The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(24)
For now, the thunder had faded away. The far-reaching inquiry promised by the SG had been kicked into the very long grass that sprouted across the UN bureaucracy. The German authorities had closed down a criminal investigation into KZX’s senior executives, and the company was expected to soon float on the New York Stock Exchange. KZX’s relationship with the UN had survived and thrived. The firm had sponsored the UN press corps’ luxurious flight from New York to Turkey, and the official press center at the Istanbul Summit.
Sami put down the DVD and picked up a piece of thick white card, embossed with gold letters.
Mr. Sami Boustani and partner are kindly requested to attend the opening reception of the new KZX School of International Development at Columbia University.
Guest of honor: Fareed Hussein, Secretary General of the United Nations
Cocktails at 7pm. Dinner to follow.
Business attire.
Partner. Who could he take? It would be a glamorous event, even by Manhattan’s exacting standards. He had been musing about asking Yael, although it was perhaps a little early in their fledgling relationship for such a public outing. But that was a theoretical question now, not a practical one.
He put the invitation down and opened the new e-mail.
Subject: Of potential story interest
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
The e-mail had no text, but included an attached JPEG file. He ran them both through his security program and they came up clean. He saved the JPEG to his desktop and clicked on the file. It opened up into a photograph.
He could not stop staring at the picture, all thoughts of dinner and wrecked dates forgotten.
*
Yael watched for a couple of minutes as CNN moved on from Charles Bonnet to Syria, then pressed the red button on the television remote control. The screen clicked off. She did not move, turning Roger Richardson’s report over and over in her mind.
A deal.
She had heard the rumors as well, of back-channel diplomacy in Kigali in 1994 that had resulted in disaster, but had never been able to get any details. Every few weeks she brought up the topic in her conversations with Fareed Hussein. He adopted his now familiar look of pious regret, slowly shook his head—and stonewalled. Now, the CNN report raised more questions than it answered. What exactly was the deal? Whose idea was it? Who had brokered it? And who was the go-between? Yael had operated in the gray area herself for long enough to know there were always cutouts. Usually her, but not in this case. Find the cutout between the UN—no, the DPKO—and Hakizimani—and she could, would, find out why David had died.
Could it be Bonnet? His family certainly had the connections across Africa. She reached into the drawer under the coffee table and pulled out a thick plastic file. Yael had long been suspicious of Bonnet and his family’s business interests in Africa. She had compiled the bundle of printouts on the Bonnet Group from the Internet and several classified databases over several weeks last fall, before the coltan scandal broke. Founded in 1880 by Jean-Claude Bonnet, a miner from Brittany who had found a large gold deposit in what was now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the group had diversified over the decades into logging, silver and copper mining, as well as rare earths. Revenue in the Bonnet Group’s mining division, headquartered in Kinshasa, had more than doubled in the last two years, the Economist reported.
Yael picked up her iPad, opened a new window in her browser, and typed in “un.org.” The pale blue welcome page of the main UN website appeared, with the UN logo—the world encased in two olive branches—in a darker tint. A dark blue band stretched across the screen proclaiming “WELCOME” in each of the organization’s six official languages. Yael clicked on the English word and a new page opened with dozens more links, photographs, and video clips leading to new pages and sections on numerous crises, wars, and general themes such as development and sustainability.
A new banner down one side featured updates about the upcoming UN Sustainability Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, which was to be chaired by Fareed Hussein. The conference was scheduled to start in a week, but so far few A-list attendees had been confirmed apart from President Freshwater. Yael knew most countries were just sending an environment minister, many of them quite junior. She moved the cursor into the search bar and typed “Charles Bonnet.” Bonnet’s UN career had ended in disgrace, but he had worked at the organization for twenty years; the last time she had checked there had been a substantial and detailed biography. She clicked on the GO button. The screen flashed. Then a box appeared:
Your search “Charles Bonnet” did not match any documents. No pages were found containing “Charles Bonnet”
There was no point in adjusting the search parameters. Bonnet had been airbrushed out, at least for now, as his UN history was doubtless being readjusted. But in cyberspace, some things could not be erased.
Yael opened archive.org in a new window. The wayback machine, as it was known, was an archive of the Internet, dating back to some of the first web pages and websites in the early 1990s. But it was much more than a trip down cyber-memory lane for techies and geeks. Wayback kept snapshots of every website, around a dozen days for each month, with a comprehensive search facility. Websites could delete pages, files, even the biographies of former officials who were now an embarrassment or a liability, but they lived on forever, inerasable and untouchable, if you knew where to look.
Yael decided to search un.org when Bonnet was at the height of his UN career, in August 2012, a good couple of years before the coltan scandal broke and before he had been appointed Special Representative for Africa. She settled on May 3 and typed “Charles Bonnet” into the search box. His biography immediately filled the screen. Yael read it through slowly, seeking the snippets of information that might reveal something of significance.