Scorpion Deception (10 page)

“Herr Baveghli,” he said to Apple-cake, then caught himself and switched from German to French. “Pardon, Monsieur Baveghli. I'm Müller. We have your writ under Title 2.”

“Monsieur Müller,
c'est un scandale
.” It's an outrage, Scorpion said in French into the microphone, then switched to English. “A violation of Swiss law and neutrality. Monsieur Norouzi must be released at once,” watching as Apple-cake repeated it word for word to Schwegler.

“Of course,” Schwegler said. And to Norouzi in German: “Herr Norouzi, you're free to go,” gesturing to Dieter and Marco to unlock the shackles and give Norouzi the rest of his clothes. “If you wish, Herr Norouzi, my men can take you home or wherever you want.”

“No, please
,
” Norouzi replied in German, wincing as he pulled himself up straight. “I've had quite enough of your men.”

“I have a car downstairs,” Apple-cake said. “I'll take you home, Monsieur Norouzi.”

As Norouzi collected his things and dressed, moving painfully, Schwegler and his men watched, saying nothing.

Norouzi, helped by Apple-cake, limped to the door. As they went out, followed by Schwegler and his men, Schwegler told Norouzi in German, “Don't leave Zurich, Herr Norouzi. Our investigation is not yet concluded.”

“Tu goh khordie,”
Scorpion heard Norouzi mutter in Farsi as he left. Go eat shit.

Putting his finger to his lips to alert the others, Scorpion put his ear to the office front door. He heard the elevator go down and went to the window, peering out from behind the curtain.

He watched as they came out of the building. Norouzi waited on the sidewalk below with Schwegler, Dieter, and Marco, while Apple-cake brought the car around. Norouzi got in, throwing off Dieter's helping hand, and a moment later the car disappeared down Winterthurerstrasse, the overhead tram lines swaying slightly in the wind. The sky was beginning to turn the faint purple-gray of predawn, still too dark to see the distant Alps.

The others had gone back to work or had left. Only Chrissie stood next to him.

“Now what?” she asked.

“We wait,” Scorpion said. “You go join the surveillance team.”

Forty minutes later Scorpion got the call. It was Glenn, the buzz cut in the Burberry, whom he had assigned as the lead bird dog.

“We lost Homer,” Glenn said, panic in his voice evident even with a bad cell connection and the sound of a tram in the background.

“Impossible,” Scorpion said, a sick feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. It couldn't be. They were using GPS and COMINT tracking three different ways, plus 360 surveillance on Norouzi's apartment house. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“He's gone. Disappeared,” Glenn said.

CHAPTER NINE

Barcelona,

Spain

“S
agen Sie dem Gärtner, muss das Gras zu schneiden
.
”
Tell the Gardener, the grass needs to be cut.

Scorpion kept going over that single sentence again and again in his mind on the flight from Zurich to Barcelona. “Tell the Gardener.” The Gardener. And the sound of it. A woman's voice on a cell phone call speaking German, but with a hint of Slavic in her accent; not a native German or Swiss-German speaker.

Because they were still working out JWICS logistics, Shaefer had forwarded the MP3 of the woman's voice to Scorpion during their chat in a European singles Internet chat room so highly trafficked that chances of interception were remote. In the chat room, Shaefer was a forty-something Italian woman named Liliana from Bari in Apulia, the heel of the Italian boot, and Scorpion was Claude, a high school teacher in St.-Étienne in France with a thing for women's high heeled shoes,
avec des sangles
. The strappy kind.

Glenn's call had sent them scrambling. From the moment Apple-cake dropped Norouzi off at his apartment building in Leimbach until they had eyes on the building, barely one minute forty seconds had elapsed. The video camera planted in a tree across the street showed no one had exited the building during those critical seconds. Plus there was electronic surveillance. While they had been interrogating Norouzi, two of the Gnomes set up bugs and hidden cameras for 24/7 monitoring of Norouzi's apartment; in CIA-speak, a 360 black-bag job.

Except the monitors showed there was no one in Norouzi's apartment. The bugs they had planted on Norouzi's cell phones, plus an additional bug sewed into the seam of his pants, indicated no movement. So Norouzi was stationary and in the building.

Except he wasn't.

To confirm, Dieter had knocked on the apartment door and, when no one answered, picked the lock and went inside. It was empty. There was no sign that after Apple-cake dropped him off, Norouzi had ever returned to his apartment.

They would have to search the entire building. While Schwegler set up a power outage as an excuse so Dieter and Marco could go in as electricians to “check” every apartment, Scorpion pulled up on his laptop the file Rabinowich had put together on Norouzi. The bottom line, was, as Schwegler put it:
“Unmöglich.”
Impossible. “People don't just disappear.”

