Diplomatic Immunity

by Grant Sutherland

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  TUESDAY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  THURSDAY

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  FRIDAY

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  SATURDAY

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Grant Sutherland and DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY

  Preview

  Copyright Page

  “The most dangerous of all moral dilemmas: When we are obliged to conceal the truth in order to help the truth be victorious.”

  —Dag Hammarskjöld, United Nations Secretary-General, 1953–1961. Died in a plane crash while on a UN mission to the Congo. The cause of the crash was never determined.

  PROLOGUE

  ON MANHATTAN ISLAND BY THE EAST RIVER THERE are eighteen acres that are not legally part of the United States. This fact was impressed upon me throughout the first week of my induction, but acquired the force of reality only when I was called upon to pledge allegiance to a charter that was not the U.S. Constitution and to a flag that was not my own.

  After the ceremony that year, the Secretary-General invited me and my fellow inductees up to his private dining room for drinks on the thirty-eighth floor. He made a speech.

  “You have come here from many lands to dedicate your working lives to the service of all nations,” he proclaimed, sweeping his hand regally to embrace us, the newest and lowliest members of his team.

  Twenty-two of us, as I recall. Three, like me, U.S. citizens, the others from all quarters of the globe. And all gathered to join the great United Nations enterprise, to aid the downtrodden of the earth, to build bridges of trust between nations, and to free mankind from the scourge of war.

  The Secretary-General was eloquent. He painted the big picture. Duty. Responsibility. Hope. The greater good of mankind. A practiced politician, though I did not see it at the time, he offered us the words we wanted to hear. I was twenty-six, my fellow inductees mostly younger, each of us playing at being maturely levelheaded but underneath that, burning, lit with personal ambitions and universal ideals that seemed not only compatible but inseparable, as if the world’s good was somehow at one with our own. We were united too, of course, by youth’s universal belief—the evidence for which was all around us—that our parents’ generation had screwed up badly; that we could do better; that, given a chance, we could build a finer world.

  I sat by the window. The view from the thirty-eighth floor was splendid.

  “Each of you has a part to play, a real part in this endeavor. To serve all nations. All nations. Not merely your home countries. Not even that greater number, those nations with which you feel some affinity, some tie of culture or language or race. But all nations. Those with whom you agree and those with whom you disagree. Those which you believe good and those which you believe bad. Once accepted by the General Assembly, once a signatory to the UN Charter, each state has a legitimate call on the services of the Secretariat.” His hand swept over us again, not regally now but inclusively. “On me. And on you.”

  Then he put on his glasses. And he opened the UN Charter, a red morocco-bound copy, which he held in one hand.

  “You have undoubtedly heard this several times these past few days. It will do you no harm to hear it again.” His smile was wry, our laughter dutiful. But when he looked down and began to read, his grandiloquent and somewhat showy manner of address fell away. His tone became dry, almost professorial. And though we had as he surmised heard Article 100 of the Charter frequently during the course of our induction, we listened. Attentively.

  “‘In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or any other authority external to the Organization. They shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible only to the Organization.’”

  He closed the morocco-bound copy. “The Secretary-General and the staff,” he intoned. He removed his glasses slowly. He looked up. “Me,” he said. “And you.”

  A weight seemed to settle over the room, a moment of pure silence. And at that moment we were not merely young, ambitious men and women embarking on careers as international civil servants; at that moment we were acolytes, novitiates of a secular order, receiving final instruction from the high priest of our faith. A final warning. We would be leaned on. Attempts would be made, through us, to subvert the UN’s high ideals.

  Then the Secretary-General raised a hand. And smiled somewhat equivocally.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  ELEVEN YEARS LATER

  When Toshio Hatanaka called, I was alone at my desk. I picked up the phone and said my name, then listened to the crackling coming down the line.

  “Windrush,” I said again, louder this time. “UN Legal Affairs.”

  The distant crackle continued. I was on the point of hanging up, when I heard a voice calling forlornly into the ether. “Sam?”

  There are not many voices I would recognize under those conditions—just family and maybe three or four colleagues and friends—and I guess it says something about how close I’d become to Toshio over the years that I picked out his voice immediately. Smiling, I kicked back in my chair.

  “I can’t hear you, Toshio. Speak up.”

  The line broke up again, Toshio’s fragmented words reaching me faintly, like some indecipherable code. I’d held more than a few of these conversations with Toshio since he was appointed UN special envoy to Afghanistan. He spent half his life in places where a portable satellite-telephone was not a luxury item but a piece of equipment as essential as a four-wheel drive or a guard with a gun.

  “Sam.” His voice emerged from the static. There was some more that I missed, and then, “Abatan.”

  I took up my pen. Abatan was one of the UN-controlled refugee camps on the Pakistan border, a place to which we had recently sent out a relief medical team. One of the relief doctors, on sabbatical from her real job in New York, was my wife. I asked Toshio what the team needed, what inevitable bureaucratic and quasi-legal hassles they were having that I, as first deputy of UN Legal Affairs, could help straighten out.

