Rules of Betrayal

3

It was snowing in the resort of Les Grandes Alpes. Large, fluffy flakes tumbled from a curiously clear sky onto the mountainside. Translated, the resort’s name meant “the Big Alps,” but the slope was nowhere near Switzerland, nor any other mountain range in Europe, and its runs were anything but grand. The entire skiing area consisted of a single well-groomed piste that descended in three sections, like flights of a staircase, steep, then flat, and finally a gentle decline to the bottom.

The woman named Lara Antonova attacked the hill expertly, skis pressed together, hands at her waist. It was just past three and the slope was crowded with skiers. Most were novices. The snowplow was the rule, and the majority had difficulty mastering even that. Dressed in white stretch pants and a turquoise down parka, her auburn hair pulled into a ponytail that hung past her shoulder, she carved a sleek line among the other skiers, her eyes casting about for a familiar face.

Lara Antonova had not come to Les Grandes Alpes for the skiing. Born in Siberia and raised a ward of the state, she was a highly ranked operative assigned to Directorate S of the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service. Directorate S was responsible for foreign clandestine operations: intelligence-gathering, blackmail, extortion, and in the rare case assassination. Lara Antonova had come to Les Grandes Alpes on assignment to meet the most powerful arms dealer in southwestern Asia.

Reaching the halfway point, she came to a crisp parallel stop. She removed her goggles and surveyed the slope. Despite their lack of skill, most of the skiers were dressed as if they were habitues of the finest alpine resorts. A survey of equipment turned up nothing but the latest Kastle skis, Rossignol boots, and Bogner ensembles. Still, even among the raft of colorful attire, she had no difficulty spotting her mark. He stood fifty meters down the hill, a trim, diminutive man clad in a conservative navy ski suit, skiing slowly and with great caution down the center of the slope. Surrounding him, arrayed like a battle fleet protecting the prized carrier at its center, were six very large men in black-and-gray parkas. It was a retinue worthy of a head of state. Then again, her mark was royalty. Lord Balfour, by name if not lineage.

“I’ve got him,” said Lara as she bent to check her bindings. “He’s got six crushers with him.”

“Six?” Her controller’s gravelly voice spoke to her from the miniature receiver planted deep in her ear canal. “That’s up two from the last time. He must be in trouble.”

The person in question was named Ashok Balfour Armitraj, a.k.a. Lord Balfour. Hair: black (dyed); height: 5?5?; weight: 160 lbs.; age: 52. Bastard son of a Muslim mother and a British father, brought up in Dharavi, Mumbai’s worst slum. A childhood on the streets. An early bent toward criminality, or, his word, “entrepreneurship.” Member of a gang at age eight. A chieftain at fifteen. Then, at twenty, the big move to start his own crew.

Balfour dabbled in everything, black and white. On the legitimate side, there were real estate and raw materials and even online brokerage. Less legitimately, there were drugs, white slavery, and counterfeit merchandise. But in the end it always came back to arms. Guns, artillery, helicopters, even jets. If there was mention of it in Jane’s Defence Archive, Lord Balfour could get it for you.

Down the hill, Balfour had come to a halt. His men gathered around him, forming a two-layer defensive perimeter. Judging by the heft of his jacket and the way he kept his zipper undone to his breastbone, the bodyguard closest to Lara was carrying an Uzi. And if there was one machine gun, there would be others. Balfour wasn’t one for half-measures.

“Where’s the merchandise?” Lara asked her controller.

“On the ground at Tehran International. Three-hour transit time inbound to you.”

“All there?”

“Down to the last bullet.”

She had negotiated the transaction herself and knew the packing list by heart. Fifteen hundred Kalashnikov assault rifles, 1,000 grenades, 200 antipersonnel mines, 2 million rounds of ammunition, 100 Advanced Night Vision goggles, 500 kilos of Semtex plastic explosive. There was big stuff, too. Twenty shoulder-held ground-to-air missiles, 10 fifty-caliber machine guns, 100 antitank weapons, and an ample supply of munitions. A grand total of $10 million worth of arms and materiel. Enough to supply a reinforced infantry battalion of Taliban insurgents.

“Sounds good,” she said. “We’re a go.”

“Just get us our money.”

Lara slid her phone from her pocket and hit speed-dial. A cultured British voice answered. “Hello, darling.”

“I’m just up the hill.” She raised a pole and the man below glanced at her.

“Aren’t we dashing?” said Lord Balfour.

“Tell your boys to let me through.” Lara pushed off and skied down the hill, cutting past the phalanx of bodyguards without a glance and coming to a dramatic halt next to Balfour.

“You don’t ski like a Russian,” he said with admiration.

Lara considered this. “Unfortunately, you ski like a Maratha.”

Balfour threw his head back and laughed richly.

Everything he does, he does in spades, Lara remembered. He laughs too much, talks too loudly, and kills too freely. Looking at the small Indian, his hair slicked back with pomade, his Mississippi gambler’s mustache just so, his eyes warm and friendly, she forced herself to remember that he was a volatile and dangerous man.

“But really, where did you learn to ski like that?” Balfour’s smile was stretched to breaking.

“Switzerland, mostly.”

“Gstaad?” He pronounced it perfectly. Sshttaad.

“Why, yes.” In fact she’d never set foot in the Swiss resort, but she knew better than to embarrass him twice. “How did you know?”

“I have a friend who lives there. A doctor. He says the Russians have positively overrun it. Is that where you went while on your sabbatical?”

Lara sensed something amiss. “Excuse me?”

“I mean when you left the FSB. I understand you stopped working for Moscow for a number of years. Isn’t that correct?”

“You tell me.”

