Chapter 16

2009 - Egypt

Since I felt that we were no longer under any serious threat, I upgraded our train tickets to deluxe sleepers. By the time the train left it was already dark, and immediately afterwards we were having our dinner in the lounge-bar car. There were several tourists and also many locals there, who were all dressed less conservatively than the ladies traveling with me. I could almost sense how all this was getting on Karen’s nerves. Hana and Pam were used to situations like this, but Karen was still an all-American girl and she wasn’t used to being a second-class citizen.

By the time it was time to go to sleep, we decided to play it safe and Hana and Pam went to one cabin while Karen, Naiya and I shared the other one. Once again I had the luck to take care of all the fatherly duties considering Naiya. OK, I could have pushed her to Hana and Pam but I felt better this way. This time when it was time to go to sleep I was ready to visit the corridor but Karen stopped me.

“You have seen all of me before. I trust you and I’m sure Hana trusts you, but of course you can go if you find me distasteful.”

I had to laugh a bit about that.

“Karen, you know just as well as I do, that you have probably not gained an extra pound since we split.”

Now it was Karen’s turn to laugh.

“You are still a flatterer, I see. I certainly am not the same young woman I used to be and the extra pounds are there, trust me.”

I shrugged.

“If they are there then they are well hidden and you carry them extremely well. To me you look the same as you did then.”

“Thanks, Greg, you do not know how much those words mean to me.”

After that I decided that it was better to stay quiet. Instead I started making sure that Naiya would go to sleep peacefully. Luckily she was a sound, even if an occasionally restless, sleeper. I could feel Karen watching me when I patted Naiya carefully until she fell asleep. After that I still kept on looking at that little girl, and even though I’m not at all religious, I said a silent prayer that she would be able to live a normal life. A life of a normal little girl without any unnecessary fears.

“Somehow I always knew that you’d be a good father.”

I knew that Karen meant good with her words, but just now her words felt like a sucker punch under my belt. Even if I tried to hide how that felt to me, she must have noticed that something changed.

“I’m sorry, Greg. I didn’t mean to hurt you with that.”

“I know that, Karen. And thank you, it was a nice thing to say.”

She looked at me for a moment.

“You have changed, Greg. You are like two different persons, one is the same nice person I used to know, but the other is someone tougher, someone who has hardened during the years. I guess I can blame myself partly for that.”

“No, Karen, that is much too much credit to put on any single person. Especially you.”

Yet I had to admit that she had given me a good shake. I should have expected that, since we had lived together and there was a time when we were closer to each other than I considered possible. Even if it was nice to sleep in a decent bed, and the movement of train was quite soothing, it took me some time to fall asleep.

The following morning was all a flurry, since the train arrived in Cairo quite early in the morning. I used my phone and made sure that we had two nice adjacent rooms waiting for us in a good hotel. We arrived at our hotel which was located quite close to the embassy, in quite reasonable time, considering the local traffic. Once we were inside the room, Karen turned to face me.

“Why couldn’t we go straight to the embassy? We would be safe there.”

“Would we? Don’t you remember what my local boss wanted to have happen to me? Look, it’s just one more night and that’s just for me make sure that we can make it there safely. Besides, wouldn’t you like to have one more chance to do some authentic local shopping?”

The look on her face changed from worried to terrified in a split-second! It was only when she turned to look at Hana and Pam’s grinning faces, that she understood I was just pulling her leg.

“You bastard!”

But after a moment she was laughing together with Hana and Pam. I guess a whole lot of the pressure that had been accumulating during the last few days, came out with that laughter. I smiled a bit and went to the adjoining room to make a call. Maybe it was not a good idea to tell them that I was afraid that it wasn’t over yet.

I ordered some lunch for us from the room service while waiting for the results of my call. We were almost finished when there was a call to me - or Faisal - from the reception that there was a delivery for me. I excused myself from the ladies, got dressed, and went down.

One of the reasons for selecting this hotel was that they didn’t demand to scan your luggage or the stuff that was being delivered, as was the case with slightly higher class hotels. This delivery looked like a gift coming from a friend or a business partner. Something that looked like an old Egyptian statue – probably made in China. Something big, and really terrible. The reception took a cursory look at it but I had no problems in taking it with me. Once I was back in our room with the opened package, all the ladies looked at me with a question in their eyes.

I took a good grip on the statue and started forcefully rotating the lower half. It was not easy, but slowly it opened. I picked up an odd-looking phone and a charger inside that ugly thing. I carefully reconnected those two statue parts before unwrapping the phone and the charger. When I turned the phone on, I noticed that it was almost fully charged. Good. I put the phone away for a moment and rolled what was left of our lunch out of the room. Then it was time for the first real call.

It took the Frenchman so long to answer that I almost got worried for my friend. After a few moments we had exchanged our greetings, and by the time my French got more fluent I knew that he was in a hotel in Algiers and everything was okay. In fact, he had been waiting there for some time already. Soon after that I started dictating to him letters and numbers. The first dictation was a password to an encrypted file, and the second was an overseas account number. When I finished he was silent for a moment.

“Mon ami, I wouldn’t have needed any money. You have already saved my life, and you have also given me a reason to live again. Merci beaucoup.”

“You saved several lives for me, my friend.”

“Nah, you silly Yankee, you would have been able to do all that by yourself. Au revoir, have a good life back there.”

“I intend to, mon ami. I intend to.”

I was almost sure that I would never hear anything from my friend, again. In our business you didn’t usually have friends, you had work partners. Sometimes partners had common interests, but usually not. Now when he could return to work for his government, there would be no way for us to keep this unofficial friendship going.

From the looks on the ladies’ faces, I could see that Pam had been the only one who could speak enough French so that she had been able to follow our discussion in detail. Therefore, she was also the only one who understood that my call had been something more than a business call. She knew the number of friends I had, or didn’t have.

Before my next call, I looked at my watch. It was still damned early in the morning in U.S. On the other hand, why should I care? This time I excused myself from my girls (My girls? Where in a hell did that come from?), and closed the door between the adjoining rooms before making the call. I hoped that I could soon forget this phone number for good.

I could tell that my contact on the other end was not happy that I’d called this early, but I got an impression that he was not really surprised that I contacted him. I guessed that some of my demands did really surprise him, but if he wanted all the information I was about to give him, I wanted them done. However, I had already seen some of this business and I guess that by helping me he was walking on thin ice himself. The major difference between my situation and his was that he was risking his career and I would be risking the lives of people close to me - and, of course, my own.