Olen Steinhauer's recent three-volume Milo Weaver series was about the Tourists, a top-secret CIA spy unit. Milo was an exceptionally appealing character among black ops types. His personal life was as fraught as his cloak-and-dagger work, and when he wasn't trotting around the globe, he was apt to turn up in Brooklyn. But by the third installment, after the Chinese had entered the mix, the plot had thickened so much that it bordered on the impenetrable. Only the most seasoned le Carre buffs had the chops to tackle Steinhauer's ever more elaborate tricks.
So it's something of a relief to find him writing a stand-alone, The Cairo Affair, that has only the CIA, the Bosnian War and the most inflamed parts of the Middle East on its playing field. For a writer of Steinhauer's skills, this practically qualifies as Tradecraft 101, even though the book has a large cast of suspicious characters. Under ordinary circumstances, a dramatis personae at the front of the book might help in telling them apart. But not one person in this story - okay, maybe one - is who he or she pretends to be.
The Cairo Affair would surely offend fans of the high-spy genre if it bluntly began in Cairo. So it starts in Eastern Europe in 1991, when Sophie and Emmett Kohl are newlyweds fresh out of Harvard, eager to see the world and convinced that they are bright and erudite enough to understand it. Steinhauer makes sure that something unforgettably symbolic befalls them in the book's very first chapter. They are tourists in Prague when Emmett jokingly buys Sophie a bust of Lenin as a souvenir. In a flash, a little thief interrupts their patronising laughter to steal the thing and throw it off the Charles Bridge. This shakes Sophie in ways she never forgets. She was smug; she was careless; she was vulnerable. She allowed herself to trivialise something she didn't understand.
Twenty years later, the Kohls have come and gone from Cairo. Sophie and Emmett lived there for a while, but now they are dining in Budapest, where he is a deputy consul, and she is bored; she spends a lot of time drinking and gossiping with the wife of his boss. In the run-up to the Arab Spring, they remember that Hosni Mubarak's Cairo had been a good place to get out of; and the Kohls are enjoying Budapest just out of a sense of relief. No reader seeking relief ought to turn to Steinhauer as a source of consolation.
During the course of this one dinner, Sophie confesses to an affair she had in Cairo with a man named Stan. She thinks this is the reason her marriage to Emmett will never be the same, but she's underestimating that by a long shot. Along comes a sinister mystery man, pointing a pistol at Emmett and saying, "I here for you." And Sophie is a widow at a restaurant table, just like that.
These are only the beginnings of Steinhauer's sophisticated spy tale, a long, twisty road full of cleverly placed potholes. It's the kind of book in which a character thought to be spying for Hungary might possibly be spying for Libya; in which Muammar el-Qaddafi is enjoying his last desperate moments in power and willing to try anything in the name of self-protection; in which Cairo has become an even more impenetrable maze of intrigue than it ordinarily is; and in which American operatives are suspected of trying to co-opt every aspect of the Arab Spring, even if they have not made plans to do so.
One resourceful agent, Jibril Aziz, is a charismatic young man who has come up with Stumbler, an important espionage plan for Libya that sounds like an app. Because Steinhauer draws his spies as flesh-and-blood characters in whom his readers invest both attention and emotion, a lot rests on the truth about Jibril and the intent behind his plan. The book has the wisdom to replay certain scenes involving him from different characters' points of view, because there's no such thing as overclarifying this plot and no end to the complications it spawns.
How does the Bosnian war connect to the recent government collapses in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia? It introduces Zora, the book's trickiest, sexiest mercenary, a Serbian woman who gives the Kohls' their first lessons in wartime brutality and turns up throughout the rest of this story, and it teaches the lesson that there is no such thing as neutrality in a war zone. It also prefigures the treachery that will arise during the course of the main action, when Zora is still working her wiles, somehow crusading on moral high ground while also selling out to the highest bidder.
She is only one of many fascinating figures in a book whose sights, sounds and smells are immensely atmospheric; anyone who reads it will come to shudder at the smell of garlic, the hallmark of the book's most coldhearted killer, and picture the Pyramids as barely visible through a haze of smog. Steinhauer is equally comfortable evoking the world in which Arab operatives circle one another and the early mix of savagery and wild nihilism in the former Yugoslavia, though he credits an eyewitness for helping describe the area around the Balkan town of Vukovar.
