by Adam LeBor
Look, Aba.
The hand rises out of water so cold it sears her skin. She locks the bald man between her thighs, forces his head underneath the surface. He thrashes underneath her, his eyes on hers, first furious then pleading, her legs a vise, until the water becomes still.
Look, Aba.
She raises the lighter to the corner of the photograph of the three smiling girls. The plastic covering turns black, melts, and starts to smoke. Hakizimani’s face collapses as he pleas for her to stop.
Look, Aba, look, look, look….
Would she have burnt Hakizimani’s last picture of his dead daughters? She desperately hoped not. But the truth was, she didn’t know anymore.
Yael was so deep in her thoughts she barely noticed that someone had sat down next to her.
“Hey, stranger,” said a friendly female voice.
Yael turned to see Isis Franklin. She snapped out of her reverie, smiling with genuine pleasure at the sight of the American diplomat.
“You look like you were miles away. How are you? Full date update, please.”
“Nothing to report. There was no date. You saw Al Jazeera?”
Isis nodded, her hand resting on Yael’s arm. “Of course. A grade-A asshole.”
Yael saw Isis looking hard at the powder on her right cheek, which covered the marks from her fight with Cyrus Jones. She resisted the surprisingly strong urge to touch her face and check that the scratches were still disguised.
Yael gave Isis a wry smile. “Is he? He is a journalist. He was just doing his job. My mistake was to think he might put me first. He didn’t show for dinner. How could he, after that?”
Isis was indignant. “Sure, but no flowers, apology? Not even a call, or an e-mail?”
Yael shook her head. “Nope. No nothing. He is probably too embarrassed.”
“There’s no need for you to make excuses for him.”
No, there is not, thought Yael. So why was she? She must really be a glutton for punishment. “And you? Any tall, dark, and handsome diplomats on the horizon?”
“Nope. Just Istanbul, Istanbul, and more Istanbul. A week until it starts, four days of complete craziness; then normal life can resume. I hope.”
Born in Chicago, Isis was the daughter of an African American municipal official, a former radical who had been a founding member of the Black Panthers, and a Swiss violinist in the city’s orchestra. She was petite, handsome rather than pretty, with tawny skin, a high forehead, and long curly black hair that she wore tied back. Her eyes were her most striking feature. Large and brown, brimming with curiosity, they made even the most jaded diplomats temporarily lose their bearings. Forty-four, divorced, childless, she had worked for the State Department since she graduated with a master’s degree from Harvard.
Yael had heard the whispers, that Isis had been promoted to department head of the Public Diplomacy section because she was an old friend of President Freshwater. Both women had worked on the Rwanda desk at the State Department during the 1994 genocide. But to Yael Isis seemed smart and professional. Yael strongly sensed that there was much more to Isis beneath her bright and cordial exterior. She had seen Isis work a room, charged with a coiled energy, charming nuggets of information out of normally tight-lipped diplomats. During a reception for Turkey’s national day, Yael had gone to the bathroom and seen Isis urgently tapping away at her BlackBerry, so absorbed in her task she did not even notice Yael slide into a cubicle.
Isis picked up Yael’s hand and touched the ring on her second finger. “That’s beautiful. Where did you get it?”
“From my brother, David.”
Isis leaned forward, still holding Yael’s hand. “You still miss him?”
Yael smiled sadly. “Of course. Every day.”
It was curiously comforting to have Isis holding her hand. One of the worst things about her solitude was that nobody touched her. She was used to waking up alone, and going to sleep alone, even eating alone with only a newspaper or book for company. But sometimes she longed for the feel of another’s skin against hers, no matter how briefly.
“How long is it now?” asked Isis. “Twenty years?”
Yael nodded. “Yes. It’s incredible. He would be forty-three.”
“What’s incredible is that the peacekeepers weren’t dispatched to save them. I knew one of them as well. Cornelius Roche. He was Swiss, a friend of my mother’s.” Isis looked directly at Yael. “That’s why you stay, isn’t it?”
“Stay where?”