“Rumor is that the FSB dumped you when they ran out of money back in the nineties. You jumped to the other side of the Atlantic and went to work for American intelligence as some kind of freelancer. They chucked you out a few months ago and you went running back to Daddy.”

Lara smiled casually, but inside, her alarm bells were sounding. This wasn’t a rumor. It was a full-fledged leak. “I wouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

But Balfour wasn’t so easily put off. “I couldn’t care less,” he explained with exaggerated earnestness. “I built my first house with money from the CIA. Even today the director has me on his speed-dial. ‘Balfour,’ he says, ‘Congress won’t allow us to arm the Waziris. You do it for us. Here’s a check for twenty million from the black fund. You can double your commission if you buy American.’ Frankly, I consider myself an honorary agent. No, it’s not me who’s concerned about whether or not you worked for the Americans.”

“Then who is it?”

“My client. I don’t need to tell you that there is no love lost between the prince and Uncle Sam. In fact, he’s convinced they’re trying to kill him.”

The prince was Crown Prince Rashid al-Zayed, youngest member of the Zayed clan, rulers of the United Arab Emirates, and secret financier of all causes Islamic.

“The papers reported that his private jet lost an engine,” said Lara. “That’s common enough.”

“Granted. But last week a Predator drone missed him by five minutes when he was visiting friends in the tribal areas near Peshawar. Killed ten of his closest friends. Nothing accidental about that.”

“He may be right, then,” said Lara. “He’s arming their enemies, after all. Taliban, Hezbollah, FARC.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Rumors,” said Lara. “My boss, General Ivanov, is well informed, too. Last I checked, he wasn’t too keen on the Americans either. I am correct in assuming that it was you who initiated contact with our organization on the prince’s behalf?”

Balfour stared into Lara’s eyes for several seconds. The smile was gone, as was any indication of warmth. He was a hardened criminal sizing up a contact and deciding whether or not she was to be trusted. “And so?” he said finally, with his usual vigor. “Is the shipment complete? The prince is adamant that he receive everything.”

“One hundred percent fulfillment. All sitting on the tarmac in Tehran waiting for the prince’s go-ahead.”

Balfour raised an eyebrow, impressed. Turning his head, he placed a call and spoke in rapid Arabic. “The prince asks if midnight would be all right,” he said after hanging up.

Both of them knew it was not a request.

“Midnight will be fine.” Lara gazed casually up the slope. Her eyes landed on two men dressed in decidedly inferior gray ski suits. “Tell me, Ash, is everything all right between you and your client?”

“Never better,” replied Ashok Balfour Armitraj. “We are as close as brothers.”

“Then why does your brother have two of his hoods watching you?”

Balfour followed Lara’s eyes to the two men. “Them?” he chuckled, his humor firmly back in place. “They’re not His Highness’s men. They’re ISI. Pakistani intelligence. I consider them my backup protection.”

“Really?”

“They see to it that the boys from Indian intelligence don’t get their hands on me. Delhi is convinced that I had a hand in the Mumbai attacks. They say I armed the bad guys. They’re out for blood.”

Hence the Uzis. “Did you?” she asked.

“Of course,” said Balfour. “But that’s beside the point. I was just the broker. I sold them their toys. They could’ve bought them from anyone. In point of fact, the weapons were yours.”

“Mine? I didn’t even know you then.”

“I mean Russian. The lot. AKs, grenades, fuses, even the phones. It was a Russian package from stem to stern.”

Lara looked at her watch. They had been standing together conspicuously on the slope for ten minutes, which was nine minutes too long. As a contact, Balfour was a nightmare. Somewhere along the line, he had gotten it into his head that he was not a criminal wanted by the law enforcement agencies of a dozen Western nations but a legitimate businessman. In Germany or Britain, his brand of flagrant behavior would have gotten him either killed or jailed for life. In Pakistan, where he made his home, it made him a king.

“And so?” she said. “Midnight. At your hangar at Sharjah Free Trade Zone.”

“I’ll have one of my aircraft ready to transship the merchandise.”

“Where’s it going?”

“Tsk, tsk,” said Balfour. “That’s the prince’s business.”

“We like to know where our weapons end up.”

“There’s only one war going on in the region that I know of at the moment. Use your imagination.”

Business concluded, Lara waited as Balfour and his men skied to the bottom of the hill. On cue, the pair of Pakistani intelligence officers followed them down the slope.

She spent another hour at Les Grandes Alpes, taking the chairlift to the top of the hill several more times and skiing down. Certain she wasn’t being trailed, she made a final descent, took off her skis, and returned them at the rental desk, along with her boots and poles. Leaving the rental desk, she proceeded into a changing room, where she removed her ski attire and packed it neatly in a shoulder bag.

She emerged five minutes later, wearing denim shorts, a tight black tank, and low heels. She’d exchanged her oversized Uvex goggles for Ray-Ban aviators and freed her hair from the ponytail, letting it take its usual ungoverned course, falling around her face and shoulders.

Walking past the base of the ski slope, she glanced up to the sky, where giant snow machines hidden in the rafters continued to shower perfectly formed snowflakes onto the mountain. Not bad, she thought to herself, for a desert kingdom thousands of miles from Europe. What did the Quran say? If Muhammad won’t go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Muhammad.

A moment later she pushed through a pair of tall double doors and stepped into the harsh sunlight and ninety-degree temperature of a late fall day in the sprawling metropolis of Dubai City, on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

As soon as she reached her car, she placed a call. Not to Moscow, but to Washington, D.C.

“It’s Emma,” she said. “It’s a go. Midnight at the duty-free zone in Sharjah. The prince himself is coming.”