“Ma’alesh,” it’s okay, “things happen.” The Palestinian shrugged.
“Did you see anything?” Gabir whispered.
“La, I was on watch. Anyway, no one has suggested the captain’s death was anything other than natural. He was a sakran. Everyone knew it. You said so yourself.”
“Inshallah, that will be the end of it. This is becoming an unlucky ship,” Gabir said, touching the silver Hand of Fatima hanging on a chain around his neck. The Palestinian went back to work. He hoped what Gabir said about an unlucky ship wasn’t true. He was so close, and at that moment felt a sliver of dread that he didn’t have a haz sa’eed good luck charm that like Gabir he could touch too. He would need the luck. Once he was ready in Europe, he would have to go back to America.
Thirty hours later the Zaina berthed at the terminal port in Genoa. Officers of the polizia di stato and gray-uniformed guardia di finanza came aboard to examine the captain’s body in his quarters, while the dockside gantry cranes unloaded the containers marked for Genoa. As the Palestinian left the ship, he squinted in the sun, looking back at the bridge, but couldn’t see the first officer. The Italian inquiry must be keeping him busy, he thought as he went down the gangplank, unnoticed by anyone. There was no sign of the Camorra on the dock or terminal building, but the containers came through the Italian dogana with the crates stamped and unopened in a record six hours.
Less than a half hour later Moroccan seaman Hassan Lababi no longer existed. The Palestinian, without the Moroccan passport and seaman’s card he’d torn into pieces and flushed down a toilet in the terminal building, was now using an Algerian passport and Italian resident card that identified him as Mejdan Bonatello, a nod to the fact that many Algerians had Italian surnames dating from World War Two. He got into the first of two big Mercedes armored trucks bearing the logo of BANCA POPOLARE DI MILANO, into which the crates containing the uranium had been loaded. The other crates from Volgograd were loaded into the second truck: As he boarded the first truck, the Moroccan who had driven the van that picked him up that first day in Torino handed him an armored truck guard’s uniform and a gun.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Utrecht, Netherlands
It took Scorpion a critical day and a half that he could ill-afford to set up the Moroccan. By then he’d gotten the bad news from Harris. He’d spent the night in the BMW parked near a mosque in the Kanaleneiland neighborhood. It was a long shot, but now that the dwarf was dead, it was the only lead he had. There were at least a dozen mosques, masjids, and Islamic community centers in Utrecht. Any one of them might have been associated with the dead drops Tassouni had used.
Scorpion knew that while most Westerners, including many Dutch, tended to lump Muslims together, there was a lot of hostility between the different immigrant communities and they almost never mixed. Turks, for example, wouldn’t be caught dead in a Moroccan mosque, and vice versa. The dwarf had said the neighborhood of most of the drops was Maghrebi, North African, and that you could smell the cinnamon and cumin. That meant Moroccan, so he’d parked the BMW near a Moroccan mosque in Kanaleneiland that had a reputation for radicalism.
His target was the night security guard, whom he glimpsed once an hour on his rounds checking outside during the night, and otherwise as a shadow at a back window. He was a small man with a Vandyke beard, wearing an FC Utrecht football T-shirt under a worn leather jacket. If this mosque had a link to the Islamic Resistance in Damascus-a hell of a big if, Scorpion admitted to himself-the night guard wouldn’t be just anyone. He’d be a fanatic, prepared for a martyr’s death to protect whatever operational information they had. And you couldn’t just take him out. If this mosque were a link to the Palestinian, taking anyone out would set off an alarm that could trigger exactly what he was trying to prevent before he could get to it. The only way to do it was to flip the guard; what Koenig in his vaguely Catholic way used to call “conversion” or “getting the Joe to see the light.” And he only had a day to do it.
In the morning, when the mosque finally opened and the night shift was over, he tailed the Moroccan as he bicycled back to his apartment. He lived in an area of identical, anonymous apartment buildings, reminiscent of Eastern Europe. The Moroccan’s was dotted with TV satellite dishes, one for nearly every apartment. As he studied the building from the BMW, Scorpion made a call to a private detective agency in Amsterdam he’d found on the Internet. He gave the detective on the line the security guard’s description and address and, using a South African ID, hired him at a double rate to get all the information he could on the guard within eight hours.
