by Adam LeBor
The SG spoke for several minutes, explaining what he wanted Yael to do. Her eyes widened in surprise. Even with Akerman’s death, she had not seen this coming.
Hussein sat back. “So you see now, why Akerman was in Istanbul, and why I could not tell you until now.”
She was about to reply when the door opened and Roxana walked in, holding her mobile phone, wafting perfume through the air. The fragrance smelled familiar. She smiled and nodded briefly at Yael in greeting, then looked at the SG. “I need to talk to you.”
“Please, Roxana, sit down,” Hussein said.
Roxana remained standing, looked at Yael again, then back at the SG. “Fareed, we have a situation here.”
Yael looked at Roxana, then at the SG. Roxana’s dominating body language, her demanding tone of voice, were both extraordinary and telling. And Yael definitely knew that smell: it was Zest.
Hussein sat still for several seconds. He looked at Yael. “Would you excuse us, please.”
21
Yael and Joe-Don sat at a table by the window in Patsy’s Pizzeria, three empty cans of Diet Coke and the remains of a large Margherita pizza—a few crusts and a lone slice—in front of them. The rush hour traffic was pouring down Second Avenue, but they had a clear view of number 800, and the gray police booth that stood by the entrance, across the street.
Joe-Don handed Yael a printout of a photograph. “You’ve seen this before. But here’s a reminder.”
“Salim Massoud,” she said. “Number two in the Revolutionary Guard. The money man, with the occasional assassination on the side. Is he back?”
He took a sip of his Diet-Coke. “We don’t think so. But he hasn’t given up. He is still in communication with Clairborne. They want their war.”
Yael stared closely at the photograph. She pointed at the side of Massoud’s right eyebrow where an inch or so of skin was ridged and puckered. “What’s that?”
“A scar, from the Iran-Iraq war. He was a commando. Three of his brothers were killed. He is the last one of his family. Apart from his son.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Farzad Massoud. A teacher, went to Afghanistan to help. The Americans lifted him at a checkpoint in Kandahar five years ago. He was clean; his only value is his connection to his father.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Sure. Thinner, but alive. Every year his father gets a birthday card from him. Same as yours—August twenty-first.”
Yael handed the photograph back to Joe-Don. “How old is he?”
“Twenty-six. So he was born when?”
“Er, 1985?” Yael’s inability to do simple mathematics was a running joke between them.
“Try again.”
“Eighty-eight?”
Joe-Don smiled. “Eighty-seven.”
“Whatever. Where is he?”
“Somewhere in the US. In a DoD black prison. So black it’s off the books. Run by a private corporation. Guess which one?”
Yael said, “Begins with P?” She looked outside again, across the road. 800 Second Avenue spanned the length of the block between East Forty-First and East Forty-Second. Apart from the police booth, the building appeared to be just another of the standard office and apartment blocks that filled this unremarkable quarter of Manhattan. The UN Plaza Pharmacy occupied one corner of the ground floor, Calico Jack’s Cantina the other. But heavy concrete blocks had been staggered in front of the building and along the sidewalk that ran down its right-hand side. They had been painted gray, and some had plants growing out of the center, but there was no mistaking their purpose: to prevent car bombers from smashing through the doors. The only direct clue that this was the Israeli mission to the United Nations was a small blue street sign, on the corner of East Forty-Second Street, for Yitzhak Rabin Way, named after the Israeli prime minister assassinated by a right-wing Jewish fanatic.
Yael glanced at her watch. It was ten minutes to four. The mission’s end-of-week review and security update took place every Friday at four o’clock. He should be here at any moment. She gestured at the last slice of pizza, keeping one eye on the building entrance.
Joe-Don shook his head. “Please, be my guest. How can you eat that much?”
“I get hungry when I’m stressed.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea? I can’t help you in there, if it goes wrong.”
She took a large bite out of the slice. “Sure. I need to speak to him—and on his home territory. I can pick up all sorts of stuff about what’s going on once I’m there. I’ll tell him you are waiting for me. I’ll be fine.”
Joe-Don looked doubtful, but said nothing.
