by Adam LeBor
“That’s it,” said Najwa.
Sami sat back. “OK. So what is the SG’s special envoy doing in a hotel, presumably pretending to be an escort, using a fake ID to get into a room that has two security guards outside? And who sent the DVD?”
Najwa shrugged. “We don’t know. It arrived hand-delivered, in a plain brown envelope. Marked for my attention. This was the only file on the disc.”
“The metadata?” asked Sami.
“Nothing.”
“No date, time, and make of camera? It should be embedded in the video file.”
Najwa ran the cursor over the video file’s properties. Every field was empty. “Stripped out. But a note came with the disc.”
She handed a sheet of folded paper to Sami. There were two words, “More follows.” The phrase dated back to the era when news stories were typed up over several sheets of copy paper. “More follows” indicated that the article ran onto another sheet. The letter r was malformed, missing its horizontal spar.
Sami nodded and stared back at the screen. “Run the clip again, please.”
The screen filled with the woman walking down the corridor. Sami stared, then pressed the pause button after a few seconds. The picture froze. He scratched his head. “I know where that is. I need to call my news desk. Is this another joint production?”
Sami reached for the play button to watch the end of the clip.
Najwa grabbed his hand before he could press down. “That depends,” she said, gripping his wrist.
“On what?”
Najwa smiled sweetly. “You.”
Sami looked wary. “You have the video file. I don’t.”
“But you have information about someone we are both very interested in. Information that you have not shared, habibi.”
“I told you everything that I could confirm. It’s all in our program.”
Najwa closed the video window on her screen. She looked at Sami, still holding his wrist. “Everything you could confirm. And the rest?”
“There is nothing else,” he said indignantly.
Najwa released his hand. “OK.”
She picked up the telephone on her desk. “I’ll see you later,” she said to Sami, turning away. Najwa dialed the switchboard. “Can I speak to the Washington Post bureau, please?”
Sami instantly leaned forward and pressed the button on the handset cradle.
Najwa looked at him expectantly, still holding the handset. “Yes?”
Sami said, “There is more.”
“For me?”
“Yes, Najwa. For you.”
Najwa put the telephone back down. “We can get the story on the eight o’clock news tonight. I will give you the clip, exclusively, for the Times website. But Sami…”
“What?”
“We go in hard this time. No more protecting her because you are dating her…”
“Let’s get to work,” said Sami, before Najwa could finish her sentence, already hating himself.
Thirty floors above the Al Jazeera office, Yael leaned forward and put Braithwaite’s folder down on the coffee table. The information the folder contained, while shocking, did not surprise her, especially after Clairborne’s performance. Suddenly a wave of tiredness hit her. The sun had set, blanketing the UN headquarters in darkness. She had got up at dawn to catch an early train to Washington, DC; confronted one of the most powerful men in America; been threatened, followed; spent another four hours getting back to the UN; and now this. She watched a police helicopter sweep by, its searchlight cutting through the dusk as it followed the path of the river, flying so close that its blades rattled the office windows.
Yael briefly squeezed her eyes closed, only half-listening as Hussein outlined the implications of the information in Braithwaite’s dossier for the UN, and by implication, for the SG’s career. Who was this man, the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations? A refugee turned multimillionaire; a self-proclaimed champion of the poor and downtrodden who adored luxury and celebrities; a fighter for peace who had stopped the UN intervening in so many wars. What did he want? What drove him?
Yael knew the facts of the SG’s biography so well she could recite them on demand. Born in Delhi in 1940, Fareed Hussein was the son of a Muslim father and Hindu mother. His father, Ahmad, had owned a private bank. The Husseins were a mainstay of the city’s business and social elite, with a wide network of friends and business partners among Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Jains, Parsis and Jews. The family door was always open, and their home full of visitors dropping by for tea and often staying on for dinner. Hussein and his younger brother Omar were privately educated in a school modeled on Eton, the training ground for Britain’s ruling class, just outside the city. Even now, the SG still used the idioms and slang of the 1940s Raj, an affectation that he carefully, and secretly, cultivated by regularly reading P. G. Wodehouse novels.
