Rules of Betrayal Read Free Page A

his teeth from chattering. Finished, he dried himself, brushed his teeth, and put on his shirt and jacket. His hair was too long and tangled to tame with a brush, so he combed it with his fingers for a few moments before giving up on it.
    “Hamid,” he said. “Wake up.”
    To combat the cold, Hamid had disappeared inside his sleeping bag. Jonathan crossed the room and kicked him. “Move it.”
    A head of unruly black hair popped out of the sleeping bag. Hamid peered angrily around the room. In the dim light, the circles under his eyes gained depth and he looked older than his nineteen years. “That hurt.”
    “Get your butt out of the sack. We’ve got a lot to do today.”
    “Just a sec—”
    “Now.”
    Hamid sat up slowly, pulling his cell phone out of the bag and checking it for messages.
    Jonathan observed him, wondering for the hundredth time how a village could not have electricity but manage to have cellular phone service. “Your mom call?”
    Hamid didn’t look up from the phone. “Not funny.”
    “Yeah, well, put that thing away and get moving. I’ll see you at the clinic.”
    Jonathan picked up the duffel that held his equipment and swung it over his shoulder. Pulling on his pakol hat, he opened the door and sniffed the air. Wood smoke, damp foliage, and peat: the smells of the world away from civilization. It was a scent he knew well.
    For eight years he had traveled the world as a physician with Doctors Without Borders. He had worked from the top of Africa to the bottom. He had spent time in Kosovo, Beirut, and Iraq, too. Wherever he was located, his mission was to bring medical care to those who needed it most. Politics was not a factor. There were no good guys or bad guys. There were only patients.
    He’d arrived in Afghanistan two months before, but he no longer worked for Doctors Without Borders. Events in the recent past prevented him from working in an official capacity as a physician or surgeon for them or anyone else. The man at the American embassy had told him he was crazy to venture into the Red Zone—the Red Zone being anywhere outside Kabul. When Jonathan said he was traveling alone, without bodyguards or weapons or any personal security whatsoever, so that he might offer medical care to people in the remotest villages, the man called him “suicidal.” Jonathan didn’t think so. He had calculated the risks, weighed them against his responsibilities, and found the balance equal, more or less.
    Now, standing outside his one-room shelter in the predawn darkness, his boots sinking into the icy muck, he listened again. It wasn’t noise that unsettled him, but the lack of it.
    “One hour,” he said to Hamid, then shut the door.
    A soft rain fell as he walked along the path zigzagging down the hillside. Below, shrouded in clouds on a spit of flat terrain tucked between steeply descending mountains, lay the village. All the structures looked the same: low-slung, rectangular slurries of rock, timber, and mud that seemed to have grown out of the earth itself. A thousand people lived in Khos-al-Fari. Many times that number visited from the surrounding valley to trade at the bazaar, sell crops and timber, and conduct a rudimentary social life.
    Hands thrust into his pockets, Jonathan made his way through town. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he walked purposefully, leaning forward as if to combat a rising wind. To look at him, one would think he was a native. He wore the baggy trousers and untucked shirt known as a shalwar kameez. To protect against the cold, he wore a herder’s sheep-fleece vest. His beard was coarse and long, black cut through with gray. But a closer look revealed his European ancestry. His nose was prominent and well shaped. His teeth were straight and white and, most tellingly, in complete order. His skin was smooth, and except for the crow’s feet at his eyes, youthful for a man of thirty-eight. His eyes were the color of tar and, even at this time of day,