The Geneva Option (22 page)

Twenty-Two

Y
ael was dozing on her sleeping bag on the floor in room 506 when her mobile beeped that a text had arrived. She picked up the handset: the screen showed a blank message from an unknown number. She sat up quickly, walked to the bathroom, stuck her head under the cold tap, and rubbed herself dry with a T-shirt. She briskly gathered her and Joe-Don's toiletries and belongings, rolled up the two sleeping bags, and jammed them all into her rucksack, together with the rest of her clothes. She folded up the UN floor plans and put them inside her small shoulder bag.

In three days, Yael had accumulated an impressive wardrobe from Joe-Don's cash allowance, including a black leather jacket that she had bought that morning on sale at Balenciaga for eight hundred euros, and a long purple merino and cashmere scarf. The scarf reminded her of Bertrand. She felt a pang of nostalgia for his stall on the corner of West 81st Street and Riverside Drive. But the scarf also gave her strength, reminding her of why she was living out of this grim room.

She put on her new jacket, marveling once more at the softness of the leather, and grabbed Joe-Don's bag, a small black nylon duffel bag that he always kept packed. Claudia Lopez's passport was safe in a traveler's wallet that she wore on a thong around her neck, together with several thousand more euros in cash. Yael checked the bed and the bathroom one last time. It all looked clear to her. She locked both bags with unique, unpickable US-government-issue padlocks; put her purse on, then her rucksack; slipped her right arm through the handles of Joe-Don's bag, hoisting it onto her shoulder; and walked briskly down the five flights of narrow wooden stairs. The hotel's owner watched her walk across the lobby and turned back to the television, grunting good-bye as she left.

Yael walked at a moderate pace down Rue des Grottes, neither too fast nor too slow, past the restaurant with no name and a large sign for “Kronenbourg 1664” beer, past the Indian-owned convenience store that sold the sandwiches she and Joe-Don had been existing on, and into the Place des Grottes, a good place, she thought, for some dry-cleaning—not of clothes, but people. The Place des Grottes was a pedestrian precinct, the roads passing through it blocked off by small concrete bollards, with a retractable post in the middle in case the emergency services needed to get through. A smartly painted green and white wooden house stood on the east side—a chocolate-box piece of Switzerland that looked curiously out of place in the urban landscape—facing a shop and a café across the square. A marble fountain stood in the middle, and a stately apartment block, painted bright pink and purple, marked the northern end. Two more apartment buildings stood on the left side. A tall cylindrical advertising kiosk was covered with ragged posters and colored flyers, flapping wildly in the cold wind that was blowing in from the lake.

A good place, then, for surveillance teams to wait. Yael slowed down as she walked through the square, observing and checking. Two young mothers sat chatting on a bench facing the fountain, their children wobbling around on baby wooden bicycles with no pedals. The women seemed completely absorbed in their conversation, and anyway it was hard to follow a target and remain inconspicuous with a three-year-old in tow. A middle-aged man, tall and swarthy with a long, curved nose, was reading a Turkish newspaper and drinking coffee on the terrace of the café. Again, too conspicuous to be a watcher, she thought. A gaggle of teenagers were sitting on the edge of the fountain, laughing, smoking, and playing with their mobile telephones. Too young.

She walked to the end of the Place des Grottes, and she could see the back of the train station ahead of her, just a few hundred meters away at the end of the street, on the other side of the Place de Montbrillant. A white and blue tram rolled smoothly across her field of view. She took a sharp right turn into an open parking lot. This was a piece of Geneva most tourists did not see: the road was cracked and fissured, the tarmac spotted with poor quality repairs, the sidewalls of the buildings raw brick or concrete. An abandoned Citroën 2CV sat rusting in the corner. The walls were covered with graffiti. A row of run-down gray apartment houses overlooked the square.

