He left the apartment shortly before dawn, the sky streaked with gold over the Nile. He took the East Delta bus from the Eltorgan bus station in the center of the city to the small port city of Hurghada some three hundred miles south on the Red Sea coast. Just before boarding the bus, he bought a live chicken at the open-air souk. The bus was stifling hot and when he glanced at a passenger’s Al Ahram, the headline said only that the authorities were making progress in the bombing investigation.
At an army checkpoint ten kilometers outside Hurghada, two soldiers came on board and checked everyone’s ID. They were looking for a foreigner; he could pass for a working-class Egyptian, he told himself, his heart pounding. His battered ID card and the chicken made them pay him little attention. They asked where he was going, and he said he was visiting his cousin in Hurghada. He hoped to work in a hotel there. The soldier shrugged and went on to the next passenger.
He traded the chicken for lunch in a worker’s restaurant in Hurghada near the port and caught the ferry in the harbor to Sharm el Sheikh, the resort city at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula. When the ferry landed, he went into a public bathroom stall and changed out of his gallabiya and turban into a “Rock for Africa” T-shirt, shorts, and sunglasses, more suited to the beach scene with its bikinis and Four Seasons and Starbucks cafes. At the beach at Naama Bay he connected with a pair of Danish backpackers. They went for drinks at the Camel, a rooftop bar where they were joined by a spectacular Swedish blonde who was, she said, a lingerie model in Sharm for the scuba diving “and the beautiful Arab men.” She touched his forearm with her fingers and suggested they could see the sunset better from her room.
In the morning, he left her snoring on the bed and took the ferry to Aqaba in Jordan. There were army patrols by the ferry before he left Sharm el Sheikh, but they took one look at his backpack, sunburned face, and German passport and let him pass. By mid-afternoon he was sipping a Bloody Mary in the first class cabin of a Lufthansa flight from Amman to Frankfurt, leaving behind what was to become the most intensive manhunt in human history. Before it was over, it would nearly destroy the CIA and force everyone involved into the most terrible choice of their lives, including the American agent known only as Scorpion.
CHAPTER TWO
Karachi, Pakistan
The steel container hung high in the air as the gantry crane swung it over to a row of containers stacked four high on the dock. Two dockworkers shared a cigarette in its shadow, unconcerned as the container passed over their heads. They knew the standard twenty-foot TEU unit was at most fifteen tons, and that the big crane could easily handle three to four times that weight. The crane lowered the container neatly into the next position in the top row as though stacking Legos and swung back for another container.
Another man, clad like the dockworkers in an orange jumpsuit and hard hat, watched from the shadow of a tall reach-stacker machine. There was a scar over his right eye, and his gray eyes, unusual in this part of the world, focused not on the containers, but on the ship being unloaded. She was the Bunga Seratai 6, a mid-sized Malaysian-flagged container vessel bound next for Port Klang, south of Kuala Lumpur. Having berthed two hours earlier, the Bunga Seratai 6 would leave before midnight, after unloading 370 containers and picking up 200 more.
That wasn’t what bothered Scorpion as he watched, or why he’d waited more than an hour and still hadn’t approached. Everything about the setup was wrong, last minute wrong. The RDV should’ve been in a safe house, like the one in the Korangi district. Instead he’d had to pick up an East Wharf stevedore’s ID at the last minute from a drop in a pharmacy on 13th Street. There were only two possibilities: either it was a trap, in which case the network in Pakistan was blown and there was a good chance he was about to die. Or worse, something had gotten out of control and Langley was improvising, not what they were best at. Either way, the container ship was a potential red zone. For that matter, much of Karachi was a red zone. The city, one of the largest in the world and one of the biggest ports in South Asia, had become a haven for terrorists. They moved easily among the millions of Pushtuns and Taliban who had fled here from Pakistan’s Northwest tribal regions and Afghanistan.
