Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“First they nailed Harandi in Hamburg. Then Paris, coming after me with a ton of resource. Harandi had given me a key lead in the Palestinian business. It all ties back to Bassam Hassani, the Palestinian in Rome, which was ultimately an Iranian operation. Correction, the Gardener’s operation.”

“Finally! Somebody besides me knows how to actually use a few brain cells,” Rabinowich said. “Keep going.”

“A power struggle over control of the Revolutionary Guards.”

“Exactly. You eliminate Sadeghi and Ghanbari and who wins?”

“Beikzadeh. Now he’s head of both the Expediency Council and the Revolutionary Guards.”

“So now he owns the brain and the muscle. Makes him the most powerful man in the country; more powerful even than the Supreme Leader,” Rabinowich said.

“Now comes the loose end,” Scorpion said. “Sadeghi didn’t know who I was when he saw my photo. Meanwhile, Ghanbari set up Zahra instead of me till he tried to have Scale take me out at the end. What does that tell you?”

“You’re warm. Hot even. You know, you might actually make it as an intelligence analyst here in McLean.”

“Can’t stand the CIA cafeteria food.”

“Come on, say it. Nobody here but us girls,” Rabinowich said.

“What if neither of them was the real Gardener? What if he’s still alive?”

“Indeed. What if? Think about it,” Rabinowich said. “The beauty of it. The sheer symmetry. The Gardener provokes an action that forces you out from wherever you’re hiding and into the game. If he takes you out, he eliminates the key person who spiked the Palestinian op and killed one of his key operatives. He’s a hero and he’s eliminated a big threat. If he doesn’t take you out, he’s set it up so you eliminate not just one, but both his rivals for him, which he then uses to justify him taking over. No matter what happens, he wins. It’s so elegant. Like a perfect equation.”

Mozart, Scorpion thought. That’s what Yuval called him. Mozart. They’d all been doing arithmetic; he’d been doing calculus.

“So-and this is purely hypothetical. .”

“Totally.”

“Just a wild-ass theory, mind you; the question is, who’s the Gardener?”

“Think about it,” Rabinowich said. “Who wins?”

“Beikzadeh.”

“Head of the class, pal. Gold star.”

Except Rabinowich was wrong, Scorpion thought. Beikzadeh wasn’t the Gardener. Wrong age. Beikzadeh, the man he’d seen on TV, was in his fifties. Based on what Yuval had told them, Absalom would have to be in his late thirties, early forties.

“So what do you think? Is he still after me?”

“Doubt it,” Rabinowich said. “Everybody in the Pickle Factory thinks the Gardener is dead. This totally theoretical person we’re talking about loves that. But if you get hit, especially given that I’m around, suddenly everyone on Planet CIA knows he’s alive. Why risk it? Besides, they’ve got their hands full with the Israelis who might attack any second. Can I go back to my dinner now?”

“One more thing. Who’s Beikzadeh’s hatchet man? Who does his shovel work? I need a name. Somebody connected with him.” Whoever ran Beikzadeh’s dirty work was the real Gardener, Scorpion thought. Someone, like Absalom, in his thirties.

“Give me some time. Whoever it is, is really buried.”

“Come on, Dave. Give me something. A wild-ass guess, anything.”

There was a moment of silence. Scorpion could hear the sound of a basketball game on TV in the background over the phone.

“There was this one thing I came across a few years ago,” Rabinowich said. “A wedding announcement in Fars, the Iranian news agency. Something about Beikzadeh’s daughter getting married.”

That’s it, Scorpion thought. What was it Yuval had said about Absalom? “Of course, he married well. The daughter of a very powerful man within the Supreme Leader’s inner circle.”

“The article mentioned something about him working in one of Beikzadeh’s departments. Now I remember. It was odd.”

“Why?”

“Because there was no other mention of him anywhere. Not even university. Nothing. It’s as if he never existed except to marry Beikzadeh’s daughter.”

“What was his name?” Scorpion asked, excitement building. It was the Gardener. That was exactly how he’d do it.

“That was even odder,” Rabinowich said. “They didn’t say. Can you imagine writing an article about a prominent wedding and not mentioning the name of the groom?”

“They must have said something. Anything. What department was he in?”

“Let me think,” Rabinowich muttered. “It was years ago.”

Come on, Scorpion thought. Rabinowich was stalling. A genius with a near photographic memory, Rabinowich was taking his time because he hadn’t decided whether to tell him.

“Ministry of Islamic Guidance,” Rabinowich said finally. “I think that was it. Shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Soames, on the other line.”

“Tell him your poem,” Scorpion said, and ended the call.

That night, after dinner, they made love on the four-poster bed. Afterward, she lay with her head on the pillow, looking out at the night.

“How does this work?” she said.

“I don’t know. If you had any sense, you should run as fast and as far as you can in the opposite direction.”

She raised herself on an arm to look at him, her eyes reflecting the light from the half-moon risen over the plain.

“Is that what you want?”

He pulled her close, inhaling the smell of her, the feel of her.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

“Hypothetically, where would we live? What would we do?” she asked.

“Whatever you want. I have a house on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. A sailing ketch. We could go there. We could stay in Africa, America, Paris,” he said. He’d already told her everything. His real name, Nick Curry. That he was born in Santa Monica, California, and his father took him to Saudi Arabia as a child after his mother died and then his father was killed and his strange childhood, raised by the Bedouin in the desert. All of it. Tehran University, the Sorbonne, Harvard. U.S. Special Forces, JSOC, the CIA, and how he left and became an independent agent. Whatever she wanted to know.

“And from time to time, you go away and kill people. I don’t know if I can live with that,” she said, raising her head and looking at him with those luminous eyes.

“Except if I didn’t, many innocent people-sometimes thousands, tens of thousands, millions even-will die. What’s the moral calculus on that?”

He got up and walked out onto the deck in his jockey shorts. A zebra yawned and trotted away, and the sky was so bright with the moon and stars he thought he could almost read by it. Godfrey had left out clean glasses, the bottle of Springbank scotch, Evian water, and an ice bucket on the off chance they’d want a late nightcap. He poured himself a drink and took a sip. In the distance, he heard the sound of an elephant’s trumpeting.

There was something else, he thought. Because Harris was right. He’d lied about his meeting with Harandi in Rome before any of this had happened. He had deceived them. Yes, he’d turned the Israelis down about Absalom, but before they parted, Harandi had said to him, “Promise me. If anything happens to me, you’ll go to Iran.” He’d promised because in his world, until Sandrine, it was the only thing he had to hang onto. When you lose someone, you can’t just let it go. Things have to be made right. Oddly, he sensed he shared that with his enemy. Absalom. The Gardener. The man who had run the Palestinian. The man behind the embassy attack in Bern.

He wondered if the Israelis had attacked Iran. He and Sandrine had avoided cell phones, the Internet, anything to do with the outside world. Oddly enough, at that moment he didn’t want to know.