  “No,” he said. “Can’t contact—” And then the line faded.

  I told Toshio I was losing him; I asked him again to speak up. His voice suddenly crested.

  “The tribesmen went to Abatan. Into the camp.”

  My pen froze over the notepad. The Afghan tribesmen should not have been anywhere near the camp; the Pakistani military guara
nteed us full security.

  “Who do you want me to speak to, Toshio? The Pakistani ambassador?”

  For several seconds there was only static on the line, audio waves swelling, then receding. “Toshio?”

  “I will find them,” he said. “I will contact them.”

  “Who?” The Pakistani military? The Afghan tribesmen? I could hear the concern in his voice. Something was not right. I dropped my pen, then rose from behind my desk. “Who do you have to find? What’s going on out there?”

  “Medical team,” he said, his voice breaking up. “Hostages.”

  The line faded, crackled like gunfire, and was gone.

  TUESDAY

  1

  “WE’RE GOING TO BE LATE,”PATRICK O’CONNER REMARKS unhappily.

  We have just emerged from a twenty-minute session in the local Starbucks, Patrick, over two light grandes, telling me his woes. Now he considers the thickening crowd on the sidewalk before veering right, wiping the last muffin crumbs from his mouth with a handkerchief as I fall into step beside him.

  “You know,” he says, continuing his complaint as we walk, “it’s unbelievable. This thing’s been on the cards how long? Years. And here we are, the whole jamboree set to start—for chrissake, they’ll be voting on it in two days—and still no one knows the numbers. Tell me, Sam. Really. What kind of cockass thing is that?”

  This question, in variations, is one I have been listening to every day now for at least a month. So I incline my head but offer no comment, and as we push our way through the sightseers, Patrick goes on delivering his latest thoughts on the subject, the main matter of debate at Turtle Bay, in fact, for over a year: the elevation of the Japanese to a place at the top table of international diplomacy, a permanent UN Security Council seat. What Patrick refers to in private moments, in his inimitable Australian way, as the Nip Question.

  “Every tinpot bozo lining up for his say, and the Japs still walking around like a buncha zombies, like it’s in the bag, as if it’ll all go through on a nod from Uncle Sam.” He shakes his head, disconsolate. He swears.

  And then, mercifully, he lapses into a thoughtful silence. He is not a tall man, and is in his late fifties, but as he barrels forward, the crowd parts around him like water around a stone.

  Patrick O’Conner, the UN’s Undersecretary-General for Legal Affairs, has been my boss for almost three years. I have become accustomed to his moods, but today, this morning, his disgruntlement has gone into overdrive, reached an altogether higher order of magnitude. He sweeps a hand across his forehead. He sets his bulldog jaw tight. He does not look happy.

  Patrick, as everyone in the Secretariat knows, has fallen out of favor lately with the thirty-eighth floor. Breaking with his usual practice, the Secretary-General no longer calls Patrick to his side at the onset of any crisis. He has ceased to find Patrick’s speechwriting talents indispensable. He does not invite Patrick back to his grand Upper East Side residence, as he once did so often, to shoot the breeze and drink whiskey till all hours of the night. And everyone knows, too, that the reason for Patrick’s fall is the vote, just two days away now, on Japan. Following Patrick’s advice, the SG has forced the pace on the vote, driving it to the top of this year’s General Assembly agenda. Patrick, in a rare miscalculation, was certain the Japanese had the numbers. In fact, they still may. But the whole thing is so delicately balanced now that no one can call it, and if the worst should happen, if Japan loses the vote, then the SG, after all his efforts, will look like a fool.

  Which is why for the past several weeks Patrick has been kept at arm’s length from the thirty-eighth floor. Should the need for a scapegoat arise, Patrick is shaping up as ideal material.

  Now Patrick shoulders his way impatiently through the sightseers and tourists who have gathered near First Avenue. It is not just me. Patrick O’Conner is unhappy with the world.

  “Speak to Hatanaka,” he tells me as we bump together in the throng.

  Right, I think. Okay, now I get it. Why Patrick has asked me to Starbucks for a quiet word, why I have just spent twenty minutes listening to his beef. He has been softening me up, priming me to comply with this request. Speak to Hatanaka.

  When I pretend not to have heard, Patrick touches my arm.

  “I want you to speak to Hatanaka. Get him to ease off this crap he’s talking, trashing his own bloody country. Who’s he think he is anyway, running a private campaign? Is that what he’s paid for?”

  I concede, reluctantly, that Toshio Hatanaka has probably overstepped the mark.

  “Overstepped? Christ, the way Hatanaka’s playing it, there is no bloody mark.” Patrick shakes his head in disgust. “You hear the latest? He’s sent out a letter to all the senior delegations telling them how a Security Council seat’s incompatible with the Japanese Constitution. Can you believe it?”

