The Washington Stratagem (33 page)

Yael watches Yusuf finish his pide. His fingers are long and slender, his dark eyes, somewhere between brown and black, warm and intelligent. A lock of hair, so black it almost shines, falls over his forehead
.

Yusuf Çelmiz, senior operative in the Milli I·stihbarat Teşkilatı. Her accomplice in the rendition of Cyrus Jones. But could she trust Yusuf with what she now knew? The CIA, Mossad, MI6, even France’s DGSE had all reduced their information exchange with the
MI·T
, judging its new director to be too close to the Iranians. The truth was, whether or not she could trust Yusuf Çelmiz, she wanted to. In fact, she had to. Her other contacts had all been mysteriously busy, unavailable, or unreachable. But where was he? They were supposed to meet at Café Markiz at 9:30. Her new mobile telephone beeped—a text message had arrived. The phone was one of three cheap pay-as-you-go phones Yael had purchased that morning from a tiny shop in a back street of Sultanahmet. According to Turkish law, even pay-as-you-go mobile telephones must be officially registered in someone’s name, with proof of address. But an extra $200, in cash, had persuaded the owner that this time, the law could be ignored. In any case, she would only use each burner for a few hours, then dispose of it. The obsolete Nokia candy-bar model felt tiny in her hand. She could close her fingers around it. The sender’s number was blocked, but apart from Yusuf, only one person had this number.

Your disc is a master copy

Yael smiled as she read the text. Beaker’s code was not very subtle. But then it didn’t need to be.

She picked up the tulip-shaped glass and sipped her tea. It was strong and delicious, scented with cinnamon. Once she got home on Friday night, Yael had played the DVD she had stolen from Sami on her computer and watched herself at the Millennium Hotel. Like Sami and Najwa, Yael had looked for the metadata. Yael too found nothing. She had met Beaker on Saturday morning and handed him the DVD with a request to see if he could find out where the video file had been created. “A master copy,” she read again. And now she knew who had sent the DVD to Sami and Najwa.

Sami and Najwa. Yael did a quick mental calculation: it was 10:00 a.m. in Istanbul, which meant it was 3:00 a.m. in New York. The Monday edition of the
New York Times
must be online by now. She rummaged in her bag for her iPhone and clicked on the newspaper’s app.

FAREED HUSSEIN “ORDERED BOSNIANS FROM UN COMPOUND AT SREBRENICA,” INTERNAL DOCUMENTS REVEAL

Many Killed Soon After, Hussein Return to Post Now Judged Unlikely

By SAMI BOUSTANI, NAJWA AL-SAMEERA, Special to the
New York Times

UNITED NATIONS—Fareed Hussein, the secretary-general of the United Nations, personally ordered the handover of three hundred Bosnian Muslims who had taken refuge in the United Nations base at Srebrenica in July 1995 to the Bosnian Serbs, according to internal UN documents obtained by the
New York Times
. The women were put on trucks and sent across the front lines. The men, including several teenage boys, were shot soon after, their hands tied behind their backs.

At the time, Mr. Hussein was serving as the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. The leaked documents reveal that Dutch troops panicked and retreated to the UN base when promised air strikes failed to materialize. A group of some two hundred Bosnian Muslims, some of whom worked for the UN as translators and drivers, managed to flee to the UN base with their families. But they were forced out under Fareed Hussein’s orders, for fear that their presence would compromise the UN’s neutrality. Srebrenica was a UN-declared “safe haven.” About eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys, taken prisoner by the Bosnian Serbs, were ultimately killed over several days in early July 1995.

Mr. Hussein is currently on medical leave. His deputy, Caroline Masters, has been appointed acting secretary-general. The revelations about the massacre at Srebrenica have caused shock across the United Nations headquarters. They come just three days before the start of the Istanbul Summit, the UN-sponsored Middle East peace conference. There is concern among Western officials that Ms. Masters lacks the necessary leadership skills to oversee the conference. In a memorandum obtained by the
New York Times
, James Berger, the deputy chief of the US mission to the UN, accused Ms. Masters of having lost “her sense of judgment.”

