“Min fadlak, we were very impressed. What we don’t know is why you are here.”
“You know Salim Kassem, of the Hezbollah Central Council?”
Al-Hafez gestured to indicate that of course he knew him.
“The first call he made after he escaped in Beirut was to a Dr. Samir Abadi here in Damascus.”
“How do you know that?”
Scorpion smiled.
“Americans and their technology. Amazing! Truly.” Al-Hafez shook his head. “How can you be so smart and yet so stupid?”
“Do you know Dr. Abadi?”
“There are many doctors in Damascus.”
“Don’t play stupid. It insults both of us,” Scorpion said.
“Why should I help you? How does that help Syria?”
“Because you don’t want to be on the wrong side of what is about to happen. This isn’t about the Golan or the Israelis or who killed Hariri. You’re right about us. We can be stupid,” Scorpion said, his fingers lightly resting on the gun on the desk.
“If you don’t report in… of course there will be repercussions. You could’ve just called for an appointment,” al-Hafez said.
“No, I couldn’t.”
“No, you couldn’t,” al-Hafez conceded. “We had nothing to do with Budawi. But you already know that or you wouldn’t be here. We’re not even sure it was Hezbollah.”
“Just when we were almost talking,” Scorpion sighed. “Tell me about Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance.”
“A myth,” al-Hafez said, shifting uneasily in his chair. “Aliases and half-baked groups consisting of two jihadis in ski masks and an imam who talks too much are more common in the Middle East than fake goods in the souks.”
“You say it wasn’t you, it wasn’t Hezbollah, and the Islamic Resistance doesn’t exist. There’s only one problem. Budawi didn’t kill himself. What do you know of the Palestinian?”
“Who?”
“Now you’re overplaying your hand, Najah. A man code-named the ‘Palestinian’ killed Budawi.”
Al-Hafez leaned forward. “Are you sure? How do you know that?”
Scorpion didn’t answer. For a moment they just looked at each other, the only sound the hum of the air-conditioning and the faint sound of traffic from the street. The phone on the desk began to ring.
“Don’t answer it,” Scorpion said.
The director let it ring till it stopped, then said, “They’ll be checking on me.”
“No. You’re too important to disturb,” Scorpion said.
Al-Hafez shrugged. “You’re sure about Cairo?”
Scorpion didn’t answer. Al-Hafez glanced out his office window at a superb view of Damascus, looking toward the Old City. From it, Scorpion could see the citadel and the Umayyad Mosque, where both the head of John the Baptist, revered by both Christians and Muslims, and the body of Saladin were entombed. Looming over it all through the smog haze was the distant ridge of Jabal Qassioun.
“It seems we both have secrets,” al-Hafez said finally. “May I smoke?”
Scorpion picked up the gun and gestured with it for al-Hafez to go ahead. Al-Hafez started to light a cigarette and asked, “How about shai? Shall I have some brought?”
Scorpion shook his head no. Al-Hafez lit the cigarette and exhaled.
“Of the Palestinian, I know only a little. Very little, and for that you have to shoot me,” he said.
Scorpion fired the pistol, the bullet hitting the seat between al-Hafez’s legs with a loud thunk. Al-Hafez stared at him, stunned, wide-eyed.
“The Palestinian,” Scorpion said. He cocked the hammer, and al-Hafez flinched involuntarily at the click. “Is he really Palestinian?”
“I have no idea. There was a rumor that he fought the Israelis in Lebanon in July 2006.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know, and if I did, I would not say,” al-Hafez said, raising his hand. It trembled, just slightly, and he was embarrassed by it. He took a deep breath. “Even if you shoot me, I can’t tell you. I’ve probably told you too much already.”
“How is it you don’t know? You support Hezbollah, you and the Iranians.”
“Against the Israelis, of course. And in Lebanon, where we have legitimate national interests. Lebanon was part of Syria for thousands of years, until the 1920s when the French came along and invented it as a country. But not against the Egyptians-or the Americans.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re surrounded by countries allied to you, including the strongest army in the Middle East, the Israelis, right on our border. We are not so smart like you with satellites and gadgets, but also not so stupid. It’s not in our interest, just as what happened to Budawi was not in our interest. And please, where is the BlackBerry that you took?” Scorpion placed the BlackBerry he’d found in al-Hafez’s drawer on the desk.
