Christopher Reich - Rules of Betrayal

He was not in Balfour’s office but in a bedroom decorated similarly to his own. A suitcase stood open on a luggage stand near the armoire. Inside were men’s clothes-shirts, underwear, socks. On the ground was a pair of men’s loafers. Very large men’s loafers. He examined the clothing and noted that the labels were from foreign brands he did not know.

A Quran sat on the desk, and below it a manila folder stuffed thick with papers. A ticket jacket for Ariana Airlines lay to one side. He opened it and saw a reservation from Kabul to Islamabad. He was standing in Sultan Haq’s room.

Aware that he had little time, Jonathan rummaged through the folder. There were papers downloaded from Islamic websites and others written in Pashto. There was a map of Islamabad Airport, with some numbers and letters written across the top. A letter written in a child’s hand on pale blue paper demanded his attention. Though it was in Pashto, he was able to understand a few words here and there: “Dearest Father, I miss you already… I am sorry you will not see me grow up… I hope to make you proud… Your loving son, Khaled.”

Peeking out from beneath it was a paper bearing some kind of logo: METRON, and below it HAR and NEWHA.

Footsteps pounded down the hallway. Hurriedly Jonathan closed the folder and went to the door. The footsteps faded. After a moment he cracked the door. The hallway was empty. He stepped out of the room, walked to the door leading to Balfour’s office, opened it, and stepped inside.

Back pressed to the door, he directed the penlight’s beam around the office. An imposing mahogany desk ran the length of one wall, with three monitors arrayed side by side taking pride of place. To one side was a rattan basket filled with used mobile phones, and above it shelves stacked with new ones still in their boxes. Cabinets occupied the other walls. And everywhere paper. Reams of paper, bundled and tied and stacked high. Balfour’s records, made ready for the shredder.

Placing the penlight in his mouth, Jonathan studied the papers arrayed on Balfour’s desk. Connor had told him to act as if he were a reporter. He must look for the where, when, who, and how. Names, places, dates, times. Connor had suspected Balfour had the bomb, and Jonathan now knew that suspicion was correct. Somewhere there was information regarding the buyer and the time and place of the exchange. Was Sultan Haq the end user, or was he passing it along to someone else? Was the exchange to take place at the airport?

One stack contained banking confirmations, another telephone bills, and a third credit card bills. The problem wasn’t too little information, it was too much. He remembered Danni’s instructions about opening his mind to see everything at once and trusting his memory to mine the valuable nuggets later. He scanned the information, committing accounts and phone numbers and transfer instructions to memory, assigning each an individual locker in his mind and ordering it to remain there until needed.

An explosion lit the sky, rattling the windows and furniture. Jonathan crouched and protected his head instinctively. Rising, he spied a large blotter on a side table. The blotter was covered with notes, but they were written in Urdu and thus incomprehensible.

He hit Enter on the computer keyboard. The monitor remained dark. Power was still out, and it seemed that the IT system did not benefit from its own auxiliary power supply. If he couldn’t find anything, he’d let Connor have a try. He slipped the blade he’d taken off his razor from his pocket and held it between his fingers. It wasn’t in fact a blade at all, but a flash drive encoded with the Remora spyware. The operating instructions were idiot-proof: insert the flash drive into a USB port for ten seconds and withdraw. Remora would copy the computer’s hard drive and send its contents via the computer’s own Ethernet connection to Division. There was only one problem. Jonathan could not find the computer’s central processing unit. Wires extending from the monitor dove behind the desk and disappeared beneath the carpet. He scanned the wall to both sides but saw nothing.

Another dead end.

More footsteps sounded in the hall. The same pairs of boots. Two men, at least. Jonathan froze, and the footsteps continued past. He breathed again.

He moved back to the desk. The top drawer was locked, but a side drawer was not. In it he found a brochure for Revy’s surgical practice, a matchbook from Dubai, pens, a calculator, and little else of interest. He tried the top drawer again, but it still didn’t budge. The desk was old enough to have a conventional lock. No doubt Mahatma Gandhi himself had signed the declaration of India’s freedom on it. He looked around for a key but found nothing. He tried a letter opener, but the blade was too wide. He trained the light across the desk. Something glimmered. It was a pair of surgical scissors. Inserting the pincers into the lock, he felt for the tumbler. This was one class Danni had forgotten. He angled the scissors up and down. Feeling resistance, he pressed harder and the tumbler fell.

Gingerly he slid the drawer open. An agenda lay on top of a raft of papers. A ribbon marked today’s date. He opened to the page and read, in English, “M. Revy-Emirates Air 12:00.” And on the next line, “Haq arrives. Prepare for transport to EPA. H18.” He turned the page. “UAE6171. 2000. PARDF Pasha.” A phone number followed with the initials M.H. He recognized the country code as Afghanistan.

He turned the page and read more details, this time about flights to Paris and onward to St. Barts. He read names and places: hotels and banks, government officials and corporate bigwigs, the entire itinerary of Balfour’s new life.

His eyes strayed, and the trained observer saw something else in the drawer. A knife. Dull and gray as a shark’s skin. He picked it up. An army issue KA-BAR, one side of the blade honed, the other serrated.

Another explosion shook the windows, and for an instant the office lit up. In that moment he spotted the computer tower behind a glass cabinet door. He returned the agenda to its place and closed the drawer just as an engine roared into the motor court. Car doors opened and closed. He looked out the window to see Balfour and Singh climbing out of the Range Rover.

“They can’t be phantoms,” Balfour was saying. “Someone is shooting at us. If it’s not Indian intelligence, it’s the ISI trying to scare me into leaving. Don’t tell me no one’s there. I want them found, do you understand?”

Jonathan rushed to the computer and, falling to a knee, ran his hand behind the unit. One USB slot remained empty. Fingering the flash drive, he struggled to slip it into the slot, but the space behind the tower was too narrow. He set the drive on the table, then leaned over and dragged the tower away from the wall.

Still kneeling, he ran a hand blindly across the table.

The flash drive was gone.

“Looking for this?”

Jonathan froze.

The voice.

It was her.

Slowly he rose from his knees and turned to face his wife. “Hello, Emma.”

They stood face-to-face in the dark. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Jonathan needed the time to take her in. He noticed the hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail, the windburned cheeks, the chapped lips. There was a scar on her jaw that hadn’t been there before-a laceration that had required stitches. She wore a loose-fitting black blouse and jeans, and he knew they were not her clothes. He met her eyes, and the shock of seeing her hit him like a gale-force wind. Yet there was no surge of lost love, no overwhelming desire to take her in his arms. Some time ago he had forbidden himself to consider her his wife. He loved her, no question, maybe something deeper than that. Even now, her outlaw beauty thrilled him. With no distance separating them, the sound of her breathing slow and shallow, the warm smell of sandalwood rising from her skin, he was as overwhelmed by the animal force of her personality as he had been the day he met her.