WIP1 - chapter 2

Here's Chapter 2 of the untitle Egyptian spy thriller. While Chapter 1 was about Gatsu and the slave child, Chapter 2 moves forward in time by about five thousand years and focuses on Maloof and his new boss. Comments very welcome.

2

​​In the years before the Rose Revolution there had been a lot of money to be made building mansions. On the airport road they sprung up in hundreds – conveniently located for people who did not really live anywhere and might need to come and go quickly.

They stood apart from the apartments – which were themselves a world of experience away from the normal accommodations of the city of Cairo and had been designed to meet foreign living standards. As in London – and many other cities besides – these luxurious homes were mostly empty; a few had never been lived in at all. They were investments for people used to owning money rather than making it.

​In Egypt, buying a home would have been unusual until the late twentieth century. By tradition, a great patriarch would purchase a square of land and he and his sons would build the family home. As his sons grew up and married, they would construct their own homes over the first, so each large family might in the space of two generations erect its own tower block. The practice began in mud brick and was continued in concrete and steel. Such family homes were easy to spot; their flat roofs were marked by clusters of rebar rods rising into the air in expectation of the next home and the next generation.

Though it was still common outside of the main cities, the practice had been deliberately crushed in urban areas after a minor earthquake caused six such buildings to collapse, killing fifty people. Though this was all twenty years ago and Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East had changed much in that time.
The success of alternative energies brought about a permanent fall in oil prices and demand. America ceased propping up the House of Saud and events followed a predictable course. It had been inevitable – everyone said so. The former princes of Arabia followed their money abroad: to Egypt, to Paris, and of course to London.
With an end to the supply of petty monarchs with infinite means and limited taste, the construction of mansions on the airport road came to a halt and Egypt experienced, not for the first time, the sad silence that followed a great endeavour.
The company that owned the offices on the Tahrir Qasr El-Einy in downtown Cairo was called Mohammed and Sons. It had never been a partnership of father and sons – the name was a marketing trope intended to inspire trust and discourage anyone from negotiating hard on price. As the fortunes of the company fell, the directors who had named the firm sold their controlling interest. The company flirted with insolvency for a decade. Always profitable enough to stay afloat. Never such a good investment that it attracted any attention from the markets.
This situation continued until one otherwise uneventful Thursday morning when Mohammed and Sons became the most westerly solely-owned subsidiary of the Yangzhou Corporation. Every share was purchased in an hour, mostly through personal arrangements which must – said those who knew about these things – have been months in the planning. Before the company was officially withdrawn from listings on the Cairo exchange, its value had increased by only three percent – not even in the top ten fluctuations for the day.
The Chinese had bought the company almost in secret. They kept the old offices in central Cairo. The post of CEO had been vacant for several weeks – and this they filled with one of their own – but otherwise they kept the staff. And they kept the name.
“Who is this man?”
“What business is that of yours?”
The driver shrugged, “I was only making conversation.”
“Did I ask you for conversation?” said Mr Maloof. “I did not. You are a driver, so drive. When I want conversation, I will go to a . . . someone else.”
The highway from the airport was in parts literally that – an elevated road that ran over low-rise buildings and wound through the grey and cream tower blocks. In gaps between these, one might see a pyramid on the near horizon, still shockingly large; the sandstone zenith of Khufu’s Great Pyramid visible even above modern structures made of glass and light.
Though the city had come to envelope the pyramids, it maintained a respectful distance and the three wonders were always separate: still serene after five thousand years. Different in character from Rome’s Colosseum – a comparatively recent construction – where the Italians had built a curving road that followed the building, getting as close as they could without putting two lanes of traffic through the fighting pit.
Depending on the preferences of the drivers and the width of their vehicles, there were anywhere between three and five lanes of traffic on the highway. White markings – where they had been painted at all – did not serve to meaningfully delineate. A car going too slow for the drivers behind might find itself overtaken on the left and the right simultaneously and where there had been one lane in front of it, there would then be two.
The cars and vans and trucks moved like five-year-olds playing football. Articulated lorries and pick-ups loaded with great piles of goods – by people who had never heard of the dangers each additional straw posed to the camel – jostled for space in an immediate future no further than two or three seconds away.
Though the car horn was employed frequently, it did not convey any information or change the behaviours of other drivers. It would have been equally useful if it had been disabled on all cars in Egypt, or if it had been set by the manufacturers to go off at random intervals whenever the engine was running.