“Here. There,” said Isis, gesturing at the Secretariat headquarters, two blocks away. “You get sacked, sidelined, exposed on national television, you might get arrested by the NYPD or extradited to Switzerland, but you are still here. You want to know why David died and who was responsible.”
Yael sat up straight, alert now that the conversation had taken such a personal turn. “It’s not the only reason. But yes. I do want to know. Beyond Fareed Hussein’s pusillanimity. He didn’t take the decision himself. Someone told him what to do.”
“Exactly.” Isis hesitated for a moment, as though uncertain whether to speak. “Listen, honey. There may be some new information.”
“What?” asked Yael. Her eyes really were remarkable, thought Yael; the irises seemed flecked with gold.
“I don’t know exactly. Just bits and pieces I’m hearing. What Fareed and the P5 were really doing behind the scenes.”
“And?” asked Yael, trying to keep the eagerness from her voice, her fingers tightening against Isis’s hand. “Tell me. Please. Anything you have.”
Yael had already trusted Isis with one of her darkest secrets—albeit only a part of the story. One night in a village in the Afghan mountains, cold, lonely, scared, Yael had slept with her interpreter, Sharif. He had immediately fallen in love with her and announced their forthcoming marriage. When Yael refused Sharif’s proposal, he was consumed with shame. He joined the Taliban and offered himself for martyrdom. That much Yael had shared. Several days later Sharif, wired up with a suicide vest, was shot dead by an American sniper on his way to the Kandahar bazaar. Yael had not told Isis how the sniper knew what route Sharif would be taking. The guilt still gnawed at her: over Sharif’s death, of course, but also for another life ended prematurely.
Isis frowned. “There may be some kind of French connection. A deal that went wrong. Something to do with the Bonnet Group. But I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s all secondhand at this stage. Whispers and rumors. I will tell you when I have something definite. Promise.” Isis squeezed Yael’s hand, then let it go and picked up her purse.
“Thank you,” said Yael, her mind racing. A deal that went wrong. That fitted with the whispers and rumors she had heard. But now, Yael knew, was not the time to push it. “And what’s new with you?”
“Free at last,” said Isis, a wry smile on her face. “The divorce is finalized.”
Gerson, Isis’s former husband, was also an American diplomat, a highflyer who had just been posted to Paris as deputy chief of mission. They had met in Sarajevo six years ago, where Isis had been posted after Kandahar. A year later they were married and serving together in Montevideo. Until Isis walked into Gerson’s office late one evening to find him entwined on the office sofa with the embassy’s cultural attaché, a lissome Yale graduate fifteen years his junior. Gerson had confessed the affair had been going on for months. He moved in with his girlfriend the next day. Isis had confided in Yael that the marriage had been rocky for some time because they had been unable to have children. A battery of tests had revealed that her husband’s sperm was fine—the problem was hers. A few months after the separation, Gerson’s girlfriend gave birth to twins.
Isis had put a brave face on the breakup, blaming pressure of work and too much time apart. But Yael knew that she had been heartbroken. All her adult life Isis had hungered to create the kind of warm, stable family life she had missed in her own childhood. Like Yael, Isis had fractured relationships with her parents. Isis’s father had bee
n a serial philanderer, bedding a stream of colleagues in the Chicago municipal administration and even the mayor’s sister-in-law. Her parents had divorced and Isis’s mother returned to Switzerland, where she had suffered a series of strokes and now lived in a nursing home. Isis no longer spoke with her father. The last time Isis visited her mother she had not recognized her. Isis’s inability to have children had sent her into a deep depression. After the separation, a year ago, she had taken six months’ unpaid leave. She had done some pro bono work for a human rights organization and spent the rest of the time, she said, visiting all the places she wanted to see as a tourist. Isis was trying desperately to adopt a child, and Yael had heard rumors that Isis had even used her connections to UNICEF and other aid organizations to find a suitable girl or boy from somewhere in the developing world.
“I’m so sorry,” said Yael.
“Don’t be. It’s better like this. We can both make a new life. At least Gerson’s children can be legal,” she said, a catch in her throat.
