The Washington Stratagem (18 page)

He did not imagine that she would ever speak to him again. He certainly would not, if their roles were reversed. It was one thing to be stood up on a date, quite another to have your most sensitive work exposed on an international television channel—and by the person you had cooked dinner for that same evening. But what options did he have? Either he was a journalist, committed to investigating the UN, or he was not. Najwa was right. Reporters cannot date their sources. The media interest in Yael had not abated after the resolution of the KZX–Bonnet Group scandal. In fact the story seemed to be taking on a new life, swirling around the long narrow corridors of the Secretariat Building, filling newspaper pages and television screens. Sami had to be part of that. So he told himself. Again. He had a choice: Love or career? Career or love? Every choice exacted a price. The price of his choice was Yael.

Sami raised the beer bottle to his mouth again, hesitated, then put it down without drinking. Najwa had invited him to a documentary film festival in Tribeca that evening. She wanted them to meet the director, to persuade him to show their film. But Sami was in no mood for schmoozing. He glanced down at that day’s
New York Times
, which lay on the coffee table in front of him. He picked the newspaper up, removed the front page with his name in bold type, crushed it into a ball, and threw it across the room, before sinking back onto the sofa.

Sami’s apartment was a dark and cramped one bedroom, in the basement of a brownstone on Ninth Street, in the East Village. The cream walls had faded to light brown, streaked with darker shades. The floor was covered with an orange acrylic carpet, the pipes thumped and pounded, and the erratic hot water in the bathroom ran brown as often as clear. The furniture dated from the 1980s, but its dilapidated condition displaced any notions of retro chic. The bedroom had a twin bed. Even though Sami had lived there for more than two years he still had not properly unpacked. He told himself that was because it was temporary accommodation, that he would eventually find somewhere more suitable for a
New York Times
reporter. But at a mere $1,500 a month, the apartment, which belonged to his uncle, was incredibly cheap for Manhattan. A recent brief glance at a couple of rental websites had made Sami realize that, despite the gloomy décor and old-fashioned furniture, he was not moving anywhere, at least for the moment.

That, and the prospect of romance, had finally inspired him to tidy up the place. The boxes of books, papers, and long-forgotten research materials were neatly arranged in the corner. The kitchen was clean and tidy, the counters gleaming, the linoleum floor swept and mopped down. He had even bought a vase, which now stood on the kitchen table holding a bunch of daffodils. He walked over to the kitchen, took out one of the flowers, and sniffed it. It smelled stale. The stalk wilted in his hand.

Sami dropped the flower in the trash can and opened the fridge door. The beer had suddenly made him ravenously hungry. There was a bottle of ketchup, a pot of hummus, and a block of yellow processed cheese inside. He found some pita bread in the bread bin, so dried out it almost snapped under his fingers. He squirted some ketchup onto the plate, added the bread, cheese, and hummus and took the food through to the sitting room. He put the plate down on the coffee table, picked up his laptop from the sofa, and placed it on the sideboard before he started eating.

The hummus was ringed by a dark brown crust. He sniffed it, dipped his finger in, and tasted the beige paste. It was on the edge of turning sour but still edible, just. The cheese was cracked and fissured with age. The pita bread was spotted with mold on the edge. He broke that section off, put it aside, and dipped the remainder into the hummus, before switching on the television to the CNN early-evening news. The screen showed a photograph of Caroline Masters.

The anchor, a young Chinese woman, was interviewing Roger Richardson, the UN correspondent for CNN, in the network’s mini-studio in the Secretariat Building. Richardson, a tall, middle-aged man with a dry sense of humor, was a veteran of the UN press corps, posted there almost as long as Jonathan Beaufort.

“The UN is back in the news, Roger, tell us why,” asked the anchor.

“That’s right, Amy, it certainly is. We have a new secretary-general, or rather acting secretary-general, Caroline Masters. She is the first American to hold the post,” said Richardson, before giving a brief resume of Masters’s career.

“How sick is Fareed Hussein?”

Richardson looked puzzled. “It’s curious. As far as I understand, from multiple sources, he was playing tennis this morning. And then this afternoon we were told that he was on sick leave. Maybe the game was too much for him. But you must remember, Amy, that Fareed Hussein is over seventy years old, and has been under a lot of stress organizing the Istanbul Summit.”

