The Washington Stratagem (6 page)

Hussein looked at Yael. “So, Washington. How did it go?”

Yael opened her folder and took out her notes. “Clarence Clairborne is not our friend,” she said, her voice wry, before giving a brisk account of her meeting with the chairman and CEO of the Prometheus Group.

“And President Freshwater? Did you mention her?” asked Hussein.

Yael nodded. “I did. Clairborne almost spat when I said her name. Called her ‘President Dead-in-the-Water.’”

“He might be right,” said Braithwaite.

Yael remembered Clairborne’s crude dismissal of President Freshwater, that she could go “fuck herself.” And the way he had started a sentence with “we” before suddenly stopping himself from saying any more. That part, she decided, she would keep to herself for now and share with Braithwaite later.

Yael sat back. Her shoulder was pulsing again. She closed her eyes for a moment, once again seeing Clairborne rigid with anger, gripping the armchair so hard his fingers had turned white. She opened her eyes to see the large photograph of Lucy Tremlett, a willowy blond English actress, still in the center of the facing wall. Hussein had appointed Tremlett an ambassador for UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund. The photograph showed him standing with his arm around her at a refugee camp in Darfur, surrounded by barefoot African children, who were smiling with excitement. “Fareed, thanks for everything,” Tremlett had scrawled on the print in her big, loopy handwriting. “We are doing so much good.”
But were they?
Yael asked herself, her mind drifting away.
Were they really?

The SG’s voice cut into her reverie. “Yael, are you with us?”

Yael sat up straight and focused herself. “Sorry. Yes, of course.”

“Did you show Clairborne the paper?” asked Braithwaite.

Yael nodded. “Yes. I did. He was furious. But he wouldn’t back down, even when I said it might soon appear on the Internet. He threatened me; then he threw me out. On the surface he seems very confident.”

“So the trip was a waste of your time,” said Hussein.

Yael shook her head. “No. It was not. I learned something very valuable.”

“What?” demanded the SG.

“He was scared.”

Hussein nodded. “Of course. He is scared of going to prison. His father died in prison.”

Yael shook her head. “It was more than that. After I showed him the paper, he sat for at least a minute, praying to himself. As though he was caught up in something that was out of his control.”

“He is,” said Braithwaite, reaching inside his briefcase. He pulled out two plain manila cardboard folders and handed one to the SG and one to Yael. “Read this.”

“It’s not her,” said Sami, his shoulders hunched, his voice tight.

Najwa rested her hand on his arm, but kindly, no longer the vamp of the Levant. “Sami, habibi, it is.”

The Al Jazeera bureau was just a few yards away from Sami’s dank cubbyhole, but it seemed like a different world. The bright light of a spring Manhattan morning poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. One wall was covered with four giant television screens. They showed feeds from Al Jazeera Arabic service, Al Jazeera English, and the new Al Jazeera America service, while the fourth had the BBC World News channel playing. The furniture was sleek and modern, polished chrome and black leather, and the computers state-of-the-art with wafer-thin LED monitors. The walls were decorated with framed black-and-white stills from the recent uprisings that had convulsed the Arab world. A jumble of plaques, metallic statuettes, and slabs of engraved plastic, Najwa’s awards for her reports and documentaries, covered most of one shelf.

Sami and Najwa sat at her desk, watching the film playing on her computer monitor. A tray on the side table was piled high with pastries and fruit. Sami’s coffee was untouched. He had taken a single bite out of a chocolate muffin, but it had turned to dry crumbs in his mouth when the video started playing. Najwa’s producer, a taciturn but talented Spaniard named Maria, sat next to them, also watching, happy to let her star reporter run the show.

Sami leaned back, staring at the ceiling, shaking his head slowly, conflicting emotions churning inside him. “But how… what…?” he stuttered, for once at a loss for words.

“We have checked the footage, Sami. It’s real, the raw CCTV feed, not spliced or enhanced. It’s a hotel but we don’t know which one yet.”

Sami nodded. He reached forward and pressed the play button again.

The video clip started with a rear view of a slim woman walking down a long, narrow corridor. The walls were light brown, the carpet darker and patterned. She wore a wraparound raincoat and a fashionable military-style cap. She carried herself with poise and confidence on long, slim legs. There was no sound and the footage was clear and steady.

