Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

Scorpion moved the desk, lifted the rug up and saw the panel in the floor. He sat down beside it, pulling his backpack next to him, the flashlight in his mouth, and opening the panel, saw a high security floor safe. It was the type that had a three-inch thick solid steel body, a spoke locking handle, and two locks-a combination lock and a key lock-and you would need both in order to open it. Normally, it wasn’t that hard to crack a safe. You either used explosive on the lock or drilled a hole next to the lock-or at the back of the safe if the door had a hardened cobalt plate to prevent drilling-inserted a flexible fiberoptic bore lens to see the changes in the lock mechanism as you turned the combination or digital dial, and that was that. But he couldn’t do that. He had to open the safe in such a way that no one would ever know it had been touched.

You couldn’t just do it the way it was done in the movies. That was nonsense. You couldn’t sandpaper your fingers and either feel or hear the tumblers click when you reached the right number. Safe manufacturers had long ago put in safeguards, such as false tumbler notches or lock wheels made of lightweight nylon, to frustrate hearing or feeling the tumblers click. As for the kind of autodialers that opened a safe in seconds in the James Bond movies, in reality, autodialers needed to be model-specific, could require hours to cycle through all the thousands of number combinations, and because of that were only practicable for three-number safe combinations, not for the six-plus number combination likely on a high security safe.

For such assignments, the CIA used an audio “soft drill” like the one Scorpion pulled out of his backpack and placed next to the lock after pulling on latex surgical gloves. The soft drill used sound waves, like a sonogram, to probe and detect the contact points as he slowly turned the dial. The LED display indicated where to “park the wheels”-there was one wheel inside the lock for each number; a six-number combination required six wheels-as a starting point, and a computer chip in the drill graphed the convergent points and displayed the six-number combination on the LED. There was a sound and Scorpion looked up, his hand on his gun. He saw Abdelhakim’s silhouette in the doorway.

“What is it?” he asked.

“What are you doing?” the Moroccan asked nervously. “How much longer is this going to take?”

“Get away from the door, I’ll let you know,” Scorpion said, waiting till Abdelhakim’s shadow was gone from the doorway. The little Moroccan was antsy. Scorpion wanted to keep him alive if possible. Now that he was turned, they could run him for years, but if he got too antsy, there might be no choice.

He dialed the combination, then used a master key, tapping the key lock with the tapper tool to jump the tumblers. He turned the key and the locking handle and opened the safe.

It was filled with papers. He turned on the desk light and began to go through them one at a time, placing each one facedown on the rug so that when he was done he’d be able to put them back sorted in the original order. From time to time he took a photograph of a page with his cell phone camera. Sandwiched between two pages of an inventory of mosque supplies, he found a picture postcard of sailboats on the Aussenalster Lake in Hamburg with what appeared to be the same jumbled Arabic lettering code as on the postcard in the Ayatollah Khomeini book in Germany. He took a photograph of both sides of the postcard and put it back in the same position between the pages. Then he saw them and knew he had hit the jackpot: incorporation papers and stock certificates for a number of different companies.

One was a Netherlands property company. A second was Gelderland Sporting en Vuurwapens, BV, a Dutch sporting goods and firearms company. Two were of companies incorporated in Luxembourg: Utrecht Materiel Agricole, Sarl, a farm equipment company; and Bukhari Nederland-Maroc Societe de Financement, S.A., which looked like a holding company. They were all of interest, but the one that jumped out at him was FIMAX Shipping, headquartered in Kiev in the Ukraine. According to the papers, FIMAX was owned by the Bukhari Nederland-Maroc holding company and had as assets offices in Kiev and Odessa and two cargo ships, the MV Donetsk and the MV Zaina, both convenience-flagged in Belize.

Scorpion’s mind was racing as he snapped photographs of the documents as fast as he could. They had planned it beautifully, like a big engineering project or a beautiful, complex work of art. Because of Luxembourg’s secrecy laws, investigating companies headquartered there was next to impossible, even when international treaties were invoked. Farm equipment was a perfect cover for fertilizer for explosives. The sporting goods company could buy and sell as many guns and other weapons as they wanted. As for the Ukrainian shipping company, if you wanted to move something for which the logistics were almost impossible, like nuclear material or weapons from Russia, given the corruption in Russia and the Ukraine, a legitimate shipping company was perfect cover. He was so occupied, thinking and snapping photos under the lamplight, he didn’t hear Abdelhakim come in.

“You have to stop. Someone’s coming,” the Moroccan said from the doorway.

“Get rid of them,” Scorpion said, taking out the HK pistol.

“What if I can’t?” he hissed.

“Who is allowed to come into the imam’s office?”

“Only the imam and his sons,” Abdelhakim whispered, and ran toward the door. Scorpion grabbed the papers, making sure they were in the original order. He was about to put them back into the safe when he saw it: a contract in English between Baselux Pharma, Ltd., a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company, and the Bukhari Nederland-Maroc holding company. It was for the Swiss company’s entire yearly output of an experimental gram negative antibiotic, Ceftomyacole. Scorpion remembered Rabinowich on the iPod talking about the plague bacillus: “resistant to virtually every antibiotic known.” It was a holocaust they were planning-only the Islamic Resistance was planning to survive.

Scorpion heard the front door open and Abdelhakim speaking to someone. He was out of time. He stuffed the contract into his pocket, put the rest of the papers back into the safe and locked it. He had just managed to turn off the desk light and grab his backpack when he heard voices coming toward him. He was trapped.

Papendorp, Utrecht, Netherlands

The musalla prayer hall was dark. Scorpion crept into it on all fours, feeling his way across the carpeted space to the minbar, the wooden pulpit where the imam would give the sermon at Friday services. He heard Abdelhakim talking with someone, and the lights came on just as he climbed the stairs of the minbar and crouched hidden behind the podium.

“What’s happened? Where is the imam?” he heard Abdelhakim say in Arabic.

“Never mind. Go keep watch,” a man answered. Probably one of the imam’s sons, Scorpion thought. “We’ll talk in here. Keep the lights out,” the same man said to someone else, not Abdelhakim. They were standing in the middle of the empty musalla, their voices barely audible from where Scorpion was hiding.

“What about the guard?” a second man said in Fusha Arabic.

“What about him?”

“He saw my face.” His words riveted Scorpion-and there was something about this man’s voice, but he couldn’t place it.

“He’s loyal, a good Muslim.”

“Good Muslims can be turned. Show me the…” The words were lost as the voices moved toward the imam’s office, then the light in there came on.

He knew if he was to get out, this was his chance. But who didn’t want his face to be seen? The Palestinian! Was it possible? That voice! It could be the same one he’d heard on Harris’s cell phone in Karachi. It’s him! a voice screamed in his head.