Scorpion Betrayal Read online

  You couldn’t just do it the way it was done in the movies. That was nonsense. You couldn’t sandpaper your fingers and either feel or hear the tumblers click when you reached the right number. Safe manufacturers had long ago put in safeguards, such as false tumbler notches or lock wheels made of lightweight nylon, to frustrate hearing or feeling the tumblers click. As for the kind of autodialers that opened a safe in seconds in the James Bond movies, in reality, autodialers needed to be model-specific, could require hours to cycle through all the thousands of number combinations, and because of that were only practicable for three-number safe combinations, not for the six-plus number combination likely on a high security safe.

  For such assignments, the CIA used an audio “soft drill” like the one Scorpion pulled out of his backpack and placed next to the lock after pulling on latex surgical gloves. The soft drill used sound waves, like a sonogram, to probe and detect the contact points as he slowly turned the dial. The LED display indicated where to “park the wheels”—there was one wheel inside the lock for each number; a six-number combination required six wheels—as a starting point, and a computer chip in the drill graphed the convergent points and displayed the six-number combination on the LED. There was a sound and Scorpion looked up, his hand on his gun. He saw Abdelhakim’s silhouette in the doorway.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “What are you doing?” the Moroccan asked nervously. “How much longer is this going to take?”

  “Get away from the door, I’ll let you know,” Scorpion said, waiting till Abdelhakim’s shadow was gone from the doorway. The little Moroccan was antsy. Scorpion wanted to keep him alive if possible. Now that he was turned, they could run him for years, but if he got too antsy, there might be no choice.

  He dialed the combination, then used a master key, tapping the key lock with the tapper tool to jump the tumblers. He turned the key and the locking handle and opened the safe.

  It was filled with papers. He turned on the desk light and began to go through them one at a time, placing each one facedown on the rug so that when he was done he’d be able to put them back sorted in the original order. From time to time he took a photograph of a page with his cell phone camera. Sandwiched between two pages of an inventory of mosque supplies, he found a picture postcard of sailboats on the Aussenalster Lake in Hamburg with what appeared to be the same jumbled Arabic lettering code as on the postcard in the Ayatollah Khomeini book in Germany. He took a photograph of both sides of the postcard and put it back in the same position between the pages. Then he saw them and knew he had hit the jackpot: incorporation papers and stock certificates for a number of different companies.

  One was a Netherlands property company. A second was Gelderland Sporting en Vuurwapens, BV, a Dutch sporting goods and firearms company. Two were of companies incorporated in Luxembourg: Utrecht Matériel Agricole, Sàrl, a farm equipment company; and Bukhari Nederland-Maroc Société de Financement, S.A., which looked like a holding company. They were all of interest, but the one that jumped out at him was FIMAX Shipping, headquartered in Kiev in the Ukraine. According to the papers, FIMAX was owned by the Bukhari Nederland-Maroc holding company and had as assets offices in Kiev and Odessa and two cargo ships, the MV Donetsk and the MV Zaina, both convenience-flagged in Belize.

  Scorpion’s mind was racing as he snapped photographs of the documents as fast as he could. They had planned it beautifully, like a big engineering project or a beautiful, complex work of art. Because of Luxembourg’s secrecy laws, investigating companies headquartered there was next to impossible, even when international treaties were invoked. Farm equipment was a perfect cover for fertilizer for explosives. The sporting goods company could buy and sell as many guns and other weapons as they wanted. As for the Ukrainian shipping company, if you wanted to move something for which the logistics were almost impossible, like nuclear material or weapons from Russia, given the corruption in Russia and the Ukraine, a legitimate shipping company was perfect cover. He was so occupied, thinking and snapping photos under the lamplight, he didn’t hear Abdelhakim come in.

  “You have to stop. Someone’s coming,” the Moroccan said from the doorway.

  “Get rid of them,” Scorpion said, taking out the HK pistol.

  “What if I can’t?” he hissed.

  “Who is allowed to come into the imam’s office?”

