Scorpion Winter Read online

  “U’af!” Stop! “Give me your shaal,” Scorpion demanded, shoving rials at the driver.

  They screeched to a stop. The man took off his turban and Scorpion put it on, grabbed his carry-on and jumped out of the taxi. He ran across to the other taxi, jumped in, and in seconds they were off.

  As his driver made the turn toward the airport, Scorpion saw the Camry come barreling down the other way, the two Abidah men inside scanning the street like crazy, a farmhouse no doubt on their mind.

  Chapter Four

  Porto Cervo

  Sardinia, Italy

  A heavy rain lashed the piazzetta, the little piazza near the marina in Porto Cervo. Standing in the shelter of an arcade, Scorpion, known to the locals as il francese, the Frenchman, looked for anything that shouldn’t be there. Normally, in Sardinia he shouldn’t have had to do that, but after Yemen there was no “normally.”

  He waited until a layover in Dubai before he risked contacting Rabinowich through an iPad at the Apple store at the Deira City mall. They texted using a teenage chat site so heavily trafficked it was virtually impossible to monitor. Rabinowich was presumably a thirteen-year-old girl from Omaha named Madison, Scorpion was a fourteen-year-old boy named Josh from nearby Bellevue.

  u clear? Rabinowich texted.

  4 the moment, Scorpion texted back.

  what about alby? whos she seeing? Rabinowich asked, referring to al-Baiwani.

  she broke up with ay kyoo and a-pee—AQAP—now all shes got is us, Scorpion typed. After Ma’rib, al-Baiwani had no choice. He had burned his bridges with al Qaeda. So long as the CIA fed him arms and money, they would own the Bani Khum.

  shes so 2-faced, Rabinowich texted, meaning he assumed that al-Baiwani was a double agent. Running al-Baiwani would be a sword that cut both ways.

  considering guys she dates, wouldnt you? Scorpion texted back, saying that after what had happened in Ma’rib and the way things were going in Yemen, it didn’t leave al-Baiwani with a lot of choices. He had to play both sides.

  2 bad about pete. Peterman.

  u loco? he was like so nfg, Valley-speak plus CIA slang for no fucking good.

  I miss u, qt. r u ok?

  u tell me, Scorpion typed, ending the call. Because it wasn’t just the mission failure in Yemen that no doubt had Langley scrambling like crazy. They’d made him run. No one had ever made him run before. It was a bad omen. Winter had come, he thought, looking out at the rain-swept piazzetta. And not just for the CIA. Something was wrong.

  Shaking off the rain, he stepped into the small realty office nested among the luxury-designer-label shops around the piazzetta. Although it was after New Year’s, the office was still decorated with Christmas lights. They provided the only color in the gloomy day. He glanced out of the window to see if anyone had seen him go in.

  Abrielle, the owner’s daughter, was alone in the office. Lithe, with long dark hair, she handed him his mail, and as he glanced at it, they chatted half in Italian, half in English, about his farmhouse in the mountains, an updated casa colonica that she looked after when he was away, which was much of the time. Then he saw the envelope.

  She had picked it up from the harbormaster’s office. A simple request on a white card engraved with a yacht insignia to meet to “discuss matters of mutual interest” and a phone number. He would need to Google it, but Scorpion thought that the area code was Luxembourg, most likely meaning it was a holding company protected by that country’s secrecy laws.

  “Where’d this come from?” he asked, going deadly still.

  “Some sailors in a tender from a yacht brought it. I think they were Russi,” Abrielle said. “Is for a Signor Collins. He is a friend?”

  “Is the yacht still there?” Scorpion asked, not answering her. He edged closer to the window and looked out. The piazzetta was empty in the rain. Beyond the buildings and the harbor, there was only the dark sea. Maybe it wasn’t just Alex Station in Yemen that was blown. He had to face the possibility that because of what might have been on Peterman’s laptop, he was blown as well. Christ, had they tracked him to Sardinia?

  Abrielle shook her head. “They said they were heading for Monte Carlo.”

  “Big yacht?” he asked.

