by Adam LeBor
But Najwa also knew from a recent reporting trip to Israel that a cell phone could now also be used to hack a nearby computer. Invented by Israeli researchers, “air-gap network hacking” allowed a cell phone, fitted with the requisite software, to connect to a computer from a range of up to six yards, get inside it, and transmit the computer’s data. The software could be remotely installed on a cell phone without the owner’s knowledge, and there was no need for a USB, or even a Bluetooth, connection between the phone and the computer. Air-gapped computers, ones not connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi or a modem, or to any other devices, were thought to be secure. But even when a computer was air-gapped, the keyboard, monitor, hard drive, and memory chips still poured out a stream of microsignals and electronic vibrations. Every stroke on a keyboard, for example, transmitted an electronic signal on a particular frequency. The hacked cell phones covertly scanned for electromagnetic waves, and if a hacker had access to those emanations, he could gain access to usernames and passwords. Many of those working on the hacking software had previously served with Unit 5200, the highly secretive cyber unit of the Israeli military.
Najwa switched off the Wi-Fi on her iPhone and placed it inside the secure bag that she had showed to Sami at McLaughlin’s. She then removed the SIM card from the Nokia, cut it in half and dropped the pieces in the trash can. She opened up the Nokia’s message folder. There was one message:
All Akerman’s UNMO files missing.
She took the battery out of the Nokia as well, and then put the phone in her purse. The news did not surprise her. All sorts of files, it seemed, had a habit of disappearing from the UN archives. Access to many records of the DPKO’s involvement in both Rwanda and Srebrenica was highly restricted, and each archive kept records of anyone even requesting sight of the reports. But there were rumors that several files, detailing Fareed Hussein’s involvement in both catastrophes, had not been seen since the mid-1990s.
Najwa unlocked a drawer in her desk and took out a Toshiba laptop. It was thick, heavy, and at least fifteen years out of date. With no built-in Wi-Fi, it could only connect to the Internet through a dial-up modem, but it did have a USB port. She powered it up and plugged a memory stick into the port. A window opened on the screen, playing a file of fifteen minutes of CCTV footage from the corner of East Fifty-Second Street and First Avenue. The clip was date- and time-stamped Thursday April 17, 8:00 a.m.—two weeks earlier.
She sat staring at the footage for thirteen minutes. It showed the bustle of early morning commuters on a busy Manhattan thoroughfare. Every other person mouthed silently into the cell phone clamped to their ear. Most were carrying large cups of coffee as they weaved a path through the crowd. An elderly lady walked a tiny dog on a leash. A tall black man in a green vest handed out copies of Metro, a free daily newspaper. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
When the footage reached its last ninety seconds, Najwa straightened, suddenly alert. Henrik Schneidermann appeared, his briefcase in his hand. He looked curiously cheerful and purposeful, quite different from the morose Belgian she was used to dealing with at the UN press office. She felt a sudden pang at the thought of never seeing him again except in this video clip, forever striding forward, full of energy. She watched, transfixed, as a man bumped into Schneidermann’s left side and fell onto the sidewalk. He was bald with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Schneidermann reached down to help the man get up. Najwa could see their mouths move as they spoke.
The man held his hand out as he scrabbled to right himself.
Najwa pressed pause.
The screen froze, revealing the man’s fingers, in black leather gloves, grasping Schneidermann’s hand as he rose from the pavement.
22
Yael stepped out of the lift on the seventeenth floor of 800 Second Avenue and walked into the entrance foyer of the Israeli UN mission. Two CCTV cameras were mounted on the top corners of the heavy steel door. Two more CCTV cameras pointed down from the ceiling. The room was a small, windowless space, around twenty feet by twenty, with light blue walls and a gray floor. On one wall, a poster of smiling, attractive young people in a nightclub advertised Tel Aviv, “the 24 hour city.” Part of another wall was made of tinted glass, an inch thick. A single door opened onto a corridor of more offices.
Yael walked up to the glass wall. Behind it sat a plump young woman with short black hair and thick, black-framed glasses. She stared at Yael. “Can I help you?” Her voice was tinny, coming out of a hidden speaker.
“I hope so. I’m here to see Eli Harrari.”
“Who?”
“Eli Harrari. The chief of staff to the ambassador.”
The young woman stared at Yael. “Mr. Harrari has left New York. He has returned to Tel Aviv.”
“Really? Then how did I see him walk into the building five minutes ago?”
“You didn’t.”
“Actually, I did. At 3:57 p.m. Check the log.”
Even with the wall of glass between them, Yael sensed the young woman’s mind spinning. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Please leave or I will call security,” she said, as she picked up the phone.
“Sure. Do it. Have me thrown out. See what Eli says then. And see how long you will still be working in New York.”
The young woman looked at Yael again, less sure of herself. “Who are you?”
“Motek.”
“Your name, I mean.”
“That’s what he calls me.”
Her eyes opened wider as she placed the phone handset back in its cradle. “Pass your ID, wallet, and cell phone under the glass.”
“I don’t have any of those with me.”
“How did you get into the building without ID?”
