Scorpion Betrayal (17 page)

“You would have done anything.”

“Anything. If they had told me to put on a suicide vest and kill half of Amsterdam, I would have done it.”

“They promised her to you.”

“Suggested. They said they would not object. For a Muslim girl, that is much.”

“And she—what was her name?”

“Salima. They killed her,” Tassouni said, staring into space.

“For
ikram
?” Family honor?

“I don't know. For being defiled just kissing me on the cheek once that day in the park. For knowing too much. What difference? They're coming for me now,” the little man said, emptying the glass and pouring himself another.

“How do you know?”

“What do you think? They're going to kill her who was so innocent and leave me alive?”

“I can help you,” Scorpion said.

“How? By bringing her back to life? That's the only way you can help me,” he said.

“What did you do for them?”

“Carried messages. I would pick them up in a place and leave them in another place. I would put them behind a loose brick in an alley wall or under a specific seat in a cinema, places like that.”

“Dead drops, they're called. Did you go to Utrecht?”

“So you know already. I wasn't even good at that,” Tassouni said.

“Where in Utrecht?”

“Different places. Once near the university. Most were in the Kanaleneiland district.”

“Muslim neighborhoods?”

“Obviously,” Tassouni grimaced.

“What were they? Moroccan? Turkish? Farsi?”

“Maghrebi. You could smell the cinnamon and cumin in the streets.”

“What did the messages say? Did you read any of them?” Scorpion's cell phone vibrated.

“I don't know. They were all in some kind of code,” Tassouni said.

His phone vibrated again. He took it out and looked at the text message. It was from the default number and read: 000. It was in response to his Internet café query to the International Corn website on Najla Kafoury. It meant they had come up empty. They would have run checks on her through all the U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies, Interpol, the German BND and Bundespolizei, and the response indicated they had found no alerts or evidence of criminal, intelligence, or radical Islamic connections. Too late, he thought. He had let her go.

“I have to go. You have to come with me. You're not safe here,” Scorpion said, motioning with the gun.

“No, I'll stay here. You can shoot me,” Tassouni said. “Do it now. Without her…” He looked at Scorpion. “Better to shoot.”

“I can make you come.”

“Then I stop talking. It's not worth it for you. A man who doesn't care if he dies can be very difficult.”

“They'll kill you.”

“They kill me, you kill me. What difference?”

“I have to take care of something, but I'll be back. Keep the door locked. Don't let anyone in till I return,” Scorpion said, getting up. He had to find out about Najla. He had left her in the hotel room, washing her hair in the bathroom.

“Why should I trust you? I don't know you. You come in with a gun—and listen to a fool's story.”

“Because I'm the only one, including you, who wants you alive.”

“Then that makes two of us who are fools.”

“Lock the door. If anyone comes, no matter how well you know them or what reason they give you, don't let them in. I'll be back soon,” Scorpion said, opening the door.

He left the dwarf staring into his drink, and waited in the dimly lit hallway till he heard the door lock. He pulled a hair from his head and wrapped it from the doorknob to a screw he loosened in the doorjamb as a simple trap. He left his bicycle by the apartment house rack to help discourage anyone who might show up, by letting them think Tassouni had company, and caught a taxi back to the hotel. On the way, he tried calling her cell phone—he had taken the number off the phone in her purse in the morning before he got breakfast—but she wasn't using it and it went immediately to voice mail.

He thought about it in the taxi. Langley had cleared her, but he didn't buy it. Najla had earned her chops as a TV reporter, yet according to the BND and Bundespolizei, she didn't have a single questionable contact. He'd been with her. She was smart and tough and hadn't done it all on her looks. And it still didn't explain why she'd followed him after staking out the mosque in the middle of the night. Langley was missing something. Being a reporter was classic cover for an operative, he thought. He had made a mistake letting her go. The sex had colored his judgment. He had to find her again, and if he were honest with himself, wanted to see her again.

Night had fallen, the lights of the city blurred by a drizzle. He could smell the canals. Going by the Dam Square in the taxi, the Royal Palace with its cupola, the Nieuwe Kerk church and the tall pillar of the National Monument were brightly lit. They gleamed wetly in the rain. The restaurants and the brown bars were open, and despite the weather, the streets were filled with people out having a good time. Back at the hotel, he raced back up to the room. The
privé
card he had put into the card key lock was gone. When he opened the door, the room was empty.

There was no sign of Najla. He searched the room carefully. There was nothing of hers, and so far as he could see, no bugs or traps left behind. She had gone through his carry-on; the way he'd arranged the location of things, like his disposable razor and toothbrush, had all been moved. She couldn't have found out anything about him anyway. His important things—passports, money, laptop, extra cell phones, and such—were all locked in the roll-on carry-on he had taken from the BMW and put into a locker in the train station before moving the BMW to the station's car park. The room was clean and the bed was made, so the chambermaid had come in. The sexual restraints he had used to tie her up were gone. She was really gone, he thought, acknowledging that he'd been hoping she would have waited for him, although he still had no way to know whether she was just a journalist who went back to Germany or part of whatever the Islamic Resistance still had going on. With a jolt, he realized that his body physically missed the touch of her. The whole thing felt strange, and he still had to get back to the dwarf. There was something wrong, and he didn't know what it was as he went down to the lobby.

