Scorpion Deception (4 page)

Soames nodded. “Just the cover and the code name, ‘Scorpion.' Nothing else, except . . . ” He hesitated. “Langley checked the backup server. They got the Kilbane photo.”

Scorpion stared coldly at him. Somebody who was good enough to take out a fortified U.S. embassy guarded by Marines and all the high tech in the world now had him on an enemies list, and they knew his code name and what he looked like. It was bad enough.

“Just answer me one question,” he said through clenched teeth. “What the hell was it doing in an embassy file—
in Switzerland!
”

“The latest re-org. We're all supposed to share information. Hold hands and play nice. No more 9/11s. All very Kumbaya. Total crapola. Welcome to the new improved, better-than-ever Washington,” raising his Tusker in a mock toast and taking a long swig. “Where the hell's that waiter? I want another of these—or . . .” He squinted suspiciously at the bottle. “ . . . is it going to give me the Nairobi runs?”

Scorpion got ready to go. Soames looked at him.

“What do I tell Bob Harris?” he asked.

“Tell him to kiss off.”

“The administration's going to take it to the U.N. Security Council, as if it matters what those jerk-offs do,” Soames murmured, not looking at him. “There's gonna be a war.”

“With whom?”

“We'll find out who did it. Trust me. And when we do . . .” Soames said, balling his fist.

“Go ahead. Knock yourselves out. It's got nothing to do with me.”

“They're talking about going to Congress for a declaration of war. Nobody's done that since Roosevelt. Pentagon's gearing up, but it isn't just about finding out who did it. We need proof for the whole world. No more screw-ups. Bob really needs you on this one,” Soames said, putting on his best
win one for the Gipper
expression.

“Tell Harris he's a big boy. He needs to learn how to cross the street by himself for a change,” Scorpion said, getting up.

“What will you do?” Soames said, staring blankly at the floor as though he wasn't relishing reporting a wasted trip to Harris. “About Kilbane and all?”

“I'll take care of it.”

“How?” Looking like a kid who had lost his lunch money. “They'll ask.”

“Yeah,” Scorpion said over his shoulder. “But I don't have to answer.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Hamburg,

Germany

T
he ferry left the Finkenwender dock precisely at 9:00
P.M.
, heading upriver to the next stop on the Elbe River. The night was cool, drizzly, the outside deck wet and deserted except for a lone man wearing glasses and a newsie cap at the bow rail. Because of the weather, the other passengers stayed inside the cabin on the deck below. Scorpion turned up his collar against the rain, the lights along the shore shimmery reflections on the dark surface of the river.

Almost done, he thought. He had checked into The George, a boutique hotel in the St. Georg district that was like a private English men's club improbably dropped in the middle of Germany. On the TV, all the news was about the crisis in Switzerland. There were reports of a worldwide manhunt for information on the Bern attackers. The Americans had called an emergency NATO meeting. The media was speculating wildly. Al Jazeera had reported from an “unnamed” source in the Gulf region that an al Qaeda leader, Tamer al-Warafi, had provided a tape claiming responsibility for the attack. But al Jazeera had not yet released the tape.

In New Delhi, a government source implied that it had been an operation by Pakistan's covert ISI's SS division as a reprisal for U.S. drone attacks in northern Pakistan. Israel's foreign minister, Shalom Goldman, claimed it was the Iranians. Which the Iranian foreign minister, Hamid Gayeghrani, angrily denied, declaring that such a charge was just what one could expect from a “regime of devils spawned in hell.”

Scorpion had spent the afternoon at an Internet café on Kleiner Schäferkamp across from a wooded park. He used a European singles chat room to contact Mendy69 in Vilnius, Lithuania. A little man in a wheelchair born with a child's twisted tiny legs that never grew, Aldis Slavickas aka Mendy69—after Mendeleev, the inventor of the Periodic Table, and the sex position—was a born criminal and the most brilliant computer hacker Scorpion knew. He had first used Slavickas to bulletproof his French cover ID, the identity he used for his home base in Sardinia. Slavickas had been able to penetrate the presumably impregnable firewalls and databases in the French Ministry of the Interior, as well as the DST and the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service.

In the chat room, Mendy69 posed as Giedre, a sexy nineteen-year-old female blonde with a fetish for leather. Scorpion was an aging French businessman named Max, because no matter what cover name he used, Mendy69 insisted on calling him Max anyway. They corresponded in French.

The first part of the job Scorpion wanted was to change his photo in the Reuters personnel database at their Canary Wharf office in London for the Michael Kilbane journalist credentials he had used in Ukraine, so it no longer resembled his face.

Mendy69 typed:
pas de problème, mon chéri Max.
No problem, my darling Max.
I will make it so your own mother wouldn't know you.

“
Bon
.
And the Ukrainian things, you naughty girl?
referring to the same photo that had been used for Kilbane's Ukrainian visa, now residing in Ukrainian Militsiya and SBU internal security databases in Kiev.

