The Geneva Option

by Adam LeBor

  Sami’s experience at the airport had further unsettled him. He had been stopped at the border control and questioned and then pulled over again by customs officers. They had turned his bags inside out and questioned him at length about his visit to Geneva. He told them the truth, or part of it, that he had come to report on the opening of the UN-KZX Institute for International Development. Still, at least he could walk and talk. He swirled his drink around the glass, his head down as he stared at the table.

  Najwa put her hand on his arm. “It’s not your fault, habibi.”

  Sami looked up and pushed the drink away. Nothing would shift the lump in his stomach, not even a twelve-year-old single malt on Al-Jazeera’s tab. “Yes, it is. I got him the assignment. His wife is six months pregnant. What if he never wakes up? Or he’s crippled? Mitchell is a freelancer. The paper is paying his medical bills for now, but he has no insurance.”

  Najwa signaled to the waiter for another glass of Sancerre. “Did you hit him on the head?”

  Sami looked up. “No. Of course not.”

  “Then stop feeling sorry for yourself. Journalism is a risky business. You can feel guilty about me instead,” she said, removing her hand and looking him in the eye.

  Sami nervously licked his lips and looked out over the water. A tourist boat chugged across the center of the lake. He could see the revelers drinking and dancing on board, glasses in hand. Their laughter and chatter carried over the water. “Guilty about what?” he asked, innocently.

  The waiter arrived and Najwa waited until he filled her glass and left. “Sami, please don’t take me for a fool. Because I am not,” she said, all trace of her usual flirtatiousness gone. “When were you going to give me copies of Mitchell’s photographs?”

  Sami reached for his whisky and took a sip. He was suddenly ravenously hungry and reached for the tray of peanuts and Japanese rice crackers on the table. Najwa moved faster and put her hand over his, gripping his fingers so he could not reach the snacks. She looked straight at him expectantly.

  He nodded. “I owe you an apology,” he said, his voice contrite.

  “Do I get one?”

  “Yes. I am sorry. Really. I should have told you.”

  Najwa lifted her hand from his. “You should have. We made a deal, Sami. Are we working together or not?”

  Sami smiled sheepishly. “Yes. We are.”

  She reached for a rice cracker. “Good. Then tell me what he got.”

  Twenty-Two

  Yael was dozing on her sleeping bag on the floor in room 506 when her mobile beeped that a text had arrived. She picked up the handset: the screen showed a blank message from an unknown number. She sat up quickly, walked to the bathroom, stuck her head under the cold tap, and rubbed herself dry with a T-shirt. She briskly gathered her and Joe-Don’s toiletries and belongings, rolled up the two sleeping bags, and jammed them all into her rucksack, together with the rest of her clothes. She folded up the UN floor plans and put them inside her small shoulder bag.

  In three days, Yael had accumulated an impressive wardrobe from Joe-Don’s cash allowance, including a black leather jacket that she had bought that morning on sale at Balenciaga for eight hundred euros, and a long purple merino and cashmere scarf. The scarf reminded her of Bertrand. She felt a pang of nostalgia for his stall on the corner of West 81st Street and Riverside Drive. But the scarf also gave her strength, reminding her of why she was living out of this grim room.

  She put on her new jacket, marveling once more at the softness of the leather, and grabbed Joe-Don’s bag, a small black nylon duffel bag that he always kept packed. Claudia Lopez’s passport was safe in a traveler’s wallet that she wore on a thong around her neck, together with several thousand more euros in cash. Yael checked the bed and the bathroom one last time. It all looked clear to her. She locked both bags with unique, unpickable US-government-issue padlocks; put her purse on, then her rucksack; slipped her right arm through the handles of Joe-Don’s bag, hoisting it onto her shoulder; and walked briskly down the five flights of narrow wooden stairs. The hotel’s owner watched her walk across the lobby and turned back to the television, grunting good-bye as she left.

