As I approached, Mohammed got out and moved around the hood to open the rear passenger door for me. Thunder rumbled in the distance. It was as cold here as it was back in Israel.
But as I crossed the street, I suddenly saw a flash of light to my left. My first thought was lightning. But it was too low, too isolated. And then came the massive concussion. The SUV I’d just stepped out of—the one Hussam was still in—exploded. It flipped through the air and came back to earth with a deafening crash. The resulting shock wave sent me soaring. I smashed into the side of the Mercedes. Then I heard the distinctive whoosh of a second rocket-propelled grenade and once again felt the earsplitting explosion and the searing, scalding fireball.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear or see. Thick, black, acrid smoke filled the sky, filled my eyes, and the last thing I heard was the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire.
And then everything went black.
72
When I came to, I was lying on the wet pavement, covered in glass.
My clothing was soaked and torn. My eyes stung. My ears were ringing. I had no idea how long I’d been out. As I pulled myself to my knees and then to my feet, I saw that all the windows in the Mercedes had been blown out. Then I saw Mohammed sprawled out on the sidewalk, his body ripped to shreds, a pool of crimson surrounding him. I stumbled over to him and checked his pulse. He was gone.
I looked around and stared at the carnage before me. The roaring, flaming wreckage of the SUV. The charred bodies of Hussam, his driver, and the bodyguard. The gaping, jagged holes where the windows of the café had been. They’d all been blown to bits, and the building was on fire. It was then that I realized I couldn’t have been unconscious very long. There were no police cars on the scene, no fire trucks or ambulances. But they’d be here any moment.
Looking to my right down Baghdad Street, I noticed the delivery van was gone, and a chill abruptly ran down my spine. Did Abu Khalif somehow know I was here? Had he sent jihadists to kill me before I found him? How was that possible? How could he have known? Was one of the Israelis a mole? Someone in Mahfouz’s office? That didn’t seem likely, but there were still only a handful of people who even knew I was here. That meant there were only a handful of possible suspects, and four of them were dead.
I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. I took the call, but whoever it was, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A moment later a text message came in. It was from Yael.
Get out of there now! she insisted. Meet at the safe zone—go!
My head was pounding. My right knee was bleeding. I felt foggy and disoriented. I knew we’d discussed a rendezvous point, a safe zone, just in case something went wrong. But right now it was all a blur. I couldn’t remember the name. I couldn’t remember the address. But I had no time to think about that. I had to get moving. Yet I couldn’t leave Mohammed there. I couldn’t leave the body of a fallen Mossad officer on a Cairo side street.
I opened the back door of the Mercedes. Then I picked up the six-foot-one, two-hundred-pound Israeli and wrestled him into the backseat, even as a crowd was beginning to form. As I shut the door, I noticed that his pistol—equipped with a silencer—had fallen out of his holster. It was sitting in the gutter, in a puddle, and just the sight of it—along with the blood on the sidewalk, and the blood that was now all over me and all over the car—triggered a shot of adrenaline through my entire system.
I grabbed the pistol and raced for the driver’s side. I could hear again—not perfectly, but it was slowly coming back. Sirens were approaching from multiple directions. Behind the wheel, I gunned the engine and took off, leaving the growing crowd of onlookers and knowing they were all witnesses.
As I barreled down Baghdad Street heading for El-Orouba Street, a major thoroughfare, I knew people had seen me. They’d seen my face. They’d seen the car, shot up with machine-gun fire. They’d seen me put a body in the backseat. And someone had surely taken down the license plate number. Someone always did.
I raced up the ramp, onto the highway and into thickening traffic. I tromped on the accelerator, weaving from lane to lane when I could, but knowing all the while I was running the risk of attracting the attention of the police. I couldn’t afford to be stopped. Not the way this car looked. Not with who I had in the backseat. Not with the information I had to get to Yael.
The phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it as I raced westward onto Salah Salem Street, heading for the Nile. But it was Yael and she could tell me where I was supposed to be going. So I put the phone on speaker and dropped it into the cup holder by the gearshift, knowing I would need both hands on the wheel from this point forward.
“You’ve got a tail,” she yelled before I could even say hello.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re on Salah Salem, heading west, right?”
“Right.”
“Someone’s following you—a silver Audi—it’s eight, nine cars back and it’s coming up fast.”
“How do you know?”
“’Cause Abdel and I are six or seven cars behind him.”
“Cops?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Secret police?”
“I doubt it, not with that car.”
“Then who is it?”
“I have no idea, but you need to lose them.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You need to get them off me—now.”
I glanced in my rearview mirror and then in my side mirror. Yael was right. Whoever was in the Audi, they were coming up way too fast. I shifted into a higher gear, broke left and roared around a dump truck, then cut back to the right. In the process two other cars braked hard to miss hitting me, which temporarily blocked the Audi’s view of me as well as its approach. But I doubted it was going to be enough.
Edging to my right, I checked my side mirror again. I could see the Audi. It was only five cars back but boxed in between a Ford Expedition and a large moving van. This was my chance. I pulled onto the shoulder and then hit the gas. Fifteen seconds later, I reached an off-ramp and took it.