“I can’t let you walk out with that,” al-Hafez said.
“You can’t stop me. Unless…” Scorpion hesitated.
Al-Hafez nodded, accepting the implied offer. “We’ve heard rumors of a power struggle within Hezbollah,” he said. “The Islamic Resistance is the action cell of a violent radical faction. That’s why we weren’t surprised when you showed up on our radar, and why I’m telling you now. There are whispers of something very big about to happen, but we don’t know what and we are not involved. To prove it, in exchange for returning my BlackBerry and letting you walk out of here, I’ll give you Dr. Abadi’s address. Inside Islamic Resistance his nom de guerre is Abu Faraj.” He got up, walked over to his desk and wrote the address on a piece of paper. He started to hand it to Scorpion, then stopped. “Where is my man, Fawzi al-Diyala?”
Scorpion told him the name of the hotel.
“Is he alive?”
“He’s tied up and he’ll have a filthy hangover and won’t remember much, but otherwise he’s unharmed.”
Al-Hafez offered the slip of paper. “Call off your men. If anyone else follows me, I’ll kill them,” Scorpion said, putting the slip of paper in his pocket.
“It’s in the al Mouhajarine district. Be warned. He’s well protected,” al-Hafez said.
“So were you.”
“Extremely well protected.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Scorpion said, leaving the BlackBerry on the desktop and getting up.
Al Hafez walked around and sat down behind his desk. Scorpion stuck the gun in his belt, pulled his shirt over it and headed for the door.
“By the way,” he said, pausing at the door. “What’s Abadi a doctor of?”
“He’s a medical doctor.”
“What’s his specialty?”
“Infectious diseases. Why?”
“Just curious. Wait five minutes before you press the button under the desk, Najah,” Scorpion said. Something al-Hafez had said was setting off alarm bells in his head, but he wasn’t sure what.
“I want you out of my country, Monsieur Leveque,” al-Hafez said, using Scorpion’s cover identity, his eyes narrowing. “You have twenty-four hours. After that, bi ‘idni allah, you will never leave Syria. Not even as a corpse.”
T he night goggles cast a greenish glow over the trees and the wall and the guardhouse outside the gated estate. Scorpion studied the layout from his rental car down the street. Dr. Abadi’s compound was well protected, all right, he thought. In addition to the guardhouse by the gate and the razor wire atop the high concrete walls, he spotted a number of security cameras, wireless alarms, and motion detectors along the perimeter, and more no doubt were strategically located on the grounds and in the house. And he heard the barking of guard dogs from inside the walls.
He put the night goggles in his backpack. There wasn’t any choice. He’d have to go in. The question was how. Al-Hafez had kept his word about the tails. He’d been free of them all day. He’d been given twenty-four hours because al-Hafez wanted to distance Syria and the GSD from whatever the Islamic Resistance was planning. As for him tackling
Dr. Abadi’s compound, for al-Hafez it was a no-lose situation. The Syrian GSD and Mukhabarat were tied to the traditional Hezbollah leadership. From al-Hafez’s point of view, whether he killed Abadi or Abadi killed him, the director won.
Scorpion had spent the day making preparations. He’d rented a Renault Megane, a car they’d used to tail him, obviously popular with the GSD. At an Internet cafe, he’d posted what he learned from al-Hafez about the Islamic Resistance to the International Corn Association website. Enough to keep them scrambling and to keep Rabinowich happily digging through databases. In response to a cryptic coded post by Rabinowich, Scorpion indicated that so far as he could tell, al-Hafez was most likely telling the truth about no Syrian involvement in the Cairo bombing, but he would know more after tonight.
That afternoon, he had gone to a number of shops in Saida Zaynab, a slum district filled with refugees from Iraq where, for a price, you could buy anything or anyone. Later he’d mingled with the evening crowds in the lanes and shops blazing with light in the Souk al-Hamidiyeh, in the walled Old City next to the citadel, where he bought an inexpensive suit like the one his cover, Fawzi al-Diyala, would wear. He was prepared as he could be. If Abadi’s men captured him and he had to get out, he was counting on the Houdini trick, the one that had enabled the magician to make his famous escapes. But there was no way to stop the dryness in his mouth or his heart rate from going up. He knew there was a good chance he’d end the night as a headless corpse floating in the Barada River.
