Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

He went back into the imam’s office, where he spent another half hour going through, photographing, and carefully putting back everything in the safe, including the contract with the Swiss drug company. He downloaded the contents of the computers in the assistant’s office onto his plug-in drive. It was useful, but he was stymied. Whatever was so urgent that it had brought the Palestinian to Utrecht, he hadn’t seen it. He was about to take care of the bodies, which he’d rolled into prayer rugs, when something made him go back to the imam’s office for one last look.

He moved the flashlight slowly around the room and was struck by how sparse the room seemed, reeking of poverty; almost a repudiation of the wealth in companies and assets hidden in the safe. The flashlight beam moved along the bookcases and stopped when he realized he was staring at a copy of the imam’s book on the Hadith of Bukhari. He opened the book and began flipping through the pages, not knowing what he was looking for. Then, on a page in the middle of the book, he saw it: a penciled-in drawing of a Muslim warrior with a sword in the margin of a paragraph commenting on a hadith from volume 4, chapter 3, of the Sahih Bukhari:

It seemed he had seen it before, but he couldn’t recall where. There was something vaguely archeological about the simplistic drawing and its markings in the circle of the flashlight beam. The paragraph of commentary written by the imam stated that the text of the hadith was in reality a secret prophecy of the Prophet. Scorpion read the original text of the hadith in Arabic: “The creation of these stars is for three purposes, as decoration of the sky, as missiles to hit the devils, and as signs to guide travelers.” As signs to guide travelers!

He looked at the drawing again and all at once realized what he was looking at. It was the constellation Orion. He strained to remember the name of Orion in Arabic. Like a gift, an old memory from childhood came bobbing to the surface. He recalled a night in the desert spent gazing up at the stars that filled the sky from horizon to horizon. It was not long after the Mutayr had saved him after his father was killed. He was standing with Sheikh Zaid, who was pointing out the constellations. The stars were out of reach, yet so close you could almost touch them, and there were so many he could see the sheikh’s face in their glow.

“Do you see there, little dhimmi, the belt, the sheath, and the arm of the warrior raised with the sword?”

“What is it called?”

“That is al Jabbar, the Giant,” Sheikh Zaid had said.

He had to get this to Langley at once, he thought. He took photos of the cover, title page, and the drawing and replaced them where he had found them. Then he found the keys to the imam’s son’s Mercedes parked in front of the mosque in the dead man’s pocket, carried the bodies out and dumped them into the trunk. He drove the Mercedes a few blocks away and left it parked on a side street, the keys in the ignition. With luck, a local gang member would steal it before realizing what was in the trunk.

Returning to the mosque, Scorpion reconnected the outside security cameras. Making sure he wasn’t seen, he was soon driving the A2 to Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam. It was all there right in front of them, taken from the words of the hadith, he thought as he drove. “Missiles to hit the devils” and “signs to guide travelers.”

He checked into a hotel near the airport and, using his laptop, uploaded to the mission website the encrypted photos and intel he had collected, the image of the Swiss drug contract, his thoughts on the Bukhari hadith and the constellation al Jabbar. Then he requested immediate information on the mosque’s companies and on the whereabouts of the two Ukrainian ships, the Donetsk and the Zaina.

Just before he fell asleep, Scorpion tried to convince himself he wasn’t a total failure because he hadn’t caught even a glimpse of the Palestinian’s face. He thought too about pimping the woman, Anika, and dropping her into the little Moroccan’s life like a tornado, destroying it completely. It left him wondering if, somewhere in the moral calculus of the universe, the lives of those who could die if he didn’t get to the Palestinian in time outweighed what he was doing to save them. And then he fell asleep and dreamed that he was driving the A2 at night, only every car’s driver was a man with no face, and when he looked in the rearview mirror, he had no face either.

His cell phone rang a few minutes before six in the morning. On the other end, a voice that could’ve been Rabinowich, though he wouldn’t swear to it, said: “Remember kindergarten? Four left Mombasa two days ago, bound for Marseilles. Last was supposed to be in Marseilles, but they have no record of her. We’re still checking,” and he hung up.

Scorpion got up and looked out the window, trying to clear his head. He felt like he had barely slept. It was before dawn, the light a shadowy gray and the window wet with a fine drizzle.

By “kindergarten” Rabinowich meant the first days of learning codes during CST training. “Four” was the fourth letter of the alphabet, D, for the ship, Donetsk, and the “last” letter of the alphabet was Z for the Zaina. There were red flags all over this. Mombasa in Kenya was a known smuggling port for al-Qaida terrorists based in Somalia. Both ships were headed for Marseilles. He called the concierge, who checked and told him there wasn’t a flight from Amsterdam to Marseilles till late in the day, but if he hurried he could just catch the Thalys train from the Schiphol Airport station to Paris, and from there connect to the high-speed TGV train that could get him from Paris to Marseilles in three hours.

Within forty minutes Scorpion was boarding the Thalys train to Paris, ordering a cafe americain and a croissant from the bar on the train. He had arranged with the concierge for the hotel to return his rented BMW at the airport. He sat by a window and watched as the train sped past the suburbs and polders of Holland, his face and hair still wet from the drizzle. Al Jabbar, the Giant, was some kind of key to the code the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya was using. But there were still so many loose ends. If the Zaina wasn’t in Marseilles, where the hell was she? And then there was what Groesbeck had said, that twenty-one kilos of U-235 was nowhere near enough. And that the mosque holding company had made a deal to buy up the entire inventory of a new antibiotic. All loose ends, except that it was obvious that Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya had gone operational and the clock was ticking down.

The Thalys train arrived mid-morning at the Gare du Nord. It was still drizzling in Paris, and he had to run to grab a taxi and race to the Gare de Lyon. He barely managed to catch the TGV, the French ultra-high-speed train to Marseilles, with only minutes to spare. He was still breathing hard as he entered the first class carriage, and it was with a sense of anticlimax, almost inevitability, that he spotted the final loose end. Sitting in a table seat by the window, looking very beautiful but not at all happy to see him, was Najla Kafoury.

Le TGV, Paris-Marseilles, France

“And what am I to call you today, Herr Cr-”

“McDonald. Damon McDonald,” Scorpion said, interrupting her. They were sitting across from each other over glasses of Bordeaux in the TGV first class carriage. Through the window next to them the green fields and trees and clusters of tiled houses of the French countryside flew by, punctuated by flashes of telephone poles. The only sound was the murmur of conversation and the steady hum of the train on the tracks. The electronic readout above the door at the end of the car indicated that they were traveling at 296 kilometers per hour.