Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

As Scorpion stepped into the car, the train slowed as it pulled into a station and he felt the momentum pulling him forward. Mustache’s gaze flickered for a moment at the station platform moving by, then back to him. If there was shooting, Scorpion thought, people were going to be killed, his eyes darting at the platform, knowing there would be a bunch of mossos waiting for him. If shooting started, both he and Mustache, plus a bunch of bystanders, would be dead. In any case, he was trapped. The only question was what to do about Mustache.

He struggled to push toward the burly man through the crowd of people getting up to leave the train, the momentum as it stopped lurching him forward. Pushing through, he saw Mustache join those people getting off through the far door. He started to push out through the nearest door but was met with a scrum of passengers coming onto the train. There was no way through, and he watched desperately as Mustache walked past a large squad of mossos , who ignored him as they scanned the train.

He had to wait for the crowd boarding the train to ease, and then, as he started to get out, one of the mossos pointed at him, shouting, “Ahi esta! Es el!” It’s him!

Seven or eight mossos rushed the train, shoving their way into the car, their guns drawn. People shrank away from them as two of them ran up to Scorpion, who took his hand out of his pocket and just stood there, while the train loudspeaker announced in Catalan and Spanish that the train would not be moving because of police activity.

Two of the mossos roughly grabbed his arms, and a third put handcuffs on him.

“Voste esta sota detencio,” one of them said. You’re under arrest.

Eixample,

Barcelona, Spain

The handcuffs were made of nickel-coated steel and not connected by links but a hinge that allowed less movement. The keyholes for each cuff were in the extensions that formed the hinge. He thought about escaping, but there was no chance after they brought him out of the Metro and put him, along with a mosso to watch him, in the back of a mossos d’esquadra van to the police comisaria in the Eixample business district. It was a gray concrete fortress of a building off a smart, tree-lined street, Via Augusta, that he only caught a glimpse of before they hustled him inside.

They brought him to a room with no windows, empty except for a table and chairs, and frisked him. A mosso went through his pockets, dumping everything onto the table. When they found the knife and the bloodstained pieces of toilet paper, they looked significantly at each other. One of the mossos pulled on latex gloves and placed the knife and the toilet paper in separate see-through plastic bags. Throughout it all Scorpion said nothing. He barely glanced at the one-way glass on the wall or the video camera near the ceiling, but registered their locations.

They sat him in one of the chairs facing the one-way glass. One of them, an older, tanned police sergeant with long iron-gray hair, sat opposite him.

“Quin es el teu nom?” the sergeant asked him first in Catalan, then in Spanish, then English. What is your name? Scorpion didn’t answer.

The sergeant stood up, leaned across the table and smacked him hard across the face. The tiniest flicker of a smile ghosted Scorpion’s lips. “If you do that,” he remembered Sergeant Falco saying about smiling at his first interrogation during his Level C SERE training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he was in JSOC’s First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta Force, “you’re letting the interrogator know he’s in for a fight.” At Level C SERE, interrogators were allowed to break no more than one major and two minor bones. In comparison, most other interrogations, even brutal ones, were walks in the park.

“Who are you?” the sergeant asked. Scorpion had left his Richard Cahill Canadian passport in the hotel safe and was carrying no ID. “Why did you kill Mohammad Karif? What was he to you? Did you know him? Where are you from? Are you Catalan? Spanish? I think you are a foreigner, yes?”

Scorpion just looked at him.

“We have you,” the sergeant said. “We have witnesses. We have the knife, the bloodstains. We will do scientific analysis and have a lot more. If you talk now, it will go more better for you.”

Scorpion didn’t respond.

“Say something!” the sergeant shouted, smacking the table with his hand. “Fill de puta!”

Scorpion stared at the one-way glass, where he knew others were watching. Think nothing, he told himself. Show nothing. Be nothing. Sooner or later they’d leave him alone for a minute and he could escape.

The sergeant went out, leaving him alone. There was no point doing anything; he knew they were watching. Probably trying to decide whether to send in someone else to question him. Good cop, bad cop. Meanwhile, his mind was racing ahead.

When he had knocked on Karif’s door, both he and Mustache had been surprised. Mustache had improvised, and it was likely he’d called the police to pin the blame on him for the murder. Assumption: Mustache worked for the Gardener, who was shutting his network down.

Why?

Because he didn’t want the attack on the embassy to be traced back to Kta’eb Hezbollah, thereby allowing the Americans to justify an attack on Iran, he decided. No witnesses, no proof. Total deniability. If the U.S. attacked, Iran could turn to Russia, China, and the rest of the Muslim world and talk about U.S. aggression.

He was getting a sense of the Gardener. He was careful, smart, devious, and ruthless as hell. The Gardener was as dangerous an adversary as he had ever faced, he decided as the sergeant came back into the room with four more policemen.

“We have two eyewitnesses who say they saw you go into Mohammad Karif’s apartment,” the sergeant said in Catalan, then in Spanish and English. “Unless you talk to me now, you will not leave prison for many years.”

Scorpion just looked at him.

The sergeant gestured to the policemen, who took him out of the room and down a long hallway to another room, where they prepared to photograph and fingerprint him. A television on top of a file cabinet was on. It showed a newscaster from Antena 3 Noticias in front of a screen showing a floodlit police nighttime scene. It was a European country, but not Spain, Scorpion thought. A subtitle on the screen read: ZURICH, SUIZA. Switzerland. One of the Swiss policemen on TV pointed at a body in what looked like a wooded or park setting. Then the camera showed more bodies. They started to turn Scorpion toward a table to be fingerprinted.

“Espera,” Scorpion said, the first word he had spoken. Wait.

Surprised, they stopped, and like him, they turned to watch the TV.

Although he couldn’t follow the rapid Spanish, he could catch some of it from the news ticker crawl at the bottom of the screen. It was Bergholz Park in Zurich. Five men and one woman found dead. Murdered. Some of the dead may have been Americans. They showed the face of the dead woman taken from a passport photo, a pretty blonde, and even before they showed it, Scorpion knew it was Chrissie.

It hit him like a pile driver. The Gnomes. Chrissie. Glenn. All four of them dead. He felt like throwing up. He’d warned Shaefer! Told him to pull them off. It was his fault. He’d asked Harris to leave the Gnomes in Zurich to help him pull off the movie for Norouzi. Soames, he thought. If he got the chance, he’d rip his guts out.

Five men dead, the announcer said. Who was the fifth?

Norouzi, he thought. It had to be.

The announcer’s next words, which he read in the crawl at the bottom of the screen, confirmed it.