “Man, I love this country.”
“And they love you, too,” Ozgur said. “That’s why they tried to kill your wife.”
“What?” Hector’s blithe was all drained. “What are you talking about?”
“Your concierge,” Derek said, stepping away from the bed, “was found dead inside your bedroom.”
“Take it easy,” Ozgur joked. “I don’t think Yubi had the hots for this guy—”
“Get to the point,” Hector cut him off, a crushing pain in his ribs.
“Point is,” Ozgur said, “your concierge was a bastard. The Chinese ordered him to kill your wife, on Russian orders of course. Obviously the Russkies have it in for you. You’re a free man, and their best mole in decades is dead. But again they screwed up. Simply because you went there and saved her. She resisted her attacker, so he hit her. And she hit him back—killing him, actually. Then she ran to the bathroom to hide. That’s when the fire started.”
“At least, that’s our interpretation,” said Derek.
Hector felt needles piercing the sac of his heart. “Did she say anything?”
“She’s not conscious yet,” Derek said.
There was movement outside the room. A stretcher carrying a chattering patient moved past the doorway.
Hector asked, “And what caused the fire?”
“Electric short circuit,” Ozgur said with a puff. “That’s the Pulaui report.”
“No kidding.”
“Yep,” Ozgur said.
“A lot is gonna change, sir,” said Derek. “We’re rethinking our alliance with Pulau in the first place. This country has gone bonkers now that its founder is gone. We were aware there were some Chinese sympathizers among them, but nothing like the thorough infiltration we have seen. And it’s happening all over Asia. China, in this day and age, isn’t fazed by us. No country is. And this”—he paused, fumbling for word—“is scary.”
Hector thought about his late tragedy. Before he’d come to this island, he’d been a firm believer in the global American hegemony. That is to say, he’d seriously believed that the United States was the mightiest nation on earth. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
After a moment, he asked the Cardinal’s son, “Is your father still in town?”
“Yessir.”
“Then let him know I’ll be accepting his offer. It seems Liza and me are stuck together for another round.”
Ozgur leaned over the bed with a victorious grin. “Is it the fire?”
Hector raised his hands helplessly, indicating his current condition. “The world is a much meaner place than I thought. I was delusional about my happy retirement. Spies can’t retire. Once you go underground, you can’t walk in the sun anymore.”
“But why not AIMES? You still can be dean, and work for the DIA on the side,” Derek said.
With pain, Hector shook his head on the pillow. “I’m not going back to academia. It took me thirty years to learn that I’m not my father.”
Ozgur agreed. “Good call, buddy. We can call the Cardinal right now.”
A nurse came, carrying a load of supplies. She was dressed in a retro white dress with a matching apron and cap. She looked like Florence Nightingale risen. “Dressing change time,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t wanna see that,” Ozgur said.
“My friend here is very squeamish,” Hector said to the nurse with a smile.
“Black chicken or sushi?” Ozgur bade Derek choose.
“I’ll go for sushi,” said Derek. Then he turned and looked at the patient, then at the nurse. “Is he allowed to eat at all?”
“He’s on DAT,” said the nurse. “Diet as tolerated. But take it easy on salt and spice.”
“What do you say, homie?” Derek asked Hector. “Is sushi okay?”
“‘Homie’?” Hector objected with a rise of his head, instantly regretting it because of the pain.
Ozgur let out a chuckle, patting Derek’s well-formed deltoid. “We’ll see you soon, homie.”
And they left Hector alone with the nurse.
* * *
Now the nurse went around the bed and began setting up her dressing equipment on the veneered overbed table. She was a smooth-faced mid-thirties woman with the body of a multiparous mother.
Hector told her, “I like your nail polish,” and she laughed with a guttural cough.
“You smoke?” Hector asked her.
She shook her capped head. “With the haze? We smoke twenty-four seven on this island.”
By now she’d unfolded her aseptic drape on the table, dropped her gauze and forceps, and begun pouring out her saline into a white plastic tray.
“Do you,” she asked him, “smoke?”
“I smoked my lungs out last night. Why am I feeling so much pain?”
“I’ll get you something for the pain in just in a moment, dear.”
“But I thought...” He turned his head on the pillow to peer at the IV bag now three-quarters empty. “Isn’t that morphine?”
“You wish. Narcotics are emergency medicine in Pulau. They gave you some at Emerg yesterday. What you have now is Hartmann’s solution, dear, to restore your fluids.”
“Heart-Man? But I’m a man with many hearts,” Hector said with a groan. “You can have one if you want.”
“Huh. You’re so sweet. But your wife won’t be so happy about that, will she?”
