Treason Play

“Maybe I need to clarify,” Bolan said. “I don’t like you. You’re a monster preying and profiting on the misery of others. You wore out my patience three minutes ago. If I had more time, or was a better interrogator, I’d establish a rapport with you, earn your trust, make you a lot of promises. I don’t have that kind of time. So answer my questions. What’s the game here?”

“He poked his nose into Khan’s affairs.”

“And?”

“Khan didn’t like it.”

“News flash.”

“I mean, he betrayed Khan.”

Bolan’s brow furrowed. “Betrayed. You mean, they were working together?”

“That’s what Khan thought. I mean, Lang was working through an intermediary, but Khan thought he had him, had leverage over him.”

“What kind of leverage?” Grimaldi asked.

“When Lang first started poking around Khan’s operations, Khan thought the guy was just another journalist sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. We tried to throw him off the trail. We sent a couple of people his way, ones who gave him bad information, tried to send him in the wrong direction.”

“And?” Bolan asked.

“And it didn’t work. Not for long, anyway. Sure, he might follow the lead for a little while, but then he always came back around, asking the right people the right questions, going to the right places. It was uncanny.”

“And Khan considered this a betrayal?”

Sharif shook his head. “No. After a while, Khan got tired of playing games with him and started having his people do their own digging, build their own case. Khan started to believe Lang was getting his information from an intelligence source or multiple sources.”

“You thought he was a spy.”

“Well, wasn’t he? I mean, look at you two. You’re not reporters, are you?”

Grimaldi looked at Bolan and grinned. “Pretty perceptive for a psychopath.”

He turned to Sharif. “So Khan decides Lang’s a spy and has him killed. And here we are. How’s that a betrayal?”

“I don’t know all the details.”

“But you know some,” the pilot replied.

“The way I understand it, Khan never knew for sure Lang was a spook or at least working with spooks. He made inquiries with his old ISI contacts, but they had nothing much on the guy. He’d been in Islamabad for a while, but their records had always pegged him as a journalist and nothing more. But Khan wasn’t convinced, so he decided to try recruiting him.”

“As a double agent,” Grimaldi said.

Sharif nodded. “He wanted to see just how much Western intelligence really knew about him and he figured that, if Lang knew something, he’d share it, maybe even take bad information back to his handlers. If the right pressure was applied.”

“Clever,” Bolan said. “Risky, but clever.”

“Too clever by half. Khan underestimated him. We thought we were turning him, but he was using us, penetrating the organization further all the time. He got what you Americans call the family jewels. Pieced together the organization’s structure, found out who Khan did business with, what he sells and where. Surely some of this information you’ve seen.”

Bolan gave a noncommittal shrug. “Khan knew all this stuff was going out the door?”

“Not at first, but he got the idea after a while. Hey, Khan had been an intelligence agent himself and had run operations against India while he was with the ISI. He knew the score. He’s no fool.”

“Not if he surrounds himself with top-shelf talent like you,” Bolan said. “Didn’t Khan think it was risky killing Lang? Who cares whether he was a reporter or a spy? Either way he’s dead, and now you have me and a bunch of other folks breathing down your neck. Seems like a bad trade to me.”

Sharif’s lips parted as he prepared to reply to Bolan. Before he could utter a sound, though, a small dark hole opened on his forehead, followed an instant later by the sound of glass breaking. Bolan whirled toward the sound and spotted the window behind him disintegrating in a waterfall of glass shards.

Grimaldi grabbed hold of Bolan’s windbreaker and gave it a hard yank, causing him to reel backward. A bullet sizzled through the air and pierced the space where he’d been standing only a moment before.

Once the Executioner hit the ground, he rolled across the floor and got out of direct site of the now-shattered window.

Grimaldi simultaneously was on the move, his hand filled with a Browning Hi-Power as he sought cover. Bolan saw from the corner of his eye that his friend was safe, which freed him to deal with the shooter. Three more rifle slugs lanced through the window and drilled into the floor and walls. None of them came close to hitting the Stony Man warriors, though the shooter did succeed in keeping them out of sight of the window.

