Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

At the same time, on his cell to Glenn, he said: “Describe her.”

Why? Is she hot? Shaefer typed back.

“Blond. Long straight hair. Not bad looking,” Glenn said. “Do we tail?”

Need address now! Scorpion typed.

Seconds ticked. Then Shaefer responded, and there it was.

Oksana’s address was the same as Norouzi’s, only his apartment was on the second floor, hers on the fourth. Norouzi had had the balls to install his girlfriend in an apartment in the same building as his wife and family.

“Front and back tail,” Scorpion told Glenn. “Don’t lose her. Take Chrissie.” Norouzi must have gone straight to his girlfriend’s apartment in the same building instead of going back to his place. If she was leaving now, it was on an errand from him and he was at her apartment, or he was hidden, possibly in the trunk or backseat of the VW.

Scorpion got the text from Glenn half an hour later.

Stopped. Rudenplatz. Hair salon . The girlfriend, Oksana, had parked in or near the Rudenplatz in Zurich’s Old Town and gone into a hair salon.

Send Chrissie in after her, he texted back.

She’s already on it, Glenn responded. Good girl, Scorpion thought.

It didn’t take long. Oksana made a call from the ladies’ room in the hair salon. She spoke the single sentence in German that had whole departments at both the CIA and NSA working overtime, then hung up. Fortunately, Chrissie had been at the sink outside the stall and done a swipe, technology that enabled you to hack someone’s cell phone with an appropriately configured cell phone just by coming within a few meters of them. Once she had the message, Chrissie linked it with NSA-based SIGINT; it was “slaved,” to be able to eavesdrop on everything said or done with that person’s cell phone.

Within minutes the MP3 file of Oksana’s call in German had been forwarded via satellite to the Black House, the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Ten minutes later both Scorpion and Shaefer had the original message in German and the translation. Shaefer texted Scorpion that she had made the call to a cell phone in Barcelona, Spain.

The business heard on the cell phone about cutting the grass was probably their equivalent of a Flagstaff-type message, indicating to whomever was running Norouzi that he’d been taken in for questioning on the Bern attack. Or maybe Norouzi was pulling the pilot eject handle, telling them to pull him out. He’d leave that to the cryptologists, Scorpion thought. Bottom line, it was a distress call. The key was the Gardener, whoever or whatever that was. Shaefer had indicated that according to Rabinowich, Langley had never heard of the Gardener.

Shaefer had texted that pikl @ ful boyle, the Pickle Factory, insider slang for the CIA, was at full boil, running around like crazy trying to come up with something.

Rabinowich indicated that Harris suspected the Gardener-presumed to be a previously unknown spymaster-was the person behind the Bern attack. Scorpion could already see where Harris was going with that. If he could pin the blame for Bern on the Gardener-and if he, Scorpion, could identify who this Gardener was, preferably someone in the Iranian government-the generals and the hawks would be able to bomb Iran, and no one at the UN or anywhere else would raise a finger against it.

“Find the Gardener,” was the Company’s new imperative. Their top priority, Shaefer had told him.

“Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe it’s a cover and there is no Gardener,” Scorpion said. That wasn’t the least of what was troubling him.

“Find him anyway,” Shaefer replied.

At Zurich Airport, waiting for his flight to Barcelona, Scorpion watched a TV monitor showing a U.S. aircraft carrier moving into the Persian Gulf. The announcer looked meaningfully into the camera and pronounced: “Iranische DNA. Heist das, Krieg?”

He had just enough German to know he was saying: Iranian DNA. Does this mean war?

War, he thought. The Iranians had to be feeling it too. He had to talk to Shaefer. As the gate loudspeaker announced his flight, he held back, taking out his L-3 SME PED device and dialing. Shaefer picked up at the first ring.

“Mendelssohn,” Shaefer, a music lover, answered, using the agreed-upon code name. His voice was faintly slurred by the encryption on the line.

“Flagstaff,” Scorpion said. “Listen. We need to pull the Gnomes. Just use COMINT.”

“Negative,” Shaefer said in such a way that Scorpion sensed he had already been arguing with Langley about it. “Soames says no.”

“Soames? How the hell did he get into this?”

“Harris had to deal with- Never mind. There’s a pissing contest going on with the alphabet soups.” Scorpion could only imagine the turf wars as the different agencies, the CIA, the DIA, SOCOM, the State Department’s INR, and for all he knew, the Girl Scouts, fought over the operation.

“I don’t give a damn,” he said through clenched teeth, glancing around to make sure he wasn’t overheard. “Pull ’em. It isn’t going to take whoever’s behind this two minutes to figure out that the Iranian Embassy never sent a lawyer to free Homer.” As it was, they were damn lucky Apple-cake was safely on a flight back to Stockholm.

“That point’s been raised,” Shaefer said evenly, and Scorpion sensed the battle behind the scenes. He imagined Shaefer sitting in front of his computer in his office in Bucharest, or maybe he was still at the safe house in Zug, staring out at the view of the hills and the town and the lake. “Soames says what if Barcelona’s a feint?”

“Is he completely insane?” Scorpion growled. “Homey’s so scared shitless he has to send his girlfriend to broadcast an SOS from a hair salon in the Rudenplatz, and this idiot thinks it’s a feint?”

“Politics. He’s covering his ass. He wants the Gnomes here so whatever happens, it won’t come back to bite the great you-know-who,” and Scorpion knew he was talking about Harris. In the background, he heard the gate loudspeaker announce the final boarding call for his flight.

“Jesus,” Scorpion breathed. “Didn’t that jerk go to high school? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Listen, there’s some protocol here. I’m the field op, the one who requested them in the first place. This is an order. Pull them out now!”

“They don’t want to be pulled. What if someone contacts Homey?” Shaefer said. It sounded like Shaefer wasn’t sure. He was being pulled in two directions.

“Do it,” Scorpion said, ending the call, and immediately calling Mathias Schwegler.

There were street sounds in the background when Schwegler answered. He must be walking, Scorpion thought.

“Flagstaff,” he said. “There’s a storm coming. I told Shaefer to pull the Gnomes.”

“It appears there is confusion on this,” Schwegler said carefully, clearly aware of the disagreement going on back at Langley.

“I’m the field op. You don’t want your people walking in a mine field.” In the background, he could hear the final boarding call for his flight.

“My feelings also. Ein genuss , my friend,” Schwegler said. It’s been a pleasure.

“See you around,” Scorpion said, ending the call and slipping onto the boarding bridge as they were about to close the gate.

Flying into Barcelona at dusk, he could see the strings of lights on the boulevards and along the line of the shore, the spires of the Sagrada Familia church and the phallic shape of the Agbar Tower lit up like gold against a pink and purple sky.

He had a bad feeling about leaving the Gnomes behind in Zurich. Soames didn’t get it. They were doing 24/7 surveillance on Norouzi, which made them easy to spot. And they were so obviously Americans, they stuck out like African-Americans at a Mormon convention. They couldn’t even speak German. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. All he could do was hope to God he was wrong and that Shaefer was able to change Soames’s mind, or even better, get to Harris and pull them out.