by Adam LeBor
He looked at her in surprise. “You work for the UN and you don’t know the head of Efrat Global Solutions? Stein was a general in the Israeli army. A war hero. Now he runs the world’s biggest private military contractor.”
“I said I don’t know him. Not that I had never heard of him. Is he working for you?”
Hakizimani laughed. “You don’t expect me to answer that. Come,” he said, standing up.
She followed him out of the room and down to the lobby, out into the landscaped gardens. Yael’s tall, slim figure and long auburn hair immediately attracted the stares of a group of South African businessmen at the check-in desk. She ignored their shouted invitations for a drink. The air smelled of orchids and cut grass. She breathed deeply, relishing the breeze blowing in over the water as they walked down to the lakeside. A cormorant soared, wheeled, and dived, riding the air currents. Aid workers lay on sun loungers, soft drinks or cold beers in their hands. Uniformed hotel staff, all African, picked up cigarette butts, swept the paths, and watered the plants. A manicured lawn reached down to the beach, which was dotted with palm trees. Mount Nyiragongo loomed over the lake in the distance, spilling smoke and steam. The volcano had recently covered much of the city in lava. Most of it was still there. Locals even built their homes out of lava. The volcano could blow again at any moment.
They stood together. Hakizimani pulled out a pack of Marlboros and offered the box to Yael. She took a cigarette and he leaned over and lit it for her. His eyes were startling, like molten sapphire. She drew deeply on the cigarette, pulling the smoke into her lungs, feeling the instant nicotine buzz.
“So why the rush?” he asked. “I have been on the wanted list for years. Then the messages start arriving. Then the intermediaries, and now the envoy herself, in person.”
There were times to tell the truth, Yael knew. This was one of them. She said: “Coltan.”
He nodded. “Bien sûr. Give me your telephone please.”
Yael handed it to him. He cradled the shiny handset. “You know they use children to mine coltan? They are small—they can fit in confined spaces. They eat less. They are paid almost nothing. Some food perhaps. They often have no parents. What does it matter what happens to such children? Nobody knows if they are alive or dead. Sometimes the tunnels collapse, and the children cannot get out. But as long as you can call your friends, Yael, who cares?”
She did not reply. Everything he said was true. Coltan was the world’s most coveted mineral, essential for mobile telephones and computers. Yael had read a seventy-page UN document on the plane from Paris to Kinshasa: “Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The report had been commissioned by the Security Council a decade ago and was publicly available. It was a detailed, thorough account. It revealed the front companies that processed the mines’ profits; the airlines whose rickety Soviet-era jets shipped the coltan out from remote landing strips in Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda; the warlords and businesspeople who organized the trade; the banks that facilitated it; and the role of Congo’s neighbors and the shadowy international gangs who built their empires on the mineral.
The UN document had lain unread in ministries and company headquarters across the world.
Hakizimani handed Yael her telephone back. “Your proposal is interesting. But I have a better offer.”
“Which is?”
They reached the edge of the lake. She watched a white UN helicopter fly low overhead, deep into Congo, the roar of its rotor blades churning the lake.
Hakizimani smiled at her. “I always admired Yael. Your biblical namesake. The Hebrew spy who seduced Sisera, the enemy general, seven times, and lulled him to sleep. And rammed a tent peg through his head. You joined the UN to make the world a better place, non?”
Yael nodded warily.
“Maybe you are right. Imagine how much of a better place this part of the world would be if there was a peace agreement here. Thousands, tens of thousands of lives saved. Stability. Education, economic growth. Mobile telephones for all.”
Hakizimani bent down and took a handful of soil. “This land is rich, not just with coltan, but with gold, diamonds, the wealth of the world. Eastern Congo could be a shining example for the new Africa. All because of you, Yael.”
He let the earth run through his fingers and took Yael’s hand. He stared at her face: “Your eyes are beautiful. Like a cat’s.”
