Scorpion Betrayal Read online

  Scorpion raced on the walkway to stay with the taxi, his tires skidding as he whipped around the woman and the child who stared wide-eyed at him. The Palestinian glanced back and fired again, Scorpion swerving the Vespa to the side then back. The taxi had gone past the bridge, so the Palestinian was staying on this side of the river, Scorpion realized as they raced past Tiverina Island. Then a truck passed, blocking the view, and the Palestinian swerved back into and across the traffic lanes, heading up the Aventine hill.

  Scorpion had to gear down and rev up on the incline, cutting into the opposing traffic lane to keep up. An Alfa Romeo was headed straight at him. He saw the driver blink in horror, the car’s brakes screeching as Scorpion just raced past, the Alfa’s bumper nearly grazing him. He could see the taxi pulling ahead as it raced around the Circus Maximus. Instead of going around, Scorpion drove past the barrier, the Vespa slowing on the green turf as he rode in a direct line across the open field to intercept the Palestinian. He got his 9mm ready to fire, holding the gun on the handlebar.

  The Palestinian’s taxi weaved through heavy traffic, scraping other cars and cutting into the opposite lane to get around a car in front of him before dodging back onto his side of the road. Now Scorpion could see the Coliseum ahead. The Palestinian was heading directly at a giant tour bus that was turning off the street toward the parking area for Coliseum tours. Suddenly, the Palestinian turned and slowed so he was directly across from the bus driver, who looked down at the taxi, startled. The Palestinian fired through the passenger window, hitting the driver in the head, killing him instantly. The bus lurched forward and slammed into a car, crushing it and completely blocking the street.

  Jumping out of the taxi, the Palestinian ran around the bus, showed the gun to a woman in a Fiat sedan with two children in the backseat, ordered her and the screaming children out, and when they complied, drove off.

  By the time Scorpion got to the bus, the street was completely blocked with cars, people, and passengers screaming and trying to get out of the bus. He crawled under the bus to the other side, but the Fiat was nowhere to be seen. For a moment he stood there, sweating from the ride, his mouth tasting like ashes as he realized he’d made a terrible mistake. He should’ve killed Hassani when he’d had the chance on the train platform. Even worse, he’d lost the element of surprise, and now Hassani knew what he looked like. It was a disaster. Then he remembered the woman in the apartment.

  He caught a taxi at a stand near the Coliseum and went back to the Campo dei Fiori. The taxi driver wanted to talk about the bus incidente, but Scorpion just kept saying, “Non lo so,” I don’t know, till the driver stopped talking.

  The sun was high and hot over the market as he got out of the taxi and wondered how he would disarm the bomb. The Palestinian had likely rigged it to the apartment’s front door. It struck him then that there were no polizia. The woman in the apartment hadn’t called the police! She was still there!

  He’d started toward the building when there was a tremendous explosion and a fierce rush of hot air knocked him off his feet. An orange fireball exploded out of the side of the apartment building. The roof immediately caught fire and began collapsing onto the wrecked lower floors, raining flaming debris on the canvas tops of the market stalls, which began to smoke with fire.

  The piazza filled with smoke and the smell of explosive, and he could hear people screaming as he tried to clear his head, his ears ringing as he got to his feet. Most of the top three floors of the building were gone. The two women up there were certainly dead. He could hear the wailing sounds of approaching polizia sirens and fire engines. There was nothing to be done. He had failed completely.

  Scorpion brushed himself off, and wiping the dirt off his face with his sleeve, began to walk through the debris and the burning market stalls, vendors desperately trying to save their stock.

  As a final failure, he realized he’d figured out why the Palestinian had risked everything to be at the demonstration at the Palazzo delle Finanze. Only now it was too late.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Villa Ada, Rome, Italy/New York, United States

  “Why didn’t you call?” Moretti said. “We could have had a thousand Polizia di Stato. It would have been finished.”

  Scorpion shook his head. It was almost midnight. They were sitting at an outside table in a café in the small Piazza di Sant’ Eustachio near the Pantheon. The lights from the café spilled out onto the cobblestones.

