Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

“In Torino,” the Palestinian said, and told her the name of the street. He was eating the best Piedmontese veal battutu he’d ever tasted, washed down with an excellent Sagrantino wine. “Just deliver it and walk away.”

“And the money?”

“Before your men go two meters, they will have the rest of the money.”

“You understand with the Camorra, you don’t get two chances?” she said.

“You aren’t afraid to talk about the Camorra here?” he said, looking around at the well-dressed diners at nearby tables.

“Why not? I own this place.” She had a rough contralto laugh. “Many others too. You are surprised to find a woman capa, yes? Of the Camorra, it is the custom when the husband dies or is in the prigione, for the wife to take over. Good custom. We hold it close,” she said, touching her chest. “But you were surprised. I see it in your eyes.”

“Only at how attractive you were.” She was in her forties, her skin tan, with a good shape shown off by the red designer dress she wore, her breasts so perfect that only a world-class surgeon who was half in love with her could have done them.

“Non c’e male,” she said-not bad-licking a drop of spaghetti sauce from the corner of her mouth. “Listen. You want to take me to the bed? What job is this? You tell me and this will be the best night of your life.”

“Tempting. Also dangerous-in more ways than one,” he said, glancing at the two bodyguards she’d come in with, now standing on either side of the front door, their suit jackets unbuttoned.

“You are not afraid. I can see you are not a man who fears. You understand, we women are curious, like cats. Arouse a woman’s curiosity and you can have her.”

“Any woman?”

“Any woman on earth-and in heaven too,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “You want me?”

“I won’t tell you. Ever.”

“Maybe I don’t care,” she said, tossing her hair. “Maybe I want to make chiavare with you in the bed,” she said, leaning forward so he could see the swell of her breasts.

“Maybe you’d rather have the money. Sixty thousand now as agreed.”

“You see! You do understand women. Where is it?” she said, getting up.

“A package. I gave it to the maitre d’.”

She leaned over and kissed him, her tongue darting into his mouth, tasting of the lobster ragout from the spaghetti sauce. “Next time I fuck you so good, caro,” she whispered. She got up and left, stopping at the maitre d’, who handed the package to one of her bodyguards.

When the Palestinian left the restaurant, he doubled back for nearly an hour, zigzagging through the dark city streets and autostrada exits, anticipating that Francesca would have him followed. When he thought he was clear, he drove to the Milan Central Station, where he caught the late night Red Arrow high-speed train to Rome. In the morning, he flew from Rome to Moscow.

The Camorra were dangerous enough, and what he had to do in Russia even more so, he thought on the long flight. All the while, the shadow hunting him nagged at the Palestinian, an unknown killer without a face or a name, like a nightmare from his childhood. Except he wasn’t a child anymore. Now, he was the one to be feared. Looking through the airplane window at the snowcapped Alps below, he remembered an old Arab proverb his father had told him when he was a boy: “An army of sheep led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.”

Hamburg, Germany

Scorpion first saw her on TV in the giant Saturn electronics store, her image repeated on hundreds of televisions tuned to the same German N-TV News channel like a kind of surreal electronic art exhibit, before he saw her in the flesh, standing in the middle of the street outside the large turquoise-colored mosque with a loudspeaker, demanding an end to “Islam’s imprisonment of women.” On the TV panel of talking head commentators, her looks were striking. Her skin was a smooth gold, her sleek black hair, cut short, a stunning contrast with her aquamarine blue eyes, a touch of mascara underlining them hinting of the Levant. She wore no head scarf, and although the credit at the bottom of the screen identified her as “Najla Kafoury,” everyone addressed her only as “Najla,” as if she had already achieved the one-name status that, as Harris once wryly remarked, denoted real celebrity nowadays. “You are either a one-name or a no-name,” he’d said.

Now, seeing Najla Kafoury in the center of the demonstration outside the mosque, a slim figure in a belted Burberry raincoat, she was smaller than he had expected from her TV image. Her voice rang out in perfect German through the loudspeaker as she demanded that Islamic leaders stop “behandlung von frauen wie sklaven,” treating women as slaves. A line of helmeted Schutzpolizei stood between her and an angry crowd of Muslims, men and women, trying to shout her down, some carrying signs that read Feinde des Islam, Enemy of Islam; others, Verrater, Traitor, and Haretiker, Heretic.

“The Prophet said treat women well, but the only sura you know is the fourth sura, which tells you to beat women!” she shouted.

“A good Muslim woman is obedient and does not need to be beaten,” someone in the crowd shouted in Farsi.

“Das ist Europa, not sixth century Arabia. Fourteen centuries of abuse is enough! No woman should ever be beaten!” she shouted back in German.

Some in the crowd began to throw things at her, cushions, eggs, oranges. The line of Schutzpolizei started forward as she and the small band of men and women with her retreated, the TV cameramen edging forward to capture the shot.

“She got what she wanted,” a man near Scorpion in the crowd commented in German to a paparazzo photographer next to him. “She’ll be on Heute tonight,” he added, referring to the nightly TV news show.

“Naturlich. Najla delivers the only thing anyone cares about-ratings,” the paparazzo said, standing on his toes to try to get the shot of her holding a hand up to protect herself. “That’s meine liebsten,” he smiled as he got the shot.

“How much is it worth?” Scorpion asked.

“Depends. A shot like this, two, three hundred euros. If I could get Najla with her top off, she’d be worth twenty thousand.” The paparazzo grinned.

“She’s nothing. Just good looking,” the man next to him said.

“That’s why she’s worth every euro.” The paparazzo winked, pulling his gear together.

Scorpion drifted away in the crowd that was starting to disperse as the woman and her little group left in two cars and the Schutzpolizei began waving away the rest of the gathering. He walked the landscaped perimeter of the mosque grounds, blending in with passersby who had stopped to watch the demonstration and were now hurrying home for dinner. He studied the mosque grounds for alarms and communications. Spotting a Deutsche Telekom sticker on a phone line, he guessed they were using DSL to access the Internet. They had an alarm system, but it looked like a basic dual channel alarm, and shouldn’t be a problem.

A cool fog drifted in from Alster Lake as it grew dark, the streetlights glowing ghostly white. He had dinner in a nearby gaststatte and thought about the conversation he’d had on one of the disposable cell phones he bought in the Saturn store and afterward broke apart and dispersed into a number of trash cans.

According to the nameless male voice on the local number he called, the NSA had traced the Mohammad Modahami account through a series of e-mail aliases and proxy servers to the Hamburg Islamic Masjid in the Uhlenhorst district. They were still working on the code Dr. Abadi had used to contact the fictitious Modahami. The voice said nothing about the Syrian killings, so Harris had to be handling whatever Foggy Bottom political dustup he’d stirred up in Syria.