Scorpion Betrayal Page 8

  “You don’t pay, maybe you don’t look so good. Maybe don’t feel so good, Turco,” Bartolo said, shuffling toward the door, his shackles clanking.

  “Andiamo,” the guard said, unlocking the door.

  “Vaffanculo!” Bartolo cursed, shuffling out.

  The Palestinian left the prison and drove the Mercedes out of town, heading for Turin. Along the way he bought two disposable cell phones and called a number in Turin from an Autogrill rest stop on the autostrada.

  “Fee ay fis sinima il layla di?” he asked in Arabic. What’s playing at the movie tonight?

  “Piazza della Republica, Porta Palazzo Nord,” a man replied, and hung up. The Palestinian used the second phone to call a number in Holland.

  “Bitnazaam gawalaat?” he asked in Arabic. Do you arrange tours?

  “Abu Faraj is dead. In his home in Damascus,” the voice at the other end said, using the nom de guerre of Dr. Abadi. The Palestinian watched the traffic on the A4 go by. Suddenly, it seemed as if every car was a potential danger. Impossible, he told himself. They couldn’t be on to him so quickly after Cairo. “Also his wife and three guards.”

  “Who was it?” he asked.

  “We don’t know. The Jews or the Americans. Pick one. Whoever, the dog got away,” the voice said.

  “He was good enough to get past all the guards and alarms. That house was like a fortress.”

  “Khalli baalak,” the voice said. Be careful. “Whoever it was is very dangerous. He also took a folder and may have accessed his computer. Is there anything on it of you?”

  “Wala haaga.” Nothing, he said, his thoughts racing. This plus the near capture of Salim Kassem in Beirut meant they were after him. Even if they didn’t know who or where he was, someone was getting closer.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Nothing,” he said, remembering the long walk he had taken with Dr. Abadi in the Bekaa Valley after the 2006 July war with the Israelis. You do not exist. It is the only way, Dr. Abadi had said. There would be nothing of him on Abadi’s computer, or anywhere for that matter. He was certain of it. He waited, and when the voice did not continue, finally said it: “Do we go on?”

  “Allahu akhbar!” the voice said. God is great.

  “Allahu akhbar!” the Palestinian replied and hung up. It was as they had agreed. No matter what, there would be no turning back.

  Making sure he wasn’t watched, he pulled out the SIM cards, placed the two cell phones and SIMs just behind his front tire, and backed the Mercedes over them. He jumped out, picked up what was left of the phones and tossed the pieces at intervals into the brush along the autostrada to Turin.

  It was getting warm, the sun glittering on the Po River and on the mountains as he drove into Turin and parked in a structure near the Porta Palazzo. It was a working-class area, and he passed warehouses and cheap couscous restaurants as he walked to the piazza and waited on the sidewalk near a cluster of market stalls. Within minutes a van pulled up. Two Moroccan men jumped out and shoved him into the back. One of the Moroccans started to put a hood on his head.

  “U’af!” Stop! “No hood. I want to study the area,” the Palestinian said sharply in Arabic. One Moroccan looked at the other, who didn’t say anything. He kept the hood in his hand. “Where are we going?” the Palestinian asked the driver.

  “Across the river. Make sure no one is following,” the driver said, weaving through the traffic, mostly Fiats, of course, from the big Fiat factory in the suburbs of the city, past the lush green of the Royal Gardens and the towering four-sided dome of the Mole Antonelliana, Turin’s signature landmark. Designed to be a synagogue, the Mole was now Italy’s National Movie Museum, and was said to be the tallest museum in the world. They drove across the bridge over the Po River, then cut illegally across the oncoming lane to a side street, turning back on the Via Bologna and recrossing to the western side of the river. After another ten minutes going back and forth on side streets to make sure no one was following, the driver pulled up to the loading dock of a small warehouse a few doors down from a garage that had been converted into a mosque. They got out and went inside the warehouse.

  There were six young Moroccan and Albanian men in work clothes, two of them wearing the green coveralls of Italian sanitation workers, and two women in hijabs. They stood around or sat on metal chairs near a stack of crates in a corner of the warehouse. A bearded young Moroccan man sat behind a folding table in the front of the group, sipping a bottle of Orange Fanta. An older man in an embroidered taqiyah cap, who the Palestinian assumed was the imam, sat beside the bearded Moroccan.

