The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(54)
Najwa smiled. “Our Sarajevo bureau received an anonymous e-mail. After that it was easy.”
“It always is when you know where to look.”
“A little guidance goes a long way,” she said, watching Braithwaite’s face as she spoke.
“It does indeed,” he deadpanned.
Colonel Quentin Braithwaite was tall and sturdy with red hair, freckles, weathered cheeks, and a brisk manner. He wore his usual green tweed jacket with leather elbow patches over a white shirt whose collar was fraying slightly, and a striped university scarf. Braithwaite was the leader of the interventionist faction in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. His world view had been shaped twenty years ago by his time as a peacekeeper in Bosnia, when his Warrior fighting vehicle had smashed its way through a Bosnian Serb checkpoint. A furious Fareed Hussein had denounced what he called a “reckless and foolhardy violation of the UN’s neutrality” and tried to get Braithwaite removed. But Britain and the United States had rebuffed Hussein’s lobbying and Braithwaite had later moved to a senior position at the DPKO.
Braithwaite sat back and looked around, taking in the smoke-stained walls, sniffing then exhaling. “Ah … nothing like the smell of yesterday’s beer in the morning. I’ve often walked past this place, but never been inside.” He paused for a moment to give Najwa a searching glance. “I wouldn’t have thought this was your natural habitat.”
She raised her eyebrows, a glimmer of a smile on her lips. “Precisely.”
The waiter ambled over, still wearing yesterday’s T-shirt. “Breakfast’s finished. Lunch service starts in an hour.”
“Thanks,” said Najwa. “We’ll just have coffee.”
Braithwaite waited until the waiter walked away. “How can I help? I seem to have plenty of time on my hands at the moment.”
Fareed Hussein had recently appointed Braithwaite to lead the UN’s Commission of Enquiry into the coltan scandal. The SG had been praised for appointing someone of principles and integrity to get to the bottom of the affair. But Braithwaite soon realized, as he was stalled and diverted at every move by the UN bureaucracy, that his appointment was a neat way of both marginalizing and neutralizing him.
“So I hear,” said Najwa, with a grin. “Which is why I brought you this.”
She reached inside her purse to retrieve the photograph she had found in the white envelope, and slid it across the table.
*
Salim Massoud walked through the scuffed front door and glanced around the one-room studio: gray walls, a single bed that visibly sagged in the middle, a Formica coffee table, a threadbare sofa with a front almost shredded by a pet cat, the stink of garlic and ginger from the nearby restaurants in Chinatown, a whiff of drains and stale water from the tiny shower cubicle. Perfect for his needs. He sat down at the small kitchen table by the window and rifled through his canvas bag until he found a large brown envelope. He tipped the contents onto the table: a bundle of birthday cards, held together by a red elastic band. He carefully slid off the elastic band and opened the top card. Nothing was written inside, but there was a photograph of a thin, dark-haired young man, with hollow eyes and sallow skin, holding up that day’s issue of the New York Times.
Massoud put the photograph back inside the card and picked up another one. It was identical—“Happy Birthday to a Great Dad” emblazoned in garish writing on the cover and nothing written inside, but it contained a similar photograph of the same young man holding the New York Times, marked with the same date a year earlier. Massoud swallowed, slid the cards back into the envelope, and replaced it inside the bag.
He closed his eyes for several seconds then looked out the kitchen window. A sliver of the East River could be glimpsed between the gray walls of the Lower East Side apartment blocks. The landlord had shown no interest in his new tenant, only in the $800 Massoud had paid up front for a week and another $800 as a security deposit, which was how Massoud liked it. He took out a Canadian passport from his jacket pocket and flicked through the pages. There had been no questions at the border, a little-used land crossing, when Toronto-based businessman Parvez Marwan came back into the United States. Still, the passport was probably coming to the end of its useful life. In seventy-two hours the question would anyway be academic. His home country and the United States would be at war.
He opened his laptop and flicked through the Iranian news websites. The smiling, attractive face of Shireen Kermanzade looked out from almost every home page. In each she wore her trademark green and gold headscarf, pulled so far back from her forehead that several years ago she would have been arrested. In a lifetime spent within the darkest, innermost circles of the Iranian regime, Massoud had never known such a sense of betrayal. From the voters, certainly, but most of all from Kermanzade herself. The nuclear deal with the United States was a catastrophe. Not because of its terms, although these had been broken as soon as the ink was dry. The Israelis were right: Iran would get a bomb, sooner or later, and an accord with Washington would slow that process but not stop it. Luckily, the more Tel Aviv shouted, the less anyone listened.
No, the real catastrophe of the nuclear deal was the opening to the West that it brought. In exchange for the lifting of sanctions, Kermanzade had allowed outside inspectors into Iran’s most secret military and nuclear installations and had launched an unprecedented program of liberalization. Everything that his generation had fought, and died, for was crumbling. Western firms were opening “liaison” offices with local partners to help them penetrate a market of seventy-six million people, a majority of whom were under thirty-five and connected to the Internet. An Internet stripped of its controls, where students and activists now poured out their demands on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Demands for full democracy, human rights, civil freedoms. Demands that just a few months ago would have earned a session in the basement of Evin Prison, or even a noose on the end of a crane. The Basij, a motorcycle militia that had crushed the 2009 protests, was disbanded and its leaders arrested. Even members of the Revolutionary Guard were being investigated. It would not be long, Massoud knew, before his time came. He had no regrets, except his son.