The Reykjavik Assignment

by Adam LeBor

  She spent the next twenty minutes trying to find out more. Modern-day terror groups, especially Islamic ones, were usually deft users of the Internet and social media. But the Army of Forty had no website, Twitter handle, Facebook page, or Instagram account. Her Arabic-language Internet searches did not yield anything. Nor were there any leads in the jihadi deepweb, the clandestine corner of the Internet where the extremists gathered on restricted-entry forums using code names. Then it came to her.

  The Shia holy day of Ashura.

  After which came the Shia holy day of Arbaeen.

  She opened a new window in her browser and typed in “www.farsi.com.” A virtual Farsi-character keyboard appeared, and she began typing rapidly.

  14

  Yael stared again at the screen of her phone, half-hoping she had imagined the message. She had not. Isis Franklin was dead, found hanged in her prison cell in Istanbul. Yael placed her phone on the table in front of her, trying to disentangle the flurry of emotions and memories.

  Isis sitting next to her on the bench on Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, just by the UN building, trying to persuade her to come out to party at Zone. The gold flecks in her dark eyes shining, her black hair pulled back tight from her forehead.

  “Don’t be coy, babe. You are a star. The whole building’s talking about you. Everyone wants to meet you. Don’t think. Just do.”

  *

  Isis talking about the new information she’d said she had on why no peacekeepers were sent to save David and the other UN aid workers.

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s all secondhand at this stage. I can’t confirm anything, yet. I will tell you more when I have something.”

  *

  Isis and Yael having lunch in the UN canteen, sharing the latest gossip about who was up and who was down, who was in and who was out. The two of them in the lounge at the UN base in Kandahar, watching DVDs of Friends and fending off advances from the “Oakleys,” as Yael had dubbed the legion of soldiers, spies, mercenaries, and military contractors who all seemed to wear that brand of wraparound sunglasses. Two women with similar jobs, backgrounds, and interests, enjoying each other’s company. Two women who were starting to trust each other, sharing confidences. Or were they? Perhaps Isis had sensed Yael’s craving for companionship. Perhaps she exploited it for her own ends, to draw out the information that Yael had, and that so many others wanted.

  Had she and Isis ever really been friends?

  Yael thought so. She hoped so. Surely her sixth sense would have alerted her if Isis had an agenda. All relationships were based on a degree of mutual exploitation; the only question was, how much? Lord knew Yael had used her looks, charm, and considerable skills of emotional manipulation often enough to get what she wanted. Yael didn’t remember Isis probing, or trying to extract secrets from her. So, yes. They had been friends.

  But then there was the other Isis, the Isis in Istanbul calling her on the phone, taking advantage of Yael’s determination to find out why her brother died to lure her into Eli’s trap.

  “Walk towards me. I’ll meet you on the corner, where Tigcilar turns onto Mercan Caddesi. We can talk in the van.”

  *

  The curse of Azoulay was as strong as ever, it seemed. It already reached from Kandahar to New York and was now looping back to Istanbul. Isis was its third victim. The second was Olivia de Souza. Olivia had been Fareed Hussein’s personal assistant. She and Yael had become friends, a relationship that was steadily deepening until last fall, when Mahesh Kapoor, Hussein’s chief of staff, had hurled Olivia off a balcony on the thirty-eighth floor of the UN’s New York headquarters. Kapoor was now in prison for murder. As for the first victim, his death, and its consequences, was the most painful of all.

  Yael walked over to the large picture window. She lived in a good-sized one-bedroom apartment with thick walls, high ceilings, the noisiest water pipes on the Upper West Side, and a breathtaking view of the Hudson River, and had done so for more than a decade, moving in after her grandmother had passed away. Her grandmother had bequeathed it to her with two instructions: take care of the art deco furniture that she had brought from Budapest after the end of the Second World War, and start a family. Yael ran her finger over the surface of the sleek, curved dining table by the window. The furniture, at least, was in fine condition.

  She rested her forehead on the window, the glass cool against her skin. The river shone black and silver. A speedboat swept past, bouncing on the water, its searchlight skittering across the water. The lights of the apartment blocks across the water in New Jersey were glowing in the distance, their reflections shimmering on the water’s surface. Would she also die alone, like Isis? Perhaps in a prison cell, or, more likely, here on West Eighty-First Street, a childless spinster who spent her weekends reading the New York Review of Books, going for epic walks in Central Park, having lunch at the long shared table in the cramped café at Zabar’s in the vain hope she sat next to or opposite someone decent-looking and interesting?

  And if she did die childless, it would be partly her own fault. Her mind drifted back, to a night seven years ago, on assignment for the UN, stranded overnight in a remote village controlled by the Taliban, high in the Afghan mountains. A night of fear, freezing cold, and a colossal blunder. Sharif’s tent had been pitched next to hers. A snap decision, a walk of two steps and she was inside the tent, then soon inside his sleeping bag. Yael was the first woman he had slept with. Her interpreter had instantly fallen in love with her, announced that they would soon be married.

