The Reykjavik Assignment

by Adam LeBor

  The anchor asked, “What was Mr. Akerman doing there, Najwa?”

  “That is a very good question, Faisal. We don’t know for sure, but my sources tell me that he may have been acting as an intermediary between the United States and Iran. Both sides deny that they have been in contact, but there has been increasing talk of high-level discussions, especially now that they both want to see the defeat of the Sunni extremists and the jihadists in Iraq. We’ve already seen reports of American and Iranian intelligence agencies and special forces working together against the Islamists, which both parties refute. But the UN would be the obvious channel for these kind of negotiations.”

  Yael watched, riveted and annoyed. Najwa was better informed than she was, at least about Akerman’s movements. Where was she getting this?

  “So we could be looking at an alliance between America and Iran? The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said the anchor.

  Najwa nodded. “That’s how it works, especially in the Middle East.”

  The anchor continued. “And what is the UN itself saying about this apparent assassination of one its senior officials?”

  “Nothing yet, but—wait a second.” Najwa paused. “Roxana Voiculescu, the secretary-general’s spokeswoman, has just come out of the residence.”

  The entrance of an imposing five-story mansion appeared on the screen. Roxana Voiculescu stood outside and began speaking. “We utterly condemn the …”

  A loud crack sounded and a shower of wood splinters erupted around her. Roxana’s startled face filled the screen, then was replaced by the sky, a blur of images, the pavement. There were screams, shouts, a male voice yelling, “Get down, get down!” Bystanders and journalists were lying on the pavement, scrabbling for cover behind cars.

  Yael leaned forward and placed her wine glass on the coffee table, trying to process what she had just seen. The glass would not stand flat and tilted to one side, spilling a little wine on the wood. She picked it up and immediately saw why the glass was crooked.

  A tiny scrunched up fragment of brown paper rested on the table.

  15

  Rain lashed the windows of La Caridad. The sky was dusk-dark, thick clouds muffling the feeble morning sunshine. Water fell from the sky in a biblical torrent, sweeping along Broadway in great gusts of wet wind. Morning commuters huddled under shop awnings, fingers and thumbs gliding over their phones as though their messages and e-mails would somehow stop the deluge.

  The weather suited Yael’s mood. She checked her watch. Where was Joe-Don? She had a lot to discuss with him. They had planned to meet for breakfast at eight and it was now almost a quarter past. He was never late. In fact he was usually ten minutes early, checking out the place where they were meeting, even if it was just the same diner they’d been going to for years. And today of all days. She reflexively checked the inside pocket of her denim jacket, where a small plastic envelope held the scrap of paper she had found on the coffee table last night. The confrontation with Eli, the CNN report about the deal in Rwanda that had gone wrong, Akerman’s shooting, finding her tell, all had unnerved her. She had hardly slept. Her phone beeped. She glanced down at the text message.

  Sorry for delay. On my way. Fighting with OHRM-called me in later.

  Yael frowned. What did the UN’s Office of Human Resources Management want? An unexpected summons to the personnel department was never a good sign in any organization, especially one announced before nine o’clock in the morning. The waiter, a stooped, elderly Chinese man, arrived with black tea in a small aluminum pot. Yael smiled and thanked him. She declined his offer of a menu. Her breakfast order had not changed in a decade.

  La Caridad was one of the last Chinese-Cuban diners on the Upper West Side. Situated on the ground floor of a brownstone apartment building, it looked out over Broadway and West Seventy-Eighth. The diner was renowned for its enormous portions, low prices, and rapid, brusque service. Yael had been coming here for breakfast since she was a child growing up in New York, always sitting at the same corner table. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough through the clamor of the diners’ conversations and the staccato Chinese and rapid-fire Mexican Spanish of the waiters, she could think herself back in time to when her parents, David, and Noa piled with her through the door for a weekend brunch treat, she and her siblings loudly declaring what they would order.

