Scorpion Read online

  “Why doesn’t he just ask him?” the Scorpion said and the three men laughed loudly enough to attract attention from the next table where an Iraqi businessman had been bragging about the new Japanese TV he had bought for his son’s Pontiac Firebird, and shooting his cuffs so that no one could miss his gold Piaget watch. The joke, of course, was that Arabic was a language of implications and ambiguities and truth could only be approached obliquely. In intelligence matters, it was even worse. In their world, no one ever said anything straight out. The Scorpion remembered a classic line religiously recited to all the CTP recruits at the Farm: “Complete paranoids would make good agents if they weren’t so trusting.”

  “Very good … why not just ask him?” al-Amir snickered.

  “You see … it’s more than just the blonde. P-p-pepper on a hen’s belly … that’s all that is,” Braithwaite said, his false teeth clicking like a geiger counter. Like most old desert rats, he had more than a touch of the Puritan in him. That’s why when Lowell Thomas had once asked T. E. Lawrence why he liked the desert, Lawrence had replied: “Because it’s clean.”

  “Not for her,” the Scorpion said. Braithwaite looked at him blankly, his face ridged with seams like a radial tire. The British SIS must have been really desperate to bring the old retread out, the Scorpion thought. He hadn’t been in Bahrain two hours and the needle was already in the red zone.

  “I suppose not,” Braithwaite said at last. When he picked up his glass again, his hand was shaking. He quickly put the glass down and pulled the offending hand out of sight.

  “What about the girl?” the Scorpion asked. Al-Amir sighed and fingered his beads.

  “T-t-tummy friction, that’s all … rub, rub … pepper on a hen’s belly,” Braithwaite shrugged, trying to smile like a man of the world. Something was frightening him all right, the Scorpion decided.

  “Nuruddin,” al-Amir said, dropping the name like an Alka Seltzer tablet into water, then he sat back waiting for it to fizz.

  “Big man … import-export … knows everyone. His daughter is married to Sheikh al-Khatifa’s nephew,” Braithwaite said, rubbing his thumb against his fingers in the universal sign for money.

  The Scorpion nodded grimly. So that’s what happened to the girl, he thought. Import-export was the classic cover in ports like Bahrain for illegal smuggling. Except that with his money and connections, this Nuruddin probably could have taken her off the plane with a brass band playing. No wonder Braithwaite was scared.

  “Does Nuruddin have a connection with Prince Abdul Sa’ad?” the Scorpion asked. Now he knew why they needed an outsider and why no one wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. It was the kind of log that might come crashing down on you if you weren’t careful, and if you did manage to turn it over, God only knew what slimy things might crawl out.

  “Do you know the Place of the Tombs near Sar?” al-Amir asked.

  The Scorpion nodded.

  “Nuruddin and the prince are meeting there tonight … secretly. Perhaps you might find what you’re looking for,” al-Amir said. His face revealed nothing, as though he wore one of those black face-masks still worn by the older Gulf women. The Scorpion flushed angrily.

  “Is that where Chambers went?” he demanded. Al-Amir looked as shocked as if the Scorpion had reached for food with his left hand, the most unforgivable breach of manners possible.

  The color drained out of Braithwaite’s face as though a plug had been pulled in his neck. “Now … now … hardly cricket, old lad,” he stuttered.

  “Just checking,” the Scorpion grinned. He felt like the commander of the Light Brigade who’s just been given his orders and knows it’s a fuck-up and that there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it, except go charging like an asshole into the Valley of Death. “This isn’t a business for heroes. Guts stand about as much chance against brains and logistics as a rabbit in a tiger cage,” Koenig had told them once. Well, what would Koenig do if he were here now, the Scorpion wondered. He didn’t really want to think about that, because he suspected that Koenig would be looking for the emergency exit at this point. Almost superstitiously his fingers touched the pocket where he kept the girl’s photo. Although she didn’t know he existed, he was really all she had. He took a deep breath, because it was time to show his hole card and he didn’t know whether he was holding an ace or a deuce.

  “Just remember, it’s the girl I’m after,” the Scorpion said.

  “Allah be praised,” al-Amir murmured, piously raising his hands.

