The Geneva Option (8 page)

She stood up, touched her toes, stretched, and walked through the park to Central Park West. She crossed Broadway and headed uptown, past the familiar landmarks: the Greek diner with fantastic hamburgers and green plastic garden chairs; the homeless Vietnam vet who lived on the church steps by the 72nd Street subway station, to whom she gave a dollar; and Zabar's, the world's greatest delicatessen, on the corner of Broadway and West 80th Street. There she bought herself a large tub of the shop's special mix of cream cheese and smoked salmon, a sourdough loaf, a pound of mixed olives, and a tub of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Brownie ice cream. Yael turned left when she came out of the shop, walked one block north, turned left again, and walked down 81st Street toward the Hudson River. A taxi was parked across the road from her building's entrance at the corner of 81st and Riverside Drive. The vehicle caught Yael's attention with its tinted windows, which were unusual for a New York cab. She watched it pull away from the curb, reflexively memorizing its number plate: 7H35.

Her apartment was a good-sized one-bedroom in a 1930s apartment block with thick walls, a uniformed doorman, and a revolving door that opened onto an expansive black and gray marble foyer that looked like a Hollywood film set. Each time Yael stepped inside she half expected to see Cary Grant or Lauren Bacall come out of the elevator. Her kitchen still had the original wooden cabinets and door handles; the small bedroom had an en-suite bathroom with a deep tub and the noisiest pipes in the world; and the living room had high ceilings, huge windows overlooking the Hudson, and enough room for the three-piece art-deco furniture suite that her grandmother had shipped over from Budapest after the war.

Yael greeted the doorman, took the elevator to the 12th floor, and she was home.

S
ami felt guilty, regretful, and excited. The foreign desk had ordered a 1,500-word story on the mysterious death of the SG's diary secretary and the firing of Yael Azoulay. He was the cause of Yael's unemployment, and yet he had to write about her once again. But the SG had confirmed what Sami's journalistic instincts were shouting: that something big was brewing in the UN headquarters, and he was way ahead of the pack. Sami's e-mail inbox pinged: the SG's press office announced an emergency press conference in two hours. He picked up his sandwich. It seemed his appetite was coming back.

Eight

Y
ael sat in the half-lotus position on her bed, and turned the piece of lava over in her hand. It was brown and pitted and surprisingly light. She lifted it to her nose and inhaled the burnt, sulphurous stink. The lava was somehow reassuring: her senses worked. It was real. Even in her current admittedly febrile emotional state, she was not imagining things. She put the lava down, paused the sound file playing on her laptop, and pushed her headphones off her ears.

It was almost 1:00 p.m. and she had been home for an hour. As soon as she'd returned she sent an e-mail to her UN address. It immediately bounced back with the message that the address was invalid. She was also locked out of the UN computer system. She had called Rina and left a message on her voice mail, but she did not expect a response. Yael unscrewed her pen and uploaded the contents of her UN computer to her personal laptop: all her files, documents, e-mails, and notes, together with all the contact numbers from her UN mobile telephone. From there they would be automatically backed up to an encrypted server, protected by a complex alphanumeric password that only she knew.

Her work done for now, Yael closed her computer and stripped down to a tank top and a pair of boxer shorts. She needed to clear her mind, and Budokan was a recent addiction. At first she had been dismissive of the sport—a mix of the tougher yoga styles and martial arts and favored by Hollywood stars. Yael already knew how to defend herself, brutally if need be. Her father had taught her Krav Maga, the street-fighting self-defense style invented in the back streets of Bratislava in the 1930s to dispense with fascists and then honed by the Israeli Army. Krav Maga was fast, vicious, and effective, using knees, fists, and elbows to attack the eyes, neck, and groin. Yael could swiftly take down two or even three assailants. But she wanted something more, exercise that left her feeling calm after a training session, instead of hyped and ready to take on the world.

Budokan's mix of the physical and mental did just that. She started the Sun Salutation, the series of yoga poses to start the day. She began slowly—bending, stretching, and holding each pose—and steadily speeded up. Each movement flowed into the next as she concentrated as hard as she could on her body, her breathing, and her protesting muscles. Slowly, the poses worked their magic. Her mind emptied as she moved into the fighting stances: kicking, blocking, punching, and lunging. After half an hour Yael was sweating, and the physical exhaustion brought a welcome and relaxing tiredness.

