Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

The photograph showed a tall, lanky man in jeans and a parka carrying a rucksack. Dark hair with a hint of gray, strong nose, sturdy lips, and black eyes that made her look twice.

“Rather on the intense side, isn’t he?” said Emma as she slid the picture across the table. “He looks more like a student than a surgeon.”

“He’s finishing up a fellowship at Oxford in plastic surgery. Apparently he’s the real deal. Has offers from hospitals all over England and the States.”

“Is he one of us?”

“Good Lord, no,” said General John Austen, the air force two-star who had stood up Division several years before. “And we don’t want him to be. He just turned in his application to work for Doctors Without Borders.”

Emma took back the picture. “A do-gooder?” she said, not entirely trusting.

“Aren’t we all?” Austen opened a file on his desk. “We want you in Nigeria. The deputy minister isn’t playing ball. He’s making noise about terminating some contracts with our friends in Houston. Thinks his country is more than capable of drilling their own oil and seeing it to market.”

“And I’m going to convince him otherwise?”

“Either that or kill him,” said Austen.

“Come now, General, you don’t mean that.” It was the other man in the room who spoke. The fat one who insisted on wearing short-sleeved shirts and was constantly perspiring. Emma remembered his name: Frank Connor. “The deputy minister has been dipping his finger in the till for quite some time now. We’d like you to collect evidence of his greed and remind him where his true interests lie.”

“Or else I’ll provide the information to the prime minister,” said Emma, “who’ll string him up with piano wire and cut off his balls with a rusty knife.”

Connor frowned. “Accurate and persuasive.”

“I still say we kill him,” said John Austen. “But I will defer to Frank, seeing as how this is his operation.”

Connor went on: “We’re putting you into Doctors Without Borders a month ahead of Ransom. We’ve wrangled you a job as a mission administrator. Basically, you’ll run the whole show. Don’t worry, we’ve got a few weeks to bring you up to speed. Get close to Ransom and we’ll fix a transfer for him to Lagos. The Lagos mission is staffed by locals, so it’s imperative that Ransom request that you accompany him. No one’s going to be looking at a doctor and his trusted colleague.”

Emma didn’t like Africa. It was too hot, too humid, and had far too many creepy-crawlies. “How long?”

“Start to finish? Two months in Liberia. It’s up to you to see how quickly you can get the job done in Nigeria. Best case, six months.”

“And after?”

“The usual. You break it off with the doc. We pull you out. Take sixty days and go lie on a beach somewhere.”

Emma looked at the photograph again, and she felt a current pass through her. Ransom was handsome, to be sure. But there was something about him that disturbed her. It was his eyes. Like her, he was a believer. And so he was dangerous. At once she warned herself to be wary of him. Six months was a long time. “Where did you find him?”

Austen took back the picture and slid it into his file. “None of your business.”

The helicopter landed on a rock-strewn plateau at 4,500 meters. Emma shouldered open the door and jumped to the ground. The cold hit her like a hammer. To the east, a track of cumulus clouds streamed past the summit of Tirich Mir. During the hour’s flight, the sky had turned a curdled gray. Heavy weather was approaching.

Emma dug the Magellan GPS out of her pack. The device put the distance to the bomb at twenty-two kilometers. But that did not take into consideration the 1,500-meter gain in elevation, the lack of a well-marked trail, or, most trying of all, the thin air. Alone, she might cover that stretch in six hours. She looked over her shoulder at the porters unloading the equipment. Each would carry a load weighing forty kilos. They would be fine. Near them stood the two engineers, batting their arms for warmth. One took a few steps, then bent double and put his hands on his knees. They would not be fine.

Emma walked to the guide. “Get those men some oxygen,” she said. “And tell the porters to hurry. We move out in twenty minutes.”

She watched the guide run off, then turned her attention back to the darkening sky.

Trouble.

“You have thirty seconds to walk into a room and commit everything you notice to memory,” said Danni.

“Like what? The color of the curtains? Kind of bedspread? I don’t get it.”

“Both of those. But also the location and type of desk. Do the drawers have locks? What’s on the counters? How do the windows open? Is there an alarm system? Anything that your instincts tell you is important.”

Jonathan stood next to Danni on the front steps of a run-down villa in the hills above Herzliya. It was past two in the afternoon. The morning’s robin’s-egg blue sky had given way to sodden gray clouds. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and raindrops had begun pelting his cheek. Mentally he prepared himself for the task at hand. Closing his eyes, he willed his mind to become a blank slate able to capture everything it saw. He drew a breath and ordered himself to be calm. But all the while a voice shouted in his head: “You have to do better!”

The morning’s work had been an unmitigated disaster. Danni had run him through five more courses. The route varied, but the objective remained the same. Spot the four tails. Each time, he had failed. His senses weren’t as dull as a butter knife. Sandstone was more like it.

Danni opened the door and led him into a foyer with concrete floors, a high ceiling, and paint chipping off the walls. They ascended a flight of stairs and stopped at the first room on the right. “Thirty seconds.”

Jonathan opened the door and stepped inside.

The room was pitch black.

Panicked, he ran a hand over the wall until he found the light switch. The question was whether to turn it on. He decided he must, or what was the point? He flicked the switch, and a bulb hanging from a threadbare wire threw a weak light around the room. Should he move or stay still? He took a step, and the floorboard groaned loudly enough to be heard in Syria. There was a king-sized bed with a ratty cover and four filthy pillows. There were two night tables with several books stacked on each. A chintz sofa took up one corner, a standing mirror another. He took another step, and the ungodly floor creaked even louder. If he were being judged on stealth, he had failed already. For some reason he found himself staring at the curtains, which were purple with green polka dots. At the far end of the room sat an imposing desk with lion’s paws for feet. He tried to see if it had locks, but the light was too dim, and the sensitive floorboards left him nervous about making so much noise. So far he’d seen nothing of the least interest to an intelligence agent.

Frustrated, he decided to forget about the creaky floor and set off on a circuit of the bedroom. He rushed to the desk and tried the drawers. All were locked with an old-fashioned key. There was a television with some papers on top of it, and next to it an electric fan. He kept moving and found a closet. The door was open. Inside was a safe, and on it another stack of papers. He reached for the papers just as a hand shoved him headlong into the closet. He hit the floor and turned in time to see Danni closing the door.

“I said, ‘Look, don’t touch,’” she said.

“How did you get across that floor without me hearing you?”

“Be quiet and tell me everything you saw.”

The dark in the closet was absolute. Jonathan pulled his knees to his chest and tried to re-create the bedroom. “A king-sized bed, some dirty pillows, a desk that I couldn’t open, and a stack of papers on top of a safe.”