The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(8)
The SUV was connected to everything that happened, of that she was sure. Yael took out her phone and pulled up the video she had made in the taxi. The frame shook from the vibration of the car and the sudden acceleration, but the black vehicle was clear enough. The front license plate was visible: EXW 2575.
She closed the video and scrolled through the home screens until she came to the HomeZone app. Numerous apps existed to allow homeowners to check in on their residence while they were somewhere else. But this was a version encrypted to NSA standards. Any unauthorized movement would automatically trigger an alarm on her handset, Joe-Don’s phone, and at the central control room of the United Nations Department of Safety and Security at the New York headquarters. She flicked through six CCTV feeds that filled her screen, checked the network of pressure pads inside the apartment. There were no intruders and no alert messages. However, she did not put all her faith in technology. Tiny scraps of scrunched-up brown paper, the same color as the parquet flooring, were jammed into the apartment’s front door and would fall if someone opened it. The edge of each was aligned against a mark on the door frame that was only visible under ultraviolet light, so even if an intruder noticed them it would be near-impossible for him to put them back in the same place.
She shut down the phone. She was not going to call Joe-Don. She was safe here. But the SUV still worried her. Why use such a high-profile vehicle for a mobile surveillance operation? It didn’t make sense. Unless whoever deployed the car wanted Yael to know she was under surveillance. Either way, Gurdeep and his cousins had come through, in an impressive display of coordinated driving that was well worth the extra $300: $100 for each of them.
The sun was slowly setting, the air slowly cooling. She sat back on the bench, enjoying the calm of the park. A brother and sister ran past, perhaps six or seven years old, playing tag, laughing out loud. A tall black man in jeans and a tuxedo jacket stood on the other side of the open area, blowing giant soap bubbles, Miles Davis playing on his boom box. The iridescent bubbles swelled larger and larger before floating off, carried away by the spring breeze.
Yael closed her eyes, breathed slowly through her nose. Her nervous energy slowly dissipated, only to be replaced by a different kind of jitteriness, a type she had not felt for a long time. Sami Boustani’s apartment, on East Ninth, was just a few minutes’ walk away. She had spent two hours getting ready, time that was not going to waste.
*
Clairborne wriggled in his seat, trying without success to get comfortable. His palm throbbed, the back of his chair rattled but would not recline. He was a big man, from his size twelve shoes to his bearlike shoulders, a remnant of his time on the University of Alabama football team. He had earned his nickname of “the Bull.” But appearances could be deceptive. His booming voice, southern accent, and good ol’ boy, steak-chewing, bourbon-guzzling persona were a useful cover for a keen, calculating intelligence that had caught more than one adversary by surprise.
The doors of the Pentagon, the CIA, the Treasury, the Department of Defense, every government department was open to Clairborne whenever he chose. There were just four photographs on the wall of his office, each the size of a sheet of printer paper and discreetly lit. Three showed him with former presidents of the United States. In each one he had his arm around the then leader of the free world. The fourth, mounted separately to the side, showed Clairborne shaking hands with Eugene Packard, America’s most popular television evangelist.
But Prometheus was more than just another lobbying firm. It was also a private equity company, specializing in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It could rip open virgin rainforest, tear a new strip mine, bring down a recalcitrant government, and reap the benefits with no fear of consequences. Its new social media division could ignite revolutions to order, bringing thousands into the streets on one day to demand freedom and reform, call for a security crackdown on the next. Clients who worried about a vengeful population, or former business partners with a grudge, could rely on a division that provided corporate security and guaranteed anonymity. A seven-figure annual retainer to a New York PR company on Fifth Avenue had helped keep the firm out of both the news and business sections of the newspapers. Until now.
That girl.
They had planned for years, spent tens of millions of dollars, to save America and the free world by ridding the country of its most dangerous president in history, in the process making the Prometheus Group the most powerful corporation in the world. How could one woman, almost half his age, wreck everything?
It was a total clusterf*ck. That squaw Renee Freshwater was still sitting in the White House. He had lost contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The New York Times had somehow got hold of his e-mails with Caroline Masters, the former UN deputy secretary-general. Masters was the hinge on which everything had turned, the driving force behind the UN policy of outsourcing to Prometheus—first security, and then peacekeeping operations. But no sooner had she got her feet behind Fareed Hussein’s desk than she had resigned in disgrace after the fiasco of the Istanbul Summit.
Everything had gone wrong because of Yael Azoulay. She was 230 miles away—and still fomenting chaos all around him. He couldn’t organize a proper tail on her car. The chair back rattled as he shifted in his seat. The red stain around the dressing on his palm was getting bigger. He couldn’t even smoke a cigar or drink his bourbon. And the visitor was coming in an hour.
The phone on his desk trilled. The number showed as *99. The last person he wanted to talk to, but he didn’t have a choice. He hesitated for a moment, closed his eyes, then lifted the handset.