Scorpion Betrayal (4 page)

“Nothing,” Harris said, inspecting his nails. If it were possible for someone as deceitful as Harris to reveal true emotion, Scorpion would have said that he was running scared.

“I'm not a virgin, Bob. I don't need foreplay. What is it?”

Harris shook his head. “Need to know.” Scorpion knew that the deputy director was within his rights to withhold information. The rule was “no excess baggage.” You only told a field agent what he absolutely needed to know. Except he was getting a bad feeling about this one. He stared at the cabin porthole, the Arabian Sea a distant blue beyond the breakwater while Springsteen went dancing in the dark. Neither man spoke.

“You've got plenty of firepower on this. What's the problem?” Scorpion asked finally.

“It won't work. I have a feeling about this Palestinian. He's good. Too good and absolutely ruthless. No matter what we do, he'll find a way. That's where you come in. I want you on your own, running your own operation, completely separate from everything and anyone else in the Agency. You'll have unlimited access to anything we have anytime you want it. Spend as much money as you have to. If you want, I'll give you the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs' private cell number. Call out the goddamn Marines. You have one job. Stop the Palestinian. However you have to do it. No questions asked.”

“It'll get dirty. You know what we're dealing with.”

“Whatever it takes.”

Scorpion waited. He picked up the Beck's but didn't drink. The only sounds besides Springsteen were those of the port machinery and someone on the dock shouting in Urdu. As an independent agent, for Scorpion there was always the matter of payment. Finally, Harris said it.

“Double the usual fee plus a triple bonus when the Palestinian is—” He hesitated. “—no longer an issue. The first half'll be in the Luxembourg account in an hour.”

Christ, they were scared shitless, Scorpion thought. Harris didn't even bat an eye at so much money. What the hell was this?

“Hezbollah means Lebanon. I don't trust Beirut station,” Scorpion said, putting down the beer.

“Rabinowich agrees. Keep it separate. Do it any way you like. There's a backpack with a dozen passports, credit cards, money, contacts, some gear, the usual. Get it at the drop on 13th Street.” Then Harris told him the website they'd be using and the emergency password and countersign, what Scorpion's old mentor, Koenig, used to call the pilot eject button. “Anything else?” he asked.

Scorpion stood up. “I have a plane to catch.”

“You have two weeks; probably less,” Harris said.

CHAPTER THREE

Beirut, Lebanon

F
ouad was sitting by the window over a café au lait at an inside table at the Café de Paris. He was pretending to read a copy of
Spécial
magazine, a sexy Lebanese actress in a low-cut dress on the cover, as Scorpion entered the café. It was the signal that he was clean. If there had been any opposition, any one of the dozen different Lebanese factions opposed to his group, the March 14 Druze, the magazine would have been lying closed on the table.

Scorpion sat down across from Fouad and looked around. The café, with its orange awnings and multicolored chairs, was a Rue Hamra institution, and most of the clientele, he noted, was older. Gray-haired men who still wore suit jackets and
en vogue
women of a “certain age” who had kept their shapes. They looked like they dated from the nineties, when the café had been a hotbed of politicians, journalists, and spies.

“Salaam aleikem,”
Fouad said, limply shaking Scorpion's hand, passing a small plug-in flash drive as he did so.

“Wa aleikem es-salaam.
This place is still here,” Scorpion said.
“Un café turc, s'il vous plaît,”
he said to the waiter.

“The students all hang out at Starbucks now. The old Lebanon is dead,” Fouad said, lighting a cigarette. He spoke a Druze-style Arabic distinguished by the
qaf,
the guttural
k
sound. “The photo is on the flash drive,” he whispered, leaning closer and opening his cell phone to show Scorpion the image of a man in Western clothes and a checkered kaffiyeh draped around his neck, talking on a cell phone on an apartment balcony.

“Salim?” Scorpion said.

Fouad nodded. “It's him.”

“How do I know it's him? Man on a balcony with a long distance lens. Could be anybody.”

“You know Choueifat?”

“Druze village. East of the airport,” Scorpion said.

“Hezbollah came at night. They took four boys. One of them was my brother's son, Badi. Before they killed him, they cut out his eyes. This is Salim,” Fouad said, tapping the cell phone. “How many will you need?” He stopped and they waited until the waiter served Scorpion the thick coffee and left.

“Depends. Does he ever leave?”

“Sometimes.” Fouad looked around. “He has a woman in Ashrafieh.”

“How do you know?”

“She is one of us.” Scorpion raised his eyebrows and didn't say anything. “Her mother was Druze,” Fouad explained.

“And he trusts her enough to visit her?”

“You should see her. Dark-haired, dark-eyed…” Fouad tried to find the words, his hands in front of him as if to touch something exquisite. “A beauty.”

“Where's the apartment?”

“On Baroudi, near Shari' Abdel Wahab. You know it?”

“Near the football stadium? That's an expensive neighborhood,” Scorpion said. “How does she afford it?”

Fouad shifted uncomfortably. “She is a singer. A patriot,” he said.

“She's yours?”

Fouad nodded. “This will end it for her?” he asked.

“We'll try to make it appear that she's a victim too,” Scorpion said. “Maybe they won't kill her. What floor is her apartment on?”

“The eighth. The building has ten floors.”

“How many men does he come with?”

