Scorpion Deception (29 page)

“You panicked?” Scorpion put in.

“Worse than panicked. We started to secretly prepare for full-scale war. Only war with our eyes blindfolded and our hands tied behind our back. At that point, without Absalom, we believed the very existence of Israel, of the Jewish people, was at stake. That's when we contacted Rabinowich to try to recruit you,” he said to Scorpion.

“Did you ever hear from him?” Harris asked.

“In a way,” Yuval said, ducking his head into his shoulders as if about to receive a blow. “This is the hard part. This is why we had to meet here, the three of us, in person.”

“Jesus Christ!” Scorpion said. Suddenly all the pieces came together. He looked out at the city and the water; a single ferry, a row of windows lit along its side, was plying its way along the Beyoglu shore. The world was suddenly different. “Bern. It was a message,” he said, and looked at Yuval. “You miserable son of a bitch. You bastard!”

Yuval exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked away.

“No,” he said. “It wasn't us. On my grandchildren's lives, it wasn't us. It was him. Absalom. What he had become. What we made him.” He stared out over the rail. “What I made him.”

“Son of a bitch,” Harris growled. “So Absalom aka the Gardener aka Ghanbari orders the hit on the embassy in Bern to send us a message. Why couldn't he use an e-mail or a dead drop or whatever the fuck other mechanism you guys had set up? Why did people have to die? What was he trying to say?”

“Because the message wasn't for the Israelis,” Scorpion put in. “He wanted to force America's hand.”

“Meaning what?” Harris demanded.

“The Iranians crossed the line,” Scorpion said. “They have a nuclear bomb and they were going to use it. Probably give it to Kta'eb Hezbollah.”

“He did it to force the United States to stop them?” Harris asked.

“No,” Yuval said, shaking his head. “He did it because he wanted the United States to attack. To bring them down. Samson in the temple.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Yesilköy,

Istanbul, Turkey

“W
hat will the President do?” Yuval asked Harris.

“Nothing.” Harris shrugged. “Take credit for something they didn't do. It's what Washington's best at.”

Yuval grimaced. “You leave us no choice.”

“No. Given your history, Jewish history, probably not,” Harris said, turning his collar back down and getting ready to go. “I'm sorry. This kind of thing is above my pay grade. Yours too, probably. Are we done?”

“Just one thing,” Scorpion said. “After Bern, the Gardener focused on me. They found me in Paris—and I'm not that easy to spot—which means they used a ton of manpower just on me. Sadeghi used my code name, Scorpion, and told Zahra it was all about me. So I need to know, what was that about? Why me?”

Yuval shrugged. “I don't know. It's a mystery.”

He's lying, Scorpion thought. Holding something back. But what? He turned to Harris.

“Bob?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, or actually fortunately for everyone, as it turned out, you killed the Gardener, the only person who could answer that question,” Harris said. He extended his hand to the Israeli. “Yuval, it's been an interesting evening. Shalom.”

The two men shook hands.

“Shalom,” Yuval said. His eyes searched Harris's face. “You'll discuss just the part about the nuclear bomb with the President? Nothing about Absalom.”

“I will, but I'll have to tell him it's just a surmise. We don't have definitive proof. Scorpion terminated the proof,” Harris said. He turned to Scorpion. “Give you a lift to the airport?”

“No thanks,” Scorpion said.

Harris paused. “That wasn't a request.”

“Yes it was, because I'm not coming,” Scorpion said. And to Yuval: “Thanks for this,” gesturing vaguely. “I needed to know.”

Yuval stepped on his cigarette butt and nodded.

“I'm told she's very beautiful, your Dr. Delange. Good luck.” He turned and started to walk away. Two men, Mossad agents with Yuval, detached themselves from the shadows.

“To a hundred and twenty,” Scorpion called after him. Yuval raised his hand to show he heard. Scorpion turned and started back toward the Beyoglu side. Harris put a hand on his arm, and Scorpion stopped and looked at him. Harris let his hand drop.

“You can't let this go. It's urgent,” Harris said. “I have a car.”

“Do you?”

“We have to talk,” Harris said, signaling Soames and another agent.

