The Reykjavik Assignment
Page 35
Yael turned to him, then looked away, damping down the emotions bubbling inside her. First she needed to understand, then she could shout, scream, cry, or do whatever it was she felt like doing.
“Who is this ‘we’ and ‘us’?” she asked.
“We have a lot to talk about. I’ll get to that.”
Stein moved closer. Yael pushed him away, feeling him flinch. “No. We don’t. I read the classified files about you. Everywhere where there is violence, conflict, every squalid little war, you are there, providing advice, arms, intelligence, and other ‘services.’” Her voice rose with her emotions. “Profiting from all the death and destruction. Kosovo. Darfur. Congo. Syria.”
Stein remained calm. “Is that why you wouldn’t talk to me for so long?”
“Is that why Mom left you?”
“In part. But when she eventually agreed to hear what I have to say, she started thinking about coming back. At least she and I are talking now.”
Yael felt her father’s eyes on her, brought her feelings under control. She needed answers. Getting emotional would not bring them. “Who. Is. We?”
Stein dipped his head under the water for a moment, floated on his back before he answered. “We is a small group of current and former politicians, industrialists, business people, diplomats, and others who know that sometimes you need to take shortcuts.”
“What kind of shortcuts?”
“Necessary ones. To sidestep the system. To get the job done.” He turned to Yael. “You know about that, I think.”
“Tell me some names. Who?”
Stein slowly shook his head. “I cannot do that.”
Suddenly Yael was back in her childhood bedroom in their New York apartment, listening to a babel of languages. “The ones who visited Aleph. You and Mom told me they were clients. But they were your backers.”
Stein nodded. “They were both. Aleph started as a research outfit, then we realized that we could act with the information that we had. But we needed a new operation. We couldn’t just launch ourselves like white knights, ready to save the world.”
“Which was Efrat Global Solutions?”
“Exactly.”
“So Efrat, which had its long and bloody fingers in almost every war zone in the world, was really a force for good, working behind the scenes to save lives.”
Stein smiled. “Yes.”
“Mom tried to tell me the same thing, when I saw her in New York. Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“It’s a lot to process, I understand.”
Yael did not answer, swam out into the lake. Stein remained at the side. The water was very buoyant and she floated on her back for a while, staring at the sky, picking out the constellations, listening to the seabirds squawk. A torrent of questions tumbled through her mind. She sorted them into a list.
Her father was leaning against the wooden jetty, his body floating in the water, watching her as she swam back.
Yael positioned herself a couple of yards away and began to speak.
“Kosovo in 1998. You supplied military advisers and intelligence to the Serbs.”
“We had people on the ground, yes. They fed us back information. It was passed to NATO. The NATO bombing started, the ethnic cleansing ended. Hundreds of thousands of people went home. Alive. Kosovo is now an independent state.”
“Iraq. You worked with Saddam Hussein, through a front company.”
“Same story. We only operated in Kurdistan. We gathered information, supplied disinformation to Saddam. Kurdistan is now a de facto independent state. The only success story of that war.”
“Darfur. Your operatives liaised with the Janjaweed, the regime’s militia.”
“We were tasked by the Pentagon with intelligence gathering. We could get in where they could not. At that time, eight or nine years ago, there was serious planning going on for western intervention. But it didn’t happen.”
“Either way, Efrat made plenty of money. It profited from the wars and the killing and the destruction.”
Stein rested his hand on Yael’s shoulder. She flinched for a second. Stein said, “Yes, it did. That is the world in which we live.”
Yael brushed Stein’s hand off. “Congo—KZX and the Bonnet Group? The coltan plot? You were distributing weapons.”
“They were duds.”
“What?”
“Old, rusty AK-47s. They didn’t work. Was there a genocide in Congo?”
“No.”
“Why not? Because you were alerted.”
“By Fareed.”
“And who instructed him to do that?”
Yael closed her eyes for a moment, slid back under the water. The wind had picked up now, was blowing hard and cold. Her father had told Fareed to leak the sound file about the planned attack on the Tutsi refugee camp so she could stop it? It was too much to think about. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I am prepared to believe something of what you claim. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I tried. You wouldn’t take my calls. You didn’t reply to my e-mails or letters.”
“You brought Kapitanovic here so he could kill Akerman.”
“I did, yes.”
“You facilitated a murder.”
Stein stared out over the water. Small waves were breaking the surface. “Akerman had facilitated many more. He was a dead man walking. Kapitanovic had been waiting a long time. It was much worse than you know. Akerman was on the Bosnian Serbs’ payroll. He had been since the start of the siege. He used to tip the Serbs off when the Muslim soldiers’ raiding parties broke out. He had blood on his hands. He’s no loss.”
“And Bonnet?”
Stein’s face darkened. “Charles Bonnet, more than anyone else, is responsible for the death of David. I don’t know what he told you. He was in operational command. Sure, Fareed dreamed it up, a cock-eyed scheme. But Bonnet was tasked with making it happen. Every step of the way. He was working for the DGSE, the French intelligence service, and they knew better than anyone the kind of slaughter that was planned.”
“Who was on the roof in New York?”
“Me and Kapitanovic. I was the spotter. He took the shot.”
“He missed.”
“Only thanks to you.”
“Why didn’t he fire again? Bonnet was still in range, lying on the ground. Kapitanovic had a laser scope. He couldn’t miss.”
“There still was a risk.”
“Of what?”
“Hitting my daughter.”
“The car bomb in DC. The police got a tip-off. Was that you?”
Stein tipped more water over his head, did not reply.
Yael leaned back and exhaled slowly, watching the steam float. “How does Mom know Reinhardt Daintner?”
Stein started with surprise. “What?”
