Rules of Betrayal

20

“How high up is it?” asked Emma.

“Six thousand meters,” said Lord Balfour.

“How was it found?”

“A local came across it.”

“What?” asked Emma with irritation. “He stepped outside his hut and tripped over it? You’re not talking to one of your toadies anymore. I need specifics.”

Balfour started out of his chair, only to catch himself. “He was traveling home from his father’s village on the other side of the pass. He made camp and came across it as he was collecting snow to melt for water. There had been an avalanche, and he saw the guidance fins protruding from the icefall several hundred meters up the slope. People here are ignorant, not idiots. He knew that something of that nature might be worth a lot of money. When he returned home, he told his brother. They took a picture of the missile and brought it to the regional boss of Chitral. The man is a friend of mine. He knew I would be interested.”

“That’s more like it,” said Emma.

“I’ll thank you to watch your tone.”

“I’ll thank you to answer me properly.”

It was midafternoon. The day was clear and warm, the air dry as a bone, the kind of day that the north of Pakistan produced in abundance in late fall. She sat in a high-backed leather armchair in Balfour’s study, with a cup of Darjeeling tea to keep her awake and a bottle of Vicodin to kill the pain. Balfour had other, more potent remedies should she need them. If weapons were his first love, narcotics came a close second.

He called his estate Blenheim, and Blenheim it was. Oriental carpets covered the parquet floor. There were Regency desks and Gobelin tapestries and life-sized oils of long-deceased (and surely unrelated) ancestors staring down from walnut-paneled walls, pretending to be Sargents or Gainesboroughs. Every time she glanced out the window, she expected to look upon the rain-swept hillocks of Oxfordshire. Instead she was granted a breathtaking view of the violet-hued mountains of the Hindu Kush.

“So no one else knows about the find?” Emma continued.

Balfour shook his head.

“You’re certain?”

“This is Pakistan. Certainty is not a word to us. We make do with ‘probably’ and hope for the best.”

Emma rose from her chair. “Show me the rest of the pictures.”

Balfour laid a series of eight-by-twelve color photographs on his desk. They showed the missile fully uncovered from a variety of angles.

“Six four seven alpha hotel bravo.” She read the identification number painted on the cruise missile’s belly. “You know what this is?”

“It’s an air-launched cruise missile manufactured by the Boeing Corporation circa 1980. Weapons are my business.”

“I mean what these numbers denote.” Emma pointed to a photograph showing a close-up of the missile where the identification number was clearly visible. “Designation ‘alpha hotel bravo.’”

Balfour sipped tea from his Wedgwood cup. “It is the American designation for a nuclear-tipped weapon,” he said, looking at her from under his brow. “Does that cause you any concern?”

“Why should it? Weapons are my business, too.”

Balfour threw his head back and laughed richly, his theatrical laugh. “I knew I was right to come for you. You and I are a match made in heaven.”

“Really?” said Emma. “I’d have thought it was more the other place.”

Balfour laughed louder.

Emma nearly smiled, feeling something close to fondness for the man. A little more than a week earlier, she’d never been happier to see anyone in her entire life.

After her beating at the hands of Prince Rashid, she’d lain in the desert for hours, broken in body and spirit. It was not only the pain of her injuries that left her without hope, but the circumstances of her betrayal. Over and over she’d played Rashid’s words in her mind. “Who do you work for? The CIA? The Pentagon?” It was Connor’s doing. There was no one else to blame. It was anger that drove her to her feet, to deny the impossibility of her situation. She hadn’t sacrificed so much to die alone in a foreign land. It wasn’t right. Not for all she had done. Not for a woman in her condition. She’d made it fifty steps before Balfour arrived, and she didn’t know if she could have made it one more.

He’d flown her to Pakistan aboard one of his jets. He’d seen to it that she received medical care and proper rest. But all the while she’d known there would be a price.

“Why do you trust me?” she’d asked when she’d recovered enough to ask why he’d come for her.

“Because you’re like me,” Balfour had answered. “You have nowhere else to turn.”

“What makes you so sure?” she’d asked, a rebel despite her bruised ribs, second-degree burns, and the angry scabs that covered her hips and shoulders and back.

“Thanks to Prince Rashid, the Russians know you’re a double. You can’t go back there. It’s obvious the Americans don’t want you either.”

“How do you know?”

Balfour had leaned close, so that she could smell the mint on his breath and note the long eyelashes that made his brown eyes glimmer. “The bullets, darling. Rashid told me that someone tipped him off.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?” Balfour’s dismissive tone convinced her he knew more than he was saying. “Someone on your side wants you dead. You can’t go home.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she’d countered, turning her head away so he couldn’t read the hurt in her eyes. “I can take care of myself.”

“Of course you can. But first I need your help.”

Emma had said nothing. She could refuse him, but he could as easily kill her as let her go. In the end, it came down to actions. He’d saved her life. The fact that he’d done so to further his own aims changed nothing. She owed him. It was only later that she began to fashion her own plan.

“Give me a map,” she said, returning her mind to the present.

Balfour showed her to a round table in the center of the room where a detailed topographic map was laid out. For an hour they discussed the logistics of the operation-men, equipment, timing. And all the while she sensed his eyes on her, measuring, appraising, calculating. She had known that Balfour was in trouble, but she sensed a new impatience about him, a frisson of desperation that electrified his every movement.

She had more questions. To whom did he intend to sell the missile? How much did he expect to receive? Where would the transfer take place? But these were an intelligence agent’s questions, and she knew better than to ask.

She remembered Rashid’s shadowy associate, the solemn, robed man kept deliberately apart from the others. She realized now that his separation was not to prevent him from learning too much about Rashid’s transaction but to keep Emma, and perhaps even Balfour, from learning too much about him.

“How soon can you go up?” Balfour asked, barely able to keep his ostrich-skin loafers in one place.

“How soon would you like?”

“Two days,” said Balfour. It was a command, not a request.

“All right,” said Emma, hiding her uncertainty about whether her still fragile body would be up to the task. “Two days.”

It was then that Emma knew Balfour’s troubles were worse than she’d realized.

Retrieving the missile was key.

For him and for her.