Rules of Betrayal (32 page)

“But perhaps I may wish to view some more of your exquisite art collection,” said Jonathan. “Another Constable, perhaps?”

“All the art is downstairs.”

“And if we need to speak?” continued Jonathan, knowing he’d reached a boundary and was testing its strength.

“I can find you whenever necessary,” said Balfour. The smile returned, but this time to cloak a warning. “If I see you anywhere upstairs, I will have Mr. Singh kill you. Do I make myself clear?”

The outburst shocked Jonathan, and he could do nothing to conceal it. His eyes narrowed as he searched for a response, and for that instant he and Revy were one. His first reaction was to grab Balfour by his spiffy white lapels and threaten to kick his teeth in if he ever spoke to him that way again.
Cover
, urged Emma from a distant corner of his mind.
Dr. Revy doesn’t get into fistfights
. Jonathan followed his wife’s advice, but reluctantly. The novice spy was already chafing at the collar. So in the end he chose humor. A wealthy, educated European didn’t lower himself to a South Asian bastard’s level.

“But then who will there be to make your face even handsomer than it already is?” he asked.

Balfour considered this. Deciding to accept the diplomatic way out, he threw his head back and laughed much too loudly.

The two left the main wing through a back door and Balfour led the way along a garden path through a topiary of bears and deer and
foxes. At the end of the topiary, the path forked. To the left was a low-slung concrete building with a shingle roof and no windows. A map of the premises had labeled the building a maintenance shed, but to Jonathan’s eye it looked more like a bomb shelter. Two guards with AK-47s held at their chests stood by the door. Another Range Rover was parked nearby, doors open, and four more security men stood at the ready. There was a hubbub as two men in white jackets rolled in a piece of mechanical equipment.

“What’s in there?” asked Jonathan.

“My future,” said Balfour.

“Looks dangerous,” said Jonathan, still smarting from their earlier exchange.

Balfour glanced over his shoulder. “Mind your own business.”

It was the surgical suite Jonathan had always dreamed of. Every time a ventilator clogged and a pulse oximeter failed, whenever there were not enough clamps or even a rudimentary crash cart in the OR, he would swear to himself, close his eyes, and imagine operating in a place like this. There was a Stryker operating table and a Drager anesthesia machine as big as a dryer. There was a brand-new crash cart and a defibrillator. There was a suction machine and monitors to measure cardiac function, pulse, blood pressure, and CO
₂
levels. And then there were the instruments. Arrayed on a tray was a rack holding scissors, needle holders, clamps, forceps, and hemostats, all polished to an exquisite gleam. At least one hundred in all, if not more.

“Adequate,” said Jonathan, as arrogantly as any spoiled surgeon to the rich and infamous should. “I think I can make do. Yes, yes, yes.”

Balfour’s brow knitted in concern. “Did I miss anything? I ordered everything you suggested.”

Jonathan recalled the shopping list taken from Revy’s computer. “Ventilator with a HEPA filter?”

Balfour rushed to a corner of the room. “A Guardian 400.”

“Very well,”
said Jonathan. “And my assistants? You’ve found a trained anesthesiologist and a surgical nurse?”

Balfour explained that he had hired the chief of anesthesiology from the National Institute of Health and that the surgical nurse was the doctor’s daughter. Jonathan replied that he thought that was fine. “I am a little tired,” he said. “And I’ll need time to read the results of your blood work. Shall we say three p.m. for our initial consultation?”

“Three is fine,” said Balfour. “If you’d like, we will take a ride afterward. I told my grooms to have my favorite stallion ready.”

Jonathan saw the challenge in his eyes. He thought of Connor’s excuses and discarded them in a bunch. “I look forward to it,” he said. “It will build our appetite for dinner.”

Suddenly Balfour checked his watch and hurried from the room. “Excuse me,” he said. “There’s someone else I must meet.”

Jonathan kept himself from following too closely. He had not yet seen Emma and was nearly insane with curiosity that it might be her.