Yael kept a steady pace, looking in the cars' side-view mirrors to see if she were being followed as she walked through the lot. Any serious surveillance would be carried out by a “box”: one watcher behind, one at the side, and one in front, all three communicating by radio. The really skilled operators wore reversible jackets and carried eye- and sunglasses, scarves, hats, and gloves in different styles, shapes, and colors—even wigs. They would dart into shops or alleys and change along the way to throw the target off the scent.

She couldn't see anyone, but that did not mean they were not there. But there was also a simple technique to expose even the most mobile surveillance: the “choke point,” also known as “channelized terrain.” A choke point could be a bridge, a tunnel, or an overpass—anything that forces the flow of pedestrians, including any watchers, in one direction. Yael's was a narrow concrete stairway that was flanked on both sides by a thick wall of ivy and that led out of the run-down square into the Place de Montbrillant. She walked slowly down the stairs, holding on to the length of scaffolding that had been turned into a handrail, taking care not to slip on the damp concrete. Best of all, halfway down, the stairway turned sharp right. A choke point within a choke point.

Yael stopped at the bottom and turned around 180 degrees, swiftly glancing back. The staircase was empty. She stepped into the Place de Montbrillant. It was a wide, windswept space bisected by a busy two-lane road and tramlines. The square faced the rear of the train station, a long, low sweep of poured concrete, divided into two wide, underlit passageways. The Place de Montbrillant was dotted with detached apartment buildings, as though the builders had run out of time, or money, or both, and the wide empty spaces were used as parking lots. A large red double-decker bus that had been converted into a community information center stood in the middle of the square. Yael watched a line of schoolchildren shepherded by their teachers cross the road, then walked across to the side of the vehicle. A passerby would see her reading the notices advertising courses in French, basic literacy, and computer skills pasted in the window. In fact, she was using the window as a mirror to see if anyone had followed her.

Yael slid Joe-Don's bag off her shoulder, as though it were too heavy and she needed to take a break. She rubbed her neck and shoulders and took out her mobile telephone, scrolling through the empty contacts menu before pressing a button. She held the handset to her ear, conversing with nobody while observing the passageway and watching for anyone coming from the Place des Grottes. It all looked clear to her.

Yael waited at the traffic light until the green man appeared, crossed Rue de la Cordiere, and walked through the dark passageway into the station, past the newsagents, bakeries, and sweetshops and out to the tram stop on the Place de Cornavin. The Place de Cornavin showed a better side of Geneva: stately, well-maintained luxury boutiques and apartment buildings, bicycles neatly parked in street-side racks, spotless sidewalks without a speck of litter in sight. She waited until the number 13 tram arrived, ensuring that she was the last one to board, and stood by the door, looking at the route map. Just before the tram pulled out she shook her head in exasperation and stepped off, apologizing as hers and Joe-Don's bags brushed against several passengers. Nobody followed her.

She then walked back across the front of the station toward the taxi line. She stepped around the front vehicle, walked a few yards, stood on the left side of the line of cars in the road, and put her and Joe-Don's bags down between her feet. There was a strict protocol—passengers waited in line in the designated area on the sidewalk and took the first available car. She stood looking at the cars, wiping her head, to all intents a bemused and tired tourist.

The taxi drivers signaled to her to join the queue of thirty or so people on the other side of the sidewalk. She knocked on a couple of windows, pretending not to understand the queuing system. The drivers shrugged and pointed at the queue again. She continued standing on the road, looking exasperated. This was a risky move because she was drawing attention to herself. But she wanted to take a random vehicle, and was gambling that one of the drivers would take pity on her. She knocked on the door of the fifth car, a black Mercedes, and a young man in his late twenties, dark-skinned, wiry, with a mustache and goatee beard got out.

He smiled, picked up Yael's bags, and ignoring the other drivers' protests, placed them in the trunk of the car. The other would-be passengers, patiently waiting in line, looked on, outraged at this breach of protocol. One lady in a tweed suit even shouted at her that she would call the police. Yael ignored her and thanked the driver profusely.