Scorpion scoured the files on his laptop from both Rabinowich and Schwegler, focusing on Norouzi's company, Jamaran Trading International. But he didn't see anything that would provide a lead on Norouzi's disappearance. It didn't compute anyway, he told himself. They had taken him home. Whatever disappearing act Norouzi pulled off had happened inside the apartment building.

One thing: the fact that Norouzi had bolted suggested they were on the right track. He wasn't some innocent foreign businessman in Zurich.

Scorpion went back over what they had on Norouzi's personal life. He lived with his wife and son, a ten-year-old. At the moment, according to Schwegler, the wife and son were visiting relatives in Iran. There was also a teenage daughter in boarding school in Lausanne. He called Schwegler and told him to check with the school and make sure the girl was at the school where she was supposed to be.

And a mistress—a twenty-year-old girl from Kharkov in eastern Ukraine named Oksana—Scorpion feeling a twinge, the reference to Ukraine reminding him of Iryna and Kiev. A Facebook photo of Oksana showed a pouty blonde in a short skirt and white boots barely older than Norouzi's daughter. He looked for the girlfriend's address in the file. It wasn't there.

How the hell had they missed that? he wondered, texting Shaefer on JWICS. As he did so, Glenn called to tell him a young woman in a red VW CC was driving out of the apartment building's underground garage.

Scorpion texted furiously to Shaefer:
homeys girlfriend. whats her address?

At the same time, on his cell to Glenn, he said: “Describe her.”

Why? Is she hot?
Shaefer typed back.

“Blond. Long straight hair. Not bad looking,” Glenn said. “Do we tail?”

Need address now!
Scorpion typed.

Seconds ticked. Then Shaefer responded, and there it was.

Oksana's address was the same as Norouzi's, only his apartment was on the second floor, hers on the fourth. Norouzi had had the balls to install his girlfriend in an apartment in the same building as his wife and family.

“Front and back tail,” Scorpion told Glenn. “Don't lose her. Take Chrissie.” Norouzi must have gone straight to his girlfriend's apartment in the same building instead of going back to his place. If she was leaving now, it was on an errand from him and he was at her apartment, or he was hidden, possibly in the trunk or backseat of the VW.

Scorpion got the text from Glenn half an hour later.

Stopped. Rudenplatz. Hair salon
. The girlfriend, Oksana, had parked in or near the Rudenplatz in Zurich's Old Town and gone into a hair salon.

Send Chrissie in after her,
he texted back.

She's already on it,
Glenn responded. Good girl, Scorpion thought.

It didn't take long. Oksana made a call from the ladies' room in the hair salon. She spoke the single sentence in German that had whole departments at both the CIA and NSA working overtime, then hung up. Fortunately, Chrissie had been at the sink outside the stall and done a swipe, technology that enabled you to hack someone's cell phone with an appropriately configured cell phone just by coming within a few meters of them. Once she had the message, Chrissie linked it with NSA-based SIGINT; it was “slaved,” to be able to eavesdrop on everything said or done with that person's cell phone.

Within minutes the MP3 file of Oksana's call in German had been forwarded via satellite to the Black House, the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Ten minutes later both Scorpion and Shaefer had the original message in German and the translation. Shaefer texted Scorpion that she had made the call to a cell phone in Barcelona, Spain.

The business heard on the cell phone about cutting the grass was probably their equivalent of a Flagstaff-type message, indicating to whomever was running Norouzi that he'd been taken in for questioning on the Bern attack. Or maybe Norouzi was pulling the pilot eject handle, telling them to pull him out. He'd leave that to the cryptologists, Scorpion thought. Bottom line, it was a distress call. The key was the Gardener, whoever or whatever that was. Shaefer had indicated that according to Rabinowich, Langley had never heard of the Gardener.

Shaefer had texted that
pikl @ ful boyle,
the Pickle Factory, insider slang for the CIA, was at full boil, running around like crazy trying to come up with something.

Rabinowich indicated that Harris suspected the Gardener—presumed to be a previously unknown spymaster—was the person behind the Bern attack. Scorpion could already see where Harris was going with that. If he could pin the blame for Bern on the Gardener—and if he, Scorpion, could identify who this Gardener was, preferably someone in the Iranian government—the generals and the hawks would be able to bomb Iran, and no one at the UN or anywhere else would raise a finger against it.

“Find the Gardener,” was the Company's new imperative. Their top priority, Shaefer had told him.

“Maybe he didn't do it. Maybe it's a cover and there is no Gardener,” Scorpion said. That wasn't the least of what was troubling him.

“Find him anyway,” Shaefer replied.