Before they got to the end of the bridge, a black Cadillac sedan pulled over and stopped. Scorpion and Harris climbed into the backseat. Soames started to get into the front passenger seat.

“If he gets in, I get out,” Scorpion said.

“Why?” Soames said. “What did I do?”

“I don't like you. Also, the grown-ups are going to talk about things the children shouldn't hear,” Scorpion said. “As a matter of fact, nobody likes you.”

“You're a prima donna, you know that? That's what everyone says. A goddamn prima donna,” Soames said.

“Were the Gnomes prima donnas too?” Scorpion said quietly, his hand on the door handle.

“Get in the other car,” Harris said to Soames, who darted one last venomous look at Scorpion and got out. He walked back and got into a second black sedan, a Mercedes, that had stopped behind the Cadillac. Harris motioned to his Turkish driver and they drove off.

“He's right,” Harris said. “You are a prima donna. Unfortunately, a very necessary one.”

“Where are we going?” Scorpion asked.

“Ekrem?” Harris said to the driver.

“The E-5 to the airport, sir,” the driver, Ekrem, said.

They drove past the so-called New Mosque, built in the 1600s, and into the Old City. Scorpion checked the side mirror; the Mercedes was behind them.

“That was quite a story,” Harris said.

“Yes it was,” Scorpion said, thinking about the code name Absalom and the Bible story. King David,
O Absalom, my son, my son
. Was it guilt? Was that why Yuval told them? Or was it just that the American relationship was the oxygen that Israel needed in order to live, and Yuval was afraid that if it ever came out that would be the end of it? He turned to Harris.

“This better be important,” he said.

“I need to show you something,” Harris said, taking out his iPhone. He tapped it a couple of times and held it up for Scorpion to see.

It was a video from an airport security camera. People walking or sitting near a gate waiting for a flight. At first he couldn't tell which airport it was. Then he understood. He watched himself walk over and sit down next to a man. Now he knew which airport and when. Fiumicino, Rome. About seven weeks ago. Before he had gone to Africa. Before he met Sandrine and any of this had happened.

“All right, it's me,” Scorpion said, handing the iPhone back.

“The man is Ahmad Harandi—or at least that was his cover name—the Mossad agent killed in Hamburg.”

“What about him?”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“Not really.”

“Don't fuck with me, Scorpion,” Harris snapped. “Not on this. How long have you been working with the Israelis?”

“Never.”

“So what is this?” holding up the iPhone. “Seven weeks ago. Before this all started.”

“That was Harandi aka Avi Benayoun trying to recruit me in Rome. For the record, I turned him down. Just like I turned down your pet monkey, Soames, in Nairobi. And for the same reason. I was done with it. Finished. I wanted out.”

Harris shook his head.

“I don't believe you. Why do I get the feeling that this was some giant chess game between you and the Gardener, and the rest of us only pawns? There's something you're holding back. With every fiber of experience after way too many years in this business, I'm sure of it. If you're lying, you better tell me now. You don't want the CIA for an enemy.”

“Works both ways, Bob old buddy,” Scorpion said quietly.

They didn't speak. They were driving on Ataturk Boulevard and passed under one of the towering arches of the ancient Roman aqueduct that spanned the road, lit up at night. You couldn't look anywhere in this city without being reminded of how old it was, he thought.

“Deception isn't always the best policy . . .” Harris began.

“Funny, I thought it was our stock in trade,” Scorpion said. “Anything else?”

“This Frenchwoman, Sandrine Delange. She'll have to be vetted.”

“No one comes within a million miles of her. If she so much as chips a fingernail in her own bathroom, I'm going to hold you personally responsible. I mean it.”

“I know,” Harris said softly. “I can see it. Love.” He made a face. “To feel that way. Did you mean what you said about quitting?”

“Depends on her. I tried to quit and found out it's not so simple. I endanger the very people I care about. We'll see,” Scorpion said. “You owe me money.”

Harris nodded. They were on the E-5 motorway. Scorpion saw a sign ahead for Ataturk International Airport, Yesilköy.

“You'll get it—plus your bonus. We've gone from egg on our face after Bern to heroes, in no small part thanks to you. The White House has asked for time from all the networks. The President will announce that the perpetrators of the Bern massacre, including the man behind the attack, the ‘Gardener,' have been killed in a joint CIA-JSOC-Air Force operation. They'll be busy pinning medals on each other for months. I have a request from the President. He wants you to come to the Oval Office. He wants to thank you in person.”

