Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

There was only one solution: he would have to make something happen.

He turned off her computer, put his shirt and jacket back on, checked to see if Zahra was still sleeping soundly, and pulled a bedcover over her. Then he went over to the window. The Peugeot was still parked in the same spot. Making sure everything in the apartment was the way it had been before he came in, he left, closing the door silently behind him.

Laleh Park,

Tehran, Iran

The park was a few blocks from Scorpion’s hotel. Traffic was light this time of night, but he had taken no chances and had gone out of the hotel using the back entrance, around the block in one direction and another block in the opposite direction, to make sure he wasn’t followed.

It was still raining. He walked down Keshavarz Boulevard under an umbrella, shielded from view by plane trees on either side of the center pedestrian island. A water canal shrouded by foliage ran through the center of the pedestrian walkway for the length of the wide boulevard to Laleh Park. The city was crisscrossed by such water channels.

The streets were nearly empty in the rain. The cafes were closed, their plastic chairs folded and stacked, leaning against the sides of buildings; the only sound was the splash of a passing car and the gurgle of water flowing in the canal. He stopped for a moment as if to tie his shoe and glanced behind him. The boulevard was empty. Either he wasn’t being followed or they were giving him plenty of rope to hang himself, he thought, straightening and walking into Laleh Park.

Except for the occasional streetlight beside a paved walkway, the park was dark and still and wet. There were broad green spaces, fountains and trees and the patter of raindrops on the leaves.

“A dead-drop. That’s the best we can do,” Shaefer had said in Dubai. “As it is, someone will have to risk their life to get anything to you.”

“If I find Ghanbari, how do I get something to you?” he had asked.

“There’ll be something in the dead drop. Just use it once and get rid of it because the VEVAK’ll be on you like white on rice,” Shaefer had drawled in response.

He made his way past a fountain with a statue in the middle and down a lane so overhung with trees they formed a tunnel over benches where, in evenings when the weather was good, couples who had nowhere else to go for privacy would hang out and kiss. The lane opened to a broad green, a children’s playground, and two concrete structures for men’s and women’s public restrooms. He went into the men’s restroom. The first stall was empty. In the second stall he found a black Tumi messenger bag identical to the one he was carrying.

He closed the stall door and put his bag down, leaving it where the other bag had been. Inside the new bag there were two cell phones, a plug-in flash drive, and a PC-9 ZOAF-an Iranian copycat version of the SIG Sauer P226 9mm pistol. There was also a sound suppressor and four magazines of ammunition, wrapped with rubber bands. He loaded the ZOAF with a fifteen-round magazine and put it and the cell phones into his raincoat pocket, zipping up the new messenger bag and slinging it over his shoulder as he left the restroom.

The area was still empty. He didn’t bother to scan the trees. The contact who had left the bag was either watching, waiting for him to leave to retrieve the empty messenger bag he’d left in the stall, or would be back in a half hour; certainly before dawn, he thought.

Before leaving the park Scorpion stopped in a stand of trees, and after making sure there were no eyes on him, turned on both cell phones, one at a time. The second phone had a text message. It was a jumble of letters that didn’t seem to represent anything but changed daily based on a random-number algorithm on his flash drive, which could be plugged into any USB port or cell phone. The letters represented multiple alphabet values, to avoid frequency analysis, and were synchronized with identical results on drives held by Rabinowich and Shaefer; a key that could only be used by the three of them. Once translated, it read: tangoershadfinalwmzexpectedarlingtonfullcourtpress . Pure Rabinowich, he thought.

They had topped it off with a simple reversal code he’d worked out with Rabinowich and Shaefer in Dubai just in case. The reversal wasn’t serious encryption, just meant to slow someone down a few crucial minutes in case they broke the random number code. They were acting on the assumption that any communication was bound to be picked up by the COMINT monitoring by VEVAK and the Revolutionary Guards that blanketed the city.

“Tango” was military-speak for the letter T, the seventh letter from the end of the alphabet, so Scorpion knew that Rabinowich was referring to the seventh letter from the beginning of the alphabet, G, obviously meaning either Ghanbari or the Gardener. He assumed it stood for Ghanbari or there would have been more. ERSHAD was a Farsi acronym. It stood for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Iranian ministry in charge of government censorship of media and the Internet. Combing through reams of data, Rabinowich had somehow uncovered that Ghanbari worked there as a cover for his al Quds activities; either that or someone at that particular ministry knew how to get to him.

Scorpion knew that going through the ministry would be difficult. He had appointments with General Vahidi’s people in the IRGCAF, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force. It would be next to impossible to explain to VEVAK what business he had with the Islamic Guidance ministry, and in any case it didn’t matter. He was counting on Zahra, he thought, looking around at the stand of trees in the darkness.

The silence was complete; no bird or animal stirrings, not even the faint patter of rain on the leaves. The rain was tapering off.

Final wmz, when the three letters were numerically reversed alphabetically, stood for “final DNA.” Combining that with “expected” meant that the final DNA tests on the bodies of the terrorists in Bern had yielded the expected results they first talked about in Zug and that had since been broadcast all over the world. Except for the Kurdish girl, the dead terrorists in Bern had been Iranians.

It was starting to look like that was enough for Washington. Arlington meant the Pentagon plus full-court press. It meant the generals were pressuring the pols, telling them that they couldn’t hold at this DEFCON level for too long without a security breach or losing mission readiness. He could feel the pressure coming from Harris, who was obviously trying to hold his finger in the dike. Unless they heard otherwise from him soon, the U.S. was seriously considering attacking Iran, even without the proof they needed. Except neither he nor anyone in Washington understood what was going on. Especially in this internal battle within Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. It could be a huge potential fiasco, he thought. And Harris was all he had. The DCIA, the head of the CIA, was a political appointee. He couldn’t stand up to the generals and the politicos forever.

Message received, Bob, he thought, taking the SIM out of the cell phone, burying it in dirt at the base of a tree and covering the ground over it with sodden leaves. As he walked back on the path, he dropped the rest of the cell phone into a plastic trash can. Coming out of the park onto Keshavarz Boulevard, he saw that the rain had stopped. He closed the umbrella and kept walking. Ahead of him, to the east, a gray predawn light was visible behind the buildings. To his left loomed the Alborz mountain range, white with snow from the foothills to the peaks. The rain must have fallen as snow at the higher elevations, he thought.