The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(37)
Perhaps Eli was right. Maybe she should have married him. She would be living in Tel Aviv now, in a big villa near the coast. She would have children. Their father would be an assassin. An assassin who never gave up.
Eli’s operation in Istanbul, and more recently her encounter with him in the park, were the latest and most extreme of a series of attempts by Mossad to bring Yael back to Israel. They had first approached her twelve years ago, while she was studying for her master’s in international relations at Columbia University. Then they had tried to play on her patriotism, assuring her that what happened at the Gaza crossing point was a terrible mistake, that lessons had been learned and those responsible disciplined. They did not ask for information—although Yael knew they were interested in two high-profile Palestinian academics who taught at the university—just for her to keep in touch.
Now they wanted Yael back not just because she had been the star of her training class, but also because of the gold-standard information she had access to at the UN. At first they love-bombed her with a stream of invitations to lunches, dinners, receptions, and cultural events. Alone in New York trying to build a new life for herself, sometimes homesick and lonely, she was tempted. But the memory of that day in Gaza, and what she later discovered, steeled her resolve. Eventually the invitations faded away, and for a while Yael thought she was free. Until she realized she was being followed and that her apartment was being watched. Each morning when she left for work, she saw a white van parked across the street. Yael did not alter her routine, or carry out anti-surveillance maneuvers, unless she was headed to a sensitive or confidential meeting. But she did alert a former Columbia classmate who had joined FBI Counterintelligence.
The FBI’s New York field office kept a very close watch on the Israeli mission to the UN, in part to ensure that it was not under surveillance or threat from hostile powers or agents. But also because Israel maintained one of the largest and most active espionage operations conducted by a foreign power in the United States. Israel and the United States were close allies, and the United States was also a free and open society—a paradise for Israeli spies who mined it for vast amounts of industrial, technological, and military intelligence, much of it from open sources such as specialist publications and websites.
One morning Yael walked out of her apartment building to see two NYPD vehicles parked by the white van. When she came home that evening, the white van was still there and so were the NYPD patrol cars. The same thing happened the next day. By the third, the NYPD cars were gone and so was the white van. After that, there had been no more invitations and no more strange vehicles parked nearby. That is, until Yael’s involvement a few months ago in the coltan scandal, which had almost brought down the secretary-general and nearly triggered a new genocide in Africa. Then the invitations, the “chance” encounters with Israeli diplomats in the UN buildings and its surrounds, started again.
Yael put her T-shirt back on, tucked it into her sweatpants and walked back to the living room. She leaned back on the sofa, her eyes closed. Images tumbled through her mind like a kaleidoscope, fragments of voices, sounds, places. Congo. New York. Geneva. Istanbul.
Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, the Rwandan warlord wanted for genocide, tearing up the file detailing his crimes against humanity in a Goma hotel room. Hakizimani trussed on the floor of the Hotel Millennium in New York, pleading as Yael held a lighter to his only picture of his three dead daughters.
Her legs locked tight around the American thrashing underneath her in Lake Geneva, pushing his face down into the water as his body convulsed, then stilled.
Sprinting along the roof of the bazaar in Istanbul with Eli behind her. The crack of the rifle. Looking around to see that Eli had vanished.
The memory faded, replaced by understanding. She knew who had shot the gun from Eli’s hand.
*
Najwa was trying to decipher an Iranian opposition website when a window appeared on her computer screen.
<good work. You are on the right track>
She closed her eyes, rubbed them, and drank some more of the coffee she had just made. She looked again. The window was still there, two inches by three, the cursor blinking. Najwa considered her options. She could close the window. Or switch off her computer. Or call UN security. Or Al-Jazeera’s computer experts. This was creepy. But it was also intriguing. Who could do this? A government, or an intelligence agency perhaps. Or a very adept hacker.
Najwa typed: <who are you?>
The answer came back a second later: <a friend>
<what kind of friend hacks into someone else’s computer? And won’t tell their name?>
<the helpful kind. Who has a tip-off for you. An exclusive>
Najwa smiled despite her rising annoyance. Her new friend knew how to bait the hook. <why me?>
<because you do good work>
<I’m listening>
<I need your word that you won’t record this dialogue or keep any records of our conversation. It’s in your best interest as well as mine.>
<I’ll think about it>
Najwa finished typing. A screen grab would doubtless alert her interlocutor, so she grabbed her iPhone, started the camera, and positioned the lens in front of her monitor.
Her monitor screen turned black.
She sat bolt upright, dropping her phone onto the desk. The small blue light in the lower right corner of the monitor frame glowed softly. It was still switched on. She picked up her iPhone and checked the Wi-Fi connection: five solid bars. She checked the hard drive: it was switched on. So there was nothing wrong with the computer. She glanced at the top of the monitor. A tiny pinprick of red light glowed next to the lens of the webcam. Najwa reached around the back of the hard drive and pulled out the webcam cable.