Yael had shown her driver’s license to the police outside and to the security guard at the reception, but she was not going to hand it over. She would never see it again.
Yael leaned forward, switched to rapid Hebrew. “Are you really as dumb as you look? How many times do I have to tell you? Eli is waiting for me.”
The young woman flinched, switched off the microphone, picked up the phone receiver again, and spoke rapidly. She stopped talking, listened for several seconds, then looked at Yael. She turned the speaker back on. “Wait here.”
*
Joe-Don looked at his watch, the knot in his stomach twisting tighter by the moment. The battered Rolex Oyster showed five minutes past five. He returned to staring at the entrance of number 800. The door opened. Two young women walked out. Neither was Yael.
“If I’m not out in an hour, come and get me.”
She had been joking. But this was not funny. No matter how smart or how brave she was, she was on Eli’s territory now. The instant she stepped inside the mission, US law no longer applied. Not that laws were really the issue here if something went wrong. He would have to get past the cops at the building entrance, force his way into one of the most secure diplomatic buildings in the United States, find her, take down whoever was holding her, and then get both of them out. While he was unarmed. The odds were, to put it mildly, against him.
He scanned the contact numbers in his phone. There was someone he could call, an old friend from his Special Forces Group days in Central America who could be here in twenty minutes with a weapon, maybe sooner. But it might be easier for him to get one of the cops’ guns. It would certainly be faster. He looked over the road to the UN Plaza Pharmacy. A can of hair spray, a polite request for directions, a sudden face-full of L’Oreal, a haymaker. He could grab the officer’s gun and use it to take down his partner. And probably spend the rest of his life in prison.
Joe-Don shook his head. It would never work. Especially not on his own. There would be backup systems for a building like this. And the Israeli mission would certainly have a CCTV feed onto the street. They would see what was happening, go into lockdown mode, sound the alarm. The NYPD, FBI, Secret Service, and who knew what else would be here instantly.
He had to damp down his r
ising anxiety and think this through. Logic, not emotion, was needed now. He watched a laundry truck stop on the corner of Fortieth and Second Avenue. The deliverymen worked with mechanical efficiency, hurling large sacks of clothes into the back before slamming the door and jumping back into the truck as it headed into the traffic.
That was it. If she really was a prisoner, eventually they would have to get her out of the building and into a vehicle. It was just a question of waiting. Entering and exiting buildings and vehicles always made for the most vulnerable moments. Former Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic had one of the heaviest security details in the world, but it had not prevented a sniper from killing him as he stepped out of his car one afternoon in Belgrade.
Joe-Don had checked the building plan earlier and number 800 had no back entrance. If they had Yael, they would need to come out of the front, or more likely the side entrance on East Forty-Second Street. Maybe he would make that call to his old friend, but give him a longer shopping list. He would need a vehicle, weapons, and some backup. He began to calculate the permutations: the number of men, the weapons, the positions they would need to hold. He picked up his phone and called up the number of his contact. He was about to press the dial button when the door of the pizzeria swung open.
*
Reinhardt Daintner checked over the guest list for the twelfth time that day, nodding to himself in quiet satisfaction. Almost every one of the city’s great and good were attending. Both the Democratic mayor and the Republican governor had promised to be there, even though it was well known that they cordially loathed being in the same room as one another. The chairman of the board for both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, the chairman of the Board of Education, almost every city councilor and state senator, as well as numerous journalists from the major newspapers, television networks, and websites, had all gladly accepted KZX’s invitation. Even Page Six was sending two reporters.
Twelve hours ago, it had looked like he would have to cancel. The NYPD and the FBI demanded that the event be postponed, claiming the threat level was too high after Akerman’s shooting. But after a series of phone calls to some of the most prominent guests, and promises of substantial donations to the NYPD’s and the FBI’s Benevolent Funds, they had agreed to go ahead. Daintner put the list down on the faux-antique desk in his executive suite at the Waldorf Astoria and looked around. Composed of two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room, it was furnished with the bland corporate elegance that now seemed to be his permanent habitat: a dark blue carpet, lighter walls, two plush cream-colored sofas, the walls decorated with unthreatening works of abstract modern art.
He leaned back, yawned, and stretched his long limbs. Daintner had arrived in New York three days ago. He’d factored in a couple of days to get over the jet lag, but the journey had certainly been eased by the fact that he was the only passenger on KZX’s corporate jet, a Bombardier Global Express. The onboard chef had prepared him a light dinner of grilled sea bass, washed down with a superb Chablis. A good night’s sleep in the airplane’s bedroom was followed by a swift VIP processing at Teterboro Airport, just outside New York, and a limousine to his hotel.
He reached across the desk for the fine white china teapot, poured himself another cup of Japanese Sencha green tea, and walked over to the large corner window. The sky was still gray but the rain had stopped and pedestrians were striding along without umbrellas. He watched a pizza deliveryman effortlessly zip through the crowds on Rollerblades, all the while holding two cardboard boxes in front of him. How easy it looked. How easy Daintner’s own work had been, directing the tide of money that quickly washed away the stains on KZX’s reputation.