He opened the door for her, and Yael sat back gratefully in the black Mercedes. A string of green prayer beads hung from the mirror. A taxi license in the name of Ahmed Aboulafia was displayed in a plastic holder, on top of the sunshade on the driver's side.

“Where to, madame?” he asked politely.

“Do you know the Old Town?” Yael asked.

He turned and smiled with an engaging grin that crinkled the skin around his brown eyes. “Old Town, New Town, uptown, downtown, wherever you like, madame.”

Yael leaned forward slightly as the car pulled away, into the traffic. “Please drive up to the Old Town and the streets around St. Peter's Cathedral. I am an architecture student and I have to prepare a presentation tomorrow. Of course I left it all until the last minute,” she said, shaking her head at her poor time management. “So let's just wander around for a while, then I will get out and take some pictures, and make some notes, you wait and then we will come back,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag and handing him a twenty-franc note as they drove toward the lakeside. “If that's OK.”

It was. Ahmed took the money and thanked Yael, chatting about the difficulties of life in Geneva for a North African—the police, the paperwork—as they crossed the Mont Blanc Bridge over the lake and climbed up into the Old Town toward St. Peter's Cathedral. He stopped there and Yael got out of the car, wandering around the narrow lanes and alleys, staring at the medieval buildings and scribbling in a notepad or taking pictures with her telephone camera. Each time, she took several sharp turns in succession, doubling-back on herself. She did not see the same person or vehicle twice, and the streets were almost deserted as the shops and offices closed for the day. As far as she could tell, she had not been followed.

After a half hour of meandering around the Old Town, she went back to the car, where Ahmed was reading the
Tribune de Genève
. He smiled, put the paper down, and drove back across the Mont Blanc Bridge to the Left Bank and dropped Yael at the Place des Alpes, a couple of blocks back from the lakeside. He got out of the car, opened the trunk, and handed Yael her bags. She thanked him and said good-bye, watching his car disappear into the traffic as she checked the padlocks. It was not great tradecraft to leave the bags in the trunk of an unknown taxi, but they were securely locked and contained only clothes and toiletries. It was either this or a luggage locker at the train station blanketed by CCTV. The bags were untouched.

Yael hoisted her rucksack on, slung Joe-Don's duffel bag over her shoulder, and walked through the tree-lined square onto the corner of the Rue de Zurich and the Rue de Lausanne, the main road in front of the train station, before heading through the back streets to the rendezvous point she had agreed to with Joe-Don. She thought she saw Ahmed's car again, but there were many black Mercedeses in the evening traffic and she could not be sure. She did not see him take down his taxi license and replace it with one under a different name. Nor did she see him pick up his telephone, press a number on his speed dial, and speak for some time.

S
ami was about to answer Najwa when a tall man with deep-set gray eyes pulled out a chair three tables away from them and sat down. His bald head gleamed under the terrace lights, and his ears stuck out. He wore a single-breasted navy blazer, chinos, and a blue button-down shirt and looked like he had just stepped out of the metro at Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC. He picked up the menu and idly scanned the price list.

Najwa saw Sami looking at him. She was about to speak when Sami laid his hand on her arm. The bald man reached inside his pocket, glanced quickly at Sami and Najwa, looked away, and placed a smartphone on the table.

The waiter appeared. Sami heard the man ask for a “club soda.” That decided it. Europeans never drank club soda.

“
Yalla, habibi
,” Sami said quietly as he stood up, putting on his coat. Najwa immediately followed. They walked to the bar, where she signed for the exorbitant bill. There was a large mirror over the bar, and Sami could see the man sip his drink. He looked very annoyed.

Twenty-Three

T
he men came to the village again that night. Two he knew well—Baptiste, the local schoolteacher, tall and mournful, and Lucien, who helped deliver water supplies and had one eye but was still always jolly—and two he thought were Europeans. Herve did not like the Europeans. One was skinny and blond-haired with a straggly beard. He said his name was Stephan, but his smile never reached his eyes. The other one was much darker, with eyebrows like caterpillars, thick arms covered in gray hair, and a potbelly. Herve had asked the man his name in his best, most polite French, but the man had ignored him. Herve thought he was Spanish or Italian, but he had a strange, harsh accent, and the way he talked frightened Herve.

