The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(39)
Yael watched, riveted and annoyed. Najwa was better informed than she was, at least about Akerman’s movements. Where was she getting this?
“So we could be looking at an alliance between America and Iran? The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said the anchor.
Najwa nodded. “That’s how it works, especially in the Middle East.”
The anchor continued. “And what is the UN itself saying about this apparent assassination of one its senior officials?”
“Nothing yet, but—wait a second.” Najwa paused. “Roxana Voiculescu, the secretary-general’s spokeswoman, has just come out of the residence.”
The entrance of an imposing five-story mansion appeared on the screen. Roxana Voiculescu stood outside and began speaking. “We utterly condemn the …”
A loud crack sounded and a shower of wood splinters erupted around her. Roxana’s startled face filled the screen, then was replaced by the sky, a blur of images, the pavement. There were screams, shouts, a male voice yelling, “Get down, get down!” Bystanders and journalists were lying on the pavement, scrabbling for cover behind cars.
Yael leaned forward and placed her wine glass on the coffee table, trying to process what she had just seen. The glass would not stand flat and tilted to one side, spilling a little wine on the wood. She picked it up and immediately saw why the glass was crooked.
A tiny scrunched up fragment of brown paper rested on the table.
15
Rain lashed the windows of La Caridad. The sky was dusk-dark, thick clouds muffling the feeble morning sunshine. Water fell from the sky in a biblical torrent, sweeping along Broadway in great gusts of wet wind. Morning commuters huddled under shop awnings, fingers and thumbs gliding over their phones as though their messages and e-mails would somehow stop the deluge.
The weather suited Yael’s mood. She checked her watch. Where was Joe-Don? She had a lot to discuss with him. They had planned to meet for breakfast at eight and it was now almost a quarter past. He was never late. In fact he was usually ten minutes early, checking out the place where they were meeting, even if it was just the same diner they’d been going to for years. And today of all days. She reflexively checked the inside pocket of her denim jacket, where a small plastic envelope held the scrap of paper she had found on the coffee table last night. The confrontation with Eli, the CNN report about the deal in Rwanda that had gone wrong, Akerman’s shooting, finding her tell, all had unnerved her. She had hardly slept. Her phone beeped. She glanced down at the text message.
Sorry for delay. On my way. Fighting with OHRM-called me in later.
Yael frowned. What did the UN’s Office of Human Resources Management want? An unexpected summons to the personnel department was never a good sign in any organization, especially one announced before nine o’clock in the morning. The waiter, a stooped, elderly Chinese man, arrived with black tea in a small aluminum pot. Yael smiled and thanked him. She declined his offer of a menu. Her breakfast order had not changed in a decade.
La Caridad was one of the last Chinese-Cuban diners on the Upper West Side. Situated on the ground floor of a brownstone apartment building, it looked out over Broadway and West Seventy-Eighth. The diner was renowned for its enormous portions, low prices, and rapid, brusque service. Yael had been coming here for breakfast since she was a child growing up in New York, always sitting at the same corner table. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough through the clamor of the diners’ conversations and the staccato Chinese and rapid-fire Mexican Spanish of the waiters, she could think herself back in time to when her parents, David, and Noa piled with her through the door for a weekend brunch treat, she and her siblings loudly declaring what they would order.
She felt the longing inside her. There was no point fighting it and so she let it course through her. It seemed such a long time ago. Another lifetime. Hers, yes, but one lived so differently. David was gone. Noa had moved to Israel. Her father was no longer part of her life. Her mother … Her mother.
Caught up in last night’s news of the bomb in DC and Akerman’s murder, Yael had forgotten that her mother was arriving tonight from San Francisco. One part of Yael was pleased and excited. Another was nervous. Nervous and resentful at the way they had grown apart over the years—or rather, the way her mother had let them grow apart. Or that she had allowed her mother to let them grow apart. Everything that had happened between them was too dense, too complicated, and too fraught to untangle. But maybe, this weekend, they could start to fix things. And then Yael remembered her conversation with her mother in Gurdeep’s taxi last night, before she had noticed the black SUV. Her mother had explained that they needed to talk—about Yael’s least favorite topic.
Yael had not spoken to her father for eight years. Just the mention of him triggered a slew of competing emotions. Especially because lately, she had sensed his presence. Once, in her apartment, almost physically, as though he had left his energy there to disturb the air. At other times, that he was somehow involved in the events in which she was caught up. Even watching her, looking out for her. Perhaps she needed that now, when she felt under threat. Yael’s father had never liked Eli. Intoxicated by love, sex, and their glittering future, she had brushed off her father’s warnings that Eli was not what he seemed. Maybe she should have listened. Now Eli was back and she was in danger again. Was that why her mother was coming now?