“Remind us what that is, Roger,” said Amy, as an image of the historic Turkish city filled the screen, before it switched back to the CNN UN studio.

“It’s the most ambitious diplomatic project in history. The aim is to negotiate final peace agreements for Israel-Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. All the superpowers will be there, next Thursday, just eight days from now.”

“But is Istanbul safe? We’ve seen two bombings in the last couple of weeks, both of which targeted the tourist heartlands: one in the covered bazaar and another just outside the Blue Mosque. Are these bombs a prelude to an attack on the summit? Tell us about the recent arrests, Roger.”

The screen showed pictures of three men, all in their early twenties, dark skinned, unshaven, staring at the camera.

“The Turkish authorities say they have broken up a Kurdish terrorist ring, a new grouping called the Kurdish People’s Liberation Army, which planned to attack the summit. The Kurds strongly deny any connection. They and the democratic opposition say the bombs were planted by government agents, to give the Turkish authorities an excuse to crack down on dissent and detain anyone they want before the summit opens. It’s impossible to know, but we do know that there have been many arrests.”

“What does the UN have to say about the crackdown, Roger?”

Richardson smiled knowingly. “Not very much, Amy. Fareed Hussein has expressed his ‘concern’ but that’s about all. Both he and the Turkish government know that preparations are so far advanced that it would take something very serious to delay or derail the summit.”

Amy nodded. “And one person won’t be attending,” she continued, as Yael’s face filled the screen.

Richardson shook his head. “No, sadly for Yael Azoulay, it looks like her brilliant career has hit a wall. The UN’s top behind-the-scenes negotiator has a new job. A non-job, some might say—not coincidentally, I think, after the release of some curious video footage of her dressed very alluringly in a prime downtown New York hotel.” The screen showed a few seconds of the footage of Yael in the hotel corridor, before he outlined the role of the Trusteeship Council.

“The Millennium Hotel seems a much more exciting assignment. What exactly was she doing there, Roger?”

“We are working on that,” said Richardson, a smile on his face.

The program moved on to the row in Congress about President Freshwater’s latest attempt to return intelligence gathering to national agencies, in the process breaking the contracts signed with private military contractors for more than $50 billion. Sami watched for a while, but his mind was not really on the story. Instead he was remembering his conversation with Henrik Schneidermann after the press conference earlier that day. Sami often met the UN spokesman in private, usually in his office, or sometimes in the Delegates Lounge, the bar and open space on the ground floor of the Secretariat Building, or in the Delegates Dining Room. This time Schneidermann had summoned him to McLaughlin’s, a dark Irish bar on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street, at six o’clock in the evening. They had met in a private room at the back. The excessive precautions seemed over the top to Sami, until Schneidermann explained why he had wanted to meet.

Sami pondered how he would use this information. It was potentially the start of an investigation that was bigger than anything he had reported so far—if the Iranian connection was true. Schneidermann had promised to provide evidence, in the form of incriminating e-mails, but only on the strict condition that he did not share it with anyone—especially not with Najwa. Schneidermann and Najwa had fallen out after she, against Sami’s advice, had run a story on a quiet news day claiming that Schneidermann would be the next casualty of the KZX-Bonnet scandal and Roxana Voiculescu was being groomed to succeed him. The story had an element of truth—it did appear Schneidermann was being sidelined—but he was unlikely to be sacked.

Sami had told Najwa there was no sense alienating Schneidermann with a report of such little interest to the wider public. Sami knew he was right, even though his judgment was shaky when Roxana was involved. He still cringed inside at the memory of the “non-date,” as he had dubbed their first and only meeting. After weeks of hints, suggestions, and, eventually, near demands from Roxana that he take her out for a drink, he had eventually spent part of an evening buying her expensive cocktails at a hipster bar before stealing confidential UN documents out of her handbag. Eventually Sami had agreed, reluctantly, to Schneidermann’s terms, after Schneidermann promised he would produce the e-mails in the next twenty-four hours. They had a tentative plan to meet for breakfast tomorrow morning at a bar near the UN building. Schneidermann had promised to call if he was not coming.

Sami drained the last mouthful from the bottle of lager and wiped out the tub of hummus. The brown crust fell away and landed in the pot. Sami pushed the tub away and was cutting himself another wedge of cheese when the doorbell rang.