Many Western officials would prefer to see Mr. Hussein in charge of the summit, said Keir Rogerson, a former British diplomat stationed at the UN. Mr. Rogerson now runs Diplomacy Unbound, a research institute based in New York. “The people I have spoken to, in Washington and London, say they wanted Fareed Hussein to take charge of the summit and, once he is recovered, return to run the United Nations.” But this is now seen as unlikely. “I cannot see any way back for Fareed after this. The Srebrenica documents are explosive. They link him personally to the death of several hundred people,” said Mr. Rogerson.

Ms. Masters planned to leave for Istanbul late on Sunday night. Roxana Voiculescu, her spokeswoman, said that the contents of the documents would need to be verified before the UN could comment, but that they appeared to be “very disturbing,” especially if they did implicate Mr. Hussein in the deaths of those forced from the base. Mr. Hussein could not be reached for comment. His former spokesman, Henrik Schneidermann, died earlier this month, reportedly from a heart attack. No replacement has yet been named.

Page 3: The leaked memo in full; the long shadow of Srebrenica

Page 4: What future now for Fareed Hussein?

Page 12: Op-Ed: A Survivor Remembers

Yael sat back and breathed out hard, processing what she had just read. Fareed Hussein’s whispering campaign against Caroline Masters had just been vaporized. Yael had heard the rumors, of course, about Hussein and Srebrenica, but nothing had ever been confirmed. Until now. She ran through the likely sequence of events in her head. Sami’s story on Masters had run on Saturday morning. Masters must have arranged for the documents to get to him as soon as the newspaper hit the newsstands. Sami would have needed a day to confirm and verify the material. He must have filed this second story on Sunday evening, to make Monday’s edition. And now Masters and the UN press corps were on their way to Istanbul. Even by UN standards, the contents, the speed, and the ferocity of Masters’s response were breathtaking.

Clairborne slid the end of the cigar into the cutter. “Are you familiar with the word
krysha
?” he asked
.

“It’s Russian for
roof
.”

Hers, Yael knew, was gone. But far more importantly, so was her best chance of finding out the truth about David’s death. Unless Isis could deliver on her promise.

Yael’s Nokia mobile beeped again. Another SMS message.

Sorry for lateness and delay. Meet you taxi stand NW corner Taksim. Y.

Yael picked up her purse and rummaged inside, looking for her wallet, buried somewhere under her extra Nokia phones, cigarettes, lighter, tissues, crumpled receipts, miniature makeup palette, chewing gum, antiseptic wipes, Swiss Army knife, emergency tampons, and assorted lipsticks. She pulled out a folded square of glossy paper and opened it up: it was a page torn from last month’s
Vogue
, showcasing a black, off-the-shoulder cocktail dress by Versace. She smiled to herself, folded the paper up again, and slipped it back inside. Her fingers brushed against a piece of thick cloth, trapped in the bottom right-hand corner. Curious as to what it could be, she took it out. It was a napkin, heavy and white. Yael opened it up, her smile vanishing at what she saw. Silver stitching spelled out “Millennium Hotel, Manhattan.” A small shiny square with serrated edges sat in the center of the cloth. The blue lettering said “Durex: Perfomax.”

It had taken Yael several afternoons to teach Mahesh Kapoor to learn to control his excitement and extend his—and her—pleasure. The condoms had helped. Her affair with Fareed Hussein’s former chief of staff, seven years earlier, had lasted for several months. It had been a fine example of what the French referred to as a
cinq à sept
—
a liaison conducted between five and seven, in the hours after a gentleman’s work for the day is completed, before he is obliged to return home or attend an evening engagement. But Kapoor had tried to kill her in Geneva and was now serving a life sentence for the murder of Olivia de Souza. And the hotel held even darker memories for her: of Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, lying still on the floor of his suite, his eyes unseeing, his skin turning gray.

Yael banished the vision. She suddenly realized that she was sitting in a café in Istanbul, dressed as a moderately observant Muslim woman, staring at a silver and blue condom wrapper, nicely framed on a clean white napkin. She scrunched the condom back into the napkin, put it in her purse, and finally found her wallet. She looked around for her waitress, who was deep in conversation with two young women on the other side of the café, by the coffee machine. Yael pulled out a ten-lira note and left it under the saucer. It was more than enough to cover the bill, with a generous tip.

Yael looked out the window once more. The beggar girl was still crawling back and forth along the sidewalk. A jazz trio—saxophonist, drummer, and double bass player—were setting up nearby.

