“Suppose I wanted to move something big through the port. Something très difficile, très dangereux. Could la Brise de Mer do it.”
“Sure. But as you say, it is très difficile. The douanes of Marseille Fos are good.”
“What about Genoa?”
Didier smiled. “Much easier. The Camorra di Napoli run the Genoa docks.”
“I’m sorry you can’t stay for dinner,” Scorpion said, sliding an envelope stuffed with a thousand in hundred euro notes under a napkin that he pushed toward Didier, who pocketed it and stood up.
“Bon appetit. They make the true bouillabaisse here. You should try it,” Didier said. He was about to leave when he stopped and added in French, “What about your petite amie? For a fee, I’ll take care of it.”
“It’s good to see you again, mon vieux copain,” Scorpion said, and watched him go. As soon as Didier left the restaurant, Scorpion got up and grabbed a waiter, whispered something to him and slipped him some money. He came back and sat down again.
“What was that about?” Najla said.
“Just being careful. In our business, it’s important. But of course you know that.” He smiled. “Shall we try the bouillabaisse?” he said, signaling to the waiter.
As promised, the bouillabaisse was very good. It was done Marseilles style, with the fish and shellfish presented on a separate platter from the broth, which was served in a bowl with floating slices of baguette spread with rouille.
“This ship you asked him about—where’s it from?”
“Ukraine. How’s the bouillabaisse?”
“Delicious, and you’re changing the subject. What’s your interest in this Ukrainian ship?”
“Did you find it curious about the captain dying?”
“I was wondering about that too. You think someone killed him? Why?”
“Maybe he didn’t do what they wanted. Or maybe he demanded more money than they wanted to pay.”
“Maybe someone wanted to go to Genoa, where it would be easier to get something dangerous through customs. Something you could ship in three containers. That good-looking Frenchman at the port thought that was very odd.”
“You just like him because he kissed your hand.”
“With his looks, he didn’t have to. You could learn from him. It’d be interesting to see the autopsy report on that captain, wouldn’t it?”
“Very.”
She put down her fork and looked at him. “You’re a kind of policeman, aren’t you?”
“No, not a policeman.”
“Or a CIA spy,” she said. “‘The Spy Who Loved Me.’ Except you don’t, do you? Love me.”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea, would it?” he said.
“Because you don’t know if I’m on your side, whichever side that is?”
“We need to finish up,” he said, putting his napkin on the table.
“Are we going to Genoa?” she asked, not looking at him.
“We’ll see,” he said, getting up and speaking for a moment with the waiter he had spoken to earlier. He came back, tossed some money on the table, and grabbed Najla’s hand.
“Come on. We have to go,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, getting up.
“Didier. I had the waiter check outside from time to time while we were eating. He’s sitting in a car down the street.”
“What does he want?”
“He smells money. He’s decided to try to cut himself in,” Scorpion said, guiding her toward the back of the restaurant. As they walked into the narrow kitchen with three workers talking and noisily handling pots, a man in a soiled white apron shouted at them:
“Attention, monsieur! Il est interdit! You may not come back here.”
Scorpion handed him a twenty euro note, and pulling Najla after him, was headed for the back door when he paused for a moment in front of a small TV mounted on a shelf. A chic well-tanned woman was broadcasting the Dix-neuf—Vingt Journal Télévisé nightly news.
“I thought you wanted to go,” Najla said.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and then the woman on TV said something that stopped him cold. Suddenly all the loose ends came together and he knew exactly where the Palestinian intended to strike and when.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Marseilles, France
He shouldn’t have gone back to the hotel. He hadn’t wanted to, but Najla insisted in the taxi after they’d gotten away from the restaurant.
“Where are we going? Genoa?” she asked.
“Rome,” Scorpion said. He checked flights on his cell phone and booked reservations for the two of them on an Air France flight from Marseilles Provence Airport to Fiumicino for that evening.