He’d made his choice that afternoon. Basically, there were only two ways in.
He could sneak in, deal with the perimeter guards, and tranquilize the guard dogs with Diazepam. As for the alarms, a preliminary drive-by earlier in the day convinced him that for such a large compound, they were likely using wireless alarms. Trying to eliminate alarms individually meant getting to the alarms or the controller without setting off motion detectors and other sensors that were probably all over the place, and then required someone who knew what he was doing to disconnect them. The system was almost certainly multichannel, so that the instant you disconnected one, the other channel would set off the alarm. But all wireless devices were based on RF technology, and a better way would be to disable them all at the same time with an electromagnetic pulse. All that required was a powerful enough transmitter-say a 2.4 GHz transmitter with a miniparabolic dish-and something to create an electromagnetic interference wave. An iPod playing Bruce Springsteen would do.
But the problem with breaking in was you never knew what you would run into. Sooner or later there would be a confrontation with other guards, and gunfire and police to deal with. And all that so at best he could briefly interrogate Abadi under pressure where the value of information from torture was always suspect. Anything you got from such interrogations was always a mixture of lies and half-truths, and that’s if you had time, and he had none.
The second way in was to make an appointment and try to talk himself in. As with what he had done with Kassem in Beirut, the real intelligence would come not from what was said, but how Abadi reacted afterward. Except they were not stupid, and his cover was thin, and if they started to question his cover, he might be the one screaming in a dark cellar trying to think of lies and half-truths they’d believe. From somewhere, a dog barked just once, and he realized his heart was pounding.
A car came down the street, its headlights carving the only light in the darkness except for a dim red glow from the interior of the guardhouse. As it passed, Scorpion started his rental car and drove it to the gate. A guard in olive-drab fatigues stepped out of the guardhouse. At the same instant, a second guard appeared on the other side of the car with a Chinese Type 95 assault rifle pointed at him. It looked brand new and very lethal.
“I have an appointment with Abu Faraj,” Scorpion said in Arabic, using Abadi’s cover name and showing the guard the GSD ID card that identified him as Fawzi al-Diyala. A bead of sweat trickled down his back. If al-Hafez had alerted Abadi, they would let him in and it would go bad very fast. The guard glanced at the card, then at his face, and nodded to the other guard.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” he said, pressing a button to open the gate and gesturing for him to drive in.
He drove around a circular driveway, a marble fountain splashing water in the middle of a lawn, and parked in front of the villa, bathed in white light from outside floodlights. As he got out of the Renault, he spotted a guard with a German shepherd patrolling beyond the floodlit area, and surveillance cameras on the side and roof of the villa. He walked up to the entrance, and three armed men appeared and asked him to take off his suit jacket. They checked the jacket and frisked him thoroughly, taking pistol from the holster at the small of his back. It was a Russian SR-1 Gyurza, standard issue for the Russian FSB and former allies like the Syrian GSD, which he had bought that afternoon in Saida Zaynab. When they were done, one of the guards took him inside and asked him to wait.
The foyer was marble and sleek, an interior designer’s dream. After a moment the double door to a living room opened and a paunchy middle-aged man with a goatee and wearing glasses came out. In the gap of the door just before Dr. Abadi closed it behind him, Scorpion caught a glimpse of a well-dressed woman and a young girl watching a big screen TV. He was glad he hadn’t come in shooting.
“Min fadlak, this way,” Dr. Abadi said. He led Scorpion into a small office, the walls covered with books. The guard who had taken his gun waited outside the door. “Would you like some juice? Turkish coffee?” the doctor asked, sliding a folder on the desk into a drawer.
Scorpion looked at the books on the walls. They were on medicine, mostly infectious diseases, anthropology, and Islamic studies.
“You come from Najah al-Hafez?” Scorpion didn’t answer. “So what does the Idarat al-Amn al-’Amm want at this hour?”
