Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

“No.”

“You’re here to…” Jonathan allowed her to finish the sentence.

“I’m here to teach you how to kill quickly and silently.”

“I’m going to Pakistan to gather information. Connor never said anything about killing.”

“It wasn’t an issue at that point.”

“And now it is?” asked Jonathan.

“Think of it as a precaution,” said Danni, but something in her eyes told him the lesson was more than that.

“Has he found out something about my wife? Is she being held against her will? Is she in danger?”

“I don’t know anything about your wife.”

“Then what? Come on, Danni. I mean, get real. Connor can’t ask me to kill somebody. Self-defense is one thing. This is another ball-game.”

Jonathan jumped to his feet and strode across the room. Danni was by his side in an instant, stopping him, taking him by the hands. “Just listen to me.”

“What’s there to say? The whole notion is ridiculous. I’m a doctor. I don’t take lives. I save them.”

“You’ve done it before. Connor told me.”

“To protect myself.”

“And in Zurich? General Austen? You shot two men dead. That wasn’t just self-defense.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“And what if you don’t have one now?”

“It was different. There was a plane. They were going to kill hundreds of innocent people. It was happening at that instant.”

“It’s easier that way, isn’t it? Not having time to think.”

Jonathan dropped her hands and walked to the far side of the room. He needed space. Room to figure things out. He rubbed his forehead, feeling as if he were seeing things clearly for the first time. “What was I thinking? Why did I even tell Connor that I would help? I must have been out of my mind. PTSD or something. All of this-the training in Israel, the marching up and down the streets looking over my shoulder for you and your buddies, the memory games, shadowing Dr. Revy. Who am I kidding? I’m not one of you. I’m not an operative or a spy or whatever it is that you call yourselves.”

Danni approached in measured paces, her eyes locked on his. She was no longer pleading. Her speech to convince had ended. She spoke slowly and calmly, as if he were a criminal who needed to be talked out of his gun. “What if we’re talking about more than that? Not hundreds but thousands.”

“I don’t care how many people you’re talking about. If he thinks I’m going to kill someone, he’s lost his mind.”

“And if there is no one else?”

“That’s not my concern.”

“Isn’t it all of ours?” asked Danni. “You think this is something I like to do? I felt the same as you when I first learned my trade. I was a twenty-one-year-old woman. I knew how to shoot machine guns and run an obstacle course. But killing? The only thing I’d ever harmed in my life was a duck I shot hunting with my uncle, and I felt sick to my stomach for a week afterward. I thought, How dare they ask me to do such a thing? I’m not evil. But my teachers saw something in me. Not something bad, just something unyielding-maybe something rather cold and uncompromising. I always completed a task, no matter how difficult. I was able to remove myself from the equation and do what needed to be done. Too often it’s your mind that gets in the way. You’re the same as me, Jonathan. You can’t leave a job undone. It’s why you’re here.”

“I’m here because a man tortured my wife and I have a chance of doing something to prevent him and his colleagues from hurting anyone else again.”

“No, that’s not the reason why. You’re here to see if you are as good as she is.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? You want to find out for yourself if you are capable of doing everything she does. If you measure up.”

“No. Not true.”

Danni put a hand to his cheek. “You’re here because you still love her.”

Jonathan pulled her hand away. He wanted to deny her words, to shout at her that she was mistaken. He couldn’t. He looked away, then sat down. Danni sat cross-legged next to him. “If you have any questions, you can ask Connor yourself.”

Jonathan looked at her, surprised. “He’s coming?”

“He’ll be here later today to give you your final briefing. You’re leaving tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“But…” Suddenly there was nothing more to say, and Jonathan wondered if the fear showed on his face.

Danni slid a long, slim knife from a hidden pocket in her pants. Its blade was the color of mercury. “Let’s get started,” she said, offering him a hand so he could get to his feet. “We don’t have much time.”

The kidnapping of Dr. Michel Revy took place at two in the afternoon on that same picture-postcard day and was orchestrated and executed by Chief Inspector Marcus von Daniken, with assistance from members of his own Service of Analysis and Prevention, the wing of the federal police concerned with counterterrorism and the monitoring of all espionage activities within Switzerland’s borders.

The operation was hurried from the start, but this was nothing new. Time was rarely a policeman’s ally, and von Daniken had long ago made his peace with rushed operations. Perfection was not a word in his vocabulary. He’d had twelve hours to draw up his plan, assemble a team, and put them into position. He would have liked another day in order to stage at least one rehearsal, but Michel Revy’s schedule forbade it. In von Daniken’s business, you worked with what you were given, not with what you wished for.

“Mobile One, pull off. Mobile Two, get in position.”

Von Daniken sat parked in a shaded lay-by in the densely forested foothills on the outskirts of Bern. An insistent breeze was blowing from the north, kicking snow off the hillsides and sending it spinning and twirling in the fractured light. On his lap was a handheld tracking monitor, and he kept his eyes glued to the red dot moving along the A1 motorway in his direction. The red dot was Revy (transmitted from the homing beacon von Daniken himself had installed in the bumper of Revy’s Porsche Panamera, the outrageously expensive, outrageously beautiful sports sedan for which the surgeon owed three months’ back lease payments). The three blue dots trailing the Panamera belonged to von Daniken’s men. He was running a standard “three-car swing,” slotting a new driver behind Revy in a seven-minute rotation.

“He’s exiting the motorway,” said Mobile One.

“Hang back until he gets through the village. Once he turns on Dorfstrasse, set up the roadblock. No one gets through.”

In fact, the surveillance was a precaution. An e-mail sent from Revy’s computer the night before and intercepted by the Remora software indicated that he was planning to drive to his mother’s home that afternoon for a short visit prior to boarding a jet later that evening for Pakistan. There had been discussion about how and where to abduct him and what to do with him afterward: whether to grab him at his mother’s house, whisk him from the hotel before he checked out, or, finally, kidnap him somewhere en route between the two. Some suggested drugging him and placing him in an induced coma for the duration of his captivity, others locking him in a safe house near the Gornergrat where only the crows would see him. Any option had to meet two imperatives. No one could witness the capture, and Revy could never know who had kidnapped him or where he’d been held.

In the end, they decided on the third alternative-kidnapping Revy en route to his mother’s home-after field reconnaissance located a stretch of road von Daniken could commandeer and ever so briefly make his own. Afterward, Revy would be taken to an abandoned air-raid shelter in the Engadine above the town of Pontresina and be looked after by a revolving team of two guards. The coma was deemed too risky.