Scorpion Betrayal s-1

by Andrew Kaplan

  “Still, he is not Signor Superman, your Palestino. He made a mistake this time. You know what he looks like, you know when he is coming and where, and now you know something more. You find la donna inglese, you will find your Palestino.”

  “That had occurred to me,” Scorpion said. In fact, after leaving the television studio he went from one student hostel and cheap hotel to another, checking out places where the demonstrators tended to stay. By late afternoon a fifty euro note had convinced a desk clerk at a hotel near the Stazione Termini to admit that la donna inglese might be staying there with her ragazzo, a long-haired Italian student. From the photograph taken at the demonstration that Scorpion had printed at the Internet cafe, the clerk identified the other Englishwoman as a friend who sometimes came to see her. Scorpion decided to go back and stake out the hotel as soon as he left Moretti.

  “You know what he looks like, don’t you?” Moretti said. “You have a photograph? Perhaps we should alert the Polizia di Stato and the Carabinieri. This becomes a simple security matter.”

  “Or let the DIA handle it? They won’t stop him, and if you get close, he doesn’t have to be near the bomb and whatever else he has planned. He just presses ‘Send’ on a cell phone and arrivederci. I have to get to him first.”

  “You look tired,” Moretti said, studying the man across from him, Scorpion’s eyes were shadowed, a two-day stubble on his face. He wore jeans and a black SAVE THE WHALE T-shirt under a jacket, presumably to blend in with the demonstrators. It wasn’t a pretty-boy face, but his eyes, gray like the sea, and his look, like a wolf that never stopped moving, must attract women like crazy, Moretti thought. “What will you do when this is over?”

  “Sleep. For at least a week.” Scorpion grinned. “Preferably someplace where I can hear the sound of water on sand.”

  “You go back to America?” And when Scorpion shook his head, “You should come to Italy. Only Italians know how to live.”

  “Why? Do you have an apartment you want to rent?”

  “No!” Moretti laughed. “But a place for you, we can always find. I have to go,” he said, putting his napkin down.

  “Family?”

  “I have that also. Three bambini,” he said, holding up three fingers. “No, I have a mistress. Blond, sexy,” using his hands to portray her breasts, “but, Dio mio, she is crazy! Women, when they love you, they go a little bit crazy, you know? But so bella,” he sighed, getting up.

  “You’re right. Maybe I should live in Italy,” Scorpion said, tossing money on the table and also getting up.

  “I look forward to our next encounter, il mio amico. Good luck. In bocca al lupo,” Moretti said, shaking his hand.

  “And may the wolf die,” Scorpion replied.

  Moretti started to walk away, then turned back.

  “By the way,” he said, “the capitano of the ship Zaina. He died of asphyxiation, but is curious.”

  “In what way?”

  “He had enough Demerol in the body to kill him ten times over, even without all the whiskey he drink. There are Demerol pills next to bed, but no pills in stomach. Yes, and there is an injection place with trace residue of Demerol between his toes.”

  “So someone shot him full of Demerol and smothered him when the injection started to wake him up,” Scorpion said.

  “That is also what the coroner said. He ruled it a omicidio. We will talk again soon. Ciao,” Moretti said, and gestured goodbye.

  Scorpion watched him walk toward the Piazza Navona and disappear into the crowd. Then he went to a Vodafone store on the Via del Corso that he knew was open late, bought two new cell phones and SIM cards, and used one to text Rabinowich.

  Venice V Cross cousins hot bath pickup. nose HA. Scorpion used Venice to indicate that it was urgent. He knew Rabinowich would recognize that he was talking about immediately notifying the “V Cross cousins,” MI6, whose headquarters were at Vauxhall Cross in London, which Harris had once called “the worst intersection in Europe, in every conceivable way,” to pick up someone who had flown into Heathrow, located on Bath Road. It was “hot” that MI6 interrogate Liz’s friend, whose name he had discovered-from the hotel registry, thanks to the clerk-was Alicia Faring, and grill her because she “nose” HA: Hearing Aid. The Palestinian’s girlfriend might’ve let something drop to Alicia, perhaps a hint about where the Palestinian was staying in Rome or where in Italy, if not Rome, he had gone after leaving Genoa.