  “Salaam aleikem,” the imam said.

  “Wa aleikem es-salaam,” the Palestinian replied, taking a seat and turning the chair sideways so he could see the two men at the table and the rest of the group. The bearded man put a Beretta pistol on the table.

  “You are welcome, Brother,” the imam continued in Arabic. “We have been instructed to assist you in all possible ways.”

  “Assist, yes. But in Torino we lead,” the bearded man said, his hand touching the gun.

  “You are GICM?” the Palestinian asked, naming the terrorist Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group responsible for a series of deadly bombings and kidnappings across northern Italy.

  The bearded man nodded.

  “Give me your gun,” the Palestinian ordered, standing and holding out his hand. The bearded man picked up the pistol and pointed it at him.

  “I give the orders here,” he said.

  “Do you submit to Allah? Have you said the Shahadah?” the Palestinian demanded, his eyes burning. “We are the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya. Do you know there is a fatwa against any who would lift a hand against me because of my work in our holy cause?” He stepped closer to the table and held out his hand. “Either kill me now and burn forever in jahannam or give me the gun, Brother.”

  The bearded man’s eyes darted around, looking at his friends and followers. Everyone was riveted on the confrontation. One of the Moroccans from the van started to pull his gun out of a shoulder holster, then stopped halfway. From outside the warehouse came the sound of a car honking in traffic. No one moved. The bearded man’s fingers tightened on the gun. The Palestinian could see specks of dust floating in the shafts of sunlight coming through the high warehouse window, and he wondered if it would be the last thing he ever saw. At last the bearded man exhaled. Without a word, he pushed the gun on the table toward the Palestinian.

  “Allahu akbar,” God is great, the Palestinian said, picking up the gun. The others started to echo “Allahu akbar” when the Palestinian aimed the gun and shot the bearded man in the head, the shot ringing unbelievably loud in the silence. One of the women gave out a muffled cry as the body slumped to the side of the chair.

  The Palestinian turned on the group and stared at them. “Our moment of truth has come. There can be only one leader here,” he said, and told them what he wanted them to do.

  “Where do you want the delivery?” Francesca said, tossing her long blond hair, her dark roots showing only at the part. They were having dinner in a small exclusive restaurant in Milan, near Sempione Park.

  “In Torino,” the Palestinian said, and told her the name of the street. He was eating the best Piedmontese veal battutu he’d ever tasted, washed down with an excellent Sagrantino wine. “Just deliver it and walk away.”

  “And the money?”

  “Before your men go two meters, they will have the rest of the money.”

  “You understand with the Camorra, you don’t get two chances?” she said.

  “You aren’t afraid to talk about the Camorra here?” he said, looking around at the well-dressed diners at nearby tables.

  “Why not? I own this place.” She had a rough contralto laugh. “Many others too. You are surprised to find a woman capa, yes? Of the Camorra, it is the custom when the husband dies or is in the prigione, for the wife to take over. Good custom. We hold it close,” she said, touching her chest. “But you were surpris
ed. I see it in your eyes.”

  “Only at how attractive you were.” She was in her forties, her skin tan, with a good shape shown off by the red designer dress she wore, her breasts so perfect that only a world-class surgeon who was half in love with her could have done them.

  “Non c’è male,” she said—not bad—licking a drop of spaghetti sauce from the corner of her mouth. “Listen. You want to take me to the bed? What job is this? You tell me and this will be the best night of your life.”

  “Tempting. Also dangerous—in more ways than one,” he said, glancing at the two bodyguards she’d come in with, now standing on either side of the front door, their suit jackets unbuttoned.

  “You are not afraid. I can see you are not a man who fears. You understand, we women are curious, like cats. Arouse a woman’s curiosity and you can have her.”

  “Any woman?”

  “Any woman on earth—and in heaven too,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “You want me?”

  “I won’t tell you. Ever.”