“Why Rome?”
“Don’t you know?” he asked, his eyes searching her face in the intermittent flashes of light from passing headlights.
“We haven’t even unpacked and now you want to leave. Why?”
“Because the story you want is in Rome.”
“Where did that come from?”
“You’ll figure it out. C’est à quelle distance de l’aéroport?” he asked the taxi driver. How far to the airport?
“Ten kilometers, monsieur,” the driver said.
“What about my clothes and things?” she said.
“We’ll buy new ones in Rome.”
“That’s what you think. I have to freshen up. Besides, I’m doing you a favor. You have no idea what those clothes cost. Turn around. Take us to the Pullman Hotel,” she told the driver.
“Ne prêtez aucune attention,” he told the driver. Pay no attention. “Keep going.” He didn’t want to tell her that the hotel was a red zone. Didier was ex-DGSE and it wouldn’t take him long to track their hotel down, and that was only half his problem. If anyone from the Utrecht network learned that they had made inquiries about the Zaina, or if they found the bodies and got to Anika, or just put two and two together and figured out where he would go next, it wouldn’t take Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya long to look for foreigners in Marseilles, a city teeming with Muslims working at every hotel. Even more urgently, he had to connect with Langley without Najla or anyone else looking over his shoulder.
She grabbed his wrist. “I’m tired of this. Either you take me to the hotel now or so help me I’ll scream ‘rape’ at the top of my lungs the second we get to the airport.”
“Forget it,” he said, pulling his wrist away. “I’ll drop you at the hotel and go to Rome myself.”
“I know where you’re going. I can book a flight too. What is it with you? Just five minutes and we’ll go, I swear.”
Suddenly, he realized that he had to go back to the hotel. He’d checked in his laptop at the desk and hadn’t wiped the disk. That was the problem when you weren’t traveling alone. It was hard finding the privacy to do the things you didn’t want anyone to see. You cut corners; you made mistakes.
“Five minutes and that’s it,” he said to her. Then to the driver, “We changed our mind. Allez à l’hôtel.” The driver signaled and made the turn back to the city.
“What is your problem?” she asked him. “What’s wrong with going back to the hotel?”
“Didier. How long do you think it will take him to check out the hotels in Marseilles and find us?”
“You realize you’re paranoid, don’t you?” she said.
“You’re not the first person to say that to me.”
“Then maybe it’s true.”
“You’d have to ask them, only you can’t.”
“Why not?” she said as the taxi turned onto the Corniche Kennedy. The street was lined with buildings and hotels fronting the bay.
“They’re all dead.”
“You don’t trust anyone, do you? Especially me.”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“Nor I you. As if you are really South African, scheisse.”
“Where were you born?”
“Lebanon. My parents brought me to Germany when I was a baby.”
<
br /> “Where’d you go to school?”
“What is this?” she snapped. “You know me. I hate the Islamists! You saw me at the demonstration.”
“In my business we call that ‘deep cover.’ Five minutes,” he told her as the taxi pulled up to the hotel. She went up to the room as he retrieved his laptop from the front desk clerk.
“Are there any messages?” he asked.
“No, monsieur,” the clerk said, not looking at him.
“Check again,” Scorpion said.
The clerk checked the room box and the computer and shook his head, still not looking at him.
“Has anyone asked about us, anyone suspicious, maybe more than one? N’ayez pas peur.” Don’t be afraid. He slipped the clerk a fifty euro bill. The man glanced around and nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Merde, Scorpion thought in French as he headed for the elevator. It only took a few seconds to kill someone; Najla was in the room alone.
Their room was on the next to top floor. He took the elevator up to the top floor and walked downstairs to his floor. He took out his gun, put the silencer on, cracked the stairwell door a fraction of an inch and peered out at the corridor. It was empty. Stepping out, he walked silently to the door and, careful to stay out of sight range of the peephole, listened. The room was silent; there were no sounds of her moving around. He went to the room next door, listened and then knocked.
