The Geneva Option

by Adam LeBor

  Bonnet ushered him inside as she left. Neither man noticed the tiny wire that reached from the flower in her lapel into the top pocket on the inside of her jacket.

  “I was, just, er, interviewing for a new research assistant,” Bonnet blustered.

  Daintner shook his head and held the bridge of his nose for a couple of seconds, with his eyes closed, his face grim. He turned, grabbed Bonnet’s lapels, and slammed him against the wall. The Frenchman was bulkier and more powerful but offered no resistance.

  “Do you have the faintest idea of what is at stake here?” Daintner demanded. He grabbed Bonnet’s genitals with one hand and twisted hard, his thumb digging up into Bonnet’s perineum.

  Bonnet’s knees gave way. He twisted in agony and turned white. “Please, I beg you,” he stuttered and panted.

  “I asked you a question,” said Daintner, forcing Bonnet against the wall to stop him from collapsing.

  Bonnet nodded frantically. “Yes, yes, I do. I am sorry. Please,” he replied, as sweat erupted across his face.

  “Then learn to control yourself. Especially in the office. Or call East Side Escorts.”

  Bonnet nodded frantically. “Oui, oui. I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

  Daintner removed his hand, sat down, and poured himself a mineral water. Bonnet staggered to his chair, his face still contorted with pain.

  “We have two problems,” said Daintner.

  Bonnet moved to pour himself some more cognac. Daintner shook his head and passed him the mineral water. “Thank you,” said Bonnet, drinking deeply. “What kind of problems?”

  “The Yael Azoulay kind. And the New York Times kind.”

  Sixteen

  The duct tape was exactly where Joe-Don had promised Yael it would be: on the right-hand side of the bed, under the mattress. Hakizimani lay on his side in the lounge, gagged with a hand towel, his hands bound together behind his back and taped to his ankles. His breathing was ragged but slowly stabilized. He groaned softly as he opened his eyes and blinked.

  Yael crouched on the floor next to him, the handset in her hands. “It will take you a good hour to recover full movement. If you move, shout, or try to attack me, I will use it again. So soon after the last charge, death will be instantaneous. Nod if you understand me.”

  Hakizimani moved his head slowly, staring at the black device.

  Yael said, “I am going to take off your gag.”

  Hakizimani’s eyes opened wide to show his agreement. Yael took the cloth from his mouth.

  “What do you want?” he asked, panting, his forehead covered in sweat.

  “Firstly, to show you something,” said Yael, as she reached into her handbag. She ripped the lining open, took out a photograph, kneeled down, and held it in front of his head.

  “Who is he?” asked Hakizimani.

  “David Weiss.”

  Hakizimani looked puzzled. “Nice-looking boy.”

  Yael felt a lump rise in her throat and her stomach turn over. “He was.”

  “Who is the girl on his shoulders?”

  Yael said nothing, just stared at him.

  He looked at the photograph, at Yael, and back at the photograph. Recognition dawned in Hakizimani’s eyes. “What has this got to do with me?”

  “You killed him.”

  “I’ve never met him.”

  Yael breathed slowly and deeply, forcing herself to keep calm. “You or your militiamen. It makes no difference. He was one of the nine UN workers murdered at the Belgian Mission School.”

  Hakizimani wriggled and tried to get more comfortable. “I told you, that was the Tutsis. The Belgian Mission School massacre had nothing to do with us.”

  “Don’t lie to me anymore. David Weiss was my brother. He was twenty-four. The UN was his first job,” she said, her voice thick with anguish.

  He looked up at her. “Weiss?”

  “We each took our grandmothers’ maiden names.”

  Hakizimani watched her warily. Yael sensed that he was calculating that her personal involvement was clouding her judgment, and so was weakening her. Which could give him an opportunity. She needed to take control of the situation. Immediately. She opened the dressing gown around Hakizimani’s neck, and ran her finger down his throat to his upper chest, feeling the clammy sheen of moisture on his skin.

