State of Honour (31 page)

“Why?” Tom said, his voice tremulous.

“Why? You haven’t worked it out yet, Tom?” the woman replied.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, wondering whether his eyes were playing tricks. He still felt nauseous, and cold sweat beads had broken out on his skin.

“I’m a patriot, just like you.”

“ISI. You ISI?” he asked, knowing that, despite the shock to his system of her deception, he had to focus now. Hard.

She grinned.

“You’re one piece of work,” Lester said.

“That from a thug with a dishonourable discharge,” she said, her face full of contempt.

Lester looked at Tom. Tom knew what that look meant. He nodded. They had very little time to find the secretary now and he wasn’t in the mood to go through the motions. If, in fact, she was still alive.

Lester shot the woman in the foot.

She screamed. “You bastard. You shot my foot.”

“I’ll work my way up,” he said.

“You haven’t asked me anything, you jerk,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Shoot her in the shin, Lester,” Tom said, figuring she’d crack before he’d have to.

“Wait!” she said, putting up her hand.

“The secretary?” Tom asked.

“Just give me a second.”

Something clicked. “That helo is heading to the airfield with the secretary on board. I’m right, ain’t I?”

Tom knew most helicopters had limited capabilities in terms of height and distance. If they wanted to take her to somewhere remote abroad, they’d need a plane. Lester’s plane. He discounted the possibility of a midair refuelling linkup, although he’d seen it done once or twice.

“I’m right, yes,” he said.

She nodded.

“She plan on killing us at the airfield?” Lester asked.

“Yeah, I reckon. Is Proctor on there with her?” Tom asked.

“Yes,” she said, breathing heavily, grasping her shattered foot.

“Why?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Shoot her in the head, Lester.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, holding up her hand again. “A clean-up.”

Tom winced. The woman was an ISI operative. He realized that she’d wanted him to find the secretary, since the ISI wanted to cover their tracks and kill everyone who might point the finger at them. And that meant him and Lester, too.

“Where’s he planning on taking her now?”

She fell silent again.

Lester raised his SIG.

“Yemen. She will be flown to Yemen,” she said, miserably.

“And murdered?” Tom asked. “Filmed?”

She nodded.

“Your real name?”

“Major Durrani.”

“How the hell did you know I was linking up with Lester?”

“Steve Coombs. He bugged your phones and computers. When you rang Brigadier Hasni, I got involved.”

Tom got out and ripped off the arm of his shirt. He opened the passenger door and, after shrinking back at first, she allowed him to lift her off the seat. He turned and lowered her onto the grass verge, saying nothing. Bending over her, he used the cloth to stem the flow of blood before taking out a phial of morphine and a hypodermic syringe from her bag in the trunk and handing it to her. Being a trained medic was probably the only truth she had spoken to him when he’d let her join up.

Lester got out and came around to the verge just as she injected herself. “Why don’t we trade her skinny ass for the secretary?”

She laughed, mockingly. “They’ll let me die. They’d let a hundred like me die to keep her.”

“We gonna just leave her here?” Lester asked.

“She sure as hell ain’t going anywhere,” Tom said. “The French will deal with her.”

“Whatever you say, Tom.”

He looked down at her. “Why did you give me the name of the wrong chateau at the diner?”

“So the French were sent to the wrong place. I didn’t know they’d find out the right place as quickly as they did.”

“But we would’ve ended up at the wrong place, too.”

“You thought I was smart, Tom. I am. I would have gotten us to the right place before the French.”

“And when we didn’t?”

She inhaled deeply. “I texted Proctor. Told him where you were meeting the DCRI operatives. His men killed them and waited for you. I had to hope that you and Lester would kill them in turn before they killed you. I have to think on my feet, you see. Least I did before your attack dog shot me. As I said, I’m a patriot. The Iranians would gladly slaughter my people. I can’t allow that to happen. The secretary was the only way.”

Tom ordered her to hand over her cell, which she did. He checked the sent box, saw the text she’d sent Proctor, before removing the SIM card and battery and throwing them over the hedge that abutted the verge.