  She felt the longing inside her. There was no point fighting it and so she let it course through her. It seemed such a long time ago. Another lifetime. Hers, yes, but one lived so differently. David was gone. Noa had moved to Israel. Her father was no longer part of her life. Her mother … Her mother.

  Caught up in last night’s news of the bomb in DC and Akerman’s murder, Yael had forgotten that her mother was arriving tonight from San Francisco. One part of Yael was pleased and excited. Another was nervous. Nervous and resentful at the way they had grown apart over the years—or rather, the way her mother had let them grow apart. Or that she had allowed her mother to let them grow apart. Everything that had happened between them was too dense, too complicated, and too fraught to untangle. But maybe, this weekend, they could start to fix things. And then Yael remembered her conversation with her mother in Gurdeep’s taxi last night, before she had noticed the black SUV. Her mother had explained that they needed to talk—about Yael’s least favorite topic.

  Yael had not spoken to her father for eight years. Just the mention of him triggered a slew of competing emotions. Especially because lately, she had sensed his presence. Once, in her apartment, almost physically, as though he had left his energy there to disturb the air. At other times, that he was somehow involved in the events in which she was caught up. Even watching her, looking out for her. Perhaps she needed that now, when she felt under threat. Yael’s father had never liked Eli. Intoxicated by love, sex, and their glittering future, she had brushed off her father’s warnings that Eli was not what he seemed. Maybe she should have listened. Now Eli was back and she was in danger again. Was that why her mother was coming now?

  She watched a policeman standing by the broken traffic light on the corner of West Eightieth Street, stoic as he directed traffic, clear rivulets streaming from his cap and cape.

  Had Mossad really placed her in the UN, manipulated her up to the thirty-eighth floor, into the SG’s office and his deepest confidence? Over the course of a decade? Could they do that? Maybe. Especially if they had something on Fareed Hussein, and Lord knew there was enough out there to compromise him. One sound file in particular, which Yael had in her possession, and which she had nicknamed “Doomsday,” would destroy the SG and his reputation for good.

  Joe-Don, with his network of contacts through the UN and numerous US government agencies, could find out if Eli was telling the truth. But whatever the truth of his claim, she was not going back to work for her old employer. Ever. For a moment she was back at the crossing point between Gaza and Israel, a stifling hot day fourteen years ago when she made up her mind to leave Eli, and Israel, for good.

  *

  The man in the Jeep turns to the passenger in the back, an Arab woman.

  She jumps out of the vehicle and runs forward, her head scarf flapping in the breeze. Yael lets go of the boy’s hand. The boy sprints toward her. They embrace, crying and sobbing.

  The second man climbs out of the vehicle.

  Yael smiles at him, happy the mission is over. He smiles back and raises his hand in greeting, but walks toward the boy and his mother.

  He says something to the boy and takes his arm. The boy starts sobbing again, shaking, saying no, over and again, holding on to his mother. The mother keens.

  *

  Yael closed her eyes for a few seconds. She could still hear the sound of the woman’s cries as her son was taken away.

  She looked out of the window. A harried-looking young mother pushed a double stroller in front of her, trying to negotiate a path through the rain. A hipster on a commuter bicycle with tiny wheels weaved in and out
of the traffic on Broadway, barely missing a blue Toyota trying to squeeze into a parking space. The cyclist banged the roof of the car hard enough to leave a dent and the driver leaned out of the window, yelling abuse as the cyclist sped off. Manhattan was not happy in the rain.

  The door opened and Joe-Don Pabst strode over to her table, rain dripping off his hooded green US Army–issue parka. He hung his coat on a nearby stand and sat down in front of her. Yael smiled at the sight of her bodyguard. She hated eating alone in public places. Joe-Don’s presence was as welcome as it was reassuring, especially after finding the paper tells on her coffee table. “Hey. I’m so glad you are here. What did personnel want?” she said, her hand moving inside her jacket toward the plastic envelope.

  “I don’t know. I put them off until midday. I’m not worried about that right now.”

