Scorpion Betrayal Read online

  “They play online,” Ulrike explained. “Sometimes I think the neighbors will hear Gerhard cursing. They’re incorrigible, those two.” She shook her head.

  “He is the cheater! I wrote a computer program to track his moves, and even when I show him, he denies them. For a time I thought a mind like his is a waste in your Amerikanisch Commerce Department till I realized that he was undoubtedly CIA. Tell him his secret is no longer safe. The next time he cheats at chess, I will publish his true identity on the Internet. As for you, you are no doubt a CIA agent as well,” Reimert said, leaning forward.

  “We need your help. It’s important and it’s urgent,” Scorpion told him.

  “Yes. Rabinowich said it was, how do you say ‘bevorzugung’ auf Englisch?” he asked Ulrike.

  “A favor.”

  “That’s it. He asked for a favor. So why don’t you go to the Bundespolizei or the Bundesnachrichtendienst? Why come to me?”

  “We don’t have time. And there are other reasons,” Scorpion said.

  “You mean you don’t trust the BND.”

  “If I don’t get your help tonight, people will die.”

  “Why should I, a German, trust the CIA, whom many people despise, over the German authorities?”

  “This is not our business,” Ulrike said, pouring the coffee.

  “It is,” Scorpion replied. “The reputation of the university is at stake. Believe me, you don’t want the authorities involved at this stage. Please, come with me to the campus now. See with your own eyes. If I’m lying, call the Bundespolizei.”

  “You say this involves terroristen?”

  “These are Muslims?” she asked.

  “Most likely,” Scorpion said.

  “One tries to be open-minded. Many of them are good students, decent people. Still…” Reimert said, looking at his wife, who was looking at Scorpion in a way that gave him the impression she was comparing Scorpion to him. Reimert stood up. “As a professor, I have the right to look at student files. Therefore, I am doing nothing illegal. You won’t tell me what this is about?” he asked.

  “Better if you don’t know.”

  “Better for whom?” Ulrike said, carrying the coffee cups to the kitchen.

  “For everyone, especially you two. Whatever happens, don’t tell anyone about this.”

  “You mean better for you,” she said, coming back in.

  “No, better for you. I know you think we Americans are all paranoid, but there are some very dangerous people out there.”

  “We’ll go. But only because I’m curious,” she said, pulling on a leather jacket and handing a windbreaker to Reimert. “It’s not because I believe you. I don’t. If it is not as you say, we will call the Bundespolizei.”

  Reimert drove them onto the campus and parked near a modernist multistory building of glass, metal, and concrete. A sign over the doorway read: FAKULTÄT FÜR PHYSIK. Despite the evening hour, there were still lights on in the building and students with backpacks walking or bicycling along the paths. They went up the stairs and down a long hallway to Reimert’s office.

  Ulrike turned on the light and sat down at the computer. After a few moments she turned to Scorpion. “How many students?” she asked.

  “Just three,” Scorpion said, handing her a slip of paper with the names.

  “Ulrike was my unterrichtassistent,” Reimert said. “Now she’s an administrator. Better for her to do it. She knows the system better than I.”

  “Here’s the first,” she said, bringing up a student record. “Sermin Bayat. Here’s his transcript. Emigrated from Ankara in Turkey fourteen years ago. Diplom in biotechnologiewesen, after which he did his doktorat at Bonn University, where, yes, he is on the faculty. Here’s his address in Bonn.”

  “Could you call him?” Scorpion said, looking at the face in the file photograph from ten years ago.

  “Why?”

  “To confirm. It’s standard. Tell him you’re from the alumni office just verifying his address.”

  “If you insist,” Ulrike said, clearly annoyed. She dialed a number and spoke briefly in German, said, “Entschuldigen sie mich, bitte,” then slammed the phone down. “He wasn’t so pleased. He was watching the football highlights on the television. Is that sufficient for you?” she said, looking sharply at Scorpion.

  “What about the next?”