“I saw them at the Columbia reception. He had his hand on her arm. They looked very comfortable in each other’s company.”
“KZX was a client of ours, once. Barbara handled their account.”
“A client or one of your backers?”
“Does it matter?”
Yael waited before she replied. She was no longer sure that she knew the answer. “What do you want, Aba?”
Stein stretched out his arm and picked up the black waterproof bag from the wooden walkway. He took out a thin brass nameplate. “Remember this?”
Yael nodded, suddenly back in her parents’ office, when her family was whole.
Stein handed the nameplate to her. “It’s time to come home.”
39
Clarence Clairborne flipped between the news channels. A day after the terrorist attack, coverage from Reykjavik was still rolling 24/7. He switched to CNN. A male reporter in his forties stood against a familiar, bleak landscape ringed with guard posts and razor wire. His voice faded in and out as helicopters roared overhead, each with the letters FBI painted on the side. A SWAT team ran across open ground toward the perimeter fence.
Clairborne’s e
xpression did not change. He poured himself a generous measure of bourbon, and took a long swallow, then opened the second drawer in his desk and took out a Colt .45 revolver. He checked the cylinder: six bullets in place. A commotion suddenly erupted in his office anteroom: raised voices, male and female. His office door started to splinter.
He picked up the gun, placed the photographs of his son and daughter in the center of his desk, and raised the barrel to his head.
*
Yael felt a soft touch on her shoulder, felt the change in the engines’ vibrations as the airplane slowly banked. She opened her eyes. The dream was still with her.
*
She is seven years old, sitting on her brother’s shoulders as he strides across Central Park, pretending to be a giant, walking between the trees. Her mother prepares the picnic, her father is play wrestling with Noa. Her little sister is shouting with delight. The sun is shining, the air is warm, and it smells of summer.
*
The voluptuous brunette flight attendant smiled kindly. “Please lift your seat back up, madame, we are preparing for landing.”
Yael nodded, pressed the button on the side of the seat, felt its back spring into place. She dropped her hands to her legs. She could still feel her brother’s shoulder muscles under her thighs as the familiar yearning swelled inside her.
She swallowed and wiped her eyes, reached inside her purse, and took out the brass nameplate that her father had given her.
Yael smiled as she ran her fingers over the indented letters: “Yael Azoulay: Office Manager.”
She turned the nameplate over in her hands. She had not seen it for more than twenty years. The metal had been polished to a golden shine. She would think about her future and her father’s offer. But not today, and probably not tomorrow.
She yawned softly, stretched her legs, looked out the window. The Bosporus shone in the summer sunshine, Istanbul spread along the coastline, beckoning.
THE END
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Author's Note
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
My interest in the United Nations began in the early 1990s, when I covered the Yugoslav wars as a journalist. That experience led to my nonfiction book Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide, which examines the UN’s failures in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. I welcome feedback from readers and reply to every e-mail. Contact me at aleborwork@gmail.com or follow me on Facebook or Twitter: @adamlebor.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like Yael, I was captivated by Iceland. I am especially grateful to Eliza Reid and Erica Jacobs Green, the cofounders of the Iceland Writers Retreat, for bringing me to Reykjavik in spring 2014. Paul and Marigrace O’Friel were warm and gracious hosts during my stay and took me on a memorable hike up the Búrfell volcano. Stefán Eiríksson, formerly of the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police, gave me an informative briefing about crime and law enforcement in Iceland. Lára Aðalsteinsdóttir, Project Manager at Reykjavik UNESCO City of Literature, was an excellent ambassador for Iceland’s rich cultural and literary heritage.
As always, a big thank-you goes to my agents, Elizabeth Sheinkman, and Suzanne Gluck. Hannah Wood at HarperCollins in New York was, once again, an outstanding editor, seamlessly zooming out to fix structural problems and zooming in on telling details. Thanks also to Claire Wachtel for launching the Yael Azoulay series, Bill Warhop for his sharp-eyed copyediting, and Katherine Beitner and Amanda Ainsworth for their diligent publicity work.
In London my thanks go to the team at Head of Zeus, especially Anthony Cheetham and Madeleine O’Shea for her thoughtful editing and incisive suggestions. As always, “Z,” was a most useful guide to the dark world where American corporate interests meet power politics. Thanks also to my friends and hosts in New York: Peter Green, Bob Green, and Babette Audant, Josh Freeman, and Matt and Emmanuelle Welch. Otto Penzler at the excellent Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan kindly hosted launch events for both The Geneva Option and The Washington Stratagem. Thanks also to Jewish Book Week in London for inviting me to chair two events where I could talk about the Yael Azoulay series and to Dan Friedman at the Forward newspaper.
Special thanks to Lawrence Lever, of Citywire, who encouraged me to develop a course on storytelling, then made it available to his colleagues. Special Agent Anne C. Beagan of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Lt. Joseph Leal of the UN Department of Safety and Security provided valuable insight. I am grateful to several other UN officials who asked to remain anonymous and to Carne Ross, of Independent Diplomat.
Justin Leighton, Roger Boyes, Clive Rumbold, Andrew Haslam-Jones, Mekella Broomberg at JW3, and Annika Savill were always supportive, as were my fellow writers Alan Furst and Matthew Dunn. Thanks most of all, of course, to my family for their love, patience, and pride in my books.
About Adam LeBor
ADAM LEBOR lives in Budapest and writes for The Economist, the New York Times, Monocle, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, and numerous other publications. He is the author of a number of non-fiction books, including Hitler’s Secret Bankers, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Adam LeBor, 2016
The moral right of Adam LeBor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781784970284
ISBN (HB) 9781784970291
ISBN (XTPB) 9781784970307
ISBN (PB) 9781784970314
Jacket design: Anna Green
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