Rules of Betrayal

by Christopher Reich

  It was ten o’clock the morning after Jonathan had arrived in Israel. Standing next to Danni on the corner of Ramat Gan and Ben Gurion streets in the commercial heart of Tel Aviv, he leaned closer to hear her over the noise of the traffic. Around them, the sidewalk pulsed with activity. A multitude of shoppers passed in both directions, all of them appearing to be in an urgent rush.

  “We’re going to start with something simple,” she went on. “I want you to cross the street and continue halfway down the block before crossing against traffic to the other side. When you get to the other side, keep on going in the same direction until you reach the traffic signal. We’ll catch up to you there.”

  Jonathan scoped out the route. “It’s less than two hundred meters.”

  “That’s far enough,” said Danni. She had abandoned the maid’s uniform for jeans, a white tank top, and black designer sunglasses. “Four people are going to follow you. They’re all in plain sight right now. Take a second to look around you and familiarize yourself with the people you see.”

  Jonathan stepped away from Danni, finding a gap where he had a clearer view of both sides of the street.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, grabbing him by the arm.

  “What you said. I’m looking around at everyone.”

  “And everyone knows that’s what you’re doing. You look like a virgin in a strip club. Your eyes are about to pop out of your head. Watch me.”

  Danni walked casually to the corner of the intersection, taking up position next to a squat middle-aged woman carrying two straw shopping bags. Danni said a word to the woman, then returned her gaze to the intersection, pausing only to scratch her head. The light changed. The pedestrians around her crossed the street.

  “That’s how you do it,” Danni said, once more at Jonathan’s side.

  “Do what? You didn’t look anywhere except at that lady and the pavement in front of you.”

  “Exactly.” Keeping her eyes locked on Jonathan, she said, “There’s a man across the road by the kebab stand, blue jeans, red shirt. Another guy is waiting to cross next to him, dark suit, sunglasses, cropped hair, can’t keep from checking his watch. Kitty-corner to us are two teenage girls, I’d say fifteen or sixteen, who’ve been working their way through the same rack of T-shirts since we’ve been standing here.”

  Danni went on, pointing out men and women both stationary and on the move. Jonathan viewed each in turn, marveling at her ability to recall. “Which ones are going to follow me?” he asked.

  “That’s not the point. I’m saying you have to observe without looking. Keep your head still and let your eyes move. Use store windows. Reflections from passing cars. Use natural movements as an excuse to look. Stop to tie your shoe. This is about sensing as much as anything else. Clear your mind. Expand your listening. Feel your surroundings.”

  “I thought this was Israel, not Japan. I’m about to have a Zen moment.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it, fine. Hone your senses. Right now they’re about as sharp as a butter knife.”

  “How can you hone anything when you can barely hear yourself think or move without bumping into someone?”

  As if to prove his point, a police car sped past, siren blaring. Jonathan stepped back from the curb, only to notice that he was the only one who had done so.

  “Off you go,” said Danni, arms crossed. “One hundred meters. Cross halfway along. Your job is to spot the four people following you. And don’t give yourself away.”

  The light turned in his favor. The pedestrians surrounding him left the curb. A step late, Jonathan joined them. Four people tailing him. He started to turn his head, then yanked it back to center. Let your eyes move. He looked out of the corner of his eye. The teenage girls who’d been examining T-shirts were mirroring his progress on the opposite side of the street. The businessman in the dark suit was there too, talking on a cell phone. Jonathan locked onto a pregnant woman and a boy wearing a Lakers cap. It might be them, too. Danni probably thought he wouldn’t suspect a guy wearing an American basketball hat. Jonathan stepped onto the curb, just avoiding a collision with two Hassidim barreling right at him, and realized he’d been craning his neck.

  Foot traffic slowed. Ducking his shoulder, Jonathan angled through the crowd, keeping a steady pace. He lost sight of the teenage girls. The businessman was long gone, too. He was unable to spot one familiar face. Overwhelmed, he gave up trying to locate his tails. He concentrated instead on not barging into anyone. He reached the midway point and stepped to the edge of the sidewalk. Automobile traffic cleared, and he jogged across the street.

