Rules of Betrayal (20 page)

At two a.m., he slipped on a pair of leather gloves and pulled a balaclava over his face. He retrieved a P40 semiautomatic pistol from his glove compartment and screwed on a silencer. He set the gun on the seat beside him while he stuffed several pairs of flexicuffs and a roll of duct tape into his pocket. He checked his calf to make sure the KA-BAR knife was in its sheath. His only other tool was a pair of needle-nosed pliers. He’d learned long ago that simplest was best. Fingernails were very sensitive.

There was one last thing to do. Taking a vial from his jacket, he shook two small blue tablets into the palm of his hand. The tablets were Oxycontin, a synthetic morphine known on the street as “hillbilly heroin.” Using the vial, he crushed each tablet on a small vanity
mirror, then snorted them rapidly. An arctic rush spread through his limbs and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Time to rock ’n’ roll,” he whispered, and slid into the night.

The Ripper returned to his automobile a few minutes before three. He pulled off the balaclava and sat for a minute, gathering his breath.

“Raven, checking in,” he said into the encrypted phone.

“What do you have?”

“Connor wanted to see about the location of a B-52 that went down in 1984 somewhere in Pakistan. He said the bomber lost a cruise missile—a friggin’ nuke—and thought there might be some people trying to retrieve it.”

“A nuke? Was he able to find this missile?”

“No, ma’am. The pictures of the crash site taken twenty-five years ago were missing. But Malloy borrowed a KH-14 making a pass over the area and the bird spotted a recovery team in the vicinity of the crash site.”

“Real time?”

“Yes, ma’am. Malloy said the team had plenty of equipment and it looked as if they were getting ready to move out.”

“And Connor saw all this?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did Connor tell Malloy what he intended to do?”

“No. Malloy just said that Connor was real upset.”

“And did he tell anyone else about what he’d discovered?”

“Not while he was with Malloy.”

“Good.”

“And so?” asked Jake the Ripper, wiping the blade of his knife back and forth against his trouser leg. “What about Connor?”

“That’s the question,” said his superior, and for a rare moment the Ripper caught her accent. Working for a woman was bad enough, but for a foreigner, too, was damned near unimaginable. “What about him?”

Ashok Balfour Armitraj, better known
as Lord Balfour, sat in a cramped, untidy office on the second floor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, running his fingers along the razor-sharp creases in his trousers. He was hot and impatient and perilously close to losing a grip on his precious manners.

“The decision is final,” said the colonel with the immigration police. “Your permit has been revoked. You have thirty days to leave the country.”

“The entire matter is a misunderstanding,” said Balfour, for the umpteenth time. “I’m sure if you review my paperwork, you’ll see that I’ve received all necessary approvals. I was promised by the highest authorities that my stay was open-ended.”

With care, he removed a linen handkerchief from his jacket and wiped his brow. It had been a difficult day from the start. He had arrived at the meeting punctually at nine a.m., only to be kept waiting an hour without explanation or refreshment. When the meeting did begin, it was not with the usual simpering functionary who faithfully executed his superior’s orders but with a gold-frocked colonel who’d descended from his lofty perch on the top floor to deliver the bad news. For the better part of an hour, Balfour had been trying to talk sense to the man, all to no avail.

“I am the sole individual with the right to grant an open-ended residence permit,” said the colonel. “And I’ve never seen your papers before.”

“Be that as it may,” Balfour countered, light as ever, “promises were made. Assurances were given. I’ve made a sizable investment in your country.”

“And we’re grateful,” said the general, without the least sincerity. “But that does not change how things stand. You have thirty days.”

Balfour sighed and raised his hands. He did not like to pull rank, but it was clear he had no choice. “Perhaps we need to speak with General Gul.”

“General Iqbal Gul?”

“That’s correct. I made my agreement with him. The general is a personal friend.”

“That won’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“General Gul is no longer with the ISI.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Balfour. “Of course he’s with the ISI. He’s deputy director.”

The colonel leaned across the desk. “So you haven’t heard?”

