Rules of Betrayal Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”

4
    Her name was Amina. She was a