The Washington Stratagem (7 page)

Yael had worked for Fareed Hussein throughout her UN career. It was a relationship, she knew, underpinned by a kind of mutual exploitation. She used him, and the UN, to try and save lives wherever she could. Hussein used Yael as his secret conscience. Behind the scenes, Hussein had been happy for Yael to, if not violate, at least bend the concept of neutrality, as long as nothing could be traced back to his office. Indeed, that was one of the reasons her job existed: to broker the covert deals that kept the wheels of superpower diplomacy turning, and to ensure that the balance sheets of multinational corporations stayed healthy. Yael knew she operated in a gray area of compromises and trade-offs, sometimes sordid ones. Warlords walked free; crimes went unpunished. But lives were saved and wars averted. Overall, her moral account had stayed in the black.

Hussein had been her patron and protector, at least until Yael had been sent to Goma, in eastern Congo. There her task was to negotiate a deal with Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, a Hutu Rwandan warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. Hakizimani, a former minister of health, had once been marked out as one of the new generation of African leaders. But after his wife and three daughters were killed in a car bomb, blamed on Tutsi extremists, Hakizimani became the ideologue and propaganda genius behind the Rwandan genocide. His theory of “Hutu Power” demanded the complete extermination of the Tutsis. Every day, for hour after hour, he had broadcast on Radio Milles Collines, exhorting his Hutu compatriots to squash, kill, and stamp on the “cockroaches,” meaning the Tutsis. His instructions had been diligently followed.

Yael was to offer him a shorter sentence, in a comfortable prison in Paris, in exchange for surrendering and dismantling his militia. Almost two decades after the genocide, the Hutu militias had regrouped in eastern Congo. Under Hakizimani’s command they were launching raids into Rwanda and threatening to destabilize the whole region. Yael found the assignment repulsive, but she could not refuse. That was her job. She knew how to handle killers. It was a little late for her to start getting squeamish. The only difference this time had been the numbers involved. But Yael also had more personal reasons for wanting to meet the man dubbed “the Goebbels of Africa.”

Yael glanced at the SG’s desk. Next to the picture of Omar was one of a pretty young Indian woman—Rina Hussein in her graduation gown. Rina was a human rights activist. She and her father had not spoken for years. Rina had recently caused an international incident at the UN headquarters in Geneva. Rina and her comrades had pelted UN officials, Lucy Tremlett, and her rock-star boyfriend at a press conference with the yellow sludge from which coltan is extracted. Yael knew that the SG had pulled strings with the Swiss authorities to get Rina and her group released. Rina probably suspected as much, and it only seemed to fuel her rage against her father, whom she had recently denounced on Twitter as an “accomplice to genocide.”

Yael brought herself back to the room. The SG, she realized, was still talking. She listened patiently as he finished his exegesis on the file he had just read and Yael’s meeting in DC that morning, outlining what he called the “potentially catastrophic consequences” if the UN took on the Prometheus Group.

Braithwaite picked up his folder. “I beg to differ, Fareed. We need to go public with this. It’s dynamite.”

“Indeed it is, Quentin. Which is why it stays inside this room, at least for now,” said Hussein. He turned to Yael and gave her a questioning look.

“I go with Quentin. Just leave a printout in the pressroom early one morning. Nothing can be traced back to us.” A vision of Sami picking up Braithwaite’s dossier flicked through her mind. She could almost see the excitement on his face. Perhaps she would leave it there herself, she thought with a trace of a smile.

Hussein shook his head. “Not now. Not yet.”

Yael and Braithwaite looked at each other, then reluctantly nodded. The SG, it was understood, had the last word.

Yael leaned forward as she spoke. “Fareed, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Forgive me for bringing this up. But you will have seen the story on the
Daily Beast
today. Is it true? Are you suffering from blackouts?”

“No. I am not,” he said indignantly. “I’m fine.”

Yael watched Hussein carefully as he spoke. There were no microsigns of dissimulation. He was telling the truth. “Then who is leaking these stories about you?”

“Clairborne?” asked Braithwaite. “You have plenty of enemies in DC.”

