The Washington Stratagem

by Adam LeBor

  Hussein’s plan was simple enough. He just needed to make sure there were none of his fingerprints on it. He opened the drawer of his desk, took out a file of papers, and flicked through the sheets. He smiled. Everything was ready.

  She is five minutes early, sitting down at a table reading Haaretz, when her telephone buzzes. She takes the call, listens, does not protest at the intrusion, argue with her new orders, for there is no point.

  Sarah arrives and greets her, smiling with pleasure.

  Yael’s face is blank. She says, “Who are you?”

  “What a question. I am your cousin. We just spoke on the phone. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know you. You are bothering me. That’s what wrong.”

  “Is this some kind of joke? Because it’s not very funny.” Sarah reaches inside her bag and takes out a book, the new Amos Oz novel. “Here, you asked for this.”

  Yael looks her in the eye. “I said, I don’t know you.” She pushes the book back across the table, ignoring the anguish tearing at her inside. “And I don’t want your book.”

  Sarah’s open, trusting face twists in pain. She reaches for Yael’s hand. Yael instantly pulls it away. She sits back, her arms crossed, her eyes cold.

  “Why are you doing this?” asks Sarah, her voice cracking.

  Yael returns to her newspaper.

  Sarah stands up and walks away, tearful now.

  She watches Sarah go, willing herself not to cry.

  The ferry sounded its foghorn, a deep lowing that carried far over the water. The mournful sound matched Yael’s mood. The encounter on the boat had broken her concentration. The demons had gleefully marched back in, feeling quite at home. What a trail of destruction she left in her wake, she thought: dead bodies, wrecked relationships, stillborn love affairs, ruptured family connections. Her relationship with Sarah had never properly recovered. Yael had called her a couple of days later, to invite her for a coffee. Sarah had not answered her calls. Eventually, Yael had gone to her apartment, claiming complete ignorance of their previous encounter. Sarah had eventually agreed to meet her, but despite Yael’s best efforts they never regained the closeness they had enjoyed before.

  And now Yael could add Miranda Napolitano to her list. The two women had worked together a decade or so ago, when Yael first joined the UN, and soon became friends. Miranda had been the PA to the head of peacekeeping. Bronx born and bred, Miranda had been taking night classes in international affairs at college when she had become pregnant. Under pressure from her Italian family, she had married her boyfriend and resigned. Although she and Yael had promised to stay in touch, they had eventually lost contact.

  Miranda had proved surprisingly persistent when she sat down, or perhaps Yael was losing her touch. Miranda had explained that she was now a housewife, still married to her boyfriend, living on Staten Island. Miranda simply did not believe that Yael did not recognize her. Yael’s mask began to slip. She had ached to tell Miranda that she was right, to talk about old times and bring her up to date on the latest office gossip. Then Cyrus Jones had reappeared. Yael’s inner wavering evaporated. Her mask slid back into place. Miranda eventually gave up, annoyed and disbelieving, and went to sit somewhere else.

  Yael watched Manhattan slide closer into view. The radio masts on the skyscrapers’ roofs blinked orange and their windows were a honeycomb of light in the gloomy dusk. The mist was thick now, trailing around the buildings, ghostly tendrils floating through the canyons of Wall Street onto the surface of water the color of gunmetal. Yael looked for the newly built Freedom Tower, which had replaced the Twin Towers destroyed on 9/11. A memory flashed into her mind: her fifteenth birthday lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant in the old World Trade Center with her brother David. He had told her he was gay. The news had not surprised her. She had long wondered why he never brought a girl home. She turned David’s ring around on her finger.

  Apart from Joe-Don, there were no men in her life. Except, of course, for Cyrus Jones, she mused, with a glimmer of a smile. The waves were rougher now, foaming white on their crests, slamming hard against the sides of the hull. Yael could feel the engines straining to keep the ship on a straight path as the ferry slowed, beginning to maneuver itself into the harbor. She thought briefly of Sami, his intelligent brown eyes, his wild curly hair and almost touching naïveté with women, or at least with her. Then she remembered his appearance with Najwa on Al Jazeera. Not so naive, after all.