  This opposite side of the road was less crowded. He kneeled to tie his shoe, then realized he was wearing moccasins that didn’t have laces. Giving himself to the illusion, he pretended, but when he looked to either side of him, he saw only knees and shoes and men with potbellies, all too close for comfort. Rising, he continued on toward the end of the block.

  At a cell-phone store, he stopped to study the items on display, hoping to use the window to spot one of Danni’s tails. But the sun was too bright, and he couldn’t see anything except glare. He started off once more, and after ten steps reached the end of the block. Standing next to the traffic signal, he studied the faces of the people walking past. Nothing. No one looked familiar.

  “And so? Who are they?”

  Startled, Jonathan spun to find Danni behind him. “How’d you …?” he asked. “When did you … ah, forget it.”

  “It was too easy, right?” she went on. “They were sticking out like sore thumbs.”

  Jonathan took a last look down the street. “Trick question, right? No one was following me.”

  Danni’s eyes narrowed. “Not one?”

  Jonathan averted his gaze, more embarrassed than he cared to admit. “Sorry.”

  “All right, then—I’ll show you.” Danni pointed to a blond woman in the doorway of a music store. A moment passed, and a woman walked up next to her. Something about them was vaguely familiar. The women casually took off their jackets, one let her hair loose from a ponytail, and Jonathan recognized them as the teenagers in the T-shirt shop. Next Danni indicated a trim man in a warm-up jacket and racing cap. The man removed the racing cap and turned the warm-up jacket inside out. Jonathan found himself staring at the frenetic businessman.

  “I even pointed them out before you started,” said Danni. “I couldn’t help you more than that.”

  “But they changed clothing.”

  “Common practice. My girls put on jackets and threw their hair into ponytails. If you look closer, you’ll see that they did not change their pants or their shoes.”

  Jonathan noted that one wore yellow shorts and Nike tennis shoes and the other white Capri pants and matching flats. He hadn’t paid attention to their attire. Just their faces.

  “Your job is to spot the consistent item. Don’t look at faces. Faces change. Look at shoes or at belts or at anything you find distinctive.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “I was the fourth. I was right behind you the entire time.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Inside of three meters, every step of the way. And I didn’t even change clothes.”

  “But—”

  Danni checked her watch. “Go again.”

  22

  Frank Connor heard the kitchen door slam and a pair of vigorous feet charge up the stairs. The bedroom door opened, and Congressman Joseph Tecumseh Grant bounded into the room. He was wearing athletic shorts and a sweatshirt and he carried a basketball under one arm. Like half the other members of Congress, he was a late-in-life pledge to the fraternity of Phi Slamma Jamma. He saw Connor and drew up.

  “Frank … What the—?”

  “Why did you lie to me, Joe?”

  Grant put down his basketball, then closed the door to the bedroom. The modest row house on the 300 block of C Street Northeast sat within sight of the Capitol and was home away from home for Grant and three other congres
smen.

  “I’m afraid I have to object to your presence in my home. Just what the heck gives you the right?”

  “Sit down and shut up.”

  “I know all about you and your crew of ‘operators.’ Trained killers is what they are. Nothing but thugs and assassins.”

  “That’s enough, Joe.”

  “Are you trying to intimidate me?” Grant advanced toward Connor, his finger raised in righteous indignation. “If you are, it won’t work.”

  “I don’t do intimidation, Joe. Otherwise, you’d be lying in an alley somewhere between here and the gym with that basketball shoved up your ass. I do results.”

  “You got your results yesterday. I answered all your questions to the fullest of my ability. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave now.”