Having earlier torn up and flushed the Crane passport and driver’s license down a public toilet at the Utrecht railroad station, his latest passport identified him as Damon McDonald, a lawyer from Johannesburg. Being an attorney, like being a journalist, was a good catchall profession, providing an instant cover explanation for poking into other people’s private affairs.
“You understand this is a legal matter,” he told the detective. “No one must know about your inquiry, especially the subject. No talking to neighbors, coworkers, anything like that. Strictly computer lookup and distance surveillance.”
“We understand,” the man replied. “In such cases, we typically act as a Belastingdienst tax agent, or sometimes we wear the uniform and go as the gas meter reader. It is quickly done. There are no questions and everything is normal.”
“I also want surveillance photographs. Wife, children, mistress, anyone he talks to. Anyone. Again, it must be long distance. He must not see or know anything or I pay nothing. Also, copies of identity papers and anything the government has on file, and a copy of a utility bill, something that shows residence. And no reports, nothing. You tell me everything verbally and give me all your notes and photographs when we meet and then forget it. You hand me the photographs personally along with the memory drive and I pay in cash.”
“It is understood, meneer.”
Scorpion drove to a nondescript business hotel near the Utrecht Central Station and caught a few hours of sleep. Later, he rented a furnished two-bedroom apartment near the Nieuwegracht Canal for a week and checked out De Rode Brug, the local red light street, prostitutes sitting in the windows of a line of houseboats tethered along the canal bank. The women seemed tired and ordinary. He didn’t see what he was looking for and it was past time that he needed to get on the Internet so he headed to the university. After stopping a few students and asking around, he found a combination Laundromat/Internet cafe near the campus.
He sat at a laptop facing the wall, surrounded by students doing laundry, drinking coffee and chatting, checking Facebook and playing video games on the Internet, the hum of the washing machines and dryers drowning out the conversations and noises from the video games. Even before he logged onto the International Corn Association site, he went looking for a beautiful woman online. There were two problems. Utrecht didn’t have any high quality escort services, so he would have to get a woman from Amsterdam, and there was no way of knowing what type of woman the Moroccan might be attracted to. He guessed that a beautiful Dutch blonde might be something the working-class Moroccan might have fantasized about without ever having had a chance at one.
He found a knockout-looking twenty-two-year-old blonde named Anika on an escort service website and booked her online for an entire day in Utrecht. He texted to set it up, and texting back, she assured him the photograph of her on the site was only about six months old. He arranged to meet her at the Grand Hotel Karel in the center of Utrecht, then logged onto the International Corn Association site, where he got the message mentioning the code word Venice and a coded Amsterdam phone number. There was no indication what had broken loose, but he assumed that Peters, the CIA’s Netherlands station chief, would know.
Following the emergency procedure, he left the BMW where he’d parked it in a structure near the train station and rented a Kawasaki motorcycle for easy street parking and in case he had to make a getaway through tra
ffic. The fact that they were trying to reach him with a Venice code meant it wasn’t about Amsterdam or the dwarf or the girl. Something urgent had happened or was about to blow up in their faces. As always, he cleaned the temp files and rebooted before leaving the Internet cafe computer, to make sure he left no trail.
Scorpion got to the RDV, one of the pubs on the Oudegracht Canal’s lower embankment, an hour ahead of time, and it was a good thing he did because when Peters arrived-he assumed the American in a tweed jacket and wearing glasses sitting at a canalside table was the Netherlands station chief-he was dirty. Watching from a table next to a tree at a cafe on the upper level on the other side of the canal, Scorpion spotted an Arab in a windbreaker on the street above the canal spending a long time leaning against a railing and reading a newspaper. Another Arab, a big one in a raincoat, even though it wasn’t raining, had climbed into the back of a dry cleaner’s van parked nearby a half hour earlier and hadn’t come out, and on Scorpion’s side of the canal, still another Arab spent a lot of time glancing over at Peters and talking on his cell phone. Worse, Peters didn’t seem to realize he was covered. The American sat at the table, nursing a beer and glancing at his watch.