  She watched a giant cargo ship sail by, its long deck piled high with shipping containers. The wind blew the cabin window open again, and it smashed back and forth against the handrail. She shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable. The pressure in her bladder was near irresistible now. She had to go to the toilet. It should be OK. She and Jones were on a boat. He couldn’t go anywhere else and they were not due to arrive at South Ferry for another ten minutes. There was a restroom near her seat, but within Jones’s peripheral vision. Yael stood up, turned around, walked along the deck away from the prow, and down the stairs to the ladies’ restroom.

  She was washing her hands in the basin, her purse next to the tap, when the door opened behind her. She looked up into the mirror.

  “Hello, Yael,” he said.

  10

  The restroom was narrow, barely eight feet wide. As Jones said the first syllable of Yael’s name she was already twisting in midair.

  By the time he finished the second syllable she crashed face-first into him, slamming him backward into the rear wall.

  Jones’s shot went wide and hit the mirror. It shattered, showering the washbasin with slivers of broken glass.

  Yael instantly grabbed the barrel of his gun with her left hand. She slammed the pistol against his chest, trapping the weapon under her forearm, using her bodyweight to pin him hard against the wall.

  The room shrank around her, as the adrenaline pumped and her sixth sense went into overdrive. She knew how Jones would counterattack before he knew himself.

  Jones tried to twist out from under her, his left hand balling into a fist as it flew at her face.

  Yael dodged the blow, turned at the hip, and slammed her right fist into his groin again and again. Buttressed against the wall, Jones had nowhere to go. He grunted and turned white.

  The heavily scratched silencer on Jones’s pistol added a good five inches to the barrel. That was a disadvantage for him. It made the gun more difficult to use against an opponent versed in close-quarter fighting, and it gave Yael extra leverage as she held on.

  Jones tried to squirm away from her. She kept her grip on the barrel, pushing his gun arm so hard against his ribs that she could feel them pressing against her fingers. But then she moved her hips out to bring her body weight into another punch to his groin.

  Jones felt the lessening of pressure on his chest. He drove his left fist into her left shoulder, his middle knuckle extended, twisting around to dig into her scar as though he had been precisely briefed on her weakest point. She gasped as the pain shot down her left side. She willed herself to ignore it and shifted back to push the gun harder against him.

  Yael brought her right knee up fast, toward his groin. Jones blocked her with his thigh and raised his left hand again, his fingers extended now, jabbing at her eyes.

  Yael jerked away, taking the blow on the side of her face. Jones’s fingers slid down her cheeks, scraping her skin. She yanked the gun sharply upward. Trapped inside the trigger guard, Jones’s right index finger snapped. He yelped in pain and slammed his fist down toward Yael’s nose.

  She dodged sideways, feeling the hammer blow on her collarbone as she swept his legs from under him. The gun flew away, sliding back and forth across the restroom floor as the ferry was buffeted by the waves. They scrabbled trying to reach it. Yael slipped and went down hard. Jones landed between her legs and jumped on top of her, grabbing her throat with both hands, ignoring the pain in his broken finger, driving his thumbs into her windpipe.

  Yael coughed and j
erked her head sharply to the left, trapping the fingers of his right hand between her throat and her collarbone. The move distracted Jones and bought her a precious second. She yanked Jones’s thumbs down and away from her neck. She pushed her back up into the bridge position, taking his weight on her knees and thighs, raising his body above hers. Held up by her hips, Jones flailed uselessly, too high for his blows to connect.

  Yael clenched her left fist and slammed it into his right side, using the momentum to flip him sideways and underneath her. Now she was on top. But Jones was also trained in close-quarter combat. He tried the same maneuver, pushing his hips up to try and flip her over.

  Yael was too fast for him. She punched him in the face with her left hand, lifted his head and slammed it against the floor, rolled backward over her left shoulder, and jumped up, hands up in front of her face, ready for a counterattack. There was none.

  Jones lay supine and dazed for several seconds. He tried to slide toward the gun.

  A brown mist descended over Yael’s vision. She kicked Jones in his side.

  Her breath turned thick in her throat.

  Something fell away inside her.

  Jones lay still.

  She raised her foot over his head.

  The brown mist darkened.

  Jones groaned, a thin trickle of blood dripping from his nose. His eyes opened.

  Yael’s vision widened out. The mist receded.

  She dropped her foot, controlled her breathing to center herself. She quickly stepped around him and picked up the gun. It was a .22 Beretta, she noted with interest. The same caliber and make that had fired a bullet through her shoulder on the shore of Lake Geneva.