  “Sweat is a great conductor,” Yael said. She switched the handset back on and held it a centimeter from his neck.

  Hakizimani jerked back and tried to crawl away. “Yael, I am very sorry for your loss. I had no idea. Really. But ask your boss why New York did not reply to their calls for help. Ask him where the peacekeepers were. If I killed your brother, Fareed Hussein was my accomplice.”

  How true, thought Yael, although she could hardly start agreeing with him. “He is not my boss anymore. You were right. I have been fired.”

  Yael felt Hakizimani’s mind race as he processed this. If she was not working for the UN, then she was there on a personal mission. And he had killed, or authorized the killing of, her brother. Not only was this personal, he was completely at her mercy.

  “You said that the five hundred were just the trigger. The trigger for what?” Yael asked.

  Hakizimani smiled confidently. “You cannot imagine. It will make what we achieved in 1994 look like a picnic. It cannot be stopped by me, you, or anyone else. So do as you wish. My fate is irrelevant.”

  A knock sounded on the door.

  Yael reached over to the coffee table and picked up the picture of Hakizimani’s daughters. “I found this in your wallet.” She picked up a cigarette lighter and lit it, holding the photograph near the flame. “The trigger for what,” she asked again.

  Hakizimani’s bravado collapsed. “Please, no, don’t—it’s my only picture.”

  A faint smell of chemical burning carried through the room. The three girls stared at her, smiling, from behind the plastic covering. She tried to ignore her rising feeling of self-disgust.

  The knock on the door sounded louder.

  Yael moved the lighter closer to a corner of the photograph. The plastic began to turn black and melt. “Why did you have them killed? You sacrificed your own family so you could wipe out the Tutsis. What kind of man are you?”

  Hakizimani’s face twisted in anguish, and his body sagged against the restraints. She felt the grief and misery course through him. “Stop, please. That I will tell you. Please. Just put the photograph down.”

  Yael did as he asked, barely able to disguise her relief.

  Hakizimani’s eyes welled up and he blinked the tears away. “The French secret service put the bomb in the car. I was supposed to discover it so we could show it to the media and blame the Tutsi terrorists. The French said later it was a terrible mistake. They were very sorry but somehow the wrong instructions were sent to the bomb-maker. It was live. After that, I did not care about anything anymore. Are you going to kill me? Then get it over with.”

  Yes, I am, Yael wanted to answer. Every minute when we were in Goma I imagined this scene. The man who had taken so many lives, and my brother’s, finally, helpless and begging for his own. Except Hakizimani was not playing his role.

  Staring at him trussed up in front of her like a chicken, powerless, mourning his daughters, snot running from his nose, she felt her resolve dissolving like ice in a warm bath. She had come here ready to kill him, but what good would it do? David would still be dead. So would everyone else who had died at his hands and those of his henchmen. She needed to find out more. Then lives would be saved, not taken.

  Hakizimani sensed her hesitation. He seemed to recover some of his strength as he spoke. “Do it, Yael. The first one is always the most difficult.”

  Is it, is it really, she thought furiously, suddenly back in Kandahar.

  Hakizimani looked up at her. “Avenge your brother. Nobod
y will blame you. Pull the trigger—I have thought about doing it myself so many times. But I do not have the courage. Do it.”

  She shook her head. “What is the UN connection?” she asked, her voice calm and insistent.

  The Rwandan smiled cynically. “Work it out yourself. Why did the UN send you to Goma to negotiate with me? Because of coltan. Why are KZX and the UN setting up the first corporate-sponsored International Development Zone in Goma? Because of coltan. The UN gives it legitimacy. Who can question KZX and the Bonnet Group’s motives now? Nobody. Fareed Hussein is the perfect alibi.”

  “What does the UN get?”

  Hakizimani laughed out loud. “Do I really need to spell it out? There is a global recession. America pays twenty-five percent of the UN budget. Congress wants to cut that in half. Moscow, Beijing, Delhi—they are all suffering from UN fatigue. So what the UN gets is money. Public money—for fancy institutes in Geneva and charities to rescue child miners. Private money in envelopes. Much more. It’s a tiny price to pay for a blue flag flying over the entrance of every coltan mine. But businesses need stability, and for that KZX and the Bonnet Group need to take control of the territory and its resources. And how do we do that in Africa?”