“Did you see her? Is she okay?”
“She’s in ICU, ground floor. You’re in Acute, third floor. But the story of you going into the fire to save her is all over the hospital. You must love her very much.”
The nurse put on her blue gloves and bent to remove the old bandages off Hector’s left-side wounds. She removed the dressing on his left-hip would, and Hector yelped. “How bad is it?” he asked.
“This one isn’t too bad. Second-degree with the fascia intact. I’ll put a little bit of honey there. But I need to cleanse it first.”
“How many burns are there?” Hector tried to squeeze his head and gain a full view of his damaged side, but the pain, and the nurse’s gloved left hand, pushed him back.
“Don’t look,” the nurse said. “You have a thirty-percent burn area, mostly on your left side and legs. We covered the ones where the skin is near or totally gone. My biggest worry isn’t the one I’m doing right now, but the one on your left leg and foot. It’s a third-degree and it might need a graft.”
“Anything on my right?”
“A few ones, yes. But mostly first- and second-degree. I’ll put some cream there in just a moment. You need rest and a good diet and antibiotics.”
“And painkillers.” Hector ouched as the nurse swiped the wet gauze along the exposed nerve endings on his wound.
The nurse did another—longer—dressing on the lateral side of his leg and covered his foot wound with some black sponge, which she soon sucked using a vacuum device and put a clamp on to keep the negative pressure. She moved to apply a silver cream to his relatively superficial right-side wounds. Hector could see now that his entire right leg was purple, vesicular, and swollen. But the skin was still there. He was wearing a rather skimpy pale blue hospital gown with spades in deep blue all over it. Underneath he was naked. Something about the nurse’s gentleness made him unusually shy.
The nurse finished her job and dumped the dirty pieces of gauze into the garbage box, then her metal forceps into the yellow sharps container on the wall. “I can get you some briefs if you need some,” she said, as if she’d read his thoughts.
Hector refused politely.
“Can you move up by yourself?” she asked.
Grinding his teeth, Hector raised his head, then dangled his legs on the right side of his bed to the floor. He balled his fists and pushed himself up on his tender feet. He groaned with pain, but he was able to hold a stance. He took two steps, then tripped on his oxygen tubing. In a fit of rage, he snapped his nasal cannula off. “Goddammit, I need some painkillers!”
“Don’t use such language, please.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Glad you said so.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Gaia,” said the nurse.
“Are you serious? That’s your name? Anyway, Gaia, I’d like to be left alone now.”
Gaia left, and Hector limped with his IV machine to the washroom, which stood in the alcove-like narrow end of the room.
He rinsed his face, then looked in the mirror. It took him a long while to adjust to the man who looked back at him. Most of Hector’s beautiful dark hair had been lost to the fire, giving his scalp a mangy appearance. And his left eyebrow was scarred. His skin was Cabernet Sauvignon in color, and his lower lip was swollen and chapped. He had a patchy, two-day stubble with more white hair than he remembered.
He lathered the hand soap and cursed as he rinsed then dried off his face with a scratchy, rough towel. He dragged his IV machine out of the washroom.
Before he went back to bed, he lifted the venetian blinds on the window at the end of the alcove. The view wasn’t good. Save for a few ventilation orifices, a bald roof greeted him. Obviously Winston Churchill was in some parts still under construction. Beyond the bald rooftop of the hospital, Hector could espy the outline of Mount Victoria. Everything else—the sky, the sea, the streets, the trees, the people—was invisible.
The haze had eaten away most of the visible world.
Hector drew the blinds down.
He sat on his bed and felt a searing pain from his leg through his torso. He cursed louder and fumbled behind him for the call bell. Winston Churchill’s beds were equipped with a lavish control device wired to the wall, which did all sorts of functions, from managing the lights to programing the overbed TV to calling the nurse to ordering food. Hector pressed the nurse button multiple times, then he flung the device away and picked up his phone and powered it on.
* * *
Dean Noman had sent him an email, timestamped only an hour ago. Citing her brother’s gratitude, she thanked him also for Fifi’s safety then wished him a speedy recovery. Fifi had told her about the fire. The dean, then, moved on to bemoan Kero’s miserable death. “Keroloss was a stellar student, a poor and very tortured soul. His mother and two sisters have been found, do you know that, Hector? Yes! Thanks to Ibrahim’s efforts, a private investigator who used to work for the State Security has traced them to a nunnery in the city of Nag Hammadi. That’s where the Gnostic scrolls were found, Hector.” The nunnery had a strange name that the dean had not heard of before: Anba Bedaba, after a bishop and martyr during the reign of Diocletian. (“A rich but ignored history, Copts have!”) And the SSP had forced the three women there, or else—the SSP had threatened them—Kero would die. “How savage! Kero would have met them right at the airport once he returned to Cairo. This was going to be a big surprise for him. But, alas, he passed away for real, and not by the SSP. His mother and sisters are heartbroken. They feel, somehow, guilty for his death...”
