Scorpion Deception s-4

by Andrew Kaplan

  “I was contacted through an intermediary-can’t reveal who-from the Iranian Embassy.”

  “What’s their address?”

  “Thunstrasse 68 in Bern.”

  “Shoma dar Iran al-e koja hastid?” Scorpion asked. Where in Iran are you from?

  “I was born in the States-” Apple-cake began.

  “Are you out of your mind?!” Scorpion snapped. This guy was pathetic, like a bad American Idol audition. He took a breath. “Look, where were your parents-your real parents-from?”

  “Northern Tehran.”

  “Where? What district?”

  “Elahieh.”

  Scorpion studied him out of the corner of his eye. Before the Iranian Revolution, Elahieh had been a Jewish neighborhood.

  “You’re Jewish, right?” he asked. “Your parents fled when the shah fell?”

  Apple-cake looked taken aback. He nodded.

  “What street did they live on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s before I was born.”

  “All right, listen. Your parents still live in Elahieh, in a fancy high rise on Farzin Street, a block from Fereshteh Street. Everybody in Tehran knows Fereshteh Street. The Jews are long gone. It’s all high rises now, very expensive. If he ever asks, it’ll impress the shit out of him. And for God’s sakes, you’re not Jewish, understood?”

  “Yes,” Apple-cake said, suddenly deadly serious.

  Scorpion exhaled. “Look. Here’s the key: you’re his friend, his best dust. You want to help. As an avocat suisse, a good Swiss lawyer and fellow Iranian, you are outraged at this violation of Swiss neutrality and at the NDB sucking at the CIA’s teat. Be indignant. Cite Articles 173 and 185 of the Swiss Federal Constitution on Switzerland’s neutrality to him and anybody who’ll listen. Understood?”

  Apple-cake nodded.

  “And most important-and this is absolutely critical-don’t ask him any questions. That’s key to this movie,” he added, using the intelligence term to describe the creation of a scenario that was presented as real to a mark but in fact wasn’t. “Remember, we don’t want or need any information from him. We just want him to think we do. You’re on his side, his avocat. That’s it. At most, at the absolute most, you can ask him at the end if there’s anything he knows or might have done that you as his lawyer should know about in case it comes up.”

  “If he says, no. .?” Apple-cake asked.

  “Good. You’re happy,” Scorpion said.

  “And if he says, yes. .?”

  “Don’t say a word. Just listen. Remember, he’s not a joe. He’s a client-and a fellow countryman in a place where you’re surrounded by infidels and the walls have ears. You’re his lawyer. Period. And a loyal supporter of the Iranian government and the Supreme Leader. You’re a baradar of the Revolutionary Guards and a good Shiite Muslim, and you don’t know what this is about. That’s who you are,” Scorpion concluded, pulling into the parking lot for the office building on Winterthurerstrasse, where, if everything was going according to plan, they were currently putting Norouzi through what was politely called in CIA-speak “enhanced interrogation.”

  “He doesn’t speak French or German?” Schwegler said. They were in the bare office-just two chairs and a table, the windows shuttered and locked-that they would use for Homer to meet with Apple-cake. “Sheisse,” he muttered. Shit.

  “And his suit looks like sheisse too,” Scorpion grimaced. “I sent Chrissie to get him something decent on Bahnhofstrasse.”

  “What’ll we do about the language?”

  “They’ll talk Farsi. The Gnomes will set him up with an ear receiver. I’ll be on a microphone in case he needs French or I have to tell him what to do.”

  “We’ll use Dieter and Marco as the guards,” Schwegler said. “Only German speakers.”

  “How’s Homer doing?”

  “Not bad. They beat him up; nothing that shows. Some really good smacks with a rubber baton in the testicles. He’ll walk funny for a while. Stress positions. No food, water. Blasting Eurotrash music on earphones so he can’t think. Naked. Always in the hood, so he can see nothing; no sense of time. They’re waterboarding him now.”

  “Said anything of interest?”

  “Claims to be innocent. Knows nothing. Demands to be able to call his office. He’s good,” Schwegler said with a touch of admiration.

  “Cell phones?”

  “He had two: a prepaid and an iPhone. The Gnomes are working on them now.”

  Scorpion turned the laptop to the hidden camera in the basement room where they were interrogating Norouzi, his head covered by the black hood, hands tied behind his back.

  With a flick of his wrist, one of Schwegler’s men, Dieter, smacked Norouzi’s groin hard with a truncheon.

  “Sprechen Sie, du Stuck Scheisse!” Dieter shouted. Talk, you piece of shit!

  “Ich weiss gar nichts,” Norouzi gasped, his voice muffled by the hood. I don’t know anything.

  There was a knock at the door. Scorpion shut the laptop as Chrissie came in. She was holding an expensive men’s blue suit and a shirt and tie on hangers, and carrying a shopping bag from Weinberg’s on Bahnhofstrasse.

  “What do you think?” she said. “The suit’s a Zilli. Isn’t it gorgeous?” wrinkling her nose. “The tie is Burberry.”

  “Looks good. Thanks,” Scorpion told her, waving her away.

  “Don’t thank me. I wish I could dress men in expensive clothes all the time. It’s the sexiest thing on the planet,” she said, flashing her perfect teeth as she left.

  They watched her go.

  “At least someone’s happy,” Schwegler said.

  “So long as it’s not Homer,” Scorpion said.

  Eleven hours later, at four in the morning, they brought Homer/Norouzi into the room. He was shackled and the hood was still on his head. They had put his shirt and trousers back on but his feet were still bare, and after hours of interrogation they had to support him to keep him upright as they sat him in the chair and ran a chain from his shackles through an eye bolt on the floor. Schwegler’s men, Dieter and Marco, checked the room one last time to make sure there was nothing that could be used by Norouzi to orient himself as to who was holding him, what time it was, or where he was. The one window was shuttered and locked; the security cameras were in place.

  Watching from an office two offices away on laptops showing multiple security camera views of the room were Scorpion, Schwegler, Apple-cake, and the Gnomes. Scorpion turned to Schwegler.

  “How long does he think he’s been here?” Scorpion asked. He wore earphones and a microphone set to transmit to an invisible earpiece in Apple-cake’s ear. Apple-cake stood next to him, nervously tapping his hand on his thigh.

  “Two days. He asked how many days he’s been here. Of course, they hit him for asking,” Schwegler whispered, even though they had soundproofed the office.

  On the screen, they watched Marco leave the room. Dieter was alone with Norouzi. They watched as Dieter removed Norouzi’s hood.

  “Ihr Buro muss jemand kontaktiert haben.” Your office must have contacted someone, Dieter said, going to the door. “Your lawyer is here.”

  Scorpion tapped Apple-cake’s arm.

  “You’re up,” he said. He heard Apple-cake take a deep breath, hesitate for a second, then leave. He watched him walk into the office next door on the monitor, Dieter opening the door for him and then closing it, leaving the two of them, Apple-cake and Norouzi, alone. Apple-cake, looking surprisingly sharp in his new suit, sat across from Norouzi. Around him, Scorpion felt everyone hold their breath.

  “Hooshang Norouzi agha, esm-e man Hamid Baveghli ast,” Apple-cake said, sitting down at the table, saying in Farsi, Mr. Hooshang Norouzi, my name is Hamid Baveghli. “I’m a lawyer. I was contacted by the Iranian Embassy. They are concerned. Are you all right?”

  Norouzi looked at him. Despite being the worse for wear, his hair disheveled and needing a shave, his eyes were clear.

  “Where am I?
” he asked in Farsi.

  “You’re in an office in District 12,” Apple-cake said. He glanced around and leaned closer. “I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to tell you. My main concern is getting you out,” he whispered.

  “Who’s holding me?” Norouzi asked.

  On the laptop screen, Apple-cake looked blank. Christ, Scorpion thought. Apple-cake swallowed; a deer in the headlights.

  “You don’t know,” Scorpion whispered into the microphone in Farsi. “But it’s not the cantonale. Your office checked.”

  Apple-cake repeated what Scorpion had said in Farsi, using the French phrase for the canton police. Norouzi stared at him, his face tight.

  “Who’s holding me?” he repeated.

  Apple-cake leaned forward conspiratorially.

  “No one’s talking. But we suspect the NDB, the Swiss intelligence service. What did they want?”

  “What the goh is this?” Norouzi growled suspiciously. “Who are you? What company did you say you were from?”

