Scorpion Page 3

  “Did anyone see you come here?” Khattak asked nervously, his sweat-slick face shining like the man in the moon.

  “Only the storyteller without eyes.”

  “I am to search your person,” Khattak said, coming closer. The .45 was cocked.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Does anyone know who anyone is in Peshawar?” Khattak said, his eyes darting about like fish in a tank. The Scorpion smiled.

  “I am called ‘the Scorpion,’” he said.

  Khattak paled. The gun began to shake in his hand. He nervously stuffed it back inside his robe and bowed, his hand over his heart.

  “A thousand pardons, Sahib. The one you seek is waiting,” he said and with a series of anxious bows, he led the Scorpion through a beaded curtain to a small airless room in the back, where Bob Harris was sitting like a sultan on a leather hassock. Harris was grinning as though it was all a glorious adventure. Iced lime drinks for both of them were already set up on a large copper tray.

  “Oh Christ,” the Scorpion muttered and shook his head. With another bow, Khattak eased his huge bulk past the curtain, leaving them alone. Harris winked and gestured for him to sit down, but the Scorpion just stood there.

  “What was all that James Bond bullshit with Khattak?”

  “Oh that,” Harris shrugged. “He’s not a contact. This is just a one-time deal. Besides, don’t worry about it. We’ve bigger fish to fry.”

  “Worry is what keeps people like me alive,” the Scorpion said quietly.

  “Of course. Sorry,” Harris said, with an understanding grin. He had a smile for every occasion, like Hallmark cards, the Scorpion thought. He sat down on a hassock, positioning himself so he could watch the doorway and Harris at the same time.

  Harris was tall and fair, his boyish face alive with the mischievous charm of an urchin who has gone to all the better prep schools. In his spanking-new safari jacket and pith helmet, Harris looked as if he had just stepped out of the window of Abercrombie & Fitch. The Scorpion scratched his five-day growth of beard and tried to remember the last time he’d had a hot bath. Harris always managed to make him feel that way, like the character in the commercial who uses the wrong kind of deodorant soap.

  But seeing Harris, he knew that whatever it was had to be top drawer. Harris was the DCI’s protégé, so he wouldn’t have been sent out unless someone very high up was interested. Harris handed him a glass of iced lime juice and he sipped at it, hoping it would help to dissolve the knot he felt at the pit of his stomach. The last time he had seen Harris was in Abu Dhabi, when Harris had roped him into Operation Eagle Claw, the Blue Light Brigade’s abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran. “A Pentagon Blue Plate special,” Harris had called the operation. He had tried to squirm out of it, but Harris had hooked him and he had been lucky to get out of Teheran in one piece, just two steps ahead of the Revolutionary Guards. The brass had handled the fiasco in the usual way, by handing out posthumous medals, and Harris had wound up with a promotion. That was Harris all right, the Scorpion mused. Throw him into a manure pile and he’d come out sniffing a rose.

  “There’s a little job we’d like you to do for us,” Harris said in his best briefing-room manner. The only things missing were the wall maps and pointer.

  “Another Blue Plate Special?” the Scorpion couldn’t resist asking. Harris gave him his patented “Come on, don’t be that way” smile, a lop-sided grin that had toppled more women into bed than champagne.

  “No, you’ll like this one. Money-back guarantee,” Harris said.

  “If it’s as good as the last one, I can hardly wait.”

  Harris pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his face. The heat was starting to get to him. He looked around at the cramped storeroom with distaste, then sighed to show he was ever the good soldier and stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  “Why don’t you get Khattak to set up a fan?” the Scorpion grinned. He was beginning to enjoy watching Harris squirm.

  “No electricity, besides there isn’t time. As soon as you get cleaned up and out of your Gunga Din outfit”—looking at the Scorpion as if he had just stepped out of a cesspool—“you have to be on a plane out of here.”

  “I still have business here,” the Scorpion said. He’d spent months trying to set up the gun deal with the Afghani rebels and now he had the queasy feeling that the Company was about to pick up its marbles and tell him that they didn’t want to play any more.