  “By starting wars.”

  Hakizimani nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Where and when?”

  “Soon. I don’t know the details. I am just a small cog in a very large machine. But it will be directed from the UN headquarters.”

  Yael’s eyes widened. “In New York?” she asked.

  “Of course not. There are too many journalists poking around the UN in New York. Why do you think they have set up the development institute in Geneva? It’s inside the UN headquarters, but it’s autonomous with no oversight mechanism. Who cares about those endless meetings in Switzerland? Nobody. They call it the Geneva option. Now do it.”

  The knocking was now so loud it could no longer be ignored. Yael put the photograph down and briefly touched the handset to Hakizimani’s neck. She had lied about the device’s potency: a quick charge should not kill him.

  He jerked back, a faint smile on his face, exhaled softly, and passed out. She swiftly unzipped her dress, walked down the corridor to the door, and slowly opened it. The two security guards stood on the other side, their eyes opening wide as they saw her standing naked.

  “Can I help you, gentlemen?” she asked, her hands on her hips, as though she were a waitress waiting for an order.

  The shorter guard turned bright red and spoke first, unable to meet her gaze. “Ma’am, our orders are to check on Mr. Hakizimani every fifteen minutes.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Hakizimani is fine. Very fine indeed. But he is irritated at being interrupted.” Yael paused, her voice conciliatory. “Of course, I understand you gentlemen also have a job to do. Why don’t you let me get mine done and then I will be out of here?”

  The two guards looked at each other. The senior one looked her up and down and nodded. “Fifteen minutes, ma’am.” He closed the door.

  Florence Munyakarana, the Rwandan ambassador to the UN, was tall, slim, and poised. Her long hair was tied back with a red and yellow headscarf. She was elegantly dressed in a matching mushanana—a long, flowing skirt and sari-like scarf draped over her right shoulder, the strong colors bright against her dark skin. She stood on the sidewalk on First Avenue, under the row of flags, waiting patiently as the scrum of journalists in front of her fell into some kind of order.

  The television crews were at the front, their lights illuminating the nighttime scene. Najwa and CNN reporter Roger Richardson were in the center and flanked by Russia Today, Reuters, France 24, the BBC, and several African channels. The print and radio journalists lined up behind them. Sami stood to the side, next to Jonathan Beaufort, who gave him a knowing, amused look. Journalistic etiquette dictated that Sami now owed him a favor, and there was no doubt that Beaufort would soon call it in.

  The Rwandan ambassador spoke in clear, French-accented English over the roar of the evening traffic as it turned the corner from 42nd Street. “Firstly, please excuse me for summoning you at this time in the evening. Thank you all so much for coming. The building behind us has hundreds of rooms, but I have just been told by the secretary-general’s office that none are available for us to hold this press conference, so here we are standing outside in the wind. I know you would rather be at home or somewhere having dinner and so would I. But I would not call you out if this was not a matter of the utmost seriousness.”

  She paused. “One of life . . . and . . . death,” she said, carefully enunciating each syllable.

  The journalists fell silent. The television reporters looked back and forth from Munyakarana to their camera operators, nervously checking they were getting the footage. The radio reporters held their microphones out and forward as though they were about to take part in a duel, their faces set in concentration. The newspaper and news agency correspondents scribbled rapidly in their notebooks.

  A strong breeze blew in from the East River as Munyakarana spoke, ruffling her mushanana, and she held the wide strip of cloth down as it flapped back and forth on her shoulder. “The Rwandan government is calling for emergency reinforcements of UN peacekeepers to be immediately deployed to the Goma refugee camp. We have credible information that some kind of atrocity is planned to take place there, possibly in the next few hours. This cannot be allowed to happen. Peacekeepers must be deployed immediately.”