The heat was intense, the sun brilliant on the water in the harbor, and he had to squint against the glare. He sipped a can of Pakola orange soda, colored an alien green despite its name, as he quartered the ship, the dock, and the approaches to the gangway one last time. Everything appeared normal. The gantry crane was moving another container, gleaming in the hot sun, from the ship to the dock. Three loaders were working farther down the dock. The two dockworkers were walking toward their forklifts, the way clear except for a ship’s crew member near the top of the gangway, resting a handheld scanner on the rail. No one was loitering or doing anything out of the ordinary.
Scorpion crumpled the can and tossed it in a trash bin. He walked across the wharf, climbed the gangway and stopped at the top to show his ID badge, which he had just gotten that morning. The crew member, a young Malay, checked his face against the photo on the ID, scanned the ID bar code, and let him aboard.
He opened a heavy outer door, closed it behind him, and instead of going down toward the hold as a dockworker might be expected to do, went up the stairs toward the crew deck. He studied a cross-section map of the ship posted near the compartment door, then went up another deck and entered the officers’ and passenger deck quarters. At the last passenger cabin on the port side, he knocked twice and went in.
Bob Harris stood in a two-handed stance, pointing a Navy SEAL standard-issue SIG Sauer 9mm at his chest. He wore shorts and a T-shirt, one of the rare times Scorpion had ever seen him not in a suit.
“Put it away. You’ll hurt yourself,” he said.
“You’re right. I haven’t touched one of these since CST training.” Harris nodded and put the gun down on the table in the small cabin.
Instead of sitting, Scorpion started checking the bulkheads and closet for bugs.
“It’s clean,” Harris said. “I had NSA Dubai sweep it twice, before and after I came on board last night.”
Scorpion ignored him and continued checking the cabin, running his fingers along the edge of the windows and under all the ledges. Harris watched for a moment, then opened the small refrigerator under the TV counter, popped the tops on two Beck’s and handed one to Scorpion. Then he turned on the MP3 player loud enough to drown out any possible eavesdropping with Bruce Springsteen.
The two men sat face-to-face, knees almost touching in the cramped quarters, and leaned close so they could whisper to each other. Harris tilted his bottle to Scorpion and swallowed. He’s trying to do it by the book, Scorpion thought. Harris was the CIA’s National Clandestine Service deputy director, and it had been years since he was in the field. For him to have flown halfway around the world to take a last minute meeting outside a safe house and try to act like an ops officer meant that all hell had broken loose.
“You’ve heard about the Budawi killing in Cairo?” Harris asked.
“There was something on the Pakistani TV. What about it?”
“Budawi was probably the most closely guarded man in Egypt, maybe one of the best guarded anywhere. His death has set off alarms in every capital in the world. The Egyptians locked up the entire country tighter than a gnat’s asshole. They’ve sweated every informer they ever had-or will have at the rate they’re going.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Nada. They’ve come up empty. We’ve come up empty. MI-6, the BND, the Israelis…” Harris shrugged. “Nothing. Every intelligence service on earth’s come up zero.”
“Or so they say,” Scorpion said carefully. The last time he had worked with Harris was on the attempted coup in Arabia, and whatever there was between them, trust wasn’t any part of it. The only time Harris ever told the truth, went the saying around Langley, was when he thought no one would believe him. “What’s this about? You think the hitter’s in Pakistan?”
“Listen,” Harris
said, touching an icon on his cell phone screen, then handed Scorpion a plug-in earpiece. “The second voice is General Budawi.”
“A demonstration. Multiple demonstrations. Something they will not forget. ”
He heard a man speaking in an uninflected Fusha standard Arabic, not Egyptian or Iraqi or any particular country’s accent. It was hard to hear. The bug wasn’t close, and there was background noise and other indistinguishable conversations from the outdoor cafe and street sounds where the bombing had occurred.
“Where?” a second voice, Budawi’s, said.
“Lo samaht.” Please. “We haven’t discussed terms,” the other man said, his neutral voice soft. He knew he was being recorded, Scorpion thought, and listened till the man said, “The Americans and their allies will owe you a — ” The recording suddenly ended.
“Photos?” Scorpion said, looking up.