  Hoo? Rabinowich asked. Scorpion needed to use the quick and dirty Vigenere cipher they had agreed upon in Castelnuovo, employing the keyword YANKES with only one E, because Dave was a lifelong New York Yankees fan. The advantage of the Vigenere cipher was that it was impervious to frequency analysis, which made it hard to break without the keyword, and you didn’t need a computer or anything fancy. You could draw the Vigenere Square anywhere and destroy it when you were finished. Scorpion did it on a piece of toilet paper in a stall of the men’s room in the Vodafone store. ylvmmsdaesry he texted to Rabinowich, to indicate Alicia Faring.

  Friends in blk house looking 360 4 mrvyr, Rabinowich typed.

  Scorpion assumed that the “friends” in the black house referred to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Using the Vigenere Square with the keyword YANKES, he translated mrvyr to mean Orion. The message meant that the NSA was monitoring all communications, 360 degrees worldwide, for any reference in any language to the constellation Orion, aka al Jabbar.

  Scorpion ended the call and tore up and flushed the paper with the Vigenere Square down the toilet. He caught a taxi on the Corso and took it back to the hotel near the Stazione Termini. After slipping another twenty euros to the clerk, he camped out on the lobby couch, to all appearances just another backpacker making do.

  At just past five-thirty in the morning, the sky still dark, while pretending to be asleep, his arm over his eyes to help obscure his face, he saw the attractive female friend of the Englishwoman, Alicia, from the video enter the hotel and go up in the elevator. Later that morning, as he watched from across the street, the sky bright and promising heat, he saw the three of them-the Englishwoman, Alicia, the female friend, and a boyfriend-come out of the hotel with their wheeled luggage.

  He followed them to the Stazione Termini, where he was stunned to see Hassani, the Palestinian himself, come up and join them. Scorpion reached into the backpack where he kept the SIG Sauer 9mm that Harris had given him at Castelnuovo. Do it now! he told himself. He’d never get a better chance. At this distance it was almost impossible to miss, and if any of the others got in the way, it didn’t matter. They were obviously co-conspirators. He took a deep breath to lower his heart rate as his hand closed on the gun. Then he hesitated. Even if he killed Hassani, that would still leave the bomb, with no way to find it and maybe a time mechanism or someone else to set it off. His sense of the Palestinian was that he left little to chance, always arranged a backup. He realized he couldn’t do it, not yet, and let go of the 9mm in the backpack with reluctance, wondering if he wasn’t making a fatal error.

  The Palestinian and the woman got into a taxi outside the station. Scorpion followed in another taxi, telling the driver not to get too close, “non troppo vicino,” but not to lose them in the traffic on the Via Cavour. Although the Palestinian might not have recalled seeing him at the train station, if he saw him again, it would click.

  Knowing he had to alter his appearance, Scorpion offered the driver an extra thirty euros to trade shirts, exchanging his SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt for a checked cotton shirt that he wore unbuttoned and outside his pants on the theory that he wanted anyone, at first glance, to look at the shirt instead of his face. The taxi ahead dropped the Palestinian and the woman off near the market stalls in the Campo dei Fiori. He told his driver to stop, and waited till he saw them head into an apartment building bordering the piazza.

  He paid the driver, who was now wearing his former T-shirt and, using the canvas-topped stalls for cover, slipped through the aisles between the market stalls toward t
he apartment building. He double-checked to make sure the Palestinian didn’t have someone covering his back, then studied the building before stepping out from under the cover of the stalls. He could see no surveillance. He tried the building’s front door. It was locked, but it only took a few seconds with a credit card to open it and step into the hallway, dim despite a shaft of sunlight from a window above the door. The floors were tiled and there was a faded wallpaper mural of the Roman countryside on the entryway wall. He looked around, pulled his gun out of the backpack and clicked off the safety.