“Heard what? Has something happened to him? Is he all right?”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about his health,” said the colonel. “General Gul is in prison. He was removed from his post one week ago.”

The room rocked beneath Balfour’s feet. “What for?”

“Bribery and corruption.”

Balfour looked at the documents on the desk in front of him. The stack was encyclopedic and contained the official history of his stay in Pakistan, down to the receipts for every niggling fee he’d paid to the state. Nowhere in the overflowing dossier, however, was there a receipt for the $1 million he’d paid General Iqbal Gul to gain residency or the monthly retainer of $50,000 he wired to Gul’s account in Liechtenstein to keep it.

Balfour leaned across the table and put his hand on the colonel’s arm. “Perhaps you and I might discuss this matter between ourselves. I’m certain we can find a mutually satisfactory agreement. May I suggest dinner this evening?”

The colonel’s stare did not waver. “Your status is no longer in my purview,” he said. “It has been taken up by the federal police. There is nothing more to discuss.”

Thirty days
.

Balfour thought of his home and his operations at the airports in
Islamabad and Karachi. Arms trafficking was not a cheap business to get into. He owned seven aircraft and maintained an entire workshop full of spare parts. If he left, he would lose them all. Not counting the amount he’d paid to Gul over the years, the loss would total in the tens of millions of dollars. Yet it wasn’t the money that upset him so and left his heart beating frantically. It was the thought of having to physically leave the country. Ashok Balfour Armitraj had nowhere else to go.

“Look here, colonel,” he said amicably, “my visa is good for another year.”

“Really? Valid for another year, you say?” The colonel met his smile with one of his own. “May I see your passport?”

Relieved, Balfour placed his Indian passport on the table. Finally he was getting somewhere. “I’ve another eleven months before it runs out.”

The colonel thumbed through the pages. The smile had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Finding the visa, he set the passport on the table, took a ruler from his desk, and, using it as a straightedge, ripped out the offending page.

“Hey!” shouted Balfour, rising from his chair. “What are you doing?”

The colonel crumpled the paper in his fist. “Your visa has expired.”

Standing, Balfour took back the passport and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “Do you know who I am?” he said, his face quivering with contempt.

“An embarrassment to the government of Pakistan. Good day.”

Frank Connor eyed his deputy
, Peter Erskine, with an unsettling suspicion. “We don’t have any other choice,” argued Connor. “We’ve got to run this op ourselves. No one else can act quickly enough.”

“Division is an intelligence agency,” replied Erskine, with the glacial cold that seemed to flow through his veins. “We are not a branch of the military.”

“We are a clandestine agency whose one and only mission is to insert operators into foreign territories—”

“To gather intelligence—”

“To safeguard our nation’s interest!”

The clock on the wall of Division’s operations center gave the time as one minute past four o’clock in the morning. Though nothing to compare to the size or sophistication of the ops center on the sixth floor of the Core at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the room boasted enough state-of-the-art equipment to meet all of Division’s needs and then some. Liquid crystal display monitors measuring sixty-two inches diagonally and only one-half inch in width covered one wall. A bank of sleek workstations lined another. A red telephone and a white telephone and a black telephone were embedded in the console, and each had its use. Connor and Erskine sat at opposite ends of the conference table in the center of the room.

“What you are proposing is a full-scale, overt, armed intervention outside a recognized theater of war,” said Erskine. “The minimum force requirement is an entire special operations team with air support. You might as well be ordering an invasion.”

“Less,” said Connor. “I need a squad of operators. Ten men. And
the missile is sitting in no-man’s-land, the northwest tribal territories. No one has sovereignty over it.”

“You’re missing the point, Frank. We’re not talking about blackmailing the dictator of Guinea-Bissau in exchange for some oil leases. This is a pressing national security issue.”

“You’re right. That’s why we can’t sit on our asses a second longer. This is actionable intel that requires an immediate response.”

“But not the response you’re thinking of.”

Connor cracked a can of diet soda and drank a slug. “Let me tell you what’ll happen once I breathe word of this up the official chain of command.”