  The weapon felt slippery in her hand.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The gun made a muffled pop.

  The bullet hit the floor a foot away from the right side of Jones’s head.

  He stared at her, his face contorted in a mix of fear and fury. “We are coming for you, Yael. If not me, then someone else. And we won’t stop. Ever.”

  She thought quickly. There was a powerful argument for killing Jones. He knew her face, where she worked, and could easily find out where she lived. And this was personal. Any man who had thought he was going on a dinner date in a romantic restaurant overlooking Istanbul only to end up in a basement owned by the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, with footage of the ordeal freely available on the Internet, had good reason to want revenge. Yael had killed before: Hakizimani in the Millennium Hotel and her attacker on Lake Geneva. But Hakizimani’s death had been an accident, perhaps. The fight on Lake Geneva had been a fight for her life. She had no doubt that her opponent would have killed her. Jones was different. He could have shot her as soon as he walked into the washroom, yet for whatever reason, he had not. To kill him now would be cold-blooded murder. In addition, the South Ferry terminal had CCTV. Her DNA and fingerprints were all over this room. Her UN immunity would not extend to a third corpse in her wake. In fact, that would give Masters the perfect excuse to turn her over to the NYPD. And Jones surely had valuable information.

  “Sit up,” she ordered.

  Jones struggled to raise himself, panting as he moved, his face pale and damp.

  “Whom were you meeting on Staten Island?” Yael asked.

  He laughed, coughed, spat out a tooth. “Your boyfriend. Oh, I forgot, you don’t believe in boyfriends.”

  “Try again,” she said, ignoring his provocation. She aimed at Jones’s leg, her hand steady.

  Jones stared at her. “You won’t shoot me,” he said, his voice confident.

  “Maybe not on purpose. But it’s hard to hold a gun straight in a storm.” Yael moved the gun slightly to the left. As if on cue, the ferry juddered and lurched. She fired again. The bullet hit the wall six inches from the left side of his head. Jones tried to control himself but he was trembling. “Phone,” said Yael.

  Jones spat on the floor again, blood and saliva hanging from his mouth. “Come and get it.”

  “Do you want to walk out of here? Or leave in an ambulance?” Yael fired again. The ship slowed for a moment. The bullet slammed into the floor, inches from Jones’s knee.

  Jones reached into his pocket and took out his phone.

  “Slide it over to me.”

  Jones pushed the telephone across the floor. Yael picked it up.

  “Take it. You will never get in.”

  Yael pocketed the phone. “How much is Clarence Clairborne paying you?”

  Jones hesitated before he spoke. Yael saw something flicker in his eyes. He blinked once and his body stiffened slightly. “Who?”

  “Your boss. Clarence Clairborne, the CEO of the Prometheus Group.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Yael knew he was lying. Keeping Jones covered with the Beretta, she took out a plastic restraint from her purse and dropped it on Jones’s stomach. “Cuff your ankles together.”

  She could feel the fury radiating from him. His birthmark, now purple, seemed to pulse.

  Yael stood with the gun still trained on him. “Seven rounds in a Beretta clip. That’s four down and three to go. Do you want another one?”

  He picked up the white plastic strip, fastened it around his ankles, and pulled the restrainer until it reached its limit.

  “Good,” said Yael. “Now pull it tighter.” His eyes flitted from the gun to her face and back again. She sensed him calculating range and distance. “Try it, Cyrus. You have to stand, jump, and take me down, all with your legs tied together. I just have to squeeze this little trigger.”

  She stepped back and put her left hand inside her purse again, still covering Jones with the Beretta. She retrieved a pair of handcuffs and placed them on his chest. “Put your hands in front of you. Cuff yourself to the water pipe.”

  Jones placed the handcuff on his right hand, as instructed, then looped the handcuffs around the water pipe that ran along the lower wall to the washbasin before closing it around his left wrist.

  Yael knelt down next to him. His skin was wet with sweat. His cheeks were covered with blond stubble. He seemed boyish, almost vulnerable, until she remembered the body in the water off the Istanbul shoreline, the neat row of teeth marks in the dead man’s shoulder.

  She ran the silencer slowly down the side of Jones’s head. She felt his body stiffen under its touch. “Your friend Clarence Clairborne.”