  “We’d be appreciative if you’d handle this little matter for us first. Very,” Harris said, making a steeple with his fingers. It reminded the Scorpion of the Thai wai greeting and the night a thousand years ago when Alex and he had met Harris for the first time. It was at the Derby King on Patpong Road, the CIA’s favorite watering hole in Bangkok. That was the night Harris had told them about a quick little op in Phitsanulok province. Alex had never come back from that one, and later they learned that the Pathet Lao had impaled him on a bamboo stake.

  “How much is appreciation going for these days?” the Scorpion asked.

  “I had a feeling you were going to use dirty words.” Harris reached into his pocket and pulled out a color photo and tossed it over to him. It showed a beautiful young woman posing on a park bench which might have been in the Luxembourg Gardens. If people came out of files, hers would have been labeled “All-American Girl—Pretty.” She wore a green silk blouse, designer jeans and a smile that said she could have a love affair with the camera any time she wanted. Her shoulder-length blond hair was tousled in the way that took a top-notch hairdresser half a day to achieve. Her eyes were a disturbing violet with silver specks, sparkling with intelligence. They’d have made the ugliest girl special, and if it weren’t for a touch of wistfulness in them, she could have been posing for a magazine cover. She was the grown-up version of the head cheerleader whom everyone had a crush on in high school. She was a dream girl, the kind who attracts tragedy the way honey attracts flies.

  “I hope you’ll be very happy together,” the Scorpion said.

  “She turned up missing in Paris five weeks ago. We want you to find her.”

  “Have you tried the French lost and found?” the Scorpion said and put the photo on the tray. He was annoyed. This wasn’t his kind of job and Harris knew it.

  “The rue des Saussaies put us on to it. I don’t know if they’d appreciate that description,” Harris said drily.

  “How did the Sûreté and the Company suddenly get involved? I mean, she’s cute, but nobody’s that pretty.”

  “Her daddy is Congressman Max Ormont, the oil millionaire. He’s a member of the Republican National Committee.” Harris winked.

  “How do you know she didn’t run off for a dirty weekend on the Cote d’Azur?”

  “She was snatched,” Harris said with finality.

  “Political?”

  Harris shook his head. “It looks like white slavery.”

  The Scorpion whistled silently to himself. Now he knew why Harris needed him. Arabia was his personal briarpatch and that’s where the biggest market was for white females. But it was also a dead end, because the one sure way to get Arabs to kill you was to go around trying to sniff out their womenfolk.

  “How good is the data, Bob?” the Scorpion asked.

  Harris looked insulted and turned his profile to the Scorpion to show how bravely he could suffer. In a way, a pique was justifiable, the Scorpion mused. In theory, any data passed from a senior case officer to a field agent was supposed to be sacrosanct. They might—and usually did—withhold a lot, but what they gave you was supposed to be good. Except that he had known men to die in the gap between theory and practice. When Harris looked back at him, a hard glint had come into his eyes.

  “Don’t worry about the data. This is straight from the Sûreté and we independently confirmed. It’s got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”

  “Oh sure, Grade A. Just like Warsaw,” the Scorpion shrugged.

  Har
ris winced at that one. He had been in Warsaw when the Company had paid thirty thousand dollars for the latest Soviet military plan on Poland; except that the report turned out to be a rewrite of an article in Le Figaro. Then he leaned forward and the Scorpion saw that the flush in his face was anger, not embarrassment. His naked fury surprised the Scorpion. Harris was a born actor. Normally, he held his real emotions like a miser, carefully doling them out like coins.

  “Do you want the guns, or don’t you?” Harris said through gritted teeth.

  The Scorpion nodded. As Sergeant Walker used to say in his easy Georgia drawl, “They got you by the short and curlies, boy. Y’all can’t complain about the price when it’s the only store in town.” Harris leaned back and smiled, back in control again. That was the way he liked it.

  The two men sipped their drinks. Dimly, they could hear the distant cry from the mosque loudspeaker calling the faithful to prayer. The Scorpion glanced down again at the photo on the table. If she had been sold as a white slave in Arabia, she’d either wind up in a brothel or the desert. Either way, she probably wouldn’t live out the year. There was a tilt of independence in her chin. Slavery would be a kind of death in life for her, he thought. Harris noticed him looking at the photo and pushed it a little closer to him. There was something dirty about the way he did it, as though Harris were bribing him with the girl’s beauty.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?” Harris said.