  Connor didn’t move a muscle. He sat in Grant’s swivel chair, as imperturbable as Buddha. “It’s like this, Joe. I know you lied to me. I would have lied myself if I were in your shoes. The problem is that I don’t have time to cut through a load of air force BS. This thing with the cruise missile—it’s happening now. We both know that no one would ever admit to having lost a nuclear weapon unless I personally delivered the device myself to the Pentagon and plopped it on the desk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” protested Grant. “We have never lost a missile. I told you the whole truth and nothing but. Scout’s—”

  “Honor,” said Connor, in unison. “I’ve heard that tune before.” Frowning, he removed a manila envelope from his jacket and flipped it onto the coffee table. “Open it.”

  Grant stepped forward and picked up the envelope, his eyes widening as he read the name of the world-famous journalist to whom it was addressed. The envelope was not sealed, and its contents slid easily into his hand. He looked at the photographs first, his expression passing from bewilderment to anger to shame. Connor had seen it all before. Then Grant read the transcripts of the cell-phone intercepts and his expression collapsed entirely. He gazed up at Connor, then, seized with a notion, threw the papers down and began pulling books off the shelves, dumping them on the floor. Connor had seen this, too.

  “Where is it, you sonofabitch? Where’d you hide it?”

  “Don’t bother,” said Connor. “You won’t find the camera. We don’t leave stuff like that around.”

  Grant stopped. “Was it her?” he said. “Is she one of yours, too?”

  “As I said yesterday, Joe. I’m not that clever. She really is a fourteen-year-old student at Sidwell Friends School.”

  Grant dropped to a knee and replaced the papers and photographs in the envelope. “Is this the only copy?”

  Connor shook his head. “Of course not.”

  “Why?”

  “Leverage. I won’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy putting you holier-than-thou blowhards in your place. But really it’s more about efficiency. I need to be able to do my job without you interfering.”

  A terrible idea came to Grant, and his face darkened further. “You don’t do this to everyone?”

  “God, no,” said Connor. “We don’t have the resources. Besides, everyone isn’t the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees my activities. Ways and Means has nothing to worry about. Neither does the Banking Committee.”

  Grant paced the perimeter of his room, every so often looking at Connor and shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you put your finger in it this time.”

  “I’m just collecting information, Joe. I think this one is in your court.”

  “It was twenty-five years ago.”

  “Last I heard, uranium had a half-life a wee bit longer than that.”

  “Frank, I just can’t …”

  “I’m waiting.”

  Grant sat down, as if he had an unbearable weight on his shoulders. “You know what a mirror mission is?” he said finally.

  “That’s not my bailiwick.”

  “Back in the day when Russia was still the big bad bear, we used to send out our aircraft on long-range runs mirroring the flight profiles we would follow in the event of a nuclear exchange. That’s when it happened. One of our B-52s suffered a catastrophic engine failure and went down, carrying two nuclear-tipped ALCMs. Since the plane’s flight was top-secret, we couldn’t mount a full-fledged retrieval operation. There was also the embarrassment factor. We weren’t going to admit to losing anything until we got them back. It stacked up as a disaster on ten different levels.”

  “So you just left them there?”

  “Our tracking data showed that one of the devices broke apart on impact and was rendered useless. We figured we only had to worry about the one. We had a decent idea where the plane went down, but remember, this was back in 1984, before we had the kind of GPS system we do now. We were able to narrow down the crash’s location to a one-hundred-square-mile perimeter. The problem was the terrain. Up there, a hundred square miles might as well be a million. For three years we put teams up that mountain. It was a monumental undertaking, more so because it’s impossible to travel around without being noticed. When a place is absolutely deserted, even a single person stands out. It’s not like you can zip in there at night, grab the thing, and zip back out. We’re talking the tallest mountains on earth.”

  “What about satellites?”

  “To reposition one of our birds in space required an order of Congress. You can’t just flip some switch and move your footprint. At least, you couldn’t back then. No one wanted to spill the beans. We were effectively blind.”

  “No one ever found it?”

