Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

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.

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 home. 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?