Scorpion Betrayal (12 page)

“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

S
corpion 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 date, 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.

Scorpion tiptoed quietly down the hallway, away from the general office area, and entered the imam's office at the end of the hallway. It was dark, and he turned on the desk lamp and looked around. The fog pressed against the windows, closing him in. Nothing could be seen outside. If there was danger, he would have to rely solely on hearing it. He went through the imam's desk and turned on the computer, plugging in a USB flash drive with special NSA software that could break any OS and log him in with administrator privileges. Once in, he explored the shared directories and exchange accounts on the center's local area network.

He quickly found the fictitious Mohammad Modahami e-mail account, which apparently was only used to receive encrypted messages that NSA was still trying to break. The account never sent any e-mails or responded to those from Abadi in Damascus. It's a one-way relay cutout, he thought. They were aware of Western intelligence services surveillance and were using some low tech way of forwarding messages from Damascus to the Palestinian's contact in Europe or the United States.

He copied the contents of the Modahami files onto the flash drive and shut the computer down, then moved on to the books on the shelves, most of them religious texts in Farsi and Arabic. He went through them quickly, looking and putting them back. Every once in a while he stopped and went to the door, listening for noises from outside or down the hall. He heard nothing from the other office where the bearded Iranian was working. He could have been alone in the world. He checked for a wall safe, but found only an electronic bug behind a photograph hanging on the wall. It was of the golden-domed shrine of the Imam Reza, the so-called Shi'ite “Eighth Imam” in Iran. He used his penknife to disable the bug.

Turning off the desk light, he went to the office of the imam's assistant next door. Intel from the BND had indicated that the assistant, Parviz Mostafari, ran the Islamic Center on a day-to-day basis. Scorpion began rummaging through Mostafari's desk and shelves, pausing for a moment to look at a framed photograph on the desk of a young Iranian woman in a
hijab
and black
chador
robe with a small boy taken on a beach somewhere. Another framed photo on a bookshelf showed a bearded Iranian man he assumed was Mostafari getting some kind of certificate from an older man, most likely the imam, Ayatollah Kazimi. Then he found it.