Rules of Betrayal (41 page)

“MH has to be Massoud Haq,” said Jonathan.

Danni agreed and said she would pass the number to the technical services branch of the office, “the office” being professional’s shorthand for her own intelligence service. “It may take some time, but they’ll be able to create a network of his associates from the calls placed and received.”

“How quickly?” asked Jonathan.

“That’s always the question,” said Danni with exasperation. “With a little muscle, I think we can count on sooner rather than later.”

Jonathan’s finger rested on a grouping of letters he recalled seeing on Sultan Haq’s desk. The first line read “METRON,” and the successive lines below it “HAR” and “NEWH.” “Ring any bells?”

Danni said the words aloud. “It sounds like it’s only part of each word.”

Jonathan tried sounding out additional syllables to form a word, but came up with nothing. “Let’s move on.”

“What interests me is this name.” And here Danni pointed to where Jonathan had written “Pasha” and “PARDF.” “Wasn’t Pasha the name of our American major’s most trusted colleague?”

“It’s common enough.”

“PARDF stands for Pakistani Army Rapid Deployment Force,” Danni went on. “How many Pashas do you think they have?” She pushed back her chair. “Pasha was on Balfour’s payroll all along. He was there to look after Haq and make sure he got the warhead to its destination. If Haq escaped through the back, it was with Pasha’s help.”

Jonathan returned his attention to the pad where he had written down “N14997.” “I recognize this. It’s an N number—an aircraft registration code. Every country has its own code. G is for England, F for France.”

“And N?”

“N is for the United States.”

“Are you a pilot?”

“No, but when I was working with Doctors Without Borders, Emma used to ferry medicine from one country to another. We were required to list the registration code of the aircraft flying the supplies on our customs declarations.”

“I see,” said Danni. “So I imagine there’s a central registry that keeps track of these.”

“Absolutely,” said Jonathan.

“Let me run it by the office.” Danni placed a call to Israel and rattled off a series of instructions in Hebrew. Jonathan listened patiently as Danni fought her position with her colleagues in Herzliya. Unable to understand a word, he found himself thinking once again about Emma.

There was not a moment since he’d arrived in Pakistan that he had not felt her invisible hand lurking above him, guiding events to her advantage. He had no doubt that it was she who had placed the spyware-encoded flash drive into Balfour’s computer. Working under Connor for so many years, she would have known that his response would be to immediately dispatch the special ops boys stationed in Pakistan. But why would she want to thwart Balfour’s plans after she had risked her life, and the life of her child—no,
their
child!—to help bring them to fruition?

“Jonathan, we’ve got a hit.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“N14997 is a C-141 Starlifter registered to Blenheim Cargo Corporation of Miami, Florida, which in turn is owned by East Pakistan Airways, Balfour’s private airline. Apparently the plane is being leased by the United States Army Materiel Command to transport military equipment back from Iraq to the States.”

“Do they know where it is?”

“According to Plane Tracker, the aircraft landed in Islamabad this morning.”

“A cargo plane,” said Jonathan. “It figures. The last I saw Haq, he was headed toward the freight terminal.”

“Hold on,” said Danni, picking up her conversation where she’d left off, jotting notes furiously on her pad. “Okay, shalom. Thanks.”

“And?”

Danni’s eyes were wide. “The plane took off at eight p.m.”

Jonathan looked at the ornate clock on the wall: 10 p.m. “Did the pilot file a flight plan?”

“Yes,” said Danni, much too softly for Jonathan’s liking. “It’s flying to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.”

“That’s it?”

“No, Ramstein is only a refueling stop. It’s slated to continue on to McGuire Air Force Base in Wrightstown, New Jersey. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah,” said Jonathan. “It’s a little more than an hour from New York City.”

In Georgetown, snow fell as
Jake “the Ripper” Taylor approached the three-story gray-brick town house at the corner of 34th Street and Prospect Street. A Ford Grand Victoria sat parked directly in front of the stairs leading to the front door. The car was unoccupied, and he assumed that the federal marshals to whom it belonged were inside, minding their prisoner. A second Grand Vic waited around the corner, two officers in the front seat, drinking their afternoon coffee. The feds were not winning points for being inconspicuous, thought Taylor, and he was sure to make a full and complete stop at the intersection before continuing on. In that time he cracked his window and looked to his right. The alley was right there behind the town house, just as the boss lady had said it would be, and there, poking its head above the fence, was the old wooden shed.