  “Dieter Bockmeyer. He doesn’t sound Muslim,” she said, typing on the keyboard. “There it is,” bringing up the file. “Diplom in informationstechnik. After graduation, went to work for Siemens in Munich, then transferred to the Siemens office back here in Karlsruhe. Secretary of the Alumni Association. Shall I call?”

  “Please.”

  She called the number and listened for a moment. “It’s asking for a message.”

  “No message,” Scorpion said. “Try the next one.”

  She typed in Bassam Hassani and waited while the screen took longer than usual to display. When it did, except for a single line, the screen was blank.

  “What is it?” Reimert asked.

  “Impossible,” she said, staring at the nearly empty screen. She typed another search on a wider database and the same screen came up again. “Nothing. No records, no transcript, no application file, no forwarding address. Just a single line. Diplom in chemieingenieurwesen, chemical engineering, nine years ago. It cannot be.”

  “It’s been deleted,” Scorpion said, his heart beating faster. “You don’t have a photograph, anything else on this man?”

  “There’s nothing. I don’t understand,” she said, looking at Reimert.

  “Nine years ago?” Reimert mused. “In chemistry. I seem to remember something.” He looked at his wife. “Do you remember Keck? Bernhard Keck?”

  “Must’ve been before my time. Or maybe when I was a freshman,” she said.

  “Yes.” He tapped the desk with his finger. “I remember something about heat transfer. Look up Keck in the Universitat Karlsruhe Journal für Anorganische und Allgemeine Chemie. Now.”

  She typed it in and a number of links came up. There was nothing of use in the first two, but when she clicked on the third link, it brought up a nine-year-old article in the university’s chemistry journal with a photograph of a research team that had apparently come up with a breakthrough on explosive chemical heat transfers. The caption identified one of the team in the photograph as Hassani.

  I’ve got you, you bastard! Scorpion thought. “Could you please make the photo bigger?” he asked as he intently studied the face of the man identified as Hassani in the caption. It was a young man’s face, dark-haired, with dark serious eyes, good-looking enough, if he were interested and not so serious, to be able to beat women off with a stick. Nine years was a long time. It would be better if he had a more recent photograph, and then he realized that of course there was a more recent photo. “Look, could you please send the link to that file to Rabinowich? It’s urgent.”

  “I’ll do it right now,” Ulrike said, typing. “There you are. It’s done.” She looked at Scorpion. “This is very strange. I can’t understand why whoever deleted the record left the single entry about the diplom.”

  “Vanity perhaps,” Reimert shrugged.

  “Or credibility among his own. Whatever the reason, it’s a break for us or we would never have found him,” Scorpion said.

  “I prefer vanity as an explanation. It’s more Greek,” Reimert said.

  “You’re a romantic, a Sorrows of Young Werther type,” Scorpion said, smiling.

  “You found him out,” Ulrike laughed. “When we first met, he presented me with a copy of that book. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted to have sex with me or kill himself.”

  “Sex. Believe me, sex,” Reimert said, kissing her cheek. “This man,” meaning Hassani, “he is dangerous?”

  “I know of at least six people he’s already killed. I have to go. I know you may not believe me, but what you did tonight was important.” He started to get up when suddenly he had an idea. “Can you acc
ess the university’s exchange servers?”

  “I don’t know how,” she said.

  “May I?” he said. She got up, and he sat at the computer and logged her out. He plugged in the NSA flash drive and was shortly on the network with administrator privileges.

  “How do you say ‘exchange mail server’ in German?” he asked.

  “Austauschcomputerbediener. What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “E-mail inquiries,” he said, typing on the keyboard.

  “Wouldn’t whoever deleted the record have deleted any e-mails too?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, logging onto the mail server. He opened the header log files and began searching. After several minutes he found what he was looking for. Two entries to the mailbox, one incoming, one outgoing. Someone had sent an e-mail query for information on Hassani. The messages themselves were not there, but the records contained the date, time stamps, and IP addresses of the sending and receiving machines. Scorpion mentally calculated the date. Four weeks before the Budawi assassination. He used his cell phone and an RSA key to access the restricted URL of the NSA’s Whois database of classified IP addresses worldwide, and there it was.

