Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“What do you want?” Shaefer said finally.

“Get rid of Soames.”

“Not happening.”

“Do it-or I will.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Shaefer muttered. “Anything else?”

“I need an SOG,” Scorpion said.

El Born,

Barcelona, Spain

“You were there?” Scorpion asked.

“You kidding, hombre? I helped with the cooking,” Shehi said. The Albanian was a short man with a close-shaved head and a three-day beard that didn’t disguise the knife scar that ran down the side of his face from the hairline to the jaw.

They were in the back room of a small bar on the cobblestoned Carrer de l’Argenteria in the gothic El Born district. Starting with a Romanian whore on Calle Ramon in El Raval, it had taken Scorpion just four hours to work his way up the criminal food chain to the Albanian. It seemed odd for him to be there in the tiny room, dark and smelling of beer and mold, when the day had turned sunny, the trees green, and in an early sign of spring, girls were on the Ramblas in tank tops and brighter colors.

“How’d they kill him?” Scorpion asked. They were talking about a notorious incident that had echoed around the police and intelligence world in which the members of an Albanian Spanish mafia gang had killed, cooked, and eaten one of their own they considered a traitor.

“With a hammer,” Shehi said. “Why do you think they call Hayir ‘El Martillo’? Here.” He poured brandy from a bottle of Fundador and pushed the glass at Scorpion. “Stop with that cava piss and drink like a man.” Scorpion traded the sparkling wine for the brandy.

“Salud,” he toasted, and they drank. “So how’d you cook him?”

“We ground him up in a meat grinder. Then we made pimientos rellenos de carne . Stuffed red peppers. Everyone at a big table. Must have been at least twenty of us.”

“How was it?”

“You know. .” The Albanian paused to reflect. “We fried the peppers, and let me tell you, with a nice onion sauce and vino tinto , he was pretty good. Better than he ever was alive, that culero .” He laughed, then looked at Scorpion speculatively. “So what kind of joda hijo de puta ”-cop son of a bitch-“you looking for?”

“A joda who likes to chupame la polla. ” A cop who’ll do oral sex; in slang, someone willing to do anything for money. “Even Muslims.”

Shehi looked at him sharply. “What kind of Muslims?” For Albanians, religion was dangerous territory.

“Shia,” Scorpion said.

“Hezbollah? You talking Hezbollah? That’s serious mierda you talking, hombre.”

Scorpion put a hundred euro bill on the table. Shehi didn’t respond. He put another hundred down, then a two hundred. Shehi put his hand over the money, and Scorpion stopped him from taking the money by touching his index finger to the back of Shehi’s hand. Neither of them moved.

“The joda you want is Pintero. Victor Pintero. A sotsinspector in the mossos d’esquadra in El Raval,” Shehi said, taking the money.

“He’d sell information to Hezbollah?”

Shehi shrugged. “For the price of a stink-faced whore, he’d sell his mother.”

“What makes you so sure he’s Hezbollah’s puta ?” Scorpion asked, letting his right hand drop below the table to the pocket where he carried the Walther PK380 he had taken from the police station. Shehi was holding something back; he wasn’t sure what. He put his hand on the gun. “You don’t want me to come back,” he added quietly.

“I shit on you too,” Shehi said. Then looking into Scorpion’s cold gray eyes, he reconsidered. “He’s on our payroll. I know definitely one hundred percent he deals with Hezbollah. So do we.”

“Like what?”

“Guns, drugs, money washing, putas . Romanian women, Moldovan, Russian. Good business,” rubbing his thumb on his fingers in the universal sign for money.

“And I should believe you because. .?” Scorpion said.

“Like you say, hombre,” Shehi said, taking a swig of the brandy and wiping his mouth with his hand. “I don’t want to see you again. You too hot. Too many people looking for you,” looking directly at Scorpion. “No good for business.”

So Shehi had recognized him from the police sketch shown on TV and in the newspapers, Scorpion thought. He would have to change his appearance beyond just growing a Van Dyke type beard. It also meant Shehi knew about the four policemen he had taken out at the comisaria who were all in serious condition at Clinic de Barcelona hospital. That’s why the Albanian didn’t want to mess with him.

“Except maybe you’ll think to call the mossos the minute I leave.”

Shehi grinned. “The thought occurred.”

“Sure. Kill two birds with one stone. Make a little extra.” Scorpion winked, easing the Walther out and pointing it, under the table, at Shehi’s belly. Another word and he would have to kill him.

Again Shehi shrugged. “Not a bad idea.”

“It’s a very bad idea,” Scorpion said, finger tightening on the trigger.

“You think I don’t know, hombre? I shit in the milk of any joda’s mother,” Shehi said, giving no sign he knew how close to death he was. “I never tell mossos nothing. Nada . And if I did, what would I tell them? We talk. ‘And where did he go?’ they will ask. What can I say? I don’t know nothing. I don’t want to know nothing.” He looked shrewdly at Scorpion. “We finish, hombre?”

Scorpion slid the Walther back into his pocket as he got up.

“Cell phone,” he said, holding out his hand. Shehi handed his over.

Scorpion stood over him. “So long as you forget you ever saw me, that we ever had this conversation, we finish,” he said.

When he got outside, the sun was so bright he had to shade his eyes. As he walked the narrow street toward the Santa Maria del Mar church, he used Shehi’s phone to make a call. When he was done, he took out the SIM and battery, tossed the cell phone into a trash bin, then dropped the SIM and battery into a storm drain a block away before heading to the Metro.

The clock was ticking. And all he could think about was not the mission, but Sandrine. He wondered where she was now and if she was safe.

Dharkenleey,

Mogadishu, Somalia

She was being watched. It was the South African, Van Zyl, a lanky bearded man with blue eyes. He was from UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, at the improvised horror show called Badbaada Camp on the western outskirts of Mogadishu. The Badbaada refugee camp made the one at Dadaab in Kenya seem like the Ritz Carlton. Plastic sheeting was the only shelter, no food or toilet facilities, nothing; just dirt on the wrong side of Dharkenleey Road and a single water faucet for sixty thousand people and hundreds more arriving every day to escape the fighting and starvation in Afgooye and Lower Shabelle. Van Zyl had shown up just three days after she arrived.

She had flown in from Nairobi. Coming in from the airport, Mogadishu was a city of blazing sun and battered white Toyota vans so packed with people that men and boys rode clinging to the outside, standing on rear bumpers as they bounced along the rutted streets; a city of open-air markets selling vegetables, guns, and ammunition; concrete cinder-block buildings, some blasted to ruins by the recent fighting, women in multicolored direhs with children moving among the armed green-bereted African Union troops and Somali government soldiers that were everywhere.