Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

The voice had said, “R with M is sameach. Ditto for the prime confirm on the bug,” which Scorpion understood to mean that according to Rabinowich, the CIA had shared the information he’d retrieved from Abadi’s computer with the Israeli Mossad, and that both Rabinowich and the Israelis were sameach — Hebrew for happy-with what they were getting. It also meant that his own information about the weaponized plague, “the bug,” was confirmation of a threat Rabinowich already had from another source, which was the information Harris, citing the Prime Directive-need to know-had withheld from him in Karachi. Scorpion knew that his operating assumption now had to be that the Palestinian got his hands on an aerosol form of Septicemic plague.

The voice had asked if he was staying in a “B and B,” and he said no. They meant did he want the German BND and the BPOL-the Bundespolizei-to raid the Islamic Masjid? Saying no would indicate to Harris that he would do it himself, he thought. A raid by the BPOL in Hamburg was the last thing they needed. After Beirut and his taking out Abadi in Damascus, it would set alarm bells off all across the Hezbollah grid. Even worse, it would let the Palestinian know exactly where they were and how close or far behind him. The Palestinian might even move up the target date, and then they’d have even less time to try to stop it.

That was always the problem when Washington got involved, he mused. They tended to overkill everything, using a cruise missile with a thousand pound warhead when what you needed was a dart. “Sure you obliterate the target,” Koenig used to say, “but how much intel do you get from an obliterated target?”

He paid the check and walked back to the mosque. The streets were nearly empty now, the Alster invisible in the darkness and fog, except for the glow of streetlights along the shore. He walked the grounds around the mosque with its twin Iranian-style minarets and a light from someone working late in an office toward the back. He looked for wire connections and had to go more by touch than vision in the darkness, finding a wire connected to an outside alarm and a security camera. After peeling away the insulation from the wire with his pocketknife, he wrapped the wire with a piece of steel wool and connected it to a cell phone with two wires to an AA battery and a little capacitor he’d picked up in the Saturn store. If he called the cell phone, the current would cause the steel wool to burst into flame and short-circuit the alarm.

Scorpion scanned the silent street, looking for something out of place, a car with someone in it, a commercial van parked where it shouldn’t be. But the fog made it difficult to see anything except the hazy light from the center’s second story office window. Something wasn’t right. His internal antenna, honed after years in the field, was sending him a signal, but with the darkness and the fog, he couldn’t see where the danger was coming from. If this were a standard RDV or a break-in, he could wait them out or reset for another time, but on this mission there was no time. It forced you to take risks that were normally unacceptable.

There was only one alarm lead, and a single security camera covering the front entrance. He disabled the alarm with his pocketknife, removed the camera’s recorder and put it in his pocket. He picked the lock to the front door and then hesitated. If there was another lead that he’d missed, the alarm would go off. He held his breath as he opened the door, but nothing happened. He crept up the stairs and at the corner held a small pocket mirror angled to see who was in the lighted office. The area was open, with a number of empty desks and a bearded Iranian man with glasses working at a computer.

Scorpion tiptoed quietly down the hallway, away from the general office area, and entered the imam’s office at the end of the hallway. It was dark, and he turned on the desk lamp and looked around. The fog pressed against the windows, closing him in. Nothing could be seen outside. If there was danger, he would have to rely solely on hearing it. He went through the imam’s desk and turned on the computer, plugging in a USB flash drive with special NSA software that could break any OS and log him in with administrator privileges. Once in, he explored the shared directories and exchange accounts on the center’s local area network.

He quickly found the fictitious Mohammad Modahami e-mail account, which apparently was only used to receive encrypted messages that NSA was still trying to break. The account never sent any e-mails or responded to those from Abadi in Damascus. It’s a one-way relay cutout, he thought. They were aware of Western intelligence services surveillance and were using some low tech way of forwarding messages from Damascus to the Palestinian’s contact in Europe or the United States.

He copied the contents of the Modahami files onto the flash drive and shut the computer down, then moved on to the books on the shelves, most of them religious texts in Farsi and Arabic. He went through them quickly, looking and putting them back. Every once in a while he stopped and went to the door, listening for noises from outside or down the hall. He heard nothing from the other office where the bearded Iranian was working. He could have been alone in the world. He checked for a wall safe, but found only an electronic bug behind a photograph hanging on the wall. It was of the golden-domed shrine of the Imam Reza, the so-called Shi’ite “Eighth Imam” in Iran. He used his penknife to disable the bug.

Turning off the desk light, he went to the office of the imam’s assistant next door. Intel from the BND had indicated that the assistant, Parviz Mostafari, ran the Islamic Center on a day-to-day basis. Scorpion began rummaging through Mostafari’s desk and shelves, pausing for a moment to look at a framed photograph on the desk of a young Iranian woman in a hijab and black chador robe with a small boy taken on a beach somewhere. Another framed photo on a bookshelf showed a bearded Iranian man he assumed was Mostafari getting some kind of certificate from an older man, most likely the imam, Ayatollah Kazimi. Then he found it.

He discovered the postcard in a copy of Velayat-e Faqih, the book on Islamic government by the Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. It was an ordinary picture postcard of a canal in Amsterdam with no postmark, so it had been hand-delivered. It was written like a postcard message, but the text was a jumble of Arabic letters, not real words. It occurred to him that was how they avoided NSA electronic surveillance. They were hand-delivering coded messages by courier. He was just slipping the postcard into his pocket when the bearded Iranian man with glasses suddenly appeared in the doorway, aiming a 9mm pistol at him.

“Wer sind sie?” the Iranian said. Who are you?

“Salam. I’m a friend of Parviz Mostafari,” Scorpion replied in Farsi. He knew it was his ability in Farsi as well as Arabic, Urdu, and a number of European languages that had made him uniquely qualified for this mission, and why Harris had come all the way to Karachi to see him. “We know each other from Tehran,” he added.

“You’re lying. You’re from Tehran?” the Iranian said in Farsi, scrutinizing him.

“Khoshbakhtam. I’ve been there.”

“What’s your favorite coffee shop?”

“The White Tower,” Scorpion said.

“The one on Jomhuriyeh Eslami?”

“Na,” Scorpion said. The Iranian was testing him. “On Pasdaran Avenue.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” the Iranian asked.

“Someone who’s not supposed to be here. Why don’t you call the Schutzpolizei? Go ahead,” Scorpion said, nodding.

“I could shoot you now,” the Iranian said, aiming the gun. “You’re a thief. You broke in.”