  “He would’ve triggered the bomb with a cell phone before anyone could stop him. Even if we got him, you don’t do this on your own. He has confederates. We wouldn’t have stopped anything. I had no choice. I had to get him and the bomb together,” Scorpion said. He could hear the bitterness in his voice.

  “E’ un disastro. Now he knows we know he’s in Rome. Maybe he even knows what you look like?”

  “I never got close enough.” Scorpion grimaced, taking another sip of the grappa.

  “Is no good,” Moretti said.

  “We know that,” Scorpion snapped.

  “I told my wife I have work, but naturalmente she thinks I am with my mistress. We lose the Palestinian and I am here with you and not my blond mistress. I lose twice. Is no good,” Moretti said, making Scorpion smile in spite of how he felt. “What if this figlio di gotta changes his plan? All our preparation goes for nothing.”

  “He won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he thinks it’s his destiny,” Scorpion said.

  Moretti lit a cigarette and studied the American’s face, partially in shadow from the light from the café.

  “You begin to know him, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Scorpion said.

  “What will you do?”

  “Get drunk.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Alert Langley. After what happened today, he probably sent the signal.”

  The next day, Scorpion got the call from Rabinowich before noon. A half hour later he was sitting next to Moretti looking at a closed-room bank of TV monitors inside Carabinieri headquarters on the Via Romania near Villa Ada Park. It was 6:00 A.M. in Washington and New York, and the FBI Hostage Rescue Teams were fully operational.

  Before he sat down, Scorpion verified that his face was blurred on the TV monitor, as he’d requested. Other TV monitors showed Wade Anderson, head of the FBI task force on the Palestinian operation; Dave Rabinowich, viewed at his desk via his Web cam; a heliport by the water in what was clearly lower Manhattan; an apartment building in a run-down New York neighborhood, viewed from a camera in an apartment or on a roof across the way; a two-story building in another New York neighborhood; a subway station; and a tac ops coordination center filled with men in SWAT gear.

  As soon as Scorpion sat down, Anderson said, “You’re here at my request. I have a FISA warrant,” and waved a sheaf of papers he picked up from his desk, the shades drawn over the office window glass behind him. “It’s for two individuals whose names were supplied to us on a Special Access Critical basis by NSA and your buddy Rabinowich in Langley. I understand this was done based on information supplied by you. We’ve got multiple HRT teams deployed in Manhattan. Supervisory Special Agent Forrester’s heading that up.” A crew-cut man in a bulky SWAT outfit in one of the monitors nodded. “In fact, we’re using every damned HRT in the country, so this better be right,” Anderson said, glaring at the camera.

  “These are people in the U.S. who received cell phone messages last night mentioning al Jabbar,” Rabinowich put in. “There’s also one in Chicago and another in L.A. that NSA is still running down. All the calls were made from a single cell phone in the Portonaccio district in Rome that subsequently went dead, so there’s no GPS track.”

  “I assume that has something to do with why you are in Rome, Scorpion,” Anderson said.

  “The Palestinian is in Rome,” Scorpion replied. Moretti looked hard at him.

  “For our part, Langley’s telling us to focus on New Yor
k. Correct?” Anderson asked.

  “That’s right,” Rabinowich said.

  “Well, we’re not doing it just because Langley says so, but because it matches our analysis as well,” Anderson growled. “But we have critical tactical decisions to make and I wanted your input, Scorpion.”

  “Who are the two individuals?” Scorpion asked.

  “One’s a woman in her twenties, named…” Anderson squinted at his BlackBerry. “… Bharati Kabir. The family’s from Bangladesh; she came here when she was a kid. Lives in Queens with her brother’s family and works in an insurance office in midtown Manhattan. Frankly, we have concerns. She doesn’t fit the profile. The second is a Pakistani male from Brooklyn. Name is Atif Khan.”

  “What about the girl’s brother?” Scorpion asked.

