The Washington Stratagem

by Adam LeBor

“No. But we could come back with one if you like. Then we might stay around a little longer than we planned to tonight.”

  “Give me a moment, please,” said Sami.

  Sami closed the door and went back inside. He walked into the bathroom, put the shower onto the coldest setting, and stuck his head under the water for half a minute, before vigorously toweling himself dry. Shivering but wide awake now, he walked into the lounge. He stayed in the room for a minute, returned to the door, and opened it.

  The two men followed him in. He did not offer them coffee or anything else, but gestured at them to sit down while he cleared away the remains of his supper. Taylor reached inside his pocket, his movements slow and careful. Sami saw that his right index finger was bandaged. A birthmark ran down the left side of his neck.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Taylor dropped a photograph onto the table. “Her.”

  The door shook in the frame as Lysette closed it hard.

  “I’m sorry,” said Yael. “I don’t want to make life difficult for you.”

  Beaker shrugged. “Don’t worry. She’s Hungarian. You know, difficult, passionate, irrational. Not straightforward, like you. We will make it up later.” He gestured at the sideboard. “Pass me that laptop please,” he said, pointing at an ancient-looking IBM ThinkPad, as he cleared a space in front of him.

  Yael handed him the computer. It was black and very heavy.

  Beaker sensed her curiosity as he put the laptop on the table. “The shell is antique. The technology inside is not. Plus, it’s air gapped. That means it has never been connected to the Internet and cannot connect to the Internet, so nobody can hack into it. But it does have three sandboxes inside, what we call safe zones on the hard drive, where we can play with the code on your BlackBerry.”

  He fired up the laptop and connected it to the third monitor. It whizzed and whirred and the screen lit up. A terminal window, where program commands could be entered, opened. Beaker tapped out a line of letters and numbers. A second line instantly appeared underneath. He connected the BlackBerry to the IBM. A new window flashed up on the monitor. Fresh lines of code flew across the screen, glowing softly in the semidark apartment.

  Beaker smiled, his eyes narrowing, a hunter on the trail of his prey. “Well, pimp… my… ride,” he said.

  Yael leaned forward. “What is it?”

  “Shredbox. NSA standard. Government issue only. It takes a file, chops it into dozens of sections, encrypts each one, and sends it off via a relay of proxy servers around the world to a secure server where the pieces are reassembled.”

  “I know. I’ve got it on my other phone.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “A friend gave it to me.”

  “Lucky you, having friends like that. I’ve wanted to get my hands on this for a while. It’s theoretically unbreakable.”

  Yael smiled. “Theoretically. Especially in your case.”

  Beaker nodded to himself, now totally absorbed in his task. Yael sat down on the sofa, watching him work. Bald, broad shouldered, hunched over the table, wearing a loose linen shirt, Beaker looked like a medieval monk transported to the twenty-first century. The light from the lamp reflected off his shiny scalp as his stubby fingers moved nimbly across the keyboard.

  Beaker’s words echoed in Yael’s head, her thoughts bouncing around like a pinball. Not irrational. Perhaps not even passionate. But straightforward. Did she want to be straightforward? She didn’t think so. She wanted to be passionate. A picture flashed into her mind, of Beaker and his girlfriend, their limbs tangled together under a quilt, laughing. She brushed it aside. Another image appeared, as if autogenerated: a dinner table, set for two, the candles alight, the wine chilling in an ice bucket, the thin, iridescent layer forming on the food as it congealed. That too Yael forced from her head. God, she was so sick of eating on her own. At least she’d had company at breakfast this morning. La Caridad too triggered a fresh surge of memories, of family brunches and dinners after excursions downtown or to the beach in New Jersey.

  Yael had not spoken to her father for more than a decade. She had thought he would be proud of her when she started her first job at the UN. For all their rows and arguments, Yael’s parents had brought her, Noa, and David up to have an intelligent, informed interest about the world. But her father was not proud. He was furious. She could still hear him yelling that he had lost his son to the UN and now he had to sacrifice his daughter as well? Yael had regularly called and e-mailed, keeping her father up to date with her news, to reassure him that she was quite safe. But the more she flourished at the UN, the more her father withdrew.