“There’s a back entry that’s accessed through a shed in the neighbor’s yard,” she had informed him. “You can see it from the alley behind his home. Mr. Connor is a sneaky fellow, and he uses it when he thinks someone’s checking up on him.”

A sneaky fellow
. The boss lady using that upper-class accent he knew so well from the university-educated camel jocks he’d met over in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And how the hell did she know that about the shed and the alley? Taylor wondered with grudging admiration. Probably the same way that she knew Connor was under house arrest and had just returned from questioning at FBI headquarters. The same way she’d known about his visiting Mr. Malloy at the NGA. The boss lady had someone inside Division.
Someone deep inside
.

“Take out Connor,” she’d said. “Not your usual way. It must appear natural. He has a heart condition. It shouldn’t be too hard. But be careful. He’s a cornered animal, and cornered animals are dangerous.”

He’s also pushing sixty and has a belly the size of a boulder, retorted the Ripper silently. Frank Connor would not be a problem.

The Ripper turned left up 33rd Street, then left again at P Street, taking his time to circle round and eventually finding a parking spot two blocks from Connor’s place. Opening the glove compartment, he removed a chamois cloth, balled it up, and shoved it into his pocket. For good measure, he took his carpet cutter, too.

Exiting from his car, he pulled his navy workman’s cap low over his forehead and dug his hands deep into the pockets of his pea coat. Setting off up the brick sidewalk, he looked no different from any undergraduate en route to the Georgetown University campus, a few blocks away. He turned right on N Street and spotted the address of Connor’s neighbors. He let himself in the side gate and came upon the shed at the back of the garden.

Though the shed abutted the back fence and appeared to belong to the neighbor’s home, it was in fact linked by an underground passage to Connor’s house. The Ripper jimmied the shed’s lock and slipped inside. The beam of his flashlight shone on an old stone stairwell leading steeply downward to a low, damp tunnel redolent of the Potomac River, which flowed barely fifty yards to the south. A door blocked his way at the far end of the passage.

“No alarm,” the boss lady had said. “The tunnel is Connor’s secret. If he doesn’t acknowledge it, no one else will.”

The Ripper defeated the double-action bolt lock inside thirty seconds. With infinite patience, he turned the knob and opened the door. He stepped inside, his feet landing on a hardwood floor. His hand withdrew the carpet cutter from his pocket, and he advanced the triangular razor from its metal sheath. He wasn’t disobeying orders. As far as he was concerned, suicide was a natural cause. Disgraced spy-masters killed themselves all the time.

Step by step, he climbed to the third floor. Step by step, his heart beat faster as he closed in on his kill.

The Ripper marveled at how much blood spilled out of a wrist when you cut the vein properly: vertically, long and deep; never horizontally.

Frank Connor paced the floor
of his secret study like a condemned man. His phone had been confiscated and his landline restricted. Likewise, technicians had disabled all Internet access, both Ethernet and wireless. Even his cable TV had been cut off. His isolation was complete. He might as well be in prison already.

Pouring himself a glass of bourbon, he threw off his jacket and loosened his tie. His initial interrogation by the FBI had been brief and to the point. He’d decided up front to tell the truth. Piece by piece, he’d revealed the operation. The unauthorized attempt on Prince Rashid’s life with the explosive bullets was the first strike against him. Nine innings’ worth more followed. There was no point in lying. If he hadn’t already, Erskine would offer up his own version of the events. Connor’s every action of the past six months would be put under the microscope—every phone call, every e-mail, every meeting. His only hope was for the WMD to be found inside the hangar. Results meant exoneration. Failure meant punishment. Frank Connor was a big boy. He knew the drill.

Connor pulled up the section of floorboard and unlocked his private safe. Inside was a stack of virgin BlackBerries. Terrorists weren’t the only ones who didn’t want the government eavesdropping on their calls. He chose a phone and called his assistant, Lorena.