  “Name’s Zahid Kabir. Works in a shoestore.” Anderson frowned. “We only got these last night, so we’re still digging stuff up.”

  “This Atif Khan, what does he do?” Scorpion asked.

  “You’ll love this,” Rabinowich said.

  “He works for Prestige Helicopter Services,” Anderson replied, checking the BlackBerry. “They do private tours and charters out of the Pier 6 Heliport in lower Manhattan. This Khan’s a helicopter pilot.”

  “Christ,” Scorpion muttered. “That’s how he’s doing it.”

  “You mean aerial spraying of the plague pathogen over Manhattan from the helicopter? We thought of that,” Anderson said, frowning again. “Walking and spraying through the streets or in a subway or office building would’ve been too obvious. They want this thing to incubate before we were alerted.”

  “That’s not why you’re here, Mister … uh, Scorpion,” Forrester jumped in, sarcastic about the code name.

  “No, it isn’t,” Anderson said, taking the meeting back. “Justice,” indicating a man in a suit sitting next to him, “has come up with all kinds of constitutional hoops for us to jump through. These presumed terrorists—and we have concerns; as I said, the woman doesn’t fit the profile—are American citizens. DOJ wants us to take them in, Mirandize them, wipe their noses for them, the usual crap.”

  “You’ll never take them in,” Scorpion said.

  “Look, we don’t like it either, but if we have to, we know how to do this,” Forrester said, his men stirring.

  “The Palestinian makes bombs,” Scorpion said. “He’s a graduate of a world-class technical university and he can control the blast to within a centimeter like he did in Cairo. It takes less than a second to press a button, and while I don’t know whether an explosion will destroy these pathogens or distribute them to everybody in the vicinity including your men, I guarantee that he does.”

  One of Forrester’s men came over and whispered something to him. Forrester looked at a monitor and cut in.

  “The Kabir woman. She’s on the move,” he said. “We need to decide.”

  “Is she carrying anything? A suitcase, a shopping bag, anything?” Scorpion asked.

  “Have a look,” Forrester said, and they all looked at the monitor showing a young woman in jeans and a head scarf walking down the street from the apartment building entrance.

  “What the hell is she wearing?” Anderson asked, putting on his glasses and squinting at the monitor.

  “Backpack. The big kind they use for camping,” one of Forrester’s men said.

  “She’s the carrier,” Scorpion said.

  “So what do we do? Arrest her now before she gets on the subway?” Forrester asked.

  “You’ve got a FISA. Probable cause is a little iffy, but I’m okay if you want to take her in,” the suit next to Anderson said.

  “The pilot, Khan, is on the move too, sir,” another of Forrester’s men said.

  Another monitor showed the Pakistani, wearing a Prestige Helicopter jacket, coming out of his brick two-story house.

  “Is he carrying anything?” Anderson asked.

  “Just a briefcase,” Forrester said.

  “You can’t arrest her,” Scorpion said. “The second anyone gets near her, she’ll detonate. Once the pathogen is out, it’s out. Everyone who survives will be a carrier.”

  “And what’s your suggestion?” Forrester said sarcastically.

  “Surveillance. Lots of switch-offs. She’s headed for the subway. Don’t lose her, but don’t keep the same agents on the same subway car with her for more than a few stops. No one looks at her; no one touches her; no one gets anywhere near her. One way or another—maybe she’ll get off and grab a taxi in Manhattan—she’s heading for the helicopter unless we do something stupid that forces her to do something she doesn’t want to do.”

  “What happens when she gets to the heliport?” the suit next to Anderson asked.

  “The heliport is built out into the East River,” Forrester said. “There’s a building next to the landing pad. We could grab her or take her out there.”

  “You need your two best snipers,” Scorpion said. “I mean the best. Guys from Delta or SEALs; guys who won’t miss. There’s a building next to the landing pad, and the monitor shows skyscrapers nearby. They’ll have two or three seconds as she approaches the helicopter.”