  A few days before her vetting for top-level security clearance, he’d called her. He was in New York unexpectedly on business, he explained, and wanted to take her for dinner. She was glad to accept, but he spent the evening trying to persuade her to resign. She was hurt and puzzled, especially as things were going so well for her. He invoked David’s memory, which annoyed her because she knew, as much as she had ever known anything, that her brother would approve of her choice of career. Yael’s father claimed to be worried about her safety, but at that early stage she only occasionally went on field missions, and then always as a part of a team with high-level security. Yael knew her father was lying about why he wanted her to resign. There was something else flowing underneath his anger: a nervousness, even fear. The evening ended badly.

  Soon after, on her twenty-sixth birthday, Yael received her security clearance. The process had proved surprisingly slow, compared to her colleagues. She had undergone an extra interview, at which she had been asked numerous detailed questions about her precise relationship with her father. That same day he had called her from Tel Aviv to wish her happy birthday. At least that was the pretext. His voice on the telephone had sounded even tenser than when they’d had dinner together. Yael knew his actual agenda: to try, again, to persuade her to resign. She cut the call short, citing the pressure of work, and promised to call him back. After hanging up she had sat for a while, thinking, wondering why her father was so stressed about her job. She typed his name into the peacekeeping department’s highly classified database. The database received information from all the P5’s intelligence services. What she had read still haunted her. She had sat, staring into space, for an hour afterward. Her database search was noticed. Soon after, Yael was called in by the UN security department and ordered to report any contact with her father. Yael had not spoken to him since.

  Yael’s mobile telephone rang. She looked at the screen. A 510 area code. She pulled her legs up underneath her, made herself comfortable, and took the call.

  Taylor stared at Sami. “OK, wiseass. Let’s stop fucking around.”

  Sami nodded. “Yes. Let’s. It’s a federal offense to impersonate a government official. Why don’t I call the cops and let them sort this out,” he said, reaching for his mobile telephone.

  Taylor leaned back and looked at Sami with interest, as though this was a novel plan of action that could prove mutually beneficial. “Good idea. Let’s see what they have to say. It’s also a federal offense to lie on your immigration forms. One that can result in being stripped of citizenship, deportation, and/or imprisonment. As can being a known associate of terrorists.”

  Sami’s hand remained suspended in midair, still holding his phone. He sat very still for several seconds, his mind racing. “Meaning?”

  “Let’s talk about your girlfriend,” said Taylor.

  Yael closed her eyes and sank back into the sofa, pleased that her mother had called again. Sitting in Beaker’s apartment, hearing her mother’s voice, had brought back some welcome childhood memories of shared Sunday-afternoon family parties—and a sudden craving for Dobos torte. She and Barbara had spoken for almost twenty minutes, their longest conversation for several years. Her mother had been worried and unusually maternal. She had seen Yael on Al Jazeera the previous evening and fired a battery of questions about what was going on in Yae
l’s life and whether she was safe. Yael had reassured her that everything was fine, that she was OK. Barbara had been somewhat reassured, Yael could sense, but not completely. She was happy that Yael was at Beaker’s, although Yael did not tell her why she was there. Yael and her mother had agreed that Barbara would definitely come to New York soon. There were some things that they needed to talk about, Barbara said. Important things, not to be discussed on the telephone. Suddenly Yael felt shaky and exhausted. The adrenaline had worn off and her body ached from the fight with Jones. Tiredness rolled over her in waves. She felt as if she could curl up and sleep for a week. Except she could not, she needed to stay awake. She traced the circle of scar tissue on the front of her left shoulder through her sweater.

  She pressed it hard, almost digging her nails into the carapace of ridged skin. Needles of pain shot out. She slid her hand around to the back of her shoulder. Another circle of scar tissue, slightly higher than the one in front, poking through the soft wool. She thought often about the sheer randomness of being shot. If the gunman’s hand had moved a millimeter or two in one direction, or if he had slipped, he would have missed. A millimeter or two in another direction, the gun held at another angle, and the bullet would have taken her in the throat, in which case she would not be sitting here.