“Where’s the Palestinian?” Scorpion said.
“There are millions of Palestinians under brutal Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza,” Dr. Abadi replied.
“Just the one,” Scorpion said.
“Why is this of interest?”
“You know why! Do you take us for idiots? We’re having to deal with the Egyptian Mukhabarat now!” Scorpion shouted, standing up. Behind him, he heard the door open and the guard come rushing in. Dr. Abadi held up his hand to stop the man from attacking Scorpion. “You live here because we allow you to live here!” Scorpion continued.
“Because it is in your interest for me to be here,” Dr. Abadi said, signaling the guard to leave.
“Maybe after Cairo, it is not so much in our interest anymore,” Scorpion said, and sat down. “Where’s the Palestinian?”
“Not in Syria. Or Lebanon.”
“And therefore none of our business? Hardly. Tell me about him.”
“The Palestinians are a people oppressed. There is nothing else to know.”
“Trained in Iran?”
“Palestinians are not the only ones trained in Iran,” Dr. Abadi said, his meaning obvious. Syrian GSD and Mukhabarat officers often collaborated and trained with the Iranians. “Nor is Iran the only country sympathetic to the Resistance.”
“Is he in Europe?”
“What do you care? The Palestinian is an operative. Policy is decided here,” Dr. Abadi said, tapping his own chest. Just then his cell phone rang.
“As-salaam aleikum,” he said into the phone, then listened. He looked at Scorpion and said nothing. Scorpion began to get a bad feeling. He was about to move when Dr. Abadi pulled a gun from beneath the desk and pointed it at him. “Ahmed!” he called out, and the guard outside the door rushed in, saw what was happening, pointed his gun at Scorpion and shouted to the two other guards.
“Who are you?” Dr. Abadi demanded.
“You know who I am. Fawzi al-Diyala of the GSD. Director Najah al-Hafez sent me, as you were told,” Scorpion snapped.
Dr. Abadi shook his head. “One of my men is with al-Diyala at his apartment this minute. It seems he doesn
’t feel too well. Someone slipped a drug into his juice today. Are you a Jew? Mossad? BND? Who are you?” he asked.
“What do you care? Policy is decided elsewhere,” Scorpion said, his mind racing. Someone, not al-Hafez, had tipped Abadi off. An Islamic Resistance agent inside the GSD. Of course Abadi had suspected Mossad, but of all the intelligence services in the world, why had he mentioned the German BND? Did that mean the Palestinian was in Germany? Wherever he was, Scorpion realized, it didn’t look like the information was going to do him much good.
“Stupid. Whoever you are, even your jokes are stupid. Get rid of him,” Dr. Abadi said, pointing the gun with a two-handed stance at Scorpion. One of the guards pressed the muzzle of his gun against Scorpion’s head as a second guard started to tie his wrists with a plastic zip-tie. Once his hands were tied, they’d relax, figuring they had him, he thought, waiting till two of the guards pulled him roughly to his feet.
As they started to shove him out, he did a Brazilian back leg sweep, taking down the guard to his right, then turning close into the guard behind him, he butted him under the chin while grabbing the single-edge razor blade hidden in his hair, a trick Houdini had used in his famous paper bag escape, and used it to cut the plastic zip-tie. Then he pulled the guard he had butted into a low choke hold below the level of the desk, so Abadi couldn’t see to shoot, and slashed his carotid artery with the razor.
The first guard Scorpion had taken down now aimed his gun at him. He used a Krav Maga move, blocking with the hand, stepping out of the line of fire, twisting the guard’s wrist and taking the gun away, all in less than two seconds. He whirled and shot the third guard in the face, and then, still on his knees, fired through the desk, hitting Abadi in the stomach. Scorpion rolled away as Abadi fired into the desk, missing him. As the first guard started to pick up the gun, he shot him in the head.
He stood up then, as Dr. Abadi, pressing his forearm against his bleeding stomach, aimed his gun. Scorpion fired, the bullet going through Abadi’s hand into his stomach. Abadi cried out as he fired, his shot going wide. Scorpion fired again at his chest, killing him.
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