  Apple-cake straightened up as if he’d been slapped.

  “I told you, Norouzi agha. My name is Hamid Baveghli. I’m a lawyer with the law firm Spalding and Cellini, SA of Gen-” Shit, Scorpion thought, thinking he was going to say Geneva. But Apple-cake caught himself: “-neve.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Apple-cake started, looking around and leaning forward to whisper as Scorpion scrambled to open another window on his laptop and pull up the relevant Swiss legal section. He whispered it into the microphone. “We had to file a writ of habeas corpus under Title 2, Article 31 of the Swiss Federal Constitution. We had to call in favors to find you.”

  Apple-cake ad-libbed what he’d been told in Farsi, and Scorpion thought, Good. Finally, he’s actually thinking.

  “Do you have any idea why they brought you in?” Apple-cake asked.

  “The attack on the American embassy,” Norouzi said. “They think I know something.”

  Apple-cake nodded. “No wonder all the secrecy. Any idea why they thought you might know something?”

  “I know nothing. I had nothing to do with it. I told them,” Norouzi said, staring at him without expression.

  “Of course. It’s because we’re Muslims, jenab Norouzi agha,” Apple-cake said sympathetically, using the honorific, jenab. “I’ll bet it’s not just the NDB,” he whispered, implying the CIA might be behind it.

  Scorpion nudged Schwegler.

  “Your cue,” he murmured.

  Schwegler nodded and took an official-looking writ out of his suit jacket pocket. He went into the next room followed by Dieter and Marco, who carried the rest of Norouzi’s clothes.

  “Herr Baveghli,” he said to Apple-cake, then caught himself and switched from German to French. “Pardon, Monsieur Baveghli. I’m Muller. We have your writ under Title 2.”

  “Monsieur Muller, c’est un scandale.” It’s an outrage, Scorpion said in French into the microphone, then switched to English. “A violation of Swiss law and neutrality. Monsieur Norouzi must be released at once,” watching as Apple-cake repeated it word for word to Schwegler.

  “Of course,” Schwegler said. And to Norouzi in German: “Herr Norouzi, you’re free to go,” gesturing to Dieter and Marco to unlock the shackles and give Norouzi the rest of his clothes. “If you wish, Herr Norouzi, my men can take you home or wherever you want.”

  “No, please,” Norouzi replied in German, wincing as he pulled himself up straight. “I’ve had quite enough of your men.”

  “I have a car downstairs,” Apple-cake said. “I’ll take you home, Monsieur Norouzi.”

  As Norouzi collected his things and dressed, moving painfully, Schwegler and his men watched, saying nothing.

  Norouzi, helped by Apple-cake, limped to the door. As they went out, followed by Schwegler and his men, Schwegler told Norouzi in German, “Don’t leave Zurich, Herr Norouzi. Our investigation is not yet concluded.”

  “Tu goh khordie,” Scorpion heard Norouzi mutter in Farsi as he left. Go eat shit.

  Putting his finger to his lips to alert the others, Scorpion put his ear to the office front door. He heard the elevator go down and went to the window, peering out from behind the curtain.

  He watched as they came out of the building. Norouzi waited on the sidewalk below with Schwegler, Dieter, and Marco, while Apple-cake brought the car around. Norouzi got in, throwing off Dieter’s helping hand, and a moment later the car disappeared down Winterthurerstrasse, the overhead tram lines swaying slightly in the wind. The sky was beginning to turn the faint purple-gray of predawn, still too dark to see the distant Alps.

  The others had gone back to work or had left. Only Chrissie stood next to him.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “We wait,” Scorpion said. “You go join the surveillance team.”

  Forty minutes later Scorpion got the call. It was Glenn, the buzz cut in the Burberry, whom he had assigned as the lead bird dog.

  “We lost Homer,” Glenn said, panic in his voice evident even with a bad cell connection and the sound of a tram in the background.

  “Impossible,” Scorpion said, a sick feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. It couldn’t be. They were using GPS and COMINT tracking three different ways, plus 360 surveillance on Norouzi’s apartment house. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He’s gone. Disappeared,” Glenn said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Barcelona,

  Spain

  “S agen Sie dem Gartner, muss das Gras zu schneiden.” Tell the Gardener, the grass needs to be cut.