Hector decided to wait on composing the reply. He needed to explain himself in the best, most careful way possible. No other email was worthy of attention.
But before he left his emails app, a new email popped up in real-time. This one was from Lisa. The Agency was obviously too eager to have him back. The email was dry and formal. Lisa welcomed his return to Murphy & Associates as “chief operating officer” starting July first, and congratulated him on being “selected” for this position among “a large pool of candidates.”
Hector checked his home screen and found a Facebook message from Zainab. He read her good wishes for him and Yubi and wrote a quick reply, expressing his thanks. He wondered about her husband’s next move. With Kero’s death, Pharaohstan would get international hype. Would invisibility still satisfy the Mukhabarat officer? And what would become of his personal life? A whisper about his true identity to Zainab’s family would certainly end his happy marriage—maybe even jeopardize his very life.
Hector was thinking about this when he went back to his home screen and tapped the messages icon. He inspected the list of first-few-words, then scrolled up and down. He was confused. Kero’s last message—about the new novel—was nowhere on his phone.
He remembered that Fabio had fiddled with his phone during the interrogation. He could have simply swiped “Delete” and the message was gone. That made sense. But still, a deeper question lingered in Hector’s head.
Gaia came in. “Is everything all right, dear?”
“Can you get me some pain pills? I need something really strong. If you can’t do opioids, at least give me a high dose of Advil or Tylenol.”
Gaia walked to the oxygen dispenser on the wall and turned it off. “Your cousin is coming back to visit you at noon, by the way?”
“Why, what time is it now?”
“It’s ten-fifteen.”
There was a shrill cry outside, which added to Hector’s confusion. “You said ‘cousin’?”
“Yes. He asked how you were doing and I told him you wanted time alone. So he went down to check on your wife. He said he would come back later, at lunch, which is noon.”
“Which cousin? You mean one of my two pals who went to buy food?”
“No, dear. He’s a funny-looking guy. Short and bald with a hard face and small eyes. And he speaks in a funny accent, too.”
Hector jumped off his bed. He yanked his IV line off and lurched to stare at Gaia, who was about to scream.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Did you tell him where my wife is?”
Gaia nodded. “I’m so sorry. I’m so...”
Hector dashed to the door.
* * *
A clerk from the nursing station yelled, “Hey! Sir!”
Hector raced to the floor’s automatic sliding doors. His gown hung by a thread from his neck, his right hand dribbled blood on the floor, and his legs ached with every step. He was back into the fire, emotionally, physically, and mentally. His brain moved faster than his damaged body could.
The Acute Floor’s door gave way to a circular elevator lobby where an elderly Chinese couple was waiting. Hector had no time for this. He went down the spiral staircase the fastest he could without stumbling. Every touch of his bare soles on the steps sent an electric shock to his brain. He winced and felt tears well up in his eyes. But he kept going.
On the ground floor, he found himself in a vast, crowded, disorienting lobby. There were many stores on one side and a coffee shop—TCC—midway between the staircase and the front door. There was a security desk there, indicated by a hanging sign. Hector lurched toward it and approached a tubby security guard in a blue security vest. He asked the guard about the ICU and the guard, scowling dubiously, pointed at a long corridor behind him.
Hector bolted through the corridor, feeling his heart about to explode. It was a long and empty corridor and he couldn’t feel his legs. His brain had apparently given up on him seeking help. A generalized soreness of his body ensued. The left side of his skull, where the fire had left its most visible mark, pulsed with every movement. His vision began to suffer.
He crashed into the ICU’s double door to open it, slipping on the floor with a shriek.
Hector pulled himself up and examined his surroundings.
He’d expected a dynamic place, but the ICU was almost deserted. Only one nurse was at the nursing station, under a daisy chain of overhead monitors. The place was U-shaped and stuffy, hosting only seven rooms. A beep echoed regularly.
“How can I help you?” the nurse—chubby, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and too much makeup—said with a bored air, chewing gum.
“I would like to see my wife. Yubi Kane. She came here yesterday. A burn injury.”
“Do you have ID?”
“I’m her husband!” Hector quickly toned down his voice. “I’m in Room Three Twenty-Two on the Acute Floor. I’ve lost all my papers in the fire. And, for crying out loud, where is everybody?”