At Zurich Airport, waiting for his flight to Barcelona, Scorpion watched a TV monitor showing a U.S. aircraft carrier moving into the Persian Gulf. The announcer looked meaningfully into the camera and pronounced:
“Iranische DNA. Heist das, Krieg?”

He had just enough German to know he was saying: Iranian DNA. Does this mean war?

War, he thought. The Iranians had to be feeling it too. He had to talk to Shaefer. As the gate loudspeaker announced his flight, he held back, taking out his L-3 SME PED device and dialing. Shaefer picked up at the first ring.

“Mendelssohn,” Shaefer, a music lover, answered, using the agreed-upon code name. His voice was faintly slurred by the encryption on the line.

“Flagstaff,” Scorpion said. “Listen. We need to pull the Gnomes. Just use COMINT.”

“Negative,” Shaefer said in such a way that Scorpion sensed he had already been arguing with Langley about it. “Soames says no.”

“Soames? How the hell did he get into this?”

“Harris had to deal with— Never mind. There's a pissing contest going on with the alphabet soups.” Scorpion could only imagine the turf wars as the different agencies, the CIA, the DIA, SOCOM, the State Department's INR, and for all he knew, the Girl Scouts, fought over the operation.

“I don't give a damn,” he said through clenched teeth, glancing around to make sure he wasn't overheard. “Pull 'em. It isn't going to take whoever's behind this two minutes to figure out that the Iranian Embassy never sent a lawyer to free Homer.” As it was, they were damn lucky Apple-cake was safely on a flight back to Stockholm.

“That point's been raised,” Shaefer said evenly, and Scorpion sensed the battle behind the scenes. He imagined Shaefer sitting in front of his computer in his office in Bucharest, or maybe he was still at the safe house in Zug, staring out at the view of the hills and the town and the lake. “Soames says what if Barcelona's a feint?”

“Is he completely insane?” Scorpion growled. “Homey's so scared shitless he has to send his girlfriend to broadcast an SOS from a hair salon in the Rudenplatz, and this idiot thinks it's a feint?”

“Politics. He's covering his ass. He wants the Gnomes here so whatever happens, it won't come back to bite the great you-know-who,” and Scorpion knew he was talking about Harris. In the background, he heard the gate loudspeaker announce the final boarding call for his flight.

“Jesus,” Scorpion breathed. “Didn't that jerk go to high school? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Listen, there's some protocol here. I'm the field op, the one who requested them in the first place. This is an order. Pull them out now!”

“They don't want to be pulled. What if someone contacts Homey?” Shaefer said. It sounded like Shaefer wasn't sure. He was being pulled in two directions.

“Do it,” Scorpion said, ending the call, and immediately calling Mathias Schwegler.

There were street sounds in the background when Schwegler answered. He must be walking, Scorpion thought.

“Flagstaff,” he said. “There's a storm coming. I told Shaefer to pull the Gnomes.”

“It appears there is confusion on this,” Schwegler said carefully, clearly aware of the disagreement going on back at Langley.

“I'm the field op. You don't want your people walking in a mine field.” In the background, he could hear the final boarding call for his flight.

“My feelings also.
Ein genuss
, my friend,” Schwegler said. It's been a pleasure.

“See you around,” Scorpion said, ending the call and slipping onto the boarding bridge as they were about to close the gate.

F
lying into Barcelona at dusk, he could see the strings of lights on the boulevards and along the line of the shore, the spires of the Sagrada Familia church and the phallic shape of the Agbar Tower lit up like gold against a pink and purple sky.

He had a bad feeling about leaving the Gnomes behind in Zurich. Soames didn't get it. They were doing 24/7 surveillance on Norouzi, which made them easy to spot. And they were so obviously Americans, they stuck out like African-Americans at a Mormon convention. They couldn't even speak German. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. All he could do was hope to God he was wrong and that Shaefer was able to change Soames's mind, or even better, get to Harris and pull them out.

The mission was getting to him. He thought about pulling out himself. It was all too improvised, too catch as can. Too much could go bad very fast—and no time to fix it. Think of something else, he told himself. Think of something good.

He leaned back in his seat and thought about Sandrine. He pictured her back in Africa outside the hospital tent at dusk, the refugee families around cooking fires, an acacia tree in the distance. A fantasy, he thought. She could be anywhere. For all he knew, she had gone back to her millionaire fiancé. Be a damned sight more sensible than waiting around for him. Except he didn't think she had. That wasn't her.

The flight attendant announced on the intercom in Spanish, German, and English to prepare for landing. The plane made a wide turn as it descended to approach the airport. Through the window, he could see lights of the islands of Menorca and Mallorca against the darkening sky. Out of habit, he glanced at his watch: 6:14
P.M
. local time.

He had at most eight or nine days, probably less.