The Geneva Option Read online

  She picked up her drink and slowly inhaled its aroma. “It’s very good, the Gold Label. Much more complex than the black. There’s no whisky at The Hague’s detention center, of course. General Akunda’s trial starts next week. He is facing a life sentence. Would you like me to take him a message from you?” she asked, smiling brightly. Hakizimani did not answer.

  Her voice turned cold. “Professor. Be sensible. We know where your bases are, how many soldiers you have, where the mines are, and which airstrips you use to move the shipments out. We know who your business partners are in Kigali and Kinshasa, Paris, and Geneva. We can easily leak this information to the hundreds of journalists who cover the UN. The French and Swiss governments will feel obliged to take action. We even know who your bodyguards are and that you are increasingly worried about their loyalty. Which is why you just fired your security chief and appointed your cousin instead. Good move.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Or maybe not. You might like to ask your cousin how he paid for his new 1,600-square-foot apartment in the 6th arrondissement in Paris. But your more immediate problem is that President Freshwater is taking a special interest in your case.”

  Hakizimani sat up straight. “Why?”

  “It seems it’s personal. She is an old hand at African crises—a former US ambassador to the United Nations and assistant secretary of state for Africa. President Freshwater was a junior Rwanda desk officer at the State Department during the genocide. She wrote lots of long and detailed memos calling for US intervention. Nobody took any notice of her. But now, they do.”

  Yael paused. She had Hakizimani’s full attention now. “I can help you.”

  “I don’t need your help. I have read your so-called indictment,” he replied confidently, sitting back and crossing one leg over the other, as though he were holding a tutorial. “It is based on the incident at the Belgian Mission School in Kigali. The only one when UN aid workers were killed—by Tutsis of course, who then tried to blame us. The school was surrounded for hours. They were panicking inside, sending faxes, making telephone calls to the UN in Kigali, in New York, Geneva. Everyone knew they were dead men if they weren’t rescued. CNN and the BBC were reporting outside the gates. A dozen peacekeepers could have saved them. But they never arrived.”

  Hakizimani sat silently for a moment, staring into space as he drew on his cigarette. His eyes narrowed, his breathing deepened and sped up. Yael sat up, alert now. Her sixth sense—an acute sensitivity to other people’s moods—was in full flow. She could feel the memories coursing through his head. She sensed anger and indignation, the lies and denial blending and mutating into a righteous rage, one that could turn violent. Her adrenaline kicked in as she scoped the room. The door was several yards away and Hakizimani’s men were standing guard outside. His rage was surging and the window was too high to escape from.

  Hakizimani had insisted that Yael’s bodyguard, Joe-Don Pabst, a US Special Forces veteran, remained in the hotel reception area. Pabst agreed, on the condition that he could check the room for hidden weapons and frisk Hakizimani. Both were clean and Yael knew how to defend herself. But if the situation turned really nasty, even with Pabst on her side, there were just two of them against several SUV-loads of Hakizimani’s heavily armed militiamen. There was an escape protocol, of course, but even if Pabst radioed for help the UN helicopter would take several minutes to get there.

  Hakizimani stood up, his face twisted in anger. He lifted his hand and swept the ashtray off the table, together with the spilled whisky, ash, and cigarette ends. Yael flinched as the ashtray slammed into the wall and shattered, sending charred scraps of paper all over the floor. She visualized her possible moves as she eyed the ceramic fragments. They were thick and jagged and in easy reach. And she still had the pencil.

  Hakizimani sat back again and picked up his drink. “So put your UN on trial. Not me.”

  Yael felt his rage begin to dissipate. This was theater, all part of his negotiation.

  He gulped his drink, almost emptying the glass. “Explain to me what is so special about those UN workers? Hundreds of thousands of Africans are slaughtered here and the world does nothing. Renee Freshwater sent some memos. But when six Europeans get caught up in something they can never understand, then, then, we must have justice.” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  “Nine. Not six. Nine,” she said, calmly. She leaned down and picked up a shard of the broken ashtray.

  He laughed out loud. “Nine people. Blood flows here like a river and now the UN wants justice for nine people. Who is going to arrest me? You? The Congolese police? You think they don’t know I am here?”

  According to his indictment from the UN’s Rwanda tribunal, Hakizimani had organized competitions among his militiamen to see who could kill the most Tutsi prisoners with their machetes, while he and his commanders drank beer and placed bets on the outcome. Or they made their prisoners kill each other for sport. Fathers were forced to fight their own sons, brothers made to murder one another.

  But the Hutu kingdom of death was short-lived. By the summer of 1994 the Tutsis had invaded from Uganda and recaptured the country. The Hutu Genocidaires fled over the border to Congo’s refugee camps and jungles. Fed, housed, and protected by the UN and other aid agencies—who studiously ignored Rwanda’s protests—the Genocidaires regrouped, re-armed, and formed the Rwandan Liberation Front and carried on hunting and killing Tutsis.

