The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(20)
8
Yael put her wine glass down and walked back to the sideboard. Its surface was crowded with a clutter of framed images. A black and silver art deco mirror was mounted on the wall above the display of family holidays, birthday celebrations, weddings. She stared at a photograph of a young girl with auburn hair holding hands with her father by the lake in Central Park. The child was seven or eight, her father in his late thirties. It was a picture from the pre-digital age, slightly out of focus with faded colors. She blinked, looked away, then back to pick up the largest photograph, standing in a silver frame in the center of the display. A man, clearly in his early twenties, tall, well built and good-looking, with green eyes, stood in front of a white UN Jeep near a peacekeepers’ checkpoint.
*
She is sixteen years old, sitting in her room at the Belgrade Hyatt, when the phone rings. “Your brother has arrived,” the concierge tells her.
She sprints down the corridor and takes the elevator downstairs to the glass-fronted lobby crowded with journalists, aid workers, and large, watchful men who sit there all day, chain-smoking and drinking coffee.
A UN Jeep is parked by the entrance. The vehicle is covered in mud, apart from a double curve on the windshield cleared by the wipers.
He emerges, holding a toddler in his arms.
She slides her finger into a small hole in the door. There are two more over the wheel arch and another under the window, each with the metal puckered inward. Three more women emerge from the Jeep, followed by six children and two teenage boys.
One catches Yael staring at him. He is tall, older than she first thought, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. He has high Slavic cheekbones and striking ice-blue eyes. He smiles, shyly.
She smiles back, then turns to watch her brother as he organizes the refugees and their meager bags.
*
She wiped her eyes and put the photograph back down. Twenty years on, the yearning was as powerful as ever. Especially on days like these.
Twelve years ago, after she graduated from Columbia University with a master’s degree in international relations, Yael had started at the UN as an administrative assistant in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. The position was more important than it sounded: she was responsible for ensuring that officials’ briefings and reports were written in clear and grammatically correct English—not always the case in a polyglot organization like the UN—and distributed on time to the relevant committees and to the Security Council. The Department of Political Affairs was the most powerful in the building, but the DPKO was responsible for putting boots on the ground in the world’s conflict zones. Peacekeepers fought, sometimes died, and feelings ran high in both the UN headquarters and the missions of those countries who contributed the soldiers. DPKO officials had to manage not just the complexities of multinational peace operations in war zones where fighters had no respect for the Geneva Conventions, but also balance the relentless demands of the Security Council members. Especially the P5, the permanent five: the United States, Britain, Russia, China, and France.
A steady stream of position papers and analyses, some written by UN officials, others by diplomats and intelligence officers, flowed across Yael’s desk. She watched, fascinated, as some of the world’s most sensitive negotiations unfolded literally in front of her via back channels to Tehran, Beijing, Pyongyang. The UN was a slow, cumbersome bureaucracy, riddled with factions and infighting, but overall, she believed, it was a force for good. She worked hard and helped out her colleagues whenever she could. Young, smart, and attractive, she was soon caught up in the building’s social whirl: Friday night drinks in the Delegates Lounge, receptions at UN Missions, leaving parties, joining parties, and endless national days to be celebrated.
Yael had enjoyed her new life, until her old one began to catch up with her. After a couple of years, the UN rumor mill suddenly went into overdrive about her past, so much so that she wondered if there had been a leak from Tel Aviv, perhaps even intentional. Her bosses in Israel had been furious when she resigned. But she stuck doggedly to the cover story they had agreed upon before she left. She had done her national service, yes, as a personal assistant to a general, but it had been two years of mostly boring administrative work. The most dangerous part had been fending off the advances of male officers. The legend was well back-stopped with the necessary documents and paperwork, even a report of a complaint she had made about sexual harassment. She soon realized that many of the invitations she received were either from middle-aged male UN officials or diplomats hoping to have an affair with her, or from operatives of the numerous intelligence services, stationed under diplomatic cover, who seemed to know something about her background and wanted to use her as an asset or even recruit her.
But Yael had two powerful patrons: Quentin Braithwaite, a British army officer who was seconded to the DPKO, and the SG himself, Fareed Hussein. Braithwaite noticed that Yael’s uncanny ability to sense others’ moods allowed her to defuse departmental crises without offending prickly—usually male—egos. He soon moved Yael out of administration and into the operations room. One night, French peacekeepers in the Central African Republic became trapped in their base because a rebel militia was blocking the road, preventing the arrival of a UN convoy carrying supplies and troops to replace those at the end of their tour. The militia leader was demanding 500,000 euros in “customs duties.” Yael called the French ambassador to the UN, whom she had met at a Bastille Day reception, and made a suggestion; five minutes later, she was able to explain to the militia leader that, if he let the convoy pass, his family would be flown to Paris where they would be issued with residence permits. Or he could await the arrival of several attack helicopters carrying French special forces from their base in neighboring Chad. She then sent him a satellite photograph of his vehicle’s precise location. The convoy was allowed through.