  Yael walked at a moderate pace down Rue des Grottes, neither too fast nor too slow, past the restaurant with no name and a large sign for “Kronenbourg 1664” beer, past the Indian-owned convenience store that sold the sandwiches she and Joe-Don had been existing on, and into the Place des Grottes, a good place, she thought, for some dry-cleaning—not of clothes, but people. The Place des Grottes was a pedestrian precinct, the roads passing through it blocked off by small concrete bollards, with a retractable post in the middle in case the emergency services needed to get through. A smartly painted green and white wooden house stood on the east side—a chocolate-box piece of Switzerland that looked curiously out of place in the urban landscape—facing a shop and a café across the square. A marble fountain stood in the middle, and a stately apartment block, painted bright pink and purple, marked the northern end. Two more apartment buildings stood on the left side. A tall cylindrical advertising kiosk was covered with ragged posters and colored flyers, flapping wildly in the cold wind that was blowing in from the lake.

  A good place, then, for surveillance teams to wait. Yael slowed down as she walked through the square, observing and checking. Two young mothers sat chatting on a bench facing the fountain, their children wobbling around on baby wooden bicycles with no pedals. The women seemed completely absorbed in their conversation, and anyway it was hard to follow a target and remain inconspicuous with a three-year-old in tow. A middle-aged man, tall and swarthy with a long, curved nose, was reading a Turkish newspaper and drinking coffee on the terrace of the café. Again, too conspicuous to be a watcher, she thought. A gaggle of teenagers were sitting on the edge of the fountain, laughing, smoking, and playing with their mobile telephones. Too young.

  She walked to the end of the Place des Grottes, and she could see the back of the train station ahead of her, just a few hundred meters away at the end of the street, on the other side of the Place de Montbrillant. A white and blue tram rolled smoothly across her field of view. She took a sharp right turn into an open parking lot. This was a piece of Geneva most tourists did not see: the road was cracked and fissured, the tarmac spotted with poor quality repairs, the sidewalls of the buildings raw brick or concrete. An abandoned Citroën 2CV sat rusting in the corner. The walls were covered with graffiti. A row of run-down gray apartment houses overlooked the square.

  Yael kept a steady pace, looking in the cars’ side-view mirrors to see if she were being followed as she walked through the lot. Any serious surveillance would be carried out by a “box”: one watcher behind, one at the side, and one in front, all three communicating by radio. The really skilled operators wore reversible jackets and carried eye- and sunglasses, scarves, hats, and gloves in different styles, shapes, and colors—even wigs. They would dart into shops or alleys and change along the way to throw the target off the scent.

  She couldn’t see anyone, but that did not mean they were not there. But there was also a simple technique to expose even the most mobile surveillance: the “choke point,” also known as “channelized terrain.” A choke point could be a bridge, a tunnel, or an overpass—anything that forces the flow of pedestrians, including any watchers, in one direction. Yael’s was a narrow concrete stairway that was flanked on both sides by a thick wall of ivy and that led out of the run-down square into the Place de Montbrillant. She walked slowly down the stairs, holding on to the length of scaffolding that had been turned into a handrail, taking care not to slip on the damp concrete. Best of all, halfway down, the stairway turned sharp right. A choke point within a choke point.

  Yael stopped at the bottom and turned around 180 degrees, swiftly glancing back. The staircase was empty. She stepped into the Place de Montbrillant. It was a wide, windswept space bisected by a busy two-lane road and tramlines
. The square faced the rear of the train station, a long, low sweep of poured concrete, divided into two wide, underlit passageways. The Place de Montbrillant was dotted with detached apartment buildings, as though the builders had run out of time, or money, or both, and the wide empty spaces were used as parking lots. A large red double-decker bus that had been converted into a community information center stood in the middle of the square. Yael watched a line of schoolchildren shepherded by their teachers cross the road, then walked across to the side of the vehicle. A passerby would see her reading the notices advertising courses in French, basic literacy, and computer skills pasted in the window. In fact, she was using the window as a mirror to see if anyone had followed her.

  Yael slid Joe-Don’s bag off her shoulder, as though it were too heavy and she needed to take a break. She rubbed her neck and shoulders and took out her mobile telephone, scrolling through the empty contacts menu before pressing a button. She held the handset to her ear, conversing with nobody while observing the passageway and watching for anyone coming from the Place des Grottes. It all looked clear to her.