He stepped closer. “I am older now. I cannot promise seven times. But I will do my best.”
Three
Sami Boustani leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, his head in his hands, his feet on his desk. The damp patch had spread along the grubby white plastic tiles. The electric cable poking through the dividers was drooping even lower and was covered in condensation. The neon tube buzzed and flickered. Despite his repeated calls to building maintenance, nobody had turned up to fix it. Sami was increasingly irritated at both the decrepitude and the size of his office. It was ten feet by ten, cold in the winter and a sweatbox in the summer. The reporters who worked at shared desks in the overcrowded press center considered him lucky to have any office. Instead, his workspace reminded him of the old joke about the two Jewish ladies on holiday in the Catskill Mountains: “The food here is terrible,” says one. “Yes, and such small portions,” her friend replies.
Sami did not think himself to be an arrogant person. When he offered his thick, white business card—embossed with his name, the words “United Nations Correspondent” and the logo of the New York Times—to new contacts, he still felt the same thrill as when he joined the Gray Lady as a trainee a decade ago, fresh from Columbia University’s postgraduate journalism program. Still, modesty aside, surely the world’s most famous newspaper deserved something better than a tiny room in a distant annex of the press center, with a single cracked window that opened onto a ventilation shaft.
Sami sat up and gulped some coffee. He had started work early today, and was sitting at his desk by 8:30 a.m. He wanted to dig deeper into the recent announcement that next year was to be the UN’s “Year of Africa.” The UN dedicated years for good causes as often as the fashion industry raised and dropped hemlines and usually with about as much effect. So far Sami had witnessed the years of water, education, and rice. Most people on the planet still lacked enough of all three. But there was something brewing in, or around, Africa, especially central Africa, he sensed. He opened a new browser window, pulling up the story he had written for today’s paper: “Genocide Suspect Offered Shorter Sentence, Insider’s Memo Alleges.”
He read it again and then jumped to the UN website, biting into his bacon-and-egg sandwich while reading the publicly available sections of the SG’s diary. As usual, the staff meeting was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. Sami guessed that Yael must have been called in to see the SG first thing this morning, or even last night when his story went up on the website. There was no doubt that the SG would have gone ballistic.
Sami had worked as a reporter covering Congress in Washington and Parliament in London, but he had never known anywhere like the United Nations’ New York headquarters. It was a journalist’s heaven, a modern-day fusion of the court of the Borgias and the last days of the Roman Empire, all conveniently hosted in a thirty-eight-story skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. It was the single most important building in the world, where wars were started, peace treaties brokered, and the fate of the planet decided—a lumbering, uncoordinated, bureaucratic machine fueled by intrigue, lubricated by betrayal, staffed by spies, sycophants, a handful of idealists, and sinecured relatives of Third World potentates. And it leaked like the proverbial sieve.
Sami looked like a bright but absentminded postgraduate student. Most days he wore a standard outfit of Gap khaki trousers, a long-sleeved shirt over a T-shirt, and sneakers. His mop of curly, dark-brown hair needed a trim, and his black ey
es gleamed with intelligence and a ready smile. This façade served him well. The building was full of diplomats and UN officials who had been disarmed by Sami’s warm and apparently disorganized manner into revealing far more than they had ever intended.
Official department spokespeople, employed to speak to the press, had four levels of attribution: on the record, meaning they could be quoted by name and so would say nothing quotable; as a “department source,” meaning they would open up a little, but only warily, because colleagues might trace the information back to them; as a “UN source,” when they would speak more freely, because that term encompassed about sixty thousand employees; or, every official’s favorite, “deep background,” which meant that the information could be reported but not attributed to anyone at the UN, even though it was obvious that it originated there. The really wily operators started a discussion with the words “I’m going to tell you this, but you cannot use it” as a means of simultaneously flattering the journalist and stopping information being printed. As soon as Sami heard that phrase he immediately stopped the conversation. Whichever level of sourcing they chose, rival factions and departments continuously briefed, leaked, and counterbriefed against each other.
