Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

They drove through quaint alpine streets to the Upper Town and up a winding road toward the green hills. Less than a half hour south of Zurich, Zug looked like what it was: a picturesque backwater. Except for the fact that rented boxes in its local post office served as headquarters for more than thirty thousand international corporations and that most of the world’s commodities were traded in offices overlooking picturesque Lake Zug, which made it possibly the richest town in the world.

The Mercedes turned off onto a private road lined with trees and hedges. Scorpion caught a reflection from a scope that someone should have kept covered, spotting a guard in camouflage gear with an M4 rifle hiding in the bushes. There were security cameras and sensors in a 360-pattern around acres of green field and in trees along the road to the safe house, an ultramodern structure of glass and concrete that somebody with money to burn had spent millions on. It stood on its own at the end of a long driveway. A feature he knew he wouldn’t find in Architectural Digest was the silhouette of a sniper’s shoulders and head on the building roof.

Bob Harris was waiting with Shaefer in the living room on the second floor, with its panoramic wall of floor-to-ceiling glass providing a breathtaking view of the town, the blue lake below, and the snow-covered mountains. Shaefer, a lanky African-American, was sitting on a sofa, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Scorpion and Shaefer had been in Delta Force together, the only two survivors of an ambush by the Taliban at Forward Operating Base Echo in the Chaprai Valley in North Waziristan, an area in Pakistan where officially American troops didn’t exist, and it defined a bond between them.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have sent Soames to Nairobi,” Harris began. For a change, he wore glasses and wasn’t in a suit. In his preppy khakis and cashmere sweater, he could have been an aging postgraduate lecturer posing for a Tommy Hilfiger ad.

“Soames is just a prick. It’s you I can’t stand,” Scorpion said.

Shaefer, his old friend, shook his head, grinning. Same old Scorpion.

“Soames is useful,” Harris said. “Every executive needs someone everyone can hate, so they don’t hate him. Coffee?” he asked, indicating a silver coffee service and several plates of Swiss cookies, a Linzer torte, and what looked like a Black Forest cake on a side table.

“And what’s with all the firepower? Who are you expecting? The Chinese army?” Scorpion said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“We’re talking about people who took out a secure facility manned by specially trained United States Marines. Some presence is warranted,” Harris said, stirring sugar into a cup. “Tell me about Hamburg.”

“Harandi went back to his apartment. Warned him not to.”

“Did you see who did it? The motorcyclist?” Harris said, sitting in an armchair facing the view.

“Yes.”

“Could you spot him again?”

“Not likely. I killed him in Paris.”

Shaefer snorted a laugh. Harris looked at Scorpion sharply as the young blond woman with the teeth and the Beretta came in and began working a big-screen laptop computer set up on a dining room table.

“That was you?” Harris said, and when Scorpion didn’t answer: “When were you going to tell us?”

“I just did.”

“Pity you couldn’t have kept him alive for us to question,” tapping his finger impatiently on the coffee cup. “That might have been the ball game.”

“At the time the only life I was interested in saving was mine.”

At that, the young woman glanced back over her shoulder, smiling with her perfect teeth like he was the Black Forest cake, then went back to her work.

“So they spotted you in Paris? How?”

Scorpion shrugged. “You tell me. That’s one of the reasons I contacted you. Probably someone with the Kilbane ID photo covering De Gaulle. Or a bent gendarme at Passport Control.”

“We’ll follow up with the Swimming Pool,” Harris said, referring to the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, so-called because their headquarters was located in Paris next to the French Swimming Federation.

“Because they’ve always been so forthcoming in the past,” Shaefer growled. He turned to Scorpion. “Did Harandi say anything before he died? Anything on the Iranians?”

“Wait,” Harris held up his hand. “Let’s get Rabinowich in on this.” He looked at the young woman. “Are we ready, Chrissie?” And back to Scorpion: “It’s some kind of Skype, only on JWICS,” which he pronounced JAYwicks. Scorpion understood. Whereas most U.S. federal agencies, the State Department, and the Department of Defense used both the government’s SIPRNET-for classified communications up to the Secret level-or the unclassified NIPRNET network to communicate, the CIA Clandestine Service and NSA used JWICS-Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System-the only network designed for highly secure encrypted Top Secret communications on up to the SCI/SAP-Special Compartmented Information or Special Access Program-level, the highest secrecy level in the U.S. government.

They got up and gathered around the big laptop on the dining room table. Dave Rabinowich was already on the screen, picking his nose as the others gathered around.

“Can you see us, Dave?” Harris asked. And to the young woman: “Thanks, Chrissie.”

They waited while she left and there were just the three of them in the room.

“Nice girl,” Shaefer said.

“She’s got a gun,” Scorpion said.

“My kind of girl.” Shaefer grinned. And to Rabinowich: “You can stop excavating your nose, Dave. It’s kind of killing my appetite.”

“Actually, the cilia, not the hairs, in your nose help create appetite through the sense of smell. Did you know they continue to beat after death? Their postmortem motility rate actually gives a more accurate reading of time of death than body temperature,” Rabinowich said, his face nearly filling the screen. With his close-set eyes behind glasses and bushy eyebrows slanting out at an up angle, he looked like a cartoon of a pudgy Horned Owl.

“Thanks, Dave. I think we’ve reached our Asperger quota for the day,” Harris interrupted. “Scorpion was about to tell us about Harandi in Hamburg.” He looked at Scorpion. “What about the Iranians?”

“Nothing. Harandi didn’t think it was the MOIS or Hezbollah. Said he would have heard if it was.”

“Christ,” Harris growled, frustration in his voice. “Was he saying it definitely wasn’t the Iranians?”

Scorpion understood his frustration. Things were in motion. While waiting in Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof Central Train Station, he had surfed the latest news from cnn.com on his cell phone.

The Americans had tightened security at their embassies around the world. Other Western nations, such as Britain, France, and Germany, were following suit. A news blackout had been imposed in Washington, and the White House, Department of State, and the Pentagon stated there would be no further announcements or press briefings until U.S. and “allied” intelligence sources had identified the Bern attackers, although it was widely speculated that al Qaeda had been behind the attack. The Pentagon did, however, acknowledge that the U.S. military had gone to DEFCON 3 status.

“That’s not what I said,” Scorpion said. “What about al Qaeda?”

No one said anything, but Rabinowich sat there shaking his head back and forth like a swivel-head doll.

“It’s not al Qaeda,” Rabinowich said. The fact that neither Harris nor Shaefer disagreed with him meant that as far as the CIA was concerned, they weren’t following that thread.

“How can you be so sure?”

“COMINT levels have shown zip. We’ve been monitoring nonstop. If someone even farts in Rawalpindi we’d have picked up something. It’s not them.”