Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“Not since Cast Lead,” Scorpion said, referring to the 2009 Israeli military incursion into Gaza, when there had been massive demonstrations in Madrid against Israel.

“Not since the Spanish Inquisition.” Yuval grimaced, a sour expression on his face as he gestured for the driver to pull over. They stopped at a spot not far from a Metro station. “This is your operation. Also, Ahmad Harandi. It wasn’t his real name, of course. It was Avi. Avi Benayoun. He had a wife and daughter in Netanya. We appreciate what you tried to do.”

The Israeli mole in Hamburg, Scorpion thought, feeling a stab of regret, recalling their last meeting on the ferry. He had liked Harandi and failed to save him. It wasn’t a victory.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he said.

“No,” Yuval agreed. “Here,” handing him a flash drive. “Everything we have on Karif. Photos, address, even a video. Everything.”

“Including spy software. A Trojan horse perhaps?”

Yuval smiled. “You have a suspicious mind.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Scorpion said, pocketing the flash drive and putting his hand on the door handle. “You’re out of it,” he told Yuval, getting out of the SUV. “Keep your people away. If I see an unknown on the field, as far as I’m concerned it’s the opposition. I’ll kill him, understood?”

Yuval raised his hands, a sign of surrender.

“It’s out of our hands. Kol tov ,” he said as Scorpion got out and closed the car door.

Scorpion waited for a moment, watching the SUV pull into traffic and drive away, then turned and headed to the Metro station.

Going down the stairs into the Metro, he kept glancing over his shoulder, though he hadn’t spotted anyone tailing him. He had a prickly feeling at the back of his neck as if something terrible were about to happen. Already on this operation Harandi had been killed and they’d nearly gotten him and Sandrine in Paris. And you couldn’t turn on a TV without hearing war talk. It felt like he was blindfolded on a battlefield, something bad coming at him and he didn’t know what or from which direction, as he stood on the platform and watched the train with a sign that said L3 coming into the station. He had a lead. Karif. But was it a real lead, or were the Israelis pointing him at someone for their own reasons?

It was all coming down to one thing: Who was the Gardener?

Les Corts,

Barcelona, Spain

Karif’s apartment was on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the Les Corts district, a few blocks from the tram stop. Normal protocol would have been to watch Karif and pick him up when he was isolated or go into his apartment when he wasn’t at home and wait for him to show up. But they were up against the clock. Scorpion checked the street one last time. From the get-go they’d been on the defensive, rushed and desperate to pull a rabbit out of the hat so the administration in Washington would be able to prove to the world and, most of all, to the American public, that if they were going to bomb someone, it was justified, and that they had the right bad guys in their gun sights.

He decided to simply knock on the door. If Karif was home, he would try to persuade him that the Gardener had sent him from Tehran. If not, he would pick the lock, black-bag the apartment and wait for him. While on the tram, he had plugged Yuval’s data into his iPad, and after studying half a dozen photos and a blurry eight-second time-stop video, was sure that if he saw Karif-a clean-shaven young man with dark hair and a gap-toothed smile-he would recognize him.

Looking up at the apartment from the street, he couldn’t tell if anyone was home. The curtains were drawn and no light escaped. The street wasn’t busy, only a few people out though it was not yet ten o’clock, early for Barcelona. It was just a normal weeknight in a residential neighborhood, light from a small pasteleria bakery-restaurant spilling into the street.

He used a credit card slipped between the door and the jamb to open the front door of the apartment building. There was a small lobby and an elevator, which he ignored, instead taking the stairs to the sixth floor. He walked down the hallway, stopping at every apartment door to listen. Inside each one he could hear a television, but when he got to Karif’s apartment-listening intently, his ear on the door-there was nothing. No TV, no one talking, no sound of any kind. He reached into his pocket for his Peterson universal key.

Just then the door of the apartment next door opened and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, came out, the sound of a sitcom with a loud laugh track blaring as they closed the door behind them. They looked at Scorpion curiously. Quickly improvising, he nodded at them and knocked on the door, unable even to put a hand behind him on the Glock pistol in the holster at the small of his back. He didn’t expect a response but the door suddenly opened.

It wasn’t Karif. A burly Iranian-looking man with a thick mustache, wearing a windbreaker, stared back at him. His shoulders were huge. Scorpion would have bet he’d done some wrestling, a national sport in Iran.

“Que quieres?” the burly man said in non-Catalan, heavily accented Spanish. What do you want?

“Where’s Mohammad?” Scorpion said in English, sensing the teenagers walking away down the hallway.

“Here. You coming in,” the man said, his English as bad as his Spanish, opening the door for Scorpion to enter.

He stepped into the apartment and started to turn to confront the man, his hand going back to the gun at the small of his back, when he felt a tremendous blow to the side of his head. For an instant the room tipped sideways, and then he saw nothing.

The first thing he saw was his hand, covered in blood. And then the knife in his hand, dripping blood. He was lying on the carpeted floor. How long had he been out? he wondered. Then the panic hit. The man who hit him might still be there. He jumped to his feet and whirled around, the bloody knife in his hand. He didn’t see him as he ran to the kitchen, holding the knife as far away from him as he could so the blood wouldn’t drip on his clothes. The apartment felt like the man with the mustache had gone.

He dropped the Spanish Navaja-style folding knife into the sink and ran the water, washing the blood off his hand and watching it stain the basin pink. He looked to see where he had been cut but couldn’t find anything. Using dishwashing liquid, he washed his hands, went to the bathroom and dried them off with toilet paper, then flushed the pink-stained paper down the toilet.

He felt for his guns, the one at the small of his back and the one in his ankle holster, which were still there. Odd, he thought. Then it hit him. He wasn’t thinking straight; the blow might have caused a concussion. If he wasn’t cut, where did the blood come from? And how long had he been out?

Checking his watch, he saw that he couldn’t have been out more than a minute or two. Maybe less. His head throbbed and there was a painful lump on the right side at the back. It felt like someone had been using it for a golf ball. Then he pulled the Glock from his back holster and started to go through the apartment.

There was just the living room, the kitchenette, a single bedroom, and a bathroom. A student’s apartment. Cheap furniture, a pile of books, college texts, a laptop on the coffee table in the living room. He inserted a flash drive into the laptop. Its NSA software would suck all the document files, e-mails and contacts, and Internet temporary files and history from the laptop in seconds. Then he saw the bottom of a shoe beside the bed. He crept into the bedroom, ready to fire.