Hussein’s comfortable world vanished in the violence of partition in August 1947. Families of mixed religious and ethnic heritage, like his, were often the first targets of extremists from both sides. The Husseins fled to Zurich, Switzerland, where Ahmad had business contacts who helped him obtain residence permits for everyone. Fearing the worst, Ahmad had already sent most of the family’s money out of India. But the bank was gone. So was their house in Delhi, their summer home in the mountains, all their wordly goods, apart from the contents of their suitcases. Worst of all, they lost Omar. He disappeared in the chaos at Delhi Station and was never heard from again. There was a photograph of Omar on Hussein’s desk: a skinny, bright-eyed boy, six years old, with a winning smile. Next to it was a framed half of a postcard of the Taj Mahal that had been torn in two. Even at the age of seven Fareed Hussein had already sensed the coming cataclysm. He had bought the postcard, solemnly torn it into two, and handed one half to Omar on the terrace of their Delhi villa one Sunday morning. The brothers had pledged to keep their halves for life if they were separated.
From Zurich, Hussein and his parents had eventually moved to London, where he studied at the London School of Economics. He worked as an investment banker in Frankfurt and New York, before joining the UN in the early 1990s as finance director of the UN Refugee Agency. His appointment had come out of the blue, as he had no experience with any humanitarian, public policy, or development organizations. But his opponents soon learned that his faux-aristocratic mannerisms hid a ruthless, silken operator. Hussein swiftly moved from finance to the far more glamorous and influential field of policy-making and began his steady ascent up the UN ladder. By the early 1990s he was assistant secretary-general in the Department of Political Affairs. The DPA was the most powerful UN department. It decided everything from which country’s cuisine would be featured in the week’s menu at the staff canteen, to the agenda of the Security Council meeting—which meant the DPA helped shape the superpowers’ response in a crisis. Most DPA officials dealt with a particular region of the world. But Hussein carved out a global role for himself, and quickly made a name as an intermediary between Britain, France, and the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other. Hussein soon became known across the organization for being an arch-conciliator. His prime concern always seemed to be keeping the P5 happy by avoiding anything that might run counter to their aims.
After the Department of Peacekeeping split off from the DPA in 1992, there were fears that the peacekeepers, newly emboldened by their own mini-empire, might take a more robust approach, open fire when threatened or obstructed, and prioritize saving lives over the UN’s fabled neutrality. Which is why the P5 ensured that Hussein, who had no military or peacekeeping experience, was appointed head of the new DPKO. Yugoslavia was ablaze and the Hutu genocidaires were already planning their mass slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, but Hussein’s primary concern, publicly at least, was to ensure that the neutrality of the UN, which he liked to describe as “sacred,” was not violated. Hussein made much of his personal history, and often referred to his own experience as a refugee in his sp
eeches and articles. Several chapters of his memoir, My Journey for Peace, were devoted to the buildup to the partition of India, the explosion of violence, and the family’s subsequent life as refugees. Hussein had written movingly from the perspective of a young boy who sees his safe, secure world slowly starting to crumble around him.
Yael had worked for Fareed Hussein throughout her UN career. It was a relationship, she knew, underpinned by a kind of mutual exploitation. She used him, and the UN, to try and save lives wherever she could. Hussein used Yael as his secret conscience. Behind the scenes, Hussein had been happy for Yael to, if not violate, at least bend the concept of neutrality, as long as nothing could be traced back to his office. Indeed, that was one of the reasons her job existed: to broker the covert deals that kept the wheels of superpower diplomacy turning, and to ensure that the balance sheets of multinational corporations stayed healthy. Yael knew she operated in a gray area of compromises and trade-offs, sometimes sordid ones. Warlords walked free; crimes went unpunished. But lives were saved and wars averted. Overall, her moral account had stayed in the black.
