Page 36 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
In Cairo, a couple of days before he first learned of the existence of magic, Owen Maddox met Waverly Weir to talk about his next target, a retired British national who was living in the city.
They met in a busy koshari shop behind the Egyptian Museum. Owen was pretending to be a tourist, in a casual shirt and chinos and sunglasses. Weir wasn’t pretending to be anything and arrived dressed in his usual cheap suit, cigarette in hand. “What’s this?” Weir asked, staring at the bowl of food Owen pushed towards him.
“Koshari,” Owen answered. “Local speciality. Pasta and lentils and tomatoes, basically.”
Weir ignored the food and sucked on his cigarette.
The shop was busy with locals and noisy with the hubbub of chatter and good-natured arguments. Ceiling fans stirred the air but did little to counter the dry, grimy heat. Outside, the roads were clogged with traffic, cars and minibuses and trucks fighting for space, horns blaring.
“The target lives in a property in Al-Darb Al-Ahmar,” Weir explained. “One of the oldest parts of the city, if my brief is accurate. Which it always is.”
Owen nodded once to show he was listening.
“His older brother bought it,” Weir continued, his eyes on the busy street outside. Owen followed the man’s gaze and saw a couple of scrawny children dart across the road, dodging between a minibus and a truck. “He was converting it into a modern, architecturally wanky, show-off sort of house. Probably wanted photos in some glossy magazine. Then the brother died in that plane crash in Ethiopia ten years ago and it passed to the target. And all the renovation works just stopped, because the target didn’t give a shit about that. He’s lived there alone ever since. So there shouldn’t be anybody to get in the way.”
Owen nodded again as he chewed. All of the details he needed would be delivered to him in his hotel room at the Four Seasons later, as normal. The meeting with Weir was largely pointless.
“It needs to look like natural causes,” Weir said, leaning forward on the table, close enough that Owen could smell the tobacco on his breath. “Local law enforcement won’t look too closely, they don’t give a shit, so you don’t need to do anything too elaborate. Just no bullet holes or knife wounds. Don’t give them a reason to conclude anything other than natural causes.”
Most of the time Owen killed people at a distance, but he wasn’t averse to close-quarters work. It was harder, more demanding, but ultimately more satisfying precisely because of the challenges. Shooting someone at a distance was easy. Killing them when they could reach out and fight back was much harder.
“Got it,” he said. He glanced up from his food and saw Weir watching him through the haze of his cigarette smoke, his eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Nothing,” Weir said, his expression clearing. “I’m just tired, I think. Some of the shit I have to deal with.” He shook his head slowly and his attention drifted off to the street outside once again.
Owen had noticed this happening more and more in recent months—Weir talking to him like they were friends, like he was someone to confide in. Owen didn’t know what was behind it, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to be friends with Weir. He didn’t want a personal relationship with the man, and he didn’t need company. He was a loner and wanted it to stay that way. He wanted to be given a job and then be left alone to get on with it.
“When do you want it done?” he asked, trying to get Weir back on topic.
The other man shrugged as he blew out a mouthful of smoke. “End of the week, next week. Sometime soon. Whenever you think you’re ready.”
Owen would take a couple of days to study the location before deciding on an approach and a method. Plan first, act second, as always.
“One more thing,” Weir said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “Don’t be surprised if you recognise the target.”
Owen waited for the elaboration Weir was clearly desperate to give.
“He used to be a politician,” Weir explained. “His face was in the papers for a while, back home, when he was in government. But that was years ago. Now he’s just an embarrassment. And he’s having meetings he really shouldn’t be having.”
Owen lifted his eyebrows as he chewed, asking a question.
“Fucking Iranians,” Weir answered. “This man knows too many secrets to be meeting with people like that.”
***
The Al-Darb Al-Ahmar area of Cairo was a bustling neighbourhood of narrow alleyways cutting crookedly between tall buildings the colour of sand and sunlight. The air was warm and dusty, and there was always some sort of sound to be heard in the background—car horns and engines roaring, or the reedy, tremulous azan from the mosques. Men sat around tables outside coffee shops, sucking on hookah pipes and watching Owen through hooded eyes as he passed, while above the cobbled streets and colourful awnings women and children leaned out of narrow windows, gossiping and laughing. People looked at Owen, but never for long. He carried a bag of camera equipment that he had bought in an electronics store near the hotel and occasionally he would stop and take a few random shots. The people on these streets had seen photographers before.
He found the target’s house on a corner where an alleyway turned left and widened into a street. It was a partially renovated twelfth-centurystone building comprising a single-storey section with a flat roof that Owen’s brief had told him had once been a bakery, and a four-storey building connecting to it, with wooden shutters over the windows and a large arch-shaped door constructed of thick planks of dark wood.
Owen squatted down at the end of the street, next to an old Coca-Colavending machine that guarded a shuttered doorway, and studied the target’s home through the camera’s viewfinder. He thought he would be able to pick the lock of the doorway, if he had to, but he would be exposed for as long as it took him, on the street with no cover. He thought of other ways into the property, and his eyes went upwards to the flat roof of the former bakery, to the windows on that side of the four-storey building, their shutters closed. People put a lot of thought into securing their front doors, Owen knew, but they didn’t tend to put much thought into how secure their windows were, particularly windows on upper floors.
For the rest of the afternoon, as the sun blazed orange in the sky, Owen traced potential routes across the rooftops. He found an access point several streets away, up a staircase that climbed the side of a two-storey building. That staircase had a gate with a padlock on it, but the gate was hidden from view, down a much narrower street and beyond foul-smelling dumpsters. He could pick a padlock in seconds without being seen. His plan was set.
He spent the following day relaxing, swimming in the pool at the hotel and then venturing out for an hour to walk around Cairo, enjoying the hustle and bustle, the smell of hot falafel and coffee, the bright colours of a busy market where locals bumped up against tourists. Then he went back to his room, showered, and slept until eleven, ensuring he was rested. He returned to the gated staircase next to the dumpsters at midnight and picked the old padlock in less than a minute. The gate screeched at the hinges when he opened it, and Owen paused, listening for any reaction, but the streets remained silent. He ascended the stairs quickly and silently, passing two doors, one on each floor, before he reached the top of the building. A view of Cairo spread out: minarets, the dome of the nearby mosque lit up and glowing against the night sky, and flat rooftops on all sides, with clotheslines and rusty satellite dishesand old tables and chairs. Owen scampered like a cat, making his way quickly across the jumble of rooftops, rolling over boundary walls and springing over the chasm-like alleyways. He heard televisions through windows, conversations, and what sounded like a woman screaming somewhere below him, but nobody saw him, and Owen made no noise to attract attention.
It took him ten minutes to reach the flat roof of the former bakery. There were two windows on that side of the taller building, one high above on the top floor, but another on the second floor, the bottom edge of the shutter at Owen’s waist. The shutter was secured only by a catch on the inside, halfway up. Owen slipped his knife in between the two shutters, like sliding it between ribs of a victim, and flicked the catch up, unlocking it. He boosted himself up on the sill and swung his legs inside, pulling the shutters closed again behind him. He was in. Plan first, act second, always.
He was in a bare room, tiles on the floor and no furniture but for a wooden table against the side wall. He moved to the door and opened it a crack, seeing a stone staircase ascending through the four-storey building. He heard no noise, saw no activity. The building was silent. He stepped out of the room and made his way upwards, opening every door, scanning rooms that were empty and dusty, all of them with shutters closed to the outside world. It seemed that the place had been stripped of all belongings and was now little more than a shell, a sad place empty of all life.
