The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(56)
FRENCH MAN: We need at least five hundred. That will have maximum impact.
HUSSEIN: No, no, that is unnecessary. It’s far too much. A couple of hundred at most would be sufficient for our purposes. Less would suffice. Even a few dozen.
AMERICAN WOMAN: We disagree, Mr. Secretary-General. Five hundred is really the absolute minimum, if this is going to work. More, ideally.
HUSSEIN: I am more and more inclined to stop the whole thing. I think—
FRENCH MAN: We understand, Mr. Secretary-General, that you have some doubts. We all do. That is only natural. Otherwise we would not be human. But you—all of us—need to think of the bigger picture. That will be our legacy—peace in Congo. Millions, not even born yet, will have the chance for a happy, productive life.
GERMAN/AUSTRIAN MAN: Yes, Mr. Secretary-General. That is what matters, surely. The bigger picture. How many people have died in the wars in Congo? Four million? Five? Nobody even knows, and, sadly, even fewer care. Now you have a chance to go down in history as the UN secretary-general who stopped the longest and bloodiest conflict since 1945. This is a small price to pay.
Thanks to Yael, the “small price,” of a massacre of five hundred people by Hakizimani’s militia, had not been paid. The American woman was Erin Rembaugh, former head of the Department of Political Affairs, who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident outside her home in Connecticut. The Frenchman was Charles Bonnet. The German or Austrian man, she thought, might be KZX communications chief Reinhardt Daintner. The recording had been sent anonymously to her last year, before the coltan scandal broke, and it had not yet been made public. Nor had Yael mentioned the sound file to anyone, though lately she had been hearing increasing rumors about its existence, which meant that other people knew about it.
Yael slipped her phone into her purse. Her glance fell on the SG’s desk. There were two framed pictures there, she knew. One of Omar, and another that showed a pretty young Indian woman in her graduation gown: Rina, the SG’s estranged daughter and one of Yael’s rare failures. She was a human rights activist who spent much of her time denouncing her father as “an accomplice to genocide.” Hussein had asked Yael to befriend his daughter and then gently raise the topic of a reconciliation, so she had met with Rina several times. This was one assignment Yael felt no ambiguity about: reconciling a daughter with her father was a straightforward good thing. It also made Yael wonder about her own decision to break off relations with her own father. What she had read about him still shocked her, but some of Fareed Hussein’s history was also shocking, if presented as black and white. Perhaps her father also had a case to make—if she let him.
But more than that, Yael felt she had finally made a friend, one she could trust. They had enjoyed each other’s company; Rina was witty and intelligent, with a wry, sharp view of the world, especially as seen by a smart, thirtyish single woman in Manhattan. Still, a shadow fell over the evenings they spent together—Yael knew that eventually she would have to mention the SG. She put it off as long as she could, but the SG was pressing her. Just as Yael had feared, Rina did not take the news well. One night, over dinner in a trendy Harlem restaurant, Yael had tentatively raised the topic of Rina’s father and his hopes. Rina had picked up her purse, walked out, and not spoken to Yael since. She did not respond to Yael’s e-mails, text messages, or calls. Eventually, Yael gave up. She had once seen Rina on a protest outside the UN headquarters. She considered going up to her to say hello, but when she caught Rina’s eye the SG’s daughter had looked straight through her. Yael still missed their nights out.
Yael took out her mobile phone. She scrolled through the numbers. Rina’s was still there. She called up the text message about David. Sometimes it was better to act than think too much. She added a line, and forwarded it to Rina.
Just as she pressed “SEND,” Hussein sat back down. He looked sternly at Yael before he started speaking. “Those were two interesting conversations.”
Yael brought herself back back the present, focused on the SG. “Who with?”
“First, with the FBI liaison for the Host Country Unit at the US mission.”
“What did they want to talk about?”
“You.”
*
Clairborne stared at his computer monitor and waited for his contact to come online. The two men had first met in Tehran in 1978, where Clairborne had been ostensibly sent as a cultural attaché. In reality he was a CIA officer, liaising with SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police. Clairborne was training SAVAK officers in “enhanced interrogation techniques”—including electric shocks, severe beatings, and tapping lengths of wooden dowel through the ear canal into the brain—he had learned while serving in Vietnam on the Phoenix program. All the SAVAK officers were enthusiastic students, but Clairborne was especially interested in a quiet, diligent operative who had managed to penetrate the Islamic revolutionaries. Clairborne and his contact were soon trading: Clairborne supplied satellite imagery of the Iraqi army, which was preparing for war with Iran, and made regular payments into a Swiss bank account in the SAVAK agent’s name, while the SAVAK agent passed Clairborne detailed intelligence about the coming Islamic revolution.
Clairborne’s long, detailed memos to Langley, predicting the demise of the Shah and the coming Islamic revolution, were ignored. So were his recommendations that the United States cooperate with the Ayatollah Khomeini behind the scenes to build goodwill. The SAVAK officer’s predictions came true soon after Khomeini’s triumphant return. Iran declared itself an Islamic republic. That November, revolutionaries attacked the American embassy, holding fifty-two hostages for 444 days. Despite this, and all the denunciations of the Great Satan, back-channel connections between Tehran and Washington, DC, continued. Clairborne’s contact, like many of his colleagues, smoothly transitioned from SAVAK to VEVAK, its successor organization.