Two stone-faced security guards stood outside the door of room 3017. A room service waiter walked down toward her, pushing a large trolley covered with used plates and glasses. The footage was sharp enough to see the name on his badge: “Miguel.” He mouthed something to the woman and smiled at her reply. She carried on toward 3017. The security guards instantly moved in front of her, blocking her path. They spoke and the woman presented her ID. The camera zoomed in on a driver’s license in the name of Sharon Mantello. She raised her arms and the taller security guard rapidly frisked her. She opened her bag. One of the security guards took out a heavy, old-fashioned mobile telephone. There was some discussion; then the woman took the mobile telephone back and placed it in her bag. The guards opened the door. The camera view flipped around to show the woman’s face.

Sami pressed the pause button. “She doesn’t wear glasses.”

“She does there,” replied Najwa. She passed him a printout. “We photoshopped the glasses out. There is no point arguing. It’s your girlfriend.”

Sami picked up the sheet of paper and glanced at it. “I really wish you would stop calling her that,” he said, exhaling loudly.

Najwa pressed the pause button again. The film showed the woman talking to the security guards, presumably trying to persuade them to let her into the room. One of the guards opened the door and she walked in. The door closed and the film stopped.

“That’s it,” said Najwa.

Sami sat back. “OK. So what is the SG’s special envoy doing in a hotel, presumably pretending to be an escort, using a fake ID to get into a room that has two security guards outside? And who sent the DVD?”

Najwa shrugged. “We don’t know. It arrived hand-delivered, in a plain brown envelope. Marked for my attention. This was the only file on the disc.”

“The metadata?” asked Sami.

“Nothing.”

“No date, time, and make of camera? It should be embedded in the video file.”

Najwa ran the cursor over the video file’s properties. Every field was empty. “Stripped out. But a note came with the disc.”

She handed a sheet of folded paper to Sami. There were two words, “More follows.” The phrase dated back to the era when news stories were typed up over several sheets of copy paper. “More follows” indicated that the article ran onto another sheet. The letter
r
was malformed, missing its horizontal spar.

Sami nodded and stared back at the screen. “Run the clip again, please.”

The screen filled with the woman walking down the corridor. Sami stared, then pressed the pause button after a few seconds. The picture froze. He scratched his head. “I know where that is. I need to call my news desk. Is this another joint production?”

Sami reached for the play button to watch the end of the clip.

Najwa grabbed his hand before he could press down. “That depends,” she said, gripping his wrist.

“On what?”

Najwa smiled sweetly. “You.”

Sami looked wary. “You have the video file. I don’t.”

“But you have information about someone we are both very interested in. Information that you have not shared, habibi.”

“I told you everything that I could confirm. It’s all in our program.”

Najwa closed the video window on her screen. She looked at Sami, still holding his wrist. “Everything you could confirm. And the rest?”

“There is nothing else,” he said indignantly.

Najwa released his hand. “OK.”

She picked up the telephone on her desk. “I’ll see you later,” she said to Sami, turning away. Najwa dialed the switchboard. “Can I speak to the
Washington Post
bureau, please?”

Sami instantly leaned forward and pressed the button on the handset cradle.

Najwa looked at him expectantly, still holding the handset. “Yes?”

Sami said, “There is more.”

“For me?”

“Yes, Najwa. For you.”

Najwa put the telephone back down. “We can get the story on the eight o’clock news tonight. I will give you the clip, exclusively, for the
Times
website. But Sami…”

“What?”

“We go in hard this time. No more protecting her because you are dating her…”

“Let’s get to work,” said Sami, before Najwa could finish her sentence, already hating himself.

Thirty floors above the Al Jazeera office, Yael leaned forward and put Braithwaite’s folder down on the coffee table. The information the folder contained, while shocking, did not surprise her, especially after Clairborne’s performance. Suddenly a wave of tiredness hit her. The sun had set, blanketing the UN headquarters in darkness. She had got up at dawn to catch an early train to Washington, DC; confronted one of the most powerful men in America; been threatened, followed; spent another four hours getting back to the UN; and now this. She watched a police helicopter sweep by, its searchlight cutting through the dusk as it followed the path of the river, flying so close that its blades rattled the office windows.