“Service d’étage, madame,” he called softly. There was no answer. He slid a credit card between the door lock and the frame, opened the lock and stepped inside. The room was dark and empty. He closed the door behind him, walked to the balcony door, opened it and stepped outside. The night was cool and clear, the lights from the hotel windows reflected in squares of light on the water of the bay. The balcony of his and Najla’s room was empty, and glancing over, there was just enough curtain to give him cover. There was about two feet of space between the rails of the two balconies, where he could fall three stories to the concrete yard below. The key, he knew, was not to make a sound.
Scorpion climbed onto the rail, the gun in his left hand and his right pressed against the side of the building for balance. He stepped over the gap to the rail of his balcony, sliding his hand forward as he balanced between the two balconies, then, still on top of the rail, he knelt and while balancing precariously, almost losing it, felt for the balcony floor with one foot until he touched it. Once on the balcony, he took a deep breath, transferring the gun to his right hand and peering into the room for an instant through the glass door, then ducking back.
He’d seen two men inside, one a Corsican, by the look of him, the other a black African. The Corsican was positioned, gun raised, against the wall next to the door of his room. The African was holding Najla in the middle of the room, his hand over her mouth, a knife pressed to her throat.
Scorpion knew he would only get one shot, and he needed them alive to find out who sent them. When he was ready, he stepped into the middle of the balcony in a two-handed firing position, aimed and fired, the bullet tearing a hole at the center of a spiderweb of cracked glass and hitting the gunman by the door in the shoulder. With the gun still pointed at him, he tapped the balcony door.
“Ouvrez la porte!” Open the door, he said, aiming at the gunman, who tried to aim his own gun at him, realized he couldn’t with his injured shoulder and indicated the African holding Najla.
“We’ll kill the pute,” the gunman said in French.
“Open the door or the next bullet’s in your head,” Scorpion answered, also in French.
The wounded gunman came over, unlocked the balcony door with his good hand and slid it open. Scorpion took his gun away, shoved him back into the room and stepped inside.
“Put down the gun or I’ll cut her pétasse throat,” the African with the knife said, his hand still over her mouth. Najla’s eyes were wide and she looked desperately at Scorpion, who turned and aimed at the forehead of the man holding her.
“Va t’enculer! I don’t give a shit what you do. You and your mec,” he said, indicating the gunman, “will both be dead before her windpipe’s cut. Don’t be an asshole. I want to pay you money.”
“What are you saying?” the African asked.
“Is the man who paid you tall, thin, with a black leather blouson?”
“Go faire foutre yourself! What’s it to you?” the man with the knife said.
“How much did he pay you?”
“Four hundred. Two hundred each,” the gunman said, and sat suddenly on the floor. “I’m shot, you salaud. It hurts.”
“I’ll give you five hundred each,” Scorpion said, lowering his gun and taking out the money, putting it on a table. “Go get a towel,” he told Najla as the African with the knife let go of her and came to the table for the money. As he started to pick up the money, Scorpion pressed the muzzle of the gun onto the top of his hand, stopping him.
“You’re from West Afrique?” he asked the African.
“Sénégalaise. What of it?”
“And you? Corsican?” Scorpion asked the gunman, who nodded. “But not of La Brise?”
“How do you know we’re not?”
“Because if you were of la Brise de Mer, you’d be getting paid from someone taking his orders from Cargiaca instead of my old copain, Didier,” he said, moving the muzzle so the man could pick up the money. Najla came out of the bathroom with a towel that she applied as a compress to the gunman’s shoulder wound.
“Cargiaca’s not running la Brise. He’s in Provence, counting his money and mistresses,” the gunman said. “These days, it’s Jacky, if he survives le Belge.” The Belgian.
“Jacky?” Najla asked.