An Egyptian would tell any foreigner that they had proper traffic laws and that these laws were enforced by diligent government officials and taken seriously by a law-abiding citizenry. Any foreigner who had travelled in Egypt would recognise all such assertions as nonsense.
“Conversation is included,” said the driver, “free gratis. You do not want to travel with one of these machines that drive themselves. I heard they killed three people just last week. Maybe four. They are not safe.”
“I did not hear this. Where was this? In Egypt?”
The self-driving car had found it difficult to negotiate any route alongside typical Egyptian drivers. India was having similar problems introducing the system, which was otherwise commonplace.
“He is your boss,” said the driver, ignoring the question. “I pick up a lot of bosses. I think that people do not like their bosses – so I am pleased I do not have one.”
Maloof was fifty and the two sides of his head were balding in an asymmetrical pattern. He dabbed the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief and shoved it back into the pocket of his suit jacket. The air conditioning in the car was on full, but Maloof’s heartbeat was racing. It was mid-day and even though he was not in the heat, he could see it on the other side of the car windows – baking the sand, burning the ground so it would be hotter to walk upon than coals.
“How is it that you have not met this man before?” asked the driver.
“How do you know I have not met him?” Maloof said defensively.
“You are carrying a sign with his name on it.”
Maloof looked at the cardboard sign on the seat next to him. He had spent an hour carefully transcribing and enlarging the Chinese characters of Mr Jonathon Lee’s name from the small image on Google.
“How do you know that is his name? Can you read Mandarin? Are you a spy?”
“What else would you write on a sign except someone’s name? I have been to the airport many thousands of times. This is a normal thing. I think you are overwrought. This man is working you too hard.”
They passed the last of the chain of Hollywood-style signs that marked the approach to Cairo Airport in giant, western lettering.
“I will park the car and come and join you.”
“What? No. You must wait to collect us at the door.”
“I cannot wait at the door; the police will think there is a bomb in my car, and they will shoot me. I will park at a very close spot, very nearby. I know a place. I use it just for very important parking.”
“Well . . . You must never speak to Mister Lee. He is a very important man.”
“He must be if he has business that would interest spies.” 
Sail-shaped buildings stood over Terminal One and an intricate construction of crisscrossing mesh spanned the road, forming an architectural screen that cut out half of the direct sunlight. The car stopped at the arrivals hall, the driver opened the door and Maloof got out and swooned in the heat. He had little fat legs somewhere under his large round belly, and they propelled him with difficulty into the building.
He fanned himself with his sign and searched the boards for the daily flight from Beijing.
Maloof grabbed at a handful of his sparse hair when he saw that the flight had already landed, having arrived twenty minutes early.
He raced off towards the baggage collection hall that served gate nine.
“God,” he wheezed. “Let the baggage handlers be incompetent and surly.”
Maloof’s eyes danced from person to person, searching for a round, yellow face. There was an old woman pushing a cart loaded with three times her weight in luggage and she was Chinese, but not a man. A man pulling on the trunk of a suitcase shaped like an elephant had a balloon head and slanted-eyes, but he was retarded and not Chinese. Otherwise the faces in the milling crowd were the same as Maloof’s – olive and brown and sweating.
“May they be as slow in handling Mister Lee’s luggage as they are in handling mine.”
Maloof paused to lean on a railing next to a picture of a smiling woman in an EgyptAir uniform. EgyptAir flew to sixty-three destinations from Cairo. None of those flights could take Maloof from where he was standing to gate nine.
Over seating areas, four ceiling-mounted television screens locked on the same news channel turned the events of the day into lyrics that accompanied the tune of every day. An enemy of the state arrested. A champion of the people elected. Bombs in Bangalore and refugee boats approaching the unguarded shore. Sometimes those watching joined in – as best they could – adding muttered indignation at a too-fast tempo.
Maloof set off again. Each of his footsteps made a thunderous slapping sound against the floor. People turned to watch him run.
“Does he know something we don’t?” a wife asked her husband.
The husband looked critically at Maloof and replied, “No.”
Then he had come to the end of the domestic arrivals and could go no farther. Border Control checked passports with bored thoroughness and the human traffic was all one-way. Somewhere beyond that point was Lee, or somewhere else in Cairo was a furious Asian who had not been met and escorted by someone from the company he now ran.
“If it be your will, let someone on the plane have died so that everyone is delayed getting off,” muttered Maloof. He stood in the centre of the corridor and held his sign at chest height. Where his sweaty hands touched it, the card had warped and the writing had smudged.