  “Only the imam and his sons,” Abdelhakim whispered, and ran toward the door. Scorpion grabbed the papers, making sure they were in the original order. He was about to put them back into the safe when he saw it: a contract in English between Baselux Pharma, Ltd., a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company, and the Bukhari Nederland-Maroc holding company. It was for the Swiss company’s entire yearly output of an experimental gram negative antibiotic, Ceftomyacole. Scorpion remembered Rabinowich on the iPod talking about the plague bacillus: “resistant to virtually every antibiotic known.” It was a holocaust they were planning—only the Islamic Resistance was planning to survive.

  Scorpion heard the front door open and Abdelhakim speaking to someone. He was out of time. He stuffed the contract into his pocket, put the rest of the papers back into the safe and locked it. He had just managed to turn off the desk light and grab his backpack when he heard voices coming toward him. He was trapped.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Papendorp, Utrecht, Netherlands

  The musalla prayer hall was dark. Scorpion crept into it on all fours, feeling his way across the carpeted space to the minbar, the wooden pulpit where the imam would give the sermon at Friday services. He heard Abdelhakim talking with someone, and the lights came on just as he climbed the stairs of the minbar and crouched hidden behind the podium.

  “What’s happened? Where is the imam?” he heard Abdelhakim say in Arabic.

  “Never mind. Go keep watch,” a man answered. Probably one of the imam’s sons, Scorpion thought. “We’ll talk in here. Keep the lights out,” the same man said to someone else, not Abdelhakim. They were standing in the middle of the empty musalla, their voices barely audible from where Scorpion was hiding.

  “What about the guard?” a second man said in Fusha Arabic.

  “What about him?”

  “He saw my face.” His words riveted Scorpion—and there was something about this man’s voice, but he couldn’t place it.

  “He’s loyal, a good Muslim.”

  “Good Muslims can be turned. Show me the…” The words were lost as the voices moved toward the imam’s office, then the light in there came on.

  He knew if he was to get out, this was his chance. But who didn’t want his face to be seen? The Palestinian! Was it possible? That voice! It could be the same one he’d heard on Harris’s cell phone in Karachi. It’s him! a voice screamed in his head.

  He’d been given a chance in a million. It wasn’t the perfect time or place, but he had to take him out now, Scorpion decided, carefully opening his backpack and screwing the silencer onto his 9mm pistol. But he couldn’t do it from the minbar. He had to assume that both the imam’s son and the Palestinian were armed, and if they started shooting, he had little doubt what the little guard, Abdelhakim, would do with his gun. Three against one in a static position wouldn’t work. He had to move.

  Scorpion crept down the steps and just started toward the imam’s office door when the lights came on in the musalla. Abdelhakim, who had just turned them on, loudly cried out, “Saadni! Help! Intruder!” and reached for his gun, his eyes filled with hatred. A tall bearded man with a turban—he had to be the imam’s son, Scorpion thought—filled the doorway of the imam’s office and aimed his gun at Scorpion, caught in the open in the middle of the musalla, while a figure behind the imam’s son ran out another door.

  Scorpion whirled and fired at the imam’s son, who cried out in pain as he flattened himself behind a narrow wooden post. After faking to one side as Abdelhakim fired, the bullet missing, Scorpion jumped out on the other side and shot the Moroccan in the head, the distinctive thunk o
f his silencer the only sound. Then he turned back to the imam’s son, whom he’d shot in the belly. As the wounded man struggled to raise his gun, Scorpion shot him again, this time hitting him in the neck. The imam’s son dropped to his knees, blood gurgling from his throat as he toppled over.

  Scorpion went over and kicked the gun away from his hand. The imam’s son lay on the carpet choking on his own blood, his eyes dimming as he watched Scorpion pick up his gun and put it in his jacket and run to the mosque door. He opened it just in time to see a black Fiat with its lights out race down the street, its tires screeching as it made the turn at the corner.

