The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(31)
She read the first few lines:
Ms. Yael Azoulay and partner are kindly requested to attend the opening reception of the new KZX School of International Development at Columbia University.
Partner. She smiled, wryly. Actually having a date would be an event of note. She picked up the postcard of the catamaran again.
A lock of hair, so black it almost shines, falls over his head. “Shalom, Ms. Azoulay. Welcome to Istanbul.”
For a second she imagined herself walking into the KZX reception accompanied by Yusuf Celmiz. It was a pleasant vision. Yael had spent three days in his company in Istanbul, and it had been a roller-coaster ride. They’d met when he kidnapped her at gunpoint and knocked her out with a stun dart, admittedly to save her from becoming a victim of some very nasty people; hidden her in a cemetery—where his relatives were buried—that belonged to the D?nme, a hybrid Jewish-Muslim sect whose members were known as “ships with two rudders”; billeted her in a safe house belonging to his employer, the Turkish intelligence service, also known as Milli ?stihbarat Tekilat?; had a furious row with his boss over her, then somehow persuaded said boss to provide Yael with an MIT identity card and a three-dimensional, computer-generated model of the Istanbul bazaar.
But Yusuf was in Istanbul, and she was here.
So, would she go? Yes, she would. She had no desire whatsoever to enjoy KZX’s hospitality or drink their champagne. But she did want to gather intelligence about the firm and its relationship with the UN and other players in the nonprofit world, within which KZX was seeking to remodel itself as a generous, responsible corporate citizen. With patience, sufficient funds, and enough opinion-formers on the payroll, even the dirtiest reputation can eventually be cleansed. The framework was well established: endow a university chair, or establish a memorial library or a research institute, or all three. Best of all was to start a whole new charity requiring a legion of well-paid staff, ideally drawn from the children and friends of the key philanthropic players. Personal connections were crucial, oiled with exclusive dinners, receptions, weekend retreats to luxury hotels. This was Daintner’s world, where he operated with skill and expertise. She had half-expected to see the Prometheus Group’s name on the invitation as well. The firm’s charitable foundation was making slow but steady inroads but was still running into resistance. For now at least, the world of New York philanthropy, no matter how money-hungry, would draw the line at Clairborne’s donations. But that too, could quickly change.
Yael knew that a second, exclusive dinner was planned later on Saturday evening, around 9:30 p.m. Fareed Hussein would be the keynote speaker, but this was a private affair for just a couple of dozen people. Yael had not been invited, but she did not need to be physically present to know what was going on.
She looked down at the coffee table. A single olive had rolled onto the edge of her plate. She ate it, picked up the plate, and walked back into the kitchen. There she spooned finely ground coffee into a small brass pot with a long, thin handle, added water, and then placed it on the stove. She lit the burner, stirring the water until it bubbled and began to rise. The smell of burned grounds filled the room. Yael switched off the gas and watched the thick liquid fall back into the pot. She put it and a cup the size of a large thimble on a tray and returned to the living room.
Yael’s mobile phone beeped, the sign that a text message had arrived. The number was unfamiliar but it started with +90, the code for Turkey, followed by 697, which she knew was a restricted mobile network. Only one person she knew had access to that network. She smiled, glanced again at the postcard of the catamaran.
She read the text message and her smile vanished.
*
Najwa slowly took out the envelope from her purse. It was long and thin, a standard letter envelope available in any Staples or Office Depot. She held it with her thumb and forefinger. Nothing was written on the front, so she held it up to the desk lamp. The backlight showed a folded piece of paper inside. She gently shook the envelope and examined the seal. No powder, white or any other color, had spilled out.
She was being paranoid, she knew. Printed anonymous tips, to avoid a cybertrail, were increasingly common. Two months ago somebody had slid a printout of an e-mail, from the private account of a senior Department of Peacekeeping official to a diamond dealer in Antwerp, under the office door. The DPKO official had been using UN flights to smuggle out diamonds from African war zones, thus allowing them to be reclassified as “non-conflict diamonds,” and Najwa had broken the story. The DPKO official, a cousin of the minister of interior of Ghana, had been shifted sideways to the Department of Information. And promoted.
She gingerly opened the envelope and removed a single sheet of paper, folded twice. She unfolded it to reveal a photograph of a slender middle-aged man, bald, with a carefully trimmed beard. He wore a white collarless shirt and, over it, a gray suit jacket. Two words were written across the top of the image:
Salim Massoud
Salim Massoud. But who was he? She looked again at the photograph, taking in details of his appearance. Then Najwa opened up her saved browser window. Abbas Velavi’s widow appeared, her features frozen in grief. Najwa moved the cursor back until the frame showed five seconds remaining and clicked play.
“The visitor was bald. He had a neat beard and wore fine black leather gloves. He did not take them off all the time he was here. He said he had a skin condition.”
Najwa took a photograph of the printout with her iPhone, encrypted the image file, and emailed it to a secure server she used to back up sensitive material. What was the message here? It seemed to be that someone called Salim Massoud had killed Abbas Velavi. And there was something more, another connection that was niggling at her.