The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(108)

Hussein looked away, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Yes.”

Yael fought to bring her emotions under control. Hussein was telling the truth, that much she knew. But not yet the whole truth. Her voice was level as she continued speaking. “You said this plan appeared and then somehow became part of the consensus. But that’s not entirely true, is it? You knew all along why David died. All these years. Every time I asked you, you dodged the question, changed the subject. But you knew, all along. Because it was you. It was your idea.”

Hussein could not look at her. “I … it was …”

“Fareed, please. Tell me the truth. The truth.”

“Yes. Yes.” Hussein was almost shouting now. “It was my idea. I drafted the secret memos. I persuaded the P5 and the other Security Council members.” He put his hands on his face, let out a cry of anguish. “Yael, I am so, so sorry.”

Yael wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “So am I.”

Hussein swallowed before he answered. “If it had worked …”

Yael picked up the tea tray, stood up, and hurled it against the picture window as hard as she could. The crockery exploded, shattering into jagged white fragments as the hot liquid spattered across the glass.

A pounding sounded on the door. Hussein jumped up, suddenly nimble, and walked quickly across the room. He opened the door. “It’s fine, we’re OK, really, just an accident, we’ll clear it up,” Yael heard him say.

Hussein turned around and returned to the sofa. He sat down and reached for her hand. She knocked it way, and sat at the other end of the sofa, tears coursing down her face. She picked up a napkin, blew her nose, sat for a few moments breathing deeply and slowly.

Hussein waited for several moments. “I’m so sorry. We gambled with their lives. And we all lost.”

Yael blew her nose before she replied. “Why didn’t you do something, shout and scream at the P5 to rescue them?”

“I did. I made call after call. I held emergency meetings with diplomats from every one of the countries on the Security Council. They all promised to contact their capitals, push for action, do everything they could.”

“Which was?”

“In the end, nothing.”

He stared at the window, a faraway look in his eyes as the tea slowly slid down the glass and dripped onto the floor. “After that, and Srebrenica, I realized that I couldn’t do these kind of deals. I don’t have the skills, or the stomach for it. But someone has to do this work.”

Hussein looked at Yael, paused for several seconds, continued speaking. “It took awhile, a decade or so, but eventually, I found someone. Who could operate behind the scenes. Who was much better at dealing with warlords and killers than I ever could be. Someone who could be trained, someone with enough steel to do the cold mathematics, the cost-benefit analyses: justice or peace? Arrest the killers or appoint them to run a government? And someone who reminded me, every day, of the human cost of the mistakes that I had made.”

Yael closed her eyes for a moment before she spoke, tried to put her emotions aside and think logically. She had come with a mission: to find out the truth about David’s death. So what had she learned? Of course the Rwanda plan for the UN staff had been Hussein’s idea. Nobody else would have the contacts and inside information to try and construct such an arrangement. She sensed from the first day she went to work for him that he was involved. Did she believe his claim, that he had met with all the Security Council ambassadors to try and rescue David and the other eight UN workers? There was no way of knowing. In the end there were no blacks or whites, just a sliding palette of shades of gray, of compromise and ambiguity.

And she knew all about that. When Hussein had chosen her to do the P5’s most secret work, the behind-the-scenes deals that kept superpower diplomacy rolling and the global corporations in business, she had readily accepted. She had loved it, relished every moment. Warlords were transformed into statesmen. The inconvenient were sacrificed, victims went unavenged, all for the greater good. Because in the end, she could, she told herself, rationalize what she did. But some things could never be rationalized. She picked up her iPhone, called up a sound file, and pressed the play button.

FRENCH MAN: We need at least five hundred. That will have maximum impact.

HUSSEIN: No, no, that is unnecessary. It’s far too much. A couple of hundred at most would be sufficient for our purposes. Less would suffice. Even a few dozen.

She expected him to look shocked, or angry. Instead Hussein shrugged, recovering some of his confidence. “My dear Yael, talk is cheap. Did the war happen?”

“No.”

“Who stopped it?”

“Me, I guess.”

“Who do you think sent you the sound file?”

Hussein placed his palm on her hand. Yael looked down. One part of her wanted to slap his hand away, walk out of the room, and never see Fareed Hussein or anyone from the UN again. Another part wanted his reassurance.

“You did?”

Hussein nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“But you sacked me.”

“Only for a while. I had to let you run, on your own. And you did very well. You stopped a war. But that is all in the past now. I am resigning. Quentin Braithwaite will take over as acting SG until the P5 and the General Assembly agree on my successor. I will announce this at the press conference tonight. That is, if Roxana is still organizing it for me. Maybe she will resign as well.”