Don Pendleton: Treason Play

“That bothers you.”

Potts smirked. “Past tense, brother. Now that you’re here, I can see why Hal wanted me to wait.”

“Because?”

“Because you’re a spooky bastard. I can lean on them, but you’re going to break them. Every last one of them. And hopefully find Lang in the process.”

“Hopefully,” Bolan replied.

“YOU CAN DO THIS FOR me, can’t you?” Ahmed Haqqani asked.

“I’ll do it,” Nawaz Khan replied. He stood at one of his windows, his hands behind his back, the fingers of his left hand wrapped around his right wrist, and stared at the skyscrapers that surrounded the building.

He heard Haqqani take a step, saw the man’s reflection close in on his own.

“If you can’t do it, I need to know,” Haqqani stated.

Khan spun and faced the other man. “I said I will do it.”

Haqqani nodded. “I just know how hard it will be to get this. Some say it doesn’t even exist.”

“It exists. Trust me. I know for a fact it does.”

Haqqani shot Khan a curious look.

“When I was with the ISI, we had very good information that it existed. I never saw it personally, of course. But the intelligence was solid.”

“How solid?”

Khan ignored the question. “Just make sure you have the money. Leave the rest to me.”

“How soon can you have it?”

“Soon,” Khan replied. “How soon?”

“You ask too many questions, Ahmed. That makes me nervous.”

“I meant no offense.”

“I’m not offended, just suspicious.”

The other man apologized again, but Khan dismissed him with a wave. “Never mind. I know this is important to you. You want to do this for your father.”

“Yes,” Haqqani said.

“Leave it to me.”

Sometimes Adnan Shahi wondered whether it was worth all the bullshit.

He stood on the balcony of his penthouse and stared at Dubai’s skyline. At that elevation, the sound emanating from the traffic below was muted, broken only by the occasional honking of horns. He barely heard it. Instead, all he heard was the constant chatter of his thoughts as they relentlessly raced through his head. As Nawaz Khan’s second in command, he had plenty of worries and they never seemed to stop battering him, like waves hitting rocks, one after another.

Just running Khan’s business, what essentially was a massive logistics operation, and endless march of trucks and airplanes and ships, was a big enough task. Add to that the fact that every flight contained illegal contraband and the whole thing suddenly exploded into a mammoth pain in the ass. Just thinking about it caused the acid in his stomach to bubble and churn, like a witch’s brew in a cauldron, hot enough that he expected steam to shoot out from between his clenched teeth.

Then Khan decided to kidnap an American. And not just any American, but a damn CIA agent. Suddenly, Shahi found himself waking up in hell on a daily basis. Unconsciously his open hand drifted to his stomach and he patted it. He shook his head in disgust. An American spy. They’d snatched the damn guy off the street and Shahi knew that’d be the end of it. Where they were taking the American, he was as good as dead.

Shahi slid a hand into the right hip pocket of his pants and pulled from it a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Sliding a cigarette between his lips, he torched the end of it, took a long drag and blew tendrils of smoke through his nostrils. He returned the cigarettes and the lighter back into his pocket and turned his attention back to the traffic below.

There was just nothing good that could come of this, he thought. Normally he trusted Khan, in part because experience told him he could and in part because the guy called the shots. But this time Shahi couldn’t help but wonder whether Khan had miscalculated, whether he was going to walk them off a cliff. Khan’s decision to cozy up to the Russians made Shahi especially nervous.

But surely Khan had thought all this through? Sure, he could be ill-tempered and stubborn, but the man wasn’t a fool. He hadn’t become a major player in the ISI without being able to think strategically.

“He’s no fool,” Shahi muttered, as though saying it out loud would make it a fact.

The crash of glass shattering reached out from inside the apartment and yanked Shahi from his thoughts. That noise was followed by a man’s scream.

What was that? he wondered.

He stepped to the double doors that led from the balcony into the penthouse. He pulled open the door in time to see one of his gunmen stagger toward him. The guy had a hand clutched over his chest. Rivulets of blood seeped through his fingers and rolled down his forearms. He dropped to the ground and released a final death rattle before his body went limp.

A thrill of fear raced down Shahi’s spine. He dropped to one knee next to the fallen man, one of his guards, and rummaged beneath the man’s bloodied coat, looking for his gun. It was gone, as was his mobile phone.

Shahi didn’t want to go inside. But, if he was under attack, he also knew he couldn’t continue to hide on the balcony. If his attackers found him out there, he’d have no place to run. Swallowing hard, he slipped through the door and into his home. Another of his guards was curled up on the floor, his body still, blood pooling around him. Another was draped over the back of the couch, the shirt on his back soaked in blood, the top of his head pressing into a seat cushion.

He saw something else and froze.

A man dressed in black stood several yards away. A pistol was clutched in his hand and aimed directly at Shahi’s head. The Pakistani’s eyes darted to a pistol that lay several yards away on the floor, discarded. The man in black apparently read his intentions and shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said.

Shahi swallowed hard, his mind racing through the numbers one final time as he brought up his hands in surrender. The math didn’t make sense. This son of a bitch had just knocked out three of his guards—and those were the ones he’d seen—and looked none the worse for it. No obvious injuries. No hesitation in his graveyard voice or his eyes.

Instinctively, Shahi knew he couldn’t bridge the distance between himself and the discarded pistol before the other man shot him. The only thing he’d get from that was the satisfaction of knowing he’d gone down fighting. He was too much of a pragmatist to consider that a fair trade for his life. He had to think of another way out.

BOLAN SIGHTED DOWN THE barrel at Shahi, the pistol’s snout locked dead center on the guy’s face.

As grim as hell, the soldier marched toward the Pakistani. Along the way, he bent and picked up the pistol that Shahi was eyeing, shoving it into his belt.

“Who the hell are you?” Shahi sputtered.

“Where’s Lang?”

Fear flickered in the guy’s eyes. He licked his lips.

“That’s what this is about? You’re looking for the reporter? You shoot my place up just to ask me about that?”

Bolan looked left, then right, surveying the carnage. “It appears so.”

“You can’t come in here and shoot my place up. Do you know who I am? I own the fucking police around here. They’ll string you up by your balls.”

“You talk too much, Shahi,” Bolan said, “about all the wrong things. Tell me something interesting.”

“What if I don’t know anything?”

“You do.”

Shahi’s eyes seemed to search Bolan’s face for several strained seconds. Bolan guessed the guy was running a cost-benefit analysis of turning on his boss versus taking a few extra breaths.

The change in Shahi’s expression was almost imperceptible. His eyes drifted from Bolan and looked over the American’s shoulder. Was it a trick?