Harris shook his head. “It was a condition of the RDV. They wanted to hear what he had to say first.”
“Really? Not even one? For the first time in history the Egyptian Mabahith kept their word?”
Harris grinned. “There was a partial the Mukhabarat retrieved from a piece of a cell phone chip. The phone itself was destroyed by the blast. It shows part of a sleeve. For what it’s worth, he was wearing a white shirt.”
“What’s the problem? Just go around the world looking for a man in a white shirt,” Scorpion said. He and Harris had history, and he knew Harris hadn’t come because he enjoyed Scorpion’s company. “What do you want, Bob? We’re a long way from Georgetown.”
Harris motioned him closer. Their heads were almost touching.
“We think they were sending a message with the killing of Budawi. Not just that they can reach anyone they want. We think the threat is real. Something big. He said, ‘a demonstration.’ An odd word to use. He knew he was being recorded and he said it twice.”
“How big?”
“We don’t know. It could be anything. Planes into buildings. Assassinations. Kidnappings. Bombings. Poisoning the water supply. Killing all the kids in an elementary school like Russia. A new war in the Middle East. We don’t know anything! We don’t know who. We don’t know where or when or how. For all we know, it could be disinformation. For the record, we don’t think it is.”
“Who’s ‘we’? The same geniuses who gave us Saddam’s yellowcake in Africa?”
“Rabinowich in D.I. He said to tell you,” Harris said.
Dave Rabinowich was a world-class mathematician from MIT, a Juilliard graduate violinist who had turned down a concert career and was hands-down the best intelligence analyst in the CIA. It was said that when he was bored, he would play mental chess games while simultaneously calculating prime numbers in his head. In fact, Scorpion had seen him do it once while at lunch at Clyde’s in Georgetown. Rabinowich was also the odd man out who never bowed to pressure from the top or softened his dissents. His reports were precise, methodical, exhaustively researched, and rarely if ever wrong. If Dave was sending him the message personally, the threat was real.
Now he understood why Harris had flown halfway around the world to see him when he could’ve heard the same thing from any operations officer, and why they didn’t wait to set up a safe house: to make sure he got the message. This wasn’t a job for the CIA. This was coming from higher up. At a minimum, from the the Director of National Intelligence, who oversaw all U.S. intelligence agencies.
“He mentioned ‘the Americans and their allies’,” Harris said. “That puts us in the line of fire, only we don’t have a clue, except that the messenger they sent is as good as it gets and is probably long gone from Egypt, and we don’t have any idea who he is or who he represents, or how he got out of Egypt either.”
“Multiple simultaneous attacks. You thinking al-Qaida?”
Harris shook his head. His hair was peppered with touches of gray, but at that moment he almost looked like the fair-haired graduate he’d once been. “Like a more sophisticated Brad Pitt,” a female analyst had once said, dreamily looking at an old photo, to which a male colleague had replied, “Yeah, with the social instincts of Hannibal Lector.”
“That’s what the NSC thinks,” Harris replied. “So does Homeland Security and the DCIA.” He motioned Scorpion close again. “Rabinowich thinks Hezbollah.”
“Hezbollah and the Muslim Brothers? Those are strange bedfellows.”
“That’s certainly the conventional wisdom,” Harris said mildly, as if he were the Saint Francis of the CIA instead of its dirtiest infighter.
“But Rabinowich doesn’t buy it. Why not?”
“Two things: One-the notation on Budawi’s computer for the RDV at the cafe read, ‘The Palestinian.’ Just that. ‘The Palestinian.’ Nothing else in the Mabahith’s files. Whatever else Budawi knew, he took with him when he died. Two-little ripples in the net. An NSA COMINT intercept here, a bit of MASINT from the DIA there, the odd BND rumor from an underworld informer not considered particularly reliable. No leads. Nothing definite. Nothing you can put your hands on. Not even odds and ends. What Rabinowich calls ‘subtexture.’ He says it’s his word, that he invented it. He’s actually filed a copyright application.”
“So why kill Budawi?”