  The fighting had continued ever since, as each side launched raids and reprisals back and forth across the border. The slaughter had reached new heights that month. More than two hundred Tutsis had been found dead, many floating in Lake Kivu, hacked to death. Then the word had come down from the superpowers on the UN Security Council to Fareed Hussein, the UN secretary-general: make this stop. Which was why Yael was sitting here negotiating with one of the world’s worst mass murderers.

  Hakizimani stood up and beckoned her to the window. She rose and walked over to him. He moved closer to her. Yael smelled the sharp tang of his sweat, the whisky, and cigarettes. Eau de Warlord, she thought, the same the world over.

  Hakizimani gestured at the view. “Look. Even the UN cannot change geography.”

  The room looked out over Lake Kivu. The water shone azure under the morning sun, its surface ruffled by the autumn breeze. Two Scandinavian aid workers in bikinis sunbathed on the beach, looking up as a Jet Ski roared past. The border crossing was a few hundred yards away. A line of SUVs and white UN Jeeps was backed up on the Congolese side, behind two red and white metal poles that reached across the middle of the road. Soldiers wandered back and forth, smoking and chatting. The blue, gold, and green flag of Rwanda sagged in the heat.

  The SUVs were emblazoned with aid organizations’ colorful logos. The vehicles slowly inched forward, their giant radio antennae wobbling as they bumped over the slabs of dried lava that still coated the road after Mount Nyiragongo had erupted years earlier. Some days it took five minutes to cross, others five hours. Goma had grown rich on the aid industry and was a long way from the capital Kinshasa. Visas, letters of introduction, and government permissions counted for nothing here. Whisky, cigarettes, and US dollar large-denomination bills did.

  Hakizimani spoke softly into her ear. “There it is. My homeland,” he said, gesturing at the frontier post. “Next time we will finish the job.”

  Two

  Yael stepped away from the window. Hakizimani was beginning to take control. That was OK to a point, but now it was time for her to assert herself.

  “Understand this, Professor, if nothing else,” she said, her voice cold now. “There will be no next time.” Only the deep lines around his eyes and the neatly trimmed black hair that was graying at the temple and sides showed his age. He could even be described as handsome, she thought. She softened her tone. “Professor, how long can you carry on living in the jungle? You are a graduate of the Sorbonne.”

  H
e smirked. “Yes.”

  “What exactly did they teach you there?”

  They sat back down, facing each other across the table. Hakizimani lit a cigarette, leaned back, and let the smoke trail through his nostrils. It was a posture of confident superiority. “Do you know what my family name means?”

  Yael shook her head.

  “ ‘God saves.’ But God does not save. Hate saves. That is what I learned. The power of hate,” he said calmly.

  Yael ignored the provocation and moved toward him, as if confiding some especially sensitive news. “Surrender, Professor, and you will take part in lengthy—very lengthy—peace negotiations under special UN license. You will live in five-star hotels. In Geneva or more likely, New York. It will be very pleasant. You will have a suite. Room service. A per diem. You can bring one or two advisers. A female secretary, some bodyguards. The negotiations will doubtless last several months, a year, perhaps more. Nobody will be in a hurry.”

  “And after?” he asked, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

  “You will be given a month’s notice, and then you will be arrested and put on trial. The charge of genocide will be reduced to crimes against humanity. There will be insufficient evidence that you ordered all the slaughter to take place. There will be problems with showing a chain of direct command and control leading back to you. A charge of genocide is hard to prove. There needs to be evidence of intent to exterminate.”

  “But that was our intent,” he replied, his voice matter of fact, as though ordering a pizza.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said reassuringly. “There will be insufficient evidence. You will blame your subordinates, whose excesses you tried to rein in.”

  “I did?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “That was good of me, non? And how long would I serve for being such a good man?”

  Yael began to relax and poured him some more whisky. When the target party queried the personal cost of a hypothetical compliance scenario, it meant progress was being made. It was a small step from “what if” to “when.” She saw Hakizimani’s body language change. He was leaning forward now, his hands resting together on the table with his fingers entwined. He was moving into her space, his eyes on her. That meant progress.

  She held his gaze, subtly harmonized her breathing with his, and mimicked his posture, moving toward him before she spoke. Their hands were just a few inches apart. “You will be sentenced to six years. There will be an international outcry, demands for a retrial, new charges to be brought. CNN and the BBC will broadcast extensive footage of the 1994 genocide, Tutsi survivors will demonstrate in Paris and Brussels, Rwanda will threaten to remove its soldiers from UN peacekeeping operations, the talking heads and analysts will pontificate. The UN Human Rights Commission will convene an emergency session in Geneva. America and Britain will ensure that the Commission passes a resolution condemning your weak sentence. France will abstain and the African and Arab states will vote against the resolution. All this will last about thirty-six, perhaps forty-eight, hours, we estimate, before the news circus moves on. It will certainly continue for longer in Africa, but that doesn’t really matter.”

  Yael paused and raised her glass to his. They clinked and she drank the whisky, feeling its warmth trickle down inside her, willing the alcohol to wash away her resentment. The scenario she outlined had been carefully planned out and forecasted by the SG’s staff, in conjunction with the P5, and was bound to be accurate. Everywhere else—Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, all the world’s hellholes—had so far followed the script drawn up in the SG’s suite on the 38th floor of the UN building on First Avenue. Congo would be no different. What was it the UN and the P5 diplomats called these planning sessions? “Gaming”—that was the word. Gaming the world.

