Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

“You already have. You are a kafir traitor. Everyone will know it.”

“Kol ayre wle,” Abdelhakim hissed at him. “Allah knows I am no traitor.”

“Yes, you are. Here’s the proof,” Scorpion said, tossing the bank ATM card onto the table next to Abdelhakim, whose eyes darted to look at it, though he wouldn’t pick it up.

“What’s that?”

“Your account at the ABN-Amro bank in Amsterdam.”

“I don’t have an account there.”

“Look at the card. It’s in your name. You have twenty thousand euros in your account. Go ahead, pick up the card. It’s your money.”

“You’re crazy! Where would I get twenty thousand euros?”

“It was transferred to your ABNA account from the Israeli Bank Hapoalim in Luxembourg.”

“Israeli!” Abdelhakim gasped. “What have I to do with the Israelis?”

“You see the problem,” Scorpion said. “Such bank transfers are easily traced. Everyone will know you’re a traitor, even the imam. It’s not just you, it’s your family, the ummah, all will be condemned.” Make him feel it, Koenig would say. Before you throw him a lifeline, twist the hook. You have to make sure the poor bastard understands what he’s about to lose. “If Hezbollah learns you are an Israeli agent, you will die. Your wife and sons will die. The imam and our cause will be in great danger. We cannot allow this. How many will die because of you? And do you know the worst of all, Brother?”

Abdelhakim looked at him, numbly shaking his head, his eyes vacant as he stared into the abyss.

“The worst is that you, a ‘good Muslim,’ will have dealt a terrible blow to the Palestinian cause, because truly, I have just come from Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya in Damascus and I must get something out of the imam’s office before the CIA or the AIVD can get to it. Unless you help me, we are lost.”

“I don’t understand.” He blinked. “You need to get into the imam’s office?”

“If you let me in tonight at midnight, no one will ever know about you or the Israelis or that I was there. You will keep the twenty thousand and you’ll be paid another ten thousand. As for the woman, if you don’t want her,” Scorpion snapped his fingers, “she’s gone. If you choose to forgive her for her female lie, you can have her whenever you want and your wife will never see this.” He turned on the camera and held it so the Moroccan could see the video and hear the sounds of the two of them having sex, Anika moving and groaning beneath him. “Inshallah, you will save the imam and yourself and your family.”

Abdelhakim began fumbling in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled cigarette. His hand was shaking as he straightened it and he looked at Scorpion before lighting it. Scorpion sat back and waited. You have to let them feel the trap, Koenig said. They have to touch the bars and the sides of the cage, so they really understand there’s no other way out. Come on, he thought. Take the carrot. It’s the only rational choice, pick it up, you humar: thinking if it didn’t work, he’d have to kill the Moroccan.

“Just this one night and no more?” Abdelhakim said, picking up the bank card and staring at it as though he had never seen one before.

“Just tonight. Nothing will be disturbed or taken. No one will ever know.”

“And I get to keep the thirty thousand?” he said, and Scorpion smiled inwardly. Get greedy, he thought. The greedier the better.

Abdelhakim tapped the card thoughtfully, then put it in his wallet. Scorpion let out the breath he’d been holding.

“Do you like the woman? She’s very pretty.”

“I never touched such a woman. So beautiful,” Abdelhakim said softly.

“She likes you; she told me.”

“And my wife never knows?”

“I’ll give you the chip from the camera before I leave tonight.”

“I have to go to work,” he said, getting up and putting on his shirt and windbreaker, then hesitated. “And it’s good for the Muslim ummah?”

“Ilhamdulilah, it is a good thing you’ll have done, Brother. Come,” Scorpion said, walking him to the apartment door.

S corpion watched the mosque through night vision goggles from the BMW parked down the block. The night was cool and the wind had come up, blowing dust and scraps of paper in the street. The greatest danger was when Abdelhakim had second thoughts; something that Koenig cautioned was inevitable once the Joe was out of the immediate confrontation. Scorpion could only hope that greed and sex and the threat of public humiliation would outweigh his old loyalty. “Most people,” Koenig had said, “would rather be a traitor than be thought of as a traitor.”

If Abdelhakim did have second thoughts, it could go either of two ways. Either he would tell someone and there would be militants lying in wait for him at the mosque, or it could come days, months, or even years later, when Abdelhakim put a bullet through his own head. The only way to know was to watch the mosque and wait, so there would be no surprises and he could try to figure out what the hell was happening, because nothing made any sense after what Professor Groesbeck had told him over beers at a brown bar near the university earlier that evening.

Rabinowich had responded to his Web question with a code that turned out to be Groesbeck’s cell phone number. The bar was noisy and crowded with students, some of whom were still carrying books from late classes. Groesbeck wasn’t what he had expected-an older academic along the lines of Rabinowich, someone whose brilliant sarcasm could fall like a guillotine on an unsuspecting undergraduate. But the professor was young, in his thirties, dark-haired, and with an eye for female students.

“Did Rabinowich tell you anything about me?” Scorpion asked him.

“He said don’t bother asking you anything because anything you told me would be a lie, including hello and good-bye,” Groesbeck said in English, with only a slight accent, meanwhile checking out a statuesque blonde in a yellow tank top and tight jeans at the bar. “Of course, that told me exactly who you are, not that it matters.”

“He said you were on the IAEA inspection teams in Iran and North Korea.”

“Mmm… she’s something, ja?” Groesbeck said, and for a moment the two men contemplated the blonde’s chest.

“Healthy girl,” Scorpion said.

“Lovely. So you want to know how to make a nuclear bomb? It’s easy. All you need is enough Uranium-235. Just slap it together and- pop!” he illustrated by splaying his fingers open like an explosion.

“Why not plutonium?”

“Nasty to work with, Pu-239. The radiation will kill you, and it’ll start fires at ordinary room temperature unless you have an extensive, dry-because ordinary water makes it worse-inert gas facility. U-235, on the other hand, is beautiful stuff. You can work it, shape it, you don’t need an elaborate facility, and the radioactivity is so mild, you could put it under your pillow and sleep on it.”

“So how much U-235 do I need to make a bomb?”

“Depends,” Groesbeck said, putting down his beer and trying to make eye contact with the blonde.

“I have top security clearance. I’m sure Dave told you,” Scorpion said.

“It isn’t security. It’s just not a simple number. It varies depending on how pure the U-235 is. For an ordinary nuclear reactor, all you need is four or five percent purity. For a weapon to go supercritical, much more. For the Hiroshima bomb, they used 64.1 kilos, about 141 pounds, of ninety-plus percent pure U-235, and the bomb was so inefficient that only one percent, perhaps one pound or so, went supercritical. The other ninety-nine percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb was wasted.”

“How about a terrorist with twenty-one kilos at seventy-six percent?”