Harris shrugged. “Maybe as a gesture from Hezbollah to the Brothers. A bowl of figs to seal the deal.”
“Or as you said, to send a message.”
“But to whom? The Egyptians, the Israelis, or us?”
“The other Arab regimes. Letting them know there’s a new player in the game.”
“Interesting, that’s what Rabinowich said,” Harris said.
“I thought you didn’t like Rabinowich.”
Harris grimaced. “I don’t. He’s not a team player. Neither are you.”
“No, I’m not,” Scorpion said. Now it was out in the open between them. “What do you want, Bob?”
“You’re a smart boy. You tell me,” Harris said, leaning back, his arms folded across his chest.
“Rabinowich is right. And if he is, it’s your ass on the line, which doesn’t bother me in the least. Not after Arabia.”
“Except it’s not about us, is it?” Harris said.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Scorpion took a sip of the beer and put the bottle down.
“Does Rabinowich think it’s a Palestinian? What about Hamas?”
“We don’t know. The consensus is, probably not. It’s probably a cover name to throw us off. Truth is, we have nothing. A voice. That’s it.”
“And that bothers you more than anything else, doesn’t it?” Scorpion paused. From somewhere in the ship there was a clang of steel banging against steel, a container, hitting the side of the hatch. It was like an omen, he thought. Things go wrong. He had been lucky for a long time, but you couldn’t be lucky forever. Something inside him tightened, telling him not to do it. He watched Harris take a sip of beer, pretending they were colleagues instead of men who hated each other’s guts. Harris hadn’t wanted to come all this way. He did it because he had no choice. Scorpion took a deep breath. “What’s the mission?” he asked.
“This is a Special Access Critical operation. We’re coordinating with NSA, DIA, FBI, State, and every foreign intelligence service in the world, including the ones that according to Congress we’re not supposed to talk to. I’m personally running it. Foley’s coordinating for Langley. Anderson for the FBI. General Massey for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Security will be tightened in every major U.S. city and every capital in the world. We’ve already launched the most massive worldwide manhunt anybody’s ever heard of. Every agency and DOD department is running 24/7 shifts to handle all the data streaming in.”
“All this because of Budawi? This is bullshit. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing,” Harris said, inspecting his nails. If it were possible for someone as deceitful as Harris to reveal true emotion, Scorpion would have said that he was running scared.
“I’m not a virgin, Bob. I don’t need
foreplay. What is it?”
Harris shook his head. “Need to know.” Scorpion knew that the deputy director was within his rights to withhold information. The rule was “no excess baggage.” You only told a field agent what he absolutely needed to know. Except he was getting a bad feeling about this one. He stared at the cabin porthole, the Arabian Sea a distant blue beyond the breakwater while Springsteen went dancing in the dark. Neither man spoke.
“You’ve got plenty of firepower on this. What’s the problem?” Scorpion asked finally.
“It won’t work. I have a feeling about this Palestinian. He’s good. Too good and absolutely ruthless. No matter what we do, he’ll find a way. That’s where you come in. I want you on your own, running your own operation, completely separate from everything and anyone else in the Agency. You’ll have unlimited access to anything we have anytime you want it. Spend as much money as you have to. If you want, I’ll give you the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ private cell number. Call out the goddamn Marines. You have one job. Stop the Palestinian. However you have to do it. No questions asked.”
“It’ll get dirty. You know what we’re dealing with.”
“Whatever it takes.”
Scorpion waited. He picked up the Beck’s but didn’t drink. The only sounds besides Springsteen were those of the port machinery and someone on the dock shouting in Urdu. As an independent agent, for Scorpion there was always the matter of payment. Finally, Harris said it.
“Double the usual fee plus a triple bonus when the Palestinian is-” He hesitated. “-no longer an issue. The first half’ll be in the Luxembourg account in an hour.”
Christ, they were scared shitless, Scorpion thought. Harris didn’t even bat an eye at so much money. What the hell was this?
“Hezbollah means Lebanon. I don’t trust Beirut station,” Scorpion said, putting down the beer.
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