Hussein’s energy seemed to leak away. His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked weary. “Not just in DC,” he said. “In this house.”

Yael checked the dinner table once more, making tiny adjustments to the two place settings, the wine and water glasses, which made no discernable difference whatsoever. The knives, forks, and spoons sparkled; the glasses gleamed; the candlesticks shone. It was a rare outing for her grandmother’s best silver cutlery.

The SG had given Yael the day off after her trip to see Clairborne. She had slept in late, then spent Tuesday shopping and preparing dinner. She had told Sami to come over at around 7:30 p.m. The dinner was ready—all she had to do was heat it up—and the champagne and wine were chilling in the fridge. It was the first time in months she had cooked: she usually existed on the food served in the surprisingly good UN canteen, room service while on mission, or takeout.

She finally stopped fiddling with the table and looked around her apartment, which was as clean and tidy as she had ever seen it. It was a decent-sized one bedroom in a stately building that had been constructed in the 1930s on the corner of Riverside Drive and West Eighty-First Street. The walls were thick, the ceilings high, the bedroom had an en suite bathroom with pipes that rattled and groaned when she ran the shower or the tub, and the large windows looked out over the Hudson River. The building’s elegant black-and-white marble foyer looked like something from a Hollywood film set. Each time she came home she half-expected to see Fred Astaire tap-dancing his way across the floor. She had moved in over a decade ago and the apartment was part of her family history. Her grandmother, Eva Weiss, had fled Budapest at the end of the Second World War and bought the place for perhaps a hundredth of what it was worth now. She had left the apartment to Yael, together with instructions to look after her art deco furniture, find a husband, and start a family. Yael rested her hand on the back of one of the mahogany dining chairs. The table and chairs were still in good shape, she thought, smiling to herself. The rest, well…

Yael was thirty-six years old. Born in New York to an American mother and Israeli father, she had grown up on the Upper West Side, six blocks from where she lived now. She was the middle child of three: her brother David was seven years older, her sister, Noa, three years younger. Yael’s parents had owned and ran a company called Aleph Research that supplied business and corporate intelligence to companies, individuals, and governments. Aleph kept a low profile, was not even listed in the telephone directory, and did not look for business. But it had a sterling reputation for discretion and accuracy and was never short of work. Some clients wanted the broad-brush approach, such as a report on potential future wars in the developing world and their likely impact on commodity prices. Others wanted something much more precise, such as the level of security and controls on Mexico’s border with the United States. Yael’s father and several “freelance researchers,” most of whom seemed to be Israelis, brought in the information. Her mother, Barbara, was a former journalist. She compiled the information, wrote and edited the reports, and ran the business side. Yael had spent some of her school holidays at the midtown office as a child, helping with the filing. Despite Yael’s repeated questions, her father had never properly explained how he gathered the information. She eventually realized that he had been part of the Israeli intelligence establishment—perhaps still was—and was using his former contacts and colleagues.

As a young girl Yael had been close to her mother, especially as her father was traveling so much on company business. But as she grew into an exceptionally pretty young woman, her relationship with her mother changed. Her parents’ marriage began to collapse. Her father seemed to be continually on the road. Whenever he came home, there were arguments. Some were about the firm: the kind of clients her father was bringing in and the research they asked for. Other fights were domestic. Yael’s mother resented having to raise three children on her own. Yael felt that her mother saw her as a rival for her husband’s affection. In response, Barbara poured all her attention onto Noa and David, which made Yael distance herself further from her mother. So Yael went to her father for affection and reassurance, which he readily gave and which further alienated her mother, in a self-perpetuating spiral. Yael was too young to understand this, her mother too angry at the end of her marriage to try and fix her relationship with her older daughter. Yael’s parents divorced in 1991 when she was fourteen. She went to live in Tel Aviv with her father. At the age of sixteen they moved to London for two years, before she returned to Israel and began her military service.