  The e-mail inquiry had been sent from the Egyptian Bureau of Educational Tourism, a front organization for the Egyptian Mabahith. That was the real reason Budawi had been assassinated! If Budawi had learned the Palestinian’s actual identity, it would have imperiled Hassani’s entire mission. Budawi had to be eliminated. Scorpion logged off the computer and stood up.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Ulrike asked.

  “More than you know, danke,” he said.

  “Come. We’ll take you back to your auto,” she said, shutting down the computer and getting up. They barely spoke on the short drive back to where he had parked his car near their house.

  “Auf wiedersehen,” she said. “This has been a strange evening. I did not expect this.” She looked at him oddly as he got out of the car.

  “It is a disturbance to think that one of our students may be a terrorist. He was not a student of mine, but still…” Reimert trailed off.

  “Don’t ever speak of this to anyone,” Scorpion said. “If anyone ever asks, even the Bundespolizei, say nothing. For your own safety, please, what you saw tonight never happened.” He started to go, then turned back. “Vielen dank. I’ll tell Rabinowich he owes you a favor.”

  They watched him walk back to his car, and after a moment the car lights came on and he drove away.

  Scorpion drove to the A5 autobahn to get back to Frankfurt. While on the highway he called Rabinowich on his cell phone, told him about the Budawi e-mail query, and they discussed ferreting out more information on Hassani, whom they code-named ‘Hearing Aid’ from the phrase ‘engine ear’ for ‘engineer,’ and most critically, they also discussed getting a more recent photograph. The odds were high that Hearing Aid had been in the U.S. at least once, probably more than once, in the last six months, which meant that Homeland Security had a photo and fingerprint on file. It would be under a different name, but hopefully, facial recognition software might find a match.

  This time he didn’t have to say anything; it was Rabinowich who brought up the fact that Najla was also from Germany. Scorpion didn’t respond, and for a moment the only sound was that of the car speeding on the autobahn.

  “I know,” he said finally. They briefly discussed operational details, then Scorpion hung up. He glanced down at the speedometer. He was doing over 150 kilometers per hour. With any luck he’d reach Frankfurt in time to catch the next flight and be back in Rome that night, where somewhere, in a city preparing for the EU Conference, the Palestinian was making his final preparations.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Stazione Termini, Rome, Italy

  The protesters came up the Via Umbria from the direction of the Piazza della Republica. There were thousands of them, a roaring surge of street theatre sweeping past stores and cafés, crowding out traffic, waving signs and shouting demands. They were a motley collection: PCI leftists; anarchists from the Gruppo Libertario carrying signs that read, “No States, No Capital, Direct Action”; young men and women from the Green Party, their faces painted green and carrying a float that showed the Earth in a cooking pot with a sign in English declaring, “Global Warming Is Killing Earth.” Skinheads threw cans of beer at shop windows, and neo-Nazis marched with posters that read, “Europe Is Not for Sale—Stop Immigration.” Anti-Israel groups chanted and carried signs, many adorned with swastikas: ISRAEL = TERRORIST STATE, ISRAEL NAZI APARTHEID, and PALESTINE WILL BE FREE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA.

  Even though the U.S. wasn’t involved in the conference, someone had hung a store mannequin dressed like Uncle Sam from a traffic light, where it burned in effigy. Nearby, a cardboard caricature of an Israeli soldier with a long Jewish nose hung by a noose around its neck from a lamppost. Most of the signs were in English. As with most street demonstrations, the targets of the demonstrators were not the conference attendees, but the international media, some of whom were climbing on top of their SUVs to film the crowd as it surged toward the police barriers. A massive phalanx of Polizia di Stato in full riot gear, faceless in dark blue helmets with plastic visors, had lined up to block the street. Behind them were the Carabinieri wearing body armor and carrying automatic weapons. The Carabinieri had blocked off the streets approaching the Palazzo delle Finanze from any direction.