Until she had rechecked her e-mail and found the sound file. It was twelve minutes long and of good quality. The sender line showed an e-mail address: [email protected] No information there, except that the sender wanted to remain anonymous. But few people knew that buried inside each e-mail was plenty of useful information, if you knew where to look. Which was why she had pushed Sami so hard to send him the e-mail with the Goma memo. She opened the e-mail header of the message from “afriend99” that contained the message's path through the Internet, all recorded forever.

Yael wanted the IP address given to each computer that would show from where the e-mail had been sent and which Internet service provider had processed it. The IP address was recorded in the first line, next to “Received.” She extracted the ten-digit number, opened a new browser window at a database website, and tapped the series of numbers into the window. The site linked to Google maps automatically. A new window opened and revealed that the mail had been routed through gratis.com, an Internet service provider located on East 43rd Street and Second Avenue that also had its own Internet café. It was two blocks from the UN.

Yael grabbed the bottle of mineral water by the bed and took a long drink before she pressed the sound file's play button again. The recording was clear and of high quality. There were four voices: Fareed Hussein, Charles Bonnet, Erin Rembaugh (the American head of the Department of Political Affairs), and a man she did not recognize (middle-aged, she thought, well-spoken, with a German or perhaps Austrian accent).

B
ONNET
: We need at least five hundred. That will have maximum impact.

H
USSEIN:
[
sounding dismayed
] 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.

R
EMBAUGH:
[
brisk and confident
] We disagree, Mr. Secretary-General. Five hundred is really the absolute minimum, if this is going to work. More, ideally.

Yael was surprised to hear Rembaugh arguing for more of anything. Rembaugh was a lanky, unmarried Texan in her early fifties. A former deputy director of the CIA and influential member of the National Security Council under President Bush, she was not known as a humanitarian. The DPA was the most powerful and influential department of the UN, essentially an extension of the Permanent Five. Its reach extended everywhere, from the backroom diplomacy that carved up Security Council resolutions long before they were presented for discussion, to deciding which country's cuisine would feature on the daily rota in the notably good UN staff cafés and restaurants.

The DPA was engaged in a perpetual turf war with the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Peacekeeping had once been controlled by the DPA until the peacekeepers split off and formed their own empire. The DPKO was now the biggest department in the UN, with a staff of 130,000 in fifteen missions around the world and a budget nudging $8 billion—a UN standing army in all but name. The DPA had never forgiven its upstart child for going its own way. Rembaugh expended much energy trying to place her staff, almost all of whom were former or current American intelligence agents, inside local mission headquarters as “political advisers” reporting directly to her, rather than to the DPKO Operations Center on the 37th floor. So far, Quentin Braithwaite, the DPKO chief, had resisted.

H
USSEIN
: [
sounding even more doubtful
] I am more and more inclined to stop the whole thing. I think—

B
ONNET
: [
interrupting
] 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 a chance for a happy, productive life.

G
ERMAN VOICE
: 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.

Yael pressed the pause button. What was a small price? To pay for what? And who was that talking? She rewound a few seconds. The man sounded both calm and supremely confident.

She pressed play: “ . . . a small price to pay.” Someone who had spent some time in the United States, someone who had studied or worked there. He was not a senior UN official, or at least not one she had ever met. She listened again, intently. It was a Viennese accent, with the telltale lilt of the Austrian capital.

H
USSEIN
: But this . . . event goes against every founding principle of the UN.

R
EMBAUGH:
[
her voice cold and hard
] Mr. Secretary-General, as you well know, there is a precedent for this. Srebrenica. You agreed that the Dutch peacekeepers would not defend the enclave. The Bosnian Serbs were allowed to capture Srebrenica in exchange for signing up to the Dayton Peace Accords.

H
USSEIN:
[
anguished
] Capture the town, yes. Not massacre every man and boy.

R
EMBAUGH
: Knowing the Bosnian Serbs' history, after three years of war, that was entirely predictable. And indeed was predicted by your own UN military observers. Fareed [
her voice softer now
], you know as well as I do that it's all a numbers game. It always has been and always will be. Eight thousand lost at Srebrenica to end the Bosnian war, which was about to set half of Europe ablaze and open the door to Al-Qaeda. Yes, it was horrible, for all of us. But how many lives were saved? Hundreds of thousands. And we brought peace to the Balkans, a peace that still holds. Believe me, Fareed, we all wish we did not have to do this. But it is the only way to clear the path to the peace accord. Like Charles says, we need to see the bigger picture here. Hakizimani has agreed to everything. His people on the ground are ready, as soon as they get the uniforms. But that deal simply will not happen under the current DPKO leadership. This is the only way to ensure the right people take control of the department. It's a means to an end. He has to go.