“No, no, don’t get off!” Yael screamed over the speakerphone. “What are you doing?”
“I had to,” I yelled back. “They’re gaining on me.”
“And we’re gaining on them!” she countered. “Now you’ll be on smaller streets. More traffic. More lights. Get back on the highway.”
I braked and downshifted as I roared down the ramp and came to a dead stop. Yael was right. The traffic was brutal in both directions. Everything was gridlocked. Fear threatened to overwhelm me.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m stuck.”
“Don’t worry,” Abdel said into the phone. “I don’t think they saw you.”
“You sure?”
“Either way, they’re trapped in the left lane. No wait—”
“What?” I yelled.
He swore loudly.
“What?”
“They just shot at the Ford. The Ford’s braking. They’re smashing into the Ford, pushing around him. They saw you. They’re heading for the off-ramp.”
I was still not moving. Traffic was at a standstill. And then I saw the Audi barreling down the ramp, coming straight for me. Inside were two men, both wearing black hoods. And they would be on top of me any second.
I should have panicked, but instead I had an idea. I grabbed for Mohammed’s silenced pistol on the seat beside me. I would shoot these two just before they reached me, and that would be the end of it. But the pistol wasn’t there. Frantically I searched everywhere, then realized it had slid off the passenger seat and onto the floor. I could see it, but with my seat belt on, I couldn’t reach it.
73
I was out of time.
The Audi smashed into the back of the Mercedes at full speed. This should have driven me into the Volkswagen van that had been idling directly ahead of me, but at that moment traffic started moving again. The VW turned right and
got clear just in time. I went straight ahead, but instead of folding up like an accordion from impacts on both sides—crushing me in the process—my Mercedes went ricocheting through the intersection.
I clipped the back of one car and the front of a pickup. But the velocity from being hit so hard from behind still sent me hurtling completely through the intersection and up the on-ramp on the other side. How the driver’s side air bags weren’t triggered, I had no idea, but I hit the gas and the Mercedes poured back onto Salah Salem Street, leaving the Audi trapped by the new chaos its driver had just created.
I could hear Yael and Abdel cheering over the speakerphone, but they were abruptly drowned out by the sound of automatic gunfire. At the same time, I could hear the Audi smashing its way through the intersection, and when I glanced in my rearview mirror, I saw the Audi surging back onto the thoroughfare behind me and one of the terrorists aiming an AK-47 at me.
For the moment, I was a good ten to twelve cars ahead of them, but they were fighting hard to close the gap. I pushed the accelerator down and zigzagged through the morning rush-hour traffic at forty, fifty, sixty miles per hour. Often I was on one shoulder or the other. But the guys in the Audi weren’t just keeping up—they were gaining. I roared past the National Military Museum on my right and an enormous mosque on my left. Still the Audi kept coming, and now Yael and Abdel were nowhere to be seen, stuck in the mess the Audi had left behind.
Traffic was getting worse. My speed was dropping from fifty to forty to thirty miles per hour and then all I could see ahead of me was a sea of red brake lights. When I looked again, the Audi was only six cars back and coming on strong. Fearing I would soon be trapped, I again broke right at an off-ramp and began weaving through various side streets at ever-increasing speeds.
The Audi never missed a beat. My pursuers were tracking my every move as I increasingly feared for my life. These guys clearly knew who I was. They weren’t going after Hussam. They’d been coming after me. When they saw me sprawled out on the street by the café, they must have initially thought they’d done their job. They couldn’t have known I’d only been knocked unconscious. But someone had told them after I’d gotten up and driven away. Someone in that crowd. And now they were closing in for the kill.
“Where are you? We can’t see you,” Yael said over the speakerphone.
I had absolutely no idea. Office buildings and restaurants and parks and street signs were blowing by too fast for me to process, much less report them. I was trying not to get sideswiped by the traffic around me, and that was increasingly becoming a fool’s errand.
Up ahead the street I was on was ending. Railroad tracks lay dead ahead. But there was no crossing. Not here. Just a cement wall on the other side of the tracks. I hit the brakes and pulled hard to the right, spilling into oncoming traffic and going the wrong way up a one-way street. I laid on the horn and flashed my lights as I wove my way forward.
Cars, trucks, and motorcycles were swerving to get out of my way and then, all of a sudden, the road completely cleared. I figured there must be red lights ahead. In another sixty or ninety seconds they would turn green, and then cars and trucks and motorcycles would be hurtling straight for me once again.
A freight train was now speeding past on my left. I was picking up speed on this clear straightaway—forty, fifty, sixty miles per hour—so I was slightly gaining on the train. But the Audi was gaining on me. They were a mere three car lengths behind me. Then two. And soon they were right on my tail and about to smash into me.
Then I heard something beeping. I glanced down at the dashboard and saw the gas gauge on empty. Just my luck. I’d made it through half of Cairo with ISIS butchers on my tail, and it was all going to come to an end because I ran out of gas. It had to be a leak, I knew. There was no way the Mossad guys had forgotten to top off the diesel before rolling out on this mission. Which meant I’d been leaking fuel since coming under machine-gun fire at the café.
