Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“I know,” Harris said softly. “I can see it. Love.” He made a face. “To feel that way. Did you mean what you said about quitting?”

“Depends on her. I tried to quit and found out it’s not so simple. I endanger the very people I care about. We’ll see,” Scorpion said. “You owe me money.”

Harris nodded. They were on the E-5 motorway. Scorpion saw a sign ahead for Ataturk International Airport, Yesilkoy.

“You’ll get it-plus your bonus. We’ve gone from egg on our face after Bern to heroes, in no small part thanks to you. The White House has asked for time from all the networks. The President will announce that the perpetrators of the Bern massacre, including the man behind the attack, the ‘Gardener,’ have been killed in a joint CIA-JSOC-Air Force operation. They’ll be busy pinning medals on each other for months. I have a request from the President. He wants you to come to the Oval Office. He wants to thank you in person.”

“Negative,” Scorpion said. “Besides, it’ll blow my cover.”

“We’ll keep it secure. Scouts’ honor,” Harris said, holding up three fingers.

“Right. Because nobody in Washington ever leaked anything. Tell him no thanks.”

“I can’t. It’s the President. What’ll I say?”

“Tell him I have a previous engagement,” Scorpion said.

Singita Sabora,

Serengeti, Tanzania

They had dinner under an acacia tree near their air-conditioned tent, the table set with white linen, fine crystal and china, and good French wine. Their steward, Godfrey, and his assistant, Samwel, had hung the tree with lanterns, and it was magical, the lights seeming to float in the darkness over the Serengeti Plain. A zebra grazed nearby, and while they were eating, a baby elephant came within a dozen feet of the table, studying them curiously till its mother, a large female, nudged it away with her trunk.

“They say they’re as intelligent as we are,” Sandrine said. She was wearing a sky-blue cocktail dress, and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

“I don’t know about as intelligent. Certainly better, kinder than we are,” Scorpion said.

Afterward, Godfrey brought them Springbank scotch on the rocks as they sat on the raised wooden deck in front of their tent, looking out at the Serengeti under a sky filled with stars. From the lounge tent came music from an old hand-wound gramophone-all the furnishings were African Colonial, antiques dating from the turn of the century; it was as if they had stepped into another time-someone playing songs from the 1920s, like the Charleston and “Yes Sir, that’s My Baby” and “It Had to Be You.” Zebras and wildebeests wandered by and then scampered off, and they saw why, spotting the female leopard that came by every night at that time, eyes glowing like yellow disks in the darkness.

They made love in the big four-poster bed in the tent, open to the night except for the mosquito netting. They took their time, slow and soft and sweet and strong, exploring every part of each other. Letting it grow and grow until he couldn’t tell where he left off and she began, only a single intensity, filling to bursting through them, and as she cried out, part of it was the low rumbling roar of a lion.

They slept, and in the middle of the night she reached for him and they started again. They were like addicts, unable to get enough of each other until finally, sometime near dawn, they slept again. The sun came up over the horizon, and Godfrey brought them coffee and breakfast on their deck, and they sat and ate, never taking their eyes off each other, except to breathe in the gold and green grasses and the herds on the Serengeti and to laugh at a giraffe lowering himself splayed-footed to graze on the grass next to the tennis court.

“ Dieu , I love Africa,” she said.

“So do I,” he said.

She bit her lip.

“I’m almost afraid to say it. I don’t want to break the spell,” she said.

“I know.”

“What do we do about the children?” she asked. Ghedi and Amina. She wanted to take them back to Paris to live, despite the massive bureaucratic mess it would entail with the Kenyan, Somali, and French governments. They also talked about bringing them to America.

“Are you sure it’s the right thing?” Scorpion said. “To turn them into little French people or little Americans. They have their own culture, their own language, their own world. Not necessarily inferior to ours, just different. They have to have a say in their lives too. I told Ghedi that.”

“What did he say?”

Scorpion smiled. “He said his sister was too little to understand such a big thing. I told him he would have to be the man and decide. He said, ‘I will,’ and showed me his belawa knife.”

“I know,” she smiled. “He’s ready to kill anyone who touches me.”

“I know how he feels,” he said.

“You think they should stay in Africa? They’ll never have opportunities like we could give them in France.”

“They’re African. Let’s not pretend the other kids in college will accept them like French kids or that they’ll be able to get into one of the grande ecoles . America is more accepting.”

“And you, Nick. What do you want?”

“Whatever part of you you’ll let me have.”

“Do I have that much power?”

“Look!” he said, standing up and pointing at a herd of wildebeests, thousands of them, crossing the plain in the distance; a lioness prowled on the edge of the herd. Godfrey and Samwel brought them binoculars and they watched for a while.

“It’s like the Garden of Eden,” she said, reaching her arm around him and pulling him close. She whispered: “And what about the people who tried to kill us? Is that over?”

“For now,” he said.

Later, after a day with the two of them on horseback, tracking the herds, the zebras, wildebeests, elands, giraffes, and elephants, they took turns in the thatched outdoor shower and he thought about the conversation he’d had with Dave Rabinowich during a middle-of-the-night layover in Doha, Qatar, on the flight from Istanbul to Nairobi. He was using a new SME PED Harris had given him, sitting in the airport, nearly empty at that hour, well away from the few Arabs in white thawbs and keffiyehs and bleary-eyed Western businessmen in traveling clothes, so as not to be overheard.

“Hawkeye,” Scorpion said. The Avenger character was the latest Flagstaff code word.

“Albuquerque. I’m having dinner. The Knicks are on,” Rabinowich complained, using the new countersign.

“Like interrupting frozen dinner is a hardship. You know why I’m calling?”

“I was wondering when you’d knock on my door. There’s a loose end. Knowing you, you can’t let it go, can you?”

“You shouldn’t be so clever. They’ll demote you.”

“No chance. They’re too busy patting each other’s backs about how brilliant they all were on Iran. You figure it out yet?”

“Partly. You won’t pass this on.”

“And upset everyone’s apple cart, especially after POTUS went on national TV acting like John Wayne? Uh-uh. I plan to collect my pension.”

“I’m the loose end. First the way they came after me in Paris. Then Sadeghi’s comment to Zahra that the whole thing was about me. What was so important about me?”

“Come on. You know why. You’re just fishing for confirmation,” Rabinowich said, sounding like he was talking while eating.

“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full. You might choke.”

“Wouldn’t give Harris and Soames the satisfaction. Come on, give,” Rabinowich said, with a strange grunt that was his version of a laugh.