“The adoption?”
“It looked like it was moving ahead, but…” Isis’s smile suddenly took on a frozen quality, her body language tense and stiff. “Bureaucracy, paperwork. You know how it is.”
“I can imagine,” said Yael sympathetically.
“Actually, you can’t.” Isis stared into the distance.
She sensed Yael looking at her and suddenly reverted back to her usual vivacious self. “Listen, I am in a hurry. But there are a bunch of new male diplomats in town. A couple seem to have some potential. We are heading downtown to a bar in the East Village tomorrow. There will be live music. It will be a fun evening. Why don’t you come?”
Yael shook her head. “But everyone will have seen the Al Jazeera report. I’m kind of embarrassed. I don’t think—”
Isis laughed, a deep, rolling sound. “Don’t be coy, babe. You are a star. The whole building’s talking about you. Everyone wants to meet you. Don’t think. Just do. You are at Riverside and Eighty-First, right?”
“But really—”
“No arguments. Your lobby. Nine p.m. tomorrow, Friday. I will see you there,” Isis said, standing up and blowing Yael a kiss.
Yael smiled as she watched Isis walk over to the greenhouse café. A night on the town could be just what she needed. And it would be certainly more fun than moping around her apartment. But something nagged at her about the encounter, welcome as it was.
The sight of Braithwaite—dressed in a green waxed-cotton jacket, check scarf, and a tweed cap—striding toward her pushed the thought from her mind. His ruddy cheeks shone with good health. He walked with a purposeful stride, as though he were about to saddle his mount and gallop across the English countryside in pursuit of a fox.
Quentin Braithwaite had been reassigned to the DPKO from the British Ministry of Defense in the early 1990s. Braithwaite’s classic establishment background—born into an army family that reached back to the founding of the British Empire, Eton, Sandhurst army college, service in the Brigade of Guards—had brought him a warm welcome from Fareed Hussein, who was head of the DPKO at the time. Hussein assumed Braithwaite would follow the British government’s line, emphasizing the UN’s neutrality and opposing interventions.
Hussein was wrong, as he quickly learned. Braithwaite’s first mission was to Bosnia in 1992, where he commanded a battalion of peacekeepers at the British base in Vitez. Hussein and many others believed that the UN mission in Bosnia needed the consent of the Bosnian Serbs to operate. It was not the UN’s business to confront them as they organized their genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Smoke curled skyward, columns of refugees trudged away from their burning houses, shells exploding around them, but still the peacekeepers watched and took no action. Braithwaite thought otherwise.
Soon after his arrival, Bosnian Serb troops had attempted to arrest Braithwaite and the British government minister he was escorting across the battlefield to besieged Sarajevo. The DPKO’s recommendation in those circumstances was to open negotiations, which could last hours, if not days. Braithwaite simply closed the hatches on his armored personnel carrier and smashed his way through the checkpoint. The Bosnian Serb troops ran for cover as Braithwaite roared through no-man’s-land to the Bosnian government’s front lines, where he was met with cheers. Hussein was furious and called a special press conference in New York, where he described Braithwaite as “reckless, foolhardy, and setting a dangerous precedent that would draw peacekeepers into the conflicts they were supposedly defusing.” Behind the scenes, Hussein had used every trick in his extensive armory to have Braithwaite recalled. But London, for once, stood firm. Braithwaite then further infuriated Hussein by inviting him to visit Sarajevo, offering to drive him through the front lines himself. Hussein had finally traveled to the Bosnian capital—in December 1995, when the war was over.
After Fareed Hussein had been appointed SG, Braithwaite had been promoted to run the DPKO. Hussein fought a ferocious battle to prevent his appointment, with the support of the Russians, French, and Chinese. But Britain and the United States had shifted position by then. NATO intervention had brought the Bosnian war to an end, not the UN’s neutrality. London and Washington refused to back down. Eventually, after a week of back-room negotiating and diplomatic trade-offs, the Russians, French, and Chinese conceded. Hussein’s objections were ignored. Nowadays, Braithwaite was the undeclared leader of the UN’s interventionists. This was a shrinking band, especially after the fiasco over Syria’s chemical weapons. But Braithwaite still argued that a fleet of attack helicopters and a battalion of properly armed peacekeepers had the edge on any Security Council resolution, no matter how strongly worded.