The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.

“You okay?” Bolan asked his old friend.

“Yeah. You?”

The Beretta leveled in front of him in a two-handed grip, Bolan was up on one knee, looking through the window and scanning the rooftops of nearby buildings. A trained sniper himself, his mind was running through a rough series of calculations, trying to determine the angle from which the shots had come so he could best identify the building from which the shooter had attacked. He saw no movement on any of the nearby rooftops, but within a couple of seconds thought he’d identified the sniper’s perch.

He shot to his feet and moved toward the window. By the time he’d reached it, he heard tires squeal from the street below. He looked down in time to see a forest-green sedan rocket out of a nearby alley, cutting off an oncoming car before disappearing in traffic.

“There goes our shooter,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan nodded. He stowed his weapon, ran outside and crossed the street to the alley from where the green sedan had shot into traffic. He searched the building’s perimeter while Grimaldi continued to watch from above.

Minutes later Bolan keyed his throat mike. “I got nothing,” he said. “But I do hear sirens. I guess it’s time we made our exit.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“What about the other two men?” Nawaz Khan asked.

Daniel Masters shook his head. “Couldn’t get them,” he said. “Never got a clear shot.”

Seated behind his wide mahogany desk, Khan leaned back in his chair and scowled. He pressed his fingertips together, his hands forming a steeple, and stared over them at Daniel Masters.

“This is not good,” he said.

“Thanks for the bloody understatement,” Masters snapped back. “These two men stormed the building, killed some of our best and brightest without breaking a sweat, and interrogated someone familiar with our plans. So, yeah, I’d say this is not good.”

Khan fixed a hard stare on the Englishman as he pondered the words. If his glowering bothered Masters, he gave no outward sign of it. Instead the Englishman downed a Scotch whiskey on the rocks, wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and rose to make himself another.

“Who were they?” Khan asked.

Masters shrugged. “CIA. Delta Force. Who the hell can say? You were in intelligence before you went to the dark side. You know the players as well as I do. They could be private security contractors hired by the newspaper to rescue their guy. I mean, right? What we do know is that they are here, and they just tore a big damn hole in your operation.”

“It can be dealt with.”

“Can it? Look, first Lang infiltrates your organization. You kidnap him, hold him for a couple of days and kill him. Now you’ve probably brought the righteous wrath of the U.S. government down on our necks and you think it can be dealt with. You have the operational security of a toy store. My people are getting very nervous, Khan. They were before all this happened, which is why they sent me here in the first place.”

An angry knot formed in Khan’s gut as he listened to the Englishman vent. When he spoke, an edge had crept into his voice. “Your people need to leave this to me.”

The corners of Masters’s lips turned up in a mirthless grin. “Because leaving it to you has worked so well so far,” Masters said.

“No. I have the contacts. I can make things happen. If you want to pull this off without me—” he made a sweeping gesture with his hand “—then be my guest. Otherwise, leave this in my hands.”

“Which are so capable.”

Khan leaned forward.

“I tolerate you because you can supply the things I need. Not because I think you bring anything else to this operation.”

Undeterred, Masters leaned forward, too, rested his elbows on the top of Khan’s desk and locked eyes with the guy. His face was perhaps a foot or so from Khan’s, well within striking distance should he decide to take a swing at the arrogant prick’s jaw, he thought.

“Tell you what, Nawaz. Tell me to pound sand, please. I’ll catch a damn flight back to Moscow and tell Mr. Lebed that you’ve decided to cut short our little partnership, that you’ve decided you need your own space. My guess is he’ll send five more guys back here within twenty-four hours that’ll make our little American friends look like cream puffs. And they’ll wipe out your whole gang. As for this arms sale of yours, we’d be happy to bow out, take the product back with us and be done with your silliness once and for all. Maybe you can hop on the internet and buy some radioactive material there. What do you say, lad? That sound like a fine plan to you?”

