Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

“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.”