  “It won’t change the vote.”

  “Says you.”

  Unfortunately, he has a point. Toshio Hatanaka, committed pacifist and twenty-five-year UN veteran, has become more involved than he has any right to be in this. Now I ask Patrick exactly what it is he wants me to tell Toshio.

  “Tell him he’s out of line. Pull his bloody head in.”

  “You can’t?”

  “You think I haven’t tried?” We turn face-to-face, edging our way through the crush toward the steps down to First Avenue. Part of the crowd down there is chanting, placards held high. “Of course I’ve damn well tried, he’s just not listening. But you two seem to get along, yeah? You’ve wasted enough time on that Third Committee bullshit with him. Anyway, try to speak to him, will you? See if you can talk some sense into the man’s thick head, make him see this isn’t just some pissy point of procedure he’s screwing around with here. This is the big game.”

  “And you want Toshio to butt out.”

  Patrick shoots me a look. “Sam, I’m asking you to speak to the man, that’s all. If you don’t want to, don’t. But I don’t wanna be hearing any more about your principles. You know he’s in the wrong. Speak to the man.”

  We emerge from the crowd at the head of the steps and pause; even Patrick is momentarily silenced by the sight. Turtle Bay, UN headquarters, in all its General Assembly opening day glory. Sightseers line First Avenue both ways; a motorcade of black limousines slowly snakes its way into the forecourt of the Secretariat building, the thirty-nine-story office tower where Patrick and I both work. Delegates are strolling across to the garlanded entrance, the rainbow colors of the African national costumes shimmering in the long line of gray suits. Everyone shaking hands. Smiling. One hundred and eighty-five flags flapping in line. There is, undeniably, a real sense of occasion.

  Just below us on this side of the street, the maroon-robed Tibetan monks—a shaven-headed cluster, they have been camped here on a hunger strike for two weeks—cease their chanting as the Chinese delegation disappears into the UN buildings. The monks lower their FREE TIBET placards and peer curiously through the line of New York cops to see what might happen next. Or maybe in this age of celebrity they’re hoping for the same as the ranks of sightseers crowding behind them: a glimpse of somebody famous, a face they recognize from the style magazines or TV.

  Well, I think, here we are. My fourteenth time and the thrill, though muted by the passing years, still rises. The flags fly. The limos disgorge the mighty. It is the third Tuesday in September, and here we are once again at the gathering of all the nations of the earth.

  Patrick turns to me. “Speak to Hatanaka.” Then he looks at his watch as he begins shouldering his way down the steps. “We’re going to be late,” he says.

  We are not late, of course. The delegates and the presidents, the prime ministers and the foreign secretaries, various senior UN staff, all of us are gathered in the Delegates’ Lounge, everyone busy seeing and being seen, the only two things you can do at a gala occasion like this. The moment he spots James Bruckner, the U.S. ambassador, Patrick moves in swiftly to press the flesh, leaving me alone by the w
all. Most days this place has the feel of some airport lounge built and decorated in the fifties. Long rows of high windows and clean, spare lines. Today the effect is enhanced by all the suits, the different-colored faces; it looks as though half a dozen jumbos have just arrived and unloaded several hundred VIPs.

  Mike Jardine, deputy head of Security here at the UN, weaves toward me through the crowd. He finishes delivering some command into his walkie-talkie, then turns to stand at my side. He tugs at the collar of his jacket and straightens his tie.

  “Fun day?” I venture.

  He tilts back his head. “Shit fight of the year. All we need now’s the frigging ticker tape.”

  There is not the trace of a smile on his pallid face. His hooded eyes continue to sweep left and right as he tells me that we appear to be down one delegation.

  “Who?”

  “The Japanese.”

  But the Japanese, with everything they’re playing for this session, will not be staying away from the opening. When I offer him this judgment, Mike grunts.

  “No-shows I can deal with. You ask me, they’re just holding back for the grandstand entrance, the Streisand thing. Get here last, everyone’s gonna notice.” He makes a face. “Jesus. And I used to think I had problems down at the Hall.”

  City Hall, he means, a reference to Mike’s old job of running security for New York’s mayor. Mike left the NYPD five years ago to come and work here at UN headquarters, an appointment that has turned out to be one of the more inspired of the last Secretary-General’s tenure. Just before Mike joined us, relations between UN Security and the NYPD had hit an all-time low. On one celebrated occasion a fistfight broke out during some ambassadorial lunch at the Park Plaza, four of NYPD’s finest versus four of our guys, eight grown men slugging it out in the john over who was protecting whom. That those days are now behind us is largely due to Mike. He is respected on both sides of First Avenue.

  I ask him if he’s seen Toshio Hatanaka. He shakes his head.

  “But I’ve seen your girlfriend,” he says.

  When I give him a look, Mike grins. I’m starting to wish I had never told him. Then someone reports a “red” over Mike’s two-way. Mike groans.