The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(55)

Farzad had been missing for five years. Completely uninterested in politics, he had wanted only to do good. His value as a prisoner was solely as Salim Massoud’s son. Massoud had managed to trace his journey to Kabul, Bagram air base, a black-site prison in Romania, and then silence. Apart from the cards. Presumably he was being held somewhere in America. But the messengers, intermediaries, the Swiss diplomats and German businessmen who had contacted the Americans had all failed. No part of the government had any knowledge of Farzad Massoud or his whereabouts, or so they said. Clairborne too had failed to obtain any information. There was no demand, no request for a meeting. But someone, somewhere in the Great Satan knew. The message was clear enough: We are holding your son because we can. He could do nothing for his son. Until now.





20

Yael glanced at the SG, who was still deep in conversation. Eli’s words echoed through her head.

“We placed you.”

Was it really conceivable that, all this time, she had also been working to someone else’s agenda? That she had risked her life, faced down killers and become one herself, reached the wrong side of thirty-five still single and childless, all so her old employers could lure or force her back home and find out everything she knew? The Mossad was especially skilled in false-flag operations. Few foreigners wanted to spy for Israel, especially those based in Arab or Islamic countries, but Israel was a nation of immigrants, and the children of immigrants. Its spy services had recruits from a myriad of backgrounds, who could pretend to be agents of other countries. But a decade-long false flag, in which the target did not even know that they were an asset, took things to a whole new level.

As if this was not enough to process, there was the text message that had arrived that morning.

Fareed Hussein let your brother die.

The message had come out of the blue. Yael had no idea who sent it because the outgoing number was blocked. On one level the words were shocking. On another, they did not surprise her. Was it true? She knew that David and the other UN workers trapped in Kigali had sent a stream of increasingly desperate telegrams and messages, and made numerous phone calls, to the UN headquarters in Geneva and New York and the peacekeepers in Kigali. Fareed Hussein was then the head of the DPKO, and as such he could have ordered the peacekeepers, stationed just a few miles away, to rescue David and his colleagues. But he didn’t. The UN’s own inquiry into the disaster had vindicated Hussein personally, but found that he sat at the top of a chain of command with poor communication, blurred lines of responsibility, and unwillingness to take responsibility or decisive leadership. The inquiry made some recommendations about how the UN should respond to emergency situations. In short, a classic UN snarl-up, followed by a classic UN fudge.

The great unanswered question was: What, precisely, was the SG’s role in the catastrophe? Was it his personal decision not to intervene, or was he merely following orders? If so, whose orders? Could he have refused? Or screamed, shouted, held a press conference to demand action? Or had he worked behind the scenes, as Yael did so often, to save David and his colleagues, but been stymied by the usual mix of bureaucratic infighting?

That was twenty years ago. Little had changed at the UN. But Rwanda had altered Yael’s life, forever. She was left completely bereft by her brother’s death. Her mother, Barbara, suffered a nervous breakdown. She ended her relationship with Yael’s father and relocated to Berkeley, where she eventually moved in with her female therapist, a Hungarian called Nora. Her father had taken his own dark path, one that had eventually caused Yael to break off all ties with him.

Yael knew she was not the only one haunted by the UN’s complicity in genocide. Both Rwanda and Srebrenica hung over the Secretariat Building like giant, ghostly bloodstains. No amount of redecorating or renovation could scrub away the shame, and still the reverberations continued. Kicked out of Rwanda, the genocidaires had simply regrouped in Congo, using the UN refugee camps as bases to launch raids into Rwanda. Eventually the Hutu militias brought the whole region to the brink of another war, which was why the SG sent Yael to make a deal with Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, a mission she had protested. If he stopped the raids and dismantled his militias, he would receive a lighter sentence and a comfortable prison in Paris when he was tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

But Hakizimani had known something. Something that could bring down the SG, or worse. A memory of something Hakizimani had said in that hotel room flashed into Yael’s mind.

*

Hakizimani speaks slowly and carefully: “You tell your SG this. If he starts altering the terms now, I will personally ensure that our communications during 1944 and subsequent years are leaked to the press.”

*

What were those communications? What did Hakizimani have on the SG? She had not asked Hussein. There was no point. He would just brush off her questions, deny everything. Hakizimani could not tell her about his communications with Hussein because he was dead. That much Yael knew, because she had killed him. She still did not know if his death had been her intentional revenge for David’s death, or an accident. But the end result was the same. The answer, Yael sensed, was somehow connected to the “Doomsday” sound file, implicating Fareed in a planned mass murder, that she had transferred to her phone that morning.

Yael looked again at the SG. He was still talking on the phone, ending his first conversation then starting a new one as he greeted a second person. Meanwhile, she could at least utilize the waiting time. Yael called up the Doomsday file. She inserted her earbuds, jumped back to the start, and pressed play.