  Yael walked back to the mirror above the sideboard. She pulled off her T-shirt, unclipped her bra, let it fall to the floor, cupped her breasts and released them. A little more give, perhaps, but they still sat high on her chest. She pulled at the skin over her cheeks, kneading it this way and that, then let go. It bounced back into place, but lately she noticed that the web of fine lines radiating from the corners of her eyes seemed more pronounced. She needed an eye cream, that was all. She piled her hair up, turned right and left, let it down again, as the memories poured through her head.

  Yael had explained, as gently as she could to Sharif, that she could not marry him. He had been devastated, had begged her to just go through with the ceremony for the sake of his family’s honor. “Please, Miss Yael, just pretend, for one day,” he had pleaded, “then you can go back to New York and we never have to see each other again. One day, that’s all I ask. To spare us humiliation.” She had been twenty-nine, self-righteous and full of politically correct ideas about the need to modernize Afghanistan. She had refused. Sharif disappeared. Her contacts in the Taliban told Yael that he had completed the martyrdom ceremony. She made some calls, discovered his planned route, shared the information with one of her contacts. A sniper had shot Sharif dead on the road to the Kandahar bazaar. She had not pushed to find out any more details. Back in New York, she had discovered she was pregnant. Ten days later, after two appointments at a clinic, she was not.

  Perhaps Eli was right. Maybe she should have married him. She would be living in Tel Aviv now, in a big villa near the coast. She would have children. Their father would be an assassin. An assassin who never gave up.

  Eli’s operation in Istanbul, and more recently her encounter with him in the park, were the latest and most extreme of a series of attempts by Mossad to bring Yael back to Israel. They had first approached her twelve years ago, while she was studying for her master’s in international relations at Columbia University. Then they had tried to play on her patriotism, assuring her that what happened at the Gaza crossing point was a terrible mistake, that lessons had been learned and those responsible disciplined. They did not ask for information—although Yael knew they were interested in two high-profile Palestinian academics who taught at the university—just for her to keep in touch.

  Now they wanted Yael back not just because she had been the star of her training class, but also because of the gold-standard information she had access to at the UN. At first th
ey love-bombed her with a stream of invitations to lunches, dinners, receptions, and cultural events. Alone in New York trying to build a new life for herself, sometimes homesick and lonely, she was tempted. But the memory of that day in Gaza, and what she later discovered, steeled her resolve. Eventually the invitations faded away, and for a while Yael thought she was free. Until she realized she was being followed and that her apartment was being watched. Each morning when she left for work, she saw a white van parked across the street. Yael did not alter her routine, or carry out anti-surveillance maneuvers, unless she was headed to a sensitive or confidential meeting. But she did alert a former Columbia classmate who had joined FBI Counterintelligence.

  The FBI’s New York field office kept a very close watch on the Israeli mission to the UN, in part to ensure that it was not under surveillance or threat from hostile powers or agents. But also because Israel maintained one of the largest and most active espionage operations conducted by a foreign power in the United States. Israel and the United States were close allies, and the United States was also a free and open society—a paradise for Israeli spies who mined it for vast amounts of industrial, technological, and military intelligence, much of it from open sources such as specialist publications and websites.

  One morning Yael walked out of her apartment building to see two NYPD vehicles parked by the white van. When she came home that evening, the white van was still there and so were the NYPD patrol cars. The same thing happened the next day. By the third, the NYPD cars were gone and so was the white van. After that, there had been no more invitations and no more strange vehicles parked nearby. That is, until Yael’s involvement a few months ago in the coltan scandal, which had almost brought down the secretary-general and nearly triggered a new genocide in Africa. Then the invitations, the “chance” encounters with Israeli diplomats in the UN buildings and its surrounds, started again.

  Yael put her T-shirt back on, tucked it into her sweatpants and walked back to the living room. She leaned back on the sofa, her eyes closed. Images tumbled through her mind like a kaleidoscope, fragments of voices, sounds, places. Congo. New York. Geneva. Istanbul.

  Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, the Rwandan warlord wanted for genocide, tearing up the file detailing his crimes against humanity in a Goma hotel room. Hakizimani trussed on the floor of the Hotel Millennium in New York, pleading as Yael held a lighter to his only picture of his three dead daughters.

  Her legs locked tight around the American thrashing underneath her in Lake Geneva, pushing his face down into the water as his body convulsed, then stilled.

  Sprinting along the roof of the bazaar in Istanbul with Eli behind her. The crack of the rifle. Looking around to see that Eli had vanished.

  The memory faded, replaced by understanding. She knew who had shot the gun from Eli’s hand.

  *

  Najwa was trying to decipher an Iranian opposition website when a window appeared on her computer screen.

 

  She closed her eyes, rubbed them, and drank some more of the coffee she had just made. She looked again. The window was still there, two inches by three, the cursor blinking. Najwa considered her options. She could close the window. Or switch off her computer. Or call UN security. Or Al-Jazeera’s computer experts. This was creepy. But it was also intriguing. Who could do this? A government, or an intelligence agency perhaps. Or a very adept hacker.