  Yael waited at the traffic light until the green man appeared, crossed Rue de la Cordiere, and walked through the dark passageway into the station, past the newsagents, bakeries, and sweetshops and out to the tram stop on the Place de Cornavin. The Place de Cornavin showed a better side of Geneva: stately, well-maintained luxury boutiques and apartment buildings, bicycles neatly parked in street-side racks, spotless sidewalks without a speck of litter in sight. She waited until the number 13 tram arrived, ensuring that she was the last one to board, and stood by the door, looking at the route map. Just before the tram pulled out she shook her head in exasperation and stepped off, apologizing as hers and Joe-Don’s bags brushed against several passengers. Nobody followed her.

  She then walked back across the front of the station toward the taxi line. She stepped around the front vehicle, walked a few yards, stood on the left side of the line of cars in the road, and put her and Joe-Don’s bags down between her feet. There was a strict protocol—passengers waited in line in the designated area on the sidewalk and took the first available car. She stood looking at the cars, wiping her head, to all intents a bemused and tired tourist.

  The taxi drivers signaled to her to join the queue of thirty or so people on the other side of the sidewalk. She knocked on a couple of windows, pretending not to understand the queuing system. The drivers shrugged and pointed at the queue again. She continued standing on the road, looking exasperated. This was a risky move because she was drawing attention to herself. But she wanted to take a random vehicle, and was gambling that one of the drivers would take pity on her. She knocked on the door of the fifth car, a black Mercedes, and a young man in his late twenties, dark-skinned, wiry, with a mustache and goatee beard got out.

  He smiled, picked up Yael’s bags, and ignoring the other drivers’ protests, placed them in the trunk of the car. The other would-be passengers, patiently waiting in line, looked on, outraged at this breach of protocol. One lady in a tweed suit even shouted at her that she would call the police. Yael ignored her and thanked the driver profusely.

  He opened the door for her, and Yael sat back gratefully in the black Mercedes. A string of green prayer beads hung from the mirror. A taxi license in the name of Ahmed Aboulafia was displayed in a plastic holder, on top of the sunshade on the driver’s side.

  “Where to, madame?” he asked politely.

  “Do you know the Old Town?” Yael asked.

  He turned and smiled with an engaging grin that crinkled the skin around his brown eyes. “Old Town, New Town, uptown, downtown, wherever you like, madame.”

  Yael leaned forward slightly as the car pulled away, into the traffic. “Please drive up to the Old Town and the streets around St. Peter’s Cathedral. I am an architecture student and I have to prepare a presentation tomorrow. Of course I left it all until the last minute,” she said, shaking her head at her poor time management. “So let’s just wander around for a while, then I will get out and take some pictures, and make some notes, you wait and then we will come back,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag and handing him a twenty-franc note as they drove toward the lakeside. “If that’s OK.”

  It was. Ahmed took the money and thanked Yael, chatting about the difficulties of life in Geneva for a North African—the police, the paperwork—as they crossed the Mont Blanc Bridge over the lake and climbed up into the Old Town toward St. Peter’s Cathedral. He stopped there and Yael got out of the car, wandering around the narrow lanes and alleys, staring at the medieval buildings and scribbling in a notepad or taking pictures with her telephone camera. Each time, she took several sharp turns in succession, doubling-back on herself. She did not see the same person or vehicle twice, and the streets were almost deserted as the shops and offices closed for the day. As far as she could tell, she had not been followed.

  After a half hour of meandering around the Old Town, she went back to the car, where Ahmed was reading the Tribune de Genève. He smiled, put the paper down, and drove back across the Mont Blanc Bridge to the Left Bank and dropped Yael at the Place des Alpes, a couple of blocks back from the lakeside. He got out of the car, opened the trunk, and handed Yael her bags. She thanked him and said good-bye, watching his car disappear into the traffic as she checked the padlocks. It was not great tradecraft to leave the bags in the trunk of an unknown taxi, but they were securely locked and contained only clothes and toiletries. It was either this or a luggage locker at the train station blanketed by CCTV. The bags were untouched.