A series of dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants over the last year, hosted by the PR department of KZX’s New York office, and several substantial corporate donations to the favorite charities of the cabal of elderly ladies who reigned over New York City’s philanthropy circuit had opened all the necessary doors. The coltan scandal; the recent unpleasantness in eastern Europe with the Romany people; the messy connection with the Prometheus Group over privatizing UN security and peacekeeping—all this was now old news. The new news was tomorrow evening’s opening reception of the KZX School of International Development at Columbia University, with Fareed Hussein as the guest of honor. Daintner looked at his watch, a sleek black Rado. It was now five o’clock. Twenty-six hours to go.
He sipped his tea, relishing the sharp, almost bitter taste. Tomorrow night would be the crowning glory of his career. Sometimes he admitted to himself that the reach of his company, the sheer power of money, scared him a little. What if, one day, his bosses tired of him? For now, at least, that seemed unlikely, but if they did there were the files, backed up somewhere deep in cyberspace, the hard copies in the safe sunk into the floor of his penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Geneva.
Daintner put the cup down on the desk and walked into the bedroom.
The floor on his side of the king-sized bed was empty. Three identical gray silk suits hung from the railing in the wardrobe, together with six white shirts. Each had been hand-stitched by Daintner’s tailor on London’s Savile Row. Two identical pairs of black brogues stood on the floor, both handmade by Lobbs. He walked around the bed. That month’s issue of Vogue lay open on the floor, on top of that day’s New York Times. He picked up a black bra that lay crumpled in a corner and placed it on the bed.
He slowly shook his head in irritation, walked into the marble-lined bathroom, splashed his face with cold water and stared at himself in the mirror. Reinhardt Daintner’s unusual appearance almost always turned heads. Just over six feet tall, he was stick-thin, with slightly stooped shoulders and light gray eyes, and so pale he was almost an albino. His white-blond hair stopped on his forehead in a widow’s peak, above eyebrows of the same color. On the rare occasions that he was worried, and he let it show, his tongue flicked out through his lips like a hungry lizard’s. Yet he could, when he chose, be charm itself.
Daintner had joined KZX as a trainee in the communications department after graduating from Heidelberg University. He lived to work and his dedication was appreciated; after twenty years he was now director of corporate communications, with a network of media and political contacts across the world that many of the prime ministers, presidents, and CEOs on the list would envy. An invitation to lunch or dinner came almost every week from an elite head-hunting agency representing countries and corporations keen to hire him. He never accepted any of them, partly because, despite the promises of confidentiality, word of his disloyalty would soon get out. But mostly because KZX was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. It had its own intelligence department, which was far better informed that those of many countries. KZX’s media holdings were always in the headlines, but its pharmaceutical division garnered less attention—which was how Daintner liked it.
Daintner had recently returned from a secret meeting with Taliban leaders in Qatar. Once marijuana and hashish were fully legalized, other drugs would soon follow, and the potential market was worth billions. Which was why the KZX School of International Development had already commissioned a series of pilot studies, from several leading academics and economists, under the guise of helping the pharmaceutical industry act in a socially responsible way once legalization took place. The reports had titles like “The likely socio-economic impact on the micro-economy of an Afghan village of the potential impact of the legalization of heroin,” but buried within the touchy-feely stuff about the poor peasants were numerous nuggets of hard intelligence and financial information that would be the building blocks of the company’s future strategy. Once KZX’s links were formalized with the Prometheus Group, the two firms would be unstoppable. Prometheus would supply what was known as “force projection” to secure a market in opiates, minerals, or whatever other resources were in demand, and KZX would then take care of the business side of the global drugs market.
Daintner found Clarence Clairborne’s mil
lenarian fantasies about the coming “Rapture” laughable. But you worked with who was available and could get the job done. Of that, he had no doubt. The coming war would shake up the old order, destabilize the Middle East, and leave the requisite power vacuum that would immediately be filled by Prometheus and KZX. The plan itself was buried so deep in cyberspace, and encrypted to such a level that even the NSA would struggle to find and decode it. However, others had sensed the coming storm: Henrik Schneidermann, for example. His instincts had been completely correct. If only Schneidermann had kept them to himself. Had he not put them into an analysis for Fareed Hussein, he might still be alive. His death had been regrettable, but even with him taken care of there were still several pieces of grit in the machine.
Daintner returned to his desk. Three files lay on the surface, each with a small passport-sized photograph stapled to the front and ULTRACONFIDENTIAL printed at angle across the cover. The top file had a photograph of Yael, the second one of Sami, and the third one of Najwa. He picked up the top file and flicked through the pages, lingering with a smile over the account of how, several years ago, Yael had arranged for US Special Forces to guard the Taliban’s opium fields so they would not blow up a gas pipeline. That was not the first time she had been unwittingly helpful. Daintner glanced at the second file. Sami Boustani was an irritant, and persistent, but essentially manageable. He would be receiving several visits from “immigration officials” in the next couple of days, officials especially interested in his family connection to an attempted suicide bombing on the Gaza border. That was more than a decade ago, but there was no statute of limitations on terrorism.
It was Najwa al-Sameera who proved more troublesome than expected. He grabbed her file and scanned the heading of the latest addition: