Scorpion Betrayal Read online

  “Kul khara!” Kassem cursed, the words muffled by the spray of blood that came flying out of his mouth.

  “Tell us!” Fouad said, grabbing a small saucepan from the stove and smashing it down on Kassem’s groin. Kassem moaned. “The Palestinian. Where is he?”

  “Kis em ick!” Go do something obscene with your mother, Kassem cried out as Fouad hit him again.

  Fouad put the saucepan back on the stove, turned the flame on, and went back to questioning Kassem, while Scorpion worked on the reason why he’d planned this in the first place. He found Kassem’s cell phone in his pants pocket, crumpled on the floor in the bedroom, and examined it for any scratches or noticeable smudges. There was a single small scratch on the outside casing, and a nicked corner. He pulled an identical model from his pocket, made a tiny scratch and nicked the corner with a Swiss pocketknife to mimic the first phone and smudged the screen with his sleeve. Using a port-to-port connector, he copied the memory from Kassem’s cell phone into his phone, then took the SIM from Kassem’s cell and put it into the new phone. Checking the new phone to make sure all Kassem’s contacts and messages were there, he put the new phone back in Kassem’s pants pocket.

  It had an NSA-supplied computer chip and DSP processor inside. Any call Kassem made on it would be relayed via satellite to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, the “Black Building,” so-called because of the color of the outside window glass, and from there to Scorpion’s cell phone.

  Scorpion turned off the dresser lamp he’d been using and went over to the woman, lying bound and gagged on the bed. Her face was swollen and bruised from where Fouad had hit her. She stared up at him, a man in a ski mask, and whatever was in her dark eyes, he couldn’t read it. He put his finger to his lips and removed her gag.

  “If you want to live, you need to come with us,” he whispered.

  She looked at him with her dark eyes but didn’t answer.

  “I don’t think you should stay,” he said. “I can give you asylum in America, but you have to come right now.”

  She shook her head, her long dark hair a mane on the pillow, the movement making him aware of her superb, nearly naked body. “This is my country,” she said softly.

  “They’ll have to suspect you. Once I leave this room, no one can protect you.”

  “Ana fahim.” I understand. She smiled wistfully, wincing as she did, and despite the swelling and bruises, he could see how attractive she was. “I don’t want to go anywhere. Let Hezbollah and the Syrians leave.”

  Scorpion heard a terrible muffled high-pitched squeal in the next room, almost like an animal’s. He replaced her gag and hurried into the dining area. Fouad was grinding the red-hot saucepan onto Kassem’s privates. Scorpion pulled him away, then put a choke hold on Kassem, cutting off the carotid artery and rendering him unconscious.

  “We have to go. Did he say anything?”

  “He said it wasn’t the Central Committee. He didn’t know the ‘Palestinian’. He said Cairo was the work of the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya.”

  “The Islamic Resistance? Who are they?”

  “A secret cell within Hezbollah. More radical than Nasrullah. We’ve heard only whispers. No one knows anything about it, or if they do, no one speaks. Do we kill him now?” Fouad asked, taking out his gun.

  Scorpion saw Kassem starting to stir. Whatever he did, he would have to do it quickly.

  “He has to escape,” he whispered into Fouad’s ear. “That was the plan.”

  Fouad shook his head. “You don’t understand Lebanon,” he said, and pointed his gun at Kassem.

  As Fouad started to squeeze the trigger, Scorpion reached over and, with a Krav Maga maneuver, twisted the gun away from Fouad and fired it at him three times, killing him instantly. From another apartment he heard a scream, and then gunshots from below. Kassem’s men had heard the shots and were no doubt already on their way.

  Scorpion ran into the bedroom, untied the woman and pulled her with him back into the next room. He grabbed one of the AK-47s from the floor, fired it at Fouad’s body, opened the balcony door, stepped out and fired the gun at it from outside, shattering the glass, then ran back in and handed the AK-47 to the woman. Lights were going on in apartments in buildings all around, and he could hear shouting and gunshots and dogs barking. He only had seconds.

  “You freed yourself and killed him,” he said, indicating Fouad. “You saved Kassem. I ran away. Understand?”

