The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(41)
Any potential Dutch military connection to Bosnia set Najwa’s journalistic antenna twitching. The army’s reputation, indeed that of the whole country, had never recovered from the July 1995 disaster in Srebrenica. After the city fell to the Bosnian Serbs, the Dutch UN peacekeepers stationed there had handed over eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys before retreating to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, where they drank beer and danced in a line to celebrate their freedom. The Bosnian men and boys were also lined up, but not to celebrate. Fareed Hussein had been the head of the DPKO at the time. Srebrenica was the second genocide on his watch, but the consequence for his career was the same: he was later exonerated by a UN commission of inquiry.
“A very big story,” said Sami. “That must have been scary last night.”
Najwa shrugged. “One bullet passing by twenty yards away isn’t scary. Try being the only woman on Tahrir Square, surrounded by Egyptian men drunk on revolution and their idea of free love—that’s scary. I’m just pissed that one of our cameras got damaged.”
Sami nodded, but Najwa sensed he was not entirely convinced.
“So who shot at—” he started to say.
“Wait a second,” she broke in. Sami was right. She did feel unsettled. Very unsettled, but not because someone hit the SG’s front door with a sniper bullet while she was standing nearby. She could still see the JPEG file opening when she clicked on it, the photograph image on her desktop. Reaching inside her purse, she took out two identical black pouches. Made of a heavy fabric, each was slightly larger than a mobile phone, with a long fold-over flap at the top. Two Velcro straps, one horizontal and the other vertical, looped around the outside. She passed one of the pouches to Sami.
He opened the top flap and peered inside. “What’s this?”
Najwa pointed at Sami’s iPhone on the table.
His eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
She picked up the second pouch, heavy and distended by her phone, and weighed it in her hand. “Once they start shooting people, totally.”
Sami picked up his phone, slid it inside the pouch, then dropped it into his messenger bag. “Now we are done with Jason Bourne stuff, can we talk?”
“Sure. Work or love life? How was last night?”
Sami sat back and crossed his arms, his black eyes boring into her. “Work.”
To her surprise and embarrassment, Najwa blushed. She understood immediately why he was angry.
Just then the waiter arrived. She thought quickly as he placed two large white mugs of black, scalding hot liquid on the table along with a small jug of milk. There was no point playing the innocent. Najwa received eight calls from Sami after her news story about the shooting. She had eventually called him back after midnight. Her excuse was that she had been tied up in the studio, but the real reason was that she had been so unnerved by the photograph file she could barely concentrate on getting her story reported, edited, and broadcast. But she couldn’t tell Sami that. He was right to be angry. Her behavior was a grievous breach of their agreement; not long ago they had sat at this same table as she upbraided him for not telling her about the breakfast he had arranged in secret with Henrik Schneidermann.
Najwa and Sami were technically competitors, but had found a way to pool their resources to mutual advantage. If Najwa had a story, for example, about corruption among UN peacekeepers, she gave Sami a heads-up about the broad outline of her report and when she would be filing it. This allowed him to prepare a follow-up in advance and have it ready to go soon after Najwa’s story was broadcast, went online, or both. And when Sami had a story he did the same for Najwa. They shared some of their contacts—although usually kept the best for themselves—and generally did not cooperate with any other reporters. Especially not with their greatest rival, Jonathan Beaufort. Sami and Najwa’s editors would have baulked at any kind of cooperation with a rival news organization, but as Najwa had explained to Sami, they didn’t need to know.
She tipped some milk into her coffee and sipped it. Nor would her vamp act be enough to fix things. Najwa knew Sami was attracted to her, and today she was dressed in one of her favorite outfits: an olive cashmere V-neck sweater that highlighted her generous curves and dark coloring, a matching pencil skirt, and her trademark knee-high black patent leather boots. She had noticed Sami’s quick, appreciative glances when she walked through the door. But the two reporters were more like a long-married couple bickering and reconciling than potential lovers.
Najwa put her coffee down. “I’m sorry,” she said, in her most apologetic tone, reaching for Sami’s hand across the table. “I owe you an apology.”
Sami glanced at her hand for several seconds, then shook it off. “Too late. You owed me a prompt call back last night. You tweeted twelve times about the shooting but couldn’t find the time to pick up your phone?”
Najwa tilted her head to one side, appraising him. Sami had always been sharp, digging up a stream of stories about UN corruption, incompetence, or both, interspersed with occasional feel-good pieces about brave peacekeepers and the good work done by the organization’s humanitarian wing. But when they worked together, Najwa had always set the pace. Until recently. What a difference a month and a stream of stories on the front page above the fold made. The disheveled reporter who, in Gap shirts and baggy jeans, looked like a graduate student trying to find the library was gone. Sami’s hair, once a wild mass of unruly curls, had been neatly trimmed. This morning he wore a dark blue light wool suit jacket and a crisp light blue shirt. He sat up straight with an easy confidence.