Scorpion Deception (14 page)

He swerved diagonally into a no-parking zone and again up onto the sidewalk. Blasting on the horn, he downshifted and dodged to get around pedestrians who froze in place, staring. A man and a woman walking just ahead stopped when they heard the horn as he came right at them. Yanking hard on the wheel, he swerved back into the street, the little car coming up on two wheels, teetering precariously before slamming down onto the pavement. Ahead he could see trees and traffic at the Avinguda Diagonal intersection.

Making the turn into traffic on the wide avenue with its grassy divider and car and tram lanes in the center, Scorpion glimpsed Mustache boarding a red and green tram at a stop barely a hundred meters ahead. He gunned the little engine and upshifted, shooting the car diagonally across traffic. He felt a nudge as someone hit his rear fender, threatening to spin the little car completely out of control. Fighting the wheel, he compensated for the hit, fishtailing onto the grassy center divider, slaloming between trees and onto the tram tracks in the center of the avenue. Wheels skidding on the metal tracks, he followed the tram as it picked up speed. Although the little Seat's engine was desperately underpowered, he dodged left and right between cars, trying to weave between lanes and catch up.

After whipping around two cars, he saw another tram coming straight at him. He could see the driver's wide-eyed horror as, at the last second, he slotted in behind the red and green tram, slip-streaming behind it. The sound of sirens came blasting from behind. He spotted a police car in the rearview mirror shooting out from the street he had come from. Siren wailing, it swerved onto the outer traffic lanes of Avinguda Diagonal.

As the tram ahead began to slow for the next stop, Scorpion scanned the street. It wouldn't take long for the police to catch his little yellow subcompact. Inside the brightly lit tram, he could see Mustache looking around before taking his seat.

Scorpion pulled around the tram, skidding on the tracks before sliding ahead of the tram car, which for an instant blocked the police car from spotting the little yellow Seat. He pulled ahead then, moving with the flow of traffic, watching the tram recede behind him as the wailing of the police siren grew closer.

The tram behind him was moving again. As he watched it grow in his rearview mirror, he heard the deafeningly loud police siren right behind him. It swerved right next to him. A helmeted
mosso
looking out the passenger window motioned furiously for him to pull over. Scorpion looked around.

Ahead there was a roundabout bordered by office buildings, traffic feeding from multiple side streets joining the flow, curving around trees and grass in the center of the roundabout. He hit the accelerator, shifting to the top gear and feeling it catch as the little car hurtled forward into a gap between two lanes of traffic. Cutting across the center circle, he bounced up onto the grass, barely scraping between two trees. The police car tried to follow but was too big to get between the trees. The driver, jamming his brakes on the grass, hit one of the trees, then had to back up and swerve back onto the roundabout to follow him.

The next tram stop was a block ahead. Behind Scorpion, despite the police chase, the tram was coming steadily on, as was the police car. He slammed on the brakes and braced for the impact as the car behind him plowed into the back of the little Seat, smashing it forward into another car. People were honking their horns and shouting as he unbuckled and leaped out of the car, pulling out his Glock. He ran to the tram, which had stopped, banged on the door, and showing the driver his gun, shouted,
“Policia! Policia!”

The driver opened the doors and Scorpion climbed in. He shouted
“Policia!”
again and showed the Glock to the passengers while searching for Mustache. He was in the middle of the car, already getting up. Scorpion moved toward him, pointing the Glock. Mustache grabbed a middle-aged woman and hurled her at him as easily as tossing a Frisbee, then leaped from the train and ran toward the street corner. It took a second for Scorpion to disentangle himself from the woman, and when he got out of the tram, Mustache was already a good thirty meters ahead. He was running hard toward a lit-up Metro sign, glowing red, like a traffic light in the night.

Scorpion took off after him. Behind him, he heard shouts and a
mosso
screaming,
“Détente! Stop! Policia!”

Over his shoulder he saw the
mosso
in a shooting position, a pistol aimed at him. Scorpion dodged left, then around a man with a boy so that they were between him and the
mosso
, who resumed chasing him. When he looked ahead, Mustache had already gone into the Metro station.

Scorpion ran to the entrance and using his free hand for leverage leaped over the turnstile. Mustache was shoving people aside on the escalator, pushing his way down to the platform. Scorpion could hear the sound of a train coming into the station. He leaped onto the incline by the escalator handrail, jumping and sliding down beside the escalator to the platform, people shouting at both Mustache and him and shaking their fists.

By then a train was waiting at the station, its doors about to close. Mustache ran to it, shoving at a door with his meaty hand so he could get through. The closing doors stopped and opened for a second, then started to close again. Scorpion leaped, just getting his hand between the two doors. It felt like the train was going to start with just his forearm inside as he strained to spread the doors open. They did open then, a few more inches, and he managed to slip in before they slammed closed and the train began to move. Behind him, he saw the
mosso
bursting onto the platform, and seeing the train pull out of the station, call on his cell phone.