  Scorpion kept going over that single sentence again and again in his mind on the flight from Zurich to Barcelona. “Tell the Gardener.” The Gardener. And the sound of it. A woman’s voice on a cell phone call speaking German, but with a hint of Slavic in her accent; not a native German or Swiss-German speaker.

  Because they were still working out JWICS logistics, Shaefer had forwarded the MP3 of the woman’s voice to Scorpion during their chat in a European singles Internet chat room so highly trafficked that chances of interception were remote. In the chat room, Shaefer was a forty-something Italian woman named Liliana from Bari in Apulia, the heel of the Italian boot, and Scorpion was Claude, a high school teacher in St.-Etienne in France with a thing for women’s high heeled shoes, avec des sangles. The strappy kind.

  Glenn’s call had sent them scrambling. From the moment Apple-cake dropped Norouzi off at his apartment building in Leimbach until they had eyes on the building, barely one minute forty seconds had elapsed. The video camera planted in a tree across the street showed no one had exited the building during those critical seconds. Plus there was electronic surveillance. While they had been interrogating Norouzi, two of the Gnomes set up bugs and hidden cameras for 24/7 monitoring of Norouzi’s apartment; in CIA-speak, a 360 black-bag job.

  Except the monitors showed there was no one in Norouzi’s apartment. The bugs they had planted on Norouzi’s cell phones, plus an additional bug sewed into the seam of his pants, indicated no movement. So Norouzi was stationary and in the building.

  Except he wasn’t.

  To confirm, Dieter had knocked on the apartment door and, when no one answered, picked the lock and went inside. It was empty. There was no sign that after Apple-cake dropped him off, Norouzi had ever returned to his apartment.

  They would have to search the entire building. While Schwegler set up a power outage as an excuse so Dieter and Marco could go in as electricians to “check” every apartment, Scorpion pulled up on his laptop the file Rabinowich had put together on Norouzi. The bottom line, was, as Schwegler put it: “Unmoglich.” Impossible. “People don’t just disappear.”

  Scorpion scoured the files on his laptop from both Rabinowich and Schwegler, focusing on Norouzi’s company, Jamaran Trading International. But he didn’t see anything that would provide a lead on Norouzi’s disappearance. It didn’t compute anyway, he told himself. They had taken him h
ome. Whatever disappearing act Norouzi pulled off had happened inside the apartment building.

  One thing: the fact that Norouzi had bolted suggested they were on the right track. He wasn’t some innocent foreign businessman in Zurich.

  Scorpion went back over what they had on Norouzi’s personal life. He lived with his wife and son, a ten-year-old. At the moment, according to Schwegler, the wife and son were visiting relatives in Iran. There was also a teenage daughter in boarding school in Lausanne. He called Schwegler and told him to check with the school and make sure the girl was at the school where she was supposed to be.

  And a mistress-a twenty-year-old girl from Kharkov in eastern Ukraine named Oksana-Scorpion feeling a twinge, the reference to Ukraine reminding him of Iryna and Kiev. A Facebook photo of Oksana showed a pouty blonde in a short skirt and white boots barely older than Norouzi’s daughter. He looked for the girlfriend’s address in the file. It wasn’t there.

  How the hell had they missed that? he wondered, texting Shaefer on JWICS. As he did so, Glenn called to tell him a young woman in a red VW CC was driving out of the apartment building’s underground garage.

  Scorpion texted furiously to Shaefer: homeys girlfriend. whats her address?

  At the same time, on his cell to Glenn, he said: “Describe her.”

  Why? Is she hot? Shaefer typed back.

  “Blond. Long straight hair. Not bad looking,” Glenn said. “Do we tail?”

  Need address now! Scorpion typed.

  Seconds ticked. Then Shaefer responded, and there it was.

  Oksana’s address was the same as Norouzi’s, only his apartment was on the second floor, hers on the fourth. Norouzi had had the balls to install his girlfriend in an apartment in the same building as his wife and family.

  “Front and back tail,” Scorpion told Glenn. “Don’t lose her. Take Chrissie.” Norouzi must have gone straight to his girlfriend’s apartment in the same building instead of going back to his place. If she was leaving now, it was on an errand from him and he was at her apartment, or he was hidden, possibly in the trunk or backseat of the VW.