The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(60)
Joe-Don snorted. “Sure. And look where that got us. A lot of hot wars instead. And what’s all this got to do with sustainability?”
“The conference is just the public premise for the trip. The real reason she is going to Reykjavik is to meet with Shireen Kermanzade. Fareed has been working on this for ages. That’s why Akerman was in Istanbul. It’s all double-ultra-secret.”
“And what will the two presidents be doing in Reykjavik?”
Yael picked up the last piece of crust. She looked at the crispy dough for a few seconds and offered it to Joe-Don. “Are you sure you don’t want some?”
“No. And you didn’t answer my question.”
She glanced at the building entrance, then at Joe-Don. “Sorry. He’s here. I’ll tell you more when I get back.”
Standing up, she emptied her pockets of her keys, wallet, and cell phone and slid them over the table. “If I’m not out in an hour, come and get me.”
Joe-Don put her possessions into her purse and sat with the bag on his lap, shaking his head. Yael squeezed his shoulder and hurried out, with adrenalin, excitement, and, yes, anticipation coursing through her.
*
Three minutes’ walk away, Najwa and her crew were standing on First Avenue outside the UN headquarters. The sky was still overcast, the line of flags hanging limp and wet, but the rain had stopped. Shining from the downpour, the sidewalk was jammed with television journalists, all reporting or following up on Najwa’s footage of Frank Akerman. Part of the street was blocked off by a line of television trucks, parked face-on toward the curb, each with a giant white satellite dish on its roof. Held back behind metal barriers, a couple of dozen demonstrators had gathered on the other side of the road, waving banners demanding “Justice for Srebrenica” and “Where was the UN?” A woman in her early thirties, wearing a red beret, held a megaphone and led a chant, “Fareed Hussein, Resign in Shame.”
Security was still intense. The NYPD had now set up a temporary station in two Portacabins on the UN plaza. A second layer of concrete barricades had been placed in front of the main entrance. White NYPD pods on metal stilts, bristling with CCTV cameras, stood thirty feet in the air on every corner. The black slabs of glass on each of the pod’s four sides stared down like the eyes of giant insects. A half-dozen police officers watched the demonstration, one filming the protesters.
Najwa looked into the camera as she signed off her report. “The UN Department of Peacekeeping said it was unable to provide a spokesperson to respond to the film we obtained of Frank Akerman. Roxana Voiculescu, the spokeswoman for the secretary-general, has issued a one-line statement saying that the UN is investigating the authenticity of the footage. But as you can see and hear from the protestors behind me, it has blown open a two-decades-old controversy over one of the UN’s great failures. Many in the building hoped that, twenty years after the Bosnian war, the Srebrenica massacre was filed away. For now, at least, that seems unlikely. This is Najwa al-Sameera, reporting for Al-Jazeera from the United Nations.”
“Mabrouk, congratulations. You got two scoops in a week,” said Maria, as Najwa unhooked her microphone. Originally from Madrid, Maria was petite, black-haired, and the sharpest producer with whom Najwa had ever worked.
Najwa glanced back at the protesters. The women in the red beret was walking away. Something about her looked familiar, but then she was gone, absorbed in the crowd. “We got them,” she said, smiling at Philippe, the cameraman. “All three of us. Al-Jazeera. Not me.”
Philippe was a stocky Frenchman in his fifties, a veteran of numerous Middle Eastern war zones who had been relocated to New York from Beirut, against his wishes, after narrowly escaping a kidnap attempt while on assignment in Iraq. “Maybe, but it was your instincts. We have the highest-ever levels of traffic to the website. The clip has gone viral. Every major news agency has picked it up.”
Maria glanced at her cell phone. “Here’s Reuters: ‘Slain UN official toasted fall of Srebrenica with Mastermind of Massacre.’”
Najwa smiled. “That’s about it.”
All three wished each other a great weekend as they packed up. Najwa stood for a few seconds, watching her colleagues walk up First Avenue, before she turned and walked through the main entrance. She braced herself for long waits at the security checks here and at the tent. The first she passed through reasonably quickly, because at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon the flow of people was overwhelmingly out of the building. There was a short line at the security tent in the open courtyard, but by now the system had been honed. There were three lines: for UN officials, visitors, and accredited press. There was nobody in the press queue and so she walked to the front. A UN security guard checked her ID, and she glanced at him as he ran her details through the computer: heavy paunch, luxuriant mustache, a name tag reading Nero. He looked familiar, and then she realized that she had seen him on the terrace of the Delegates Lounge while she was meeting with Bakri. Nero waved her through the metal detector, noting down the time of her arrival.
She looked at him questioningly. “Keeping tabs on me?”
“Nothing personal. Extra security measures, ma’am. All entries to the building have to be logged.”
Najwa shrugged and slid her purse onto the conveyer belt of the X-ray machine. It passed through without incident, and Nero waved her through.