  “Quite … quite,” Braithwaite said, nervously pouring himself a glassful. His eyes were teary and the Scorpion wondered if Braithwaite was remembering him as a skinny teenager in the desert, all those years ago. The Scorpion nodded at the old man and stood up. They looked at each other for a long moment, both of them remembering their first meeting in the flat searing plain near Wadi er Rumania. They had both changed so much since then, it was something of a miracle that they could still recognize each other. Or perhaps old friends don’t really recognize each other, perhaps they just acknowledge the walking images of their memories, he thought.

  “Good seeing you again,” the Scorpion said.

  “Salaam, asayid … Shaw,” al-Amir murmured.

  “G-good luck!” Braithwaite called out, looking as if he knew the Scorpion might need it.

  Place of the Tombs

  STARS FILLED THE DOME of night as though it had snowed diamonds on the sky. High over the distant Sar Mosque floated a perfect crescent moon, gleaming like a shaving from a new silver coin. The crescent was upturned, horns pointing at the Milky Way, a silvery bowl to catch stars. The minarets of the mosque were shrouded in scaffolding like cobwebs. The Scorpion remembered the scaffolding from the time when he was a small boy and his father had taken him to see the ancient Place of the Tombs. The repair work was still going on and might go on yet for centuries. It didn’t really matter how long it took. God was in no hurry.

  The Scorpion stood in one of the shallow graves opened by archaeologists and trained his binoculars at the campfire. He had carefully piled the bones to one side so he wouldn’t step on the skeleton and reveal his presence by cracking any of the brittle bones. He didn’t think whoever’s grave it was would mind. The skeleton had been in the dry earth for thousands of years, since the days of the fabled kingdom of Dilmun.

  Long ago in humanity’s springtime, Dilmun was said to be an earthly paradise. Some even claimed it was the Garden of Eden. It was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first narrative ever written. According to the story, the Sumerian King Gilgamesh crossed the sea from Mesopotamia to Dilmun in his quest for the “flower that makes men immortal,” so old are mankind’s dreams, he mused. Perhaps the skeleton had lived in that happy kingdom, of which the tablets say:

  The land of Dilmun is holy,

  The land of Dilmun is pure.

  In Dilmun the raven utters no cry,

  The wolf snatches not the lamb.

  Now, nothing remained of the dream but the ancient words and tens of thousands of mounds in the desert. Squatters lived in cardboard and tin-can shacks among the mounds. They dug holes in the sides of the mounds and used them for open kilns to make cheap pottery, feeding the fires with cast-off lumber from the construction projects around Manama. The night was illuminated by the firelight from the ovens, as though from thousands of red eyes, lighting the darkness with a twilight glow. It gave the Scorpion excellent visibility, as well as shadowy cover; ideal conditions for a surveillance.

  He could see them clearly through the binoculars. Prince Abdul Sa’ad and Nuruddin, whom Braithwaite had described to him, and several others were politely drinking coffee from a copper pot gleaming in the firelight. They were engaged in intense conversation and he’d have traded his Swiss account for a bug that would let him hear what they were saying. But he was too far away. No sound reached him on the faint sea breeze which carried only the salt tang of the sea, smoke from the kilns and the medicinal scent of the eucalyptus
trees from the direction of the beach reclamation project. In the distance he could make out the shadowy forms of a small herd of wild camels grazing among the mounds. There was a vast sense of desolation, of endless vistas of sand and ancient tombs. It was as if Bahrain was the center of the desert, instead of a sandy dagger-shaped island barely ten miles wide and twice as long.

  He considered moving closer, but that was too dangerous, even with the cover provided by the black bisht he wore over western clothes. The area was heavily patrolled by armed tribesmen and it hadn’t been easy to slip through. The fact that they felt they needed armed guards instead of retainers disturbed him. Were the guards there to protect them from prying eyes, or from each other, he wondered. Then too, he pondered why they hadn’t had the meeting in Nuruddin’s house, or some other private place. That bothered him. They had gone to far too much trouble if what they were doing was merely business, or even criminal. Their connections made them virtually immune from any charges, he reflected. So it could only be political.

  He pulled the Nikon F3 camera with the special 1.2 lens from his robe and began to snap photos of the men around the campfire. He took his time and made sure of telephoto close-ups of all of them. One of them wore a lightweight suit and looked like a Latin, which seemed wildly preposterous. Another wore the shirtlike fuuta of a Yemeni, a boomerang-shaped jambiyya dagger at his waist. His cheek bulged like a chipmunk with a wad of khat leaves. What the hell would a Saudi prince be doing with a Latin and a social inferior like a Yemeni? he wondered. Well, he would send the film to Macready and maybe George could ID them. The important thing was that he had verified a close link between Abdul Sa’ad and Nuruddin. Assuming—and that’s a hell of an assumption, habibi—that Nuruddin had sold the girl to Abdul Sa’ad, who liked his blondes, he could try to pick up the trail in Riyadh.

  Except that Harris hadn’t set him running like a rat in a maze just to find the girl, he thought. That could have been handled through channels by mid-level types. The station chief in Riyadh would have given it to the ambassador, who would have whispered it to King Salim. The king would have denied it, but the message would have been delivered and the Crown Prince would have passed the word down. There would have been a little titillating gossip within the byzantine tangle of the royal family and a few might cluck over Abdul Sa’ad’s wicked ways, but they would keep it in the family and the prince would be forced to give up the girl. He figured Abdul Sa’ad wouldn’t want it to get to the ulama. Not even the king would want to face any criticism from the strict Sunni religious council and if Kelly was still alive, she’d be delivered in due course, after a stern warning from the Company to keep her lid shut on her little Arabian adventure. That was how it should have gone down.

  But watching the firelight play on the faces around the campfire, the Scorpion knew that getting the girl wasn’t the mission at all. He should have realized it before, he thought, cursing his own stupidity. “Things are a little dicey in Arabia,” Harris had said. The Scorpion’s thoughts had returned to that sentence time and again, like a popular tune you hear on the radio in the morning and can’t get rid of all day. But if finding the girl wasn’t the mission, what was? “Sometimes, when hunting rabbits, one puts up a lion,” Koenig used to say, rocking on the balls of his feet in the Quonset hut during their paramilitary training at the Farm; what the trainees used to call “the boom-boom course.”

  The answer to the riddle was in front of him around the campfire, like a gift-wrapped package waiting to be opened. There was no way to signal Macready, his nominal case officer on this one, because he was already in the red zone and it really didn’t matter anyway. He would have to get closer and find out what they were up to.

  “Might as well,” Sergeant Walker used to say as they saddled up for a patrol in Indian country in Quang Tri province, “that’s what they’re paying us for.” But his feet didn’t want to move. He felt safe in the grave, that “fine and private place.” If they spotted him, he didn’t think they’d just pour him a cup of coffee and hand him a bowl of mansuf. Not after what they had done to Chambers.

  He knew that the answer to the girl’s disappearance was in Riyadh and he could just slip away now, pass the photos on to Macready and let all the IA computer types in Langley analyze the pictures to death. That was the smart thing to do. The only thing stopping him was the thought that he was the Scorpion, a professional. He could just picture Koenig’s incredulous glance and hear him say, “You mean, they were all right there and you didn’t try to get closer? You just fucking stood there and snapped photos like some little old lady from Iowa on the Capitol steps?” He would have to get closer. We are all the prisoners of our own self-images, he thought as he opened the camera and slipped the film cartridge into his jockey shorts, where it rested uncomfortably next to his groin. As Koenig used to say, “It’s the safest place. That way they’ve got to jerk you off before they can take it away.”

  He hid the camera and binoculars under the jumble of dry bones. There was no need to hide a gun. He hadn’t brought one. It was better that way. There were too many guards to outgun and if they did nail him he would have a chance to lie his way out of it. Packing a camera and a gun was an amateurish giveaway, like wearing a trenchcoat. Besides, guns tended to limit the conversation. When the Mutayr were first teaching him to shoot with those old British Enfield .303s, Sheikh Zaid had told him, “Words are better weapons than guns, little dhimmi. The Prophet conquered Arabia with a book, not a sword.” Still, it felt pretty damn antsy jumping into the middle of an armed camp packing nothing but a film cartridge in his jockey shorts, he thought. He rolled over the stone ledge of the grave and, crouching, moved on cat feet through the shadows.

  He played tag with the shadows, moving silently from mound to mound. Armed guards carrying AK-47s formed a ragged defense perimeter that gazed outward from the campfire and the Scorpion had to remind himself that they didn’t know he was there and that he was virtually invisible in his black bisht. He moved slowly in a careful zig-zag pattern, wondering if they could hear the pounding of his heart that sounded so loudly in his own ears. They’d cut off Chambers’ arms and legs! Don’t think about that, blinking the sweat from his eyes. Think about the next step.

  He was almost within arm’s length of one of the guards and briefly debated taking him out. It wasn’t worth the risk, he decided. The slightest sound would be suicidal. He went around the mound until he glimpsed the campfire again. The ground was flat and without cover from here to the fire. He could get no closer. He silently sank to one knee, because the eye of an observer would tend to look for a face at full height. Another edge was that their night vision would be reduced by the firelight. They were about fifty feet away and he could just make out the soft murmur of conversation. He cupped his hand behind his right ear to help catch the sound and pointed it towards the fire. The right ear was preferred because it fed a fraction more directly to the left hemisphere of the brain, which processes all sound data.

  “His death will be the signal,” the Latin said. “Unless he dies immediately …” the rest was unintelligible.

  So it was a hit, the Scorpion thought. But who was the target?

  One of the Arabs said something about the “Israeli dogs” and he saw Prince Abdul Sa’ad dismiss the notion with a wave of his hand.

  “Can their ground forces cross the Nefud?” Abdul Sa’ad said and there was a murmur of agreement from the others mingled with a few chuckles at the insanity of any land force attempting to strike across the hundreds of miles of sand dunes that were the Nefud desert.

  The Scorpion stiffened, unable to believe what he was hearing. It was the craziest thing he had ever heard. What on earth could ever make the Israelis want to cross the Nefud? To go where? Riyadh? And for what purpose? To get to the Nefud, the Israelis would first have to conquer all of Jordan and a good chunk of the Middle East besides! Not even the most fanatic religious nut of the right-wing Israeli Likud party would ever even conceive of the idea.
Yet, here were powerful intelligent men actually discussing the bizarre notion. It was crazy!

  Even before he had consciously identified the sound of a scraped pebble, he was already rising in a twisting motion to face the Arab guard. The guard motioned with the AK-47 and then made the mistake of grabbing the Scorpion’s right sleeve near the wrist, presumably to drag him into the light. Without thinking, the Scorpion was into the sequence which Koenig had drilled into them so often that they could do it in their sleep (and sometimes did, because the training included being attacked in bed in the middle of the night). He splayed the fingers of his right hand, to loosen the grip on his wrist, and rotated his hand up. At the top of the arc, he twisted his hand to grab the Arab’s wrist, brought his left hand up to lock the hands together and continued the counter-clockwise motion, breaking the Arab’s wrist. The Arab had a fraction of a second to scream before the Scorpion thrust the knife edge of his left hand into the Arab’s throat, smashing the Adam’s apple.

  The Arab was dead before he hit the ground, the Scorpion already plucking away the AK-47 and running through the shadows, because in those few seconds all hell had broken loose. Yet even through his fear, anguish stabbed at his heart, because in the Arab’s scream he saw two lives, Kelly’s and his own, sizzle into nothing like two specks of spit on a hot griddle.

  Scattered shots were fired and there were shouts as guards ran wildly about, milling in confusion like insects in a broken anthill. Prince Abdul Sa’ad, Nuruddin and the others stood uncertainly, caught for a moment in the flickering light. For the briefest instant, Abdul Sa’ad’s eyes scanned the ancient mounds, trying to seek out the intruder. Then they ran towards cars parked nearby.

  “He’s there—to the right!” the Scorpion shouted to two guards, who began running towards the mound where he was pointing. He ran behind them for a moment, then peeled back towards the mosque, where he had parked his rental car. He stopped because guards had already closed off that direction, then broke towards a small cluster of potters’ shacks. Someone shouted and dust skipped around his feet as the bullets ricocheted off the ground. He had been spotted!