Rules of Vengeance Read Free Page A

medical care to areas of acute crisis. He’d taken his skills to Liberia and Darfur, to Kosovo and Iraq, and to a dozen places in between. And for these last six months he’d served as principal physician at the Turkana camp, on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. The camp’s current population numbered upward of one hundred thousand persons. Most had come from the horn of Africa, displaced families fleeing war-ravaged regions in Somalia and Ethiopia. As one of only six physicians at the camp, and the only board-certified surgeon, he spent his time caring for everything from broken ankles to bullet wounds. But this year his crowning glory lay in another department. He’d delivered a hundred babies in 140 days without losing a single one.
    At some point along the way, he’d become an expert on parasitic diseases. With the world community paying increasing attention to the problems of disease and poverty in developing nations, doctors with experience “on the front lines” were suddenly in vogue. Early in the spring, he’d received the invitation from the International Association of Internists (IAI) to deliver a paper on the subject at its annual congress. Jonathan did not enjoy public speaking, but he’d accepted all the same. The subject merited wider recognition, and the opportunity to address such an influential body didn’t come along often. It was an obligation he couldn’t shun. The IAI had paid his fare, booked the flight, and arranged his accommodation. For a few days he’d have a real bed to sleep on, with clean sheets and a firm mattress. He smiled. At the moment, the prospect sounded inviting.
    It was then that Jonathan saw the police escorts and his heart did whatever it did when you couldn’t catch a breath and you felt paralyzed from the neck down.
    Two blue-and-white Rovers belonging to the British Airport Authority drove alongside the aircraft, their strobes lit and spinning. In short order, two more vehicles joined their rank. Jonathan pressed his back against the seat. He’d seen enough.
    Emma
, he called silently, his heart roaring to life.
They’ve come for me
.
     
     
       “They’ll be watching you. You won’t see them. If they’re good, you’ll never even be aware of it. But make no mistake, they’re there. Don’t let your guard down. Ever.”
    Emma Ransom looked at Jonathan across the table. Her tousled auburn hair fell about her shoulders, the flames from the hearth flaring in her hazel eyes. She wore a cream-colored cardigan sweater. A sling held her left arm to her chest in order to immobilize her shoulder and allow the gunshot wound to heal.
    It was late February—five months before Jonathan’s trip to London— and for three days they’d been holed up in a climbing hut high on the mountainside above the village of Grimentz in the Swiss canton of Wallis. The hut was Emma’s rabbit hole, her escape hatch for the times when things got too hairy.
    “Who are ‘they’?” Jonathan asked.
    “Division. They have people everywhere. It might be a doctor you’ve worked with for some time, or someone just passing through. An inspector from the UN or a raja from the World Health Organization. You know. People like me.”
    Division was a secret agency run out of the United States Department of Defense, and was Emma’s former employer. Division ran the blackest of black ops. Clandestine. Deniable. And, best of all, without congressional oversight. It was not an intelligence-gathering agency per se. Its members weren’t spies, but operatives inserted into foreign countries to effect objectives deemed essential to U.S. security or the protection of its interests around the globe. That objective might involve the manipulation of a political process through extortion, blackmail, or ballot rigging, the destruction of a geopolitically sensitive installation, or, more simply, the assassination of a powerful figure.
    All Division operatives worked under deep cover. All assumed false