Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

“Do I look like my picture?” she asked. Her English was accented but not bad.

“You’re very pretty. You attract a lot of attention,” he said, glancing at the businessmen at the bar who kept looking over at them.

She shrugged. “I’m used to it. I drove from Amsterdam. It’s eight hundred euros for six hours, a thousand for the night. Do you want to go to your room now or have a drink first?”

“Let’s talk,” he said, motioning the waitress over.

“I’ll have a jenever, zeer koud,” very cold, she told the waitress.

“The same,” he said.

“So what business do you do?” she asked as the waitress left.

“Is that what most men want to talk about? Their work?”

“Most men want to talk about themselves. Usually business. Sometimes they try to impress me-with their cars, their houses, elegante restaurants. If you get to know them, they’ll talk about their jobs, their wives and kids. They talk about their kids and then they want to fuck you. Don’t get me started on men.”

“What about you? What do you like?”

“I like money. You pay me well, I will make you very happy.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“The whore talk,” he said. “We don’t need it.”

She sat up, momentarily less sure of herself. She watched him carefully as though not sure what he might do next. The waitress brought the drinks and left.

“Sante!” she toasted and drank.

“Sante,” he said, taking a sip and leaning closer. “It isn’t me you need to make happy. I’ll need you for a few days, maybe a week. I’ll pay you fifteen hundred a day. Cash. If it’s a full week, ten thousand. Up front. I’ll pay you as soon as we leave here. But for someone else, not me.”

She looked at him suspiciously.

“What is this? Is this some kind of zwendel? I don’t do this.”

“This man,” he said, sliding the photograph of the night security guard, Ouaddane, toward her. “You need to make him fall in love with you. Can you do it?”

“He looks like an Arab,” she said, frowning as she picked up the photograph.

“He is. Can you do it?”

“Sometimes men fall in love with me. Given how we meet, it seems strange to me. Sometimes I think it has nothing to do with me. I’m not in the love business,” she said.

“Make him want you enough to come with you and I’ll pay you the ten thousand even if you don’t work a full week.”

“What is this for?” She took a pair of glasses out of her handbag to look at Ouaddane’s photograph, then put them back in her bag. “Is he rich? He doesn’t look rich.”

“He’s poor. It’s not about that.”

She looked sharply at Scorpion.

“You don’t kill him? I don’t want any part of anything like this.”

“If I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t need you. He works as a security guard in a place where I need information. That’s all. You take care of him; I get the information; I take care of you. Everyone is happy.”

“That’s all, just information? Nobody gets hurt?” she said, looking at him from behind her drink.

“Nobody gets hurt. Not this man, not you. Come, let’s walk,” he said, standing up. As they walked out together, his hand lightly touching her waist, he was conscious that the eyes of every man in the bar were on them. They walked outside the hotel to the landscaped garden lawns. Night was falling. Lights were lit along the path, giving the hotel with its Dutch farmhouse architecture the quiet feel of being out in the country instead of in the center of the city. It was getting cold, and she pulled a pashmina shawl out of her handbag. He put it around her shoulders and handed her a wad of euros as they walked around the grounds.

“There’s three thousand to start for two days, plus three hundred for expenses,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You’re booked for the night here in the hotel. Tomorrow, you move to an apartment by the Nieuwegracht Canal. I’ll show you in the morning. For how long depends on how well you get him to like you. And get some clothes. I want you to look like a student at the university. Pretty, nice short skirt or tight jeans, but not a hoer. Understood?”

She stopped walking. “You don’t like me, do you?” she said, her face in the shadow cast by an outdoor lamppost.

“I like you fine. Actually, you and I are in the same business. We both lie to men to get something out of them, and we both have our own set of rules. The only difference is what we sell. But I don’t want Abdelhakim-that’s his name, Abdelhakim Ouaddane-to want to fuck you. I want him to fall in love with you. You’re not just bait, you’re a reason.”

“I see,” she said, and resumed walking. “What am I studying at the university?”

“Islamic culture.”

She made a face. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Learn. Buy a book. Every afternoon he goes to a coffee shop. Tomorrow, you make contact there and get him to come with you to the apartment. That’s all you have to do. Get him into bed. Then I’ll take over and you leave.”

“No violence? No trouble?”

“It’s business, that’s all. Once I meet with him, I’ll call you on your cell and let you know what we need to do and for how long.”

“What about you?” she said, stopping.

“What about me?”

“Do you want to go upstairs?” she said, coming close. “I don’t mind. It’s already paid.”

He felt the urge to grab her. Whore or not, she was sexy as hell and she had shown sparks of something even more interesting. He was tempted, but time was running out. He had to get back to Amsterdam and there was still a lot to do. Worse, he couldn’t afford to let anyone get close to him now. “Maybe later. I have things to do. Believe me, it’s better for both of us if I don’t right now,” he said, letting go of her and moving away into the shadows.

He drove back to Amsterdam and had dinner at a brown bar near the railway station. He felt a tinge when he thought of Anika, but it was too dangerous. They’d already set a trap for him once, and she was antsy enough as it was. Let somebody put the screws to her and she would sell him out in a heartbeat. He glanced around the bar, but no one was paying attention to him. The place was noisy with tourists and young backpackers, and he sat in a corner over an Oranjeboom beer and tried to put the pieces together, because it didn’t add up.

At an Internet cafe, he had transferred money from the Credit Suisse numbered account to a secured account in Luxembourg. He would handle the rest of the banking in the morning. He also sent a coded message for Rabinowich asking if he had come up with anything on who had been funding Dr. Abadi and the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya in Damascus. If there were twenty-one kilos of highly enriched U-235 missing, it must’ve cost somebody millions. Who had that kind of money? Also, he was no expert and wondered if twenty-one kilos was enough to make a nuclear bomb. If it wasn’t, then what was it for? What the hell was going on?

And then there was the RDX military explosive. A couple hundred kilos of RDX would be difficult to smuggle anywhere, particularly past Homeland Security in the United States. Plus there was the logistics problem. How the hell would you move all that from Russia and where was it going? And worst of all, they still hadn’t fed him any information on his target, the Palestinian. Who was he? Where did he come from? How did he operate so far under the radar that not a single intelligence agency had been able to come up with anything on him in all this time? It was as if the Palestinian had never been born, but suddenly materialized as a fully grown trained terrorist. He was beginning to get a sense of his enemy, and he didn’t like it. Whoever the Palestinian was, he was very good, and Scorpion knew that unless he could make Utrecht work, they were dead in the water.