“The woman I was with, did she check out? Did she leave anything?” he asked the young man behind the desk. The man said something in Dutch to the young woman beside him, also wearing the hotel's blue jacket.

“No,
meneer.
She left earlier today, but she left no message,” the young woman said.

“Was she with anyone?”

“I did not see,
meneer,”
the young woman said.

“It happens,
meneer,”
the young man said sympathetically, automatically assuming he was dealing with a jilted lover.

Scorpion nodded and headed out to the car park by the train station. He'd need the car and some of the things in it in case he had to evacuate Tassouni. On the drive to the dwarf's apartment, he decided there were only two options. Either Langley was right and Najla had nothing to do with the Palestinian and was heading back to her normal life in Hamburg, glad to be free and out of jeopardy, or she was somehow involved in this and was searching the city for him or the dwarf. He pulled up to the corner of the street of Tassouni's apartment building and parked the car illegally at the corner. One way or another, he wouldn't be there long.

He took his time approaching the building, scanning the parked cars and the street and the rooflines. The street was quiet except for a small party in one of the ground floor apartments, the light and sounds of voices spilling out, cobblestones glistening from the drizzle. The approach to the building looked clean, but that meant nothing. There were lights in one of the windows, but not on the third floor, where Tassouni's apartment was. He picked the front door lock and eased inside, walking carefully up the stairs to the apartment door. The hallway light was dim and there was no sound. He checked for the hair trap. It was broken. Someone had gone inside.

Scorpion took out his gun and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still nothing. He didn't think the dwarf had gone out again. His instincts were telling him it was a trap. It's just nerves, he told himself. Najla had thrown him off. Langley was right. If she'd been involved in anything, they would've found it. Except he remembered something Koenig had said once. “When you don't find anything on someone, in our line of work we call it ‘deep cover.'” He looked at the doorknob, afraid to touch it. He had to get in to see Tassouni; the little man was his only lead. Except his one certainty about his adversary was that he knew how to make bombs.

He went back out to the BMW, got the roll of duct tape from the trunk and went back to Tassouni's apartment. He wrapped the tape around the doorknob and unrolled it until he was down the stairs and the hallway and well away from the apartment. Then he took a breath and pulled.

The explosion was deafening, slamming him against the wall. It rocked the building. He could smell flames and smoke as he raced back up the stairs to the shattered apartment. Two fingers of a small human hand were lying on the hallway floor. He could feel the heat of the flames coming from the door opening, what was left of the door hanging from a single hinge. He raced through the building knocking on doors, screaming, “Help!
Vier! Politie!”
Fire! Police! He heard people shouting and moving as he ran out of the building and back to the BMW. In the distance he could hear the horns of approaching fire engines.

Scorpion drove out of Amsterdam toward the A2 highway, the windshield wipers beating steadily against the drizzle. Along the way, he stopped in Zuid-Oost, broke the cell phone he had used in Amsterdam into pieces, and dropped them in different sections of a canal near the center of town. On the E35 to Utrecht, he realized he'd have to find an Internet café and let Harris know the mission had gone off the rails. He had a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. He shouldn't have let Najla go. Now she was gone, the dwarf—their only lead—was dead, and worse, the opposition was onto him. The hunter had become the hunted.

CHAPTER TEN

Straits of Messina, Mediterranean Sea

I
t was sometime after 0330 hours when the Palestinian decided he would have to murder the captain. He was standing the bow watch, the night clear and cool, the dark shadow of the Greek island of Milos passing off the port side. The
Zaina
was doing seventeen knots down the shipping lane through the Cyclades islands, latitude 36 degrees 44 minutes north, longitude 24 degrees 13.5 minutes east, on a heading of 193 degrees. It shouldn't have been necessary, he thought. Freighters made unscheduled stops all over the world. He was proposing just a little detour. An extra sixteen hours, approved by the owners. But the Ukrainian was pigheaded. He had gone to the captain's quarters an hour after dinner, enough time for the captain to get started on his drinking, something everyone on the ship down to the lowest AB seaman knew about.

“What you want?” Captain Chernovetsky said, looking up from his bottle of Ukrainian Tavia brandy. His eyes were bleary and a porn DVD was on his TV, the sounds of sexual groans providing a backdrop to their conversation.

“We need to make an unscheduled stop in Genoa,” the Palestinian said, sitting down.

“What you say? What you talking?” Chernovetsky said, not taking it in.

“We need to stop in Genoa before Marseilles, Capitaine.”

“Pishov na khuj!
Get out my quarters!”

“It's only sixteen hours added to the schedule. We unload three containers and that's it. There's ten thousand euros for you and no questions,” the Palestinian said, taking a stack of euros in cash from his backpack and putting it on the table next to the brandy. Chernovetsky stared at the money, his eyes blinking.

“What is this? You don't sit in captain's quarters. Get fuck out!”

“I have the paperwork here. I just need you to sign and go along.” He took the port papers out of the backpack and put them on the table next to the money.