Yael continued talking. “What have you got on the SUV’s license plate?”
“Black Ford Expedition, three years old. Registered to a firm in Montana. The firm ceased trading a year ago. The trail goes cold.”
“What’s the name of the company?”
“Davidson Outdoor Devices.”
She frowned, thinking hard for a few seconds. “Oh. Of course.”
“Of course what?
“D.O.D.”
Joe-Don nodded, sipped his Diet Coke. “Figures.”
“Was it them inside my apartment?”
“Maybe. But it’s clean. I swept it this morning. No bugs, no cameras.”
“So why did my visitor leave the paper tell on the table?”
“Because he could? To send a message?”
“What kind of message?”
“That your apartment is not as secure as you think.”
“Clearly. But why would someone do that? And how did he get in without triggering the alarms? The UN security people said the system was foolproof.”
“Nothing is foolproof. You know that. There was a brief power outage last night on the Upper West Side. A few seconds, but long enough to disable the system.”
She dunked a piece of pizza crust into a puddle of tomato sauce and bit the end off. Then she put it down and took out her cell phone. The screen showed a frozen frame in a video clip. “Have you seen this?”
“Not yet.”
“You need to. Najwa got it.” She slid it across the table and pressed play.
Surrounded by rolling hills and pine trees, a much younger version of Frank Akerman was standing by a shallow stream. He was dressed in the UN Peacekeeper’s uniform of khaki military fatigues, a UN armband, and a blue beret. The camera panned to the bank of the stream, where a thin man in his thirties, wearing dirty jeans and a track top, lay facedown in the mud. There was a large, dark stain in the center of his back. A few feet away a younger man lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the sky.
Akerman was talking to an older man. Shorter and stockier, the man had a puffy red face and wore a Bosnian Serb army uniform. Both he and Akerman were holding small glasses filled with clear liquid. The two men clinked glasses and downed their contents in one. They then hugged and slapped each on the back.
Joe-Don exhaled loudly. “Wow.”
Yael pointed at the date stamp on the film. “Tuesday July eighth, 16:04 1995. Srebrenica had fallen by then. The Bosnian Serbs were taking away the men and boys. The killing had already started.”
“How did she get this?”
“I don’t know. They have a bureau in Sarajevo. She’s good.” Yael shook her head admiringly. “RIP Frank Akerman. And his reputation.” She kept one eye on Second Avenue as she spoke. A well-built man, dark and tough-looking, was approaching the entrance of number 800. He looked familiar.
“What is it?” asked Joe-Don.
“Hold on. Yes. That’s one of Eli’s goons. I saw him in the park last night. Eli should be here soon. But I forgot to ask—what did HR want when they called you?”
“Me to retire.”
“We both knew that was coming. You’ll be sixty next year. I might join you. We could go into business together. Set up a consultancy.”
“Or a think tank. The Institute for How the World Really Works.”
“A great id
ea. We can ask Fareed to get the UN to sponsor it.”
Joe-Don stirred his coffee. “I was thinking about Clarence Clairborne. Or maybe Reinhardt Daintner,” he said, his voice droll.
Yael laughed. “Sure. Daintner would go for that. KZX would love it.”
Joe-Don smiled wryly. “You can ask him on Saturday. Meanwhile, you still haven’t told me what the SG wants you to do.”
“I’ll get to that. I also promised Eli that at three p.m. on Monday afternoon I would be standing in the foyer of my apartment building, with my bags packed. He kindly offered to arrange a lift to the airport. He’s booked me a ticket to Tel Aviv. Business class. El-Al, but still business class.”
Joe-Don started in surprise. “You’re going back?”
“Of course not. We will either be at the airport by then or en route. Pack warm clothes and waterproofs. And the other stuff.”
“Sure. Where are we going?”
“Reykjavik.”
Joe-Don frowned. “Is that part of your brief now, sustainability?”
Yael drained her can of Diet Coke. “It’s part of everyone’s brief, J.D. Our world has limited resources. There are too many of us. Consumer culture is killing the planet.”