Frank Connor climbed the stairs
to his third-floor retreat slowly—one step, rest, one step, rest—so as not to give his heart another reason to expire at an inopportune moment. Reaching his bedroom, he did not lie down and rest for his customary twenty minutes before entering his study. When the people spying on you were already inside, any further deception was useless.

Connor poured himself three fingers of bourbon and quaffed it in a long, desperate swallow. He was not a field man, nor had he ever been. He was an operations man: a planner, a persuader, an organizer, and at times a procurer. So it was with difficulty that he drove the blood-soaked image of Malloy from his mind. The bourbon helped, carving a soothing course down his throat, leaching his anxiety. Collapsing in his captain’s chair, he forced himself to focus on the events of the past two weeks, moving from one day to the next in an effort to spot the mole’s tracks and put a name to a traitor.

First there was Dubai and Emma’s unmasking as his agent at the hands of Prince Rashid. Peter Erskine was correct in establishing that a handful of people had been privy to the manufacture of the booby-trapped rifle, but fewer still knew of Emma’s status as a double agent. That number was four. There was Connor, Erskine, Sir Anthony Allam, director of Britain’s MI5, and Igor Ivanov, the Russian director of the FSB, who was Division’s most highly placed asset and the man to whom Emma, or Lara Antonova, reported.

Connor could take himself out of the running. Likewise, Igor Ivanov was beyond suspicion. He could not risk outing the one agent who could out him. Allam was a possibility, but only if the leak had stopped there. It hadn’t.

The mole had likewise known about Connor’s visit to Malloy at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The question was how. Had he followed Connor to NGA headquarters? If so, how had he discovered that he had visited Malloy? Or had someone told him about Connor’s destination and the object of his interest?

Connor replayed his conversation with the Marine helicopter crew chief. If he dared read between the lines, he could imagine that Emma had been forewarned to expect the Marine special operations team. Only one person other than Connor had been witness to his call to Bagram Air Base and had sat with him during every agonizing minute of the operation. Peter Erskine.

The number of suspects dwindled to one.

But here Connor’s exercise in deduction hit a wall. Erksine knew every detail of Connor’s trip to the NGA. There was no reason for his counterparts to torture Malloy for information he himself could provide his handlers. Unless, of course, Malloy was privy to information that even Connor didn’t know.

Connor rose and poured himself another measure of bourbon. No matter how compelling the evidence, he could not bring himself to believe that Peter Erskine was a spy in the pay of a foreign power. The man was a newlywed, a scion of blood so blue it was practically black, and, Connor had to admit, a damn good guy. To distrust Erskine was to distrust himself. But what other answer was there?

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
.

Thank you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

It was Erskine, whether Connor wanted to admit it or not.

And if Erskine had told his handlers about Emma and about Malloy, there was no reason why he hadn’t told them about Jonathan Ransom.

Connor put down his glass and went to his desk, where he accessed his secure line and dialed a foreign number. To his frustration, no one answered. By now she was back in Israel, no doubt taking some well-deserved leave. The voicemail was a mechanical prompt.

“Danni,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Frank. Get to Islamabad as quickly as you can. Our boy is in trouble. Call me as soon as you get this. No matter what, call me.”

He hung up and called her superior at Mossad headquarters in Herzliya. He was put through immediately, only to be disappointed that his suspicions were correct. Danni had signed out for a week’s leave prior to leaving Zurich. She had not left any word on her whereabouts.

Despondent, Frank Connor hung up.

He could not lose another one.

Jonathan unpacked his clothing with
care, placing socks and underwear in one drawer, shirts in another, and hanging his suits in the closet. The room was enormous. A tartan carpet covered the hardwood floor. The canopy bed was big enough to sail across the Atlantic, and the ceiling was high enough for a regulation basketball net. Connor had instructed him to act as if he were being watched every second of every day. There was no need to act. A bulky surveillance camera perched high in one corner dispelled any doubt about his privacy. Taking a towel from the bathroom, he leaped and managed to drape the cloth over the camera’s lens.

The blood panel lay inside a folder on the desk. Standing, Jonathan studied the results, but not before starting the chronograph on his wristwatch. A cursory study showed Balfour to be in moderately good health. His cholesterol was high. Enzymes indicated a problem with his liver. Maybe he had an ulcer. Still, there was nothing to prevent him from having reconstructive surgery.