  There was an old narrow elevator and wooden stairs, and after listening intently and hearing nothing, he began to quietly climb the stairs, pausing at each landing to do a complete 360 up and down. He stopped at each apartment and pressed his ear to the door to listen. Nearly all of the apartments were silent, except one where he heard a television tuned to what sounded like an Italian game show. A smell of chicken cacciatore came from the apartment, and he thought whatever else the Palestinian had come there to do, it wasn’t cooking. He moved on to the next floor.

  He stood outside an apartment on the third floor, his ear pressed to the door, when he heard a floorboard creak just on the other side. Someone was listening to him! He tried to make his breathing shallow and slow, leaning slowly back toward the doorjamb in case whoever it was fired through the door. He considered whether he should fire first, through the door, but it might not hit the target and it could be some innocent person, probably old, thinking a stranger had come to rob the apartment. Then he heard someone move inside and a sound like a slap. A woman gasped, and the gasp was cut off. The door looked solid, of heavy wood, perhaps oak, and he couldn’t tell whether it had been rigged like the one in Amsterdam. It was too risky. He backed away carefully, went to the door of the next apartment and knocked softly, his gun ready to fire.

  “Gli ufficio postale, signora,” Scorpion said to the closed door in his best Italian. “Gli ho una lettera per expresso per voi.” I have a special delivery letter for you. He didn’t wait for a response, but tried to open the door with a credit card, and when that didn’t work, used his universal key to open it. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him as softly as he could.

  The foyer had the dusty silence of an empty apartment, but Scorpion moved silently from room to room, richly furnished with antiques and old paintings, just to make sure. From the living room window, he looked down and saw the canvas tops of the market stalls clustered around the statue of Giordano Bruno in the piazza. He went to the kitchen, picked up a glass and went back to the foyer. Placing the glass against the common wall with the apartment next door, he pressed his ear against the bottom of it. He heard the sound of a man talking and moving things, like he was working, but no other sounds. He had to see what was happening inside that apartment.

  Scorpion opened his backpack and removed his Leatherman tool. He got a chair from the dining room and found a place high up on the wall that would allow him a good view of the other apartment and wouldn’t be spotted unless someone happened to be looking for it. Then, with the Leatherman, he hand-drilled a tiny hole in the wall, making almost no noise, stopping from time to time to listen with the glass to the sounds next door. When he saw the light from the next apartment in the hole, he got a peephole scope from the backpack and fit it into the hole he’d just drilled.

  Through the scope he saw the Palestinian finish rigging explosives around the woman, who was gagged with a tape across her mouth and tied to a chair in the middle of the room. She was moving in the chair, shaking her head, and he went over, slapped her in the face and said something Scorpion couldn’t make out. Abruptly, the Palestinian stopped. He looked around, listening intently, a gun in his hand. Scorpion froze, his heart pounding as the Palestinian moved toward the peephole. Scorpion got ready to fire through the wall when he heard what the Palestinian had heard. Someone was coming down the hall toward one of the two apartments.

  He barely had time to see the Palestinian head toward the apartment door, out of the peripheral view of the peephole scope. He got down from the chair as quickly and quietly as he could, stood beside the apartment door as the key turned in the lock. The door opened and a middle-aged woman carrying a fishnet shopping bag walked in. Scorpion grabbed her from behind, his hand tightly over her mouth.

  “Non una parola!” Not a word, he hissed in his bad Italian into her ear as she dropped the shopping bag with a clunk that had to have alerted the Palestinian. The woman squirmed and tried to struggle against him, but he held her tight. He put his gun to her head, making sure she saw it. Her eyes were wide with fear. He gestured with the gun toward the sofa. “Non parli,” he whispered, putting his finger to his lips, all the while straining to hear what was happening next door.

  Suddenly, he heard the other apartment door open and close, and by the time he got to the door to look out, he heard the elevator door down the hall closing. He ran back to the chair, stepped up and looked into the peephole scope. The woman was still tied up, but the Palestinian was gone.

  Having no time, he knew he had to make an instantaneous choice: the life of the woman next door or his only chance at stopping the Palestinian.

  Grabbing his backpack, Scorpion told the woman on the sofa, “You have to leave. Esca della casa. Telefono per la polizia!”

  “Get out my apartment,” she said in English.