  “Molto grande. Sixty meters, maybe more,” she said. Scorpion trusted her judgment about the yacht. The Sardinians were used to big expensive boats. Porto Cervo, with its picturesque harbor and multimillion dollar villas with red-tiled roofs on the hills above the town, was the scene of the annual September regatta, when some of the biggest mega yachts and richest people in the world came to party on the Costa Smeralda. There weren’t that many yachts in the world over sixty meters. It meant the note came from someone extremely rich and powerful.

  “What makes you think they were Russians?”

  She shrugged. “I asked. They said they were Ukraini. It’s a kind of Russi, yes?”

  He told her he was leaving the island. As usual, while he was gone she was to take care of the casa and the two Doberman watchdogs, Hector and Achille. Her face fell when he said he was leaving.

  “Quando tornorai?” she asked, a touch wistfully. When will you be back? She had always thought il francese, with his gray eyes, like those of a wolf and that scar over his eye, attractive enough that if he wanted, she would have locked the office door and let him have her right there and then. But he was always leaving.

  “A few weeks. I’ll be back soon,” he said, not knowing if he would ever return to Sardinia again.

  Driving back in the rain to his casa colonica away from the coast, Scorpion kept glancing in the rearview mirror. The road wound up into the mountains. He pulled over at a turnout at the edge of a cliff. Grabbing binoculars from the glove compartment, he got out of his Porsche and scanned the hills and the road all the way back to Porto Cervo. It appeared no one was following him. With any luck, he still had time; unless they were waiting for him at the casa. He wondered if he was being paranoid. In his business, the line between paranoia and spycraft was razor thin. He remembered Rabinowich joking once, saying, “Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”

  He looked down again at the card. Just two handwritten lines under a logo from a yacht, the Milena II, getting wet in the rain. For Scorpion, it had red flags all over it.

  First, it had been delivered to the harbormaster in Porto Cervo. That was a backdoor emergency network known only to Rabinowich, and even he didn’t know at any given moment which of several dozen ports in the world, if any, Scorpion might be at. The envelope had been addressed to “Arthur Collins,” a pseudonym for a supposed sailing friend of the Frenchman. Scorpion only used the Collins alias at various marinas and sailors’ pubs around the Mediterranean where they held mail.

  What made it more ominous was that it had come, according to Abrielle, from a “Russian” yacht. That made no sense. If Ivanov, aka Checkmate, head of Russia’s FSB Counterintelligence Directorate, was after him, there would be no note. It would be Spetsnaz-trained operatives in the night, and Scorpion knew he would never see them coming. The only thing he could think of was that either the SVR—the Russian equivalent of the CIA—was after him, or some private Russian outfit had been contracted by someone else he had pissed off, like al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

  The worst of it was, they had managed to find him in the one place in the world he thought was safe.

  No one in the world knew he lived in Sardinia, not even Rabinowich.

  For Scorpion, Sardinia was the answer to a unique business problem. As an independent intelligence agent, a freelancer, he sometimes made very dangerous enemies. His only protection was to be able to make himself invisible. After the realtor, Salvatore, Abrielle’s father, had shown him the escape tunnel hidden underneath the old farmhouse in the hills, no doubt used by bandits years ago, he’d decided to make Sardinia his base. The locals had a history of banditry and isolation and tended to mistrust outsiders. They even had their own language, Limba Sarda, in add
ition to mainland Italian. Sardinia was convenient to Europe and the Middle East, where he did much of his business.

  That still left one problem. Anyone who came after him would be looking for an American. He had taken great pains—hacking into databases both outside and within the Swimming Pool, as the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, was known because their headquarters in Paris was located next to the French Swimming Federation—to ensure that his French cover identity was bulletproof.

  Now all of that might have been blown, and he had no idea how—or who was after him. Unless, and this was worse, he had gone over the edge.

  On the flight to Nice, deliberately booked with the Collins ID—he could either find them or make it easy for them to find him—he went back over what he’d learned about the yacht. Using a computer at Fiumicino Airport, he discovered that the Milena II was convenience-flagged in Malta, and as he suspected from the telephone area code, it was registered to a privately held company in Luxembourg. Landing in Nice, he used the Arthur Collins British passport for the rental car, spotting two burly-looking men in leather jackets near the car rental counter.

