Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

He knew he had to leave fast, but there was something in the way Abadi had slipped the folder into his desk drawer that made him hesitate. The drawer was locked, but it only took a moment to pick the lock and pull out the folder. It contained what looked like a scientific report in Russian, and what appeared to be a typewritten translation in English titled “Modalities of Septicemic Yersinia Pestis Distribution.” The Russian paper was stamped “,” which meant Top Secret, the intelligence equivalent of the Holy Grail.

He could hear someone shouting outside, not far away, and knew he was out of time. Stuffing the paper in his pocket along with the flash drive, he walked out of the office. The woman and little girl stood in the hallway and stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Where’s the control box for the alarm?” he asked them.

They just stared at him, but the little girl involuntarily glanced at the hall closet. Scorpion opened the door, saw the metal box on the wall and opened it. He fired a bullet into the recorder drive for the security cameras and pulled all the switches. The floodlights went off outside, followed by shouts and dogs barking, and suddenly the front door was sprayed with bullet holes from automatic fire from a pair of Type 95 automatic rifles. The little girl screamed as her mother stared down at the blood blossoming on her chest a moment before collapsing. Scorpion shoved the girl down to the floor, and as the front door swung open emptied one of his guns at the opening. Then he ran back into the office, flung Abadi’s laptop at the window, shattering the glass, and leaped through the broken window and into the darkness outside.

Instead of heading for the front gate, he ran toward the back of the property. He heard one of the German shepherds growling as it raced toward him. It would jump, he thought. That’s how they were trained. To go for the hand or follow their instincts and go for the throat. It was almost upon him. He needed a stick or something, but all he had was the gun and the razor blade. As the dog leaped for his throat, he grabbed it by the fur on its neck and smashed his gun down on its nose. The dog yelped and lunged again. Hell of a dog, he thought, grabbing it and smashing its nose again. This time, the dog emitted a high-pitched animal scream and backed away, panting, its tongue lolling out.

A guard was running toward him. The man stopped and went down into a shooting position as Scorpion hit the ground, rolled over and fired three times. After the first shot, the guard didn’t move. Scorpion waited a moment, then climbed a tree next to the estate wall, inched over the razor wire, hung down from the branch and dropped to the other side. He picked himself up and walked away. In the distance he could hear the sound of approaching police sirens.

Scorpion spent a restless night in a room rented from an Iraqi family in the Saida Zaynab district, the gun kept close to him. There was always a chance that al-Hafez might change his mind and come after him, not to mention Hezbollah and the Islamic Resistance. By the light of a bedside lamp, he tried to make sense of the translation of the Russian paper he’d taken from Abadi’s desk.

It was very technical, but appeared to be a report on secret experiments done at a lab at Vozrozhdeniya involving the use of aerosol sprays to transmit plague pathogens. He recalled that Vozrozhdeniya, once an island but now a peninsula because of a severe drop in the water level of the inland Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, had been a secret biological warfare research facility in the old Soviet Union. It was essential he get the paper to Rabinowich immediately, and hated having to wait till morning to cross the border. He had to get out of Syria.

On the morning TV news, an Al Jazeera reporter standing in front of Dr. Abadi’s estate said the murders were being blamed on Israeli agents. Syria was filing a formal complaint to the United Nations, and a majority of countries in the UN were already calling for a resolution condemning Israel for assassinating Abadi.

By mid-morning Scorpion was back in Beirut, having crossed the border as a Syrian auto salesman from Aleppo. At an Internet kiosk at Beirut airport, he uploaded the encrypted contents of the flash drive and a scanned-in copy of the secret Russian paper to the International Corn website. He learned from a Rabinowich-coded post on the site that the NSA had tracked Dr. Abadi’s e-mail servers. There had been frequent e-mails in a code they were working on but hadn’t broken, between Abadi and an e-mail account in Hamburg, Germany, belonging to someone named Mohammad Modahami.

Scorpion caught the Air France flight from Beirut to Paris. Over the Mediterranean, he played back what had happened with Dr. Abadi in his mind. There was something Abadi had said that kept nagging at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. At a rented computer in the business zone de travail at De Gaulle Airport, during a layover for his flight to Hamburg, he Googled Septicemic plague.

There were three versions of the plague, he learned: Bubonic plague, thought to be the disease that caused the Black Death of the Middle Ages; Pneumonic plague; and Septicemic plague. All were caused by the same Yersinia pestis bacteria. In each version of the plague, the pathogen infected a different part of the body. Bubonic plague infected lymph nodes, Pneumonic the lungs, and Septicemic the blood. The Bubonic and Septicemic plagues were typically transmitted by flea bites from infected rodents. Pneumonic plague was transmitted from human to human by airborne droplets from coughing. Of the three types of plague, Septicemic was the most insidious and deadly. The incubation period was normally two to five days, during which there were no symptoms. Once the patient realized he was sick, with symptoms ranging from flu-like chills, fever, coughing, and headache, to black and purple patches under the skin, the disease was nearly a hundred percent fatal. In most cases, the same day the patient realized he was ill was the day he died.

A chill went through Scorpion. The paper from Abadi suggested that the Russians had weaponized Septicemic plague at Vozrozhdeniya during the Cold War and that somehow the Islamic Resistance now had that weapon. Rabinowich had put the intel about the missing weaponized plague together from his bits and bytes of “subtexture,” or maybe from a defector or an FSB mole, and connected it to the Palestinian, and Bob Harris hadn’t told him about it because they wanted independent confirmation. His conclusions were slender and based on conjecture, Scorpion realized, but the pieces fit. No wonder Harris had come all the way to Karachi! If there was such a thing as an airborne version of Septicemic plague and the Palestinian set it off in an American city, tens of millions could die. The only way to stop him was to track down this Mohammad Modahami, Dr. Abadi’s contact in Germany.

Scorpion bought a disposable cell phone and dialed a local Paris number. As he did so, over the airport loudspeaker he heard the first call for his flight to Hamburg. He used the day’s sign, “Liverpool,” and heard the countersign, “Mary Poppins.” A woman’s voice-he assumed she was someone from the CIA Paris station-stated that according to the BND, and confirmed by the German Bundespolizei, no such person as Mohammad Modahami had ever existed.

Rome, Italy

On his second night in Rome, sitting in a restaurant on the Via della Croce near the Spanish Steps and running out of time, the Palestinian considered three problems that stood in his way, each inside the other like Russian dolls, each more difficult to solve than the one before. He thought about them as he stared out at the dark street, its cobblestones lit by streetlamps hung on the sides of the buildings and the electric signs of the shops and restaurants, aware of the pretty American college girl at the next table who kept glancing over at him before returning to the conversation with her friends.