The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(23)
Instead he replied, “No, nothing to do with that. I’m writing a soft piece about Yael and the SG, how she does so much important work behind the scenes and how well they work together. It’s planned for the Week In Review and the editors have asked me to fact-check something. You’ll love it. I need to speak to her, just quickly on the phone. Could you give me her number?”
Roxana paused. Would the gambit work? Sami had Yael’s number, but Roxana didn’t know that. He could sense Roxana calibrate whether his inquiry would benefit her interest. Control of information was all, especially when dealing with unknowns.
Her reply was just as he had anticipated. “Why don’t you tell me what you need, Sami, and I will ask her for you?”
“Thanks so much, but I’m right up against my deadline. I hate to interrupt her and the SG, especially when she is having an emergency meeting with him about Syria, but it’s really important.”
Sami heard her sharp intake of breath. “What emergency meeting? The SG’s at the residence having dinner with Frank Akerman. They are probably talking about Syria as well, but not with Yael. Not as far as I know. Hold on a moment please. I’ll check.”
Thirty seconds later Roxana was back on the line. “Yael is not there,” she said with the happy certainty of someone who knows her rival is firmly out of the loop. “It’s just the SG and Frank Akerman. What did you want to check?”
Bingo, thought Sami. “Just the month when she started work at the UN. She’s not on the website—I guess because of the kind of work she does.”
“We are working on that, Sami, because as you know we are fully committed to transparency for all our employees. I don’t know where she is, and I cannot give you her mobile number, as I am sure you understand. I’ll get back to you later tonight,” said Roxana, before hanging up.
Now he had the answer he sought. He felt no guilt about deceiving Roxana, who like her predecessors daily tried to feed him any amount of disinformation. But the information brought him no joy, although there was a kind of poetic justice here. In fact, he probably deserved to get stood up.
Each time he’d had to choose between a potential romance with Yael and the demands of his job, the job had won. Last year he had published a story about a memorandum Yael had written to Fareed Hussein, protesting the deal she had been ordered to make with a Hutu warlord wanted for the Rwandan genocide. Jean-Pierre Hakizimani was the ideologue and propaganda mastermind behind the mass slaughter, urging his fellow Hutus to exterminate the Tutsis like “cockroaches.” The UN, wrote Yael, was “allowing him to escape justice for tawdry reasons of realpolitik and commercial interests.”
For several weeks after that Yael would not even talk to Sami. Even so, he could justify that to himself. Yes, he was interested her personally, romantically, but Yael’s memo was an important story and he had to report it. Eventually he had rebuilt their fledging relationship. Then he had stood her up, appearing instead on Al-Jazeera with Najwa. Incredibly, even after that he thought he had managed to fix things. Except, clearly, he had not.
Sami finished the rest of the kubbeh, washing it down with a long swig of beer. He picked up the remote control, switched on the television, and flicked through the channels before settling on a rerun of Sex and the City. Perhaps he could pick up some dating tips. Or maybe it was best to focus on work. That, at least, was going very well. He picked up a DVD from a small pile on the coffee table in front of him. The cover showed African children working underground, under the title Dying for Coltan: How the United Nations Was Almost Hijacked. Sami had produced the documentary with Najwa.
Dying for Coltan revealed how the previous year KZX and the Bonnet Group, had conspired with rogue UN officials and Efrat Global Solutions, the world’s largest private military contractor, to take over the majority supply of the mineral. KZX and the Bonnet Group had agreed to sponsor the UN’s first corporate development zone in eastern Congo. Fareed Hussein and many others, none more than Caroline Masters, at that time the deputy secretary-general and infamous for encouraging privatization of UN operations, had hailed the pilot project as a new model of cooperation between the UN and the private sector. But the actual plan was for Efrat Global Solutions, with the help of Hutu militiamen, to trigger a new ethnic war in Goma that would be a rerun of the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. UN peacekeepers would have to be deployed to stop the fighting, and once they were in place KZX and the Bonnet Group could expand the Goma Development Zone across Congo while using the UN peacekeepers to stabilize the situation. Profits for the corporations. A boost to the UN’s budget. A win-win all around. Except, of course, for the people who lived in Congo and mined the coltan.
The film had won several awards and was now a finalist in the Best Documentary category at the Tribeca Film Festival. Several UN and EGS officials had been imprisoned, and the planned merger between KZX and the Bonnet Group was on hold. Menachem Stein, the founder and boss of Efrat Global Solutions, had somehow escaped sanction. Fareed Hussein and Caroline Masters denied all knowledge of the planned war, although Sami and Najwa had heard, from several sources, that there was a sound recording proving Fareed Hussein had been forewarned of the planned slaughter. Such a recording, if it existed, would be the biggest story of their careers. It would certainly be the end of Fareed Hussein’s career.
Sami turned the DVD over within his fingers. The film had severely angered the upper reaches of the UN bureaucracy and several foreign ministries, but that was his job. According to his journalistic idol, H. L. Mencken, a veteran reporter from the golden age of journalism before the Second World War, the relationship between the reporter and the government official should be that of the dog and the lamppost. Mencken’s epithet was not exactly true, especially in a place like the UN where sources were everything. But it was still a useful motto to remember when the lure of being an insider could tempt a reporter into questionable trade-offs.