Don Pendleton - Treason Play

Bolan knelt in front of Sharif. He rubbed his chin and studied the guy for several seconds. Finally he shook his head slowly, as though overwhelmed with disbelief.

“Sharif,” he said, “I can’t tell whether you’re brave or stupid. Truth be told, I don’t care which it is. You have blood under your fingernails. Your clothes and shoes are splattered with blood. Your file says that your best skills are torture and interrogation. So if you want to tell me you didn’t kill Terry Lang, fine. I can live with that.” Bolan slipped the Beretta from his shoulder holster. “I’m not here to put you on trial. The burden of proof I require before blowing your head off is light. I mean, life’s too short for heavy burdens. Am I right?”

“What’s in it for me?”

Bolan shook his head. “One breath, two breaths. Who knows?”

Grimaldi chimed in. “Best speak truth to power, Sharif.”

Sharif scowled. Bolan watched as the cutter stared at his lap, thumbnail of one hand digging under the other while he considered his situation.

“Maybe I need to clarify,” Bolan said. “I don’t like you. You’re a monster preying and profiting on the misery of others. You wore out my patience three minutes ago. If I had more time, or was a better interrogator, I’d establish a rapport with you, earn your trust, make you a lot of promises. I don’t have that kind of time. So answer my questions. What’s the game here?”

“He poked his nose into Khan’s affairs.”

“And?”

“Khan didn’t like it.”

“News flash.”

“I mean, he betrayed Khan.”

Bolan’s brow furrowed. “Betrayed. You mean, they were working together?”

“That’s what Khan thought. I mean, Lang was working through an intermediary, but Khan thought he had him, had leverage over him.”

“What kind of leverage?” Grimaldi asked.

“When Lang first started poking around Khan’s operations, Khan thought the guy was just another journalist sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. We tried to throw him off the trail. We sent a couple of people his way, ones who gave him bad information, tried to send him in the wrong direction.”

“And?” Bolan asked.

“And it didn’t work. Not for long, anyway. Sure, he might follow the lead for a little while, but then he always came back around, asking the right people the right questions, going to the right places. It was uncanny.”

“And Khan considered this a betrayal?”

Sharif shook his head. “No. After a while, Khan got tired of playing games with him and started having his people do their own digging, build their own case. Khan started to believe Lang was getting his information from an intelligence source or multiple sources.”

“You thought he was a spy.”

“Well, wasn’t he? I mean, look at you two. You’re not reporters, are you?”

Grimaldi looked at Bolan and grinned. “Pretty perceptive for a psychopath.”

He turned to Sharif. “So Khan decides Lang’s a spy and has him killed. And here we are. How’s that a betrayal?”

“I don’t know all the details.”

“But you know some,” the pilot replied.

“The way I understand it, Khan never knew for sure Lang was a spook or at least working with spooks. He made inquiries with his old ISI contacts, but they had nothing much on the guy. He’d been in Islamabad for a while, but their records had always pegged him as a journalist and nothing more. But Khan wasn’t convinced, so he decided to try recruiting him.”

“As a double agent,” Grimaldi said.

Sharif nodded. “He wanted to see just how much Western intelligence really knew about him and he figured that, if Lang knew something, he’d share it, maybe even take bad information back to his handlers. If the right pressure was applied.”

“Clever,” Bolan said. “Risky, but clever.”

“Too clever by half. Khan underestimated him. We thought we were turning him, but he was using us, penetrating the organization further all the time. He got what you Americans call the family jewels. Pieced together the organization’s structure, found out who Khan did business with, what he sells and where. Surely some of this information you’ve seen.”

Bolan gave a noncommittal shrug. “Khan knew all this stuff was going out the door?”

“Not at first, but he got the idea after a while. Hey, Khan had been an intelligence agent himself and had run operations against India while he was with the ISI. He knew the score. He’s no fool.”

“Not if he surrounds himself with top-shelf talent like you,” Bolan said. “Didn’t Khan think it was risky killing Lang? Who cares whether he was a reporter or a spy? Either way he’s dead, and now you have me and a bunch of other folks breathing down your neck. Seems like a bad trade to me.”

Sharif’s lips parted as he prepared to reply to Bolan. Before he could utter a sound, though, a small dark hole opened on his forehead, followed an instant later by the sound of glass breaking. Bolan whirled toward the sound and spotted the window behind him disintegrating in a waterfall of glass shards.

Grimaldi grabbed hold of Bolan’s windbreaker and gave it a hard yank, causing him to reel backward. A bullet sizzled through the air and pierced the space where he’d been standing only a moment before.

Once the Executioner hit the ground, he rolled across the floor and got out of direct site of the now-shattered window.

Grimaldi simultaneously was on the move, his hand filled with a Browning Hi-Power as he sought cover. Bolan saw from the corner of his eye that his friend was safe, which freed him to deal with the shooter. Three more rifle slugs lanced through the window and drilled into the floor and walls. None of them came close to hitting the Stony Man warriors, though the shooter did succeed in keeping them out of sight of the window.

The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.

“You okay?” Bolan asked his old friend.

“Yeah. You?”

The Beretta leveled in front of him in a two-handed grip, Bolan was up on one knee, looking through the window and scanning the rooftops of nearby buildings. A trained sniper himself, his mind was running through a rough series of calculations, trying to determine the angle from which the shots had come so he could best identify the building from which the shooter had attacked. He saw no movement on any of the nearby rooftops, but within a couple of seconds thought he’d identified the sniper’s perch.

He shot to his feet and moved toward the window. By the time he’d reached it, he heard tires squeal from the street below. He looked down in time to see a forest-green sedan rocket out of a nearby alley, cutting off an oncoming car before disappearing in traffic.

“There goes our shooter,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan nodded. He stowed his weapon, ran outside and crossed the street to the alley from where the green sedan had shot into traffic. He searched the building’s perimeter while Grimaldi continued to watch from above.

Minutes later Bolan keyed his throat mike. “I got nothing,” he said. “But I do hear sirens. I guess it’s time we made our exit.”

“What about the other two men?” Nawaz Khan asked.

Daniel Masters shook his head. “Couldn’t get them,” he said. “Never got a clear shot.”

Seated behind his wide mahogany desk, Khan leaned back in his chair and scowled. He pressed his fingertips together, his hands forming a steeple, and stared over them at Daniel Masters.

“This is not good,” he said.

“Thanks for the bloody understatement,” Masters snapped back. “These two men stormed the building, killed some of our best and brightest without breaking a sweat, and interrogated someone familiar with our plans. So, yeah, I’d say this is not good.”