By now Khan had let his hand slip off the desk. He reached beneath the desktop and his fingers encircled the pistol grip on a 12-gauge sawed-off Ithaca shotgun that was suspended underneath the desk. Khan knew that one stroke of the trigger and the Ithaca would unleash a blast that would tear through the desk’s modesty panel and spray this limey fuck’s insides all over the walls of his office. He’d have the place scrubbed down, repainted and refurnished in twenty-four hours or less.

Just enough time for Lebed to realize he’d strayed off the reservation and for him to dispatch a hit team to Dubai, just like the Englishman had suggested. Maybe he and his people would be able to fend off the Russian’s army of mercenaries and spies. Maybe.

He loosened his grip on the shotgun and forced himself to smile at Masters, who’d hardly stopped to take a damn breath since he’d first launched into his tirade. The former English spy uncoiled from his chair and walked to the bar to make another drink.

“You have the item then?”

Masters nodded without bothering to look at him. Instead he focused on his bartending pursuits. “It’s nasty stuff, you know. It’s not like highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Just a little bit of this stuff and—poof—you’ve got a mini Armageddon on your hands. And it’s hard as hell to come by. Most people don’t think it exists, but it does.”

Khan considered pointing out that Masters talked too damn much for a spy, but thought better of it and instead absorbed what he was being told.

“I will get it, though?” he asked when Masters stopped to take a breath.

“You will.”

“And I will make sure you get your money.”

Masters raised his glass and toasted Khan. “Even better. In the meantime, you need to deal with our new friends. We need them gone as soon as possible.”

“Don’t worry,” Khan replied. “I’m already working on that.”

CHAPTER SIX

“The Man isn’t going to like this,” Brognola said. “Hell, I don’t like it.”

“None of us do, Hal,” Bolan said. “It is what it is.”

“Hell of a time to get philosophical on me, Striker.”

Bolan allowed himself a smile, his first since he and Grimaldi had returned to a safehouse owned and operated by the U.S. government inside a walled community located in suburban Dubai. The place was three stories high, stuffed with luxurious furniture, surrounded by iron gates and bristling with tall iron fences topped with concertina wire. It was surrounded by other, similarly luxurious homes, most occupied by foreign executives working inside Dubai who made tempting targets for Islamic terrorists.

“Where’s Jack?” Brognola asked.

“In the shower,” Bolan replied. “Or maybe one of the pools. I’m not sure.”

Brognola laughed. “How is it to sit in the lap of luxury?”

“Not a bad place as far as safehouses go,” Bolan said. “I’ve definitely slept in worse. Did you send a clean-up crew to the address I gave you? I’d like it if we could recover Lang’s body and send it home.”

“We’re on it. We have guys from the local FBI office on detail there. The local police are none too happy with us, obviously. First, we pull a covert move in their town and then we lock them out of a crime scene. But they are cooperating, which is about the best we can hope for. You already met Potts?”

“I did.”

“He’s handling things on our end. He’s really got the touch with the locals.”

“What about Lang? At least in some circles, he was a high-profile figure. He can’t just disappear.”

“Right. Fortunately he was a private pilot. According to a press release that should be going out within the next few hours, he died in an accident. His plane crashed while he was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv to conduct an interview.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“The family will issue a press release, too. Because he worked in a nonofficial cover capacity, his family has no idea that he was an espionage agent. They think he was just a reporter, which is just as well for all involved. I guess everyone is sitting on the story until the next of kin are notified. Once that happens, the story goes out, runs a couple of days and should disappear after the family has a funeral for him.”

“And since the plane was lost at sea, there’s no need for them to ever see his body so they’ll never need to know that he was tortured to death.”

“If everything goes to plan,” the big Fed said.

“We’ve had such good luck so far.”

“Cynic. Look, I’ll stress to Potts that if he or any of his crew find anything, they should pass it along to you.”

“Good,” Bolan replied. “I may need him to dig up some other information, too.”

Bolan paused and tried to gather his thoughts. “Let me ask you something, Hal. What else do we know about Lang? I mean, about the guy.”

“What are you driving at? Do you think he’s dirty?”

“Not necessarily. Frankly, I’m not sure what to think. But I do wonder how the guy got so over his head in this whole thing. And I have to wonder whether everyone’s telling us everything we need to know, including our friends in Washington.”

