The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online Page A

shared life to them. It was almost comforting speaking these things aloud, and by the time they stood and handed her their cards she was feeling a warm wave of nostalgia. The anger had slipped away, and she only wanted Emmett back. She gave them thankful smiles, but Glenda gave them another face, for she was in hysterics again, furious that they’d kept her away from Sophie for a full forty minutes.
    Fiona was manning the phone in the kitchen, which was by then ringing off the hook. Journalists. Each time, Sophie heard a single ring, then Fiona’s cold voice saying, “Kohl residence,” and then lowering to a whisper as she got rid of them. Around two, though, she came in and announced that Emmett’s parents were on the line.
    Why hadn’t she thought to call them?
    Though his mother cried nonstop, neither of them blamed her. They believed that they understood what Sophie was going through, and they simply wanted to know how she was holding up. They were good people, she realized, as if she had never truly known it before. Once she was finished with them, she called her own parents. They were at the cabin in West Virginia and had no access to the news. After the shock, they were much the same as Emmett’s parents, but without so many tears. They were just happy that she was the one still breathing. “Come home,” her father told her, and she said that she would see them soon.
    As she hung up, it occurred to her that her father had been suggesting this ever since she was a child: Come home. He’d treated her scholarship to Harvard as an inconvenience that would likely damage his frail daughter, and when she thrived in Boston he tried to lure her back to Virginia with health problems—he was suddenly diagnosed with arteriosclerosis, celiac disease, and depression. She’d resisted the pull, but during much of her college career she’d lived with the fear that her mother would call with the news that he was dead. Over time, of course, he’d emerged from his ailments stronger than ever, finally aiming his daggers at Emmett: What kind of life is all this moving around? It’s no good for Sophie—can’t you see that? What about roots? Emmett had shrugged it off better than she, cruelly referring to her father as “euthanasia’s poster child.”
    She found Glenda napping on the sofa, television off. Fiona pointed at the Jim Beam; apparently, Glenda had been sipping at it from the moment she showed up. Gerry Davis reappeared—from where?—and announced that the Hungarian police had arrived.
    To avoid waking Glenda, she met with them in the dining room, but it was only one man—the same older man from the night before, Andras Something. Andras Kiraly— key-rye, with a rolled r —which she knew meant King. He had the slow-moving, depressive presence of popular television detectives, and she realized that she was more comfortable with him than with any of the people she’d met that day. He smiled only now and then, always in embarrassment, and she found this charming. Gerry Davis hovered protectively behind her, occasionally asking if she was too tired to do this, but she locked eyes with Andras Kiraly and said that she was happy to help the Hungarian police with their investigation.
    “I should be up-front, Mrs. Kohl,” Kiraly told her softly. “I’m not actually police—I’m from the Alkotmányvédelmi Hivatal, the Constitution Protection Office.”
    She knew of this office—until the previous year, it had been called the Office of National Security, the Nemzetbiztonsági Hivatal . He, like Reardon and Strauss, and like Stan, was a spy. When they came out, they came out like hives.
    He asked the same questions as her CIA visitors, but she found herself elaborating a bit more, perhaps from practice. This time, she didn’t dwell on her infidelity. He said, “Do you mind if I show you a few photographs?”
    Behind her, Gerry Davis cleared his throat. Kiraly looked up, but Sophie couldn’t see what Gerry