Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Betrayal

“It seems we both have secrets,” al-Hafez said finally. “May I smoke?”

Scorpion picked up the gun and gestured with it for al-Hafez to go ahead. Al-Hafez started to light a cigarette and asked, “How about shai? Shall I have some brought?”

Scorpion shook his head no. Al-Hafez lit the cigarette and exhaled.

“Of the Palestinian, I know only a little. Very little, and for that you have to shoot me,” he said.

Scorpion fired the pistol, the bullet hitting the seat between al-Hafez’s legs with a loud thunk. Al-Hafez stared at him, stunned, wide-eyed.

“The Palestinian,” Scorpion said. He cocked the hammer, and al-Hafez flinched involuntarily at the click. “Is he really Palestinian?”

“I have no idea. There was a rumor that he fought the Israelis in Lebanon in July 2006.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know, and if I did, I would not say,” al-Hafez said, raising his hand. It trembled, just slightly, and he was embarrassed by it. He took a deep breath. “Even if you shoot me, I can’t tell you. I’ve probably told you too much already.”

“How is it you don’t know? You support Hezbollah, you and the Iranians.”

“Against the Israelis, of course. And in Lebanon, where we have legitimate national interests. Lebanon was part of Syria for thousands of years, until the 1920s when the French came along and invented it as a country. But not against the Egyptians-or the Americans.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re surrounded by countries allied to you, including the strongest army in the Middle East, the Israelis, right on our border. We are not so smart like you with satellites and gadgets, but also not so stupid. It’s not in our interest, just as what happened to Budawi was not in our interest. And please, where is the BlackBerry that you took?” Scorpion placed the BlackBerry he’d found in al-Hafez’s drawer on the desk.

“I can’t let you walk out with that,” al-Hafez said.

“You can’t stop me. Unless…” Scorpion hesitated.

Al-Hafez nodded, accepting the implied offer. “We’ve heard rumors of a power struggle within Hezbollah,” he said. “The Islamic Resistance is the action cell of a violent radical faction. That’s why we weren’t surprised when you showed up on our radar, and why I’m telling you now. There are whispers of something very big about to happen, but we don’t know what and we are not involved. To prove it, in exchange for returning my BlackBerry and letting you walk out of here, I’ll give you Dr. Abadi’s address. Inside Islamic Resistance his nom de guerre is Abu Faraj.” He got up, walked over to his desk and wrote the address on a piece of paper. He started to hand it to Scorpion, then stopped. “Where is my man, Fawzi al-Diyala?”

Scorpion told him the name of the hotel.

“Is he alive?”

“He’s tied up and he’ll have a filthy hangover and won’t remember much, but otherwise he’s unharmed.”

Al-Hafez offered the slip of paper. “Call off your men. If anyone else follows me, I’ll kill them,” Scorpion said, putting the slip of paper in his pocket.

“It’s in the al Mouhajarine district. Be warned. He’s well protected,” al-Hafez said.

“So were you.”

“Extremely well protected.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Scorpion said, leaving the BlackBerry on the desktop and getting up.

Al Hafez walked around and sat down behind his desk. Scorpion stuck the gun in his belt, pulled his shirt over it and headed for the door.

“By the way,” he said, pausing at the door. “What’s Abadi a doctor of?”

“He’s a medical doctor.”

“What’s his specialty?”

“Infectious diseases. Why?”

“Just curious. Wait five minutes before you press the button under the desk, Najah,” Scorpion said. Something al-Hafez had said was setting off alarm bells in his head, but he wasn’t sure what.

“I want you out of my country, Monsieur Leveque,” al-Hafez said, using Scorpion’s cover identity, his eyes narrowing. “You have twenty-four hours. After that, bi ‘idni allah, you will never leave Syria. Not even as a corpse.”

T he night goggles cast a greenish glow over the trees and the wall and the guardhouse outside the gated estate. Scorpion studied the layout from his rental car down the street. Dr. Abadi’s compound was well protected, all right, he thought. In addition to the guardhouse by the gate and the razor wire atop the high concrete walls, he spotted a number of security cameras, wireless alarms, and motion detectors along the perimeter, and more no doubt were strategically located on the grounds and in the house. And he heard the barking of guard dogs from inside the walls.

He put the night goggles in his backpack. There wasn’t any choice. He’d have to go in. The question was how. Al-Hafez had kept his word about the tails. He’d been free of them all day. He’d been given twenty-four hours because al-Hafez wanted to distance Syria and the GSD from whatever the Islamic Resistance was planning. As for him tackling Dr. Abadi’s compound, for al-Hafez it was a no-lose situation. The Syrian GSD and Mukhabarat were tied to the traditional Hezbollah leadership. From al-Hafez’s point of view, whether he killed Abadi or Abadi killed him, the director won.

Scorpion had spent the day making preparations. He’d rented a Renault Megane, a car they’d used to tail him, obviously popular with the GSD. At an Internet cafe, he’d posted what he learned from al-Hafez about the Islamic Resistance to the International Corn Association website. Enough to keep them scrambling and to keep Rabinowich happily digging through databases. In response to a cryptic coded post by Rabinowich, Scorpion indicated that so far as he could tell, al-Hafez was most likely telling the truth about no Syrian involvement in the Cairo bombing, but he would know more after tonight.

That afternoon, he had gone to a number of shops in Saida Zaynab, a slum district filled with refugees from Iraq where, for a price, you could buy anything or anyone. Later he’d mingled with the evening crowds in the lanes and shops blazing with light in the Souk al-Hamidiyeh, in the walled Old City next to the citadel, where he bought an inexpensive suit like the one his cover, Fawzi al-Diyala, would wear. He was prepared as he could be. If Abadi’s men captured him and he had to get out, he was counting on the Houdini trick, the one that had enabled the magician to make his famous escapes. But there was no way to stop the dryness in his mouth or his heart rate from going up. He knew there was a good chance he’d end the night as a headless corpse floating in the Barada River.

He’d made his choice that afternoon. Basically, there were only two ways in.

He could sneak in, deal with the perimeter guards, and tranquilize the guard dogs with Diazepam. As for the alarms, a preliminary drive-by earlier in the day convinced him that for such a large compound, they were likely using wireless alarms. Trying to eliminate alarms individually meant getting to the alarms or the controller without setting off motion detectors and other sensors that were probably all over the place, and then required someone who knew what he was doing to disconnect them. The system was almost certainly multichannel, so that the instant you disconnected one, the other channel would set off the alarm. But all wireless devices were based on RF technology, and a better way would be to disable them all at the same time with an electromagnetic pulse. All that required was a powerful enough transmitter-say a 2.4 GHz transmitter with a miniparabolic dish-and something to create an electromagnetic interference wave. An iPod playing Bruce Springsteen would do.

But the problem with breaking in was you never knew what you would run into. Sooner or later there would be a confrontation with other guards, and gunfire and police to deal with. And all that so at best he could briefly interrogate Abadi under pressure where the value of information from torture was always suspect. Anything you got from such interrogations was always a mixture of lies and half-truths, and that’s if you had time, and he had none.