“God is great. Ameen,” Maloof said, and concluded his prayer with an involuntary squeak of flatulence that made a little girl, passing with her parents, frown and put her hand to her face.
Then the trickle of people that came through the security gate turned Chinese.
They were men in their fifties and sixties who walked with their hands behind their backs, surveying the world as if it were their factory that made doll parts or cosmetics or consumer electronics.
They were women of all ages who believed that smiling was what whores did for money, so they did not. Not for a trip to the Forbidden Palace, not for a journey to the Sphinx.
They were whores, following with demure obligation the men who had adopted the expectations of a previous age; of the Japanese, when those men had briefly ruled the world.
They were the young and immeasurably privileged, whose fine dark hair was styled into spikes and angles that were much different and much the same as those their parents had worn.
Maloof oscillated, turning his body and his sign left and right across the crowd, catching every eye, but no-one did more than read it and realise it was not intended for them.
A tall, American-looking man stopped directly in front of Maloof. His expression was amused and from the inside pocket of his jacket he withdrew a black Sharpie and made a quick mark on Maloof’s sign.
“What do you think you are doing?” Maloof said. “You cannot write on a man’s sign.”
“You had made a mistake,” said the man, who spoke Egyptian Arabic with a Baltimore accent. “The first name is Jonathan, with two ah sounds – like Nathan or Nathaniel – and not Jonathon with two oh sounds – like, well, I don’t know.”
“You are a bastard son of a pig!”
The man put the marker pen away and smiled as if he had not heard the insult, but replied, “I believe that would simply make me a piglet. Marriage not being common amongst pigs I wouldn’t think they find the offspring of an unconsecrated union to be shameful. Where I am from, we wouldn’t think of piglet as being a term of anything but endearment.”
“Be on your way, before I call for the police and have you arrested for vandalising my sign!”
“You must be Mister Maloof,” said the man. He offered his hand.
“I will not shake your hand, you criminal! How is it that you even know my name? Did you steal my wallet when you distracted me with your wickedness?”
The man did not withdraw his hand.
“My name is Jonathan Lee.”
“You must take me for a fool. Mister Lee is Chinese.”
“I work for the Yangzhou Corporation, Mister Maloof. I am not Chinese. My name is a coincidence – in the sense that it is similar to a Chinese name, not in the sense that it is my name, because you see it was also my father’s name, and so on.”
Maloof fell to his knees and clutched the sign to his chest, his arms embracing his body. His jaw fell slightly farther than the rest of his body, his eyelids a little less, so that when Maloof hit the floor his expression of horror was level with the plain buckle on Lee’s belt.
“Now pull yourself together,” said Lee. “There’s no need for that.”
“Forgiveness!” Maloof yelled pathetically. “I had no idea, I swear!”
“I believe you. We’ll say no more about it. Let me help you up.”
Maloof shook Lee’s hand and apologised multiple times in Arabic and incomplete Mandarin, alternating forms that were too formal then too familiar. Lee withdrew his hand with calm conviction and left Maloof to straighten his tie and jacket.
“Do you have a car?” Lee asked.
“It is parked very nearby,” said the driver. Maloof jumped at the sound of his voice and left his right knee undusted, a circular patch of pale dirt on his dark grey trousers. 
“How long have you been standing behind me?” Maloof demanded.
“I could not answer that question honestly, Sir; you would be most embarrassed.”
“You are my driver?” Lee asked.
“I am, Sir,” said the driver.
Maloof scowled and said, “This is the driver I have arranged for you.”
“Ah, thank you,” said Lee. “Thank you, Mister Maloof. Shall we go?”
The metallic-black Ford – an executive saloon made to appeal to new world sensibilities – was parked across two disabled spaces a minute’s walk from the airport exit.
“I haven’t seen one of these in a long time,” said Lee. “You’ve kept her looking well.”
“Thank you very much, Sir,” said the driver. “The trick is to make sure you keep on top of the sand.” The driver took Lee’s suitcase and put it in the boot of the car. “Every week I get underneath and clean her with a small brush. As if she were a horse. My father used to own a horse. After the self-driving cars came, we had to put him down – the horse, not my father. It was very sad. He was not even nice to eat.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” said Lee.
“Mister Lee does not need to be bothered with your dead horses,” said Maloof. “I am the one who is paying you, I have heard all these dead horse stories and you will get nothing extra for them from me. Take us to the office and do not speak unless you are spoken to.”
