Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

Haq sliced open a plastic-wrapped brick with his long curling fingernail and scooped out a pile of the brown base. One snort confirmed that the quality was exceptional. The pain from his burns subsided, and a sense of contentment took hold. He was tempted to take more, but discipline forbade him. He must ration the drug carefully, lest he become an addict like the production master. He would not shame his father so.

Haq chopped the block into quarters and slipped one into the folds of his jacket. It would provide useful in the coming days. A balm for his pain, so he might concentrate on more important matters.

A television was playing in a corner. Three addicts sat on the floor, entranced. Haq approached. “What are you watching?”

“Gangsters in America,” said one.

Haq picked up a DVD cover off the floor. “Scarface,” he said aloud. “Good?”

“Very. The Americans like drugs.”

Haq stared at the screen. A man was chained to a curtain rod in a shower. Another wielded a chain saw. The opium in his system combined with the violent sound and images to transport him to another place. He was not home, but far away. He was at Gitmo. The room at Camp X-Ray was hot and smoky and smelled of sweat and vomit. A circle of anxious, well-fed faces surrounded him. A television blared in one corner. The same film always played. Three happy sailors cavorting across Manhattan, singing and dancing in their white uniforms. The volume was turned up very loud to drown out the unpleasant noises.

The questions began.

“Tell us what you were doing in Kunar Province during the months of July through November 2001.”

“I sell carpets. Persia. Isfahan. Very good quality.”

“Horseshit, Muhammad. You couldn’t tell a good carpet from a used shit rag.”

“Yes, sell carpets in Kabul.”

“Then why did we pick you up two hundred miles north of Kabul along with five hundred soldiers fighting for Abdul Haq?”

“Abdul Haq? I do not know this man. I travel. I sell carpets. I with him for safety. I no fighter.”

“A big strong brute like you, not a fighter?”

“I sell carpets.”

“Horseshit.”

“We heard you’re his son. Admit it.”

“No. Only sell carpets.”

And then the hood fell over his face and he was tipped backward and the water flowed into his face and he could not breathe.

And always when the hood was removed, there was the television blaring down at him, mocking him, mocking his culture. The three sailors singing and dancing merrily across New York.

He saw this forty-seven times.

Finally the red-faced men from the CIA believed him. By then he knew New York City well. The Bronx was up and the Battery down. And he despised it.

Haq felt someone nudge his shoulder, and the old, frightening images fled from his mind. He turned and looked into the toothless face of the production master. “Well?”

“Two days to finish,” said the production master.

Haq eyed the ziggurat of bricks stacked in the center of the room. He calculated there were approximately four thousand kilos, wrapped, weighed, and ready for shipment. With shrewd negotiation he might sell the lot for as much as $10,000 a kilo. Forty million dollars was not a princely sum. It was a conqueror’s sum. And he would use it to drive the crusaders from his land.

“Have the entire supply ready by then. I will be back the day after tomorrow.”

“How high up is it?” asked Emma.

“Six thousand meters,” said Lord Balfour.

“How was it found?”

“A local came across it.”

“What?” asked Emma with irritation. “He stepped outside his hut and tripped over it? You’re not talking to one of your toadies anymore. I need specifics.”

Balfour started out of his chair, only to catch himself. “He was traveling home from his father’s village on the other side of the pass. He made camp and came across it as he was collecting snow to melt for water. There had been an avalanche, and he saw the guidance fins protruding from the icefall several hundred meters up the slope. People here are ignorant, not idiots. He knew that something of that nature might be worth a lot of money. When he returned home, he told his brother. They took a picture of the missile and brought it to the regional boss of Chitral. The man is a friend of mine. He knew I would be interested.”

“That’s more like it,” said Emma.

“I’ll thank you to watch your tone.”

“I’ll thank you to answer me properly.”

It was midafternoon. The day was clear and warm, the air dry as a bone, the kind of day that the north of Pakistan produced in abundance in late fall. She sat in a high-backed leather armchair in Balfour’s study, with a cup of Darjeeling tea to keep her awake and a bottle of Vicodin to kill the pain. Balfour had other, more potent remedies should she need them. If weapons were his first love, narcotics came a close second.

He called his estate Blenheim, and Blenheim it was. Oriental carpets covered the parquet floor. There were Regency desks and Gobelin tapestries and life-sized oils of long-deceased (and surely unrelated) ancestors staring down from walnut-paneled walls, pretending to be Sargents or Gainesboroughs. Every time she glanced out the window, she expected to look upon the rain-swept hillocks of Oxfordshire. Instead she was granted a breathtaking view of the violet-hued mountains of the Hindu Kush.

“So no one else knows about the find?” Emma continued.

Balfour shook his head.

“You’re certain?”

“This is Pakistan. Certainty is not a word to us. We make do with ‘probably’ and hope for the best.”

Emma rose from her chair. “Show me the rest of the pictures.”

Balfour laid a series of eight-by-twelve color photographs on his desk. They showed the missile fully uncovered from a variety of angles.

“Six four seven alpha hotel bravo.” She read the identification number painted on the cruise missile’s belly. “You know what this is?”

“It’s an air-launched cruise missile manufactured by the Boeing Corporation circa 1980. Weapons are my business.”

“I mean what these numbers denote.” Emma pointed to a photograph showing a close-up of the missile where the identification number was clearly visible. “Designation ‘alpha hotel bravo.’”

Balfour sipped tea from his Wedgwood cup. “It is the American designation for a nuclear-tipped weapon,” he said, looking at her from under his brow. “Does that cause you any concern?”

“Why should it? Weapons are my business, too.”

Balfour threw his head back and laughed richly, his theatrical laugh. “I knew I was right to come for you. You and I are a match made in heaven.”

“Really?” said Emma. “I’d have thought it was more the other place.”

Balfour laughed louder.

Emma nearly smiled, feeling something close to fondness for the man. A little more than a week earlier, she’d never been happier to see anyone in her entire life.

After her beating at the hands of Prince Rashid, she’d lain in the desert for hours, broken in body and spirit. It was not only the pain of her injuries that left her without hope, but the circumstances of her betrayal. Over and over she’d played Rashid’s words in her mind. “Who do you work for? The CIA? The Pentagon?” It was Connor’s doing. There was no one else to blame. It was anger that drove her to her feet, to deny the impossibility of her situation. She hadn’t sacrificed so much to die alone in a foreign land. It wasn’t right. Not for all she had done. Not for a woman in her condition. She’d made it fifty steps before Balfour arrived, and she didn’t know if she could have made it one more.

He’d flown her to Pakistan aboard one of his jets. He’d seen to it that she received medical care and proper rest. But all the while she’d known there would be a price.