  Using a disposable cell phone, he called the phone number on the card from the yacht. He left a message in response to a recorded voice, telling it in English that he would be waiting at Le Carpaccio, a waterside restaurant in Villefranche, a resort town on the coast east of Nice, not far from Monaco. He picked a public place to try to minimize the damage if they were going to come right at him.

  A few minutes out from the airport, Scorpion spotted the gray Mercedes sedan following him. The men in leather jackets he had seen near the car rental were in it. Just to be sure, he pulled into an Agip station and knelt down to check the air in his tires, watching the Mercedes drive by. The two men barely glanced at him. He waited five minutes, then drove the Basse Corniche road between the hills and the sea toward Monaco, and a few minutes later saw the Mercedes waiting at a turnout. As he drove past, they started up and followed. A blue BMW pulled in front of him, with two men in that car as well. He was boxed in.

  He had an armed escort to Villefranche.

  Chapter Five

  Milena II

  French Riviera

  The main salon of the mega yacht, Milena II, was furnished in white Italian leather, soft and buttery to the touch, and looked out to the aft pool deck. The designer had gone for Metro modern, and what looked like a genuine Rothko painting hung on an interior wall. They were cruising eastward along the French coast. Through the salon windows, Scorpion could see seaside villas and the villages in the mountains. The sun broke through the clouds and sparkled on the sea.

  The yacht’s tender had come into the harbor at Villefranche and picked Scorpion up on the stone quay just steps from the restaurant. When he boarded the ship, the two shaven-headed men from the Mercedes asked him in accented English for his gun. He handed them the Glock 9mm from the holster at the small of his back.

  Vadim Akhnetzov came into the salon with a rush of energy. He was a medium-sized man, trim, with blond hair cropped almost to the skull. He wore a striped Armani suit and under it a blue and red T-shirt from Arsenal Kyiv, a Ukrainian soccer team. An attractive blond woman in a Chanel suit followed him in.

  “Mr. Collins—or are you going to throw that name away—what you are drinking?” Akhnetzov asked in serviceable English as he sat down opposite Scorpion.

  “Bloody Mary with Belvedere,” Scorpion said. The blond woman tapped on her BlackBerry as if taking notes.

  “Not Russian?” meaning the vodka. “Would you like some Beluga caviar? Dimitri?” Akhnetzov said, glancing at the white-jacked bartender behind the mahogany bar, who began preparing dishes.

  Scorpion shook his head.

  “Of course, business first. Perhaps later. Evgeniya?” he said to the blond woman.

  “Goodbye, Meester Collyins,” she said in a thick accent, and left. She had a lovely body in the well-fitted skirt, and for a moment the two men watched her leave.

  The bartender brought Scorpion’s Bloody Mary and an iced bottle of Iverskaya water for Akhnetzov, who gestured, and both the bartender and one of the leather-jacketed men standing by the door left.

  “Better?” Akhnetzov asked.

  “Do you mind?” Scorpion said, pulling an electronic sweep unit out of his pocket and showing it to Akhnetzov, who gestured that he could use it. Scorpion stood up and began walking around the salon, checking for eavesdropping bugs and hidden cameras.

  “Maybe we should both take off our shirts?” Akhnetzov said, starting to take his jacket off.

  “Maybe we should,” Scorpion said, unbuttoning his shirt as well, then gesturing it was okay.

  “We are on our way to Monte Carlo,” Akhnetzov said. “Is the only local port big enough for the Milena. When we finish talking, you may make business there. Your rental car is being brought from Villefranche.”

  “You’re assuming a hell of a lot. Such as that I’m interested in whatever it is that made you want to get me here,” Scorpion said, sitting down.

  “No, not assuming. Talking,” Akhnetzov said, studying the man in front of him. There was something about him: his strange gray eyes and the scar over his eye, his stillness, as if he could erupt into action in an instant. Akhnetzov lived in a world with many powerful and dangerous men, and he knew when he was in the presence of one. Indeed, he himself was one.

