Free The Profession by Steven Pressfield

with razor wire. Of course everybody carries a siphon. If a foreigner is foolish enough to park his car without passing out a little
baksheesh
to a pack of street urchins to stand sentry over it, his tank will be dry in five minutes, not to mention tires and wheel covers stripped, along with the alarm rig, the sealed-argon headlamps, and the nav and sound systems. If the thieves can get at the engine, they’ll winch that out too, though every car hood in Cairo is double padlocked and booby-trapped with pepper spray. I was in Egypt briefly during the NDP’s last days. One of the stunts the street kids worked then was to wait on the sidewalk outside a hotel for any European or Asian who was wearing a clean business suit. The little hoodlums would approach, holding out one hand empty, palm up, the other holding a thick black glob of shoe polish. You learned to dive into a cab fast.
    I pay for the gas and slip two folded U.S. fifties into William’s shirt pocket. We are instantly the best of buds. This is not entirely inauthentic. By recognizing his state of need and addressing it at once and without ceremony, I have proved myself a friend. Who else will do this for William? Not even his own brother, if he has one, who’s for sure as tapped out as he is.
    I am here in Egypt to contact and recruit a gentleman named Abu Hassan el-Masri. These are my orders from Salter. El-Masri is a generic name, the equivalent of Joe from Kokomo. It means “father of Hassan, the Egyptian.” My man is not from Egypt. He’s from Bergen, New Jersey.
    I know el-Masri from Yemen in 2019 and from several contract assignments over the decade. El-Masri was a contractor flown in to Sana’a by Salter to act as an interpreter and disbursements adviser, meaning bagman. Before that, el-Masri had served as a sergeant in the Egyptian army and, earlier still, as an undercover agent of the Amn al-Dawla, the old regime’s secret police. My instructions are to recruit him CDW—Can’t Do Without. Americans are not permitted in Egypt since the rise of the Brotherhood, so I’m traveling on a Canadian passport.
    El-Masri lives in Helwan, a prosperous suburb. William gets me there in about an hour, coming in down Uribe Street, by Sadat’s tomb, then past the Citadel and through Maadi into a maze of streets choked with taxis and buses, minicabs, gharries, bicycles, and mopeds. I haven’t been in an Arab country in over a year. It all comes back. The smell—which is a malodorous amalgam of diesel fumes, animal and human excrement, rotting fruit, dust, and body odor that is simultaneously revolting and romantic—triggers a full-body flashback.
    “Do you have something for me, William?”
    He indicates the cargo pouch behind the driver’s seat. Inside anoiled rag I find a U.S. Army Colt .45 automatic, M1911A1, loaded, with three full clips in a wrapper. I see William smile in the rearview. “Beautiful,” he says.
    I agree.
    I have traveled to Egypt without a weapon, knowing that Customs and the police at any hotel will go through everything I have.
    “William, let’s talk some shit.”
    I ask him who hired him and what he knows. The tone I take is agent to agent, peer to peer. Does he work for a specific agency or department that’s part of an overall operation? No, he’s freelance. He doesn’t know who hired him; a broker he often works for phoned him with a job. Did the hiring agent say what the job was? To bring you to this address. William doesn’t know who lives there.
    “Then what?”
    “Wait for you. Watch over you.”
    I ask if I’m in danger. He grins. “The blind are leading the blind, no?”
    We inch forward in the gridlock. One of the things I do to kill time when I’m traveling is to cupcake A.D.’s byline. She never stops working. She’s got contacts at every videomag, holozine, and network, mainstream or alternative, and at a hundred online and subscription journals. Sure enough, here she is now with an op-ed two hours old in