The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)(90)
Yael looked down at the row of framed pictures on the railing that showcased the avian varieties. Who knew bird-watching could be so engrossing? A whooper swan glided across the water, its long white neck regally straight. A short and stubby greylag goose bobbed past, its beady black eyes looking from side to side. A mallard watched her warily from the stone bank, its green head tucked into its curved body. The sun suddenly emerged and the lake shimmered. The breeze faded away. The air was cool and fresh.
She was a long way from Jaffa. But part of her was still walking down Yefet Street, knowing that Eli was watching. Khamis, she later learned, was really called Mahmoud, and he was not from Jaffa. There had been signs: Arabs from Jaffa were usually fluent in Hebrew, their Arabic inflected with slang from neighboring Tel Aviv, and he could not speak Hebrew properly. At times he seemed not to know his way around the backstreets. This was because he was from Gaza, Eli had revealed. He had infiltrated Israel and was part of a Hamas cell that planned to kidnap Yael and hold her hostage in exchange for several high-ranking political prisoners. So he told her. Then, at least, she had believed Eli.
A small part of Eli’s story was true. Mahmoud really was from Gaza, she’d eventually discovered. The rest was a lie. He was gay and had fled to Israel, the only country in the region where it was possible to live freely as a homosexual. But there was a price for admittance: in Gaza they called it collaboration, and in Tel Aviv they called it cooperation. Mahmoud was to make himself useful in training exercises. Word soon trickled back to the refugee camps, and Hamas issued a death sentence. Mahmoud refused to carry on working with Eli. He hanged himself in his prison cell the night before he was to be sent back.
Yael watched the mallard uncurl its neck, admiring the bird’s smooth confidence as it slid into the water and paddled out into the lake. She was prepared: a Nokia burner was taped above her ankle inside her right boot. Two pairs of plastic cuffs were jammed down the side of the left. She knew what Eli would use and she had taken the antidote in the hotel. She did not feel nervous. Rather, she felt a calm certainty that Reykjavik would be where she finished her business with Eli. For good.
Her mind drifted back to the meeting with Magnus and Karin. Then she remembered what had been nagging at her. The portly man with the silver hair, the head of the Iranian delegation. An inch of skin by his right eyebrow, puckered and scarred. She had seen that scar before. She took out her phone and called up Joe-Don’s number. Nothing happened. Joe-Don did not know she was out by the lake. She had told him she needed a nap for an hour before they headed to Bessastadir, and he had believed her, more or less. She had slipped the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door and snuck out of the back entrance of the hotel. He would be furious, she knew, especially after the shooting at Columbia University.
She looked down. There were no bars on the network connection indicator. She tried again. Still nothing. There was no point trying to use it. Something was blocking the signal. It was starting.
An insect bit her neck. She raised her hand to swat it away.
“Hello, Motek,” said a familiar voice behind her.
Yael wheeled around and her legs gave way.
*
Three miles away, Fareed Hussein paced back and forth across the presidential suite at the Hilton Reykjavik Nordica, his face twisted in anger as he gripped a sheaf of papers.
“How?” he demanded. “How could you allow that—that fiasco—to happen?”
“I resent that,” said Roxana, her eyes glittering dangerously. “It was not a fiasco. Everything was fine until the last question.”
Hussein sat down by the desk, pointing the papers at Roxana like a weapon. “Exactly. The last question. How did that Icelandic journalist know about Akerman’s documents?”
He stared at Roxana. He had never seen her like this before. She was rattled, disheveled, her hair in disarray. She even smelled different, a heavy application of Zest barely disguising yesterday’s sweat.
Roxana shrugged. “Information leaks. We cannot always stop it. Akerman is news. He’s shot dead outside your front door, then it turns out he was drinking and backslapping with Bosnian Serbs while they were taking the Muslim prisoners away to be shot.” She paused, ran her fingers through her hair, to no noticeable effect. “On your watch. While you were running peacekeeping. Here’s a heads-up, Fareed. This story has legs. Twenty-year-old legs, reanimated. It’s a zombie. And I cannot control it.”
Hussein’s anger seemed to suddenly evaporate, and with it, his self-confidence. His shoulders slumped, his face gray and lined under the bright lights of the hotel room. “So what should I do?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how many more unexploded mines there are, waiting to go off. I cannot plan your media strategy if you don’t tell what’s waiting out there, in the archives. Or not in the archives.”
Hussein looked around the presidential suite while he gathered his thoughts. The suite covered a thousand square feet, with a bedroom at one end and kitchen dining area at the other. It was a symphony in shades of white: walls, curtains, furniture, ceiling. Even the painting on the wall was a shade of white. The floor was dark polished wood, covered with pale rugs. The sofas and armchairs at least were a soft shade of brown.
He walked over to the glass wall that looked out across the city to Reykjavik bay and all the way to Mount Esja. He watched a six-deck cruise ship slowly pull out of the harbor, a large part of him wishing he was on board. He could tell her, he supposed. Tell her that two documents existed. One put on the record his catastrophic failure to intervene in Rwanda, to even save the UN aid workers. Another recorded that a year later, he had tried to make a second deal behind the scenes, this time with the Bosnian Serbs, again to protect the UN’s neutrality. And how, just, like in Rwanda, the Bosnian deal too had gone horribly wrong.