  Yael was thirty-five years old and had worked for the United Nations for twelve years. She had brokered ceasefires in East Timor and Darfur, charmed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, and sweet-talked Shia insurgents in Iraq. She had once persuaded a teenage suicide bomber, caught by the Israelis at the Rafah/Gaza checkpoint, to disarm his bomb and surrender. But she had started as an administrative assistant in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, ensuring that officials’ reports and briefings followed the departmental line, were properly written in grammatical English, and were distributed on time to the relevant committees, department managers, and the Security Council.

  This demanded more than a good command of English. Like every organization, the DPKO was riven by turf wars, but in this case the stakes were the highest of all: superpower interests demanding war or peace. Passions ran high on the 37th floor, where decisions were made to send troops to battle and sometimes, inevitably, to die. There was grief and recrimination, often bitter. Quentin Braithwaite, a former British army officer on reassignment from the Ministry of Defense, had soon noticed Yael’s uncanny ability to defuse office departmental crises. Her sixth sense allowed her to see through to the heart of the matter and mediate between her UN colleagues, easing diplomatic tensions and even satisfying the honor of prickly male egos.

  From there she had been promoted to the operations room, the department’s nerve center, and soon started going out on field missions. In Afghanistan she caught the eye of Fareed Hussein, the secretary-general, who had made her his protégé, causing admiration and jealousy in equal measure among her colleagues. Her UN ID card said she was a political adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Her actual job had no title. Officially, it did not even exist. But it was known, where it needed to be, that she spoke for the SG, and that her word was as good as his. And that meant she also spoke for the P5, the permanent members of the UN Security Council: Britain, the United States, Russia, China, and France. She was the most powerful woman on the planet, as long as she stuck to the script. And once again, standing next to Hakizimani, she felt a familiar mix of triumph and self-disgust.

  She heard her voice outlining the terms of the deal to Hakizimani, but the words seemed to come out on autopilot. “You will only serve half of your sentence because of your remorse and your good behavior. In a Western prison—Paris, if you like. You will have your own cell, with a shower and an internet connection. Day release after a year. After which, relocation to America, France, or wherever you want. You can remarry, start a new family. You will have a house, a car, school fees paid for your children. You may even be able to come back here, if the peace holds.”

  Hakizimani nodded thoughtfully. “Anything else?”

  Yael reached down, picked up the leather bag, and placed it on the coffee table. Hakizimani reached for it but she pulled it back, out of his reach. She opened the zip and allowed him to look inside. His eyes opened wide at what he saw.

  “That will buy a lot of Gold Label,” said Yael, putting the bag back under the table.

  A low rumbling sound filled the room as Yael stopped talking.

  Hakizimani raised his head. “The volcano is angry. Show me your UN card, please.”

  She reached into her pocket and handed it to him.

  “Azoulay,” he said, frowning. “Where is your family from?”

  “Córdoba.”

  He looked at her face. “You are too tall and too pale for a Spaniard. And you have green eyes.”

  “The Azoulays left Spain in 1492, on a boat to Salonika in Greece. They moved to Baghdad in the nineteenth century. My father was born there, but by then Jews were not welcome anymore. They left for Israel when my father was a child.”

  “You were born in Israel?”

  “No, in New York. My mother is American. Her family was Hungarian. They left after the war. My father met her in New York and moved there, but they divorced when I was twelve and he went back to Israel. I lived with my father for a while. Then I came back to New York and studied at Columbia.”

  “And you speak?”

  “English, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Hebrew. Some Hungarian.”

 
; Hakizimani looked at Yael with interest. “A one-woman United Nations. How do you think of yourself?”

  Yael smiled wryly. “As a human being.”

  “Did you serve in the Israeli army?”

  She nodded. “I did my military service, yes.”

  “Which branch?”

  “I was a PA to a general,” she replied smoothly, still surprised at how easily the lie came.

  Hakizimani walked to the window and looked out over the lake. “I had three daughters.”

  “Tell me about them,” said Yael. Everyone loved to talk about their family. The human connection was the best lubricant for difficult negotiations.

  He took out his wallet and showed Yael a worn photograph, covered in sticky plastic film. Three bright and happy young faces grinned at the camera in their best dresses. “This is the only picture I have left. It was taken in March 1994 at Abigail’s sixth birthday party. They were clever girls. Abigail wanted to be a teacher. Fleur was eight. Fleur wanted to be a doctor. Valentina was eleven. A real idealist. She wanted to work for the United Nations, to save the world. Like you. Valentina survived for a few hours. She would be thirty now. Perhaps I would be a grandfather.” He looked away, his face twisted in anguish.

  Yael suddenly felt ashamed. “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “So am I.” Hakizimani carefully returned the photograph to his wallet. “Do you know Menachem Stein?” he asked, composed once again.

  She hesitated for a second before she answered. “No.”