  Liz and the Palestinian, going by his Algerian cover name Mejdan, had fallen in with a bunch of Oxfam demonstrators she had met at a cheap dormlike hotel near the Stazione Termini before he came back to Rome from California. The Oxfam demonstrators carried signs about hunger in Africa and Gaza, featuring photos of big-eyed, big-bellied children. Some of the Oxfamers were dressed like wraiths, black cloth draped over their heads. They wore faceless white masks with narrow holes for eyes, and carried signs that read: “Global Warming, Global Death.”

  The demonstrators surged toward the police lines, and one of them, a tall redheaded Italian anarchist screaming, “Morte al governo!” picked up a section of the metal barricade and hurled it at the polizia, a number of whom moved forward and smashed at him with their batons. At this, the horde of demonstrators exploded with a roar of screams and shouts, throwing rocks and cans at the police, who began pushing the demonstrators back, beating them with batons and shields. Several demonstrators went down. The police rushed them away to waiting vans. Everyone in the crowd was screaming and looking for things to throw. A long-haired Italian, his shirt torn, screamed up at a TV camera, “Stanno uccidendo i vostri bambini!” They are killing your children!

  A group of Oxfam demonstrators were pressed forward against the barricades by skinheads behind them, and Liz’s friend, Alicia, a pretty dark-haired college girl from Wales, screamed, “Don’t touch me, you bastard!” as a helmeted guardia shoved her back with his shield.

  “You are beating a woman!” Liz screamed at the guardia, who just looked at her with his blank face visor. The Palestinian hung back, letting the Oxfam wraiths and the skinheads surge past him toward Alicia and Liz and the polizia. He’d forbidden the Moroccans back at the warehouse from joining the demonstrations. They could not afford for any of them to be arrested. The main thing he had to ensure was that there were demonstrations like this when the conference started in three days.

  One of the skinheads managed to grab a baton away from a guardia and began swinging it wildly, opening a gap in the line of police. A dozen or so protesters poured through it, shouting and shoving as a rain of rocks, shoes, and cans sailed into the ranks of the police. In response, a squad of Carabinieri moved rapidly through the police ranks. As they quickly rounded up the demonstrators who had broken through and hustled them away, enabling the police to close the gap in their line, the Palestinian pulled Liz and Alicia back and forced his way through the crowd, now retreating from the advancing police line. Alicia’s Italian boyfriend, a member of the Continual Struggle student movement,
dressed in a black T-shirt with the insult CHE CAZZO, You Dick, in white gothic lettering, joined them as they ducked around the corner and caught their breath.

  Later, they refought the skirmish over beer and pizza at a pizzeria near the train station. Liz was still furious over how the police had beaten Alicia.

  “It’s unconscionable. She’s a defenseless young woman. No threat to anyone, the bloody fascists. How dare they?”

  “He didn’t really do any damage. I managed to get out of the way,” Alicia said.

  “No thanks to him. The bastard wanted to hurt you. If they beat women, what’s next, babies?”

  “There’s a way to turn it to our advantage, but it takes courage,” the Palestinian said.

  Cristiano, Alicia’s boyfriend, said, “What are you saying?” and the others leaned closer to the Palestinian.

  “A picture is worth a million words,” he told them. “We need a face. A beautiful young woman’s face would be perfect. That is, if you really mean what you say about the starving children in Africa and Gaza?”

  Alicia looked at him sharply. “Those children break my heart.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Liz asked.

  “We bloody you up,” he said to Alicia, “and get you in front of a TV camera. You tell them it was the polizia.”

  “We’d be lying,” she replied.

  “Only about the details. They did rough you up, didn’t they? You’d become the face of the protest. It could go viral on the Internet in an hour. You could single-handedly stop the Israelis and the EU.”

  “What about me?” Liz said, her eyes darting back and forth between him and Alicia. “You could bloody me.”

  “We need you for other things,” he said, patting her arm, which she pulled away.

  “Where will we get the blood?” Cristiano asked.

  “From all of us.”

  “Won’t they test it for DNA?” Liz said, looking troubled.

  “That’ll take days. By then the conference will be over. It’ll be old news.” The Palestinian shrugged. “No one will care.”