  Pretty wasn’t the word, the Scorpion thought. With that exquisite face and that sexy young body, she must have started a thousand daydreams every time she walked down the street.

  “What happened to her?” he said at last. Harris almost sighed with relief and he mopped his brow again with the wet handkerchief. He raised his glass in a silent toast to himself. He’d come a long way to hook this fish.

  “Once upon a time there were two American girls in Paris,” Harris began.

  “Jesus, Bob. Don’t give me the whole Ring cycle. Just jump to the part where they meet the traveling salesman.”

  Harris straightened up, annoyed at the lack of respect for his briefing style. Then he took a long swallow of lime juice and tried the sincere smile that had taken him so far up the ladder.

  “Okay,” Harris began again. “The Congressman’s Pride and Joy is Kelly Ormont. Two months ago, she and a girlfriend, Lori, packed their traveler’s checks and Kaopectate and took off for Europe. They were at a ritzy party on a private barge on the Seine when Kelly became ill after a little too much champagne. A handsome Frenchman named Gerard offered to take her back to the hotel. Lori saw her get into a white Mercedes with him. That was the last time she ever saw Kelly.

  “The next day she went to Kelly’s room and found that she hadn’t come in. She stewed for a while, trying to figure out what to do and finally took it to the American embassy, who sent her to the Quai des Orfèvres. For two days, the Froggies gave her the usual bureaucratic runaround until she told them about the congressman. Then they figured it might be political and they might actually have to do something about it,” he said, pursing his lips with the bureaucrat’s distaste for someone else’s bureaucracy. “They turned it over to the Sûreté and eventually it got to Interpol, who sent out a Blue. By then the congressman was steaming and he called the Oval Office. That’s when we got involved.”

  “That’s a lot of high-priced talent for what sounds like a police matter,” the Scorpion said, scratching his stubbled beard.

  Harris sighed and sipped his drink. Dark sweat stains were beginning to grow under his arms.

  “The congressman is an important man,” Harris said pointedly.

  “What did the Sûreté come up with?”

  “Nobody at the party knew this Gerard character.”

  “Naturally,” the Scorpion shrugged.

  “The Mercedes was stolen, of course. It was found a few days later in St. Germain en Laye. No signs of a struggle. The Sûreté checked with the Duane and sure enough, the girl and two men boarded an Air France flight to Rome the night of the party. By then the trail wasn’t exactly red-hot, but they did come up with something. According to some unconfirmed reports from the SDECE, someone known as Gerard Aupin was rumored to be supplying choice white females out of Paris and Marseilles to the Middle East. He was supposed to be quite a lady-killer.”

  “Literally, it seems,” the Scorpion remarked. Harris nodded.

  “According to the Air France passenger list, the name of one of the two men with Kelly Ormont was Gerard Dupin.”

  The two men looked at each other. The one-letter name change was the easiest kind of a passport fix. The Scorpion picked up the girl’s photo and studied it again. It was an action that was to become obsessive with him in the days to come. He felt the faint stirrings of something that he couldn’t put a name to, almost as if something was coming to life inside him. Not curiosity or attraction. Not a quest, with a sword in an anvil at the end of it. Something else. A kind of second chance. He thought of Tuyet and the child and that last night on the Saigon River, the night the world ended for all of them. He shook his head to clear away the memory, but there was no escaping the past for any of them. He remembered once, a long time ago, Sheikh Zaid teaching him to hunt with the falcon. Although the bird was trained and tethered, it began to wildly flap its powerful wings the moment its hood was removed. Zaid released the falcon and they watched it soar to a pinpoint in the empty blue sky of the desert.

  “You see, little dhimmi,” Zaid had said. “Even the falcon born in a cage never forgets the sky.”

  “What did the Italians come up with?” the Scorpion asked.