A single spark, and the whole car could erupt.
I heard the train’s horn blow twice. It was a sharp, piercing sound—the sound of danger, the sound of warning. And that’s when I saw the railroad crossing ahead. Now I knew why the traffic was stopped. It wasn’t for a traffic light. They were stopped for an oncoming train.
Less than a quarter mile ahead of me the road veered slightly left and crossed the tracks at an angle, and I could see the gates were down. I could see the lights flashing, and I knew I had a choice to make. Floor it and try to outrun this thing. Or slam on the brakes and get hit from behind by the Audi, a collision that could easily ignite what leaking fuel was left and blow me to kingdom come. And that’s if I was lucky. More likely, if I could even come to a full stop before the crossing and not get boosted onto the tracks by the Audi, the ISIS guys following me would capture me and take me back to Abu Khalif. That would be a fate far worse than death, I knew, so the choice was clear.
As the train horn blew two more times, I pushed the accelerator to the floor. I was doing nearly seventy miles per hour as I pulled ahead of the locomotive—half a car length, then a full car length. Better still, I was pulling away from the Audi. Not much. Not enough. They were still far too close. But rather than right on my bumper they were about a car length back, and then two.
I looked ahead at the crossing. It was coming up fast. Again came the blast of the train’s horn—and not just once or twice. This time the engineers laid on the horn and wouldn’t stop. I glanced in my side mirror. I could see their faces. Looks of sheer terror. They could see what I was trying to do. They were sure I was suicidal. But there was nothing they could do to stop me, and there was certainly nothing they could do to stop their engine and the hundred fully loaded freight cars they were pulling.
A split second later, the moment of truth arrived.
At the speed I was going, the rubber-coated crossing and the slight rise over the tracks sent the Mercedes airborne. In my periphery I could see and feel and hear and even smell the rush of the oncoming locomotive. But I cleared it. It was close. Far too close. But somehow I cleared and slammed down on the pavement on the other side, metal crunching, sparks flying, and then I hit the brakes and closed my eyes. The car—shuddering, smoking, skidding, weaving—finally slammed into the side of an idling but empty city bus.
The air bags exploded. But the Mercedes didn’t.
Not yet, anyway.
The interior of the car instantly filled with smoke. Coughing, choking, gasping for air, I groped about blindly for the firearm and my phone. I somehow found both and kicked open the driver’s-side door and crawled out of the wreckage. Gripping the silencer-equipped pistol in hand, I turned back to confront my pursuers.
But then I saw the Audi—or what was left of it. Flaming chunks of German engineering were raining down from the sky. The Audi was gone. The men inside it had been vaporized. What’s more, the train hadn’t derailed. It had survived, and for the moment, so had I.
74
A crowd was gathering.
That was a problem. The police were already on their way. I could hear the sirens approaching. There were witnesses. They would be interviewed. The Mossad agent’s body would be found in the backseat of the Mercedes. And I might be found too.
I pushed my way through the crowd, limping and in pain, yelling in Arabic for people to get out of my way but careful to keep my head down and avoid eye contact. Without stopping, I made sure the pistol’s safety was on and then shoved the gun into my belt and pulled my shirt over it. Then I made my way to a subway station. I hustled down the stairs as quickly as I could, mopping sweat from my brow and trying desperately to suck in fresh air and get hold of my spiking heart rate.
I knew countless people had just seen me go into the subway station and would therefore point the police in my direction, so I hobbled my way to the other end of the station and took an escalator back up to ground level. The moving stairs ended inside an office building, out of the direct sight of anyone who was gathering around th
e crash. Immediately I bolted out the building’s back doors, crossed a busy street clogged with rush-hour traffic, and passed through the lobbies and back doors of three more office buildings and then a shopping plaza. At that point I flagged down a taxi, jumped inside, thrust a handful of cash into the driver’s hand, and told him to get me to the campus of Cairo University. Speaking in Arabic, I promised the man a very generous tip if he could get me there quickly, and he readily complied.
Soon we were weaving through traffic and crossing the Abbas Bridge, heading west. I texted Yael, telling her I was alive and where I was headed. Seconds later, she texted back with the address of a supermarket on the north side of the campus. I relayed the information to the driver and asked how long it would take to get there. He said ten to fifteen minutes, depending on traffic, and I shot that information back to Yael.
I’m on my way, she said. I’ll be there in no more than half an hour. Then she gave me exact instructions about what to do when I arrived. Pay the driver in cash. Go directly into the supermarket café, but don’t order. Don’t sit down. Head straight for the men’s room. Step into a stall. Lock the door. Turn off the ringer on your phone. Wait there. And whatever you do, don’t attract any more attention.
Everything took longer than promised. The taxi driver’s estimate was way off. So was Yael’s. But I did as I was told, and eventually Abdel met me in the men’s room. I gave him the gun, and he gave me a clean, dry set of clothes and a new pair of leather shoes. I washed my hands and face and changed quickly as he stuffed what I had been wearing into a duffel bag and rushed me through a back door into an alley, where Yael was waiting in the van.