“Negative,” Scorpion said. “Besides, it'll blow my cover.”

“We'll keep it secure. Scouts' honor,” Harris said, holding up three fingers.

“Right. Because nobody in Washington ever leaked anything. Tell him no thanks.”

“I can't. It's the President. What'll I say?”

“Tell him I have a previous engagement,” Scorpion said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Singita Sabora,

Serengeti, Tanzania

T
hey had dinner under an acacia tree near their air-conditioned tent, the table set with white linen, fine crystal and china, and good French wine. Their steward, Godfrey, and his assistant, Samwel, had hung the tree with lanterns, and it was magical, the lights seeming to float in the darkness over the Serengeti Plain. A zebra grazed nearby, and while they were eating, a baby elephant came within a dozen feet of the table, studying them curiously till its mother, a large female, nudged it away with her trunk.

“They say they're as intelligent as we are,” Sandrine said. She was wearing a sky-blue cocktail dress, and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

“I don't know about as intelligent. Certainly better, kinder than we are,” Scorpion said.

Afterward, Godfrey brought them Springbank scotch on the rocks as they sat on the raised wooden deck in front of their tent, looking out at the Serengeti under a sky filled with stars. From the lounge tent came music from an old hand-wound gramophone—all the furnishings were African Colonial, antiques dating from the turn of the century; it was as if they had stepped into another time—someone playing songs from the 1920s, like the Charleston and “Yes Sir, that's My Baby” and “It Had to Be You.” Zebras and wildebeests wandered by and then scampered off, and they saw why, spotting the female leopard that came by every night at that time, eyes glowing like yellow disks in the darkness.

They made love in the big four-poster bed in the tent, open to the night except for the mosquito netting. They took their time, slow and soft and sweet and strong, exploring every part of each other. Letting it grow and grow until he couldn't tell where he left off and she began, only a single intensity, filling to bursting through them, and as she cried out, part of it was the low rumbling roar of a lion.

They slept, and in the middle of the night she reached for him and they started again. They were like addicts, unable to get enough of each other until finally, sometime near dawn, they slept again. The sun came up over the horizon, and Godfrey brought them coffee and breakfast on their deck, and they sat and ate, never taking their eyes off each other, except to breathe in the gold and green grasses and the herds on the Serengeti and to laugh at a giraffe lowering himself splayed-footed to graze on the grass next to the tennis court.

“
Dieu
, I love Africa,” she said.

“So do I,” he said.

She bit her lip.

“I'm almost afraid to say it. I don't want to break the spell,” she said.

“I know.”

“What do we do about the children?” she asked. Ghedi and Amina. She wanted to take them back to Paris to live, despite the massive bureaucratic mess it would entail with the Kenyan, Somali, and French governments. They also talked about bringing them to America.

“Are you sure it's the right thing?” Scorpion said. “To turn them into little French people or little Americans. They have their own culture, their own language, their own world. Not necessarily inferior to ours, just different. They have to have a say in their lives too. I told Ghedi that.”

“What did he say?”

Scorpion smiled. “He said his sister was too little to understand such a big thing. I told him he would have to be the man and decide. He said, ‘I will,' and showed me his
belawa
knife.”

“I know,” she smiled. “He's ready to kill anyone who touches me.”

“I know how he feels,” he said.

“You think they should stay in Africa? They'll never have opportunities like we could give them in France.”

“They're African. Let's not pretend the other kids in
collège
will accept them like French kids or that they'll be able to get into one of the
grande écoles
. America is more accepting.”

“And you, Nick. What do you want?”

“Whatever part of you you'll let me have.”

“Do I have that much power?”

“Look!” he said, standing up and pointing at a herd of wildebeests, thousands of them, crossing the plain in the distance; a lioness prowled on the edge of the herd. Godfrey and Samwel brought them binoculars and they watched for a while.

“It's like the Garden of Eden,” she said, reaching her arm around him and pulling him close. She whispered: “And what about the people who tried to kill us? Is that over?”

“For now,” he said.

