Scorpion Betrayal Read Free

walked past apartment houses, their paint faded and cracked, laundry hanging from windows, and past a garbage-strewn lot where ragged boys played soccer by the light of a single streetlight. Was it his imagination or did the street seem emptier than usual? Just before he got to his building, he studied the street again, carefully. He saw no unmarked vans or cars with anyone sitting in them. No one loitering near one of the other buildings. No broken silhouettes on the rooflines, or street workers working late. Through some of the windows, he could see the glow of television sets.
    Crossing to his building, he climbed the stairway. It smelled of poverty,
fuul,
and cigarettes. He opened his door and snapped into a shooter’s position, ready to fire the Placeholder’s gun, but the apartment was empty, the only light coming through the window from the streetlights outside. He went over and turned on the small TV.
    The news announcer, a heavyset man with a slow, serious voice, reported that a number of suspects in the café bombing had already been rounded up. General Budawi’s photograph was displayed. According to a breathless reporter standing outside the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis, only Budawi, whose heroism and patriotism was esteemed by all, and a single aide were killed. In the meantime, air travelers could expect delays because of enhanced security following the attack.
    The program then returned to a popular Egyptian soap opera, where the lead actress was suggestively approached by her doctor in his office while her husband was out of town on business with his attractive female assistant. On another channel, an attractive female TV newscaster in a head scarf said that authorities were looking for a foreigner suspected in the café bombing in the Khan al Khalili. He was described as being tall and fair-haired, she said. He shut the TV off.
    They were downplaying the number of casualties and rounding up the usual suspects, he thought. Budawi’s deputy was probably scrambling like crazy and under intense political pressure to pick up all the pieces. As for the description of him, it was of a generic foreigner. More important, they hadn’t given the media a photograph. Budawi had probably assumed he would arrest him at the café and get all the photos he needed then. With any luck, all they had of him was a voiceprint. It was obvious they were watching the airports and looking for a foreigner matching his description heading north. That was what he had expected and planned for. Still, it wouldn’t be easy. They would be watching every exit from Egypt.
    He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his
gallabiya.
He was still sweating. Next door, the neighbor’s teenage son was playing Egyptian hip-hop music. The music echoed in the building and the empty street outside as he worked on bending and smudging the ID card and cleaning the gun and scalpel. He took a long shower, the water cool and rusty, and before he went to sleep he retaped the scalpel to the bottom of his foot.
    He left the apartment shortly before dawn, the sky streaked with gold over the Nile. He took the East Delta bus from the Eltorgan bus station in the center of the city to the small port city of Hurghada some three hundred miles south on the Red Sea coast. Just before boarding the bus, he bought a live chicken at the open-air souk. The bus was stifling hot and when he glanced at a passenger’s
Al Ahram,
the headline said only that the authorities were making progress in the bombing investigation.
    At an army checkpoint ten kilometers outside Hurghada, two soldiers came on board and checked everyone’s ID. They were looking for a foreigner; he could pass for a working-class Egyptian, he told himself, his heart pounding. His battered ID card and the chicken made them pay him little attention. They asked where he was going, and he said he was visiting his cousin in Hurghada. He hoped to work