  The journalists moved closer and began to shout questions, their voices drowned out as a bus lurched around the corner from 42nd Street and pulled up at the nearby stop. The ambassador held her hand up and gestured at the vehicle as the passengers boarded and stepped down onto the sidewalk, several of them watching the spectacle with interest.

  “What kind of atrocity?” asked Najwa, moving her microphone toward the ambassador as the vehicle departed. “Where did you get this information?”

  Munyakarana smiled. “As a diplomat, I represent the policy of my government. That is all I am authorized to talk about. My government’s policy, I repeat, is to call for urgent reinforcements of the UN battalion in Congo, to be deployed to the Goma refugee camp and protect its inhabitants, many of whom, as you know, are Tutsis, who fled the genocide in 1994. Genocide can never be allowed to happen again. And we fear it is about to.”

  Jonathan Beaufort looked at Sami, his eyes wide with the schoolboy excitement of a reporter on a major breaking story. “Did I hear right? Rwandan ambassador calls for UN peacekeepers to reinforce a Tutsi refugee camp to prevent a rerun of 1994 genocide in the next few hours?”

  Sami nodded tersely, focused on the ambassador. “ ‘Demands’ is better.”

  Beaufort scrawled in his notebook. “You’re right.”

  “Ambassador, why?” shouted Roger Richardson, “These are very serious charges. On what evidence do you think a massacre could take place?”

  Munyakarana nodded. “I’m unable to say where this information came from—I am sure as journalists you understand the need to protect your sources. But we, the Rwandan government, believe it to be accurate and reliable or we would not have called you here. We have a credible warning that a mass atrocity is planned at the Goma camp in the next few hours. Should any refugees there be hurt or lose their lives, the Rwandan government—and the world—will hold the United Nations and, especially, its current leadership, responsible for any death or injuries. I repeat. We will hold the current leadership of the United Nations personally responsible for any casualties. I don’t need to remind you all that the International Criminal Court has ruled that those who have prior knowledge of a planned atrocity, but who fail to take steps to prevent it, will be charged, together with the actual perpetrators. Thank you. That’s all. I think you have your story.”

  A chorus of questions erupted—what atrocity, who would carry it out, when would it happen—all of which the ambassador
ignored as she stepped down. The journalists immediately began calling their editors and comparing notes.

  Seventeen

  Around the corner from the security guards and out of sight, Joe-Don sat on the comfortable sofa that the hotel had thoughtfully provided for its guests. He was wearing a black tennis shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, with an Adidas sports bag at his feet. Joe-Don had booked into room 3034, several doors away. So what could be more natural than waiting here for his tennis partner before they took the elevator together to their game on the hotel’s court on the 48th floor? Nothing, as long as the wait was not too long, he thought, recalling the Mossad assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas operative, at the Al Bustan hotel in Dubai. The surveillance-camera footage, which showed the Mossad agents sitting in their tennis gear for hours in the lobby and entering the hotel bathrooms before emerging in amateurish disguise, was available all over the Internet, posted by a furious Dubai police force, and viewed by hundreds of thousands. The Israelis were all helpfully circled in red for easier identification. The whole operation was now used by intelligence services as an object lesson in how not to carry out a stealth assassination.

  Joe-Don looked at up at the dark glass bump under the ceiling that housed the surveillance camera. Joe-Don had called in several major favors to take care of that. “Quasar,” a hacker whom Joe-Don had once recruited to target a Middle East bank that Al-Qaeda was using to launder UN development funds, had disabled the hotel’s CCTV system five minutes earlier, just before Joe-Don stepped into the lobby. The hotel security manager, an old colleague of Joe-Don’s from his time in Central America, had agreed, reluctantly, on an outage to last a maximum of twenty minutes. Joe-Don checked his watch: 8:45 p.m. Yael had another fifteen minutes. A tall, curly-haired room-service waiter walked by, pushing his cart. Joe-Don checked his name badge: Miguel. The two men exchanged an almost imperceptible glance of recognition.