  “Out of curiosity, why do you use the Collins identity, which I assume you will get rid of?”

  “Either I found you or I let you find me. The latter was simpler, faster. Who’d you bribe, the man at the car rental in Nice?”

  “Something like that.” Akhnetzov smiled.

  “How’d you find me? Who told you to leave a card for Collins in Porto Cervo?” Scorpion said casually, masking his tension. His identity and base in Sardinia was on the line.

  “We had a list of some dozen Mediterranean ports. We left notes at all of them. We assume you have a boat and would pick up the note at one of them.”

  “Who told you how to contact me?”

  “Friends of friends. As you know, one cannot do business in our part of the world without certain . . .” Akhnetzov paused, groping for the word in English. “ . . . understandings.”

  “With the SVR and a back channel to the CIA?”

  “I have many friends,” Akhnetzov said. “Everyone, it seems, likes money.”

  Scorpion sipped his drink. Whoever Akhnetzov had bribed, it wasn’t Rabinowich. If Dave had given Akhnetzov a list of ports, it was because the CIA wanted him to talk to Akhnetzov.

  “So now that you’ve impressed me with how rich you are,” Scorpion said, gesturing vaguely at the salon. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to stop something bad from happening.”

  “Bad for whom?”

  “For me,” he replied, tapping his chest. “Bad for my business. For my country, Ukraina. Bad for America too.”

  “What makes you think I’m American? Or that I give a damn about you or your country?”

  “I think you are American. You are CIA, but not CIA. My sources say you kill ‘the Palestinian,’ terrorist impossible to find, but you do in only two weeks. They say you are the best.”

  “What else do you know?” Scorpion said quietly. The question of how much Akhnetzov knew about him was still very open and very dangerous.

  “Listen, drooh. This is maybe your first Ukrainian word. It means ‘friend.’ I am billionaire from a part of the world that is not so simple. I don’t get this way by being stupid. I own Ukengaz Company. We do maybe eighty percent of gaz pipeline, natural gaz from Russia for Europe. Also chemicals, steel, television, real estate. This team, Arsenal,” tugging at his football T-shirt, “I own. I begin with nothing. My maty, my mother, clean toilets in Metro so I can be student at Shevchenko Kyiv University. One night I take money from nightclub where I am working as dishwasher. The shef, the boss, send krutoy paren gangsters to get money back. They beat me with iron bar s
o bad I am in hospital. But I do not tell them where is money. I keep. Later, I use this money for my first gaz trade. You and I, Scorpion, my drooh, we are both wolves. We must understand each other or we must kill each other, yes?”

  The two men looked at each other. Akhnetzov leaned forward, his muscled forearms on his thighs. Scorpion sat casually, but he was ready to move. The code name Scorpion lay between them like a ticking bomb.

  “What do you know about Scorpion?”

  “Less than I want,” Akhnetzov said. “I know you were CIA then not CIA. Independent. It says you know Arabic from when you are child,” glancing at a tablet PC. “Real name unknown. Raised by Bedouin in Arabian desert.” He looked at Scorpion. “What is American kid doing in Arabia?”

  “My father was an oilman. He was killed. The Bedouin saved me.”

  “Is true? You’re unusual guy. Also tough guy. What were you? Navy SEAL? Delta? Marines?”

  “Girl Scouts. I sold cookies.”

  “Okay, you don’t talk. Like I said, tough guy. Only one thing important . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “I know your enemies respect you. There are worse ways to judge a man than by how his enemies fear or respect him. For you, both I think.”

  “So this is a job interview?” Scorpion asked, taking a sip of his drink.

  “In a way. One thing I must know,” Akhnetzov said, tapping a cigarette on a gold case and lighting it. “Why did you leave CIA? For money?”

  Scorpion smiled. “To tell you the truth, it never entered my mind. At the time, I hadn’t thought about making a living that way. I just quit.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t talk about that.”

  “Listen, drooh . . .” Akhnetzov looked at Scorpion, his eyes ice cold, and Scorpion had a sense he was seeing the real man. “For what I am about to tell you, this is important. I don’t ask for nothing.”