Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“I’m going to tell you a story about a little girl named Cinderella. Once there was a man who married, for his second wife, the proudest woman you ever saw. She had two nasty daughters of her own, who were just like her. The good man also had a beautiful young daughter from his first wife, a good sweet girl. Her name was Cinderella.”

As she recited, she saw Ghedi give the Somali man the money. Then she watched as Ghedi and the girl left with Van Zyl, a shiver going up her spine when they were gone and she was there alone with the child prostitutes and the Somalis with guns, all of them listening rapt to her story, though they could barely understand a word.

If she ever got back to camp, they would have to leave Mogadishu, she thought. Al-Shabaab and al Qaeda weren’t going to let this go. They would get back to Dadaab somehow. She and Ghedi and the little girl, Amina. And then what? What was she to do with them? They couldn’t live forever in Dadaab.

An odd thought. The American, Nick, would find her there, if he survived his war, she thought.

Mellat Park,

Tehran, Iran

“You heard? We’re wanted by the police, VEVAK, everyone,” Ghanbari said. “Our faces are everywhere.”

“I know,” Scorpion said, leaning on the rail of the yellow metal footbridge over the lake in Mellat Park. His and Ghanbari’s faces were on the front pages of Abrar and the Tehran Times and all the major TV channels; wanted for murder in the killing of Farzan Sadeghi, an officer and a hero of the Revolutionary Guards, and Zahra Ravanipour, an employee with the AFAGIR missile command.

He had watched the news on the television at a chain restaurant, Nayeb Kebab, in Kaj Square. For a disguise, he was dressed in a floppy red outfit and a tall floppy red hat, his face covered with blackface, like something from a late nineteenth century minstrel show. He had bought the outfit from a costume shop near the Grand Bazaar, and thought he looked ludicrous. He was supposed to be Haji Firuz, the traditional Persian minstrel of the Red Wednesday festivities. While playing peekaboo with two small children who were with their parents at the next table, and shaking his tambourine, he kept one eye on the door and on the TV. He was tired. It had been a killer night and he needed to go to ground, but there would be no sleep anymore. Not till he left Iran.

The news announcer on the restaurant TV cut back to talk about the American forces in the Persian Gulf and rumors about Israel, then the scene shifted to a reporter interviewing a burly Iranian man in his fifties in an expensive suit, wearing glasses and a white dulband turban, his tie at half-mast. They were in a government office; the TV screen caption read: ABOUZAR BEIKZADEH, SECRETARY OF THE EXPEDIENCY COUNCIL.

Beikzadeh, stared into the camera and declared: “These innocent Iranians were good people. Patriots. Murdered by CIA agents and Zionist terrorists who wish to destroy Iran. They will be found out and justice will be done. We expect to have these criminals in custody by tonight and then we will seek out and destroy those who sent them. I call upon all citizens to be vigilant. I call upon the Basiji to go out into the streets to help us find these CIA criminals.”

Scorpion had already seen Basiji militiamen out in force on every street corner. Besides the police, VEVAK, Revolutionary Guards, and ordinary citizens, it meant at least 100,000 Basiji vigilantes looking for Ghanbari and him. He could feel a prickling at the back of his neck. The noose was growing tighter.

“Further,” Beikzadeh continued, “because of the actions of the traitor, Muhammad Ghanbari, acting with the unanimous consent of the Expediency Council and the Supreme Leader, I have this morning assumed personal command of the Revolutionary Guards.” He stared into the TV camera. “All traitors everywhere will be rooted out. The criminals will not escape,” adding that anyone seeing the foreigner, Laurent Westermann, or the fugitive CIA spy, Muhammad Ghanbari, was to contact the nearest Naja police office or Basiji militiamen at once. There was no mention of the incident at Dizin or any other casualties.

Although Scorpion had known from the instant he fired the shot that he couldn’t save her, seeing Zahra’s face on the TV, confirmation that she was dead, was like a kick in the gut. How many casualties had there been on this mission? Harandi in Hamburg. Glenn. Chrissie; all of the Gnomes in Zurich. Rutledge and Mini Me on the Costa Brava. Now Zahra. She had been right about him. Just knowing him was lethal, he thought. He’d been right to stay away from Sandrine. All he could bring her was grief.

He had spent the night into the morning moving, riding buses and the Metro, not keeping still or holing up anywhere they might try to track him. After midnight he went back to the dead drop in Laleh Park to see if there was anything for him in the public men’s room.

There wasn’t.

He had torn his Laurent Westermann passport and papers into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet, pulling his last available ID from his backpack. A red Republic of Ireland passport in the name Sean O’Donnell, a documentary filmmaker from Dublin. It wasn’t deep cover, but better than nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

He’d slept fitfully on the stone floor of the public men’s room, curled next to the wall, the stink in his nostrils, ZOAF pistol in his hand. He kept waking in the dim light of a single bulb at every sound outside. In the morning, he washed and shaved with cold water and tried to clean up as best he could. Looking at himself in the mirror, he understood that without a disguise he would be caught before the morning was out. That was when he thought of Haji Firuz. The one and only piece of luck he’d had in this whole operation was that it happened at Nowruz, the Persian New Year. He wondered whether Rabinowich had taken that into account when planning the op. Which reminded him, he had to find a way to let Langley know about Sadeghi.

When he walked out in the early morning, sunlight had been filtering through the trees. The park was green, the pathways empty and beautiful. He heard a bird singing and it felt unworldly. It seemed insane that everyone in Iran was hunting him and that he would in all probability die today or that they were about to go to war.

He’d caught a bus in Vali Asr Square. Watching the city traffic and smog getting denser by the second, he calculated that he could risk up to five minutes online before the Revolutionary Guards could track him, got off and went into an Internet cafe. There, using the VPN, he bounced a Chattanooga message to Shaefer via the server at the Revolutionary Guards military base at Lavizan, through Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. “Chattanooga” was the agreed-upon signal that meant he had terminated the Gardener. He could only imagine the cheers and big smiles, handshakes all around, when Harris-or the DCIA himself-presented it to the President. Except he couldn’t stop thinking about Zahra and didn’t feel much like cheering.

Shaefer had responded with coded instructions for the escape. A dead drop under the fourth seat, seventh row, in a cinema on Shahrivar Avenue in Chalus. At midnight a seaplane would taxi close to the beach, and as soon as he and whomever he was bringing were aboard, they would take off for Baku in Azerbaijan. Plus one more piece of information. A coded addendum from Shaefer that translated to: “Baylor full mob.” Baylor was the code word he, Rabinowich, and Shaefer had agreed to use for Israel. “Full mob” meant total mobilization.

He’d thought of Yuval then. The Israelis were using the crisis as an excuse to launch the attack they had long wanted on the Iranian nuclear facilities. They wanted to do it with U.S. forces still in place in the Persian Gulf to give them cover, whether the Americans wanted to or not. All hell was about to break out across the Middle East. He had to get out of Iran now.