“Jacky le chat. They call him the cat because he’s survived eight assassination attempts. But after last week, who knows?” the gunman said, pressing the towel to his shoulder. “Three of his men were killed in their auto while waiting at a traffic light right on the Canebière. The Journal Télévisé said it was riddled with hundreds of bullets.”
“Are they still running heroin through the container terminals?” Scorpion asked.
“Not so much,” the Senegalese said. “My brother works in the container terminal, the salaud. They pay him plenty to look the other way. The containers are mostly for le cocaïne and le vert.”
“Le vert?” Najla asked.
“Marijuana,” Scorpion translated.
“Oui, le cannabis,” the Senegalese nodded. “For the heroin, these days they mostly recruit mules by taking a member of someone’s family hostage and cutting off one finger or ear at a time till the mule brings it from Athens to Marseilles. It’s a good business, but because of the fighting between the Belge and Jacky le chat, dangerous.”
“So if I wanted to smuggle something big through Marseille Fos, say big guns, missiles, there’s a good chance it would be hijacked?” Scorpion asked.
“You want to do that, mec, you tell us. We have plenty of copains; we’ll do that for you,” the gunman said. So Didier had lied all the way, Scorpion thought. About Cargiaca and about the douanes at the port making it tough on la Brise’s smuggling. The reason the Palestinian didn’t want to bring the U-235 through Marseilles was the likelihood of it being hijacked.
“About my old copain, Didier, the salaud in the black blouson. What did he want you to do with us?”
“He wanted us to take you both out in the country. He said he would call and tell us where. What happened, mec? He double-cross you on a job?” the Senegalese asked.
“C’est ça.” That’s it. “You want another thousand?”
“I don’t know. You shot me, you salaud,” the gunman said.
“You shouldn’t play with guns. They’re dangerous,” Scorpion said. “When he calls, tell him you’ve got us.”
The gunman’s cell phone rang then, startling them. A thousand euros, Scorpion mouthed, indicating with his gun that the gunman should answer.
“Oui,” the gunman said, then listened. “We have them,” he said, looking
at Scorpion. He listened some more, said “d’accord,” and hung up. “Now what?” he said to Scorpion.
“He has a place near Aix. He said to meet you somewhere near there, oui?”
The gunman nodded. “It seems you know this fils de putain.”
“I gave him a thousand euros tonight,” Scorpion said. “If you take it from him, as far as I’m concerned it’s yours.”
“Why? You don’t want the money?”
“A business expense. It’s not good to let people think they can get away with merde. It leaves a bad impression.”
“Anything else?” the gunman said, getting up and throwing the bloody, wadded-up towel on the floor.
“One thing. We never want to see either of you again.”
Later, in the taxi to the airport, Najla broke the silence.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. The next time you say we’re not going back to the hotel, believe me, I’ll listen.” She hesitated. “Thank you.” She looked into his eyes, which was all she could see in his face, hidden in shadow. Scorpion didn’t say anything. “God, you are a stone cold scheisser!” she said, pushing him away.
“None of that had to happen. We can’t afford this. We only have seven days,” he said.
“What happens in seven days?”
“Nothing, if you do what I tell you.”
“I will. I swear,” she said. The taxi made a turn, causing her to lean. She let it bring her close enough to brush against him.
By the time they got to the airport, they had thirty minutes to catch the late night flight to Rome. They checked the luggage and were going through the passport control in separate lines, Najla in the EU queue, and Scorpion, with his South African passport, in the non-EU queue. He had just gotten through when he saw the immigration officer, a woman, signal, and two armed soldiers approach Najla. She turned to look at him as they led her away. He had to decide quickly whether to stay or go. The plane was already boarding.
After a moment’s hesitation he jogged to the gate. He had no choice. The mission was entering the critical phase. Settling into his seat, he made a call with his cell phone to set up a follow-up call with Langley from Rome. There was a lot to talk about, including why the French DGSE intelligence—he was sure they had something to do with it—had taken Najla into custody.
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