Erskine looked away, a child who’d heard this lecture too many times already. “Please, Frank, I know …”

“Maybe so, but let me remind you. The first person I’m going to call is SecDef himself. The secretary will need a few minutes to wake up and process everything I’ve told him. I guarantee you he’ll call back an hour later and make me repeat the whole thing again. He’s an SOB, so naturally he won’t believe a word I say. He’s going to call the air force and ask if it’s in fact true that they lost a nuclear-tipped ALCM twenty-five years back. The air force will say, ‘No. Frank Connor is full of malarkey. The whole thing is complete and utter BS.’ But the secretary won’t stop there. He’s a politician from way back. To cover his ass, he’ll ring up the National Security Council and pass along my warning. The NSC is paid to be suspicious, so they’ll talk to the air force and yours truly before ringing up the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and running the scenario by him. You know what time it is by now?”

Erskine shrugged. “Noon.”

“Tomorrow at five p.m., earliest,” said Connor. “So anyway, the Joint Chiefs will call the air force themselves, and this time the flyboys will realize that we’re onto them. They’ll ask for time to conduct an internal investigation, which means everyone will start scrambling to see whose ass is in the ringer if they admit to losing the bomb. Finally they’ll realize that too many people are in the loop to make this thing disappear, and they’ll cough up some excuse about ‘possibly having
lost a weapon,’ but being certain that ‘if the weapon were lost, it was certain to be irretrievable.’ That’s another day gone by.

“At which point the Joint Chiefs will convene a crisis meeting in the Situation Room at the White House. The Oval Office will call me on the carpet and ask where in hell I came up with this information. I’ll tell them about Emma and Prince Rashid and about Congressman Grant’s confirming the missing bomb, and then we’ll all look at the satellite imagery and someone will ask how I managed to task a KH-14 satellite without a written order. And finally, after all this crap, I’ll have to identify Emma and admit that one of my agents has apparently lost her mind and is leading the team of bad guys up the mountain to retrieve the nuclear payload.”

Connor unbuttoned his collar and stretched his neck. His heart was beating a mile a minute, and his face felt flushed as red as a beefsteak tomato. “Four days from now, the president will authorize a strike. A SEAL team will go in and find absolutely nothing, because Emma will already have removed the payload, and if she’s smart—which we know she damn well is—she will have blown the rest of the missile to kingdom come. The president will call me over to the White House and personally fire me and shut down Division once and for all.”

“That’s a worst-case scenario,” said Erskine.

“No,” railed Connor. “The worst-case scenario is that Balfour gets the nuclear payload, the thing actually still works after all these years, and he sells all one hundred fifty kilotons of it to a group of bloodthirsty terrorists slobbering at the mouth to use it.” Connor slumped in his chair. “You know, I don’t even care if the president does fire me, but I’d like for him to do it after he authorizes a strike to stop Balfour from getting that WMD. She’s there, Pete. She’s up in those mountains making her way to the missile right this second.”

“Tell me this. Why is Emma helping him?”

Connor pushed himself out of his chair and circled the table. Gazing through the glass panel that made up one wall, he counted seven men and women hard at work. With a flick of a switch, the glass wall grew opaque. He looked over his shoulder. “One word: revenge.”

“For what?”

“Haven’t you asked yourself how Rashid knew about the gun?”

“He didn’t. He just assumed it was booby-trapped when the bullet backfired. We already know he’s paranoid—and with good reason.”

“Maybe,” said Connor, softly and with conviction. “Maybe not. But tell me how Rashid knew that she was a double agent working for us. I’ve been getting an earful from the FSB ever since. They’re threatening to expose the entire operation to the press unless we release two of their agents from custody.”

Erskine pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose as his brow worked furiously. Finally he raised his hands in defeat.

“Emma’s working with Balfour because she’s convinced we betrayed her,” said Connor.

“What you’re suggesting is impossible,” said Erskine. “Too few people knew.”

“It’s never impossible, Pete. If you start counting, at least twenty people knew of the op, one way or another.”

Erskine’s pale, boyish face grew flushed. Suddenly he flew out of his chair. “You don’t think it’s me?”