“Sure. Is that why you have twenty-four pairs of shoes?”
“Twenty-five, actually. Although that does include boots and sports shoes.”
“Right. Now tell me. Why are we going to Reykjavik?”
Yael’s voice turned serious. “President Freshwater knows she is being undermined from inside her own party. She is pissed that the Istanbul Summit collapsed. She wants to define her legacy, make a symbolic statement for history. Iceland’s good for that, it’s where Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1986. The Cold War ended soon after.”
Joe-Don snorted. “Sure. And look where that got us. A lot of hot wars instead. And what’s all this got to do with sustainability?”
“The conference is just the public premise for the trip. The real reason she is going to Reykjavik is to meet with Shireen Kermanzade. Fareed has been working on this for ages. That’s why Akerman was in Istanbul. It’s all double-ultra-secret.”
“And what will the two presidents be doing in Reykjavik?”
Yael picked up the last piece of crust. She looked at the crispy dough for a few seconds and offered it to Joe-Don. “Are you sure you don’t want some?”
“No. And you didn’t answer my question.”
She glanced at the building entrance, then at Joe-Don. “Sorry. He’s here. I’ll tell you more when I get back.”
Standing up, she emptied her pockets of her keys, wallet, and cell phone and slid them over the table. “If I’m not out in an hour, come and get me.”
Joe-Don put her possessions into her purse and sat with the bag on his lap, shaking his head. Yael squeezed his shoulder and hurried out, with adrenalin, excitement, and, yes, anticipation coursing through her.
*
Three minutes’ walk away, Najwa and her crew were standing on First Avenue outside the UN headquarters. The sky was still overcast, the line of flags hanging limp and wet, but the rain had stopped. Shining from the downpour, the sidewalk was jammed with television journalists, all reporting or following up on Najwa’s footage of Frank Akerman. Part of the street was blocked off by a line of television trucks, parked face-on toward the curb, each with a giant white satellite dish on its roof. Held back behind metal barriers, a couple of dozen demonstrators had gathered on the other side of the road, waving banners demanding “Justice for Srebrenica” and “Where was the UN?” A woman in her early thirties, wearing a red beret, held a megaphone and led a chant, “Fareed Hussein, Resign in Shame.”
Security was still intense. The NYPD had now set up a temporary station in two Portacabins on the UN plaza. A second layer of concrete barricades had been placed in front of the main entrance. White NYPD pods on metal stilts, bristling with CCTV cameras, stood thirty feet in the air on every corner. The black slabs of glass on each of the pod’s four sides stared down like the eyes of giant insects. A half-dozen police officers watched the demonstration, one filming the protesters.
Najwa looked into the camera as she signed off her report. “The UN Department of Peacekeeping said it was unable to provide a spokesperson to respond to the film we obtained of Frank Akerman. Roxana Voiculescu, the spokeswoman for the secretary-general, has issued a one-line statement saying that the UN is investigating the authenticity of the footage. But as you can see and hear from the protestors behind me, it has blown open a two-decades-old controversy over one of the UN’s great failures. Many in the building hoped that, twenty years after the Bosnian war, the Srebrenica massacre was filed away. For now, at least, that seems unlikely. This is Najwa al-Sameera, reporting for Al-Jazeera from the United Nations.”
“Mabrouk, congratulations. You got two scoops in a week,” said Maria, as Najwa unhooked her microphone. Originally from Madrid, Maria was petite, black-haired, and the sharpest producer with whom Najwa had ever worked.
Najwa glanced back at the protesters. The women in the red beret was walking away. Something about her looked familiar, but then she was gone, absorbed in the crowd. “We got them,” she said, smiling at Philippe, the cameraman. “All three of us. Al-Jazeera. Not me.”
Philippe was a stocky Frenchman in his fifties, a veteran of numerous Middle Eastern war zones who had been relocated to New York from Beirut, against his wishes, after narrowly escaping a kidnap attempt while on assignment in Iraq. “Maybe, but it was your instincts. We have the highest-ever levels of traffic to the website. The clip has gone viral. Every major news agency has picked it up.”
