Betrayal by John Lescroart Read Free Book Online

and said, “Next!”

[3]
     
    T HAT NIGHT IN HIS TRAILER’S OFFICE, Jack Allstrong sipped scotch with Ron Nolan while they tossed a plastic-wrapped bundle of five hundred hundred-dollar bills—fifty thousand dollars—back and forth, playing catch. Allstrong’s office, nice at it was, remained a sore point with him. This was because the main office of his chief competitor, Custer Battles (“CB”), was in one of the newly reburbished terminals. When Mike Battles had first gotten here two months before, he found that he’d inherited several empty shells of airport terminal buildings, littered with glass, concrete, rebar, garbage, and human waste. He had cleaned the place up, carpeted the floors, wallpapered (all of his supplies bought and shipped from the United States), put showers in the bathrooms, and hooked the place up to a wireless Internet connection.
    At about the same time, Jack Allstrong had had to start work on his trailer park to house his guards and cooks, although he still couldn’t compete with such CB amenities as a swimming pool and a rec room with a pool table. Allstrong knew that these types of cosmetics would be important to help convince his clients that he was serious and committed to the long-term success of the mission, but he was initially hampered by lack of infrastructure and simple good help.
    But then that genius Kuvan Krekar had come up with the idea of dog kennels as another income source, and that was already working. Allstrong now had a decent number of the ministry people starting to believe that IED-and bomb-sniffing dogs would be an essential part of the rebuilding process in bases all over the country.
    So all in all, Jack was in high spirits for a variety of reasons: Kuvan was in fact interested in going in with them on their currency-exchange bid, which gave it immediate credibility and might make them the front runners over CB; the CPA was still paying them in dollars (which meant Allstrong could buy his own dinars to pay his local workers at the deeply discounted black-market exchange rate); the bomb-sniffing-dog revenue wasn’t going to be stopped, at least in the short term, by bureaucrats like Charlie Tucker.
    The bottom line was that the two million dollars in cash that Nolan had retrieved today and carried here in his backpack covered approximately four hundred thousand dollars in the company’s actual current expenses, including tips to Colonel Ramsdale and several other middlemen. Everyone was too busy and/or too afraid and the times were too chaotic for anyone to bother keeping close tabs on exactly what the money was used for, or exactly where it went. There was plenty of it, in cash, and the mandate was to get Iraq up and running again. Subtext: whatever it cost.
    For example, in the first month of the contract, Allstrong’s trailer park had run out of drinking water within a week, a true crisis. Jack had gone to Ramsdale and told him he desperately needed to buy more water immediately, but that he was out of money, what with payroll, housing costs, legitimate security equipment, weapons, and vehicles such as armored Mercedes-Benz sedans, and all other daily supplies for his now close to 150-man staff. Without a personal look at the situation and apparently without a qualm, Ramsdale signed off on an authorization for Allstrong to add six hundred thousand dollars to the original sixteen-million-dollar contract over its six-month life—peanuts considering the fact that the contract as written already was paying Allstrong a little bit more than eighty-eight thousand dollars a day, all of it in cash.
    Allstrong had requested a total of a hundred thousand dollars from Ramsdale for the water, but the colonel had been so used to thinking in one-month units that he’d okayed six times the requested price, and Allstrong had seen no reason to correct him. And after all, the truth was that they were all working in an extremely hostile environment, where the danger of death