Scorpion Deception s-4

by Andrew Kaplan

  Scorpion’s mind was going a mile a minute. Said Dekhil Flauban was Arabic for the saw-scaled snake, the deadliest snake in the Middle East. Ghanem had been the Lebanese prime minister assassinated by a terrorist bomb that everyone assumed had been planted by Hezbollah. What Yuval was also telling him was that the Israelis had a mole inside Hezbollah in Lebanon. It was the only way they could have known about the Snake.

  “What connects this ‘Snake’ to this guy Karif?”

  “Karif was in Beirut at the same time. Apparently meeting with Salim Kassem. I believe you may have encountered him,” Yuval said carefully. “That’s how we got onto Karif in the first place.”

  Scorpion understood. His encounter with Salim had been during the Palestinian operation. Salim was Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of Al-Majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. Ghanem could not have been assassinated without Salim’s involvement. Yuval was saying his Lebanese mole tied Salim and Hezbollah to both the Snake and Karif.

  “Why come to me?” he asked. “Why am I so deserving?”

  Yuval nodded as if he understood Scorpion’s cynicism. Intelligence services only liaised because they had to, and they never gave anything away for free.

  “Two things,” he said, staring ahead at the traffic. They had turned from the port and were heading up Avinguda del Parallel, a broad avenue bordered by apartment buildings and stores. “First, we’re limited here. The Spanish don’t like us.”

  “Not since Cast Lead,” Scorpion said, referring to the 2009 Israeli military incursion into Gaza, when there had been massive demonstrations in Madrid against Israel.

  “Not since the Spanish Inquisition.” Yuval grimaced, a sour expression on his face as he gestured for the driver to pull over. They stopped at a spot not far from a Metro station. “This is your operation. Also, Ahmad Harandi. It wasn’t his real name, of course. It was Avi. Avi Benayoun. He had a wife and daughter in Netanya. We appreciate what you tried to do.”

  The Israeli mole in Hamburg, Scorpion thought, feeling a stab of regret, recalling their last meeting on the ferry. He had liked Harandi and failed to save him. It wasn’t a victory.

  “I didn’t do it for you,” he said.

  “No,” Yuval agreed. “Here,” handing him a flash drive. “Everything we have on Karif. Photos, address, even a video. Everything.”

  “Including spy software. A Trojan horse perhaps?”

  Yuval smiled. “You have a suspicious mind.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Scorpion said, pocketing the flash drive and putting his hand on the door handle. “You’re out of it,” he told Yuval, getting out of the SUV. “Keep your people away. If I see an unknown on the field, as far as I’m concerned it’s the opposition. I’ll kill him, understood?”

  Yuval raised his hands, a sign of surrender.

  “It’s out of our hands. Kol tov,” he said as Scorpion got out and closed the car door.

  Scorpion waited for a moment, watching the SUV pull into traffic and drive away, then turned and headed to the Metro station.

  Going down the stairs into the Metro, he kept glancing over his shoulder, though he hadn’t spotted anyone tailing him. He had a prickly feeling at the back of his neck as if something terrible were about to happen. Already on this operation Harandi had been killed and they’d nearly gotten him and Sandrine in Paris. And you couldn’t turn on a TV without hearing war talk. It felt like he was blindfolded on a battlefield, something bad coming at him and he didn’t know what or from which direction, as he stood on the platform and watched the train with a sign that said L3 coming into the station. He had a lead. Karif. But was it a real lead, or were the Israelis pointing him at someone for their own reasons?

  It was all coming down to one thing: Who was the Gardener?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Les Corts,

  Barcelona, Spain

  Karif’s apartment was on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the Les Corts district, a few blocks from the tram stop. Normal protocol would have been to watch Karif and pick him up when he was isolated or go into his apartment when he wasn’t at home and wait for him to show up. But they were up against the clock. Scorpion checked the street one last time. From the get-go they’d been on the defensive, rushed and desperate to pull a rabbit out of the hat so the administration in Washington would be able to prove to the world and, most of all, to the American public, that if they were going to bomb someone, it was justified, and that they had the right bad guys in their gun sights.