That's not so simple, my little wolf,
Slavickas responded.

He would need something; an internal password, Mendy69 responded. He said he knew someone inside. The good thing about
ce pays
primitif
—this primitive country, Ukraine—he said, was from the president on down, there was no one you couldn't bribe. Scorpion offered one thousand euros, and Mendy69 responded that it was too much for the Ukrainian piece of shit he would bribe. Two hundred would be plenty, and he, Mendy69, would keep the other eight hundred providing
cher
Max would spank him.

Almost laughing out loud at that one, Scorpion gave Mendy69 a dummy Gmail account to let him know when it was done and he would Paypal him the money. Before he left, he checked the BBC Internet news site. He was stunned by an article headlined:
AMERICAN AID WORKER SAVES SOMALI CHILDREN
. In it, they quoted aid workers in Dadaab, Kenya, about a mysterious American aid worker, David Cheyne, who had saved twenty-eight children—Scorpion had no idea how the number had grown from sixteen to twenty-eight or where they could have gotten that from—who were trapped by the war in Somalia. Apparently, the aid worker “had no comment about his heroic act, but stated that without the help of a British aid worker, Ian Dowler, he wouldn't have made it through.” So at least he knew who the source of the article was. That little prick, Dowler, who was now claiming credit for the rescue. Even worse, someone had taken a cell phone photo of him that accompanied the article. It was a bit fuzzy from a distance and caught him from the side, holding one of the children and talking with Sandrine, identified in the caption as Dr. Sandrine Delange of MPLM, Médecins Pour Le Monde; Doctors for the World.

Bloody hell, he thought, glancing uneasily around the Internet café as if everyone might recognize him any second. The only good thing was that he didn't think someone could identify him just from the sideways photo or could easily match it to the Kilbane cover ID photo. As for the Cheyne cover ID, he'd gotten rid of it as soon as he had left Africa.

David Cheyne no longer existed, and outside the context of Africa, anyone would be hard-put to identify him as Cheyne. He was now using a Canadian passport in the name of Richard Cahill, an industrial engineer from Vaughan, north of Toronto.

That evening, having a drink at the bar at the hotel, he got the modified photo from Lithuania on his iPhone. Mendy69 was right. Tiny changes in facial distance vectors between features used by facial recognition software, a microscopic thickening of the nose, an imperceptible narrowing of the distance between the eyes, a change of eye color and a pattern modification, and no one would call them the same person. His own mother wouldn't know him.

Not that she would anyway, Scorpion reflected as he stood on the deck of the ferry. She'd died when he was a toddler; tensing as he felt someone come up beside him. A Middle Eastern man with a beard, his hair wet from the drizzle.

“Haben Sie einen Gletscher Eis Bonbon, bitte?”
the man said, asking for a piece of a popular brand of candy.

“I still prefer the ice cream at the White Tower on Pasdaran Avenue,” Scorpion replied in English, referencing the coffee shop in Tehran he had mentioned to establish his bona fides with the man next to him, Ahmad Harandi, the Mossad mole in the Hamburg Islamic Masjid, when they had first met during the Palestinian operation.

“Scorpion,” Harandi said.

Scorpion nodded. “Who's your friend in the shadows at the back of the deck near the bridge?” he said.

“He's with me,” Harandi said. “We need to keep it short. This is dangerous.”

“More than you know. Whoever hit the American embassy in Bern got CIA computer files on the Palestinian operation. That means you too.”

“Sheisse!”
Shit! “How could such a thing happen?!” Harandi exclaimed.

“They got
sheisse
on me too. That's why this,” Scorpion said, touching the three-day stubble on his face, then the rain-spattered glasses and the newsie cap to help change the image.

“So I'm blown?”

Scorpion nodded grimly.

“Almost certainly. That's why I had to see you personally. So you'd know it was real.”

“Sheisse,”
Harandi said again. “I have to leave Germany.” He looked sideways at Scorpion, his face wet from the rain. “This blows everything. Years down the drain. Herzliya will go crazy,” referring to the Tel Aviv suburb where the Mossad's headquarters were located.

“The Americans are ready to go to war,” Scorpion said. “They just haven't figured out with whom.”

“I know. It's all anyone's talking about on the TV. Madness.”

Scorpion felt the ferry shudder as it pulled up to the Neumühlen-Övelgönne landing. There was damn little time before things blew, he thought, watching crewmen secure the ferry to the quay. Two passengers got off and several more got on.

“What have you heard?” Scorpion asked. The Islamic Masjid in Hamburg's Uhlenhorst district was a hotbed of Iranian Twelvers and intelligence activities, which was why the Israelis had planted Harandi there as a mole in the first place. If the Iranians had something going in Europe, it was likely that Harandi had heard something.