Langley rules were that if a contact at an RDV was dirty, you aborted and rescheduled. But Langley rules weren’t meant for a Venice alert and when time was running out on a mission. Finally, forty minutes after the set time, Peters realized Scorpion wasn’t coming. The American got up and went up the stairs to the street level beside the canal. Scorpion tossed some euro coins on the table, went back to where he’d left the motorcycle parked perpendicularly between two cars and drove across the bridge over the canal. He waited till Peters got into an Audi parked nearby and started down the one-way street toward Domplein Square. The Audi was followed by the dry cleaner’s van, two cars behind, and just ahead of the Audi a Mercedes was driven by the Arab with the windbreaker. Scorpion, trailing this caravan on the Kawasaki, could see that Peters was boxed in, and he apparently didn’t know it. It was a complete screw-up. The only good thing was that in his motorcycle helmet and sunglasses, he would be hard to recognize, he thought, gauging the traffic as he got ready to make his move.
When the traffic light ahead turned yellow, Scorpion hit the accelerator. He drove between lanes of traffic, past the van, and moving alongside the Audi, signaled with a circular motion for Peters to roll down his window. Scorpion glanced at his side mirror. He had their attention, all right, but for the moment they were waiting to see what happened. He didn’t see any guns. He stopped with the rest of the traffic as the light turned red, his motorcycle beside the Audi.
“Get out of the car,” he shouted at Peters.
“Have you been to Venice?” Peters asked.
“Climb on in back of me,” Scorpion said, watching the van in the mirror. It looked like the back door was opening.
“What about my car? I can’t just leave it.”
“Get out of the fucking car!” Scorpion shouted. The big Arab had gotten out of the back of the van and started toward them. Peters fumbled, then opened the door and climbed onto the motorcycle behind Scorpion. The second he felt Peters’s weight on the bike, he put it into gear, turning in front of the Audi just as the light changed green.
Scorpion drove up onto the sidewalk, heading back in the opposite direction of the one-way traffic, moving slowly enough to dodge pedestrians and not looking at the van, so the Arabs wouldn’t get a glimpse of his face as he passed it going the other way. The big Arab had changed direction and was running on foot through the honking traffic, shouting after them as Scorpion swerved back into the street against the traffic. He cut a car off, accelerating fast as he drove between the lanes, then cut across the next bridge over the canal to the other side, his tires skidding on the pavement as he twisted and turned. He drove down side streets, doubling back again and again to make sure they weren’t being followed.
“What about the car? They’ll trace it back to me,” Peters said loudly over the roar of the motorcycle.
“Get a new car. They already know who you are. Why the hell do you think they were there?”
“This isn’t how we do things,” Peters said. “I’m going to write you up and put it in your 201.”
“Would you like me to tell you where you can stick my 201?”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” Peters said, and Scorpion felt the man stiffen behind him on the bike.
“I just did. Now do us both a favor and shut up,” Scorpion shouted back over his shoulder. He swerved suddenly, making Peters hang on, then drove past the hospital and into the green open spaces of Wilhelmina Park. He parked the motorcycle in the lot between two cars and waited till they walked across the grass to a pond in a big open area, checking around to make sure no one was paying attention to them or could hear them.
“You’re crazy, you know that?” Peters began. “You left behind a mess in Amsterdam we’re still cleaning up and-” The station chief stopped when he caught a glimpse of the icy look in Scorpion’s gray eyes.
“You came dirty to a Special Access Crit RDV, you stupid son of a bitch. Tell me about Venice, or your career and this conversation are both over,” Scorpion said.
Neither man spoke for a while. They could hear the sound of two Dutch students chatting as they bicycled past on the bike path. They waited till the bicycles were well away.
“Listen,” Peters said, handing Scorpion an iPod with an earpiece.