Maria glanced at her cell phone. “Here’s Reuters: ‘Slain UN official toasted fall of Srebrenica with Mastermind of Massacre.’”
Najwa smiled. “That’s about it.”
All three wished each other a great weekend as they packed up. Najwa stood for a few seconds, watching her colleagues walk up First Avenue, before she turned and walked through the main entrance. She braced herself for long waits at the security checks here and at the tent. The first she passed through reasonably quickly, because at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon the flow of people was overwhelmingly out of the building. There was a short line at the security tent in the open courtyard, but by now the system had been honed. There were three lines: for UN officials, visitors, and accredited press. There was nobody in the press queue and so she walked to the front. A UN security guard checked her ID, and she glanced at him as he ran her details through the computer: heavy paunch, luxuriant mustache, a name tag reading Nero. He looked familiar, and then she realized that she had seen him on the terrace of the Delegates Lounge while she was meeting with Bakri. Nero waved her through the metal detector, noting down the time of her arrival.
She looked at him questioningly. “Keeping tabs on me?”
“Nothing personal. Extra security measures, ma’am. All entries to the building have to be logged.”
Najwa shrugged and slid her purse onto the conveyer belt of the X-ray machine. It passed through without incident, and Nero waved her through.
She strode ahead into the building. Impatient to get to her office, she walked quickly to the escalators and did not notice a female security guard pick up the phone and speak in an urgent whisper as she passed.
Al-Jazeera and other major news organizations had their offices on the first floor. Najwa stepped off the escalator, her heels clicking on the polished black granite. She should have been feeling triumphant, but instead she felt uneasy, even claustrophobic. There were no outside windows in this part of the building, except in the journalists’ individual offices, and the white ceiling of the hallway and its square neon lights now seemed to bear down on her, the pale cream walls shrinking inward.
The door to the office next to the Al-Jazeera bureau was open, Najwa noticed with surprise. The room had been empty for several months and she knew that numerous news organizations had applied to use it, although none had been successfu
l. She pushed it gently and it swung inward, so she poked her head around the door. It was a much smaller space than her office. A young woman was standing at the large window that looked out over the East River and the Queens shoreline, with her back to the door. Her bob of brown hair looked familiar.
Najwa asked, “Hello, anyone at home?”
The woman turned around. “Hi,” said Collette Moreau, smiling brightly.
Najwa started in surprise. “Hi … what brings you here?”
Collette smiled as she stepped forward. “We are thinking of further expanding the bureau. The building manager said this room had been free for ages. He gave me the key.”
Najwa shrugged. “OK. Good luck. Hey, don’t think me rude, but I’m in a rush. Keep me posted if we are going to be neighbors.”
“Sure. I hope we soon will be,” said Collette, as she closed the door gently but firmly.
Once inside her office, Najwa pulled down the blinds on all the windows. She locked the door, then pulled the handle to check that it was properly closed. Her encounter with Collette did not really make sense. The Times had just moved to a new office with plenty of space. Why would they need another room? No newspaper editorial budget nowadays could justify three reporters to cover the UN.
However, she had more urgent matters to take care of. Braithwaite had shared some information about Salim Massoud. Najwa knew he knew much more than he was telling, but it was a start. Massoud, he explained, was the number two figure in the Revolutionary Guard, an extremely dangerous man who had evaded surveillance on several occasions. He also had powerful allies in the United States, and was somehow connected to a secret government agency known as the DoD, the Department of Deniable. Massoud’s current location was not known, but he was believed to be out of the United States.
Najwa opened her purse and took out two phones, an obsolete Nokia candy-bar model and her iPhone. She removed the SIM card from her iPhone and put it on her desk. The phone’s screen showed eleven Wi-Fi networks. The strongest, Fatima79, had five solid bars. Najwa reached around her desk, unplugged the Wi-Fi router and the modem, then checked her phone again. Fatima79 showed an empty triangle. By now, most savvy mobile phone users knew that their conversations were not secure. Not only could a mobile phone be tapped, it could also be used remotely as a microphone, to bug a room or record a conversation, even when switched off.