  He couldn’t wait any longer. He ran out of the apartment and raced down the stairs, leaping down almost an entire landing. Coming to the entrance hall, he tore open the front door and was almost blinded by the bright sunlight in the crowded piazza. He saw the Palestinian point a gun at a taxi driver and haul the driver out, then get in and drive off in the taxi.

  Scorpion looked around. Next to a flower stall he saw a Vespa motor scooter chained to a lamppost. At this hour in Rome traffic, he might get through faster with the Vespa than a car. It only took a few seconds with the universal key and tapping with his Leatherman pliers to open the chain lock and the steering column lock and start the scooter. He roared off after the Palestinian as a man from one of the stalls ran after him, screaming, “Arresto! Ladro!”

  He could see the Palestinian’s taxi ahead, weaving around cars into the opposing traffic lanes and back, while he just managed to keep up on the cobblestone streets. He raced between lanes of traffic, slipping past cars by inches and going up on the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians as he raced after the taxi, trying to keep it in sight and not get it confused with other Roman taxis, all of them painted white.

  Approaching a red traffic light ahead, the Palestinian suddenly looked back, stuck out his arm and fired a shot at Scorpion that tore a spiderweb hole in a car window next to him, the driver of the car staring wide-eyed at it, too stunned to move. Scorpion hunched lower over the handlebars and drove even faster, squeezing between a van and a Fiat with less than an inch to spare on either side. The Palestinian’s taxi slowed at the red light, then sped up, darting into the intersection, then swerved to just miss a car. As the driver screamed and shook his fist, the taxi swerved again to avoid another car from the opposite direction and roared past the intersection.

  Scorpion followed, trying to calculate which way the Palestinian was heading. He darted into the same intersection, cars screeching around him, people shouting and cursing, and then he was through and realized that the taxi was headed toward the Tiber River. He had to decide: Would the Palestinian try to go against the one-way traffic or cross over to Trastevere?

  Against the traffic, he decided, based only on his sense of his adversary. Scorpion swerved up onto the sidewalk and down a stone stairway to an alley that brought him to the Tebaldi Road along the riverbank. He thrilled to see he had guessed right. He was just fifty feet or so behind the Palestinian’s taxi, which was going against the one-way traffic, cars screeching to a halt and drivers gesticulating furiously. The taxi ran up onto the walkway along the Tiber, heading toward the Garibaldi Bridge. A woman walking with a little boy didn’t see
the taxi coming up fast behind them. At the last second she turned and screamed. The taxi cut back into a gap in the traffic, then bounced back onto the walkway, still charging at pedestrians who had to leap out of the way.

  Scorpion raced on the walkway to stay with the taxi, his tires skidding as he whipped around the woman and the child who stared wide-eyed at him. The Palestinian glanced back and fired again, Scorpion swerving the Vespa to the side then back. The taxi had gone past the bridge, so the Palestinian was staying on this side of the river, Scorpion realized as they raced past Tiverina Island. Then a truck passed, blocking the view, and the Palestinian swerved back into and across the traffic lanes, heading up the Aventine hill.

  Scorpion had to gear down and rev up on the incline, cutting into the opposing traffic lane to keep up. An Alfa Romeo was headed straight at him. He saw the driver blink in horror, the car’s brakes screeching as Scorpion just raced past, the Alfa’s bumper nearly grazing him. He could see the taxi pulling ahead as it raced around the Circus Maximus. Instead of going around, Scorpion drove past the barrier, the Vespa slowing on the green turf as he rode in a direct line across the open field to intercept the Palestinian. He got his 9mm ready to fire, holding the gun on the handlebar.

  The Palestinian’s taxi weaved through heavy traffic, scraping other cars and cutting into the opposite lane to get around a car in front of him before dodging back onto his side of the road. Now Scorpion could see the Coliseum ahead. The Palestinian was heading directly at a giant tour bus that was turning off the street toward the parking area for Coliseum tours. Suddenly, the Palestinian turned and slowed so he was directly across from the bus driver, who looked down at the taxi, startled. The Palestinian fired through the passenger window, hitting the driver in the head, killing him instantly. The bus lurched forward and slammed into a car, crushing it and completely blocking the street.