Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

Scorpion had spent the afternoon at an Internet cafe on Kleiner Schaferkamp across from a wooded park. He used a European singles chat room to contact Mendy69 in Vilnius, Lithuania. A little man in a wheelchair born with a child’s twisted tiny legs that never grew, Aldis Slavickas aka Mendy69-after Mendeleev, the inventor of the Periodic Table, and the sex position-was a born criminal and the most brilliant computer hacker Scorpion knew. He had first used Slavickas to bulletproof his French cover ID, the identity he used for his home base in Sardinia. Slavickas had been able to penetrate the presumably impregnable firewalls and databases in the French Ministry of the Interior, as well as the DST and the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service.

In the chat room, Mendy69 posed as Giedre, a sexy nineteen-year-old female blonde with a fetish for leather. Scorpion was an aging French businessman named Max, because no matter what cover name he used, Mendy69 insisted on calling him Max anyway. They corresponded in French.

The first part of the job Scorpion wanted was to change his photo in the Reuters personnel database at their Canary Wharf office in London for the Michael Kilbane journalist credentials he had used in Ukraine, so it no longer resembled his face.

Mendy69 typed: pas de probleme, mon cheri Max. No problem, my darling Max. I will make it so your own mother wouldn’t know you.

“ Bon. And the Ukrainian things, you naughty girl? referring to the same photo that had been used for Kilbane’s Ukrainian visa, now residing in Ukrainian Militsiya and SBU internal security databases in Kiev.

That’s not so simple, my little wolf, Slavickas responded.

He would need something; an internal password, Mendy69 responded. He said he knew someone inside. The good thing about ce pays primitif -this primitive country, Ukraine-he said, was from the president on down, there was no one you couldn’t bribe. Scorpion offered one thousand euros, and Mendy69 responded that it was too much for the Ukrainian piece of shit he would bribe. Two hundred would be plenty, and he, Mendy69, would keep the other eight hundred providing cher Max would spank him.

Almost laughing out loud at that one, Scorpion gave Mendy69 a dummy Gmail account to let him know when it was done and he would Paypal him the money. Before he left, he checked the BBC Internet news site. He was stunned by an article headlined: AMERICAN AID WORKER SAVES SOMALI CHILDREN. In it, they quoted aid workers in Dadaab, Kenya, about a mysterious American aid worker, David Cheyne, who had saved twenty-eight children-Scorpion had no idea how the number had grown from sixteen to twenty-eight or where they could have gotten that from-who were trapped by the war in Somalia. Apparently, the aid worker “had no comment about his heroic act, but stated that without the help of a British aid worker, Ian Dowler, he wouldn’t have made it through.” So at least he knew who the source of the article was. That little prick, Dowler, who was now claiming credit for the rescue. Even worse, someone had taken a cell phone photo of him that accompanied the article. It was a bit fuzzy from a distance and caught him from the side, holding one of the children and talking with Sandrine, identified in the caption as Dr. Sandrine Delange of MPLM, Medecins Pour Le Monde; Doctors for the World.

Bloody hell, he thought, glancing uneasily around the Internet cafe as if everyone might recognize him any second. The only good thing was that he didn’t think someone could identify him just from the sideways photo or could easily match it to the Kilbane cover ID photo. As for the Cheyne cover ID, he’d gotten rid of it as soon as he had left Africa.

David Cheyne no longer existed, and outside the context of Africa, anyone would be hard-put to identify him as Cheyne. He was now using a Canadian passport in the name of Richard Cahill, an industrial engineer from Vaughan, north of Toronto.

That evening, having a drink at the bar at the hotel, he got the modified photo from Lithuania on his iPhone. Mendy69 was right. Tiny changes in facial distance vectors between features used by facial recognition software, a microscopic thickening of the nose, an imperceptible narrowing of the distance between the eyes, a change of eye color and a pattern modification, and no one would call them the same person. His own mother wouldn’t know him.

Not that she would anyway, Scorpion reflected as he stood on the deck of the ferry. She’d died when he was a toddler; tensing as he felt someone come up beside him. A Middle Eastern man with a beard, his hair wet from the drizzle.

“Haben Sie einen Gletscher Eis Bonbon, bitte?” the man said, asking for a piece of a popular brand of candy.

“I still prefer the ice cream at the White Tower on Pasdaran Avenue,” Scorpion replied in English, referencing the coffee shop in Tehran he had mentioned to establish his bona fides with the man next to him, Ahmad Harandi, the Mossad mole in the Hamburg Islamic Masjid, when they had first met during the Palestinian operation.

“Scorpion,” Harandi said.

Scorpion nodded. “Who’s your friend in the shadows at the back of the deck near the bridge?” he said.

“He’s with me,” Harandi said. “We need to keep it short. This is dangerous.”

“More than you know. Whoever hit the American embassy in Bern got CIA computer files on the Palestinian operation. That means you too.”

“Sheisse!” Shit! “How could such a thing happen?!” Harandi exclaimed.

“They got sheisse on me too. That’s why this,” Scorpion said, touching the three-day stubble on his face, then the rain-spattered glasses and the newsie cap to help change the image.

“So I’m blown?”

Scorpion nodded grimly.

“Almost certainly. That’s why I had to see you personally. So you’d know it was real.”

“Sheisse,” Harandi said again. “I have to leave Germany.” He looked sideways at Scorpion, his face wet from the rain. “This blows everything. Years down the drain. Herzliya will go crazy,” referring to the Tel Aviv suburb where the Mossad’s headquarters were located.

“The Americans are ready to go to war,” Scorpion said. “They just haven’t figured out with whom.”

“I know. It’s all anyone’s talking about on the TV. Madness.”

Scorpion felt the ferry shudder as it pulled up to the Neumuhlen-Ovelgonne landing. There was damn little time before things blew, he thought, watching crewmen secure the ferry to the quay. Two passengers got off and several more got on.

“What have you heard?” Scorpion asked. The Islamic Masjid in Hamburg’s Uhlenhorst district was a hotbed of Iranian Twelvers and intelligence activities, which was why the Israelis had planted Harandi there as a mole in the first place. If the Iranians had something going in Europe, it was likely that Harandi had heard something.

“Nothing. Not a verdammte thing,” Harandi muttered, looking around furtively. The ferry’s engine throbbed as they pulled away from the landing. “It wasn’t the MOIS,”-the Iranian foreign intelligence service, the equivalent of the Iranian CIA-“or Hezbollah.”

“You’re sure?”

Harandi shrugged. “One never knows. But if it were, I would’ve heard something.”

“So either it’s not the Iranians, or-” Scorpion stopped. “What about Niru-ye Quds?” The Quds Force, the Special Forces unit of the Revolutionary Guards; the Iranian equivalent of the U.S. Delta Force or Navy SEALs. “Or Kta’eb Hezbollah or Asaib al-Haq?” Factions within the Revolutionary Guards.

“I don’t know. There’s been nothing.”

Harandi looked like he was about to say something more but had held back. They stared out at the darkness. There were other ships and boats on the river, lights reflecting on the water. The ferry’s engine began to throb as it headed in toward the next river landing. The sign over the dock read: DOCKLAND FISCHEREIHAFEN. They were running out of time.