The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(3)
The visitor smiled. “Rifaat al-Bosni. A Muslim with light blue eyes. An aid worker who commands soldiers in battle. Who can plan an ambush, hit a target a kilometer away.”
Al-Bosni paused before he answered, drank some more water, slowly this time. He thought for a moment before he spoke. Who was this man? He spoke mid-Atlantic English, but there was the faint hint of another accent underneath, a staccato rhythm that had not quite been eradicated.
Al-Bosni said, “Sometimes a gun is the best form of aid.”
The visitor smiled. “Yes. Sometimes it is.” He walked closer to al-Bosni, glancing at the photograph page of the laissez-passer and then staring at his face. He nodded, as if satisfied, and slipped the document back into his pocket. “Armin Kapitanovic, please come with me.”
PART ONE
NEW YORK
1
Yael Azoulay kicked off her red wedge sandals and braced her bare feet against the grubby black PVC covering the taxi’s partition, her back and shoulders pushing hard into the bench seat. Two anchors in a news studio talked on the tiny television screen mounted on the dividing wall, a ticker relaying the day’s closing share prices underneath.
“Now,” she said, her voice urgent.
The driver looked right, left, ahead, checked the mirror, and looked ahead again. He touched the brakes, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the left while the car was still moving. The taxi lurched down and to the side with tires screeching, barely missed a blue Honda with a startled young woman at the wheel, then righted itself and sped off in the opposite direction.
Yael dropped her legs down and turned around, steadying herself with one hand on the seat. She picked up her phone, held it against the rear windshield for several seconds as the taxi headed downtown along Riverside Drive, then dropped the handset into her purse. It was six thirty on a pleasant late April evening in Manhattan. The redbrick apartment blocks glowed in the light. A cool breeze blew in from the Hudson, gently rippling through trees that were thick and green with spring. Joggers trotted through Riverside Park, young mothers chatted, their children in strollers, sticky fingers waving.
Yael glanced at her apartment building, a cord of tension inside her. Michael the doorman was still standing under the cream and blue awning on the corner of Riverside Drive and West Eighty-First, with the bottle of wine in his hand. He had stopped waving, looking puzzled, as Yael’s taxi sped off.
The black SUV with tinted windows was still a hundred yards behind her, but now it was facing the wrong way. Yael watched the car slow down and start to turn. It was almost halfway around, its thick hood poking into the other side of the road, when a white cement mixer truck appeared behind it. The truck lumbered around the SUV, determined not to give way, then, prevented from going any farther by the heavy traffic, stopped just in front of it. The SUV was now stuck in the middle of the road, triggering a cacophony of car horns.
Yael’s taxi driver, a tall Sikh wearing a purple turban and a Bluetooth earpiece, smiled appreciatively at the chaos behind him, then looked at Yael in the mirror. “Where to now, lady?”
Yael thought quickly. They were heading south. She had a minute or two before the cement mixer inched forward, allowing the SUV to finish its turn. Riverside Drive ran along the western edge of northern Manhattan, parallel with the Hudson River. The taxi driver could pick up the Henry Hudson Parkway at West Seventy-Ninth to get her downtown, away from the SUV. That would be the fastest, simplest route, but she would be stuck on a six-lane freeway with limited opportunities for diversions or escape. And the SUV was faster than the taxi and would soon catch up.
Yael turned around and leaned forward as she spoke to the driver. “That was great. You did really well. Take a left at Seventy-Ninth, then turn onto Broadway. Head downtown.”
He smiled at the praise. “Thank you, madame.”
The driver had talked nonstop in Hindi into his Bluetooth since she had gotten in the car—until she’d handed him a fifty-dollar bill and explained what she wanted him to do when she gave the word. That had been fifty dollars well spent. But her next idea was more complicated.
She looked at the driver’s nameplate, encased in Perspex on the top right-hand corner of the partition. “Aap kahaan se hain, where are you from, Gurdeep?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Delhi. You speak Hindi?”
“A few words,” she said, switching back to English. “You have friends nearby? Other drivers?” New York taxi drivers, almost all of whom were immigrants, usually had numerous friends somewhere nearby. Manhattan was surprisingly small, at least compared to London or Paris.
The taxi driver nodded. “Sure. My cousin is a developer. He made an app so we can keep in touch.” He pointed at the dashboard GPS and the half-dozen brightly lit cursors moving slowly across its screen, two bunched up together. “My brother, two blocks away on Amsterdam at Eighty-First, he also has a Ford Crown Victoria, most excellent car,” he said, slapping the dashboard. “My other cousin, very nearby at West End and Seventy-Ninth. He has a Mitsubishi minivan.” He shook his head and pulled a face. “Not so good. Slow.”
Yael glanced at the television. The news anchors were gone, replaced by a shot of the White House. Part of her brain registered the news ticker: Terrorist scare in downtown D.C., car-bomb found at parking lot near White House … President Freshwater pledges Reykjavik trip will still go ahead. But the rest of her was totally focused on her next move. It was a gamble, but she had no choice.