“Nothing. Not a
verdammte
thing,” Harandi muttered, looking around furtively. The ferry's engine throbbed as they pulled away from the landing. “It wasn't the MOIS,”—the Iranian foreign intelligence service, the equivalent of the Iranian CIA—“or Hezbollah.”

“You're sure?”

Harandi shrugged. “One never knows. But if it were, I would've heard something.”

“So either it's not the Iranians, or—” Scorpion stopped. “What about Niru-ye Quds?” The Quds Force, the Special Forces unit of the Revolutionary Guards; the Iranian equivalent of the U.S. Delta Force or Navy SEALs. “Or Kta'eb Hezbollah or Asaib al-Haq?” Factions within the Revolutionary Guards.

“I don't know. There's been nothing.”

Harandi looked like he was about to say something more but had held back. They stared out at the darkness. There were other ships and boats on the river, lights reflecting on the water. The ferry's engine began to throb as it headed in toward the next river landing. The sign over the dock read:
DOCKLAND FISCHEREIHAFEN
. They were running out of time.

Scorpion glanced up toward the bridge. A man in a seaman's wool cap looked away as soon as he caught Scorpion looking up at him.

Shit, he thought.

“What else? This is me. What aren't you telling me?” Scorpion asked.

“Nothing. I've got to go as soon as we get to Sankt Pauli,” Harandi said, grabbing the rail for balance as the ferry bumped against the landing. He took out a handkerchief to wipe the rain from his face as the ferry unloaded passengers and a half-dozen more boarded. He's holding something back, Scorpion thought, glancing at Harandi. Another couple of minutes and it would be too late.

He had to resist the urge to look up at the bridge. If the man with the seaman's cap worked there, how the hell could they have known about him meeting Harandi on the ferry? Unless the man had simply gone up to the bridge and either bribed or just requested that they let him stand there because of the rain. That could happen, he thought. Within a minute the ferry was again moving back out into the river. He couldn't wait any longer.

“C'mon,
dust
.” Farsi for friend, Scorpion said. “What is it?”

Harandi shrugged. “Something someone said. An odd reference. It's nothing.”

“So now we'll both know nothing. What was it?”

“ ‘Saw-scale viper,' something like that.”

“You mean the
mar
?” The Farsi word for snake.

Harandi nodded.

“What's it mean? Some kind of code?” Scorpion asked.

“I don't know.”

“Where'd you hear it?”

“That's what was so strange. A guest imam, an ayatollah from Qom, used it in a sermon at the Masjid the Friday before the attack in Switzerland. Something about doing evil and being bitten by a saw-scaled
tirmar.
” Viper. “Some kind of metaphor.” Harandi grimaced, as if to say he wasn't responsible for what some religious idiot said.

“He said ‘saw-scaled viper'? He used those words exactly?”

“Possibly. I might have misheard.”

“What was so strange about it?”

“I don't know. But it struck me as odd at the time. Not just saying ‘snake,' but a specific type of very poisonous snake. It was too precise, if you know what I mean. Almost like he was sending a message. Probably nothing,” he said again, and shrugged. “You get paranoid in this business.”

“This ayatollah, what was his name?”

“Nihbakhti. Ayatollah Ali Nihbakhti,” he said, and looked around. The ferry was slowing, shuddering as it approached the Landungsbrücken landing. “I have to go. Thank you for warning me.
Khoda hafez, dust
.” Goodbye, friend, he said in Farsi.

“Ahmad, don't go back to your house. Leave now,” Scorpion said. “The needle's off the chart on this one.”

“You too. We must both be careful,
dust
.
Viel glück
.” Good luck, Harandi said, heading for the ladder down to the main deck. The man from the shadows followed him down the ladder. The ferry had docked and the passengers began to crowd off.

Scorpion watched Harandi walk onto the covered walkway to the landing, followed by the bodyguard. He glanced up at the bridge. The man in the seaman's cap was watching the passengers debark, talking on a cell phone.

Scorpion went down to the main deck as if to debark, but stepped into the main cabin instead. A minute later the man in the seaman's cap came down to the main deck, carrying a satchel. Looking around once, he stepped onto the covered walkway to the shore.

Shit.
Scorpion took out his latest disposable cell phone and called Harandi's cell. There was no answer; the call went to voice mail. Following protocol, Harandi had turned his cell phone off. Only now there was no way to warn him. If anyone got their hands on Harandi's cell phone, Scorpion thought, they'd get the number of his disposable cell phone too.

Making sure no one saw him, he took the SIM card out of his cell phone and dropped it over the side. He watched it sink into the dark water, then crossed to the other side, tossed the empty cell phone into the river, and followed the last passengers to the walkway.

Coming out on the street, he saw Harandi and his bodyguard get into a dark VW sedan. The man in the seaman's cap went over to a parked BMW motorcycle, pulled on a helmet and followed. Scorpion ran to the taxi stand and jumped into the first one in line. The driver looked like a Moroccan.