  She looked at his face. She knew every one of his expressions. He was unsettled, even angry. She took her hand out of her jacket. The paper tells could wait. “So what are you worried about?”

  Joe-Don opened his bag and looked around the room to check that no waiters were approaching. “This,” he said as he placed half a dozen photographs on the table.

  *

  McLaughlin’s was a ramshackle Irish bar on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-Seventh. At eight thirty in the morning it was underlit and underheated, the damp air heavy with the smell of yeast. Smoking had been banned in Manhattan bars since 2003, but the top part of the walls and the ceiling were stained dark yellow with tobacco and nicotine. Last night’s glasses were piled up in the bar sink and on several tables. Van Morrison crooned softly in the background, a small concession to the morning after the night before. There were no waitstaff to be seen until a tall man in his early thirties walked out from a door behind the bar. He had scruffy black hair and wore a T-shirt that proclaimed No Fucking Way, Jose!

  “Breakfast?” he asked.

  Najwa nodded.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “There’s no menu. We have—”

  “Eggs, oatmeal, corn-beef hash, I know,” said Najwa. “Oatmeal, please.” She looked at Sami.

  “Same. With fruit, if you have any.”

  The waiter looked doubtful. “I’ll try.”

  “Coffee for both of us,” Najwa added.

  They waited until the waiter had gone.

  Sami stared at Najwa. “Are you OK? You look pale. Did you sleep last night?”

  She smiled. “Not much. Big story.”

  Najwa had returned home around two o’clock in the morning, and spent the hours until dawn trying to find out more about the Army of Forty. Her Farsi-language Internet search had proved fruitful once she started looking in the right places, among Iranian opposition websites and forums. She had found a mix of rumors and speculation but much of it pointed in one direction: Tehran. Getting anything on Frank Akerman had proved much more difficult. It was six hours ahead in Europe, so the London, Berlin, and Sarajevo Al-Jazeera bureaus all had reporters on the task as well, but so far they had garnered little, except a rehash of old rumors that Akerman worked, or had worked, for the Dutch military intelligence service, which was hardly surprising. The best potential lead seemed to reach to the Balkans. The Sarajevo correspondent was chasing down a tip that Akerman served in Bosnia during the war in the early 1990s, as a “military adviser” to the UN peacekeeping mission. They had agreed that Najwa would dig deeper at the New York end. There would be some kind of record of Akerman’s assignment in the archives.

  Any potential Dutch military connection to Bosnia set Najwa’s journalistic antenna twitching. The army’s reputation, indeed that of the whole country, had never recovered from the July 1995 disaster in Srebrenica. After the city fell to the Bosnian Serbs, the Dutch UN peacekeepers stationed there had handed over eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys before retreating to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where they drank beer and danced in a line to celebrate their freedom. The Bosnian men and boys were also lined up, but not to celebrate. Fareed Hussein had been the head of the DPKO at the time. Srebrenica was the second genocide on his watch, but the consequence for his career was the same: he was later exonerated by a UN commission of inquiry.

  “A very big story,” said Sami. “That must have been scary last night.”

  Najwa shrugged. “One bullet passing by twenty yards away isn’t scary. Try being the only woman on Tahrir Square, surrounded by Egyptian men drunk on revolution and their idea of free love—that’s scary. I’m just pissed that one of our cameras got damaged.”

  Sami nodded, but Najwa sensed he was not entirely convinced.

  “So who shot at—” he started to say.

  “Wait a second,” she broke in. Sami was right. She did feel unsettled. Very unsettled, but not because someone hit the SG’s front door with a sniper bullet while she was standing nearby. She could still see the JPEG file opening when she clicked on it, the photograph image on her desktop. Reaching inside her purse, she took out two identical black pouches. Made of a heavy fabric, each was slightly larger than a mobile phone, with a long fold-over flap at the top. Two Velcro straps, one horizontal and the other vertical, looped around the outside. She passed one of the pouches to Sami.

  He opened the top flap and peered inside. “What’s this?”