Everyone in Kimanda was scared lately. It was a settlement of five hundred or so people in eastern Congo, ten kilometers down the road from Goma, on the Rwandan border. Compared to its neighbors, Kimanda was considered rich: it had sporadic electricity, a tarmac road, and two standing taps in the square. Most of the men worked mining coltan, digging in nearby streams and sloshing out the dark yellow mud to find grains of the precious mineral. In theory, some earned as much as two hundred dollars a month, ten times the average wage of the country. In practice, they rarely kept more than half of what they mined—the militias took the rest.

And now a new force had appeared in the chaotic mix of competing armies: the East Congo Liberation Front. Most of the different factions were backed by the neighboring states. Rwanda and Uganda were the biggest meddlers, with Burundi and the Central African Republic not far behind. There was a lot of money at stake. Herve had heard a recent report on BBC Radio that Rwanda, which had no coltan mines at all, had made $250 million last year trading the mineral. Nobody knew who was behind the ECLF, but everyone had noticed that its soldiers had the best uniforms, equipment, and guns. And they got paid a hundred dollars a month. Several of his classmates had left home in the last two weeks to sign up.

There was a new ECLF checkpoint on the road to the Goma refugee camp, where Herve sometimes went to visit his relatives from Rwanda. Some of the ECLF soldiers there were Tutsis, and they shouted at him, calling him a “Hutu Genocidaire.” Herve was a Hutu but he was only sixteen and had not even been born during the time of the genocide. Last time, the ECLF soldiers had pushed him around with their rifle butts and even threatened to kill him. He still had a big bruise on his back. Now there was shooting every night, echoing through the forest. The men from the village had put up two roadblocks, feeble things made of tree trunks, one on each side of the road that ran through Kimanda. They sat there drinking beer from dusk to dawn, full of alcohol-fueled bravado about how they would fight the Tutsis and finish what was started in 1994.

And then something really terrible happened: three days ago, Evelyn, one of his school friends, had been found bloodied and half-conscious in the road, with her clothes torn to shreds. She had been taken to the hospital at the UN camp and had still not come home. Herve had known Evelyn since his childhood. Sometimes at night they would sit on the schoolyard steps, on the edge of the forest. They talked for hours, her leg resting gently against his, listening to the cicadas and imagining how it would be to study in Paris. Evelyn's father was a Hutu. Hermione, her mother, was a Tutsi. Herve liked her very much. The only way out of this mess, Hermione always said, was for Hutus and Tutsis to marry each other and make a new race: the human race.

The sixty or so men of the village were gathered in the school hall, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The benches and desks had been moved to the right-hand side to clear a space. François Nodula, the mayor, sat on a chair behind a folding table—the Europeans on his left, Baptiste and Lucien on his right. François was actually the deputy mayor. Everyone knew that the real mayor was Herve's father, but he had been killed in a car accident last year. A hit-and-run, they called it. The police had come, asked a few questions, taken a few notes, and he had never heard from them again. Now Herve was the man of the house, his mother had told him, and he had to help look after her and his brother and sisters. He tried his best, although he missed his father intensely. His mother said it would get easier with time, but it did not, not really.

Herve and the other boys leaned on the wall at the back of the school hall. The building was made of raw cinder blocks and the roof of tin sheets. It was raining hard, a heavy African downpour, and the raindrops drummed on the metal. The air was wet and thick, and he could smell the forest. Herve tried to think what his father would do if he were still alive. Watch and listen, he had always told him. Gather information and think hard before you make any decision. Then even if you make the wrong one, at least you thought it through and did your best. So that is what he would do, Herve thought, suddenly feeling comforted.

