Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“Why don’t I call you, Yuval? Yuval Ofer, head of the Mossad,” Scorpion said. Who else, he guessed, would have knowledge of a Special Access operation or know his CIA 201 code name, Scorpion?

“Better still,” the man smiled, “Yuval.”

“Now that we’re all buddies, what do you want?” Scorpion said.

“To help,” Yuval said as they turned right onto the wide Las Ramblas, in the direction of the port. The kiosks on the promenade that ran down the center of the boulevard were brightly lit. The pedestrian area was crowded with people, street musicians and performers, tourists, Gypsies, pickpockets and thieves, stalls selling flowers and souvenirs, music blasting from loudspeakers; the human parade under strands of lights strung between the trees.

“Why?”

Yuval shrugged. “We’re allies, after all. Mind?” he said, pulling a crumpled cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.

“Go wave the flag at somebody else. What do you want?” Scorpion said.

“I understand,” Youval said after lighting the cigarette. “Top Secret Special Access op, and all of a sudden another player steps on the field. Except when it comes to the attack on the embassy, we’re all thinking the same thing, aren’t we? Iran. And that, you must admit, concerns my little part of the world,” he added, picking a tobacco shred from the tip of his tongue.

“Not my problem,” Scorpion said, looking ahead. As they approached the port, the buildings were grander, more baroque, and on the promenade there were outdoor cafes under awnings strung with lights.

“No. Mohammad Karif is your problem,” Yuval said.

“Who’s he?”

“Someone we’ve had our eye on. An engineer, graduated with honors from the Universitat de Barcelona-and don’t tell me. I’m sure I didn’t pronounce it right,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke.

“And I should care because. .?”

“He’s Kta’eb Hezbollah. At least we believe so.”

Scorpion was instantly alert. It had been a contact code from Kta’eb Hezbollah that first alerted Rabinowich to Norouzi in Zurich in the first place. It meant either the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were indeed behind the embassy attack or-and this was the dangerous part-that their focus on Kta’eb Hezbollah was leading them from a single assumption further down the wrong path, And no way to know which was right. He wouldn’t put it past the Israelis to do that for their own purposes.

“Where’s this coming from? Who got Shaefer to set this little drive up?” Scorpion said. “Tell me now or I’m getting out. Was it Soames? You!” Calling out to the driver. “Stop the car.”

Ahead, a wide area fronting the marina and the sea was brightly lit, with massive columned government buildings and traffic circling the base of a column at least fifty meters high, topped by a large statue with an outstretched arm pointing out to sea. The driver slowed to pull over. Someone behind them honked his horn.

“That’s Columbus,” Yuval said, indicating the statue as the SUV turned right, heading, according to the sign, toward the Placa Drassanes and the port. “They say that’s the spot he landed when he came back from discovering America.”

“Just pull over anywhere,” Scorpion said, and put his hand on the door handle to get out.

“No, it was Dave. David Rabinowich,” Yuval said.

Scorpion settled back in his seat. It meant Rabinowich had been liaising with the Israelis, which neither Harris or Shaefer had told him. Need to know and all that Company baloney, he thought. Except he was the one on the line-and not knowing there was another player in the game could get him killed.

“Why?” he said.

Yuval said something in Hebrew to the driver and they started moving with the traffic again, down a wide palm-lined street parallel to the port.

“For years we’ve been warning Washington that the Iranians were creating resources in Europe and the U.S. to use against America and her allies,” Yuval said. “Dave’s one of the few who paid attention. Now it’s come.” He lit a new cigarette from the first and crushed the burning end of the first out on his thumbnail with fingers stained yellow by nicotine. He caught Scorpion looking at his hands. “I know,” he said. “These things will kill me. But given the fact I live in the Middle East, the odds are something else will kill me first.”

“Who’s this Karif?” Scorpion said.

“Smart, serious. A Bahraini, from Manama.”

“Shiite? Opposes the Al-Khalifas?” Scorpion asked. If Karif was a Shiite opposing the Bahraini ruling Al-Khalifa family, Sunnis allied with Sunni Saudi Arabia, it would make him an obvious recruiting target for either the Iranian MOIS or the Kta’eb Hezbollah; particularly since Bahrain served as the key base in the Persian Gulf for the U.S. Navy.

Yuval nodded. “He lives in Les Corts. Doing his MBA at ESADE.”

“And that matters because why?” Scorpion asked as they drove around a roundabout. On the left a big cruise ship docked at the port was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Listen,” Yuval said. He held up a cell phone. Then Scorpion heard it again. The same German sentence in the same woman’s voice he had been going over and over in his head since Zurich. Norouzi’s mistress saying, “Sagen Sie dem Gartner, muss das Gras zu schneiden.” Tell the Gardener, the grass needs to be cut. “We recorded this earlier today on Karif’s phone.”

Scorpion looked at the Israeli. If they recorded it, it meant they had Karif bugged.

“Who’s the Gardener?” he asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Yuval said.

Scorpion shook his head. “What indicator do you have that Karif’s working for Kta’eb Hezbollah?”

“This man,” Yuval said, pulling an iPad out of his briefcase and turning it on. He scrolled till he found the photo of a smallish man in a rumpled suit, unshaven, with what looked like outsize hands. He was talking to someone on what appeared to be a European street, but because a fraction of a billboard at the edge of the photograph advertised Bonjus, a popular Lebanese juice drink, Scorpion assumed it was taken in Beirut. “Our agent-”

“Where? Beirut?”

Yuval smiled. “Good,” he said appreciatively. “Yes, Beirut. Our man heard him called ‘Said Dekhil Flauban.’ We suspect he was involved in the Ghanem assassination a few years back. Inside Hezbollah, mention of the Flauben is associated with Kta’eb Hezbollah.”

Scorpion’s mind was going a mile a minute. Said Dekhil Flauban was Arabic for the saw-scaled snake, the deadliest snake in the Middle East. Ghanem had been the Lebanese prime minister assassinated by a terrorist bomb that everyone assumed had been planted by Hezbollah. What Yuval was also telling him was that the Israelis had a mole inside Hezbollah in Lebanon. It was the only way they could have known about the Snake.

“What connects this ‘Snake’ to this guy Karif?”

“Karif was in Beirut at the same time. Apparently meeting with Salim Kassem. I believe you may have encountered him,” Yuval said carefully. “That’s how we got onto Karif in the first place.”

Scorpion understood. His encounter with Salim had been during the Palestinian operation. Salim was Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of Al-Majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. Ghanem could not have been assassinated without Salim’s involvement. Yuval was saying his Lebanese mole tied Salim and Hezbollah to both the Snake and Karif.

“Why come to me?” he asked. “Why am I so deserving?”

Yuval nodded as if he understood Scorpion’s cynicism. Intelligence services only liaised because they had to, and they never gave anything away for free.

“Two things,” he said, staring ahead at the traffic. They had turned from the port and were heading up Avinguda del Parallel, a broad avenue bordered by apartment buildings and stores. “First, we’re limited here. The Spanish don’t like us.”