“Seven usually. Two SUVs. Four in one and three with him in the second. All with AK-47s.”

“Do any of them come into the apartment with him?”

Fouad shook his head. “He leaves two to guard outside the apartment door, the rest downstairs or outside.”

“I'll call and let you know after I check it out,” Scorpion said. “Probably need just the two of us plus two with a car for the getaway. But no one knows who the target is or what it's for or where they're going till the last second. Understood?”

“Of course. Only the two of us?”

“The fewer, the better.” He could see Fouad was worried. “It'll be enough. Security's a bigger concern than firepower.”

Fouad leaned forward and put out the glowing tip of the cigarette by slowly crushing it between his fingers. “We will kill him?”

Scorpion didn't answer.

“He has to be killed,” Fouad said. “The price is agreed?”

“Sixty M-16s, ten M203 grenade launchers, and two M-240B machine guns. A thousand dollars U.S. for each of your men, ten thousand for you,” Scorpion whispered in his ear as he stood up. “And no one touches him. He must be taken alive and unharmed or I pay nothing.”

“Maashi. Mafi mushkila.”

He's lying, saying okay, Scorpion thought. He'd have to deal with it when the time came.
“Inshallah, Ma'a salaama,”
he said, touching Fouad on the shoulder as he left.

“Alla ysalmak, habibi,”
Fouad said, not looking up.

Outside, Scorpion caught a
Service
taxi that he shared with two women, one in a head scarf, and a male student, heading toward the Corniche. He stopped the
Service
on Kuwait Street, crossed the busy street and jumped into a taxi heading the other way, toward downtown, making sure no one was suddenly reversing directions with him. He got out on Fakheddine, waited till the taxi left, then walked into a Japanese restaurant and out the back door. From there, Scorpion walked several blocks down a side street to the high-rise apartment building on Omar Daouk where he had rented a furnished flat earlier that morning. He nodded to the
portier
and took the elevator to the apartment. As soon as he got in, he went to the window and scanned the street below from behind the curtain, but there was nothing. Just ordinary street traffic. Beyond the street, he could see the side of the Ramada Hotel, and beyond that the Mediterranean, blue all the way to the horizon.

He went to the table, turned on his laptop computer, transferred the image on the plug-in drive from Fouad into the computer and opened it with Photoshop. The man in the photo was Salim Kassem, Nazrullah's deputy secretary and a member of the
al-majlis Al-Markazis,
the Hezbollah Central Council. It wasn't his face Scorpion was interested in, but his cell phone. He enlarged the photo almost to the point of seeing individual pixels, till he was sure he knew the exact Nokia model Kassem used. Using an RSA token disguised as a functioning credit card, Scorpion logged into the website of the International Corn Association, which promoted American corn exports that Harris was using as cover for the operation. The randomly generated code number plus a password enabled Scorpion to initiate a Virtual Private Network with a special port on the site that used an advanced DTLS protocol. This created a highly secure network tunnel that was far more difficult to hack than the standard SSL used by most so-called secure websites, such as banks. Once he was connected, he made the arrangements he wanted.

Only then did he unpack his suitcase and methodically check his equipment, one piece at a time, including a 9mm Beretta pistol with a sound suppressor. From this point on he would be carrying a gun everywhere he went.

Leaving the apartment, he took a
Service
to Ashrafieh. He stopped in a real estate office and pocketed a few business cards from an agent who tried to interest him in a condo in the Gammayzeh district.
“Pas maintenant,”
not now, he told the agent, using French as part of his cover ID, then caught a taxi that let him off on Baroudi, two blocks from the target. He studied the street and the building as he walked past and then completely around it. In the lobby, he slipped the
portier
one of the real estate cards and thirty thousand lira, told him he had a client who was interested and to keep it to himself. After taking the elevator to the top floor, he walked down the stairs to the eighth floor and checked the corridor to determine how he wanted to handle it when he returned.

Finally, Scorpion went back outside and called Fouad. He spent the rest of the day changing taxis and making further preparations.

N
ear sunset the next day Scorpion got the call from Fouad. He was seated at a café on the Corniche near Pigeon Rocks. The line of palm trees along the Corniche rustled in the breeze. A slim young woman in a miniskirt was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend in a black
hijab
scarf and skintight designer jeans, the two of them laughing, the sun turning the sea a fiery reddish gold and at that moment, Beirut was the most seductive place on earth. The waiter was talking with the bartender about Lebanon's upcoming soccer match against Jordan in the Asian Cup, and on the TV behind the bar an Egyptian female singer was crooning about love.

It was good to hear Arabic again, Scorpion thought. It had been too long and he'd missed it; missed its musicality and expressiveness, and even more, a sense of his strange interrupted childhood in the desert of Arabia after his oilman father had been killed. It brought back the world of the Bedouin and Sheikh Zaid, who had been more of a father to him than his own father, whom he'd barely known, and the extraordinary nights of his boyhood when the stars filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon. He remembered how it was near the end, when it was all about oil and money and the Bedu way was gone, and when he went to America to go to Harvard, Sheikh Zaid telling him, “You have to find out who you are, my
dhimmi.”

He was thinking about all that, and about dropping out of Harvard and going to war in Afghanistan and later the Delta Force—because in a way it was like going home—when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, said
“D'accord,”
and snapped the phone shut.