Steinhauer also lets a streak of black humor run through this tight, expert book. When the talk turns to the CIA's meddling in other nations' turmoil, Britney Spears can be heard in the background, singing "Oops! ... I did it again."
THE CAIRO AFFAIR
Author: Olen Steinhauer
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Pages: 416
Price: $26.99
So it's something of a relief to find him writing a stand-alone, The Cairo Affair, that has only the CIA, the Bosnian War and the most inflamed parts of the Middle East on its playing field. For a writer of Steinhauer's skills, this practically qualifies as Tradecraft 101, even though the book has a large cast of suspicious characters. Under ordinary circumstances, a dramatis personae at the front of the book might help in telling them apart. But not one person in this story - okay, maybe one - is who he or she pretends to be.
The Cairo Affair would surely offend fans of the high-spy genre if it bluntly began in Cairo. So it starts in Eastern Europe in 1991, when Sophie and Emmett Kohl are newlyweds fresh out of Harvard, eager to see the world and convinced that they are bright and erudite enough to understand it. Steinhauer makes sure that something unforgettably symbolic befalls them in the book's very first chapter. They are tourists in Prague when Emmett jokingly buys Sophie a bust of Lenin as a souvenir. In a flash, a little thief interrupts their patronising laughter to steal the thing and throw it off the Charles Bridge. This shakes Sophie in ways she never forgets. She was smug; she was careless; she was vulnerable. She allowed herself to trivialise something she didn't understand.
Twenty years later, the Kohls have come and gone from Cairo. Sophie and Emmett lived there for a while, but now they are dining in Budapest, where he is a deputy consul, and she is bored; she spends a lot of time drinking and gossiping with the wife of his boss. In the run-up to the Arab Spring, they remember that Hosni Mubarak's Cairo had been a good place to get out of; and the Kohls are enjoying Budapest just out of a sense of relief. No reader seeking relief ought to turn to Steinhauer as a source of consolation.
During the course of this one dinner, Sophie confesses to an affair she had in Cairo with a man named Stan. She thinks this is the reason her marriage to Emmett will never be the same, but she's underestimating that by a long shot. Along comes a sinister mystery man, pointing a pistol at Emmett and saying, "I here for you." And Sophie is a widow at a restaurant table, just like that.
These are only the beginnings of Steinhauer's sophisticated spy tale, a long, twisty road full of cleverly placed potholes. It's the kind of book in which a character thought to be spying for Hungary might possibly be spying for Libya; in which Muammar el-Qaddafi is enjoying his last desperate moments in power and willing to try anything in the name of self-protection; in which Cairo has become an even more impenetrable maze of intrigue than it ordinarily is; and in which American operatives are suspected of trying to co-opt every aspect of the Arab Spring, even if they have not made plans to do so.
One resourceful agent, Jibril Aziz, is a charismatic young man who has come up with Stumbler, an important espionage plan for Libya that sounds like an app. Because Steinhauer draws his spies as flesh-and-blood characters in whom his readers invest both attention and emotion, a lot rests on the truth about Jibril and the intent behind his plan. The book has the wisdom to replay certain scenes involving him from different characters' points of view, because there's no such thing as overclarifying this plot and no end to the complications it spawns.
How does the Bosnian war connect to the recent government collapses in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia? It introduces Zora, the book's trickiest, sexiest mercenary, a Serbian woman who gives the Kohls' their first lessons in wartime brutality and turns up throughout the rest of this story, and it teaches the lesson that there is no such thing as neutrality in a war zone. It also prefigures the treachery that will arise during the course of the main action, when Zora is still working her wiles, somehow crusading on moral high ground while also selling out to the highest bidder.
She is only one of many fascinating figures in a book whose sights, sounds and smells are immensely atmospheric; anyone who reads it will come to shudder at the smell of garlic, the hallmark of the book's most coldhearted killer, and picture the Pyramids as barely visible through a haze of smog. Steinhauer is equally comfortable evoking the world in which Arab operatives circle one another and the early mix of savagery and wild nihilism in the former Yugoslavia, though he credits an eyewitness for helping describe the area around the Balkan town of Vukovar.
Steinhauer also lets a streak of black humor run through this tight, expert book. When the talk turns to the CIA's meddling in other nations' turmoil, Britney Spears can be heard in the background, singing "Oops! ... I did it again."
© 2014 The New York Times
THE CAIRO AFFAIR
Author: Olen Steinhauer
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Pages: 416
Price: $26.99