Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“Tell Harris to go fuck himself.”

Soames just smirked. Scorpion stared at him.

“What’s so funny?”

“He said you’d say that,” grinning widely. “He also said don’t take no for an answer.”

“I’ll save you the trouble,” Scorpion said, getting up to leave. “I won’t even let you ask the question.”

“Rabinowich said to tell you there’s something you need to hear.”

Dave Rabinowich was acknowledged even by his enemies to be the most brilliant intelligence analyst within the CIA. A graduate of MIT when he was only eighteen, Rabinowich was on a track to win a Fields when he decided to join the CIA because, he explained, “real world mathematics is more interesting because everyone is always lying.” He was also one of only two people in the American intelligence community whose judgment Scorpion trusted.

Scorpion sat back down, his arms folded over his chest.

“I hope Rabinowich also told you that you better not be bullshitting me,” he said.

Soames took a swig of the Tusker and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“This isn’t half bad,” he said about the beer. “About Bern. You saw the TV?”

Scorpion nodded. It was on the drive to Nairobi, taking Sandrine to the airport.

Sandrine had been packing when he got back from Somalia with the children. She had to go to Paris. Something about funding for the nonprofit she worked for.

“I’m their show pony,” she said. “They tart me up a la derniere mode for these big charity affairs, and if I don’t do it, we can’t keep these children alive.”

She helped triage the children he’d brought in. Despite the way he’d mucked it up and the bullets hitting the truck, all sixteen were still alive. Before he left them in the hospital tent, the boy, Ghedi, took his hand and wouldn’t let go.

“Safa an’a weedu?” he asked. Will you come back? Sandrine watched them, her lion’s eyes unreadable.

“I will, inshallah ,” Scorpion said.

“Everyone says this, but they don’t come,” the boy said.

Scorpion knelt so he could look straight into Ghedi’s dark brown eyes. He already knew with Sandrine it was a coup de foudre . A lightning bolt. And now the Somali boy’s fingers clutching at his hand. He had never felt like this before. What was happening to him?

“I’ll come back. I promise. Eeven ana o’whyish ,” he added. If I’m still alive. Ghedi looked at him with his big dark eyes and nodded. A promise.

Scorpion and Sandrine both had to leave for the airport. For him, there was no choice. He had to get away before the press got to Dowler. Already some of the aid workers were looking at him and talking among themselves. Just to make sure, under the excuse of treating Dowler for his burn wounds, Sandrine gave the Englishman a sedative that would knock him out for twenty-four hours.

Sandrine gave Scorpion a long look when she saw how shot up the Toyota pickup was. It was riddled with bullet holes. Before they left for Nairobi, Cowell volunteered to come along to bring the truck back to Dadaab.

“He just wants an excuse to go to Nairobi. Get at the whores on Koinange Street,” Sandrine whispered to Scorpion, inclining her head at Cowell as they bounced on the rough dirt track to Garissa that passed for a road. Scorpion kept the FAD assault rifle ready. The area between Dadaab and Garissa was rife with pirates and Al-Shabaab. Cowell’s and Sandrine’s eyes widened when they saw the FAD.

“Is that for real?” Cowell asked.

“How do you think I got out of Somalia?” Scorpion replied.

For a long while, driving through an empty landscape, except for the occasional baobab tree in the distance, no one spoke. Crossing the bridge over the muddy Tana River, they passed a troop of baboons pawing through garbage from a manyatta slum on the outskirts of Garissa. Africa, Scorpion thought.

Garissa was a border town on the human trafficking route between Somalia and Nairobi. Somalis and Luo tradesmen shared the streets with refugees, aid workers, bandits, thugs, herds of camels, and Kenyan soldiers in fatigues and red berets with HK assault rifles.

They stopped for lunch at the Nomad Hotel, the local watering hole, where Scorpion saw the news about the Bern attack on the TV behind the bar. Nearly everyone at the embassy had been killed. Forty-eight dead. Three survived. A man and a young woman staffer who hid in a closet, and one of the Marines, in critical condition, were still alive.

Al Qaeda claimed responsibility, but the TV announcer said that Swiss and American authorities were skeptical. A short video from an embassy security camera beamed worldwide showed ski-masked gunmen moving through the corridors, methodically tossing grenades and firing into offices.

“Well, that’ll bloody gee things up,” Cowell said when they were back on a real road, the paved A3 to Nairobi.

But neither Scorpion nor Sandrine responded. We’ll probably never see each other again, Scorpion thought, and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. They drove the long miles of low scrub and sand till the gridlock of Nairobi, under its endless haze of smog.

At Jomo Kenyatta Airport, they only had a few seconds together at the curb, Cowell watching them from the truck. Her eyes searched his face.

“I keep thinking you’re running from the police, but that’s not it, is it?” she asked. “And you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

He didn’t say anything. The less she knew, the safer she’d be, he thought.

“ Au revoir , David,” she said, and turned away.

“My name’s not David. It’s Nick,” he blurted out, not knowing why he told her. He hadn’t used his real name in so long, it didn’t feel like it belonged to him. She whirled around.

“You bastard! Who the hell asked you to be honest?” Annoyed, frustrated, unbelievably beautiful.

“You can’t tell anyone. It’s dangerous,” he said while slipping a strip of paper into her handbag without her noticing. On it he had written a Gmail address known to only two people in the world: Rabinowich and his closest friend in the CIA, Shaefer.

“ Alors quoi? Is this supposed to make me interested, this mystery? Thank God I’m leaving.” Shaking her head, her hair rippling like wheat.

“I didn’t want to lie anymore,” he said.

She looked at him with her lion’s eyes.

“Then you’re a fool.” And as she turned to go: “C’est impossible. Adieu.”

“Bon voyage,” he muttered. She said adieu , he thought, watching her walk away into the terminal like a kick in the gut. Not au revoir . It really is goodbye.

After they left the airport, Cowell dropped him off downtown. Scorpion watched him drive away in the pickup, then caught a vividly-colored matatu minibus to an Internet cafe on Mama Ngina Street across from the Hilton. It only took a few minutes online for him to spot the “Flagstaff” e-mail from one of Rabinowich’s cover Hotmail accounts. Flagstaff was the CIA’s current emergency code. It meant Flash Critical, the highest level of operational urgency. It was only used when all hell had broken loose.

“So the Company’s messed their diapers. What’s that got to do with me?” Scorpion said to Soames, his eyes restlessly checking Diamond Plaza through the store window.

“If you mean are they shitting bricks in Washington, that’s the understatement of the century,” Soames said. “Congress is ready to bomb the hell out of somebody. They’re just waiting for us to tell them who.”

“And?”

Soames shifted uncomfortably. He leaned closer.

“This is coming from the top. The Director of Central Intelligence himself wants you in on this. So does the National Security Advisor. They asked for you personally. It’s a mess.”