  Jones stared straight ahead, his body rigid, as though willing himself not to give anything away. “I told you. I have never met him.”

  Yael twisted the silencer into his temple. “What is he planning in Istanbul?”

  He winced. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  The ferry sounded its foghorn again. She glanced quickly at her watch. The ship was about to dock. It was possible that Jones had never met him, but he certainly knew who Clairborne was. His body language had confirmed that. There was no time now to continue this conversation.

  Yael stood up. She took her phone from her pocket, turned on the camera, pointed it at herself, and started filming. “My name is Yael Azoulay. I work for the United Nations,” she said. She turned the lens toward Jones. “This man calls himself Cyrus Jones. He works for a black-ops department of the US government known as the DoD, the Department of Deniable. He is somehow connected to the Prometheus Group, which is trading illegally with Iran and the Revolutionary Guard. Cyrus Jones tried to kill me today, on this boat, the Staten Island Ferry.”

  She zoomed in on Jones’s face so that it filled the screen. “He or his friends may try again. This film will be uploaded to a secure server. If anything happens to me, it will be posted on YouTube. Remember, Cyrus Jones. Clarence Clairborne. The Prometheus Group. The DoD.”

  Yael pressed stop and put her phone away. She unscrewed the silencer from the Beretta and placed the gun and the silencer in her purse.

  Jones watched her intently. She saw hope flare in his eyes, believing that now she was effectively unarmed.

  Yael
bent down, lifted her jeans, and took out the Baby Glock 26 from her ankle holster. She placed the muzzle of the gun in Jones’s right ear. “Don’t move, Cyrus, and don’t get any ideas. Just listen. Nod if you understand me.”

  Jones did as she said.

  “If you, or any of your friends, come near me again, I will kill you.” She pushed the gun against his ear. “Got that?”

  Jones nodded.

  Yael slipped the Glock into her pocket and stood over the washbasin. She checked herself in the remains of the mirror, quickly washed her face, pulled out some antiseptic cream from her purse, rubbed it into the scratch on her cheek, straightened her hair, and walked out.

  Sami Boustani sat back on his sofa and opened a bottle of Brooklyn Lager. The lumpy cushion began to slide out from under him. He pulled himself up and the sharp end of a spring poked through the faux-tweed upholstery, jabbing his thigh. He put his beer down and pushed the cushion back into place. This time it stayed put. He ignored the metal prong that still poked his leg and shifted back and forth, trying to get comfortable. After several attempts he gave up, took a long swallow from the bottle, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

  It was nine o’clock at night. He had barely eaten that day and the beer went straight to his head. He enjoyed its sharp, bitter taste, but the alcohol did not lift his mood. It only increased his sense of gloom. He had spent most of the morning cleaning up his office. It was too embarrassing to ask Yuri, the taciturn building manager, for a cleaner. Najwa had helped, and had proved surprisingly swift and efficient. The wine-sodden keyboard was wrecked. But his computer monitor, once wiped clean, still worked. Yael had not destroyed his hard drive, and his laptop had remained at home.

  At least he was spared the need to explain Yael’s origins to his mother and sister, he thought. The Boustanis were Christian Palestinians who had arrived in the United States twenty years ago from Gaza. They had settled in Manhattan, where Sami’s father, Hamza, had relatives. Hamza died seven years later, struck down by lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking. Sami’s mother, Maryam, was still alive, living in Brooklyn with Sami’s sister, Leila, and her husband and five children. The pressure on Sami to settle down was steady and growing. He was not especially experienced with women, and had yet to master the ruthless, complicated rules of the New York dating game. Yael’s interest in him was a source of wonder, and lately he had found himself planning imaginary dialogues with his mother and his sister about her. He had even thought about inviting Yael for dinner at Leila’s restaurant in Brooklyn. He smiled as he imagined the resulting frenzy of speculation and questions, his nieces and nephews bringing endless trays of appetizers as an excuse to check her out. “The good news,” he would tell them, “is that she speaks Arabic.” Her father was born in Baghdad. The bad news was that she was an Israeli. Or an American Israeli. Or maybe he wouldn’t need to mention that part until they had met her and fallen in love with her. As he was starting to. His smile faded. That discussion, of course, was now entirely academic.