The Geneva Option Read Online Free PDF Page A

right. Imagine how much of a better place this part of the world would be if there was a peace agreement here. Thousands, tens of thousands of lives saved. Stability. Education, economic growth. Mobile telephones for all.”
    Hakizimani bent down and took a handful of soil. “This land is rich, not just with coltan, but with gold, diamonds, the wealth of the world. Eastern Congo could be a shining example for the new Africa. All because of you, Yael.”
    He let the earth run through his fingers and took Yael’s hand. He stared at her face: “Your eyes are beautiful. Like a cat’s.”
    He stepped closer. “I am older now. I cannot promise seven times. But I will do my best.”

Three
    S ami Boustani leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, his head in his hands, his feet on his desk. The damp patch had spread along the grubby white plastic tiles. The electric cable poking through the dividers was drooping even lower and was covered in condensation. The neon tube buzzed and flickered. Despite his repeated calls to building maintenance, nobody had turned up to fix it. Sami was increasingly irritated at both the decrepitude and the size of his office. It was ten feet by ten, cold in the winter and a sweatbox in the summer. The reporters who worked at shared desks in the overcrowded press center considered him lucky to have any office. Instead, his workspace reminded him of the old joke about the two Jewish ladies on holiday in the Catskill Mountains: “The food here is terrible,” says one. “Yes, and such small portions,” her friend replies.
    Sami did not think himself to be an arrogant person. When he offered his thick, white business card—embossed with his name, the words “United Nations Correspondent” and the logo of the New York Times —to new contacts, he still felt the same thrill as when he joined the Gray Lady as a trainee a decade ago, fresh from Columbia University’s postgraduate journalism program. Still, modesty aside, surely the world’s most famous newspaper deserved something better than a tiny room in a distant annex of the press center, with a single cracked window that opened onto a ventilation shaft.
    Sami sat up and gulped some coffee. He had started work early today, and was sitting at his desk by 8:30 a.m. He wanted to dig deeper into the recent announcement that next year was to be the UN’s “Year of Africa.” The UN dedicated years for good causes as often as the fashion industry raised and dropped hemlines and usually with about as much effect. So far Sami had witnessed the years of water, education, and rice. Most people on the planet still lacked enough of all three. But there was something brewing in, or around, Africa, especially central Africa, he sensed. He opened a new browser window, pulling up the story he had written for today’s paper: “Genocide Suspect Offered Shorter Sentence, Insider’s Memo Alleges.”
    He read it again and then jumped to the UN website, biting into his bacon-and-egg sandwich while reading the publicly available sections of the SG’s diary. As usual, the staff meeting was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. Sami guessed that Yael must have been called in to see the SG first thing this morning, or even last night when his story went up on the website. There was no doubt that the SG would have gone ballistic.
    Sami had worked as a reporter covering Congress in Washington and Parliament in London, but he had never known anywhere like the United Nations’ New York headquarters. It was a journalist’s heaven, a modern-day fusion of the court of the Borgias and the last days of the Roman Empire, all conveniently hosted in a thirty-eight-story skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. It was the single most important building in the world, where wars were started, peace treaties brokered, and the fate of the planet decided—a lumbering, uncoordinated, bureaucratic