Then Scorpion turned and scanned the car for Mustache. The car was full, about twenty or so passengers standing and swaying as the train picked up speed. There was no sign of Mustache, but at the far end of the car he saw the door to the next car open. He couldn't see who it was, his view blocked by a group of high school or college students standing near the door, but thinking it might be Mustache, heading toward the front of the train, he followed.

Hand on the Glock in his jacket pocket, he made his way through the car as it sped through the tunnel. He knew he might come upon Mustache at any time, and the bulky Iranian had already shown how fast he could move. The floor space between cars was covered with an accordionlike material, binding the cars together. After opening the door, but before stepping into the next car, he scanned ahead, spotting Mustache standing at the far end of the car, holding onto a steel pole and staring right at him, his hand in his pocket.

As Scorpion stepped into the car, the train slowed as it pulled into a station and he felt the momentum pulling him forward. Mustache's gaze flickered for a moment at the station platform moving by, then back to him. If there was shooting, Scorpion thought, people were going to be killed, his eyes darting at the platform, knowing there would be a bunch of
mossos
waiting for him. If shooting started, both he and Mustache, plus a bunch of bystanders, would be dead. In any case, he was trapped. The only question was what to do about Mustache.

He struggled to push toward the burly man through the crowd of people getting up to leave the train, the momentum as it stopped lurching him forward. Pushing through, he saw Mustache join those people getting off through the far door. He started to push out through the nearest door but was met with a scrum of passengers coming onto the train. There was no way through, and he watched desperately as Mustache walked past a large squad of
mossos
, who ignored him as they scanned the train.

He had to wait for the crowd boarding the train to ease, and then, as he started to get out, one of the
mossos
pointed at him, shouting,
“Ahi está! Es él!”
It's him!

Seven or eight
mossos
rushed the train, shoving their way into the car, their guns drawn. People shrank away from them as two of them ran up to Scorpion, who took his hand out of his pocket and just stood there, while the train loudspeaker announced in Catalan and Spanish that the train would not be moving because of police activity.

Two of the
mossos
roughly grabbed his arms, and a third put handcuffs on him.

“Vostè està sota detenció,”
one of them said. You're under arrest.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Eixample,

Barcelona, Spain

T
he handcuffs were made of nickel-coated steel and not connected by links but a hinge that allowed less movement. The keyholes for each cuff were in the extensions that formed the hinge. He thought about escaping, but there was no chance after they brought him out of the Metro and put him, along with a
mosso
to watch him, in the back of a
mossos d'esquadra
van to the police
comisaria
in the Eixample business district. It was a gray concrete fortress of a building off a smart, tree-lined street, Via Augusta, that he only caught a glimpse of before they hustled him inside.

They brought him to a room with no windows, empty except for a table and chairs, and frisked him. A
mosso
went through his pockets, dumping everything onto the table. When they found the knife and the bloodstained pieces of toilet paper, they looked significantly at each other. One of the
mossos
pulled on latex gloves and placed the knife and the toilet paper in separate see-through plastic bags. Throughout it all Scorpion said nothing. He barely glanced at the one-way glass on the wall or the video camera near the ceiling, but registered their locations.

They sat him in one of the chairs facing the one-way glass. One of them, an older, tanned police sergeant with long iron-gray hair, sat opposite him.

“Quin és el teu nom?”
the sergeant asked him first in Catalan, then in Spanish, then English. What is your name? Scorpion didn't answer.

The sergeant stood up, leaned across the table and smacked him hard across the face. The tiniest flicker of a smile ghosted Scorpion's lips. “If you do that,” he remembered Sergeant Falco saying about smiling at his first interrogation during his Level C SERE training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he was in JSOC's First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta Force, “you're letting the interrogator know he's in for a fight.” At Level C SERE, interrogators were allowed to break no more than one major and two minor bones. In comparison, most other interrogations, even brutal ones, were walks in the park.

“Who are you?” the sergeant asked. Scorpion had left his Richard Cahill Canadian passport in the hotel safe and was carrying no ID. “Why did you kill Mohammad Karif? What was he to you? Did you know him? Where are you from? Are you Catalan? Spanish? I think you are a foreigner, yes?”

Scorpion just looked at him.

“We have you,” the sergeant said. “We have witnesses. We have the knife, the bloodstains. We will do scientific analysis and have a lot more. If you talk now, it will go more better for you.”

Scorpion didn't respond.

“Say something!” the sergeant shouted, smacking the table with his hand.
“Fill de puta!”

Scorpion stared at the one-way glass, where he knew others were watching. Think nothing, he told himself. Show nothing. Be nothing. Sooner or later they'd leave him alone for a minute and he could escape.