Later, after a day with the two of them on horseback, tracking the herds, the zebras, wildebeests, elands, giraffes, and elephants, they took turns in the thatched outdoor shower and he thought about the conversation he'd had with Dave Rabinowich during a middle-of-the-night layover in Doha, Qatar, on the flight from Istanbul to Nairobi. He was using a new SME PED Harris had given him, sitting in the airport, nearly empty at that hour, well away from the few Arabs in white
thawbs
and keffiyehs and bleary-eyed Western businessmen in traveling clothes, so as not to be overheard.

“Hawkeye,” Scorpion said. The Avenger character was the latest Flagstaff code word.

“Albuquerque. I'm having dinner. The Knicks are on,” Rabinowich complained, using the new countersign.

“Like interrupting frozen dinner is a hardship. You know why I'm calling?”

“I was wondering when you'd knock on my door. There's a loose end. Knowing you, you can't let it go, can you?”

“You shouldn't be so clever. They'll demote you.”

“No chance. They're too busy patting each other's backs about how brilliant they all were on Iran. You figure it out yet?”

“Partly. You won't pass this on.”

“And upset everyone's apple cart, especially after POTUS went on national TV acting like John Wayne? Uh-uh. I plan to collect my pension.”

“I'm the loose end. First the way they came after me in Paris. Then Sadeghi's comment to Zahra that the whole thing was about me. What was so important about me?”

“Come on. You know why. You're just fishing for confirmation,” Rabinowich said, sounding like he was talking while eating.

“You shouldn't talk with your mouth full. You might choke.”

“Wouldn't give Harris and Soames the satisfaction. Come on, give,” Rabinowich said, with a strange grunt that was his version of a laugh.

“First they nailed Harandi in Hamburg. Then Paris, coming after me with a ton of resource. Harandi had given me a key lead in the Palestinian business. It all ties back to Bassam Hassani, the Palestinian in Rome, which was ultimately an Iranian operation. Correction, the Gardener's operation.”

“Finally! Somebody besides me knows how to actually use a few brain cells,” Rabinowich said. “Keep going.”

“A power struggle over control of the Revolutionary Guards.”

“Exactly. You eliminate Sadeghi and Ghanbari and who wins?”

“Beikzadeh. Now he's head of both the Expediency Council and the Revolutionary Guards.”

“So now he owns the brain
and
the muscle. Makes him the most powerful man in the country; more powerful even than the Supreme Leader,” Rabinowich said.

“Now comes the loose end,” Scorpion said. “Sadeghi didn't know who I was when he saw my photo. Meanwhile, Ghanbari set up Zahra instead of me till he tried to have Scale take me out at the end. What does that tell you?”

“You're warm. Hot even. You know, you might actually make it as an intelligence analyst here in McLean.”

“Can't stand the CIA cafeteria food.”

“Come on, say it. Nobody here but us girls,” Rabinowich said.

“What if neither of them was the real Gardener? What if he's still alive?”

“Indeed. What if? Think about it,” Rabinowich said. “The beauty of it. The sheer symmetry. The Gardener provokes an action that forces you out from wherever you're hiding and into the game. If he takes you out, he eliminates the key person who spiked the Palestinian op and killed one of his key operatives. He's a hero and he's eliminated a big threat. If he doesn't take you out, he's set it up so you eliminate not just one, but both his rivals for him, which he then uses to justify him taking over. No matter what happens, he wins. It's so elegant. Like a perfect equation.”

Mozart, Scorpion thought. That's what Yuval called him. Mozart. They'd all been doing arithmetic; he'd been doing calculus.

“So—and this is purely hypothetical . . .”

“Totally.”

“Just a wild-ass theory, mind you; the question is, who's the Gardener?”

“Think about it,” Rabinowich said. “Who wins?”

“Beikzadeh.”

“Head of the class, pal. Gold star.”

Except Rabinowich was wrong, Scorpion thought. Beikzadeh wasn't the Gardener. Wrong age. Beikzadeh, the man he'd seen on TV, was in his fifties. Based on what Yuval had told them, Absalom would have to be in his late thirties, early forties.

“So what do you think? Is he still after me?”