Jonathan put away the blood panel and crossed to a sash window that looked down on the rear of the house. The motor court was directly outside, and to his right lay the stables and a large grassy meadow. To his left he could see the maintenance shed that had been the hub of so much activity. A van pulled up to the far entrance, and workers in blue coveralls unloaded a piece of machinery and dollied it into the shed.

He observed this for a minute. The activity, combined with the presence of so many armed guards and Balfour’s agitated behavior, convinced him that the arms dealer had taken possession of the nuclear warhead and that it stood at this very moment barely fifty
meters away in the maintenance shed. He could also conclude that if Balfour wanted to move up the surgery to tomorrow evening, he expected his official business to be terminated by then, and that therefore he meant to deliver the warhead to his buyer sometime tomorrow.

An icon on Jonathan’s phone indicated that there was no wireless service. Connor had been correct in assuming that Balfour maintained a strict digital net over his home, jamming all incoming and outgoing calls. Cell phones were an intelligence agency’s preferred tracking system and could be hacked to act as a microphone or a homing device, or, more simply, just eavesdropped on.

Jonathan lifted the window and ran a hand over the exterior wall. The surface was rough and pitted, with smooth grooves cut horizontally into the stone a meter apart. According to the floor plans, Balfour’s office was directly above Jonathan’s room. The windows farther along the house looked to be about four meters, or twelve feet, above his own. He ran his fingers inside the grooves and judged them to be five centimeters deep. That was fine for his toes, but precious little for his fingers to work with.

A knock at the door interrupted his impromptu recon. “Yes?”

Before he could close the window, the door opened and two of Balfour’s tan-suited security men stepped into the room. Immediately Jonathan checked his watch. It had taken security six minutes and thirty seconds to notice that the camera in his room had gone black and to arrive to investigate the cause. “Is there something you need?”

One of the men marched directly to the obscured surveillance camera. He tried twice to jump and snatch the towel, but he was too short. “Sir, you will please remove,” he said.

Jonathan stood with his arms crossed. “Tell Mr. Armitraj that the only way he can watch me all day and all night is if he moves in here with me. Otherwise, the towel stays.”

The security men exchanged words. One placed a call on his two-way radio, speaking in Hindi, a language Jonathan did not speak or understand. The man frowned, then bowed and left the room with his colleague, closing the door softly behind them.

“Nice meeting you, too,” said Jonathan as he walked to the bed and lay down.

Just then he heard a horse neigh from the stables. The animal did not sound happy. He closed his eyes for a nap, but sleep would not come. He was thinking about his ride with Balfour and what a big mouth he had.

Balfour was dressed to ride to hounds in a guard’s red blazer, white jodhpurs, and knee-high leather boots. A groom held his mount, a tall dapple-gray mare with a calm disposition. “This is Copenhagen,” he said. “You’ll be riding Inferno.”

“The stallion,” said Jonathan. “Let’s have a look at him.”

A groom emerged from the shadows of the stable, leading an imposing black horse with a broad chest and fiery eyes. Jonathan swallowed, and approached the animal. “Hello, Inferno,” he said, touching its nose.

The horse bared its teeth, backing away nervously.

“Do you think you can handle him?” asked Balfour haughtily.

Jonathan grabbed the halter with something he hoped approached authority. “I shouldn’t see why not,” he said.

“Excellent,” said Balfour. “Shall we?”

It was four p.m. The physical was over and done with. Balfour had passed, as Jonathan knew he would, but he was far from the model of health. His blood pressure was elevated. He carried fifteen pounds too much weight. His flexibility was terrible, and his resting pulse hovered at eighty beats a minute, hinting at below-average conditioning. He admitted to drinking two cocktails a day, but the first rule any doctor learns is to double whatever a patient tells you about booze. One look at his liver panel suggested that the two drinks a day might really be four. Still, with the right mix of statins and beta-blockers and all the other wonder drugs available for those who squandered their health, Balfour would probably live to see eighty.