The sergeant went out, leaving him alone. There was no point doing anything; he knew they were watching. Probably trying to decide whether to send in someone else to question him. Good cop, bad cop. Meanwhile, his mind was racing ahead.

When he had knocked on Karif's door, both he and Mustache had been surprised. Mustache had improvised, and it was likely he'd called the police to pin the blame on him for the murder. Assumption: Mustache worked for the Gardener, who was shutting his network down.

Why?

Because he didn't want the attack on the embassy to be traced back to Kta'eb Hezbollah, thereby allowing the Americans to justify an attack on Iran, he decided. No witnesses, no proof. Total deniability. If the U.S. attacked, Iran could turn to Russia, China, and the rest of the Muslim world and talk about U.S. aggression.

He was getting a sense of the Gardener. He was careful, smart, devious, and ruthless as hell. The Gardener was as dangerous an adversary as he had ever faced, he decided as the sergeant came back into the room with four more policemen.

“We have two eyewitnesses who say they saw you go into Mohammad Karif's apartment,” the sergeant said in Catalan, then in Spanish and English. “Unless you talk to me now, you will not leave prison for many years.”

Scorpion just looked at him.

The sergeant gestured to the policemen, who took him out of the room and down a long hallway to another room, where they prepared to photograph and fingerprint him. A television on top of a file cabinet was on. It showed a newscaster from Antena 3 Noticias in front of a screen showing a floodlit police nighttime scene. It was a European country, but not Spain, Scorpion thought. A subtitle on the screen read:
ZURICH, SUIZA.
Switzerland. One of the Swiss policemen on TV pointed at a body in what looked like a wooded or park setting. Then the camera showed more bodies. They started to turn Scorpion toward a table to be fingerprinted.

“Espera,”
Scorpion said, the first word he had spoken. Wait.

Surprised, they stopped, and like him, they turned to watch the TV.

Although he couldn't follow the rapid Spanish, he could catch some of it from the news ticker crawl at the bottom of the screen. It was Bergholz Park in Zurich. Five men and one woman found dead. Murdered. Some of the dead may have been Americans. They showed the face of the dead woman taken from a passport photo, a pretty blonde, and even before they showed it, Scorpion knew it was Chrissie.

It hit him like a pile driver. The Gnomes. Chrissie. Glenn. All four of them dead. He felt like throwing up. He'd warned Shaefer! Told him to pull them off. It was his fault. He'd asked Harris to leave the Gnomes in Zurich to help him pull off the movie for Norouzi. Soames, he thought. If he got the chance, he'd rip his guts out.

Five men dead, the announcer said. Who was the fifth?

Norouzi, he thought. It had to be.

The announcer's next words, which he read in the crawl at the bottom of the screen, confirmed it.

“According to Swiss authorities, one of the dead has been tentatively identified as an Iranian businessman, Hooshang Norouzi, whose company had an office in Zurich.”

First Norouzi, then Karif, he thought. The Gardener was covering his tracks. He felt an anger grow inside him, a sick rage that almost made it impossible to think. He was as angry as he had ever been in his life. Breathe, he told himself. Control it. Use it.

“
Bueno
, let's take his photo,” the photographer said in Spanish, assuming the prisoner would understand Spanish if he didn't speak Catalan.

Two of the policemen faced Scorpion away from the TV. One of the them stood him against a wall in front of the camera. He tried to control his breath as he took in what had happened in Zurich. He had to get out of here now, he thought. As the guard positioned him for the photograph, the man grabbed between his legs as if to frisk him again but whispered in Scorpion's ear in Spanish,
“Estaré esperando por ti, puta.”
I'll be waiting for you, bitch.

Thinking, Boy, did you pick the wrong time, asshole, he slipped his leg behind the guard's leg and swung his handcuffed hands with all his might at the side of the man's head, smashing him so hard into the wall with the cuffs that he could hear the skull crack. He didn't wait for the guard to fall, the legs already buckling, but turned toward the other three policemen. Two of them had started toward him, while the third fumbled for his police whistle. The police photographer, who had been about to take his mug shot, reached for a telephone.

As the biggest guard reached out to grab him, Scorpion executed a Brazilian high kick to the head while using an aikido grab and throw to take down the other charging guard. With the two of them on the ground, he jumped with both knees on the first guard, knocking the wind out of him, and smashed his cuffs across the bridge of his nose, effectively blinding him. Jumping to his feet, he kicked the man in the head to finish him, whirling to face the second guard, who was getting up from the floor.

A straight-fingered thrust to the windpipe with both handcuffed hands had the second guard gasping and choking. Then he grabbed the man by his hair and smashed his head against the corner of a desk. The guard crumpled, the side of his head pouring blood.

