Scorpion Deception

by Andrew Kaplan

  “All right.” Harris frowned. “I’m listening.”

  “I first met him when he was seven years old. This was in the 1980s. Reagan was the U.S. President. The boy had come from Isfahan in Iran, where he had seen his parents murdered before his own eyes. His father had literally been torn apart by chains attached to trucks pulling in opposite directions. They made him watch. They raped his mother. Many times. They cut off her arms and legs, then poured gasoline over her and his little brother and set them on fire right in front of him. A child. Can you imagine?

  “They sent him to the Iraqi front to die. He was about to be executed by a firing squad when an unknown Iranian woman helped him get away and some of the few Jews left in Iran smuggled him to Israel. We called him David.

  “I was his trainer. His first and only case officer. In a way, he was my creation. You must understand,” he said, biting his lip, and to Scorpion it seemed he was trying to defend himself to an invisible jury, “we don’t train children. Ever. It was hard enough for him, dealing with what he had just gone through, being in a new country with a new language, customs, new everything, but it was his idea. He insisted.

  “Do you understand?” Yuval said, his face in shadow, only the lights from the bridge reflected in his eyes. “He knew what he was going to do. He knew what his revenge would be. He had formulated it, all of it. At age seven!

  “That first time we walked on Gordon Beach in Tel Aviv, just the two of us, me and this child walking on the sand, I told him it was impossible, and he told me, ‘Today, Saddam Hussein is the Ayatollah’s enemy. Tomorrow, they will come for all the Jews.’ Seven years old—and this is how he talked!” he said, shaking his head.

  “For two years I trained him. The Mossad became his school, his parents, his family. It wasn’t like training a child. He was brilliant. More than brilliant. Imagine you were the music teacher of Mozart or Mendelssohn. Your pupil not just more brilliant than you, but someone born to it in a way that you couldn’t even imagine. It didn’t just come naturally to him, it was as if compared to him you were a caveman, banging one stone against another. Mozart. Even while we trained and prepared, I tried to talk him out of it, not only because he was a child, but because what he was going to do, no one had ever done before.”

  “He was a mole?” Harris said.

  “More than a mole. Much more,” Yuval said.

  “What more?”

  “A weapon,” Yuval said. “But not for us. Not for Israel.” He looked at them. “For his parents. His life, his entire life, would be an act of revenge. Can you imagine what it must have been like to live your entire life as a lie? On guard every second of every day; even when he slept. Never dropping your guard for an instant. Never trusting a single human being, ever. Becoming with every fiber of his being the very thing he hated and despised most in the entire world. He would marry, have children, and none of them would ever know for a second who or what he really was, that what they thought was love was actually hate. All for a single purpose. Can you imagine? The psychic cost,” he said, shaking his head. “In the end, he would pay.”

  “How’d you infiltrate him?” Scorpion asked. “Must have been something.”

  “You have no idea. We had to create the most bulletproof cover ever created for any agent. We had to create perfect forged records in dozens of places and destroy others in a way so natural that no one would ever suspect; all in a country where a single mistake was death.

  “He was an orphan from parents who were shahidan—martyrs of the Iranian Revolution. It took an entire year and cost the life of one of our top agents in Iran to make sure there wasn’t a single record, a single shred of evidence or a single human being anywhere, who could refute or even suspect that this child was not exactly who he was supposed to be.

  “This was during the First Intifada of the Palestinians, when all our resources were strained. No one, not one single person in the government or the cabinet, knew anything about this operation except me and the prime minister. At the time, it was Yitzhak Shamir. In a way, out of all the prime ministers of Israel, it could have only been Shamir who would have approved such an operation. His entire family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Shamir himself once told me that when his father, who was in Poland, was facing execution, he said, ‘I will die. But I have a son in the land of Israel; he will take my revenge.’

  “And he did. In 1948, during the War of Independence, Shamir was in Lehi. The most extreme of the radical groups. The British considered him the most dangerous terrorist in Palestine. Shamir never met the boy, David. But I always thought that in a way, he understood him better than anyone.

  “Mostly I remember the boy, David’s last day in Israel, before we infiltrated him back into Iran. We walked on the beach. It was late afternoon; the sun casting long shadows. Young men with their rackets playing matkot on the sand, girls in bikinis, mothers with children in the playgrounds, some of the children not much younger than he was. Everyone watchful because of the Intifada. Can you see how insane it was? I felt like a father to him. I think he knew how I felt, but I don’t think it mattered to him. We were using him—and he was using us. And he knew it.

  “ ‘Even now, I can stop it. You can have a life, David,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have to do this.’

  “ ‘Yes, I do.’ That was all he said.”

  Yuval stopped and lit another cigarette, cupping the match flame against a faint breeze coming from the Bosphorus.

  “From the beginning,” he continued, “he was positioned to be a leader in the Revolutionary Guards. The cover was critical. An orphan child, the only survivor of an Iranian shahid and his wife, martyrs of the Revolution. He distinguished himself in the madrasa. By age twelve he knew the Quran by heart, and by fourteen he could quote chapter and verse of the Shiite hadith, al-Kulayni, al-Qummi, all that. Even among the most extreme, the most radical of the Revolutionary Guards candidates, he was extreme.”

  “The perfect Jesuit,” Harris murmured.

  “The perfect spy,” Scorpion said.

  “By the time he graduated with top grades from Tehran University, he was already a rising star,” Yuval continued. “And of course, he married well. The daughter of a very powerful man within the Supreme Leader’s inner circle. ”

  “The intel he gave was good?” Harris asked.

  “Beyond good,” Yuval said. “Essential—and pure platinum.”

  Harris frowned. “You could’ve shared the wealth.”

  “Once in a while we did. Including the most precise data about the Iranian nuclear and missile programs. You didn’t always believe us.”

  “That’s the trouble with our profession—we’re a distrustful lot.” Harris grimaced, pulling up the collar of his suit jacket against the wind.

  “There’s distrustful and there’s politics,” Yuval said. “The uranium enrichment memo, from Fordow. 89.5 kilos at ninety-two percent purity. The smoking gun. Proof positive the Iranians were close to a bomb. You did nothing.”

  Harris turned on Yuval.

  “We did put it in the President’s Daily Brief. But we had to mark it ‘Unconfirmed.’ What choice did we have?” he snapped. “You wouldn’t reveal the source.”

  “How could we without blowing Absalom—that was his internal Mossad code name—the most important asset we ever had? So the President and his National Security team assumed it was just us pressuring America to act against Iran.” Yuval sighed. “On such stupidities, wars are lost.”

  Harris turned to Yuval. “You asked us to contact Scorpion for you a while back. Was that why?”

  Yuval nodded. “For us, that’s when the crisis really intensified. Four months ago Absalom suddenly went silent. First weeks, then months went by—and nothing. We had no word from him. And no way of getting in touch with him either. His identity had been buried deep inside Iran’s inner circle. Here he was, Israel’s most essential asset, the key to Iran, and all we had was silence. For all we knew, he was dead, or blown, or worse. We had no
idea.”

  “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

  “What 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 eve
ry 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.