Had it always been like this? Sami wondered. Probably. Despite the burst of idealism that created the UN in 1945, countless wars and political disasters have ensued. Not even half of its 192 member states could be described as any kind of democracy. Many, especially from the developing world, were stuck in a 1960s mind-set, as though they were still fighting wars of liberation against their colonial overlords.
Perhaps they still were. Certainly to walk into the Secretariat building was to enter a time capsule. The UN complex was a period piece, modernist and functional, and much of the décor and furniture still dated from the 1960s and 1970s. The walls were bedecked in peace murals, maps of the world (without borders, so as not to offend the squabbling member states), and pictures of doves being released. Ancient cultural artifacts were displayed in glass cases in every corner. Diplomats, sleek and cordial, prowled the corridors and bars, murmuring and plotting. It was like being stuck on the set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
And yet, despite all this, Sami still felt a thrill each morning when he crossed First Avenue and walked into the lobby, a feeling that he was walking in history’s footsteps. Here Nikita Khrushchev had banged his shoe on the podium, declaring to the United States, “We will bury you”; here the American and Russian ambassadors had debated and eventually defused the Cuban Missile Crisis; and here Colin Powell had demanded action against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, triggering the 2003 invasion. Information, or rather, misinformation, had triggered the Iraq War, and information, not money, was the UN’s most valuable currency. Every exchange was a transaction. The building manager, a surly Russian called Yuri, had twice dropped unsubtle hints to Sami about his reporting. Yuri had not exactly said that brighter articles would get him a brighter office, but the message had been clear enough. After today Sami would probably be moved to a desk in the corridor.
A loud buzzing filled the room again, interrupting his thoughts. The neon tube flickered violently. He threw an apple core at the light. It bounced off, and the noise stopped. Sami normally had a healthy appetite, but despite his triumph, and congratulatory e-mails from both his editor and the publisher, he was not enjoying his breakfast. The food was dry in his mouth and he could barely swallow it. The two laudatory notes and his front-page story had exacted a high price: burning the best UN contact he ever had, and the dream, perhaps even the prospect, of something more personal. But once the e-mail had landed in his inbox, he had no choice except to use it. One part of him thought she would never speak to him again, another that she would storm in any moment and slap him. He would prefer the latter.
Sami opened up his e-mail inbox and scrolled through their brief correspondence, surprised at how nostalgic he suddenly felt. Yael always wrote to him from her Gmail account, and never, obviously, from her UN e-mail address. There were only a handful of messages, mostly brisk thank-you notes for the coffees he had bought her, and a longer one after he took her for lunch at Byblos, a Lebanese diner just off Union Square, where she had charmed the owner with her Iraqi-English-accented Arabic. Sami had recently tentatively suggested going for dinner at a superb Syrian restaurant he knew in Brooklyn. Yael had given him a searching look, trying to figure out if this was a ploy for extra inside information, or something different. Sami was fairly sure he was asking for the latter, but he was not very experienced with women. He had blushed and blurted out that he was not “trying to hit on her, or anything like that.” Yael had said she would think about it. He put his sandwich down and touched the screen where she had signed off her last e-mail: “Yael, xxx.”
It was time, he told himself sternly, to stop mooning around and start working. He closed his inbox and looked at the pile of papers balanced perilously on the edge of his desk. The UN spewed out documents by the truckload every day: briefings, press releases, addenda, amendments, reports, revisions, new reports about the progress of earlier reports, drafts of revisions, and proposals for the next tranche of reports. Perpetual motion did exist, in the self-propelling UN bureaucracy, and this was just the New York headquarters. Throw in the organization’s regional headquarters in Vienna, Geneva, Nairobi, and Bangkok and the vast constellations of satellite organizations like the World Health Organization, and it was clear, if not scandalous, that an organization supposedly committed to the environment was pulping too many trees, especially in the digital age.