  “I understand,” she said, pushing him. “Go with Allah.”

  “Stay away from the door. They’ll come in shooting,” he said as he grabbed the backpack.

  Running out to the balcony, he hooked up to Fouad’s rappelling line from the roof and leaped over the rail as the apartment door was shredded with AK-47 fire, shots ripping into the apartment wall. He rappelled wildly down the side of the building, not daring to take a second to look up. The instant his feet touched the concrete of the alleyway, he detached from the line and ran into the shadows.

  Behind him, Scorpion heard the sound of bullets pinging off the concrete. As he ran he pulled off his ski mask, stuffed it into the backpack, and pressed his cell phone to alert the Druze getaway drivers. He raced down the alley to the side street. Just as he got to the sidewalk, the SUV screeched to a stop. He jumped in and they sped into the darkness.

  “Where’s Fouad?” one of the Druze asked in Arabic.

  Scorpion shook his head. “Keep driving,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to stop.”

  The two Druze gunmen drove around to make sure they weren’t followed and dropped him off on Avenue Clemenceau. He waited till they drove away, cautioning them to say nothing and not to go home. Once Hezbollah discovered Fouad’s identity, there would be retaliations against the Druze. He was walking the few blocks to the apartment on Omar Daouk, the streets still active with pedestrians and traffic despite the late hour, the streetlights spaced like lonely sentinels in the darkness, when Kassem’s call came.

  “You shouldn’t have called,” a voice said. Scorpion’s cell phone screen showed the phone number of a Dr. Samir Abadi in Damascus, Syria.

  “They wanted to know about the Palestinian,” he heard Kassem say, his voice sounding surprisingly normal, despite the pain he had to be in.

  “And?”

  “I told them nothing.” There was a pause. “They know of Al-Muqawama.”

  The phone in Damascus clicked off.

  Scorpion took the elevator to the apartment and within minutes had uploaded the contents of Kassem’s cell phone to Rabinowich via the Corn Association website from his laptop. He cleared out anything in the apartment that might identify him, wiping down whatever he’d touched with antiseptic wipes. At the bus station near the port, he caught a night Service taxi to Damascus that he shared with a Syrian businessman who had come to Beirut to see his dentist and a Shi’ite woman who was going to visit her sister. They drove through the city and up the winding mountain roads in the darkness to the Syrian border.

  Scorpion hadn’t wanted to do this at night, but Hezbollah would already be mobilizing, and he knew it would be harder to cross the border if he waited till morning. As it was, there was a chance of Hezbollah gunmen stopping them anywhere in the Bekaa Valley or in one of the Shi’ite villages in the mountains. As for the border, the Syrians would soon be alerted. His best chance was to get through before they were all over the border station. The Service stopped at the border and they were ordered out of the taxi. He handed the Lebanese border officer a French passport and a press pass that identified him as Adrien Leveque, a journalist from Le Figaro.

  News about the killing was on a television on the wall behind the officer. A reporter standing outside the building on Baroudi Street said that two bodies had been found in the apartment, a man and the nude body of a woman. There was no mention on the TV of the two gunmen Scorpion had killed or Hezbollah. The police assumed the female body was the woman who had rented the apartment, but identification would take time because she’
d been badly tortured and mutilated before she died. The reporter said police were focusing on the sex angle, with speculation about a sadomasochistic game between two lovers that had gotten out of control.

  The officer looked at Scorpion’s passport and press pass photos, then at him and typed something into the computer.

  “Êtes-vous écrit une histoire sur la Syrie?” the officer asked.

  “Sur l’effet de la crise financière sur le commerce libanais et syriens,” Scorpion said. He was concerned that they were doing a computer check. The credentials from the CIA were supposed to be rock solid, so it wasn’t that, and Le Figaro often featured financial stories, such as the one on the financial crisis he claimed he was covering. That usually made people less interested, which was why he had chosen it. The officer glanced at the television screen behind him, then at Scorpion while they waited for the computer. Scorpion felt a bead of sweat slide down his back. Every second increased his danger. The Lebanese border police were staffed with Shi’a, often from either Amal or Hezbollah. And crossing the border into Syria didn’t mean anything. They were on both sides of the border.