He felt the weight of his digital camera in his pocket. It was his proudest possession. Kristina, a friendly Swiss aid worker at the Goma camp, gave it to him last month. He had spent hours learning how to use it. The pictures he liked the most were the ones he snapped surreptitiously. With her encouragement, he had taught himself how to hold the camera in his hand and snap street scenes and passersby without anyone noticing. Kristina said he showed real talent at this and promised to put some of his pictures on the Internet.

Nodula was speaking, introducing his “honored guests.” Nodula was short, fat, and getting noticeably fatter. The whole village admired his new car, a white Toyota Land Cruiser. Herve wanted to ask him how he could afford to run it on a deputy mayor's salary of eighty dollars a month, but his mother had looked frightened when he mentioned it and absolutely forbade him from ever bringing up the subject. Tonight Nodula was even more pompous than usual. Herve noticed that he kept looking at the long wooden boxes covered in plastic wrapping from the UNHCR, the refugee agency, that were piled up on the other side of the hall. The downpour was turning into a thunderstorm now as the skies opened. The rain sounded as though there were drummers on the roof.

Stephan stood up. “Thank you, Mayor Nodula. It's good to be back here. But I bring bad news and good news for you tonight, my friends.”

The men shifted nervously on the rough concrete floor. Herve slowly put his hand in his pocket and brought the camera out, shielding it with his fingers.

“Your daughter, your beautiful daughter,” said Stephan, his head downcast. “I am sorry to tell you, she will not be coming home. The doctors could not save her.”

An angry muttering filled the room as the men turned to each other. Herve watched as a thin man in his thirties, wearing thick black-framed glasses taped together at the bridge, howled in despair and started sobbing. It was Jean-Luc, Evelyn's father. Herve felt his eyes fill with tears, but he forced himself to put his anguish aside. There was, he knew, a reason why the men of the village had been gathered here tonight. He would mourn his friend in his own time.

Stephan walked over to Jean-Luc and laid his hand on his shoulder. “Don't cry, my good friend,” he said, shaking his head. “Tears cannot bring Evelyn back. Nothing can. But we can give meaning to her sacrifice.”

Nodula nodded emphatically.

Stephan continued, turning to the other men in the room. “We have to make sure that your daughters are no longer raped and murdered by the cockroaches. That is why we are here—and we have brought what you need to make sure that you can defend yourselves,” he said, gesturing at the boxes at the side of the room.

Herve watched silently and slid his fingers over the camera, switching it on. Thunder suddenly exploded like shellfire, so loudly that even Stephan jumped. Herve lifted his fingers and gently pressed the shutter button. The room filled with light.

Herve felt sick with fear. He had left the flash on.

Intrigue Swirls Deeper at UN: German, French Firms Own Allied Africa Charity; Secretary-General's Wife Has Stake

By Sami Boustani

GENEVA—Africa Child Rescue, the new charity at the heart of the United Nations Year of Africa, is majority owned by a company controlled by employees of the KZX Corporation and the Bonnet Group. Zeinab Hussein, the wife of Fareed Hussein, the United Nations secretary-general, and Hakim Yundala, the head of the United Nation's internal security office, are the only minority shareholders, an investigation by the
New York Times
reveals.

Moabi Holdings Ltd. was registered in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, last month. The firm's majority shareholders are Claude Sambala, the deputy director of KZX's Kinshasa subsidiary, and Bernard Lalola, the deputy director of the Bonnet Group's Congo operation. The two each own 35 percent while Zeinab Hussein and Hakim Yundala each have 15 percent stakes.

The web of connections linking the French and German firms together with the most senior UN officials highlights the growing power of corporate influence on the world's most powerful international body. KZX has poured millions of dollars into supporting the “Goma Development Zone” in eastern Congo, the first UN aid project to be sponsored by a corporation. Numerous senior UN officials are known to oppose the project, but Fareed Hussein has been outspoken in his support.