Horn-Rimmed Glasses looked up at him. “Room Four,” she said flatly.
Hector lurched around the nursing station and traced the white-in-black stickers to the room numbered 4. The steel-boarded, honey-colored door was ajar. Hector pushed it gently and stepped inside. The room was twice the size of his on the Acute floor, dimly lit, and Yubi’s bed stood far against the dull bisque wall.
She was covered jaw to toe with a couple of white sheets, from under which a mesh of wires fed into a vital-signs monitor on her left. Hector looked at the monitor. The blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and oxygen saturation readings were marked in green. Which was good. But she was still unconscious.
“Yubi,” he crooned, gently touching her forehead. “You’ll be okay. I’m here.”
“So let me get this straight,” said a voice behind him. “They tell you it’s a ‘corona’ virus, and you’e sold. Huh huh huh huh. Oh boy, oh boy. And I thought I was the best liar out there!”
Hector spun and stared at his interlocutor.
The man was sitting on a padded chair behind the door. A half-burnt red notebook lay open on his lap.
The man closed the notebook and stood up. He walked toward Hector, stopped, then shoved the notebook against Hector’s chest like a compact disc into a drive. “You should read it. It’s trash par excellence. Third-world symbolic junk. Everything has two or three meanings. Jesus and Satan and Darwin are one and the same person. What a waste of time, man.”
Hector was stupefied. At length, he accepted the ambassador’s gift. “Why, Jeff? Of all people, you had everything.”
The United States ambassador to Cairo joined his hands and touched the tips of his forefingers to his lips. “Precisely. You see, Hector. That was my problem. Remember when we first met? I told you I wanted to go to Russia’s near-abroad. And what a lousy lie that was. Anyone who thinks the Cold War is over needs psychiatric help. I have always wanted to be in Cairo, where time doesn’t even exist. It’s an easy job, with a good deal of gory drama (fine by me) and you live like a sultan by the sheer color of your passport. Where else would I go? But you... you, Hector, you never doubted me. Even when I gave you your Russian doctor’s name all mixed up, you didn’t care to look it up. And not only you. No one ever questions anything I say. It’s so boring. I just couldn’t stand being the only player in the league.”
“But,” Hector stammered, “I called you. You were in Cairo. How—”
“Technology.” Jeff flicked his hand disdainfully. “It messed everything up. It’s become more and more difficult to get any good intelligence nowadays. I don’t blame you. Even the State Department thinks I’m in Thailand right now. You’ll be amazed how much I get away with.”
Hector looked at the red notebook. “What’s in this bloody book, anyway?”
“That’s the funny part. Nothing. He wrote me off completely. As everyone does. He must’ve thought I wasn’t story material. I met the bastard only once, when Fab couldn’t close a deal with him. Egyptians are so paranoid, man, thanks to sixty years of living in a police state. He wanted to meet someone he trusted. Say, the United States ambassador. Huh! Stupid jerk. I’m glad he went to hell.”
“Why are you really here, Jeff?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“But I don’t want to see you. I don’t even know you anymore.”
“You can call me ‘Buratino.’”
“Was Fabio innocent, then?”
Buratino smiled, scratching his chin. “Not precisely. This is what I’ve come to tell you, Hickey. This whole charade, this whole Corona business, is just a way to replace one Pinocchio with another.”
“Pinocchio?”
Buratino nodded and sighed. “The Company lied to you. They knew about me. I wasn’t ‘Buratino’ then. Names would come later: The Russians have a soft spot for drama. Fabio was my doppelgänger, my ‘Pinocchio.’ At first, the CIA sent him to me as a bait, to feed the Russians false intel. But then—you know dear old Fab—he got sneaky about it. He told me everything and asked for more money. But overall, he did what I wanted him to do. He was a good business partner. Selfish, but isn’t everyone?”
“Is that why you killed him?”
Buratino shook his head, a sympathetic simper congealing on his face. “No, buddy. That’s another lie. Your Company did. Their deal with him was for him to bow down after this operation. Retire in his hometown in Cali and never be heard from again. They never imagined he was working on something bigger than their silly little scheme to make you hate them. People with small plans have small minds. So they became insecure about it. Imagine him in the Kremlin, airing their dirty linen. Another Philby! Huh. It would’ve been a show worth watching. But they canceled it before it premiered.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” Hector said.
“Do you see my nose?” Buratino leaned forward and raised his chin. Then he chuckled. “You’re more like him than I thought. Oh, my God,” he said thoughtfully.
“I still don’t believe a word of this.”
“Cairo’s Obligatory Replacement Of Needless Apostate. CORONA. That’s your operation.”