Yael had started her UN career, after graduating with a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University, as an administrative officer in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). She was responsible for ensuring that the reports and briefings were written in correct, grammatical English and that they were distributed on time to the relevant committees. Yael was a polyglot: fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Spanish, with a decent command of Hungarian. Her job was far more demanding than it sounded. The UN had six official languages, and a legion of zealous, protective interpreters; Yael soon learned to find her way through both the thickets of bureaucracy and the jungle of competing egos. The reports were also a matter of life or death, because the DPKO sent armed troops into harm’s way in the world’s conflict zones, where they fought and sometimes died. Quentin Braithwaite, then on reassignment from the British Ministry of Defense, had quickly noticed Yael’s skill at defusing both office crises and the perpetual power struggle with the rival Department of Political Affairs, which distracted staff and sapped their energy. Braithwaite had brought Yael into the operations room, the command center for the peacekeeping missions. There she proved ice-cool under extreme pressure. He then started sending Yael out into the field. Even her detractors, jealous of her rapid rise, admitted that Yael showed a rare ability to guide opposing sides to the conclusion she wanted, while persuading the protagonists that such a result was anyway in their best interest.

Fareed Hussein had noticed Yael’s skill set while she was on mission in Afghanistan. There she had negotiated a deal between US troops and the Taliban. American soldiers, disguised as locals, would guard the Taliban’s opium fields, in exchange for the Taliban guaranteeing the safety of a new gas pipeline from central Asia. Hussein soon made her his protégé, which instantly brought her far more enemies than allies. Hussein gave her increasingly challenging assignments and she had thrived. Her UN ID card said she was political adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Her actual job, as the SG’s special negotiator, did not officially exist. She had brokered ceasefires from Gaza to Darfur; negotiated the release of hostages in Baghdad and Algeria; set the terms for corporations wishing to invest in the developing world. The men—they were nearly always men—with whom she dealt looked askance at Yael when she first walked into the room. But if she spoke for Fareed Hussein, she spoke for the P5. On a good day, she was the most powerful woman on the planet. But she still woke up alone every morning.

She walked over to the sideboard. A clutch of framed photographs stood on the surface. The largest, in solid silver, showed David, standing by his UN Jeep on the outskirts of Vukovar during the Croatian War in the winter of 1993, soon after he started working for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. David had been a good-looking young man: tall, broad shouldered, with wavy black hair and green eyes. The sight of her brother still made Yael’s stomach lurch. David had been killed in April 1994 in Kigali, at the start of the genocide in Rwanda. Despite their desperate, repeated calls for help to the UN peacekeepers stationed nearby, David and eight other UN workers were hacked to death by a mob wielding machetes. An internal report had exonerated the UN, including Fareed Hussein, then the head of the Peacekeeping Department. Instead it blamed communications breakdowns, uncertainty over the peacekeepers’ mandate, and interference from the P5 and the Security Council. Yael was sixteen and living with her father in London when David was killed. She had been left utterly bereft by her brother’s death.

Yael believed the UN report was a whitewash. She would never give up her quest to find out why her brother had died, and who was responsible. Hussein had brushed off her attempts to find out more, especially when she asked him about his movements for the day of the killings. She had discovered that Hussein’s schedule from that week had mysteriously gone missing from the UN archives. There seemed to be no written records of his meetings and telephone calls. Yael knew from the look in Hussein’s eyes and the way his body stiffened when pressed, that he knew more, perhaps much more, than he had so far revealed. He had given Yael the photograph of her brother after the coltan-KZX-Bonnet scandal, when Yael was reinstated to her job. She had been uncertain whether to accept the gift, but eventually took it home.

Yael picked up the photograph and stared at her brother and his UN vehicle. Was it just a present from the SG, she wondered, or something more, perhaps even a symbol of atonement? She picked up a ring sitting on top of a small, painted ceramic dish. It was a wide band of white gold that David had bought in the Jaffa flea market. He had let her wear the ring on “loan,” as he said with a smile, but they both knew the loan was open-ended. Yael stared at the Arabic calligraphy that flowed around the ring, a declaration of love from a husband to his wife. She placed it on the second finger of her right hand. Twenty years on from his death, the ache inside her, the longing to see her brother, had barely faded.