  Najwa pointed at Sami’s iPhone on the table.

  His eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  She picked up the second pouch, heavy and distended by her phone, and weighed it in her hand. “Once they start shooting people, totally.”

  Sami picked up his phone, slid it inside the pouch, then dropped it into his messenger bag. “Now we are done with Jason Bourne stuff, can we talk?”

  “Sure. Work or love life? How was last night?”

  Sami sat back and crossed his arms, his black eyes boring into her. “Work.”

  To her surprise and embarrassment, Najwa blushed. She understood immediately why he was angry.

  Just then the waiter arrived. She thought quickly as he placed two large white mugs of black, scalding hot liquid on the table along with a small jug of milk. There was no point playing the innocent. Najwa received eight calls from Sami after her news story about the shooting. She had eventually called him back after midnight. Her excuse was that she had been tied up in the studio, but the real reason was that she had been so unnerved by the photograph file she could barely concentrate on getting her story reported, edited, and broadcast. But she couldn’t tell Sami that. He was right to be angry. Her behavior was a grievous breach of their agreement; not long ago they had sat at this same table as she upbraided him for not telling her about the breakfast he had arranged in secret with Henrik Schneidermann.

  Najwa and Sami were technically competitors, but had found a way to pool their resources to mutual advantage. If Najwa had a story, for example, about corruption among UN peacekeepers, she gave Sami a heads-up about the broad outline of her report and when she would be filing it. This allowed him to prepare a follow-up in advance and have it ready to go soon after Najwa’s story was broadcast, went online, or both. And when Sami had a story he did the same for Najwa. They shared some of their contacts—although usually kept the best for themselves—and generally did not cooperate with any other reporters. Especially not with their greatest rival, Jonathan Beaufort. Sami and Najwa’s editors would have baulked at any kind of cooperation with a rival news organization, but as Najwa had explained to Sami, they didn’t need to know.

  She tipped some milk into her coffee and sipped it. Nor would her vamp act be enough to fix things. Najwa knew Sami was attracted to her, and today she was dressed in one of her favorite outfits: an olive cashmere V-neck sweater that highlighted her generous curves and dark coloring, a matching pencil skirt, and her trademark knee-high black patent leather boots. She had noticed Sami’s quick, appreciative glances when she walked through the door. But the two reporters were more like a long-married couple bickering and reconciling than potential lovers.

  Najwa put
her coffee down. “I’m sorry,” she said, in her most apologetic tone, reaching for Sami’s hand across the table. “I owe you an apology.”

  Sami glanced at her hand for several seconds, then shook it off. “Too late. You owed me a prompt call back last night. You tweeted twelve times about the shooting but couldn’t find the time to pick up your phone?”

  Najwa tilted her head to one side, appraising him. Sami had always been sharp, digging up a stream of stories about UN corruption, incompetence, or both, interspersed with occasional feel-good pieces about brave peacekeepers and the good work done by the organization’s humanitarian wing. But when they worked together, Najwa had always set the pace. Until recently. What a difference a month and a stream of stories on the front page above the fold made. The disheveled reporter who, in Gap shirts and baggy jeans, looked like a graduate student trying to find the library was gone. Sami’s hair, once a wild mass of unruly curls, had been neatly trimmed. This morning he wore a dark blue light wool suit jacket and a crisp light blue shirt. He sat up straight with an easy confidence.

  Najwa leaned forward, fixing on him her most demure expression. “Sami. I’m sorry. What more can I say? I didn’t have a spare second. The editors were crazy for the story. I am in your debt,” she said, resting her hand on his again. “You said you had to talk to me about something important. How was dinner?”

  “It wasn’t. She canceled.”

  “No. I am so sorry. Why?”

  “She said she had an urgent meeting with the SG.”

  Najwa frowned, thinking for a moment. “But she wasn’t there last night. There was just the SG, Akerman, and Roxana.” She brightened. “Roxana’s pretty. Why don’t you ask her round for dinner instead?”

  “Ha-ha.”