  He decided to simply knock on the door. If Karif was home, he would try to persuade him that the Gardener had sent him from Tehran. If not, he would pick the lock, black-bag the apartment and wait for him. While on the tram, he had plugged Yuval’s data into his iPad, and after studying half a dozen photos and a blurry eight-second time-stop video, was sure that if he saw Karif-a clean-shaven young man with dark hair and a gap-toothed smile-he would recognize him.

  Looking up at the apartment from the street, he couldn’t tell if anyone was home. The curtains were drawn and no light escaped. The street wasn’t busy, only a few people out though it was not yet ten o’clock, early for Barcelona. It was just a normal weeknight in a residential neighborhood, light from a small pasteleria bakery-restaurant spilling into the street.

  He used a credit card slipped between the door and the jamb to open the front door of the apartment building. There was a small lobby and an elevator, which he ignored, instead taking the stairs to the sixth floor. He walked down the hallway, stopping at every apartment door to listen. Inside each one he could hear a television, but when he got to Karif’s apartment-listening intently, his ear on the door-there was nothing. No TV, no one talking, no sound of any kind. He reached into his pocket for his Peterson universal key.

  Just then the door of the apartment next door opened and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, came out, the sound of a sitcom with a loud laugh track blaring as they closed the door behind them. They looked at Scorpion curiously. Quickly improvising, he nodded at them and knocked on the door, unable even to put a hand behind him on the Glock pistol in the holster at the small of his back. He didn’t expect a response but the door suddenly opened.

  It wasn’t Karif. A burly Iranian-looking man with a thick mustache, wearing a windbreaker, stared back at him. His shoulders were huge. Scorpion would have bet he’d done some wrestling, a national sport in Iran.

  “Que quieres?” the burly man said in non-Catalan, heavily accented Spanish. What do you want?

  “Where’s Mohammad?” Scorpion said in English, sensing the teenagers walking away down the hallway.

  “Here. You coming in,” the man said, his English as bad as his Spanish, opening the door for Scorpion to enter.

  He stepped into the apartment and started to turn to confront the man, his hand going back to the gun at the small of his back, when he felt a tremendous blow to the side of his head. For an instant the room tipped sideways, and then he saw nothing.

  The first thing he saw was his hand, covered in blood. And then the knife in his hand, dripping blood. He was lying on the carpeted floor. How long had he been out? he wondered. Then the panic hit. The man who hit him might still be there. He jumped to his feet and whirled around, the bloody knife in his hand. He didn’t see him as he ran to the kitchen, holding the knife as far away from him as he could so the blood wouldn’t drip on his clothes. The apartment felt like the man with the mustache had gone.

  He dropped the Spanish Navaja-style folding knife into the sink and ran the water, washing the blood off his hand and watching it stain the basin pink. He looked to see where he had been cut but couldn’t find anything. Using dishwashing liquid, he washed his hands, went to the bathroom and dried them off with toilet paper, then flushed the pink-stained paper down the toilet.

  He felt for his guns, the one at the small of his back and the one in his ankle holster, which were still there. Odd, he thought. Then it hit him. He wasn’t thinking straight; the b
low might have caused a concussion. If he wasn’t cut, where did the blood come from? And how long had he been out?

  Checking his watch, he saw that he couldn’t have been out more than a minute or two. Maybe less. His head throbbed and there was a painful lump on the right side at the back. It felt like someone had been using it for a golf ball. Then he pulled the Glock from his back holster and started to go through the apartment.

  There was just the living room, the kitchenette, a single bedroom, and a bathroom. A student’s apartment. Cheap furniture, a pile of books, college texts, a laptop on the coffee table in the living room. He inserted a flash drive into the laptop. Its NSA software would suck all the document files, e-mails and contacts, and Internet temporary files and history from the laptop in seconds. Then he saw the bottom of a shoe beside the bed. He crept into the bedroom, ready to fire.