Hussein had been her patron and protector, at least until Yael had been sent to Goma, in eastern Congo. There her task was to negotiate a deal with Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, a Hutu Rwandan warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. Hakizimani, a former minister of health, had once been marked out as one of the new generation of African leaders. But after his wife and three daughters were killed in a car bomb, blamed on Tutsi extremists, Hakizimani became the ideologue and propaganda genius behind the Rwandan genocide. His theory of “Hutu Power” demanded the complete extermination of the Tutsis. Every day, for hour after hour, he had broadcast on Radio Milles Collines, exhorting his Hutu compatriots to squash, kill, and stamp on the “cockroaches,” meaning the Tutsis. His instructions had been diligently followed.
Yael was to offer him a shorter sentence, in a comfortable prison in Paris, in exchange for surrendering and dismantling his militia. Almost two decades after the genocide, the Hutu militias had regrouped in eastern Congo. Under Hakizimani’s command they were launching raids into Rwanda and threatening to destabilize the whole region. Yael found the assignment repulsive, but she could not refuse. That was her job. She knew how to handle killers. It was a little late for her to start getting squeamish. The only difference this time had been the numbers involved. But Yael also had more personal reasons for wanting to meet the man dubbed “the Goebbels of Africa.”
Yael glanced at the SG’s desk. Next to the picture of Omar was one of a pretty young Indian woman—Rina Hussein in her graduation gown. Rina was a human rights activist. She and her father had not spoken for years. Rina had recently caused an international incident at the UN headquarters in Geneva. Rina and her comrades had pelted UN officials, Lucy Tremlett, and her rock-star boyfriend at a press conference with the yellow sludge from which coltan is extracted. Yael knew that the SG had pulled strings with the Swiss authorities to get Rina and her group released. Rina probably suspected as much, and it only seemed to fuel her rage against her father, whom she had recently denounced on Twitter as an “accomplice to genocide.”
Yael brought herself back to the room. The SG, she realized, was still talking. She listened patiently as he finished his exegesis on the file he had just read and Yael’s meeting in DC that morning, outlining what he called the “potentially catastrophic consequences” if the UN took on the Prometheus Group.
Braithwaite picked up his folder. “I beg to differ, Fareed. We need to go public with this. It’s dynamite.”
“Indeed it is, Quentin. Which is why it stays inside this room, at least for now,” said Hussein. He turned to Yael and gave her a questioning look.
“I go with Quentin. Just leave a printout in the pressroom early one morning. Nothing can be traced back to us.” A vision of Sami picking up Braithwaite’s dossier flicked through her mind. She could almost see the excitement on his face. Perhaps she would leave it there herself, she thought with a trace of a smile.
Hussein shook his head. “Not now. Not yet.”
Yael and Braithwaite looked at each other, then reluctantly nodded. The SG, it was understood, had the last word.
Yael leaned forward as she spoke. “Fareed, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Forgive me for bringing this up. But you will have seen the story on the Daily Beast today. Is it true? Are you suffering from blackouts?”
“No. I am not,” he said indignantly. “I’m fine.”
Yael watched Hussein carefully as he spoke. There were no microsigns of dissimulation. He was telling the truth. “Then who is leaking these stories about you?”
“Clairborne?” asked Braithwaite. “You have plenty of enemies in DC.”
Hussein’s energy seemed to leak away. His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked weary. “Not just in DC,” he said. “In this house.”
4
Yael checked the dinner table once more, making tiny adjustments to the two place settings, the wine and water glasses, which made no discernable difference whatsoever. The knives, forks, and spoons sparkled; the glasses gleamed; the candlesticks shone. It was a rare outing for her grandmother’s best silver cutlery.
The SG had given Yael the day off after her trip to see Clairborne. She had slept in late, then spent Tuesday shopping and preparing dinner. She had told Sami to come over at around 7:30 p.m. The dinner was ready—all she had to do was heat it up—and the champagne and wine were chilling in the fridge. It was the first time in months she had cooked: she usually existed on the food served in the surprisingly good UN canteen, room service while on mission, or takeout.