“Doubt it,” Rabinowich said. “Everybody in the Pickle Factory thinks the Gardener is dead. This totally theoretical person we're talking about loves that. But if you get hit, especially given that I'm around, suddenly everyone on Planet CIA knows he's alive. Why risk it? Besides, they've got their hands full with the Israelis who might attack any second. Can I go back to my dinner now?”

“One more thing. Who's Beikzadeh's hatchet man? Who does his shovel work? I need a name. Somebody connected with him.” Whoever ran Beikzadeh's dirty work was the real Gardener, Scorpion thought. Someone, like Absalom, in his thirties.

“Give me some time. Whoever it is, is really buried.”

“Come on, Dave. Give me something. A wild-ass guess, anything.”

There was a moment of silence. Scorpion could hear the sound of a basketball game on TV in the background over the phone.

“There was this one thing I came across a few years ago,” Rabinowich said. “A wedding announcement in Fars, the Iranian news agency. Something about Beikzadeh's daughter getting married.”

That's it, Scorpion thought. What was it Yuval had said about Absalom? “Of course, he married well. The daughter of a very powerful man within the Supreme Leader's inner circle.”

“The article mentioned something about him working in one of Beikzadeh's departments. Now I remember. It was odd.”

“Why?”

“Because there was no other mention of him anywhere. Not even university. Nothing. It's as if he never existed except to marry Beikzadeh's daughter.”

“What was his name?” Scorpion asked, excitement building. It was the Gardener. That was exactly how he'd do it.

“That was even odder,” Rabinowich said. “They didn't say. Can you imagine writing an article about a prominent wedding and not mentioning the name of the groom?”

“They must have said something. Anything. What department was he in?”

“Let me think,” Rabinowich muttered. “It was years ago.”

Come on, Scorpion thought. Rabinowich was stalling. A genius with a near photographic memory, Rabinowich was taking his time because he hadn't decided whether to tell him.

“Ministry of Islamic Guidance,” Rabinowich said finally. “I think that was it. Shit!”

“What's the matter?”

“Soames, on the other line.”

“Tell him your poem,” Scorpion said, and ended the call.

That night, after dinner, they made love on the four-poster bed. Afterward, she lay with her head on the pillow, looking out at the night.

“How does this work?” she said.

“I don't know. If you had any sense, you should run as fast and as far as you can in the opposite direction.”

She raised herself on an arm to look at him, her eyes reflecting the light from the half-moon risen over the plain.

“Is that what you want?”

He pulled her close, inhaling the smell of her, the feel of her.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

“Hypothetically, where would we live? What would we do?” she asked.

“Whatever you want. I have a house on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. A sailing ketch. We could go there. We could stay in Africa, America, Paris,” he said. He'd already told her everything. His real name, Nick Curry. That he was born in Santa Monica, California, and his father took him to Saudi Arabia as a child after his mother died and then his father was killed and his strange childhood, raised by the Bedouin in the desert. All of it. Tehran University, the Sorbonne, Harvard. U.S. Special Forces, JSOC, the CIA, and how he left and became an independent agent. Whatever she wanted to know.

“And from time to time, you go away and kill people. I don't know if I can live with that,” she said, raising her head and looking at him with those luminous eyes.

“Except if I didn't, many innocent people—sometimes thousands, tens of thousands, millions even—will die. What's the moral calculus on that?”

He got up and walked out onto the deck in his jockey shorts. A zebra yawned and trotted away, and the sky was so bright with the moon and stars he thought he could almost read by it. Godfrey had left out clean glasses, the bottle of Springbank scotch, Evian water, and an ice bucket on the off chance they'd want a late nightcap. He poured himself a drink and took a sip. In the distance, he heard the sound of an elephant's trumpeting.

There was something else, he thought. Because Harris was right. He'd lied about his meeting with Harandi in Rome before any of this had happened. He had deceived them. Yes, he'd turned the Israelis down about Absalom, but before they parted, Harandi had said to him, “Promise me. If anything happens to me, you'll go to Iran.” He'd promised because in his world, until Sandrine, it was the only thing he had to hang onto. When you lose someone, you can't just let it go. Things have to be made right. Oddly, he sensed he shared that with his enemy. Absalom. The Gardener. The man who had run the Palestinian. The man behind the embassy attack in Bern.