  There was no need. Karif was lying on the carpet next to the bed. He recognized the young man immediately from his photos and video. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear, and the carpet where he lay was soaked with blood. Scorpion backed away, trying to keep the blood off his shoes.

  What the hell was going on? Did the Israelis set him up? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t exclude the possibility. Or was Kta’eb Hezbollah, the saw-scaled snake maybe, shutting down the network? The call Norouzi’s girlfriend had made about the Gardener was proving fatal for everyone involved, so it was more urgent than ever that Shaefer pull the Gnomes off Norouzi. He would demand it or call Harris at Langley direct himself, he thought. So if it wasn’t the Israelis, then it was unbelievable timing that he had knocked on Karif’s door just after he was killed, before the murderer could get away. If so, why had the murderer left him alive?

  From outside he heard the wail of a police siren. More than one. He ran to the living room window and pulled back the edge of the curtain. Two white bullet-shaped police cars had just pulled up in front of the building and police were getting out of the cars. Scorpion stepped back. Either he had been set up or the murderer himself had called it in to cover his tracks. Realizing he only had seconds to get away, he started toward the door, then stopped.

  The knife! His fingerprints were on it. He ran to the sink, grabbed the knife and dropped it into his pocket. What else had he touched? The dishwashing liquid. He rubbed it down with the liquid soap and toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet. Had he touched the door handle? No, the killer had opened the door, he thought, as he opened the apartment door with toilet paper.

  Scorpion started for the stairs and heard men’s voices and panting as they came up. In a few seconds he’d either be arrested or dead. He ran up the stairs on the tips of his toes. The roof door was locked, but he frantically managed to open it with the Peterson universal key. He stepped out onto the roof, closed the door as quietly as he could behind him, and ran to the edge. The roof of the building next to this one was just a few feet lower. He jumped down and raced across it to the next building. There was a narrow alleyway, perhaps two meters, between the buildings. If he missed, it was a seven-story drop. No other way, he thought, backing up five or six meters.

  From behind, he heard sounds and glanced over his shoulder. Two policemen had run out on the roof of Karif’s building, guns drawn. They spotted him.

  “Policia! Detente!” one of them shouted in Spanish, telling him to stop, then going into shooting position.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t do it. Just as he neared the edge he leaped off his right foot as hard and high as he could, and as he did so, heard a shot and sensed something whiz by his flailing arm.

  He sailed over the alleyway, having only the briefest glimpse of the concrete and trash cans far below, and then he landed on the other roof, stumbling and waving his arms for balance. Even before he could right himself he scrambled to the roof door.

  It was locked. He felt in his pocket for the Peterson key, glancing back at the other roof, where the two policemen were running across toward the gap between that building and his. He darted a glance over the parapet at the street below. There were at least a half-dozen policemen, hands on guns, watching the front door of Karif’s apartment building, one of them saying something to bystanders, who were starting to gather across the street.

  The burly man with the mustache, the one who had clobbered him and had no doubt murdered Karif, was standing with the people on the sidewalk, watching the police. There was still had a chance to get him, he thought, pulling the Peterson key out of his pocket and going to the roof door. He tried the key, giving it a tap to jump the lock. He felt it click but the door still didn’t open. It was jammed. He turned the key and handle and slammed against it with his shoulder. It made a cracking sound but was still jammed. He looked back over at the other roof. There was no more time. Both policemen were lining up to shoot him.

  He tried the lock again, slamming against the door with all his might, heard something crack, and then the door banged open with a loud snap. Anyone on the floor below would have heard it. Bullets cracked into the doorpost behind him as he dove through and raced down the staircase, no longer bothering about making noise.

  An apartment door near one of the landings popped open and a woman in a robe, her hair up in curlers, popped out. One look at his face and she dived back into her apartment, shutting the door and shouting for her husband. Scorpion jumped down the last few stairs to the ground floor, where the hallway was dark. He left it that way and peered out the glass in the front door, the Glock in his hand inside his jacket pocket.