“Let’s get outta here, Lester. The air stinks,” he said.

Walking to the car, Tom guessed she was probably telling the truth. But she would’ve killed him and Lester with the Ruger, of that he had no doubt.

As Tom drove off Lester said, “Upside, Karen ain’t dead. Downside, Karen ain’t Karen. But you never did have much luck with the ladies, did ya, Tom? Maybe you should ditch the Buddhism shit and become a Mormon or somethin’.”

Tom felt like exploding, but stopped himself. He knew it was the way military types like Lester dealt with situations like this. The black humour was a way of keeping their heads straight.

“Did you know her well?” Tom asked.

“I knew of her. She contacted me for a job. I said that I had something and she talked me into it.”

“Jesus, Lester.”

Lester held up his good hand. “You fell for it, too, am I right?”

“I guess.”

“Still, that was some make-up job. Had me fooled.”

Tom recalled someone saying that the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies had teams of graphic artists who designed disguises for operatives in the field. They had to be good enough to pass close scrutiny and, if necessary, save their lives. At firsthand, he had to admit that the deception had been complete. After he’d told Lester what he’d remembered, he realized that if he hadn’t asked her about the watch, he wouldn’t have known.

“You’re driving too fast,” Lester said.

“I’m only doing seventy.”

“Like I said. She do the switch when you was fighting, Tom?”

“Yeah. That’s why Proctor wanted to dance to music. That’s why he wanted to leave the secretary in the cell and why the major wanted me to cover her face. I reckon she drugged her or just knocked her out before putting her in the hall,” Tom said, speeding up.

“After what she said, does that mean the CIA guy is off the hook?”

Tom thought about it. She had set the DCRI operatives up. Not Crane. But he just didn’t know the answer to that question.

The Asr, an imam’s late-afternoon recorded call to prayer, played out from atop an ancient sandstone minaret. It could be heard for miles across Ta’if in eastern Saudi Arabia. As the sun baked the aerial-ridden flat roofs Dan Crane left a cab and walked across a marble-tiled quadrangle decorated with date palms and water features. He wore a pair of taupe-coloured pants and a matching sports jacket, and was carrying an empty black-leather sports bag.

When he reached the revolving doors of the local branch of the Arab National Bank, the doorman nodded to him, a wry smile crossing his lips. Crane was sweating like a steelworker.

At a private booth, he handed over his passport to a female teller and accepted a glass of water. Ten minutes later, he placed the crisp stacks of hundred-dollar bills into the bag, his arm dropping down under the weight as he lifted it off the table, even though he was only carrying a tenth of what had been deposited for him. The money had been transferred there by the ISI, and everything had been in order.

Leaving the bank, he felt the damp patches under his arms begin to seep sweat. The air was still and dusty, the temperature in the early hundreds. Walking slowly to the kerb, he saw a black Lexus with tinted windows cut out from behind a parked truck and race towards him. The front passenger window was down, a handgun just visible as it got level with him. He struggled to lift the bag in front of his face and took two rounds in the chest before toppling over. As the car screeched away a small crowd gathered around his still body.

Across the street, a Pakistani core collector dressed as a local in a dishdasha and keffiyeh headdress lowered his cellphone, having just videoed what had transpired. Ten seconds later, he emailed it to the ISI HQ in Islamabad.

At the Saudi Embassy in Islamabad, Hasni sat opposite the ambassador, who’d told him that the ISI had done well. Well! Hasni thought. His people had killed a wealthy arms manufacturer, Swiss, and worst of all, as far as he was concerned, a top CIA man, Crane. He could think of a lot of words to describe what had happened, but that adverb wasn’t one of them.

The two men drank coffee and discussed their families then, but Hasni’s mind was on other things.