  Beaker put the BlackBerry down, his eyes gleaming in triumph. “We have a visitor.”

  Yael jerked to attention, scanning the room, her hand instantly reaching for the Baby Glock she had strapped back on her ankle.

  Beaker watched her with interest. “Not here.” He tapped the BlackBerry. “Here.”

  Yael sat up, and let her hand fall away. “Meaning?”

  “There are two ways into Shredbox. You tap the user’s Internet connection while it’s sending the packets out. Or you use spyware to listen to the phone’s SIM card as it transmits the information.”

  She stood up, walked over to Beaker’s worktable, and poured herself a glass of Coca-Cola. The sugar rush helped, and she was suddenly ravenously hungry. “May I?” Yael asked. There was no Dobos torte, but she reached for a slice of pizza.

  Beaker put the BlackBerry down on the table. “Help yourself. I found the spyware. Someone has been tapping this phone.”

  “Who?”

  Beaker shrugged. “Impossible to say. Someone with access to this type of technology. A government or government agency. Or a private company working for them.”

  “Can you find out what the phone transmitted?”

  “I can try.”

  Yael waited for a moment, her mouth full of pizza. It was cold, greasy, and completely delicious. “Good. Please do.” She ate one slice, and then a second.

  The IBM flickered. Lines of characters appeared, flying back and forth across the terminal windows as they filled the screen.

  Beaker said, “We’re in.”

  The IBM beeped repeatedly, as though excited that the encryption had been cracked. Beaker watched the screen for a while. He reached for the bottle of Coca-Cola and took a long swig. “Were you followed when you came here?” he asked, deadly serious now.

  “Why?”

  Beaker reached over to the pizza box. Finding it empty, he cracked some more chocolate off the Hershey bar. “Well, drágám, darling. You turn up at night, out of the blue, with a scratched face, looking exhausted, carrying an encrypted BlackBerry loaded with Shredbox. The BlackBerry has been compromised with a fancy piece of spyware and you have a pistol strapped to your ankle. All of which is fine. But it would be good to know that nobody came with you.”

  Yael shook her head. “South Ferry to 168th is about a forty-minute subway ride on the one. I spent three hours getting here, including a lengthy ride up and down the escalators on every floor of Macy’s, half an hour crisscrossing the subways at Times Square, and a walk across Central Park. So, no, I don’t think I was followed.”

  Beaker nodded. “I hope not. Take a look at this.”

  Sami sat down with the two men, watching them carefully, fully alert now. He knew this was bullshit. The INS did not operate like this. They either called people in for an interview or raided premises where illegal immigrants were living. This was not an interview, nor was it a raid.

  The photograph now lying on his coffee table erased any doubts. He could call the police. But that would not solve anything. These two, or others even worse, would soon be back. It was better to find out as much as he could about who they were and what they wanted, so he knew with whom he was dealing. Sami looked out the corner of his eye at his laptop, open in the corner of the room.

  The man with the birthmark tapped the photograph. “What do you know about her?” he demanded.

  Sami picked up the photograph and looked at it for several moments. He put it down, looked up at the ceiling, and thought for several moments before he replied. “She’s a good cook.”

  12

  Henrik Schneidermann strode down First Avenue, confident and full of vim, as he deftly weaved a path through the crowds of early-morning commuters. It was 7:45 a.m. on Thursday and the sun was bright in a turquoise sky dotted by white wisps of cloud, as though it had been washed clean by the squalls of the previous evening. The smell of coffee and cooking bacon drifted out from a diner on the corner of East Fifty-Fourth Street. He stopped to let an elderly lady dressed in a navy-blue designer jacket and matching skirt pass by. She was leading a tiny pug on a leash with one hand and holding a Starbucks cup with the other, and smiled as she thanked him. Taxis hooted; gusts of steam rose from the sidewalk grill. The air crackled with energy and opportunity. He would miss these Manhattan mornings.