  Yael hoisted her rucksack on, slung Joe-Don’s duffel bag over her shoulder, and walked through the tree-lined square onto the corner of the Rue de Zurich and the Rue de Lausanne, the main road in front of the train station, before heading through the back streets to the rendezvous point she had agreed to with Joe-Don. She thought she saw Ahmed’s car again, but there were many black Mercedeses in the evening traffic and she could not be sure. She did not see him take down his taxi license and replace it with one under a different name. Nor did she see him pick up his telephone, press a number on his speed dial, and speak for some time.

  Sami was about to answer Najwa when a tall man with deep-set gray eyes pulled out a chair three tables away from them and sat down. His bald head gleamed under the terrace lights, and his ears stuck out. He wore a single-breasted navy blazer, chinos, and a blue button-down shirt and looked like he had just stepped out of the metro at Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC. He picked up the menu and idly scanned the price list.

  Najwa saw Sami looking at him. She was about to speak when Sami laid his hand on her arm. The bald man reached inside his pocket, glanced quickly at Sami and Najwa, looked away, and placed a smartphone on the table.

  The waiter appeared. Sami heard the man ask for a “club soda.” That decided it. Europeans never drank club soda.

  “Yalla, habibi,” Sami said quietly as he stood up, putting on his coat. Najwa immediately followed. They walked to the bar, where she signed for the exorbitant bill. There was a large mirror over the bar, and Sami could see the man sip his drink. He looked very annoyed.

  Twenty-Three

  The men came to the village again that night. Two he knew well—Baptiste, the local schoolteacher, tall and mournful, and Lucien, who helped deliver water supplies and had one eye but was still always jolly—and two he thought were Europeans. Herve did not like the Europeans. One was skinny and blond-haired with a straggly beard. He said his name was Stephan, but his smile never reached his eyes. The other one was much darker, with eyebrows like caterpillars, thick arms covered in gray hair, and a potbelly. Herve had asked the man his name in his best, most polite French, but the man had ignored him. Herve thought he was Spanish or Italian, but he had a strange, harsh accent, and the way he talked frightened Herve.

  Everyone in Kimanda was scared lately. It was a settlement of five hundred or so people in eastern Congo
, ten kilometers down the road from Goma, on the Rwandan border. Compared to its neighbors, Kimanda was considered rich: it had sporadic electricity, a tarmac road, and two standing taps in the square. Most of the men worked mining coltan, digging in nearby streams and sloshing out the dark yellow mud to find grains of the precious mineral. In theory, some earned as much as two hundred dollars a month, ten times the average wage of the country. In practice, they rarely kept more than half of what they mined—the militias took the rest.

  And now a new force had appeared in the chaotic mix of competing armies: the East Congo Liberation Front. Most of the different factions were backed by the neighboring states. Rwanda and Uganda were the biggest meddlers, with Burundi and the Central African Republic not far behind. There was a lot of money at stake. Herve had heard a recent report on BBC Radio that Rwanda, which had no coltan mines at all, had made $250 million last year trading the mineral. Nobody knew who was behind the ECLF, but everyone had noticed that its soldiers had the best uniforms, equipment, and guns. And they got paid a hundred dollars a month. Several of his classmates had left home in the last two weeks to sign up.

  There was a new ECLF checkpoint on the road to the Goma refugee camp, where Herve sometimes went to visit his relatives from Rwanda. Some of the ECLF soldiers there were Tutsis, and they shouted at him, calling him a “Hutu Genocidaire.” Herve was a Hutu but he was only sixteen and had not even been born during the time of the genocide. Last time, the ECLF soldiers had pushed him around with their rifle butts and even threatened to kill him. He still had a big bruise on his back. Now there was shooting every night, echoing through the forest. The men from the village had put up two roadblocks, feeble things made of tree trunks, one on each side of the road that ran through Kimanda. They sat there drinking beer from dusk to dawn, full of alcohol-fueled bravado about how they would fight the Tutsis and finish what was started in 1994.