Free The Washington Stratagem by Adam LeBor

the room. She could not believe how nervous she felt. Not because of the two men who had been following her. This was a different kind of nervousness to that which she had felt at the Prometheus Group: the kind she had not felt since she was a teenager, about to go out on her first date with Eli Harrari, the school heartthrob. He had taken her to the cinema, to see Thelma and Louise . They had held hands and she had cried at the end. They went to a café on Dizengoff Street afterward, to eat ice cream, and then down to Tel Aviv beach to watch the waves. Eli Harrari. Her first love. They were together for almost five years, had trained together, lived together in a crummy one-room apartment in south Tel Aviv.
    She had thought about marrying him. Until the day when she knew she would resign and return to the United States. She had tried to persuade him to come with her. Eli had laughed in her face. “You should be proud, not ashamed, of what you have done,” he had said. They were the elite, chosen to serve their country. A country at war, with enemies who did not stick to any kind of rules. This was a rough neighborhood, not a cricket match. “He was a child,” she had replied. Fourteen years old. Eli had shrugged. It was regrettable —that was the word he had used—but they needed to move on, not focus on the casualties. The casualties. Sometimes she woke at dawn, scared that she too had become one.
    Yael had built a wall around herself. She could never discuss the real nature of her work, and certainly not with another UN member of staff. At first she had been invited to her colleagues’ birthdays and celebrations and parties, but as her career progressed she found such occasions increasingly awkward. Everyone was intrigued about what she actually did. The Secretariat Building was a hothouse of gossip and intrigue. They wanted details. Yael didn’t want to lie and she didn’t want to stonewall. So in the end it seemed easier just to refuse the invitations, which dried up anyway. She became used to being alone, or meeting her needs through dead-end flings. But now, she realized, she did not want to grab brief solace in a tent on a mountain in Afghanistan, or even a suite booked for the afternoon in a five-star hotel in Manhattan. She did not want to be alone anymore. She wanted to trust someone.
    She walked into her bedroom and checked herself again in the mirror. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was gathered up in a ponytail. She wore a black dress, fitted but not too tight, with a scoop neck that showcased her slim figure, a single strand of her grandmother’s pearls, and black sandals. A light, clear lip gloss accentuated her wide, sensual mouth; a subtle application of mascara highlighted her green eyes. She grimaced at herself in a parody of a smile and moved her face nearer the mirror, turning from side to side. The lines around her eyes and mouth seemed slightly deeper. She looked closer. Shadows, she told herself, a trick of the light.
    Satisfied, more or less, with what she saw, she walked out and picked up the ice bucket holding the white wine. She poured some into a glass, lifted it to her mouth, then put it back down. She could wait, and she would wait. She checked the food again. Her signature dish of maqluba —a spicy mix of chicken, rice, and vegetables—was cooked and keeping warm in the oven under a lid to stop it drying out; the salads were in their bowls in the fridge, covered with plastic wrap and ready to go. She took the bottle of champagne out of the freezer, checked it was cold enough, and placed it in the fridge door. Maqluba meant “upside down” in Arabic, and the flipping of the pot over a serving plate to display the dish the right side up was always a moment of great theater.
    She grabbed a packet of Marlboro Lights on the sideboard. She usually only smoked on missions abroad. Cigarettes were a useful icebreaker, before negotiations began. She lit one, took a drag, then immediately