  The crowd of spectators across the street from Karif’s building had grown larger, but he couldn’t spot the mustache guy. Someone upstairs in his building was shouting something. He couldn’t stay there any longer, he realized, and still had the murder weapon in his pocket. For the moment, no one among the spectators and police outside seemed to be looking at this building. They were all looking up at the other roof, where the shots had been fired. Heart pounding, he opened the door and walked slowly, carefully, across the street to the edge of the crowd.

  Mustache guy was no longer standing among the spectators. Peering over the heads of other spectators, Scorpion saw the back of a burly man in a tan-colored windbreaker walking toward the corner. One of the police mossos glanced at the burly man but otherwise didn’t react. The mosso looked back toward the crowd and then up at the roof of the building, like the other spectators.

  He only had a few seconds to decide. If he tried to push through the crowd to follow, he’d be sure to attract attention. That mosso might be too dumb to do anything now, but if he was to chase Mustache, even the mosso would be able to figure it out. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Mustache turned the corner. Probably headed toward Avinguda Diagonal, he thought, one of the main streets.

  Edging away from the crowd, Scorpion walked in the opposite direction, toward the next corner. Checking the reflection in a store window, he saw no one following him and began to believe he might get away when he heard shouts. The police mossos on the roof were pointing at him, and several mossos and spectators on the street were now chasing him. He turned the corner to a street parallel to the one Mustache had gone and ran toward Avinguda Diagonal.

  People in the street stared curiously at him as he ran by. He looked around, feeling conspicuous. It was a one-way street of brick apartment houses with shops on the ground floor. There were lights on some of the balconies, where people were eating or drinking despite the cool evening. There was nowhere to get rid of the bloody, incriminating knife. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that no one chasing him had turned the corner yet, but that would change any second and then people on this street would start chasing him as well. He had to change the equation-and fast.

  A yellow Seat Mii, a tiny three-door subcompact car, emerged from an apartment building underground parking garage, a young woman at the wheel. As she stopped to check the street traffic, Scorpion ran over and rapped on the driver’s window with th
e Glock. For an instant, the woman froze. He pointed the gun at her, motioning for her to roll down the window. She hesitated, then complied. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a mosso round the corner and shout, followed by a dozen or more men and mossos.

  “Get out!” Scorpion told her in English, and when she didn’t move, shouted “Fuera!” and pressed the Glock’s muzzle to her head.

  Eyes wide, she unfastened her seat belt with trembling fingers and opened the car door. Before she could get out, he yanked her from the seat and got in. Scorpion jammed the gear stick into first and took off, turning into the street. He hit the accelerator and upshifted, the little car’s engine revving into the red-line RPMs. In the rearview mirror the running mossos were falling behind, everyone in the street staring at him, but in the distance he could hear the wee-you wee-you of a police car siren in pursuit.

  A man on a motorcycle was pulling out between parked cars, and Scorpion hit the horn and the accelerator simultaneously, swerving to squeak by him. With parked cars on both sides of the narrow street, there was only a single lane. Ahead, a Renault sedan was stopped at a traffic light. Scorpion upshifted to the top gear and, horn blaring, turned and bounced up onto the sidewalk, around the Renault, and into the intersection, just missing an oncoming sedan, the driver’s eyes wide with terror. Cross traffic all around him was screeching to a halt, cars crashing into each other and horns blaring as he tore across one street and on down another, which was one-way. Ahead he could see a commercial van stopped, blocking his way.

  He swerved diagonally into a no-parking zone and again up onto the sidewalk. Blasting on the horn, he downshifted and dodged to get around pedestrians who froze in place, staring. A man and a woman walking just ahead stopped when they heard the horn as he came right at them. Yanking hard on the wheel, he swerved back into the street, the little car coming up on two wheels, teetering precariously before slamming down onto the pavement. Ahead he could see trees and traffic at the Avinguda Diagonal intersection.