“That man at the bar!” she said in a loud whisper.

“What man?”

She motioned with her eyes in quick hard glances, agitated enough not to move her head, directing his attention across the smoky room to the end of the bar.

Carlos looked. He saw the man she had indicated, a moderately sized man with thinning hair in a rumpled dark brown suit. Carlos could only see him from the rear. He was chatting with two other men.

“That guy?” Carlos asked.

“Him!” Janet said.

“What about him?”

“That’s Michael!” she whispered in urgency.

“Michael who?”

“The Michael we used to work for in Washington,” she said.

“Michael Cerny?” he asked.

“Yes! That Michael!”

Carlos looked again, then looked back to her.

“No way!” he scoffed. “You’re toasted.”

“Yes, way. I’m not toasted.”

Carlos looked again. No recognition. “Michael Cerny’s dead,” he said.

“Sure. That’s what they told us,” she said. “The CIA people.”

“He was shot, remember? In Paris. He died,” Carlos continued. “When you die you become dead and tend to stay dead.”

“I know,” Janet answered again. “But that’s Michael Cerny over there!”

“It might look like him, but it can’t be!”

She leaned back and folded her arms. “Then you go look,” she insisted.

Carlos waited for a second, as if to reject the entire notion. Then he gave her a glance of exasperation and stood again. He was tipsy. He squeezed out from the table onto the floor of the bar and wound his way through the crowd toward the bar.

He neared the man Janet had indicated. He jockeyed for a position to get a good look. He moved into eavesdropping range. Janet saw Carlos’s expression freeze. He stared for a moment. Then the man they were watching turned his attention away from his friends at the bar and stared directly at Carlos. Janet saw their eyes lock for a moment.

Then Carlos raised a hand to conceal his own face, quickly turning away. Carlos fled in her direction, and Janet watched as the man kept Carlos in his sights. Janet grabbed a battered menu and raised it to hide her own face. Carlos returned and slid awkwardly back into his narrow seat.

“It’s him,” Carlos said in an astonished tone.

“He recognized you too,” Janet said.

“I know,” Carlos answered. “And they were talking in some funny language.”

“Arabic?”

“No. It was something else. It sounded Slavic. And one of his friends’ names was Victor. I heard him call him by name.”

She worked up the nerve to glance over the top of the menu. The man was still at the bar, looking hard in their direction. Then he looked away.

“So I was right?” Janet asked.

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re right or not, but this guy looks exactly like Michael Cerny. It’s incredible!”

“It’s him!” Janet insisted.

They both looked back to the bar. But now the man they had spotted lifted a drink from the bar and went over to a corner table, where he sat down. Within a few minutes, the two men who had been with him at the bar moved over and joined him.

They fell quickly back into an animated conversation. Both of the other men wore Western suits and white keffiyehs, the traditional headgear with two rope circlets. At one point, one of the men in a keffiyeh turned and glanced at Carlos.

“I want to have another look,” Carlos said.

But Janet was starting to turn against the intrigue. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like this at all. Let’s get out of here. You know what type of work Michael Cerny did. He was a CIA guy. Let’s blow out of here.”

“No, no. I want to have some fun,” Carlos said.

“Fun? This isn’t fun!”

“It could be,” Carlos said. “It could also be a big career break for us, you know? They’d trust us because of the work we’ve done in DC and Virginia. So maybe we can get worked into something over here. Or Europe. Maybe they’d send us to Europe for free. Wouldn’t that be great?”

“The system doesn’t work that way.”

“It does if you make it work that way. Don’t fight me on this.”

She sighed. “Why did we ever leave the hotel? A couple of lousy beers, that’s why! Sheesh!”

They argued the point for several minutes, keeping the man in view with sidelong glances. Finally the three men at the table they were watching stood up. It looked as if they were preparing to leave. But instead, the two men in Arab headgear sat, and the man they were watching-who either was or wasn’t Michael Cerny-made his way toward the men’s room.

“Here’s my shot! I’m going to go talk to him,” Carlos said.

“Don’t do it, Carlos!”

“No, this’ll be cool. Know what I think? I think he’s under some ‘deep cover’ of some sort. Well, we spotted him. We’ve been dealt a hand. I’m going to go play it.”

“This is so not good,” she moaned.

Carlos was on his feet again, to the irritation of the people at the next table, whom he again jostled. Janet sat, even more irritated, wishing she had kept her mouth shut. She watched Carlos weave his way through the smoky room.

The washroom was cramped and steamy. It stank of stagnant plumbing and disinfectant. When Carlos walked in, the man in the brown suit was the only other person there. He stood close to and facing the far wall at an old fashioned 1940s-style latrine. It was nothing more than a gutter at the base of a barely tiled wall. The man snapped shut a cell phone and pocketed it as soon as he knew he had company.

Carlos took a position a few feet away at the urinal. A big wooden fan rumbled overhead at the center of the ceiling. It turned slowly with old wooden rotors, and its function seemed to be to blend all of the ugly odors of the room into something that was even worse than the sum of its parts.

Carlos waited for his moment. Then, emboldened by his beer, he said, “Hello, Mr. Cerny. You know me from DC. Heck of a coincidence, huh?”

The man at the urinal slowly turned his head toward the intruder. He gave Carlos a long, smoldering look but didn’t speak. Then he looked away again and faced the multilingual graffiti on the tiled wall in front of him.

“I mean, you being dead and all,” Carlos said. “Then I bump into you here in a dive in Cairo, right? I guess that means you’re not dead anymore, doesn’t it, sir?”

The man didn’t speak or acknowledge him. He was very still, hands in front of him, tending to business. He looked as if he could have stood that way all day, without moving a muscle.

“See, the thing is, Mr. Cerny,” Carlos said, “I know all about secrecy and keeping things quiet. And heck, I was at your funeral, same as Janet. We’re friends, you know? We’re going to be here sightseeing. But you know, we like to travel the world too. So if there are ever any assignments outside the US, you know you can count on-”

The swinging door burst open. Two young Arabs came in, laughing about something and bantering in Arabic. The man in the brown suit abruptly finished at the urinal. He stepped quickly to the wash basin.

Carlos followed. The Arabs took a place at the urinal wall and continued their loud banter, which suited Carlos just fine.

The man in the brown suit washed his hands carefully with the soap from a dispenser, which looked like a chemistry experiment gone horribly wrong. The man was lathering quickly.

Carlos pursued and took up a position at the next sink. For a moment, the eyes of the two men smashed into each other in the broken mirror above the washbasin.

“I’m staying at the Grand Hyatt Cairo, Mr. Cerny,” Carlos said. “I’ll be there for a few days, me and my girlfriend. If you want to talk sometime in secret, we can do that. Pick your place. I mean, I got a cheap rental car at the hotel and I could meet you-”

The could-be Mr. Cerny looked him straight in the eye. Then the man angrily shook off his hands, grabbed a paper towel, and made quick work of drying himself. He turned toward the door.