  The officer checked the computer, then with a blank expression handed him back his passport. It was the time of night that had made him suspicious, Scorpion thought. But he’d had no choice. Sooner or later someone would remember seeing someone who looked like him with Fouad. The police wouldn’t put him together with Fouad and the woman, but Hezbollah might.

  He went outside and got back into the Service. They’d tortured her before they killed her. This is my country, she had said. The mission had barely started and already he had casualties.

  They stopped at the Syrian border station and went through the procedure again, then got back in the Service and drove on. The only light came from the headlights of the Service carving into the darkness of the road.

  They arrived in Damascus before midnight, dropped off at the main bus station in Soumaria. Although it was late, there were still a few vendors selling roasted meat kabobs over glowing charcoal braziers and a line of taxis waiting at a stand. Scorpion took a taxi to Le Meridian, the type of hotel a French journalist would stay at. As he handed his luggage and backpack to the hotel porter, he spotted two men he had seen standing near the taxi stand at the bus station, one with a mustache in a white shirt and blue pants, the second in a dark patterned shirt, both with bulges for holsters under their shirts. He was being followed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Utrecht, Netherlands

  The Palestinian heard the call of the muezzin echo from the mosque loudspeaker out over the rain-slick street. He stood in the Moroccan grocery store across the way, watching the worshippers—men still in their work clothes and a few women in black hijab head scarves—enter the mosque. The store smelled of couscous and fresh khobz bread and spices: cinnamon, cumin, mint, ginger, and green coriander leaves for tagines. He would not enter the mosque. It was sure to have been infiltrated by AIVD informers even before Cairo, and now the Dutch were under even greater pressure from the Americans and the other European intelligence services. He bought a sprig of mint leaves wrapped in paper and stood outside the store. There was nothing about him to attract attention, just a man under an awning, taking shelter from the rain.

  A woman in a hijab and a small boy walked toward him on their way to the mosque.

  “Salaam aleikem,” he said.

  “Aleikem es-salaam,” the woman said, still walking.

  “Do you know the imam? Imam Mohammad Solilah?” the Palestinian asked in Fusha Arabic.

  “I know him,” the boy said, turning back. “He comes to our class sometimes.”

  “Could you give him this?” he said, handing the boy the package of mint leaves. He added, “This is for you,” handing the boy a two euro coin. The boy took the coin and looked at his mother.

  “You are a friend of the imam?” she asked, looking at him for the first time. He was taller than average, close to six feet, with smooth, even features and skin that had recently spent time in the sun. He looked exceptionally fit, with a lean athletic build, and although he was smiling at her and the boy, there was something in his brown eyes that made her uneasy. She took the boy’s hand and pulled him closer to her.

  “Aywa, an old friend. Mint for his tea. And this for you.” If he handed her a twenty euro note and mussed the boy’s wet hair with his hand. “You’d better go in or you’ll drown.”

  She hesitated to take the money, but Kanaleneiland was a poor immigrant neighborhood, and after a moment she put the money in her pocket.

  “Should I tell him anything?” the boy asked.

  “La, nothing, ma’a salama,” the Palestinian said, and opening his umbrella, walked away in the rain.

  She watched him for a moment, then holding tightly to the boy’s hand, crossed the street and went into the mosque.

  The Palestinian walked to a corner kiosk, where he bought a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, then he went into a small cafeteria that appeared to be frequented mainly by Moroccans. There did not appear to be much mixing between them and the many Turks in the area.

  He sat down with a tray of chicken and rice and read the newspaper while he ate. From time to time he glanced up from his paper and through the cafeteria window at the darkening street, the lights from storefronts and streetlights reflected in puddles and wet sidewalks. No one paid any attention to him. This was a rough Muslim neighborhood and they were used to people with no work and time on their hands.

  He was still jet-lagging from Mexico, in his mind seeing hawks riding the thermals in the sky over the desert east of Mexicali, shacks along the road, and César, the vicious little coyote in an Angels baseball cap waving his pistola in that tunnel under the border to the U.S., saying, “No more mierde, cabrón. Show me what’s in your pack.” Then the surprised look on César’s face a second later with a bullet hole in his forehead.