Yael briefly squeezed her eyes closed, only half-listening as Hussein outlined the implications of the information in Braithwaite’s dossier for the UN, and by implication, for the SG’s career. Who was this man, the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations? A refugee turned multimillionaire; a self-proclaimed champion of the poor and downtrodden who adored luxury and celebrities; a fighter for peace who had stopped the UN intervening in so many wars. What did he want? What drove him?

Yael knew the facts of the SG’s biography so well she could recite them on demand. Born in Delhi in 1940, Fareed Hussein was the son of a Muslim father and Hindu mother. His father, Ahmad, had owned a private bank. The Husseins were a mainstay of the city’s business and social elite, with a wide network of friends and business partners among Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Jains, Parsis and Jews. The family door was always open, and their home full of visitors dropping by for tea and often staying on for dinner. Hussein and his younger brother Omar were privately educated in a school modeled on Eton, the training ground for Britain’s ruling class, just outside the city. Even now, the SG still used the idioms and slang of the 1940s Raj, an affectation that he carefully, and secretly, cultivated by regularly reading P. G. Wodehouse novels.

Hussein’s comfortable world vanished in the violence of partition in August 1947. Families of mixed religious and ethnic heritage, like his, were often the first targets of extremists from both sides. The Husseins fled to Zurich, Switzerland, where Ahmad had business contacts who helped him obtain residence permits for everyone. Fearing the worst, Ahmad had already sent most of the family’s money out of India. But the bank was gone. So was their house in Delhi, their summer home in the mountains, all their wordly goods, apart from the contents of their suitcases. Worst of all, they lost Omar. He disappeared in the chaos at Delhi Station and was never heard from again. There was a photograph of Omar on Hussein’s desk: a skinny, bright-eyed boy, six years old, with a winning smile. Next to it was a framed half of a postcard of the Taj Mahal that had been torn in two. Even at the age of seven Fareed Hussein had already sensed the coming cataclysm. He had bought the postcard, solemnly torn it into two, and handed one half to Omar on the terrace of their Delhi villa one Sunday morning. The brothers had pledged to keep their halves for life if they were separated.

From Zurich, Hussein and his parents had eventually moved to London, where he studied at the London School of Economics. He worked as an investment banker in Frankfurt and New York, before joining the UN in the early 1990s as finance director of the UN Refugee Agency. His appointment had come out of the blue, as he had no experience with any humanitarian, public policy, or development organizations. But his opponents soon learned that his faux-aristocratic mannerisms hid a ruthless, silken operator. Hussein swiftly moved from finance to the far more glamorous and influential field of policy-making and began his steady ascent up the UN ladder. By the early 1990s he was assistant secretary-general in the Department of Political Affairs. The DPA was the most powerful UN department. It decided everything from which country’s cuisine would be featured in the week’s menu at the staff canteen, to the agenda of the Security Council meeting—which meant the DPA helped shape the superpowers’ response in a crisis. Most DPA officials dealt with a particular region of the world. But Hussein carved out a global role for himself, and quickly made a name as an intermediary between Britain, France, and the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other. Hussein soon became known across the organization for being an arch-conciliator. His prime concern always seemed to be keeping the P5 happy by avoiding anything that might run counter to their aims.

After the Department of Peacekeeping split off from the DPA in 1992, there were fears that the peacekeepers, newly emboldened by their own mini-empire, might take a more robust approach, open fire when threatened or obstructed, and prioritize saving lives over the UN’s fabled neutrality. Which is why the P5 ensured that Hussein, who had no military or peacekeeping experience, was appointed head of the new DPKO. Yugoslavia was ablaze and the Hutu
genocidaires
were already planning their mass slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, but Hussein’s primary concern, publicly at least, was to ensure that the neutrality of the UN, which he liked to describe as “sacred,” was not violated. Hussein made much of his personal history, and often referred to his own experience as a refugee in his speeches and articles. Several chapters of his memoir,
My Journey for Peace
, were devoted to the buildup to the partition of India, the explosion of violence, and the family’s subsequent life as refugees. Hussein had written movingly from the perspective of a young boy who sees his safe, secure world slowly starting to crumble around him.