  His meeting with Fareed Hussein had dispelled any lingering doubts about his planned course of action. The SG had called him at 6:30 a.m. In normal times he and the SG often met early in the morning at his residence to talk through the day’s news agenda. From there they sometimes rode to the office together in the SG’s limousine, which still gave Schneidermann a childish thrill. But there had been no limousine rides since the SG had gone on sick leave, and Schneidermann doubted they would resume any time soon, especially after their conversation today.

  Schneidermann had almost let Hussein’s call go to voice mail because he did not recognize the number. The SG, it seemed, was no longer using his UN-issued telephone, but he remained in the four-story townhouse and had invited him to come over for breakfast. Schneidermann had hesitated because of his breakfast date with Sami Boustani at 8:30 a.m. But he had accepted. He had not seen his boss since Caroline Masters had moved into Hussein’s office. It was clear to Schneidermann that Masters had indeed organized a coup, and he knew his days were numbered. Roxana Voiculescu now appeared in his office on unnecessary errands almost every hour, barely able to contain her excitement as she assessed the furniture and fittings, far less subtly than she supposed.

  Schneidermann’s curiosity was piqued when the SG requested he use the rear tradesman’s entrance of the townhouse, rather than the front door where the NYPD maintained a twenty-four-hour watch. The SG had skated over Schneidermann’s questions about his health, stonewalling with claims of specialist appointments and waiting time for test results. Schneidermann had watched him carefully during their meeting. His hand did not shake when he poured the coffee or when he proffered a plate of pastries. His eyes were clear, his sentences lucid, his posture upright. They talked cordially about the plans for the Istanbul Summit during their brief breakfast and Hussein’s regret that he was no longer involved in its organization.

  Both knew that the house was bugged by all of the P5’s intelligence services and probably several others. Hussein had suggested a walk in the garden. He was as fit and composed as ever as they walked back and forth across the manicured lawn. There Hussein gave Schneidermann a slim blue folder. He’d leafed through the contents and immediately understood the reason for his summons. As he slipped the folder into his briefcase, Hussein wished him an enjoyable breakfast with Sami Boustani. The message was clear. Schneidermann smiled as he imagined
Sami’s reaction when he gave him the folder. Its contents were explosive—and further proof of what Schneidermann already knew.

  Schneidermann stopped at the corner of East Fifty-Second Street, waiting for the lights to change, his briefcase in his hand. He planned to walk the ten blocks or so to McLaughlin’s. He wanted to think through his breakfast with the SG. How did Fareed know that he was having breakfast with the New York Times correspondent? The same way that he knew so much about what was happening in the Secretariat Building. It was impossible to serve as secretary-general of the UN without having finely tuned political antennae, and Fareed had an uncanny ability to read the runes, calibrate and recalibrate policies as necessary, depending on the flow of power among the P5. Information was power and Hussein was a survivor. He had survived the KZX-Bonnet scandal, even though the UN had almost been hijacked under his leadership and his wife, Zeinab, had been exposed by Sami Boustani as a major shareholder in a Congolese firm that would have reaped enormous profits from the planned UN–corporate development zone. So the question was, why had the SG seemingly surrendered this time without a fight, and allowed this nonsense about blackouts, when he was clearly in perfect health?

  Schneidermann had of course heard the whispers that Hussein had been compromised for decades. They led back to the darkest days of the UN: the Rwandan genocide in spring 1994 and the capture of Srebrenica the following summer, when Hussein had served as head of the Department of Peacekeeping and had forbidden the UN troops to intervene, claiming they had no mandate to do so. Most UN insiders believed a few battalions of peacekeepers could have stopped the Rwandan massacres within a few days had there been sufficient will to deploy them, either in the Secretariat or among the P5. Mbaye Diagne, a brave Senegalese peacekeeper, had saved hundreds of lives on his own by physically preventing the Hutu militiamen from killing their planned victims. A UN commission of inquiry had later found that Hussein had acted correctly in his interpretation. Schneidermann truly believed that the UN’s disastrous response—or lack of one—to the Rwandan genocide could not be blamed in large part on Hussein. It was the result of an outmoded and dysfunctional organization, one designed for another era, which had proved completely inadequate for the challenges of the postwar world.