  Najwa typed:

  The answer came back a second later:

 

 

  Najwa smiled despite her rising annoyance. Her new friend knew how to bait the hook.

 

 

 

 

  Najwa finished typing. A screen grab would doubtless alert her interlocutor, so she grabbed her iPhone, started the camera, and positioned the lens in front of her monitor.

  Her monitor screen turned black.

  She sat bolt upright, dropping her phone onto the desk. The small blue light in the lower right corner of the monitor frame glowed softly. It was still switched on. She picked up her iPhone and checked the Wi-Fi connection: five solid bars. She checked the hard drive: it was switched on. So there was nothing wrong with the computer. She glanced at the top of the monitor. A tiny pinprick of red light glowed next to the lens of the webcam. Najwa reached around the back of the hard drive and pulled out the webcam cable.

  A minute passed, then two and three. Finally, her computer beeped, alerting her that an e-mail had arrived. The screen returned to life, showing her desktop wallpaper of grinning Syrian children in a refugee camp.

  The e-mail had no header or sender. But there was an attachment: a JPEG image.

  She clicked.

  A photograph of a young woman appeared. She was strikingly pretty, with olive skin, dark brown eyes, and long black hair.

  Najwa gasped. Letters began to appear in the message window.

 

  Najwa glanced at the image again, and swallowed.

 

 

 

  Najwa took the webcam cable and reached around the back of her drive. She found the USB port but her hand was shaking and she kept missing the slot. She took a deep breath to calm herself. Eventually, the cable jack slid into the USB port.

 

 

 

 

 

  Najwa ignored the flurry of questions that message triggered. Instead she typed:

 

  *

  Yael switched on her television and flicked through the news channels. President Freshwater’s stumble played again and again. There was more coverage about the DC car bomb as numerous pundits speculated as to who, or what, the Army of Forty was. There was no mention anywhere of Isis Franklin’s death, but that was not surprising. Nine o’clock at night in New York was four o’clock in the morning in Istanbul, and Isis had been held in a high-security prison. The news would eventually leak out overnight, either from someone inside the prison or the American diplomats who were dealing with Isis’s case. She could leak the news herself, of course, and tip off Najwa, or Sami, or both. A little credit in the favor bank with two influential journalists was always useful. She certainly owed Sami a favor. She glanced at her phone. But she owed Yusuf a much large one. She would keep quiet.

  She continued channel-hopping until she pulled up Al-Jazeera America. The television screen showed a photograph of a man in late middle age. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and thinning gray hair. Underneath was written: Breaking: Dutch UN official killed by unknown gunman near Secretary-General’s residence. The photograph vanished, replaced by a live feed of Najwa standing outside the SG’s home on Sutton Place in midtown Manhattan. The whole area had been taped off, and police checkpoints had clearly been erected on the corner of East Fifty-Fourth Street and First Avenue. Crowds of onlookers watched, held back by officers wearing Kevlar helmets and full body armor.

  “What do we know about this apparent killing, Najwa?” asked a male voice, presumably that of the studio anchor.

  “Frank Akerman was leaving a meeting with Fareed Hussein, the UN secretary-general here, about half an hour ago—” Najwa spoke as a police helicopter swooped overhead, the roar of its rotor blades suddenly drowning out her voice, sending her long dark hair
flying in every direction. She waited for a few seconds until the helicopter flew on: “—when he was shot dead.”

  The screen cut to the anchor, a middle-aged Pakistani man, in the New York studio. “Do we have any information about the type of weapon used? Or who might have been responsible?”

  Najwa nodded. “Yes, and no, Faisal. My understanding is that he was killed with one shot to the chest, which may have been a high-caliber sniper bullet. But no claims yet of responsibility and no arrests. The police have yet to release a statement.”

  “So we may be looking at a targeted assassination. Who was Frank Akerman? And why might somebody set a hit man on him?”

  “Akerman was assistant secretary-general of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs. The DPA deals with the most sensitive international issues. Akerman was a Middle East specialist who just this morning returned from a trip to Istanbul.”

  Yael stared, her eyes wide in disbelief. Akerman was dead. And he had been in Istanbul? Istanbul was a common neutral meeting point for confidential discussions on Iran. But why hadn’t she been informed? She and Akerman had met several times to talk about his role as a back channel between the White House and Tehran. She hadn’t seen him around since she’d returned, but had no idea he had recently been dispatched to Istanbul, especially as he had not been at the summit. At well over six feet Akerman was tall, even for a Dutchman, with a laconic style that was almost monosyllabic. They’d never really connected even though, or more likely because, their briefs overlapped. Yael tried not to get involved in turf wars because her mandate from the SG allowed her to act fairly autonomously, and she did get to see Akerman’s reports to the SG. At least, the SG said they were Akerman’s reports. Apart from brief summaries of his meetings with US officials in Washington and Iranians in Tehran, they never seemed to contain much of interest that could not be gleaned from media coverage and specialist newsletters.