The Saudis had risked a lot. He’d wondered at first why they’d decided to go down this route. Then it had struck him. The Shia-Sunni civil war in Iraq was going one way. The Shias would win within a few months. That meant that allied to having Iran facing them just across the Persian Gulf, the Saudis would have the Shias stretched across their northeast border. Despite his innate intelligence and grasp of international affairs, he had no idea of the Chinese dimension, and probably would have dismissed it even if a Saudi asset had whispered it to him. He trusted the Saudis on their rationale for the secretary’s abduction, if nothing else.

The threat of the Iraqis pouring jihadists and ordnance over the border had sent the Saudis into overdrive, he thought, fearing their own country would erupt into civil war as half the Middle East had already. Cutting off the head of the Shia snake was the only way to ensure the body died.

Ten minutes later, as Brigadier Hasni left the embassy en route to his meeting with Mullah Kakar at his home in the Blue Area, he saw an elegant young woman walking along the sidewalk, whom he took for a well-educated Pakistani citizen. She reminded him of his daughter, Adeela. She wore a turquoise pantsuit and a silk hijab, her gold jewellery shimmering in the sunlight. As the door to his armour-plated limo opened she appeared to trip on a groove between the paving stones, her ankle twisting.

Leaving his bodyguards standing still, he rushed over to her and helped her to her feet. She smiled and thanked him. It was only a second or two later that he realized he’d pricked himself, probably on a brooch or hem pin, he imagined. Maybe even a sharp edge on a piece of her expensive jewellery.

As the limo drove off, sandwiched between four SUVs, a dozen police motorcyclists front and back, he rubbed the mark, which had started to turn red, a circle about the size of a dime. It itched like crazy. Twenty seconds later, he felt nauseous. A minute after that, he was throwing up and sweating. A bodyguard told the driver to head for the nearest hospital. Hasni held his chest, thought he was having a heart attack. Two minutes later, he died of cardiac arrest.

The woman was an operational officer in Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, the Saudi secret service. In a secluded alley, shaded from the sun, she took out an adapted cellphone and rang the Saudi ambassador.

“Plato will die of a heart attack, if he hasn’t already,” she said, using the pro-word for Brigadier Hasni.

“And the mullah?” the ambassador asked.

“His body already covers half the street.”

Proctor had landed the helicopter in a grass field opposite the small airfield, and had carried the secretary over to the metallic-black Ford Fusion parked in an adjacent lane. The helicopter had been situated behind a barn at the end of the chateau’s three-acre, ornate garden. Ostensibly, it was to be used to evacuate his men as soon as the secretary’s murder had been carried out.

After driving the short distance to the airfield, he saw the pilot and the co-pilot, whom Lester had hired, standing outside the business jet. They were drinking coffee poured from a stainless-steel Thermos. He heard the secretary reviving on the back seat, mumbling something that sounded like a prayer or some words from the Bible. He’d revived himself with what had been left of the smelling salts that he’d used on her. He wasn’t as badly injured as he’d made out after the Yank had eased off, but for a moment he’d actually thought he was going to die. And yet it had all fallen into place. The man just couldn’t do it, and apart from the money that he’d received from Swiss already, Brigadier Hasni had promised him twice as much again. That and his life.

The substitute pilots would be waiting in the hangar. A couple of Pakistanis. Not ISI operatives, but ex-Air Force down on their luck, who had driven the fifty miles from Paris once Major Durrani had texted him from the States, confirming that they had air transport.

He drove up to the parked jet and got out. The two flight crew looked at one another.

“There’s been a change of plans,” he said.

“The hell are you?” the co-pilot said, a thickset man with pallid skin and a bald head.

Proctor pulled out his handgun still fixed with a laser sight, together with an added suppressor, and poleaxed him with a head shot. The pilot, a younger man wearing shades, dropped his cup of coffee.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

The round hit him in the throat and he fell on top of the co-pilot. Proctor popped the trunk and heaved both men in before driving back to the hangar, as casually as a man about to go on vacation.