  “We need a decision, sir. She’s approaching the subway,” one of Forrester’s men said. On the monitor, they saw the woman approach the subway entrance surrounded by other commuters.

  “Morning rush. Lots of people,” Rabinowich observed.

  “Stand by,” Forrester’s man said into his phone mike.

  “Do the surveillance on both, the girl and the pilot,” Anderson said. “No one spooks them, goddammit. Switch off tails, lots of distance, like Scorpion said. It’ll buy us some time while we decide.”

  “What if we lose them?” Forrester put in.

  “We know where they’re going,” Scorpion said.

  Anderson looked directly at the monitor that showed Scorpion’s face as an oval blur.

  “I want to be clear. You’re suggesting we terminate both of them on the helicopter pad? Is that right?”

  “A bullet in the head. Both at the same time. It has to be instantaneous and you can’t miss. They have to die before they realize something’s happened, so it has to be a clean head shot,” Scorpion said.

  “Who the hell is this guy?” the suit asked, glaring at the camera. “Have you ever heard of the United States Constitution? The presumption of innocence? If the media and the ACLU get hold of this, they’ll crucify us. We can’t just kill them!”

  “Not even terrorists in the act?” Rabinowich chimed in.

  “We don’t know that! You said yourself,” the suit turned to Anderson, “she doesn’t fit the profile.”

  “Don’t you get it? Tens of millions of people could die,” Rabinowich said. “There’s no vaccine for this thing. No antibiotic or other medication in the world that’ll stop it. Once she starts spraying, we’ve got a helluva bigger problem than the ACLU. We have no choice.”

  “You’re assuming they’re terrorists,” the suit replied, “or even if they are, that they’ve got this spray. That’s all it is, an assumption. What if you got the wrong people? What if she’s going backpacking with her boyfriend? You’re basing this all on two words in a single phone intercept.”

  “In my business, that’s usually all we have,” Scorpion said.

  “If you’re wrong, it could be a career killer. You realize that, don’t you?” The suit turned to Anderson. “You could be indicted. You need to kick this upstairs.”

  “Careers versus the lives of millions of Americans including your wives and kids,” Rabinowich put in. “That’s not a hard decision.”

  Anderson looked at the monitors. “They’ll want deniability, upstairs,” he said. “That’s what they pay me for. The buck stops here.” He looked directly at the TV camera. “Scorpion, are you sure about this—what is it—something about the constellation Orion in Arabic?”

  “I’ve chased this guy across the Middle East and Europe. With all due respect, you have no idea who you are dealing
with,” Scorpion replied.

  Anderson looked at Forrester on his monitor. “Who are your best snipers?”

  “Sadlock. Him and Pesco. For the record, both were SEAL snipers,” Forrester added, glaring at Scorpion’s blurred image on the monitor. “We’ll have my HRT squad close for backup.”

  “Get ’em in position at the heliport,” Anderson said. “Tell them to make sure it’s a head kill shot.”

  Forrester held up his hand, listening to his earpiece.

  “The Kabir woman. She just got off the train at Grand Central.”

  “Don’t lose her,” Anderson said.

  “Switching to Grand Central security feed,” Forrester said.

  They waited long seconds till one of the monitors showed crowds of people hurrying in all directions past a subway security camera.

  “There she is,” someone said, and Scorpion saw the woman with the backpack nearly submerged in a sea of people moving toward the subway stairs, before she moved out of the camera’s range. A few minutes later Forrester reported that she had exited the station and was out on the street. One of Forrester’s technicians put it on a live feed.

  “She just got into a yellow cab. Heading west on Forty-second,” the FBI tail on the scene said.

  “Air, you got her?” Forrester asked.

  “We got her,” a voice said, nearly drowned out by the sound of a helicopter rotor. On another monitor, they were able to watch the taxi from the helicopter camera as it made its way through traffic back toward the East Side and down the FDR Drive. As the taxi approached the Brooklyn Bridge, Forrester told Air to peel off so as not to spook the woman. One of Forrester’s men tapped his shoulder and said something.