“Do they ever? Brognola replied.

“Think about it. You have an experienced agent who goes up against Nawaz Khan, a major weapons dealer. And he does it all by himself? No support? Nothing? I have an arms-length relationship with the government and can do that stuff. But I can’t envision Lang doing the same thing. I’m sure he wasn’t stupid. But was he enough of a cowboy to go out and get himself killed? And he took important information with him to the grave.”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this,” Brognola said. “But damn it, I also can’t refute it. Let me rattle some cages here and see what else I can learn.”

“Thanks.” Bolan raised his mug to his lips and slurped some coffee.

“Look, Bear has been looking through Lang’s phone records, trying to chart out who the guy was talking to and when. The rest of the cyberteam is working through the guy’s bank records and whatever else they can get their hands on. Maybe we’ll know more later.”

“Keep me posted,” Bolan said before terminating the call.

SEVERAL MINUTES LATER Bolan’s cell phone rang again. He took the call.

“Go.”

“Jesus, Cooper, that’s how you answer the phone?” It was Potts.

“You get the building cleaned out?”

“About fifty percent. Not too bad, considering the mess you left behind. It was like the Valentine’s Day massacre on steroids. The harder part was convincing the state security forces that they needed to let you go about your business and ignore the death of an American journalist and several Pakistani nationals. But I think we’re in the clear, at least for the moment.”

“How’d you manage it?”

“Would you believe I’m a good diplomat?”

“No.”

“Would you believe I dropped some names of people in Washington? The kind who approve arms sales to the United Arab Emirates?”

“That I believe. You have that kind of clout?”

“Nah, I just said I dropped names. I didn’t say I knew them.”

“Just the same, thanks for sticking your neck out.”

“Don’t mention it. Hey, the real reason I called was to let you know a couple of things. First, I got a phone call from a reporter, a lady named Tamara Gillen. She left me a message, said she’d heard through the rumor mill that Terry Lang may have been lost in an airplane crash. She said she might have some important information about that.”

“I guess I don’t need to tell you to ignore the call.”

“Aren’t you a genius? Thanks for the tip. Maybe if the bottom falls out of the paramilitary business, you can jump over to public relations.”

Bolan grinned.

“Anyway,” Potts continued, “she said she thought that the whole notion that Terry died in a plane wreck was bullshit.”

“She say why?”

“Negative. Probably because she doesn’t want to believe the guy’s dead.”

“That a theory?” Bolan asked.

“Call it an educated guess.”

“Based on?”

“On the fact that Terry boned everything in a skirt in Dubai. You call five people who knew him, and they’d tell you the same thing. The bastard couldn’t keep it in his pants to save his life. I barely knew him, but he was notorious among the reporters, politicians and government people for screwing everything he could get his hands on,” Potts said.

“Good to know,” Bolan said. “You know anything about this reporter?”

“She’s little more than a name to me. I went back through my Rolodex and I had a card in there from her. She probably interviewed me at a press conference or some such. I try to avoid the press like the plague, but sometimes it just can’t be helped.”

“You think she knows anything about Lang?”

“She probably knows a lot about him. Whether any of it’s useful is another matter.”

“Maybe it’s time I checked.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I can’t stay here! The thought boomed in Tamara Gillen’s head and jolted her into action. She stepped away from her window and grabbed a handful of the curtain, ready to pull it closed. She stopped herself.

React and they’ll know you’re on to them, she thought. If they know that, they’ll move and be on you in a heartbeat. Then what?

She glided away from the window, and made her way down the hall to her bedroom. Inhaling deeply, she held the breath for a couple of seconds, exhaled heavily, hoping it would calm her racing mind and equally rapid heartbeat. It did neither.

Concentrate on what you know, she told herself. When she’d arrived home earlier, she’d spotted two men positioned on the sidewalk across the street from her building. She’d recognized the bigger of the two immediately. She’d seen him skulking around Lang’s building on at least one occasion. The man looked like he’d come straight from central casting for a thug—wide shoulders and chest, thick hair gleaming from hair gel, and a white scar that bisected his forehead.

