Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

Scale didn’t answer. He watched the dots approach the IEDs. As they came up to it, he pressed the Send on his cell phone. Instantly, they heard the loud bang of an explosion. It echoed across the clearing. He selected a second contact number, called, and there was a second explosion.

“Vay Khoda!” Norouzi said. My God! “What’s happening?”

“They were CIA, not NDB, baradar ,” Scale snapped. “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. I told them I had nothing to do with the attack on the embassy.”

Scale smacked him hard, backhanded, across the face.

“The truth! Don’t lie!” he shouted.

“I knew nothing!” Norouzi cried. “I told them nothing! Inshallah , not a word.”

Scale nodded. He grabbed the laptop and his HK assault rifle and walked back to the center of the clearing, where one of his men, Maziar, was standing over the bodies. Norouzi followed.

“This one,” Maziar said, touching the blond woman with his foot, “is still alive.”

Scale looked down at the woman. She was breathing heavily, looking straight up into his eyes, something no decent Persian woman would do. These Western whores, he thought. He took his HK, aimed, and squeezed two shots into her head.

He handed his HK to Maziar, bent down and retrieved the woman’s pistol from the ground, a Beretta, then turned and shot Norouzi once in the chest, and as he collapsed to the ground, again in the head. He put the Beretta in the dead woman’s hand and his HK next to Norouzi. With any luck, the polis would first assume they shot each other, until they did a full crime scene and forensics analysis, and that would take time.

“Collect everything. Call Danush and make sure the Ukrainian jendeh whore is dead,” he told Maziar. “We have to go. The polis will be here any minute.”

They were back in the Mercedes driving on Emil-Kloti-Strasse toward the A1 motorway when Scale got the text from Danush on his cell phone.

“Ghat’ shod.” Closed. The mistress, Oksana, was dead.

They drove into the center of Zurich, parked and gathered their things. Scale reminded them to meet him as planned at the Hauptbahnhof, Zurich’s central train station. He went back to his room-rented with a false ID-packed and used a sterile wipe to wipe down everything he had touched before he left. Then he took the tram to the Hauptbahnhof. As he walked into the station’s main concourse, near the big board listing departures and arrivals, a man in a windbreaker-he looked Iranian-asked him in Farsi for a cigarette.

“I only smoke 57,” Scale said, naming the popular Iranian cigarette brand named after 1979, the year of the Revolution; the year 1357 in the Iranian calendar.

“Take one of mine,” the man said, handing him one and walking away.

Scale went to the public men’s room, found an empty stall and closed the door behind him. He carefully opened the cigarette and shredded the tobacco into the toilet. Written on the inside of the cigarette paper were just two words in Farsi, but for Scale as he rolled the cigarette paper into a tiny ball and flushed it down the toilet with the tobacco it was as if a window had opened. He finally began to understand what the operation was really about.

It read: Barcelona. Scorpion.

“Where are we going, baradar ?” Maziar asked when he came out of the men’s room.

“Barcelona,” Scale said.

Ciutat Vella,

Barcelona, Spain

Scorpion sat over coffee and an omelet bocadillo sandwich at an outdoor cafe, tables lit by candles under the arches of a quiet square with trees, the Placa Vicenc Martorell. The night was clear, and with the arches and the candles, it seemed medieval, for all that it was only a few blocks from the noisy, crowded Las Ramblas. From somewhere, someone’s radio or iPod, came music, an enticing mix of flamenco, dub, and hip-hop that was uniquely Catalan. He was there to meet with Juan Marchena, an agent from the CNI, the Spanish intelligence service.

Shaefer had set up the RDV and it looked like the Spanish would cooperate. Going through Passport Control at Barcelona’s El Prat airport, the female Immigration agent checked his Richard Cahill Canadian passport, checked again, and asked him to wait. Two armed Spanish CNP uniformed officers appeared and asked him to follow. They led him to an office, handed his passport back to him and told him he could go, pointing to a side door. There would be no record of his ever having been in Spain.

Except Marchena hadn’t showed. The waiting was getting to him. In his hotel room, getting ready to come to the RDV, he had caught the latest news on television. Iranian foreign minister Gayeghrani was shown at a news conference, stating that not only was Iran innocent of any complicity in the attack on the American embassy in Switzerland, but if Iran detected any coercive or military action against it, they would not hesitate to act.

“We will not wait for the American Satan and their yapping dogs, the imperialist British and the Zionists, to attack the innocent Iranian people. If America dares consider action, Iran will strike first,” he declared.

They were running out of time, and for all he knew, he was chasing a ghost called the “Gardener.” The whole thing didn’t add up. If this Gardener was a major spymaster, how was it that no one had ever heard of him? Even more puzzling was the question Harris had hinted at: Why would the Gardener-if he even existed and was behind the Bern attack-want to provoke the world’s military superpower into attacking his own country? To use Harris’s catch phrase: “Where’s the profit?”

He sat an extra twenty minutes, growing more frustrated by the second, and was about to leave when a young woman who looked like a college student in shorts, carrying a backpack, brushed by his table and, as she passed, murmured in English, “Go left on Carrer de les Ramelleres to Elisabets.”

Scorpion watched her walk to a line of parked motor scooters, hop on one and take off on the narrow street bordering the plaza. He left money on the table and walked according to her instructions in the opposite direction toward the corner, where he stood and waited. A blue Seat Ibiza, a compact crossover SUV, stopped next to him and the rear door opened.

“Get in,” a stocky man in his sixties in the backseat said in English, beckoning him. Scorpion checked the street, then got into the SUV, which immediately took off down the narrow street. They went around the block several times, making turns to make sure no one was following, before heading toward Las Ramblas.

“ Buenas tardes , Scorpion-” the man began.

“Where’s Marchena?” he interrupted, crossing his leg so his hand rested on his lower calf, near the hidden ankle holster with the Glock 28 pistol. They drove past lit shop windows and cafes, and the closer they got to Las Ramblas, the more it seemed like everyone in Barcelona was out in the streets. The driver, a fit-looking young man, had to honk a number of times to squeeze the SUV past people walking on the narrow cobblestoned street.

“How do you know I’m not Marchena? You never met him,” the man said.

“Your accent is Israeli, not to mention your lack of a Castilian lisp or any hint of Catalan when you said-or should have said-‘ Bona tarda,’ not ‘ Buenas tardes. ’ So you’re not CNI. But you are in intelligence, and judging by your age, fairly senior. So what the hell is the Mossad doing in the middle of this?” Scorpion said, hand resting casually on top of his ankle gun.

“You see?” the man said to the driver, as if he had just proved a point he’d been trying to make. “I understand now your reputation,” he added, his eyes on Scorpion’s hand resting near his ankle. The driver’s eyes watched them in the rearview mirror. “Call me Avram,” the man said to Scorpion. “It’s not my real name, but then neither is yours. Is it, Mr. Cahill?” he said, using the cover name on Scorpion’s Canadian passport.