Yael left the café and stepped into the hubbub, enjoying the buzz of the street. The sky was a deep, bright blue and the Mediterranean sunlight, softer than Manhattan’s harsh glare, cast a golden tint on the buildings. A cool breeze blew down the avenue, bringing the smell of freshly roasted coffee. Three teenage Turkish schoolgirls in white blouses and blue skirts walked by eating ice cream, totally engrossed in their conversation. Two tall, thin African men, Sudanese or Ethiopian, Yael thought, stood in front of a computer showroom, pointing at various tablets and discussing their merits. A gaggle of Arabic women, each dressed from head to toe in a black abaya with a gold trim, sat on a nearby terrace, eating large sticky slabs of baklava. Yael had barely taken a few steps before she heard American and Australian English; Gulf and Levantine Arabic; French, German, and Hebrew. The workday had hardly started, but İstiklal’s passeggiata was in full swing.

Amid the crowd, Yael did not notice a tall, bald man in a gray hooded sweatshirt step out of an apartment building doorway twenty-five yards to her right. He wore a Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear and followed her.

Yael walked across İstiklal toward the beggar girl to give her the twenty lira. She was still now, crouching in front of the household-goods shop. Black metal flowers studded with colored glass flowed in and out of each other’s stems across the art nouveau façade. The girl was reflected in a large horizontal mirror on display in the window. A siren howled in the distance.

Two hundred and fifty yards away, the old-fashioned tram set off from the terminal at Tünel and began its steady trundle toward Taksim Square.

Ten yards to the left of the household-goods shop a short, fat man, wearing a brown leather jacket, stood in the entrance of a bookshop. He had a moustache like a black caterpillar and also wore a Bluetooth earpiece. He looked at the man in the gray sweatshirt, nodded, and watched Yael cross İstiklal. He touched his earpiece and started walking toward Yael.

The band started playing, a jazzy version of “Night and Day,” the long clear notes of the tenor saxophone carrying over the bustle of the tourists.

Yael stopped after a few steps, smiling as a young woman in a loose white slip and baggy pink trousers began to dance in front of the group, her eyes closed as she swayed in time to the music. Yael suddenly remembered her dance with Najwa, the feel of Najwa’s fingers entwined with hers. She had never believed herself to be interested in women. Just the touch of Eli’s hand on her back still triggered a desire she had thought long dormant. Eli was a no-go, but Sami, despite his betrayals, was a much safer option. He was smarter and funnier, and he touched her in different ways. Or he would have, she guessed, if their dinner date had worked out. And then there was Yusuf. Tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic—and late. Or maybe she should just forget about men completely for now. Her dance with Najwa had left them both quite breathless, and not just from the exertion. What was that term she had read the other day…
bi-curious
.

Yael was so absorbed in her thoughts that she failed to pick up the first signals from her sixth sense. She bent down in front of the beggar girl, the twenty-lira note in her hand, her back to İstiklal Caddesi.

The tram slowly rattled down İstiklal, crowded with excited tourists, street kids hanging off the bumpers, its bell ringing merrily.

The bald man walked swiftly toward Yael from the right. The fat man with the moustache approached from the left. An ambulance appeared by the Tünel funicular station and drove down İstiklal, scattering tourists and pedestrians, siren wailing.

Yael dropped the banknote in the bowl.

“
Teşekkür ederim
, thank you,” said the girl.

“Excuse me, miss,” said the bald man.

Yael was still looking at the beggar girl when the bald man spoke. Yael glanced up, into the mirror of the household-goods shop, and all thoughts of Eli, Sami, and Najwa vanished.

She saw the bald man bending down toward her from her right side, a small blue aerosol can in his hand. The fat man with the moustache was almost at her left side. He wore brass knuckles on his right hand with a small pointed blade.

“Excuse me, miss,” the bald man said again, pointing the can at Yael’s face.

Yael’s sixth sense was screaming now, sending alarm signals down both sides of her body. She had, she knew, a fraction of a second at the most.

She was vulnerable, already halfway to the ground, and outnumbered. There was no time to turn around and face her attackers—she could only use the mirror.

The ambulance was just a few yards away now.

The bald man slowly pressed down on the nozzle, a yard from Yael’s face.