President Freshwater's administration and Britain have expressed strong doubts, but China and France, who are also permanent members of the Security Council, have been vocal advocates of the new partnership. “The feeling in London and the White House is that the UN and business interests should be kept separate,” said one official who could not give his name because he was not authorized to speak on this subject on the record. “But Beijing and Paris think differently.” Russia, the other permanent member of the Security Council, has so far stayed on the sidelines. Whatever the United States and Britain would prefer, it seems corporate interests are binding themselves ever tighter to the UN.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Gardiner, a freelance photographer working on behalf of the
New York Times
, remains in a coma. Mr. Gardiner was attacked by unknown assailants after taking a series of photographs of Mr. Hussein boarding a private airplane owned by KZX (see facing page) at Teterboro Airport, together with Reinhardt Daintner, the company's chief of corporate communications. Police have launched an investigation into attempted murder.

These are uncertain times for the UN. Earlier this week the Department of Peacekeeping Operations rushed hundreds of UN troops to the Goma refugee camp after unprecedented claims by Florence Munyakarana, the Rwandan ambassador to the United Nations, that a massacre was about to take place there. Tomorrow, Mr. Hussein is due to open the controversial new UN-KZX Institute for International Development in Geneva, which will be housed in the United Nations headquarters at the Palais des Nations.

An in-house investigation into the death of Olivia de Souza, Mr. Hussein's former secretary, is still underway and headed by Hakim Yundala, head of the UN's Department of Safety and Security. Ms. de Souza fell thirty-eight floors to her death earlier this month. The UN has refused to allow either the FBI or New York Police to investigate, although an increasing number of UN officials believe that she was murdered.

These latest revelations will further increase pressure on Mr. Hussein, whose term is due to end next summer and who is known to be seeking reelection . . .

Yael circled the paragraph about Fareed Hussein flying on KZX's private jet. Her old boss was always a sucker for luxury, she thought as she sipped her coffee. But there were still so many unanswered questions. The rest of Sami's article reported that Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, the Rwandan warlord wanted for genocide, was rumored to be in New York, but hadn't been seen. Well, she could certainly help Sami with that, especially since the article's dateline showed that Sami was in Geneva. Perhaps they would bump into each other at the opening of the UN-KZX Institute for International Development, she thought, feeling surprisingly buoyed at the prospect. Until she remembered that she was no longer Yael Azoulay.

She checked her watch: it was 9:30 p.m. She had been sitting here for two hours, waiting for Joe-Don. The last text had said, “B410,” —before ten o'clock—so it could be another half hour. But there were much worse places to be than the Black Cat—especially the Hotel Imperial.

The Black Cat stood on the corner of Rue des Pâquis and Rue de Zurich in one of the seediest parts of the city. Prostitutes lingered in the doorways of the now closed luxury-goods shops, while young North African men walked up and down, whispering their lists of drugs for sale. It was not exactly threatening—the Quai de Mont-Blanc on the lakeside and the five-star hotels were just a couple of blocks away—but as a young woman on her own, Yael was glad to be inside. The bar was dark but surprisingly cozy.

The walls were painted dark red, and the wooden chairs and tables looked like assorted flea-market and junk-shop finds. Billie Holiday crooned mournfully in the background. The people-watching was excellent. The two barmaids, who, Yael noticed, were liberally helping themselves to the stock, were now also singing along. There seemed to be rooms for rent by the hour upstairs, judging by the procession of men in business suits and women in very short skirts who passed through and disappeared up the stairs.

The owner came over to Yael's table to introduce herself. She was pale and enormously fat with bright red hair. Her surprisingly slim fingers were topped with long pink nails studded with fake diamonds. She held a large balloon glass of red wine in one hand and seemed to be enjoying herself immensely.

“All on your own,
draga
?” she asked. She reminded Yael of Jasna, and not just because she had a similar deep voice and accent. “I'm Stella,” she said, holding out her hand.

Yael shook hands, glancing enviously at Stella's wine. Her grip was firm and confident. “I'm Claudia. I'm waiting for some friends.”