The driver opened the nearest door for Lee, closed it once he had climbed in, and moved to open the other door for Maloof. The fat man’s hand held the door closed and he leaned toward the driver to speak in a whisper. A bead of sweat dripped down from the top of his head to the end of his nose. It dried the same second it hit the ground.
“Do not drive quickly back to the office. Do not take the main roads, take some other road that is slow and quiet.”
“Some other road? Which other road?”
“Am I the driver? No, I am not the driver. You are the driver. So drive.”
Maloof opened his own door and got inside. The car was still cool, though the air conditioning had been off since it was parked. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his neck and face.
“Are you from Cairo originally, Mister Maloof?” asked Lee.
“Almost, I was born a little outside, in a town called Benha. There is no reason you would know it. Why do you ask?”
The driver got in and pressed the starter, which for a moment caused hot air to blast into the back of the car before quickly cooling again. The transition elicited sighs of relief from Maloof. Chatter from the radio returned, just louder than the sound of people and traffic. It whispered stories of murder with a lover’s intimacy, though its fearsome nothings were no more remarkable than the rumble of indistinct humanity it crowded out. The car reversed and was soon part of the ant-line of sober-coloured private hire taxis returning to the city.
“No reason,” said Lee. “The place I grew up is very different.”
“I heard that America also has desert.”
“Sure. Out west it’s not so different. But I’m from the east coast. We have winters there: it snows.”
“It snows where you come from?”
“Not so much anymore. We had snow two feet deep when I was a boy, right in the middle of the city. It was faster to take the subway than to walk two blocks. With snow more than waist-high to me, my father carried me to see the Christmas lights around Mount Vernon. And the only place that was open was this one old greek guy, dressed up like Saint Nick, selling gyros out of a van that got stuck in the snow in the day before. I had no idea where his pitch was supposed to be, and I never saw him again. In a way, that gyro was a kind of Christmas miracle.”
“Two feet of snow?” said Maloof, his voice full of wonder. “Why would you ever leave such a place?”
“Travel broadens the mind: it embiggens a person. Jiādà, as the Chinese say. I tell you I never get over racing the sun. I got onto a plane in the morning in Beijing, I flew for what felt like a day, then I get here and it’s only lunch time.”
“Two feet of snow,” repeated Maloof.
“Now, do you have something for me, Mister Maloof?”
“Something for you? Oh yes, of course.”
The back of the Brasilia was spacious. An extension of the driver’s console included a mini fridge with a frosted glass door. Maloof slid a battered leather briefcase from under the front passenger seat and fiddled with the combination locks. Lee put his hand on the fridge door.
“May I have one of these bottles of water?” Lee asked.
“Of course, Sir,” said the driver.
“Do not take one, Mister Lee,” said Maloof, placing his clammy hand on top of Lee’s. “This water is not good for you.”
“It is good water,” said the driver. “I filled it myself from my own tap. My house has the best water in Cairo.”
“I see,” said Lee. “Maybe I’m not as thirsty as I thought I was.”
Maloof released Lee, the briefcase opened with a click and Maloof handed him its entire contents – a slim folder of green card which contained the company’s most recent financial statements and performance information. Lee read them, at first grimly, then turned the pages, searching for something that was not there.
“How many units has the company built in the last year?” Lee asked.
“The market is very depressed,” said Maloof, he made an expansive gesture intended to encompass a broad range of matters which men of the world would surely understand. His face became downturned and affected an expression bordering on funereal.
“I would like a number, please.”
“A number?” said Maloof, again dabbing around his face with the handkerchief – a pointless process, as it was as sodden as he was.
“Yes, if you please.”
“A number,” Maloof said, as if he had never before been asked for such a thing. “If you were to press me for a number, I do not know what I would say.”
“I am pressing you for a number.”
“I would not like to say.”
“I must insist.”
“You insist?”
“I do.”
“Then, only as you are insisting, I would say . . . four?”
“Are you asking me if you built four units or telling me that you built four units? Because I do not know the answer to my question.”
“Yes. I would say four.”
“That is not good news, Mister Maloof. Not good news at all. The board of Yangzhou were under the impression that we were purchasing an operating company, one which had employees who had experience in high-value construction and who were ready to start work.”
“We are experienced. And we have teams of men standing idle, just waiting to be given work. Many dozens of men, in fact.”