She finally stopped fiddling with the table and looked around her apartment, which was as clean and tidy as she had ever seen it. It was a decent-sized one bedroom in a stately building that had been constructed in the 1930s on the corner of Riverside Drive and West Eighty-First Street. The walls were thick, the ceilings high, the bedroom had an en suite bathroom with pipes that rattled and groaned when she ran the shower or the tub, and the large windows looked out over the Hudson River. The building’s elegant black-and-white marble foyer looked like something from a Hollywood film set. Each time she came home she half-expected to see Fred Astaire tap-dancing his way across the floor. She had moved in over a decade ago and the apartment was part of her family history. Her grandmother, Eva Weiss, had fled Budapest at the end of the Second World War and bought the place for perhaps a hundredth of what it was worth now. She had left the apartment to Yael, together with instructions to look after her art deco furniture, find a husband, and start a family. Yael rested her hand on the back of one of the mahogany dining chairs. The table and chairs were still in good shape, she thought, smiling to herself. The rest, well…
Yael was thirty-six years old. Born in New York to an American mother and Israeli father, she had grown up on the Upper West Side, six blocks from where she lived now. She was the middle child of three: her brother David was seven years older, her sister, Noa, three years younger. Yael’s parents had owned and ran a company called Aleph Research that supplied business and corporate intelligence to companies, individuals, and governments. Aleph kept a low profile, was not even listed in the telephone directory, and did not look for business. But it had a sterling reputation for discretion and accuracy and was never short of work. Some clients wanted the broad-brush approach, such as a report on potential future wars in the developing world and their likely impact on commodity prices. Others wanted something much more precise, such as the level of security and controls on Mexico’s border with the United States. Yael’s father and several “freelance researchers,” most of whom seemed to be Israelis, brought in the information. Her mother, Barbara, was a former journalist. She compiled the information, wrote and edited the reports, and ran the business side. Yael had spent some of her school holidays at the midtown office as a child, helping with the filing. Despite Yael’s repeated questions, her fathe
r had never properly explained how he gathered the information. She eventually realized that he had been part of the Israeli intelligence establishment—perhaps still was—and was using his former contacts and colleagues.
As a young girl Yael had been close to her mother, especially as her father was traveling so much on company business. But as she grew into an exceptionally pretty young woman, her relationship with her mother changed. Her parents’ marriage began to collapse. Her father seemed to be continually on the road. Whenever he came home, there were arguments. Some were about the firm: the kind of clients her father was bringing in and the research they asked for. Other fights were domestic. Yael’s mother resented having to raise three children on her own. Yael felt that her mother saw her as a rival for her husband’s affection. In response, Barbara poured all her attention onto Noa and David, which made Yael distance herself further from her mother. So Yael went to her father for affection and reassurance, which he readily gave and which further alienated her mother, in a self-perpetuating spiral. Yael was too young to understand this, her mother too angry at the end of her marriage to try and fix her relationship with her older daughter. Yael’s parents divorced in 1991 when she was fourteen. She went to live in Tel Aviv with her father. At the age of sixteen they moved to London for two years, before she returned to Israel and began her military service.
Yael had started her UN career, after graduating with a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University, as an administrative officer in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). She was responsible for ensuring that the reports and briefings were written in correct, grammatical English and that they were distributed on time to the relevant committees. Yael was a polyglot: fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Spanish, with a decent command of Hungarian. Her job was far more demanding than it sounded. The UN had six official languages, and a legion of zealous, protective interpreters; Yael soon learned to find her way through both the thickets of bureaucracy and the jungle of competing egos. The reports were also a matter of life or death, because the DPKO sent armed troops into harm’s way in the world’s conflict zones, where they fought and sometimes died. Quentin Braithwaite, then on reassignment from the British Ministry of Defense, had quickly noticed Yael’s skill at defusing both office crises and the perpetual power struggle with the rival Department of Political Affairs, which distracted staff and sapped their energy. Braithwaite had brought Yael into the operations room, the command center for the peacekeeping missions. There she proved ice-cool under extreme pressure. He then started sending Yael out into the field. Even her detractors, jealous of her rapid rise, admitted that Yael showed a rare ability to guide opposing sides to the conclusion she wanted, while persuading the protagonists that such a result was anyway in their best interest.