Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Betrayal

Crossing to his building, he climbed the stairway. It smelled of poverty, fuul, and cigarettes. He opened his door and snapped into a shooter’s position, ready to fire the Placeholder’s gun, but the apartment was empty, the only light coming through the window from the streetlights outside. He went over and turned on the small TV.

The news announcer, a heavyset man with a slow, serious voice, reported that a number of suspects in the cafe bombing had already been rounded up. General Budawi’s photograph was displayed. According to a breathless reporter standing outside the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis, only Budawi, whose heroism and patriotism was esteemed by all, and a single aide were killed. In the meantime, air travelers could expect delays because of enhanced security following the attack.

The program then returned to a popular Egyptian soap opera, where the lead actress was suggestively approached by her doctor in his office while her husband was out of town on business with his attractive female assistant. On another channel, an attractive female TV newscaster in a head scarf said that authorities were looking for a foreigner suspected in the cafe bombing in the Khan al Khalili. He was described as being tall and fair-haired, she said. He shut the TV off.

They were downplaying the number of casualties and rounding up the usual suspects, he thought. Budawi’s deputy was probably scrambling like crazy and under intense political pressure to pick up all the pieces. As for the description of him, it was of a generic foreigner. More important, they hadn’t given the media a photograph. Budawi had probably assumed he would arrest him at the cafe and get all the photos he needed then. With any luck, all they had of him was a voiceprint. It was obvious they were watching the airports and looking for a foreigner matching his description heading north. That was what he had expected and planned for. Still, it wouldn’t be easy. They would be watching every exit from Egypt.

He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his gallabiya. He was still sweating. Next door, the neighbor’s teenage son was playing Egyptian hip-hop music. The music echoed in the building and the empty street outside as he worked on bending and smudging the ID card and cleaning the gun and scalpel. He took a long shower, the water cool and rusty, and before he went to sleep he retaped the scalpel to the bottom of his foot.

He left the apartment shortly before dawn, the sky streaked with gold over the Nile. He took the East Delta bus from the Eltorgan bus station in the center of the city to the small port city of Hurghada some three hundred miles south on the Red Sea coast. Just before boarding the bus, he bought a live chicken at the open-air souk. The bus was stifling hot and when he glanced at a passenger’s Al Ahram, the headline said only that the authorities were making progress in the bombing investigation.

At an army checkpoint ten kilometers outside Hurghada, two soldiers came on board and checked everyone’s ID. They were looking for a foreigner; he could pass for a working-class Egyptian, he told himself, his heart pounding. His battered ID card and the chicken made them pay him little attention. They asked where he was going, and he said he was visiting his cousin in Hurghada. He hoped to work in a hotel there. The soldier shrugged and went on to the next passenger.

He traded the chicken for lunch in a worker’s restaurant in Hurghada near the port and caught the ferry in the harbor to Sharm el Sheikh, the resort city at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula. When the ferry landed, he went into a public bathroom stall and changed out of his gallabiya and turban into a “Rock for Africa” T-shirt, shorts, and sunglasses, more suited to the beach scene with its bikinis and Four Seasons and Starbucks cafes. At the beach at Naama Bay he connected with a pair of Danish backpackers. They went for drinks at the Camel, a rooftop bar where they were joined by a spectacular Swedish blonde who was, she said, a lingerie model in Sharm for the scuba diving “and the beautiful Arab men.” She touched his forearm with her fingers and suggested they could see the sunset better from her room.

In the morning, he left her snoring on the bed and took the ferry to Aqaba in Jordan. There were army patrols by the ferry before he left Sharm el Sheikh, but they took one look at his backpack, sunburned face, and German passport and let him pass. By mid-afternoon he was sipping a Bloody Mary in the first class cabin of a Lufthansa flight from Amman to Frankfurt, leaving behind what was to become the most intensive manhunt in human history. Before it was over, it would nearly destroy the CIA and force everyone involved into the most terrible choice of their lives, including the American agent known only as Scorpion.

Karachi, Pakistan

The steel container hung high in the air as the gantry crane swung it over to a row of containers stacked four high on the dock. Two dockworkers shared a cigarette in its shadow, unconcerned as the container passed over their heads. They knew the standard twenty-foot TEU unit was at most fifteen tons, and that the big crane could easily handle three to four times that weight. The crane lowered the container neatly into the next position in the top row as though stacking Legos and swung back for another container.

Another man, clad like the dockworkers in an orange jumpsuit and hard hat, watched from the shadow of a tall reach-stacker machine. There was a scar over his right eye, and his gray eyes, unusual in this part of the world, focused not on the containers, but on the ship being unloaded. She was the Bunga Seratai 6, a mid-sized Malaysian-flagged container vessel bound next for Port Klang, south of Kuala Lumpur. Having berthed two hours earlier, the Bunga Seratai 6 would leave before midnight, after unloading 370 containers and picking up 200 more.

That wasn’t what bothered Scorpion as he watched, or why he’d waited more than an hour and still hadn’t approached. Everything about the setup was wrong, last minute wrong. The RDV should’ve been in a safe house, like the one in the Korangi district. Instead he’d had to pick up an East Wharf stevedore’s ID at the last minute from a drop in a pharmacy on 13th Street. There were only two possibilities: either it was a trap, in which case the network in Pakistan was blown and there was a good chance he was about to die. Or worse, something had gotten out of control and Langley was improvising, not what they were best at. Either way, the container ship was a potential red zone. For that matter, much of Karachi was a red zone. The city, one of the largest in the world and one of the biggest ports in South Asia, had become a haven for terrorists. They moved easily among the millions of Pushtuns and Taliban who had fled here from Pakistan’s Northwest tribal regions and Afghanistan.

The heat was intense, the sun brilliant on the water in the harbor, and he had to squint against the glare. He sipped a can of Pakola orange soda, colored an alien green despite its name, as he quartered the ship, the dock, and the approaches to the gangway one last time. Everything appeared normal. The gantry crane was moving another container, gleaming in the hot sun, from the ship to the dock. Three loaders were working farther down the dock. The two dockworkers were walking toward their forklifts, the way clear except for a ship’s crew member near the top of the gangway, resting a handheld scanner on the rail. No one was loitering or doing anything out of the ordinary.

Scorpion crumpled the can and tossed it in a trash bin. He walked across the wharf, climbed the gangway and stopped at the top to show his ID badge, which he had just gotten that morning. The crew member, a young Malay, checked his face against the photo on the ID, scanned the ID bar code, and let him aboard.