Yael both liked and trusted the Englishman. She stood up and fell into step beside him as he arrived. She was about to speak when her mobile phone beeped. She glanced at the screen. @najwaun had just tweeted to her thirty-six thousand followers, one of whom was Yael: “UN spokesman Schneidermann confirmed dead: medics say was massive heart attack, but he seemed healthy + was only 38.”
Yael showed the phone to Braithwaite. “He’s gone. I accessed Schneidermann’s medical records this morning, as soon as I heard from Joe-Don that he was in the hospital. Schneidermann was paunchy and out of shape. But there was nothing wrong with his heart.”
“I know. He had breakfast with Fareed this morning. I just spoke to him. He was very upset. He said Schneidermann seemed completely fine.”
Yael was no fan of the UN spokesman. He embodied the willful obtuseness and irritating sense of self-righteousness that tainted the whole organization. He had done his best to end her UN career during the coltan conspiracy, briefing the press corps—always off the record, of course—that Yael had gone rogue, was a danger to the organization, and even to international security. But recently, he seemed to have found his spine. Unlike many of the officials on the thirty-eighth floor, he had stayed loyal to Fareed Hussein. She knew Schneidermann had refused to follow Caroline Masters’s instructions to trash her at his last press briefing. And he certainly did not deserve to die. Had he been killed? This was a sad and very disturbing development.
“Why was he meeting Fareed?” she asked.
“Fareed had decided it was time to release the information in the folder that I showed you when the three of us met. Schneidermann was going to leak it.”
“To whom?”
“To Sami Boustani. He was on his way to meet him for breakfast.”
“How cozy,” said Yael, her voice barbed.
A teenage boy with a wild Afro hairstyle whizzed past on a three-foot-long skateboard, rap music hissing out of his oversized headphones.
Braithwaite waited until the skateboarder had passed before he spoke. “Now, now, Yael. Let’s not allow personal feelings to intrude. Anyway, that plan is on hold now, obviously.”
A thought struck her. She looked at Braithwaite. “Is Sami in danger?”
“I don’t think so. Not at the moment. It would be too much of a coincidence. A dea
d UN official, followed by a dead New York Times reporter with whom he was supposed to meet? That would bring an awful lot of attention onto people who would rather operate in the shadows. Or the toilet of the Staten Island Ferry.”
Braithwaite turned to look at her. She blushed, to her surprise.
“You are right to be embarrassed. My dear Yael, you know I am one of your greatest admirers. But you are either very brave, or very stupid. Possibly both. Joe-Don told me what happened. He was very angry.”
Yael slipped her phone into her pocket. “I know. He threatened to quit.”
“Did he?”
“Of course not.”
“Where is he?”
Yael gestured forward and sideways to the left with her head. A solidly built man of indeterminate age sat six benches ahead, bundled up in a black nylon winter jacket with his collar raised. He wore a woolen cap and Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and was reading the New York Post. He slowly turned two pages as they walked nearer—the prearranged signal that the path was clear and they were not under surveillance.
“Schneidermann dead makes two,” said Yael.
“How so?”
Yael told Braithwaite the full story of her encounter with Clarence Clairborne, about how she had provoked him so much he had slipped up, saying “we” in relation to the death of President Freshwater’s husband. She described how she had been followed by two men on the train back to New York, stolen one of the men’s mobile telephones, and how he had been found floating in the Potomac soon after.
“Who is ‘we’?” asked Braithwaite, almost to himself. “What was on the phone?”
“The unlisted home numbers of Clarence Clairborne and several of his friends.”
“I would like to have those. Anyone especially interesting?”
“William F. Stone.”
Braithwaite furrowed his brow. “Founder of Stone and Partners, the most powerful law firm on K Street.”