Scorpion turned it on and immediately recognized Dave Rabinowich’s voice.
“Wait, let me turn this damn thing on — oh yeah,” Rabinowich began. “Eight years ago a floater from the Motherland,” meaning an occasional source from Russia, “gave us a song and dance about how the old Soviet bio warfare lab on Vozrozhdeniya Island had created a form of the Yersinia pestis plague bacteria that could be disseminated via an aerosol spray. We followed up with the usual suspects but were never able to confirm. NRO satellite intel indicated that whatever facility was on the island had been closed and the whole thing got filed away in the ‘things we should worry about if we didn’t have so many other worse things to worry about file.’ Then last year, a sleeper — and that’s all I’m gonna say about that — woke us up with the news that while the facility in Uzbekistan may have gone the way of the dodo, fun and games in biology hadn’t and certain parties unknown in the FSU were looking for a buyer. But that’s not the bad news.”
Rabinowich’s voice got lower and more confidential, and Scorpion involuntarily looked around the park to see if anyone was watching, but there was no one except a few small children and their mothers heading toward the playground area.
“Our sleepy amigo,” Rabinowich continued, “dropped a bombshell that even woke up the assholes who run this place. It seems our vodka-loving friends had a version of the bacillus that was not only airborne transmittable, but resistant to virtually every antibiotic known, including every member of the streptomycin, gentamicin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline families. Now we were nervous, but again we couldn’t confirm until Damascus. Kudos to you for that one. I finally got our old buddy Bob to okay me telling you. You need to know what you’re up against. Oh — and I know you’ll do it anyway, but I’m supposed to remind you to delete this as soon as you’ve heard it.”
So that was what Harris hadn’t wanted to tell him in Karachi, Scorpion thought as he deleted the iPod file. It wasn’t just the Budawi assassination that had the DCIA’s drawers in a knot. It was the possibility that Hezbollah had been the buyer the Russian sleeper was talking about. No wonder Harris had come all the way to Karachi to rope him in. Except, he thought, there was something wrong. This was background data. It explained a lot, including the urgency, but it wasn’t an operational emergency. It would never have been the reason for a Venice signal. He handed the iPod back to Peters, who slipped it hurriedly into his pocket as though it were contaminated.
“Harris risked the operation for this meeting,” Scorpion said. “We probably ha
ve Hezbollah agents combing the city right this second looking for both of us. What is it you haven’t told me?”
“We received a Special Access CRITIC from Harris. He was in Tallinn,” Peters said.
Again Russia, Scorpion thought grimly. Since the end of the Cold War, Tallinn had become spy central for trading information outside Moscow, so like the bioweapon, it undoubtedly involved the Russians.
“What was he doing in Estonia?”
“To meet with Checkmate.”
“Ivanov himself.” Scorpion whistled silently. Checkmate was the code name for Vladimir Ivanov, head of the FSB’s Counterintelligence Directorate and a legendary spymaster. “What brought that about?”
“Rabinowich found something. An NSA thread. Some MOD colonel from some shithole called Mayak got a promotion to Moscow. Two weeks later Checkmate picks him up and takes him to Adult’s World.”
“So why Venice?” Scorpion asked, his thoughts racing. MOD was the Russian internal security agency for atomic weapons. Although he wasn’t sure if Peters had connected the dots, Mayak was the Russian cover name for the city of Ozersk. The whole oblast around the city of Ekaterinburg in Russia was filled with atomic labs and atomic weapons facilities and stockpiles, but Ozersk was the bull’s-eye, the dead center of the Russian atomic universe. “Adult’s World” was CIA-speak for Lubyanka, FSB headquarters in Moscow, so-called with a touch of spook humor because it stood across the way from a famous Moscow toy store called “Children’s World.” If Ivanov had arrested this MOD colonel from Ozersk, it could mean there was a serious security breach. They wouldn’t have interrupted his operation unless there was a connection. “Come on, Peters. What does Harris want to tell me?”
“Checkmate told him they’re missing twenty-one kilos of highly enriched U-235.”
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