  Scorpion ran out to where he had left the BMW and jumped in. He hadn’t seen the man’s face or anything more than a moving figure behind the imam’s son, but it had to be the Palestinian, he told himself as he put the BMW into gear and roared after the Fiat. There was still a lot to do at the mosque, but the Palestinian took precedence over everything he thought as he turned the corner and caught a glimpse what might have been the Fiat heading toward the roundabout.

  Scorpion drove the dark streets past stores and apartment houses. The Fiat had gone around a corner, and when he turned at the same corner, the Fiat was gone. Unsure which way to go, after a moment he headed for the roundabout. Just as he entered it, he saw a black car that could have been the Fiat, only now with its lights on, coming out of the roundabout and heading toward the canal. It was moving fast, and Scorpion edged the BMW to over 130 kilometers per hour in the narrow streets, hitting the brakes as he swerved through the roundabout and raced after the Fiat as it skidded around a corner. He was starting to gain on the other car as he slid into the corner, barely missing a parked van as the Fiat made another turn and raced down the broad boulevard that led to the suspension bridge over the canal, its single pylon and wires gleaming in the lights on the bridge.

  Gunning the BMW, he pulled close enough to the Fiat to see the back of the Palestinian’s head above the headrest. Scorpion picked up his pistol and held it ready as he started to pull into the lane next to the Fiat when he saw a car coming from the other direction in his lane. He hit the brakes and swerved back behind the Fiat, the BMW’s tires skidding all over the road, the car swinging wildly left and right as he fought for control, losing precious feet behind the Fiat. The two cars raced across the bridge at over a hundred miles per hour, the Fiat skidding as they came onto the Papendorp side of the canal. It had shut its lights again and was hard to see as it raced past flat farmland beside the canal. In the distance on the far side of the fields, Scorpion could see the dark rectangular shadows of office buildings in industrial parks and the distinctive oval silhouette of the Daimler building.

  The light turned red at an intersection. Scorpion gunned the engine again, planning to race through it, when he caught a glimpse of a small car filled with teenagers entering the intersection. He saw their eyes going wide, their mouths open in screams he could almost hear as he hit his brakes, throwing the BMW into a violent skid that flung it sideways at an angle to avoid the collision. The car bounded up on the curb and slid into the soft earth of the field, and kicking up dirt as it came to a sudden stop. When he looked up, Scorpion could just see the shadow of the Fiat far ahead, heading for the industrial park buildings. Stepping on the gas, he drove back to the intersection, driving around the stalled car, the teenagers cursing him in Dutch as he headed down the street toward the buildings where he’d caught a glimpse of the Fiat driving into a parking garage next to an office building.

  Scorpion drove carefully into the garage; the Palestinian had to know he was close behind him. Because it was night, the structure was empty except for a few cars, none of them a Fiat. He drove slowly, his eyes darting in all directions. The garage interior was dimly lit, except for an overhead light over each lane. It wasn’t till the third level, his nerves screaming at every turn, that he spotted the Fiat parked in an empty row facing the wall. Only a few other cars were parked on this level.

  Scorpion stopped the BMW well away from the Fiat and got out. Using his car as a shield, he quartered the area. The Palestinian had proven himself an efficient killer. He had to be hiding somewhere nearby, and barring a miracle, would get the first shot. Scorpion was beginning to get a feel for his adversary, and realized if the Palestinian shot first, it would probably be the only shot. And he had to be careful about approaching the Fiat too. The Palestinian certainly knew how to make a bomb. He listened intently. Except for the sound of his breathing, the structure was silent. Glancing toward the Fiat through the windows of the BMW, it looked clear. He had no choice. He would have to approach it. After putting a fresh clip into his pistol, he stood up.

  Moving along the garage wall, he glanced up and behind as well as ahead. The parking structure was silent except for the ticking of the Fiat engine as it cooled. He approached the Fiat, taking one last 360-turn, and aimed at the car windows, ready to fire. The Fiat was empty, the keys in the ignition. He got down on the concrete floor, but there was nothing underneath the Fiat. He could feel the heat from the engine as he walked around it, but his hand hesitated at the door.

