Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

Neither man spoke. From a radio somewhere came the sound of Kenyan hip hop; some song about “nothing to lose” heard over the street sounds and the calls of the Indian waiters to potential customers. Soames was wearing his sincere look like a merit badge.

“Look,” Scorpion said. “I don’t know what Harris is cooking up, but what I said before goes. I’m not interested.” Soames put down his beer. He looked at Scorpion with pale unblinking eyes.

“You really think we’re all bureaucratic assholes, don’t you?” he said. “That we don’t have a goddamn clue.”

“The sad thing is, some of you do have a clue. But there’s too much politics. Anyway, let’s cut the foreplay, shall we?” Scorpion said. “You made your pitch and I’m not buying. What is it Rabinowich thinks I have to know?”

“They got everything,” Soames growled.

“Who?”

“Those sons-a-bitches who attacked the embassy,” pushing the Tusker bottle away. “They got everything from the computers, from the ambassador and station chief on down. Everything! Everyone’s going nuts. State, DOD, NSA, the White House, us. Everyone!”

Scorpion heard horns honking out on Masari Road and the klaxon of a police car. Another Nairobi smash-up, he thought. Shouting, bribes, and local Mungiki youths sneaking off with whatever in either car wasn’t locked down. It felt like a bad omen.

He studied Soames’s posture. The man had a tell, rubbing his little finger. He was holding something back.

“You don’t have a clue who did it, do you?” he said.

Soames nodded. “AQAP,” he said, meaning Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, “claims they did it, but no one believes them. They wore ski masks, spoke little. Security monitors only picked up a few words. English, with indeterminate accents. They hardly spoke. Not enough voice data to nail it down. We’re dead in the water.”

“What does Rabinowich think?”

“Uh-uh, amigo.” Soames smirked. “You got to pay to play.” He sat there, a big man dwarfing the small plastic chair he was sitting in like an American Buddha.

Scorpion picked up his bottle of Tusker by the neck. Something in the way he held it seemed to remind Soames that it could be used as a weapon.

“I meant it. I’m not interested,” Scorpion said. “You jerks sent me a Flagstaff, so unless that doesn’t mean anything anymore, just say what you came to say and we’ll both get the hell out of here.”

Soames shifted uncomfortably. “They got a list of all Company ops in Europe and the Middle East. Operations officers, Core collectors, joes, codes, the works,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” Scorpion shook his head. “Somebody had all that on a computer in an embassy in Switzerland, where the only real business is visas and tax fraud, and you wonder why I think you clowns can’t be trusted?”

“You still don’t get it, asshole,” Soames said, a nasty smile playing on his lips. “That’s not why I’m here. We’re doing you a favor, courtesy of Bob Harris and Dave Rabinowich. They think you deserve it because of past service and because maybe, just maybe, you’ll be of use again. But just between us girls, there’s some of us who would be happy to leave a prima donna like you hanging out in the cold.”

“Meaning?”

“They got your name too, Scorpion. You’re on the list.”

Christ, he thought, looking out the window at people at outside tables, talking and eating, everything smelling of Tandoori and curry, as though the world was a rational place.

“How bad?” he asked finally.

“Remember the Kilbane cover?” On the Ukraine operation, the Company had supplied Scorpion with cover ID as a journalist named Michael Kilbane working for Reuters out of London. He had jettisoned the cover during the mission, but now, because of an entry on a computer in Bern, it was coming back to haunt him.

“They got my picture? They know what I look like?” He felt a shiver go up his spine. When he was a child, the Bedouin said it meant someone was weeping over your grave.

Soames nodded. “Just the cover and the code name, ‘Scorpion.’ Nothing else, except. . ” He hesitated. “Langley checked the backup server. They got the Kilbane photo.”

Scorpion stared coldly at him. Somebody who was good enough to take out a fortified U.S. embassy guarded by Marines and all the high tech in the world now had him on an enemies list, and they knew his code name and what he looked like. It was bad enough.

“Just answer me one question,” he said through clenched teeth. “What the hell was it doing in an embassy file- in Switzerland! ”

“The latest re-org. We’re all supposed to share information. Hold hands and play nice. No more 9/11s. All very Kumbaya. Total crapola. Welcome to the new improved, better-than-ever Washington,” raising his Tusker in a mock toast and taking a long swig. “Where the hell’s that waiter? I want another of these-or. .” He squinted suspiciously at the bottle. “. . is it going to give me the Nairobi runs?”

Scorpion got ready to go. Soames looked at him.

“What do I tell Bob Harris?” he asked.

“Tell him to kiss off.”

“The administration’s going to take it to the U.N. Security Council, as if it matters what those jerk-offs do,” Soames murmured, not looking at him. “There’s gonna be a war.”

“With whom?”

“We’ll find out who did it. Trust me. And when we do. .” Soames said, balling his fist.

“Go ahead. Knock yourselves out. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“They’re talking about going to Congress for a declaration of war. Nobody’s done that since Roosevelt. Pentagon’s gearing up, but it isn’t just about finding out who did it. We need proof for the whole world. No more screw-ups. Bob really needs you on this one,” Soames said, putting on his best win one for the Gipper expression.

“Tell Harris he’s a big boy. He needs to learn how to cross the street by himself for a change,” Scorpion said, getting up.

“What will you do?” Soames said, staring blankly at the floor as though he wasn’t relishing reporting a wasted trip to Harris. “About Kilbane and all?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“How?” Looking like a kid who had lost his lunch money. “They’ll ask.”

“Yeah,” Scorpion said over his shoulder. “But I don’t have to answer.”

Hamburg,

Germany

The ferry left the Finkenwender dock precisely at 9:00 P.M., heading upriver to the next stop on the Elbe River. The night was cool, drizzly, the outside deck wet and deserted except for a lone man wearing glasses and a newsie cap at the bow rail. Because of the weather, the other passengers stayed inside the cabin on the deck below. Scorpion turned up his collar against the rain, the lights along the shore shimmery reflections on the dark surface of the river.

Almost done, he thought. He had checked into The George, a boutique hotel in the St. Georg district that was like a private English men’s club improbably dropped in the middle of Germany. On the TV, all the news was about the crisis in Switzerland. There were reports of a worldwide manhunt for information on the Bern attackers. The Americans had called an emergency NATO meeting. The media was speculating wildly. Al Jazeera had reported from an “unnamed” source in the Gulf region that an al Qaeda leader, Tamer al-Warafi, had provided a tape claiming responsibility for the attack. But al Jazeera had not yet released the tape.

In New Delhi, a government source implied that it had been an operation by Pakistan’s covert ISI’s SS division as a reprisal for U.S. drone attacks in northern Pakistan. Israel’s foreign minister, Shalom Goldman, claimed it was the Iranians. Which the Iranian foreign minister, Hamid Gayeghrani, angrily denied, declaring that such a charge was just what one could expect from a “regime of devils spawned in hell.”