H
USSEIN
: Why not simply sack him? This is a high price to pay to rid the UN of one man.

B
ONNET
: We, the world, will pay a much higher price if he stays. This is not about one man. Braithwaite not only has to go, he and his whole approach to peacekeeping must be completely discredited, together with his senior staff and as soon as possible. He can have no future in this house after what he has done to the DPKO. The department must be rebuilt, from the bottom up. Remember, Mr. Secretary-General, how he humiliated you in Bosnia, how he tramped on the most basic values of the United Nations. It was an outrage, an offense against our most important tenet: impartiality, no matter how extreme the provocation. He has UN soldiers actually fighting battles.

There were several seconds of silence. Yael could almost see Hussein nodding righteously to himself as he pondered Braithwaite's damage to the sacred neutrality of the UN. Braithwaite had gained fame at home and notoriety at the UN headquarters while commanding a battalion of peacekeepers in Bosnia in the early 1990s during the Yugoslav wars. Bosnian Serb soldiers at a checkpoint outside Sarajevo had attempted to arrest the British officer together with a British Foreign Office minister and his SAS bodyguards as they crossed the front lines and passed into government-controlled territory.

The usual UN practice was to open negotiations, which would last hours and lead nowhere. Braithwaite simply drove his armored fighting vehicle through the checkpoint, smashing the barricade into pieces and scattering the Bosnian Serb troops in every direction. A furious Fareed Hussein had summoned the UN press corps to protest this violation of the UN's neutrality. He described the incident as “reckless, foolhardy, and setting a dangerous precedent that would draw peacekeepers into the conflicts they were supposedly defusing.” Braithwaite had responded by inviting Hussein to visit Sarajevo for himself. The invitation was not taken up.

Backed by the French, Russians, and the Chinese, Hussein had fought hard to prevent Braithwaite's appointment as peacekeeping chief, but for once London stood firm. UN peacekeepers around the world now shot back when attacked, with serious firepower. DPKO missions were equipped with satellite communications, high-tech weaponry including attack helicopters, and privileged access to NATO and US intelligence. There would be no Srebrenicas on his watch, Braithwaite declared, further infuriating Fareed Hussein.

Yael knew that the DPKO chief had made no secret of his contempt for the UN's covert contacts with Hakizimani and the Rwandan Liberation Front, nor did he bother to disguise his distaste for Bonnet and Rembaugh. Unforum, a gossipy insider's website, had even reported that Braithwaite had leaked what he knew of the UN's contacts with the RLF to the Rwandan embassy. Braithwaite had declined to comment on the article.

The Rwandan ambassador, a former colleague of Hakizimani's at Kigali University, who had lost sixty-seven relatives in the genocide, was at first disbelieving, then furious. She was demanding assurances that the RLF and the Genocidaires would have no role in any future regional peace agreements. At the same time, Braithwaite was also pushing for new rules of engagement for UN troops in the Goma region, allowing them to engage RLF troops on sight and to shoot to kill. The pressure was on the SG and the 38th floor, from several directions.

R
EMBAUGH
:
Après
Braithwaite,
le déluge
. We need to clean out the DPKO.

B
ONNET
: Absolutely. And our friend in Goma?

R
EMBAUGH
: [
laughing
] Just try and stop him. He was pushing for five or ten thousand. I told him that it would take too long. He assured me otherwise. We settled on five hundred. But he is crucial. He still has power because of 1994, but a younger generation is rising, snapping at his heels. Hakizimani is the only one that can hold this together. Our guys on the ground are clear: without him this will not work. His people will do what has to be done.

After Braithwaite had blocked Rembaugh's move to take over DPKO field operations, she had simply stepped around him and built her own global empire. The DPA now ran what it called “Good Offices Missions” in the world's most volatile and strategically important regions: Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. The GOMs were supposedly charged with conflict prevention, peace building, and post-conflict resolution, working in conjunction with the DPKO. In fact, their main purpose, as directed by Rembaugh, was not to promote peace but to fight a war—with the DPKO. Around the world, the GOMs were steadily slicing away at its mandates and power base until Rembaugh could take full political control of the peacekeeping empire. The new DPA GOM in Goma was one of the UN's largest.

V
IENNESE VOICE
: [
brusquely
] Where and when?

R
EMBAUGH
: At the Tutsi refugee camp outside Goma. And soon, while Hakizimani is in New York, negotiating the peace accord. That way he cannot be blamed.