  Once he was on the U.S. side in Calexico, it was so easy. All he had to do was go into a Kinko’s and FedEx a box containing the pack to the office of the fictional chemical company he had set up months earlier in the industrial Sunset Park section of Brooklyn in New York, after which he just crossed back into Mexico through the border station, no questions asked.

  The waiter, a young Moroccan in a soiled apron, came over, and the Palestinian ordered a cup of tea. The waiter put the paper slip for the bill under the saucer and whispered in Arabic, “Ask for Saïd.”

  The Palestinian saw a local telephone number handwritten on the slip. He memorized it, then spilled some tea on the slip till it nearly dissolved, and rolling it into a tiny ball, dropped it into his pocket. He asked if he could use the cafeteria phone, explaining that his cell phone battery was low, and they pointed him to a public phone near the toilet in back. Calling the number, he said he wanted to speak to Saïd, and a man on the other end said “Prins Claus Brug” and hung up.

  The Palestinian went out into the rain and walked along Churchillaan Street toward the Prince Claus Bridge over the canal. As he walked, he checked his reflection in rain-streaked store windows to make sure he wasn’t followed. He walked past apartment houses, satellite TV dishes sprouting like mushrooms on the sides of the buildings, graffiti from Turkish and Moroccan gangs painted on alley walls. This wasn’t the guidebook’s Utrecht, with its clean streets, world-class university, medieval Dom Tower dominating the skyline, and the tree-lined Oudegracht Canal, with its charming cafés and restaurants along the water. This was Muslim Europe, the heart of the struggle. It wasn’t just the Americans. The Europeans too would be punished, he thought. A more terrible punishment than they could imagine.

  Near the corner, a group of tough-looking young Moroccan men were crowded under an awning, smoking cigarettes and what smelled like hashish. They watched him, saying nothing as he walked past, his posture utterly still even as he moved, something about that stillness precluding them from challenging him. He walked along the path beside the canal, raindrops making circles
in the dark water, the ripples shattering the reflections of the streetlights. As he walked, he flicked the tiny ball of paper he had spilled the tea on into the canal.

  Just as the Palestinian went up onto the bridge, a BMW sedan pulled up beside him. Two Arab men got out, hands in their raincoat pockets. “Get into the car,” one of them said in Arabic.

  He got in the backseat, sandwiched between them. The car drove across the bridge, suddenly spun around on the other side and headed back onto the bridge going the other way.

  “Lo tismah, we have to do this,” the first Arab apologized, putting a blindfold on the Palestinian. He sat quietly, letting them do it, swaying as the car made turns, changing directions so they couldn’t be followed and so he couldn’t find his way again.

  After what seemed a long time but might have been less than half an hour, the car stopped and they led him out, knocked twice on a door and took him inside a building. The first Arab took off his blindfold. They were standing in the vestibule of an old-fashioned apartment building near a dimly lit staircase. He smelled damp rotting wood and water and thought they might be in an older part of the city, near the Oudegracht Canal.

  “I leave you here. Go to the third floor. The apartment on your left,” the first Arab said, opening the door and going back outside. The Palestinian glanced around the vestibule and looked up the staircase. There were no obvious hiding places for anyone who might be waiting for him. He went up the stairs, knocked on the door and went inside.

  The apartment was dark and sparsely furnished. A blanket hung over the only window, the only light coming from a candle on a wooden table. It was likely a temporary meeting place, only used this one time, he thought. The old man, in a round white taqiyah cap and gallabiya, sat behind the table with a glass of mint tea, and even in the dim light the Palestinian could see he was blind.

  “Salaam aleikem, Imam,” he said.

  “Wa aleikem es-salaam,” the old man said, gesturing for him to sit. “You will have shai atai.” It was not a question. The old man’s hands trembled as they found the battered metal teapot and poured the mint tea into the glass, adding lump after lump of sugar and stirring it with the spoon from his glass. The two men sipped their tea in silence.