The fourth guard had managed a small bleat with his whistle and was starting to blow again, his cheeks bulging, when Scorpion caught him with a knee to the groin. As the doubled over, expelling air with a whoosh, Scorpion smashed him into the photographer, taking both men and the camera down. He jumped on top of the photographer, landing on his face with his knees, ramming the man's head against the floor. The fourth guard, getting up, swung at him. Scorpion sidestepped the punch and caught him in a guillotine choke hold in the crook of his elbow, cutting off his air and, more critically, the flow of blood in his carotid artery. The guard went unconscious within a long fifteen seconds. Then Scorpion got up, saw the photographer stir, and kicked him in the side of the head, finishing him off.

He looked around. The entire fight had taken less than forty-five seconds. Catching his breath, he searched the first guard's pockets and found the handcuff keys. The fact that the cuffs were hinged made the positioning of his hand and wrist awkward, but not impossible. The lock clicked and the first cuff opened. With his left hand free, it was even faster opening the second cuff.

He took off his clothes down to his underwear. The fourth guard, the one with the whistle, was closest to his size. He stripped the police uniform, ID, and the PK380 pistol and holster off the man, checking the magazine before putting on the uniform, then walked out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. By the time he reached the ground floor he could hear shouts from above. At the main entrance he nodded to the desk sergeant, who looked at him oddly, as if trying to remember who he was, but didn't say anything. As he walked out the front door he felt a tingling in his back, as if any second the desk sergeant would call him back.

He passed a pair of
mossos
dragging in a Gypsy, who was shouting in Catalan,
“Creus que tots els gitanos és un lladre!”
Something about the cops thinking every Gypsy was a thief.

“Only because it's true,” the
mosso
said as Scorpion passed them. Walk, don't run, he told himself, coming around the corner to Via Augusta. He knew there wasn't much time. The police would be after him any second.

There were dozens of motor scooters parked in a line in the tree-lined passageway bisecting the street. He was about to steal one when he spotted a taxi and waved him down. The driver hesitated, perhaps wondering why a
mosso
needed a taxi, but picked him up. As they drove down the avenue, the driver kept eyeing his uniform. When they were a good kilometer from the
comisaria,
he told the driver to pull over.

“Take off your clothes,” Scorpion told him in his bad Spanish.

“Que?”
the driver asked.

“Your clothes. I want them,” he said.

The driver shook his head. “No,
senor
.”

Scorpion fished in the pockets of the uniform, found forty-five euros in the wallet and pointed the Walther at the driver.

“I'll give you forty-five euros,” he said,
“o te mato.”
Or I kill you.

The driver hesitated. He looked at the Walther, then at Scorpion's eyes, and nodded slowly. They sat in the taxi and took off their shirts and pants. In a few minutes the driver wore the police uniform and Scorpion was in the driver's clothes. He handed the man the money, got out of the taxi and motioned him to drive away.

When the taxi was gone, Scorpion walked for several blocks. He was on a quiet street of older apartment buildings with balconies and wrought-iron railings. Here, as in many places in the city, scores of motor scooters were parked in rows on the street. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he used the lock pick taped to the bottom of his foot to unlock one and start it. He drove down the street, crossing Avinguda Diagonal, not far from where he had run from the tram, and drove on for several kilometers. In a narrow street, almost an alley, he left the scooter and walked back to his hotel.

The minute he got back to his room—before he even washed his hands, which still had traces of Karif's blood—he grabbed one of his prepaid cell phones and called Shaefer's number. Although it was after midnight, he wasn't surprised when Shaefer picked up on the first ring.

Before Shaefer could speak, Scorpion said between clenched teeth into the phone: “Flagstaff. I told you to pull them, you son of a bitch.”

“You realize this is an open line?” Shaefer said.

“Go to hell,” he said.

“I'm already there,” Shaefer said, and Scorpion knew the deaths of the Gnomes had hit him hard too. “The Pickle Factory's going nuts,” suggesting the CIA, not to mention everybody in Washington, was scrambling trying to find someone to blame for the deaths of four agents.

“They deserve it,” Scorpion said.

“You're on hold, pending further notice,” Shaefer told him. What Shaefer didn't say was that he was in the crosshairs of someone higher up looking to hang him out to dry for the four deaths.

“No, I'm not,” Scorpion replied.

For a long moment Shaefer didn't say anything. He was Scorpion's closest friend in the CIA and knew him well enough to know that regardless of what the DCIA ordered, Scorpion was going forward. Scorpion could feel Shaefer trying to decide. Because of orders from higher-ups, Shaefer had betrayed their friendship in the Ukraine operation and regretted it. Now he had to make the same decision again. Scorpion waited for him to figure it out.

“What do you want?” Shaefer said finally.

“Get rid of Soames.”

“Not happening.”