  Leaving the keys, he thought, meant that the Palestinian wanted him to open the car and turn it on. He was backing away from the car when he heard a car start up on one of the lower levels. He just had time to run to the outer rail and see a dark sedan, he couldn’t tell what make, race out of the garage and head toward the moving lights of cars on the A2 motorway. The Palestinian had broken into and jumped another car.

  By the time Scorpion got back to the BMW and drove out, the other car was gone.

  In the early morning darkness the mosque looked just as he had left it. The only shot anyone would have likely heard was Abdelhakim’s one shot, and it didn’t appear to have roused the neighborhood. Still, Scorpion hung back, studying the mosque and approaching carefully. Once inside, he found both bodies still lying on the carpets in the musalla. He knew that returning to the mosque was pushing his luck, but he didn’t have a choice. He needed to delay the discovery of the bodies to give him time to get away. More important, he needed to get back inside the imam’s office. Something in there had been so important that it brought the Palestinian to the surface. He had to find out what it was.

  He went back into the imam’s office, where he spent another half hour going through, photographing, and carefully putting back everything in the safe, including the contract with the Swiss drug company. He downloaded the contents of the computers in the assistant’s office onto his plug-in drive. It was useful, but he was stymied. Whatever was so urgent that it had brought the Palestinian to Utrecht, he hadn’t seen it. He was about to take care of the bodies, which he’d rolled into prayer rugs, when something made him go back to the imam’s office for one last look.

  He moved the flashlight slowly around the room and was struck by how sparse the room seemed, reeking of poverty; almost a repudiation of the wealth in companies and assets hidden in the safe. The flashlight beam moved along the bookcases and stopped when he realized he was staring at a copy of the imam’s book on the Hadith of Bukhari. He opened the book and began flipping through the pages, not knowing what he was looking for. Then, on a page in the middle of the book, he saw it: a penciled-in drawing of a Muslim warrior with a sword in the margin of a paragraph commenting on a hadith from volume 4, chapter 3, of the Sahih Bukhari:

  It seemed he had seen it before, but he couldn’t recall where. There was something vaguely archeological about the simplistic drawing and its markings in the circle of the flashlight beam. The paragraph of commentary written by the imam stated that the text of the hadith was in reality a secret prophecy of the Prophet. Scorpion read the original text of the hadith in Arabic: “The creation of these stars is for three purposes, as decoration of the sky, as missiles to hit the devils, and as signs to guide travelers.” As signs to guide travelers!

  He looked at the drawing again and all at once realized what he was looking at. It was the constellation Orion. He strained to r
emember the name of Orion in Arabic. Like a gift, an old memory from childhood came bobbing to the surface. He recalled a night in the desert spent gazing up at the stars that filled the sky from horizon to horizon. It was not long after the Mutayr had saved him after his father was killed. He was standing with Sheikh Zaid, who was pointing out the constellations. The stars were out of reach, yet so close you could almost touch them, and there were so many he could see the sheikh’s face in their glow.

  “Do you see there, little dhimmi, the belt, the sheath, and the arm of the warrior raised with the sword?”

  “What is it called?”

  “That is al Jabbar, the Giant,” Sheikh Zaid had said.

  He had to get this to Langley at once, he thought. He took photos of the cover, title page, and the drawing and replaced them where he had found them. Then he found the keys to the imam’s son’s Mercedes parked in front of the mosque in the dead man’s pocket, carried the bodies out and dumped them into the trunk. He drove the Mercedes a few blocks away and left it parked on a side street, the keys in the ignition. With luck, a local gang member would steal it before realizing what was in the trunk.

  Returning to the mosque, Scorpion reconnected the outside security cameras. Making sure he wasn’t seen, he was soon driving the A2 to Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam. It was all there right in front of them, taken from the words of the hadith, he thought as he drove. “Missiles to hit the devils” and “signs to guide travelers.”