“He shouldn’t be here,” Lang had told her at the time.

“Who is he?”

“Never mind,” Lang had replied through clenched teeth. “Just take my word for it, he shouldn’t be here.”

But her instincts had told her to press him. “What do you mean, Terry? Who is he?”

“Just trust me and stop with the Q&A.” His voice had sounded strange to Gillen, a quiet menace tinged with fear. Uncharacteristically, he’d avoided looking into her eyes. The memory caused a shiver to travel down her spine. She’d heard Lang angry before. In fact, he often seemed to swing between a boisterous charm that attracted people to him and a righteous anger that made him an unwavering opponent in an argument, even when he was dead wrong.

But the fear, that was seared into her memory. Lang never, ever, showed fear. Sure, a shrink may have argued that his in-your-face confidence masked a hurt, vulnerable little boy, provided a bandage for his wounded psyche. And Gillen would have told that shrink he was full of it, right up until she’d heard the fear and the distress in Lang’s voice.

So, yeah, she’d dropped the discussion at the time. Now she regretted it.

Lang was long gone and this creep had found her. She had no idea who he was, what he was capable of or why he wanted anything to do with her.

“Thanks, Terry,” she muttered.

Inside her bedroom, she made her way to the dresser, yanked open the top drawer and rummaged through bras, panties and socks stuffed inside. Where the hell was it? Finally her fingertips grazed smooth, cold steel. She hesitated for a moment, but then used her fingers to rake back the clothing until she could see the gray metal box at the bottom of the drawer. Taking the box from the drawer, she carried it over to her unmade bed, swept aside the wadded sheets to clear herself a spot and sat on the edge of the mattress. Perching the box on her knees, she used her thumb and index finger to work the dial on the combination lock until the final tumbler fell.

The lid came up and she studied the contents of the box. A small stack of bills—mostly U.S. dollars—secured with a rubber band lay at a forty-five-degree angle on top of her passport. She removed both items and set them next to her thigh on the mattress. A .25-caliber automatic pistol was the next item she took out, along with two clips for the weapon. She balanced the gun in her palm and scowled. It wasn’t much, but it fit her hand well and was easily hidden. Finally she removed a silver key and slipped it into the hip pocket of her snug jeans. Sealing the box, she set it on the bed and stood.

The cash, gun and passport all were items she’d started keeping years ago, a ritual that began when she’d been a foreign correspondent in Sierra Leone and again while covering clashes between the Israelis and Hezbollah. When she’d been a green reporter, an editor had told her to carry enough cash to bribe public officials or to buy an airline ticket. And if that didn’t work, well, that was why she’d carried the gun, though she’d never used it on anything except tin cans, paper targets and an occasional watermelon.

She scanned the room. Should she pack her clothes? No time. It was best for her to simply get the hell out of the apartment, get out into the open where people would see if something happened to her. She could take a cab to the Messenger’s office and surround herself with colleagues and friends. It may not make her safer, but it at least would make her feel safer, which was no small thing. And she might be able to dig up some more information. Maybe someone had heard from Terry or they might know something about the key.

Her cell phone beeped and the sudden, sharp noise in the midst of silence caused her heart to skip a beat. By the third ring, she’d regained her breath and shook her head disgustedly at her edginess.

“Tammy, it’s Kellogg.”

It was Mike Kellogg, the Messenger’s bureau chief. The sound of a familiar voice should have relaxed her. But she heard the tension in his voice and it only stoked more fear in her.

“Mike, what’s going on?”

“Terry’s gone.”

She hesitated for a moment and said, “I know.”

“You knew? What the hell. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What’s the big deal? You know Terry. He’s like a cat. He disappears, and you don’t see him for a few days and then he resurfaces.”

“This is different,” Kellogg said.

“Different how?”

“Couple of guys came around looking for him. They asked a lot of questions.”

“Questions? Like?”

“Like, had we heard from him? Did we know who he’d been talking to? Where had he gone? They took Bonham into his office for a while and grilled him. He came out of there red-faced and sweating, like he’d run a damn marathon with these bastards.”