  “Maybe I don’t care,” she said, tossing her hair. “Maybe I want to make chiavare with you in the bed,” she said, leaning forward so he could see the swell of her breasts.

  “Maybe you’d rather have the money. Sixty thousand now as agreed.”

  “You see! You do understand women. Where is it?” she said, getting up.

  “A package. I gave it to the maître d’.”

  She leaned over and kissed him, her tongue darting into his mouth, tasting of the lobster ragout from the spaghetti sauce. “Next time I fuck you so good, caro,” she whispered. She got up and left, stopping at the maître d’, who handed the package to one of her bodyguards.

  When the Palestinian left the restaurant, he doubled back for nearly an hour, zigzagging through the dark city streets and autostrada exits, anticipating that Francesca would have him followed. When he thought he was clear, he drove to the Milan Central Station, where he caught the late night Red Arrow high-speed train to Rome. In the morning, he flew from Rome to Moscow.

  The Camorra were dangerous enough, and what he had to do in Russia even more so, he thought on the long flight. All the while, the shadow hunting him nagged at the Palestinian, an unknown killer without a face or a name, like a nightmare from his childhood. Except he wasn’t a child anymore. Now, he was the one to be feared. Looking through the airplane window at the snowcapped Alps below, he remembered an old Arab proverb his father had told him when he was a boy: “An army of sheep led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Hamburg, Germany

  Scorpion first saw her on TV in the giant Saturn electronics store, her image repeated on hundreds of televisions tuned to the same German N-TV News channel like a kind of surreal electronic art exhibit, before he saw her in the flesh, standing in the middle of the street outside the large turquoise-colored mosque with a loudspeaker, demanding an end to “Islam’s imprisonment of women.” On the TV panel of talking head commentators, her looks were striking. Her skin was a smooth gold, her sleek black hair, cut short, a stunning contrast with her aquamarine blue eyes, a touch of mascara underlining them hinting of the Levant. She wore no head scarf, and although the credit at the bottom of the screen identified her as “Najla Kafoury,” everyone addressed her only as “Najla,” as if she had already achieved the one-name status that, as Harris once wryly remarked, denoted real celebrity nowadays. “You are either a one-name or a no-name,” he’d said.

  Now, seeing Najla Kafoury in the center of the demonstration outside the mosque, a slim figure in a belted Burberry raincoat, she was smaller than he had expected from her TV image. Her voice rang out in perfect German through the loudspeaker as she demanded that Islamic leaders stop “behandlung von frauen wie sklaven,” treating women as slaves. A line of helmeted Schutzpolizei stood between her and an angry crowd of Muslims, men and women, trying to shout her down, some carrying signs that read Feinde des Islam, Enemy of Islam; others, Verräter, Traitor, and Haretiker, Heretic.

  “The Prophet said treat women well, but the only sura you know is the fourth sura, which tells you to beat women!” she shouted.

  “A good Muslim woman is obedient and does not need to be beaten,” someone in the crowd shouted in Farsi.

  “Das ist Europa, not sixth century Arabia. Fourteen centuries of abuse is enough! No woman should ever be beaten!” she shouted back in German.

  Some in the crowd began to throw things at her, cushions, eggs, oranges. The line of Schutzpolizei started forward as she and the small band of men and women with her retreated, the TV cameramen edging forward to capture the shot.

  “She got what she wanted,” a man near Scorpion in the crowd commented in German to a paparazzo photographer next to him. “She’ll be on Heute tonight,” he added, referring to the nightly TV news show.

  “Natürlich. Najla delivers the only thing anyone cares about—ratings,” the paparazzo said, standing on his toes to try to get the shot of her holding a hand up to protect herself. “That’s meine liebsten,” he smiled as he got the shot.

  “How much is it worth?” Scorpion asked.

  “Depends. A shot like this, two, three hundred euros. If I could get Najla with her top off, she’d be worth twenty thousand.” The paparazzo grinned.

  “She’s nothing. Just good looking,” the man next to him said.

  “That’s why she’s worth every euro.” The paparazzo winked, pulling his gear together.