“Did they find it?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Mr. Sharp made me leave right after you.”

“What about Ransom and Danni? Any word?”

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“And Haq?”

Lorena started crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t find out anything.”

Connor hung up, walked through the closet to the bedroom door, and opened it an inch to make sure none of the marshals were nearby. Satisfied that he was alone, Connor called his colleague at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. “Got anything?” he whispered.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

Connor’s spirits lifted. “Shoot.”

“I checked Erskine. He’s clean.”

“I thought you said you had something for me.”

“Hold on to your pecker. I’m just getting started. It’s our policy not only to check the primary suspect but to look at everyone around him. So anyway, Erskine has a home equity account linked to his payroll account. That’s normal. I do, too. But Erskine’s always taking money out of the home equity account and never putting anything back in.”

“That sounds about right,” commented Connor.

“Here’s where it gets interesting. There’s a second account linked to the home equity line of credit—Erskine’s wife’s. Check this out: it’s his wife who’s making the occasional repayments, keeping the line of credit at a manageable level.”

“I know her. They just got married six months ago. She’s a nice gal. Lina.”

“Lina Zayed Erskine.”

Connor felt the floor shift beneath him, and a sharp pain radiated from his chest. “Go on.”

“Except that she’s putting in twenty, thirty, forty thousand at a time.”

“That seems kind of steep for an attorney over at Justice.”

“A GS-12. Annual salary of $74,872 before taxes. Obviously, that nugget got my attention, so I decided to look a little closer, see where she might be getting all that disposable income if it wasn’t courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

“And?”

“Turns out the money was wired into her account from a certain
bank domiciled in the Cayman Islands that we here at FinCEN are very familiar with. This establishment turns up much too often in connection with some of our shadier targets—drug dealers, arms traffickers, even the occasional link to our friends in Islam, if you get my drift. Naturally, it was a numbered account. No name, no nothing. Knowing that this might be important, I gave the head of the bank a call myself. He was none too happy to hear from me. When I mentioned the account in question, he practically had a coronary.
One of my best clients, a man of unrivaled reputation, a humanitarian
. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was talking about the Good Lord himself. Finally this jerk tells me that if I knew what was good for me, I would never mention this account again. End of discussion.”

“The client sounds more like Pablo Escobar than Jesus Christ.”

“Bingo. First thing I did after I hung up was put this numbered account through our tracking system.”

“Any results?”

“Big time! We got a dozen hits right off the bat, all of them linked to some very questionable characters.”

“All right, I’ve still got my pecker in my hand, and you’ll be happy to know it’s hard as a rock. A real diamond cutter. Just tell me who the account belongs to.”

“I don’t have a definitive, but there’s one name that keeps popping up.”

“Who?” Connor listened to the name and felt his chest tighten. It was suddenly difficult to breathe. “Frank … you there?”

“Yeah,” said Connor, finally drawing a breath. “Forward what you’ve got to my BlackBerry. I’ve got a new number. Here it is.”

There was a knock on his bedroom door and Connor hung up, hurrying from the study and stuffing the phone into his pocket. He unlocked the door, and one of the marshals peered inside. “Would you like something from your kitchen before bed, sir? I know chow down at the J. Edgar Hoover Building ain’t so great.”

“How ’bout a tuna sandwich and some coffee,” said Connor.

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed and Connor locked it. Hurrying back to his safe, he withdrew $50,000 in neat packets of hundreds, and with them two clean U.S. passports in the names of Donald Maynard and John Riggins. Connor was a Jets fan from way back, but he drew the line at Emerson Boozer. Finally, reaching deep into the safe, he withdrew a polished oak box. He unclasped the lock and removed a sleek stainless steel semiautomatic pistol, a Ruger .380. The sight of guns made him nervous, and he handled it clumsily, struggling to insert the clip and chamber a round.

Satisfied that he had everything he needed if circumstances forced him to become a permanent fugitive, he closed the safe, turned off the lights, and walked across his bedroom to fetch his gloves and overcoat.