“I see,” said Lee. He closed the folder of information. “I should most like to meet the company’s chief government liaison. The person who is responsible for planning and strategic development at the highest level, for making sure we get buy-in from appropriate local and national agencies. Who is responsible for that?”
“Of course, of course. And, ah, what good news I have for you. That is my job.”
“You are the government liaison for Mohammed and Sons?”
“Yes, Mister Lee. The liaison must be a man of tact and subtlety who is at ease in all social situations.”
“I agree. And this is your job?”
“For two weeks.”
“I see. Then I would very much like to also meet with the CFO and the COO immediately.”
“They will both be waiting for you as soon as you get to the office.”
“What happened to the road?” Lee asked. The scenery on the other side of the tinted glass had become rural and rolling, arid countryside with nothing but rocks and the occasional sun-blasted tree to mark the passing miles of rough asphalt.
“This is the normal way from the airport,” said Maloof.
“I have been to Cairo before, Mister Maloof, and this is not the way from the airport to anywhere I wish to go. What is your name, driver?”
“He is just a driver, do not pay any attention to him,” said Maloof.
“Nonsense, tell me your name.”
“Oh no, I am only a driver. Please do not think of me at all. I am beneath you, Sir, far beneath you, and it would only embarrass me to think that a man such as yourself knew my name.”
“Where I am from it is considered polite to know the name of every person who provides a personal service to you, especially if you engage that person in conversation.”
“You must have to remember a great many names, Sir.”
“Faces too. I pride myself on never forgetting a name or a face.”
“Is that so?” asked the driver, making eye contact with Lee in the rear-view mirror.
“It is,” Lee said.
The car braked hard and skidded, moving sideways across the empty road. Lee and Maloof were jostled forward but were restrained by their seat belts and pinned by inertia. Maloof was pressed to the left-hand-side of the car and his short arms could not get purchase on the door of the mini fridge against which Lee had been pushed.
Lee flipped open the frosted glass door. Lodged between the refilled plastic bottles of water was the square barrel and textured handle of a Glock 17 9mm pistol. He pulled it out of the fridge, turned off the safety and brought it level to the driver’s head in one smooth motion as the car came to a halt.
The driver had turned in his seat and was holding a smaller revolver, which he had been able to conceal somewhere on his person.
The driver smiled. His door opened and he flopped backwards and out of the car then kicked the door closed.
Lee tried his own door and found the child safety locks had been engaged. The controls for the electric windows were unresponsive.
“Cover your ears,” Lee said to Maloof. The fat man pushed his palms over his ears while the best Lee could manage was covering one ear with his hand while pressing the other against the headrest of his seat. He fired three times at the glass. A hand-sized section fell out in safe, irregular, broken pieces and he pushed away the rest with his elbow.
Lee reached through and opened his door from the outside. Maloof struggled over the console with difficulty. Lee grabbed the fat man by his lapels and yanked him out, together managing a score of stumbling steps away from the car.
The fireball was hotter than the Egyptian mid-day sun and the force – both a sound and a rushing of air – knocked the two men off their feet and kicked the car inches into the air. It landed with a crash and the alarm sounded once, twice, then those electronics burned-up and the final noise was a throttled fraction of what the alert had been.
But from within the flames the radio managed a few more seconds; breaking into the predictable news to announce the predictable weather, as the wreck breathed black smoke that rose quickly into the cloudless blue sky.
Lee climbed to his feet, leaving Maloof to hyperventilate in the dust. Already a hundred metres away and dodging left and right, the driver was heading for a cluster of structures that might have been a small village or could have been only farm buildings. Heat haze made him a flicker, yet Lee kept his stance solid, and the driver stayed in the Glock’s sight until he was well beyond the pistol’s effective range.
“Bahrain is still burning!” the driver shouted as he ran, his voice carrying over the sound of the fire. “Bahrain is still burning!”
Lee put the safety back on the pistol and slipped it into the waistband at the back of his trousers. He pulled out his phone and activated an app that would summon a self-driving car, then called a hotline number with a Chinese dialling code.
“Wèi,” said a woman’s voice.
“This is Jonathan Lee,” he said in English. “An attempt was made on my life.”
“We are advised,” she said, her voice clear but accented. “Are you in immediate danger?”
“No.”
“Do you require medical attention?”
“No.”
“Standing order number one applies. Go to a place of safety. We will contact you.”
He ended the call and looked at the fat man, who was still face-down, but had progressed from uncontrolled breathing to uncontrolled sobbing.
“Four units is not good, Mister Maloof. Not good at all.”