  Grant shook his head. “It was a miracle we were even able to locate the plane. We blew up all the pieces we found. There was sensitive equipment on board, and we wanted to cover our tracks. But we never did find hide nor hair of that last bomb. After a while we just forgot about it. It was no different from losing a bomb at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Hell, if we couldn’t get to it, who could?”

  Connor absorbed the information without emotion. He had seen a lot of incompetence during his years. He knew about prevarication and self-deception and all the other white lies bureaucrats tell themselves to paper over their failures. “How big, Joe?”

  “I swear we tried,” said Grant. “We did everything we could. You of all people should know that some things have to remain secret.”

  “How big a bomb are we talking about?”

  “It was Russia we were up against. How big do you think?”

  “I’m waiting, Congressman.”

  “One-fifty.”

  “One-fifty what?”

  “One hundred fifty kilotons. The biggest that we could fit on an ALCM.”

  “And Hiroshima was how big?”

  “Ten.”

  Connor kept his liverish gaze on Grant.

  “It can’t be found,” Grant pleaded. “It’s above twenty-two thousand feet, two hundred miles from the nearest city. The goddamn thing weighs three thousand pounds. It’s gone, Frank. Do you hear me? It’s at the bottom of some prehistoric crevasse. No one can get to it. It’s impossible.”

  23

  The team numbered eight in all. There was the helicopter pilot, a rangy Pakistani who had flown rescue missions in the Hindu Kush for forty years. The guide, the farmer from the region who had found the missile and knew the approach like the back of his hand. Two nuclear physicists, both veterans of the A. Q. Khan network. Three porters to carry the equipment. And Emma.

  Emma was the team leader, or, as Lord Balfour had informed her, “his personal ambassador to keep the others in line and focused on their task.” She knew better than to rely on his imprimatur of authority. In her pack she carried an Uzi submachine gun, just in case.

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Emma had put down at an airfield in Chitral, elevation twenty-six hundred meters, four hundred kilometers northeast of Islamabad and a stone’s throw from the Afghan border. If, that is, one could throw a stone over the towering peaks that held the impoveri
shed mountain village in their palm. She stood huddled with the pilot and guide on the tarmac, backs turned against a bitterly cold norther as they studied a topographic map of the region.

  “Missile here.” The guide pointed to a red dot inked near the peak of Tirich Mir.

  “It’s very high,” said Emma, noting the altitude. “Seven thousand meters.”

  “No worries, madam,” he continued in his crisply enunciated but broken English. “Missile not at seven thousand meter. Avalanche in spring. Maybe missile come down mountain. Maybe six thousand meter. No higher.”

  Emma considered this. Six thousand meters was over nineteen thousand feet. With little time to acclimatize, the entire team would require oxygen. “You’re sure you can find it again?”

  “My brother there now. Lord Balfour pay.”

  Emma turned to the pilot. “How high can you take your chopper?”

  “Five thousand meters.”

  “That’s all? Surely you can take us higher.”

  “Not in my aircraft. The air’s thin at that altitude. It’s very difficult to get proper lift. To go higher, you need a military helicopter. I’m sorry.”

  “Any place to put down nearby?”

  “There are no airfields, if that’s what you mean. No one lives in the area. It’s beyond hell and gone. I suggest we make a recce and hope to find a decent place to set down.” The pilot caught Emma’s eye. “Might I have a word?”

  Emma said, “Of course,” and asked the guide to give them a moment. Grudgingly, the guide moved a few steps away. The pilot glanced at the sky, taking in the thin cumulus clouds that raked it. “There’s a front moving in. If you think it’s windy here, wait until we get up high. The gusts will be blowing at gale force. It might be better to postpone the expedition.”

  A front meant snow. This late in the year, a significant snowfall would keep the missile buried until the spring thaw next May or June. Emma couldn’t allow that to happen. “We’ll manage,” she said. “Let’s finish fueling and get moving.”

  “So we go?” asked the guide, who’d overheard every word. The trip meant payment, and in his case an early retirement.