  “A girl answering Kelly’s description boarded a flight to Bahrain, under the name Lucy Morton. The Alitalia flight hostess remembered her because she was so pretty and because she slept during the entire flight.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Who knows?” Harris said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Was this Gerard with her?”

  Harris shrugged. From somewhere the sweet smell of hashish came floating on the hot dead air.

  “What about the girl?”

  Harris shrugged again and smiled uneasily. This was his “Don’t blame me, I just got here” smile.

  “According to the authorities at Muharraq Airport, she never got off the plane. She just vanished into thin air. That’s all we know.”

  For a long moment the two men just looked at each other. From outside they could hear the muffled rumble of a car with a bad exhaust roaring like a squadron of bombers as it passed the shop, the sound slowly fading away. Harris slapped irritably at a fly that settled on his neck.

  “You like all this don’t you?” Harris said oddly, with a vague hand gesture that somehow took in the entire Middle East.

  “I like the desert.”

  Harris nodded, looking at him with the kind of polite condescension reserved for madmen, as if the Scorpion had said that his hobby was talking to little green men in flying saucers. The Scorpion looked down again, knowing that Harris would never understand what he was talking about. He studied the girl’s face in the photo. Was there some sadness there, some premonition of her fate, he wondered.

  “What have you got from the stations in Manama and Riyadh?” he asked at last.

  Harris shifted uncomfortably. This was the sticky part and the Scorpion heard mental alarm bells ringing as Harris mopped his face.

  “Things are a little dicey in Arabia right now,” Harris said finally, with the uneasy smile of a corporate vice-president telling the TV camera that there was no proof that tobacco caused cancer. The Scorpion had never seen Harris look so uncomfortable and that really worried him. It was beginning to sound like the worst kind of mission. The one where they collect your dogtags even before you leave.

  In fact, now that he thought about it, Harris was a bird of ill omen, a raven in a Brooks Brothers suit. Saying things were dicey in Arabia made Harris sound like a scout admitting to Custer that there might be a few Indians waiting at the Little B
ig Horn.

  “What the hell does that mean, Bob?”

  “We can’t use the stations in Arabia. This has to be completely unofficial. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good. You can’t just ask an Arab if somebody’s got a new toy for his harem. You should know that better than anyone.”

  The Scorpion’s eyes turned cold and gray as the sea and he stood up, trying to control his temper.

  “Look, is this a straight ‘Search and Retrieve’ or has something been fucked up?” he demanded angrily.

  Harris looked up sharply, his face flushed. “Nothing is fucked up and nothing better get fucked up,” he said. The two men glared at each other, their mutual dislike finally out in the open.

  “The contact has to be somebody I know,” the Scorpion said finally.

  “Braithwaite is on it.”

  The Scorpion nodded. That sounded a little better. They’d obviously done some advance planning with him in mind for a change.

  “What about communications?”

  “Use Macready. He’s in Doha,” Harris said, unable to keep the distaste out of his voice.

  The Scorpion’s mind raced. They had to be desperate if they were willing to use Macready. Mentally, he raised the price.

  “I want a quarter mill in U.S. dollars or Swiss francs. Usual terms.”

  “You always did have an exaggerated idea of what you were worth,” Harris said.

  The Scorpion shrugged. He knew they wouldn’t have turned to an independent like him if they’d had a better alternative.

  Harris nodded reluctantly. He didn’t bargain and that worried the Scorpion even more, because it meant they knew it was going to be trouble and they’d probably never have to pay off. Harris stood up and carefully straightened his safari jacket.

  “Well, what do you think?” Harris asked finally.

  “What do you think I think? She could be anywhere from Baghdad to Casablanca by now. Arabia alone is half the size of the U.S. and even the king doesn’t know what his borders are or what the population is. A pretty white woman is worth about seventy thousand bucks on the hoof and you can’t even ask anyone ‘How’s your wife?’ without getting your throat cut. And even if I found her, anyone rich enough to buy her is powerful enough to keep her and all we can offer is more money, which he probably needs like a hole in the head. And I can’t use Company resources or go near the embassy. What do you think I think? Anyone who figures we can find her, much less get her back, probably thinks a ticket on the Irish Sweepstakes is a conservative investment.”