Wasn’t that a story? He grabbed a pen and scribbled a couple of lines in his reporter’s notebook—Story idea: How many forests die in thickets of UN bureaucracy?—before picking up a two-page press release from the Vienna office. He scanned the headline, barely paying attention. “Secretary-General Appoints Akbar Kareem-Zafreedi as the Director of Office for Outer Space Affairs.” He blinked, frowned, and reread it slowly. Outer Space?
The door swung open and Sami’s heart raced.
Yael stopped walking and stared at the woman clasping her elbow. She was trying to steer Yael down a badly lit, narrow side corridor to a part of the 38th floor of the UN headquarters Yael had never seen, away from the SG’s office.
“Have we met?” Yael demanded, looking her escort up and down.
The woman shook her head. She had blue eyes and sharp features that were made more pointed by the onset of middle age. Her short, dark-blond hair was expensively cut, and she was well dressed in a navy two-piece business suit, cream blouse, and a simple gold necklace. She was brusque, almost hostile, but Yael also sensed a definite undercurrent of uncertainty. She could work with that.
“No, we have not,” her escort replied with a strong French accent.
Yael removed the woman’s hand from her elbow. “Then don’t touch my arm. Who are you?”
She stared at Yael angrily and wiped her hand on her skirt. “Yvonne Dubois. I have just been reassigned to the secretary-general’s office, helping with his diary and appointments. He would like you to wait in here,” she said, opening a gray metal door.
“Reassigned by whom?” asked Yael, turning to face her as the warm, stale air seeped out.
“The French foreign ministry,” she said, gesturing inside.
Yael did not move. “And where is Olivia?”
“Ms. de Souza is not available.”
“Why not? It’s eight o’clock in the morning. She is usually in by now. I had arranged to meet her today.”
“Eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock in the evening. It makes no difference. Ms. de Souza is not available,” said Dubois briskly.
Yael watched Dubois carefully as she spoke. She looked away and blinked several times. Her voice was tight. There was something wrong here. Yael asked, “Where is Mahesh?”
Mahesh Kapoor was the SG’s chief of staff and had worked with him for the last twenty ye
ars. Kapoor was a Delhi Brahmin in his midsixties, extremely handsome, and unmarried. His eyelashes were the envy of every woman in the building. His bachelor status had caused much speculation about his personal life, but he always brushed away questions, claiming that he was “married to the UN, the most demanding wife of all.” Kapoor had helped Yael out behind the scenes several times, defusing potential crises and providing her with discreet support.
Dubois ignored Yael’s question and walked into the room. “Please wait in here, and the secretary-general will see you when he is ready.”
Yael stood her ground. “Madame Dubois. I have just spent twenty-four hours on airplanes and in airports, flying from Goma to Kinshasa, Kinshasa to Paris—where I was stuck for five hours—and Paris to JFK. I had just got home when I got a message that the SG needed to see me immediately. I don’t understand what could be so important that it could not wait until I had a shower and even some sleep, but I came straight out again, and so here I am, jetlagged, dazed, sweaty, and starting to get pissed. What is wrong with my office, and why can’t I wait there?”
Dubois gave her a blank look. “There’s a problem with the lock.”
“Why don’t you call building maintenance?”
“We have. It’s best if you wait in here. You can rest.”
“Best for whom?”
“You will be called when the SG is ready.” Dubois turned and walked out of the room.
Yael was too tired to argue any more. She sat down on a lumpy, beige, fake-leather sofa and looked around her. The room was a small space, about fourteen feet square, with faded cream walls and a window overlooking the East River. A neon bulb flickered overhead, and a low coffee table stood by the sofa. The only decoration was a large framed photograph of Fareed Hussein and a cheap plastic wall clock. The Indian-born secretary-general was wearing his trademark Nehru jacket and white collarless shirt, his hands resting comfortably on his expansive stomach, his gray eyes looking out benevolently at the world.
