He laughed and shook his head.

“Me too,” he said. “And maybe some extra life insurance.”

Mo either couldn’t hear them or chose to ignore them.

The highway passed through several upscale blocks in the northern fringe of the city. Alex noted a number of satellite dishes on buildings, most of them looking as if they hadn’t worked for the past twenty years. Gradually the new buildings gave way to some very old ones, and she knew she had arrived in an ancient and picturesque city, a city she read about so many times in her life.

Cairo. Al Qahirah, as it had originally been called. The Triumphant City, so named for all the invading armies that had conquered it and then left, defeated by the quirky eccentricities of the city itself. The ancient was intermingled with the new on endless blocks. And even after the highway, traffic was a nightmare.

Their van pulled up in front of one of the better hotels, the Metropole Cairo. The Metropole was a bright modern building with several guards around it, many with heavy weapons. There was a display of foreign flags above the entrance arcade. Alex nodded a good-bye to the other passenger, and she stepped out. A porter picked up Alex’s one piece of luggage from the rear of the van.

Alex tipped Mo with an American ten-dollar bill. He grunted in response.

The Metropole stood impressively by the River Nile. The lobby was modern. It gleamed with new furniture and artwork in an Egyptian motif. Alex checked in easily, and a second porter took her to her room.

The room was a small suite, actually, more like a room and a half, a sitting area, and a sleeping area. It was thoroughly air-conditioned and had numerous amenities-multiple telephone lines, internet access, satellite television, a small refrigerator, and a polished marble bathroom with separate showers. It afforded a spectacular view of the Nile as well as a hotel pool. It was obviously designed for diplomatic and business travelers, a fine base for conducting business or exploring historic Cairo. She had heard the Metropole was considered one of the best business hotels in the Middle East, and her impression on arrival did nothing to undermine that premise.

She knew from her previous “official” visits to Nigeria and Ukraine that every US Embassy provided arrival kits for guests, including maps of the city and phrase books. She found such a kit waiting for her with a card from a political officer at the Cairo Embassy. His name was Richard Bissinger.

She knew from experience that the political officer was often more than simply that. For better or worse, Bissinger, or whatever his real name was, was her CIA contact.

On one of the maps was a notation as to where the embassy was. It wasn’t far. She had also noticed on arrival that the entire neighborhood was well policed, even beyond the weapons-toting guards that ringed the hotel. Also within the kit was a cell phone, new and presumably secure.

Alex changed into a knee-length tan skirt, a conservative light blue blouse, and shoes that would allow her to walk or run as needed. She had a linen jacket and threw it over her arm. She carried an extra silk scarf but tucked it into a jacket pocket. She knew that if she wished to enter a mosque or any Islamic holy place, she would need her neck and arms covered. She memorized the short walking direction to the embassy and set out on foot, ready for anything, not wishing to consult a map or guide book and look conspicuously like a tourist.

What struck her immediately on her way, in addition to the remorseless heat, was the din of the city-a confirmation of what Rizzo had mentioned. There was an unyielding background noise to every block. Motor vehicles jammed the streets. The drivers had one hand on the horn and a rules-free way of attacking any intersection. Trucks and cars ducked up onto the sidewalk to pass. Many seemed to have won an uncontested divorce from their common sense as well as their mufflers. Vehicular anarchy reigned. Alex regretted having not taken Rizzo’s advice about the earplugs.

Big trucks rumbled by. Pickup trucks hit their air horns at each other. Battered black-and-white taxis honked, and their drivers exchanged profanities with each other. She was secretly pleased she didn’t understand Arabic, at least not right now. Men worked on cars in the street. Vendors hawked newspapers, snacks, water, fruit, and bootlegged DVDs from tables on the streets. Butchers hawked meat in stands that overflowed out onto the sidewalks. They blasted radios and cranked up the volume on television sets. As she walked, muezzins’ calls to prayer wailed from loudspeakers in the minarets of thousands of mosques in the city, as they would five times every day.

Forewarned, Alex could still not believe the din. People in private conversations shouted to be heard. Some blocks were only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer. She wondered how people could live here. It was unlike New York or London or Madrid or Moscow or any other internal-combustion-engine-choked metropolis that she had ever experienced. This was like living next to a lawnmower.

To her relief, she was at the embassy in fifteen noisy minutes.

The American Embassy was a green high-rise of about a dozen stories, next to the Japanese Embassy. Like her hotel, it overlooked the Nile. Ten minutes after arriving in the lobby, she sat in the office of Richard Bissinger on the third floor of the embassy, savoring the silence within the American enclave.

There she waited.

Bissinger entered several minutes later. He was a thick, compact man of about five-eleven, with slicked-back hair. His brow jutted, his eyes were dark, and his chin receded sharply into his body. He looked like a prize-fighter who’d been knocked out several times but lived to fight again.

“Well,” Richard Bissinger said, “welcome to Egypt.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“So who are you?” he asked. “Other than who you really are, I mean.”

She handed him her passport. He opened it, studied it for a moment, curled a lip, gave her a bemused smile, and slid the passport back.

“Nice work, the passport,” he said.

“Latest thing, in more ways than one.”

“Josephine, huh?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, I read your c.v. this morning, Josephine. You’ve been busy in the last two years. Lagos. Ukraine. Spain. Points in between.”

“Seriously,” she said. “Either a dark cloud follows me or I’m following it.”

Bissinger nodded. “That’s how most of us feel,” he said. “Welcome to the club.”

“You know why I’m here,” she said. “Reports about a Michael Cerny.”

“I know all about that. Transcripts from Langley. Plus local activity. This is a headache. Need to get this wrapped up quickly. Make Cerny disappear and everyone who sails with him. You used to work for him? Cerny?” “He was my case officer when I was on the Ukraine assignment. He was involved in a gunfight in Paris in June, and I thought he was shot to death. So did the Agency. Now we’re getting sightings.”

“Like Elvis,” said Bissinger. “Only more radioactive and not in a Walmart.”

“What else can you tell me?” Alex asked.

“Not much good,” he said. “We’ve had a lid on Egypt for several years. The place is out of control but under control. Know what I mean?”

“We means the CIA?” she asked.

“The CIA. The United States. Western Civilization. All of the above. Right now Egypt is our type of place. Thank God they don’t hold free elections here or we’d all be out on our butts.”

“Not to split hairs,” she said, “but from what I’ve observed over the last couple of years, you wouldn’t be out on your butts so much as you’d be forced to work the same operations with much deeper cover. Am I not correct?”

Bissinger looked at her first with skepticism, then shook his head with approval. “Are you as good in the field as you are with words?” he asked.