Beaker Kormandy held up the mobile phone under the light of an antique Anglepoise lamp and turned it back and forth in his hand.

“A BlackBerry,” he said, intrigued, as though he was an archaeologist who had accidentally stumbled on the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. The phone’s screen glinted under the glare of the bulb. “It belongs to…?”

“The owner,” said Yael, her voice deadpan.

“Who is?”

“Me.”

Beaker looked doubtful. “Last time I saw you, you had a souped-up iPhone. BlackBerrys are for corporate executives and government officials. You working for the man now? Or the government?”

Yael shook her head. “No. Still striving for universal peace and harmony at the UN.”

“Inside or outside the building?”

Yael smiled. “Both.”

Beaker turned the lamp toward Yael. “What happened to your face? It’s all scratched up.”

She touched her left cheek and shrugged. “I slipped in the shower. I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Beaker’s face showed he did not believe her, but he did not press the matter. “The battery?”

Yael handed it to Beaker. “Here. I checked. There are no other power sources. Nothing hidden away inside to secretly transmit when you think it’s powered down.”

Beaker nodded. “Good.” He connected a power cord to the BlackBerry. The screen wobbled for a moment, then went dark again. “What do you want me to do?”

Yael picked up a half-eaten Hershey bar that was lying on the worktable. “Crack it open,” she said as she broke off a piece. “I can’t get in.”

“What’s the matter? Did you forget your password?”

“Something like that.”

He tapped the screen of the BlackBerry. “Is this legal?”

Yael laughed. “Is this?” she said, gesturing at the table where they sat.

It was covered with circuit boards, tangles of multicolored wiring, keyboards, track pads, hard drives, and pieces of tablet computers and mobile telephones in various states of dismemberment. Lines of computer code ran across two large monitors, while a third showed a screensaver of the Chain Bridge in Budapest, arching gracefully over the Danube at night. A nest of black and gray cables snaked back across the room to half a dozen hard drives in standing cases. A pizza box sat on one corner, spotted with grease from the two slices inside.

Beaker and Yael were childhood friends. Their grandmothers were both Hungarian and had gone to school together in Budapest. Both survived the wartime ghetto to flee Hungary at the end of the Second World War and settle in New York with what remained of their families. Beaker and Yael had grown up together, their families spending Sunday afternoons in a make-believe Mittel-Europa, sitting on Biedermeier furniture, eating open sandwiches topped with a sliver of salami, followed by Dobos torte, a seven-layered buttercream cake topped with crunchy caramel, listening to Mozart piano sonatas, watching the adults down glasses of chilled
pálinka
, fruit brandy, when the memories and the longing for home became too much to bear.

Beaker was a scientific prodigy, another of the Hungarian geniuses who had brought the world numerous innovations, including the carburetor, telephone exchange, nuclear weapons, vitamin C, and the ballpoint pen. He had graduated from Harvard at the age of twenty, moved back to Budapest for a while, set up several IT companies that still provided him with a tidy income, and then returned to New York with his girlfriend, Lysette, a green-eyed blonde nurse in her late twenties. Beaker was one of the world’s most accomplished computer hackers. Corporations and government departments hired him to break into their networks, reveal the holes in their security, and close them up. But Yael knew that Beaker also did “off the books” jobs, for free, for activists and NGOs that he wanted to help.

Yael handed a chunk of chocolate to Beaker. “Please.”

“Thanks.” He ate the chocolate as he tried a different power lead and pressed the buttons on the BlackBerry keyboard. Nothing happened. The room was silent apart from the whir of the computer hard drives.

Yael walked across the room to look out the window while Beaker worked. He and Lysette lived in a large four-room apartment on 162nd Street in Washington Heights, overlooking the Hudson River. This part of Manhattan had not yet been gentrified, and apartments were large and cheap. Yael was about eighty blocks north of her building on Riverside and Eighty-First. The view here was just as engaging as hers, perhaps even more so. The Hudson was a wide black ribbon, shimmering under the lights of the George Washington Bridge, sixteen blocks north. A police launch roared downriver, its spotlight cutting through the night, as though racing the cars that whizzed along the Henry Hudson Parkway, following the course of the river.