Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

Following the emergency procedure, he left the BMW where he’d parked it in a structure near the train station and rented a Kawasaki motorcycle for easy street parking and in case he had to make a getaway through traffic. The fact that they were trying to reach him with a Venice code meant it wasn’t about Amsterdam or the dwarf or the girl. Something urgent had happened or was about to blow up in their faces. As always, he cleaned the temp files and rebooted before leaving the Internet cafe computer, to make sure he left no trail.

Scorpion got to the RDV, one of the pubs on the Oudegracht Canal’s lower embankment, an hour ahead of time, and it was a good thing he did because when Peters arrived-he assumed the American in a tweed jacket and wearing glasses sitting at a canalside table was the Netherlands station chief-he was dirty. Watching from a table next to a tree at a cafe on the upper level on the other side of the canal, Scorpion spotted an Arab in a windbreaker on the street above the canal spending a long time leaning against a railing and reading a newspaper. Another Arab, a big one in a raincoat, even though it wasn’t raining, had climbed into the back of a dry cleaner’s van parked nearby a half hour earlier and hadn’t come out, and on Scorpion’s side of the canal, still another Arab spent a lot of time glancing over at Peters and talking on his cell phone. Worse, Peters didn’t seem to realize he was covered. The American sat at the table, nursing a beer and glancing at his watch.

Langley rules were that if a contact at an RDV was dirty, you aborted and rescheduled. But Langley rules weren’t meant for a Venice alert and when time was running out on a mission. Finally, forty minutes after the set time, Peters realized Scorpion wasn’t coming. The American got up and went up the stairs to the street level beside the canal. Scorpion tossed some euro coins on the table, went back to where he’d left the motorcycle parked perpendicularly between two cars and drove across the bridge over the canal. He waited till Peters got into an Audi parked nearby and started down the one-way street toward Domplein Square. The Audi was followed by the dry cleaner’s van, two cars behind, and just ahead of the Audi a Mercedes was driven by the Arab with the windbreaker. Scorpion, trailing this caravan on the Kawasaki, could see that Peters was boxed in, and he apparently didn’t know it. It was a complete screw-up. The only good thing was that in his motorcycle helmet and sunglasses, he would be hard to recognize, he thought, gauging the traffic as he got ready to make his move.

When the traffic light ahead turned yellow, Scorpion hit the accelerator. He drove between lanes of traffic, past the van, and moving alongside the Audi, signaled with a circular motion for Peters to roll down his window. Scorpion glanced at his side mirror. He had their attention, all right, but for the moment they were waiting to see what happened. He didn’t see any guns. He stopped with the rest of the traffic as the light turned red, his motorcycle beside the Audi.

“Get out of the car,” he shouted at Peters.

“Have you been to Venice?” Peters asked.

“Climb on in back of me,” Scorpion said, watching the van in the mirror. It looked like the back door was opening.

“What about my car? I can’t just leave it.”

“Get out of the fucking car!” Scorpion shouted. The big Arab had gotten out of the back of the van and started toward them. Peters fumbled, then opened the door and climbed onto the motorcycle behind Scorpion. The second he felt Peters’s weight on the bike, he put it into gear, turning in front of the Audi just as the light changed green.

Scorpion drove up onto the sidewalk, heading back in the opposite direction of the one-way traffic, moving slowly enough to dodge pedestrians and not looking at the van, so the Arabs wouldn’t get a glimpse of his face as he passed it going the other way. The big Arab had changed direction and was running on foot through the honking traffic, shouting after them as Scorpion swerved back into the street against the traffic. He cut a car off, accelerating fast as he drove between the lanes, then cut across the next bridge over the canal to the other side, his tires skidding on the pavement as he twisted and turned. He drove down side streets, doubling back again and again to make sure they weren’t being followed.

“What about the car? They’ll trace it back to me,” Peters said loudly over the roar of the motorcycle.

“Get a new car. They already know who you are. Why the hell do you think they were there?”

“This isn’t how we do things,” Peters said. “I’m going to write you up and put it in your 201.”

“Would you like me to tell you where you can stick my 201?”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Peters said, and Scorpion felt the man stiffen behind him on the bike.

“I just did. Now do us both a favor and shut up,” Scorpion shouted back over his shoulder. He swerved suddenly, making Peters hang on, then drove past the hospital and into the green open spaces of Wilhelmina Park. He parked the motorcycle in the lot between two cars and waited till they walked across the grass to a pond in a big open area, checking around to make sure no one was paying attention to them or could hear them.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” Peters began. “You left behind a mess in Amsterdam we’re still cleaning up and-” The station chief stopped when he caught a glimpse of the icy look in Scorpion’s gray eyes.

“You came dirty to a Special Access Crit RDV, you stupid son of a bitch. Tell me about Venice, or your career and this conversation are both over,” Scorpion said.

Neither man spoke for a while. They could hear the sound of two Dutch students chatting as they bicycled past on the bike path. They waited till the bicycles were well away.

“Listen,” Peters said, handing Scorpion an iPod with an earpiece.

Scorpion turned it on and immediately recognized Dave Rabinowich’s voice.

“Wait, let me turn this damn thing on — oh yeah,” Rabinowich began. “Eight years ago a floater from the Motherland,” meaning an occasional source from Russia, “gave us a song and dance about how the old Soviet bio warfare lab on Vozrozhdeniya Island had created a form of the Yersinia pestis plague bacteria that could be disseminated via an aerosol spray. We followed up with the usual suspects but were never able to confirm. NRO satellite intel indicated that whatever facility was on the island had been closed and the whole thing got filed away in the ‘things we should worry about if we didn’t have so many other worse things to worry about file.’ Then last year, a sleeper — and that’s all I’m gonna say about that — woke us up with the news that while the facility in Uzbekistan may have gone the way of the dodo, fun and games in biology hadn’t and certain parties unknown in the FSU were looking for a buyer. But that’s not the bad news.”

Rabinowich’s voice got lower and more confidential, and Scorpion involuntarily looked around the park to see if anyone was watching, but there was no one except a few small children and their mothers heading toward the playground area.

“Our sleepy amigo,” Rabinowich continued, “dropped a bombshell that even woke up the assholes who run this place. It seems our vodka-loving friends had a version of the bacillus that was not only airborne transmittable, but resistant to virtually every antibiotic known, including every member of the streptomycin, gentamicin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline families. Now we were nervous, but again we couldn’t confirm until Damascus. Kudos to you for that one. I finally got our old buddy Bob to okay me telling you. You need to know what you’re up against. Oh — and I know you’ll do it anyway, but I’m supposed to remind you to delete this as soon as you’ve heard it.”