  Scorpion drifted away in the crowd that was starting to disperse as the woman and her little group left in two cars and the Schutzpolizei began waving away the rest of the gathering. He walked the landscaped perimeter of the mosque grounds, blending in with passersby who had stopped to watch the demonstration and were now hurrying home for dinner. He studied the mosque grounds for alarms and communications. Spotting a Deutsche Telekom sticker on a phone line, he guessed they were using DSL to access the Internet. They had an alarm system, but it looked like a basic dual channel alarm, and shouldn’t be a problem.

  A cool fog drifted in from Alster Lake as it grew dark, the streetlights glowing ghostly white. He had dinner in a nearby gaststätte and thought about the conversation he’d had on one of the disposable cell phones he bought in the Saturn store and afterward broke apart and dispersed into a number of trash cans.

  According to the nameless male voice on the local number he called, the NSA had traced the Mohammad Modahami account through a series of e-mail aliases and proxy servers to the Hamburg Islamic Masjid in the Uhlenhorst district. They were still working on the code Dr. Abadi had used to contact the fictitious Modahami. The voice said nothing about the Syrian killings, so Harris had to be handling whatever Foggy Bottom political dustup he’d stirred up in Syria.

  The voice had said, “R with M is sameach. Ditto for the prime confirm on the bug,” which Scorpion understood to mean that according to Rabinowich, the CIA had shared the information he’d retrieved from Abadi’s computer with the Israeli Mossad, and that both Rabinowich and the Israelis were sameach—Hebrew for happy—with what they were getting. It also meant that his own information about the weaponized plague, “the bug,” was confirmation of a threat Rabinowich already had from another source, which was the information Harris, citing the Prime Directive—need to know—had withheld from him in Karachi. Scorpion knew that his operating assumption now had to be that the Palestinian got his hands on an aerosol form of Septicemic plague.

  The voice had asked if he was staying in a “B and B,” and he said no. They meant did he want the German BND and the BPOL—the Bundespolizei—to raid the Islamic Masjid? Saying no would indicate to Harris that he would do it himself, he thought. A raid by the BPOL in Hamburg was the last thing they needed. After Beirut and his taking out Abadi in Damascus, it would set alarm bells off all across the Hezbollah grid. Even worse, it would let the Palestinian know exactly where they were and how close or far behind him. The Palestinian might even move up the target da
te, and then they’d have even less time to try to stop it.

  That was always the problem when Washington got involved, he mused. They tended to overkill everything, using a cruise missile with a thousand pound warhead when what you needed was a dart. “Sure you obliterate the target,” Koenig used to say, “but how much intel do you get from an obliterated target?”

  He paid the check and walked back to the mosque. The streets were nearly empty now, the Alster invisible in the darkness and fog, except for the glow of streetlights along the shore. He walked the grounds around the mosque with its twin Iranian-style minarets and a light from someone working late in an office toward the back. He looked for wire connections and had to go more by touch than vision in the darkness, finding a wire connected to an outside alarm and a security camera. After peeling away the insulation from the wire with his pocketknife, he wrapped the wire with a piece of steel wool and connected it to a cell phone with two wires to an AA battery and a little capacitor he’d picked up in the Saturn store. If he called the cell phone, the current would cause the steel wool to burst into flame and short-circuit the alarm.

  Scorpion scanned the silent street, looking for something out of place, a car with someone in it, a commercial van parked where it shouldn’t be. But the fog made it difficult to see anything except the hazy light from the center’s second story office window. Something wasn’t right. His internal antenna, honed after years in the field, was sending him a signal, but with the darkness and the fog, he couldn’t see where the danger was coming from. If this were a standard RDV or a break-in, he could wait them out or reset for another time, but on this mission there was no time. It forced you to take risks that were normally unacceptable.

  There was only one alarm lead, and a single security camera covering the front entrance. He disabled the alarm with his pocketknife, removed the camera’s recorder and put it in his pocket. He picked the lock to the front door and then hesitated. If there was another lead that he’d missed, the alarm would go off. He held his breath as he opened the door, but nothing happened. He crept up the stairs and at the corner held a small pocket mirror angled to see who was in the lighted office. The area was open, with a number of empty desks and a bearded Iranian man with glasses working at a computer.