“Apostate? You’re lying.”
“I’ll give you two scenarios and I want you to think which is more plausible. The CIA—with its Service, Integrity, and Excellence—is seeking to infect a young lady with a deadly ‘corona’ virus to blackmail her father. The other is that Langley has noticed its Pinocchio has been acting in a vague way. He’s neither good bait, nor a confirmed traitor. He’s—let’s say—a needless apostate. So what’d they do? They seek a replacement. There is this one hothead who flopped in Europe, this agent. You know who I’m talking about? He once swore there were nuclear smugglers across the Baltic, and there weren’t. He said the Big No was a crazy old man, and the Big No turned out to be our modern Gandhi. Now our agent is in Cairo wallowing in his sorrows. He’s friends with Buratino already and he’s pretty much useless. Ditch him. Make him bitter. Cook him slowly. Give him a mission that makes him question all his morals. So maybe—maybe—he’ll end up a new and better Pinocchio. A full-fledged traitor we can use against the Russians. The American version of a Russian spy.”
Hector’s pain made it impossible for him to process this clearly. He looked at the man who was both his friend and his country’s highest representative in bloody Cairo. Could this really be the truth?
He will set you free, as the truth will.
“If that’s true, why are you telling me this?” Hector growled.
“To give you the chance to live up to your true potential. To be the man my first Pinocchio wasn’t. You see, Hickey, Fabio’s problem was that he was loyal to one and only one thing. Himself. But that’s not how it should be. A beautiful island like Pulau,” Jeff exulted, “can change a spy’s view on anything. This haze they produce and live with every day. Their shifting loyalties. Their always-changing society. Their lack of firm religious beliefs. This, Hickey, is the future of the trade.”
“What are you saying?”
Jeff turned and gave Hector a serene Buddhist look. “You can be more than what you are. Not a double, or a triple, or a quad-whatsoever, but a mosaic spy. A spy with no loyalties, not even to yourself. A hazy spy. Invisible to yourself as to others.”
“You’re crazy.” Hector gawked at him and gasped.
“I am yes. But I always win. And I want you to join me, bud.”
“It was a big mistake for you to come here, Jeff. They’ll be coming for you.”
Jeff looked around him and said, “Where is everybody, Hector? Where are the mighty Company men?”
Only the rhythmic beeps filled the silence.
Buratino walked toward his new Pinocchio and added, “How is it that you’re magically alive after the fire, Fifi is safe in Cairo, and the bad guys are all dead?”
“You’re a bad guy,” Hector said.
“I’m a liar but I’m no bad guy. And my proof is her.” Jeff nodded toward Yubi. “I could’ve killed her if I wanted to.”
“But you tried to!”
“Another lie. They filled your head with poison.”
Hector remembered the red book. He looked at it, then stared at Buratino, and snarled. “But you wouldn’t be here, Jeff. Would you? You’re here for this!” Hector threw the book to the floor.
It took only a fraction of a second, yet Hector spotted it, a glancing twitch on Buratino’s nasal folds.
The whiz was sharp and quick. Then Jeff’s body dropped like a dummy whose strings were torn.
Lebedev strutted into the room with a Glock 19 fitted with a silencer. He looked at the blood pooling from Jeff’s skull over the red notebook, then said, “He took his chance. Bad liar ve need no more.” He looked up at Hector, who was tense all over. “Do not vorry. Ve do not kill innocent people.”
“Was it all lies?” Hector asked.
Lebedev’s small dark eyes did not blink. He backed up toward the door.
“Hey!” Hector followed him. “Don’t go before you answer me!”
The Russian turned and pointed the gun at him. “Ve vill be in touch.”
“What? No! I don’t wanna be in touch!”
“Hector... Hector...”
It took him a dazed moment to realize it was Yubi. He nearly tripped over Jeff’s body, running back inside.
“Who was that?” she asked feebly. “What a nightmare.”
“No, sweetie. I’m here with you. It’s all over. The bad guys are gone, I’m here, you’re here. We’re both alive.”
“You’re raving.”
“I know.”
“And you look terrible.”
“And you look damn beautiful.”
“You’re a bad liar,” she said with a sad giggle.
“I’ll be working on my lies from now on.”
“Please don’t lie to me again.”
Hector looked at his wife. Her hair was singed; her sinewy, marmoreal neck was scarred on both sides; her face was bruised; and the surgical wound on her forehead was covered with a thick, dirty bandage. She looked more beautiful than he ever remembered.
He kissed her. She tasted like Betadine, bitterness, and fire.
“I’m not lying,” he said.