As he reached the hangar, its curved roof painted a dull green, two Pakistani men dressed as civilian pilots stepped out, looking a little too nervous for his liking. But there was nothing to stop the secretary being flown to Yemen where she’d be beheaded. Later than planned, given Tom Dupree’s interference. But late or not, if that didn’t go viral on the Internet, he didn’t know what would. Besides, the major would have dispatched Dupree and his black sidekick by now. She’d drive back to Paris in the Ford, where’d she take a scheduled flight to Islamabad, dumping all four bodies en route.

His cellphone rang, a number he didn’t recognize. He hesitated before taking the call.

“Brigadier Hasni has been assassinated in Islamabad,” a woman’s voice said.

“What the fuck…?Who is this?”

“A water lily,” the woman said, the agreed code for a friend.

“Okay.”

“You will proceed as planned,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Who killed him?”

“A Shia bitch.”

By the time Tom and Lester reached a small yew tree sunk into the hedge abutting the airfield, the jet was rising towards a mud-grey cloud miles in the distance. Tom cursed under his breath, slamming the butt of the MP7 into the tangle of bushes. With that, Lester slumped to the ground. Tom dropped the MP7 and crouched down beside him, cradling his head.

“I’m sorry, Tom.” Lester’s voice was wheezy and a sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. He was struggling to find breath, his face contorting.

Tom put his hand over his friend’s wound, but the blood seeped between his fingers, black-red and pus-like. “Stay with me, Lester.”

Lester’s eyelids were fluttering and he was clearly close to unconsciousness. Tom knew that if he didn’t get his friend to a hospital soon, he’d bleed out. He pulled out his cell and called 112, the French equivalent of 911. He gave the operator their location and was told that a hospital-based ambulance would be on its way in less than five minutes. The ETA was thirty-five minutes.

After making Lester as comfortable as he could, covering his body with a blanket and giving him some water from a plastic bottle that was in the trunk of the Land Rover, Tom called Vice Admiral Birch and filled him in on the details. The head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security simply listened until Tom finished. Tom had expected him to bark a string of expletives down the cell before telling him to turn himself in to the US Embassy in Paris. To his surprise, he didn’t.

“I’ll divert the SEAL platoon,” Birch said, calmly, referring to the US Navy’s Sea, Air, Land Teams, and principal Special Operations Force since their inception in the Vietnam War. “You
will
wait there until they arrive.”

Tom had no idea what a SEAL team were doing on French soil. “What about the French?” he asked, more than a little fazed.

“POTUS pulled in a favour from his French counterpart. The SEALs were on a joint training exercise with the British SBS,” Birch said.

Tom knew the Special Boat Service was the Royal Navy’s Special Forces unit, made up almost entirely of Royal Marines.

“The SEALs were going to liaise with French Special Forces and help out,” Birch went on. “But they ain’t carrying weapons. The French President was worried about political fallout if they killed French citizens. I guess, after what you’ve just said, I better tell her that three of her DCRI operatives are dead.”

“Can we get them to intercept the jet?”

“It’ll be outside their airspace by now. And why would it land? Those onboard know we won’t order it shot down.”

“What about Crane?” Tom asked.

“He’s dead, too. Killed in Saudi Arabia while collecting his blood money from a bank.”

Tom was stunned by Birch’s statement, taking a few seconds to focus. “Blood money?”

“He turned a CIA asset over to the ISI.”

Tom couldn’t help feeling sad that Crane had turned out to be a traitor, despite his previous suspicions. He swallowed hard as he joined the dots. “What was his name, sir?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’d like to know, that’s all.”

“Sandri Khan. Crane got half a million dollars for betraying him. Khan was the one who told us where Lyric was being held in Karachi. I guess that signed his death warrant.”

“Who killed Crane?”

“ISI,” Birch said. “So stick with the SEALs. They’re just about the only people you can trust right now.”

Tom clenched his teeth, feeling rotten. Khan had saved his life and Crane had turned him over to be murdered at the hands of butchers. At least I have an answer, he thought. But it all seemed irrelevant now, given that he’d failed to save the secretary’s life. He guessed she was on the way to Yemen, just as the ISI major had said. He sank to his knees, watching Lester cough up blood.