Left alone in the room, Rizzo exhaled long and low. He let himself calm slightly. His sweat glands were in overdrive, but he felt them slowing down now. He went to the door where Amjad and Ghalid had exited. He opened it, looked out in both directions to make sure no one was returning, then he closed the door and bolted it from within.

He walked back to the body bag, his steps falling heavily on the concrete floor. He stood above the body bag for a moment. He placed a hand on the bag and gave it an affectionate touch, almost a caress, on the shoulder of the body. Then he reached to the zipper and pulled it down again.

With a stoic expression, he stared down at the closed eyes of Alexandra LaDuca.

TWO MONTHS EARLIER

Hand in hand, Carlos and his fiancée, Janet, walked the streets of the Egyptian capital, the most densely populated city in the world. They were on what they called their “pre-honeymoon.” They had been working together in Washington, DC, for more than two years as techies for one of America’s more nefarious national security agencies. They had also been living together for a few months, though Janet still retained her own apartment. But this one-week trip to Egypt and the Holy Land was something special, their first trip together out of the United States. So far, it was going just fine.

They would visit Egypt and see the Great Pyramids and antiquities of the Nile, then the ancient cities of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Palestine. They had always wanted to take this trip together ever since they had discovered a joint interest a year earlier. Their plans for a honeymoon, the following year, would be more prosaic: sun and surf in Maui. What was not to like?

Today was their first full day in Egypt. They visited the ancient quarter now known as Old Cairo, which had grown up around the Roman fortress of Babylon. They wandered through the old town, a largely Christian neighborhood of narrow, winding streets bordered by low beige buildings of sandstone. They passed quiet homes and shops and the occasional café filled with Christian Arabs sipping walnut-colored tea and eating small sandwiches and pastries. They came to the Coptic Church of Saint Sergius, one of the oldest houses of Christian worship, which was built like a fortress, and paid the admission to enter and admire it from within.

When the old church had been built, three centuries after the time of Christ, churches were exactly that-fortresses. Entrances were often walled and bolted against attack. There was no large entrance door like modern churches have, just a small door in a bare façade. In the Middle Ages the Coptic Church of Saint Sergius had been a destination for many Christian pilgrims because of its association with the flight into Egypt.

Steps within the church led down past the altar to a refuge and a crypt where, according to legend, the Holy Family found shelter after fleeing from Herod. Christianity had been the religion of most Egyptians from the third to the tenth century after Christ. Egypt had settled into the Muslim world thereafter.

Carlos and Janet continued their walking tour in the afternoon and visited the ancient Synagogue of Ben Ezra. It bore a resemblance to the Coptic Church because it had once been one too. The Church of St. Michael had stood here during the first ten centuries after Christ, but the Copts sold the structure to the Jews to pay a tax by Ibn Tuylun for the erection of a mosque.

The building, which contained some of the original structure from almost two thousand years earlier, remained a temple, but its parish had long since dispersed. Most of Cairo’s Jews had been forced out of the country after the modern wars with Israel. Today, the building remained a historical oddity, a reminder of the two pasts, near and distant.

In the late afternoon, exhausted and with feet sore from their first day of sightseeing, they went back to their hotel and refreshed themselves. Then they settled into the hotel bar and restaurant.

It was a very comfortable modern bar in a splendid hotel, the Grand Hyatt of Cairo, a towering modern edifice located at the edge of the old city where the fortress of Babylon had once stood. But there was one problem. Right now, all that was on Carlos’s mind was that they were in the capital of a Muslim country and the bar served no alcohol, even though alcohol was readily available at other locations in the city. At the end of a hot day, Carlos would have chucked the whole journey to be able to knock back a couple of cold brews.

“Who ever heard of a bar with no booze?” Carlos grumbled. “That’s like an airplane with no wings.”

Janet laughed slightly.

“You know that Bon Jovi song ‘Dry County’?” he continued. “That should be the national anthem here. It’s like driving through western Kansas, only worse.”

“Carlos,” she said, “zip it, would you? There’s beer in the cafés. We’ll go to another place, okay?”

“I should be able to get a brew here.”

Selections of European and American pop music played on the sound system, covering their conversation. Soon something played in Italian, and it was incomprehensible to them.

“Budweiser. Coors. Schlitz,” Carlos continued. “Iron City. Lone Star. Did you know there’s a beer in Connecticut named Hooker? Their slogan is ‘Get caught with a Hooker.’”

“Carlos, honey…”

“Or how about Pabst’s? Yeah, Pabst’s. I’d kill for a ‘PBR’ right now, know that? You know what else? I’d pay fifty bucks for a lukewarm can of Bud Ice with a slice of lime in it. That’s how desperate I am.”

She held his arm, squeezed it hard, and shook it. “Okay, okay! Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.

“Sold!”

They took off for a downtown beer garden named the Royale, located in one of the more artsy neighborhoods. The guidebooks had told them it was akin to the Left Bank in Paris. Neither of them had ever been to the Left Bank, but they had an idea what that meant.

The Royale was anything but royal. It was a narrow noisy bar on a backstreet. It evoked the air of a sordid 1920s speakeasy, complete with a paunchy one-armed barman and another barman who had an ear missing. The waitresses dressed as belly dancers. They had nice yummy flat bellies, Carlos noticed, but they did no dancing.

And that was just for starters.

Behind the bar was an array of bottles, mostly local brands that ripped off better known European products: Golden’s Dry Gin in recycled Gordon’s bottles, with the head of a dog replacing the boar’s head of the authentic logo; Tony Talker Black Label in bottles that looked suspiciously like Johnny Walker castoffs. There was another suspicious-looking scotch concoction called Chipas Renal.

“Let’s stick to the beer,” Carlos said on arrival, “from closed bottles.”

The Royale was crowded, filled with pungent smoke from Cleopatra cigarettes and the nasty stench of spilled Egyptian beer-Stella and Sakara, the two liquids that seemed to fuel most of these cafés. Underfoot, the floor was crunchy from cigarette butts and lupin shells from the trees on the block outside. But at least the Stella made Carlos happy when he finally got a couple of them, and if Carlos was happy, Janet was too.

They hunched together on small wooden chairs at a small wobbly table with a zinc top. Carlos wandered off after one hour and three beers to find a men’s room, and Janet scanned the room, warding off the smiles and eye-contact of local young Arab men who had been waiting for Carlos to get lost.

Suddenly Janet’s eyes went wide, as if she had seen a ghost.

Carlos returned. He slid easily into his narrow chair, bumping elbows with some irritable Arab men sitting next to him. Janet looked to Carlos in disbelief and urgently placed a hand on his arm. “What?” he asked, slightly drunk.