Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

“Maybe someone wanted to go to Genoa, where it would be easier to get something dangerous through customs. Something you could ship in three containers. That good-looking Frenchman at the port thought that was very odd.”

“You just like him because he kissed your hand.”

“With his looks, he didn’t have to. You could learn from him. It’d be interesting to see the autopsy report on that captain, wouldn’t it?”

“Very.”

She put down her fork and looked at him. “You’re a kind of policeman, aren’t you?”

“No, not a policeman.”

“Or a CIA spy,” she said. “‘The Spy Who Loved Me.’ Except you don’t, do you? Love me.”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea, would it?” he said.

“Because you don’t know if I’m on your side, whichever side that is?”

“We need to finish up,” he said, putting his napkin on the table.

“Are we going to Genoa?” she asked, not looking at him.

“We’ll see,” he said, getting up and speaking for a moment with the waiter he had spoken to earlier. He came back, tossed some money on the table, and grabbed Najla’s hand.

“Come on. We have to go,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked, getting up.

“Didier. I had the waiter check outside from time to time while we were eating. He’s sitting in a car down the street.”

“What does he want?”

“He smells money. He’s decided to try to cut himself in,” Scorpion said, guiding her toward the back of the restaurant. As they walked into the narrow kitchen with three workers talking and noisily handling pots, a man in a soiled white apron shouted at them:

“Attention, monsieur! Il est interdit! You may not come back here.”

Scorpion handed him a twenty euro note, and pulling Najla after him, was headed for the back door when he paused for a moment in front of a small TV mounted on a shelf. A chic well-tanned woman was broadcasting the Dix-neuf-Vingt Journal Televise nightly news.

“I thought you wanted to go,” Najla said.

“Wait a minute,” he said, and then the woman on TV said something that stopped him cold. Suddenly all the loose ends came together and he knew exactly where the Palestinian intended to strike and when.

Marseilles, France

He shouldn’t have gone back to the hotel. He hadn’t wanted to, but Najla insisted in the taxi after they’d gotten away from the restaurant.

“Where are we going? Genoa?” she asked.

“Rome,” Scorpion said. He checked flights on his cell phone and booked reservations for the two of them on an Air France flight from Marseilles Provence Airport to Fiumicino for that evening.

“Why Rome?”

“Don’t you know?” he asked, his eyes searching her face in the intermittent flashes of light from passing headlights.

“We haven’t even unpacked and now you want to leave. Why?”

“Because the story you want is in Rome.”

“Where did that come from?”

“You’ll figure it out. C’est a quelle distance de l’aeroport? ” he asked the taxi driver. How far to the airport?

“Ten kilometers, monsieur,” the driver said.

“What about my clothes and things?” she said.

“We’ll buy new ones in Rome.”

“That’s what you think. I have to freshen up. Besides, I’m doing you a favor. You have no idea what those clothes cost. Turn around. Take us to the Pullman Hotel,” she told the driver.

“Ne pretez aucune attention,” he told the driver. Pay no attention. “Keep going.” He didn’t want to tell her that the hotel was a red zone. Didier was ex-DGSE and it wouldn’t take him long to track their hotel down, and that was only half his problem. If anyone from the Utrecht network learned that they had made inquiries about the Zaina, or if they found the bodies and got to Anika, or just put two and two together and figured out where he would go next, it wouldn’t take Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya long to look for foreigners in Marseilles, a city teeming with Muslims working at every hotel. Even more urgently, he had to connect with Langley without Najla or anyone else looking over his shoulder.

She grabbed his wrist. “I’m tired of this. Either you take me to the hotel now or so help me I’ll scream ‘rape’ at the top of my lungs the second we get to the airport.”

“Forget it,” he said, pulling his wrist away. “I’ll drop you at the hotel and go to Rome myself.”

“I know where you’re going. I can book a flight too. What is it with you? Just five minutes and we’ll go, I swear.”

Suddenly, he realized that he had to go back to the hotel. He’d checked in his laptop at the desk and hadn’t wiped the disk. That was the problem when you weren’t traveling alone. It was hard finding the privacy to do the things you didn’t want anyone to see. You cut corners; you made mistakes.

“Five minutes and that’s it,” he said to her. Then to the driver, “We changed our mind. Allez a l’hotel.” The driver signaled and made the turn back to the city.

“What is your problem?” she asked him. “What’s wrong with going back to the hotel?”

“Didier. How long do you think it will take him to check out the hotels in Marseilles and find us?”

“You realize you’re paranoid, don’t you?” she said.

“You’re not the first person to say that to me.”

“Then maybe it’s true.”

“You’d have to ask them, only you can’t.”

“Why not?” she said as the taxi turned onto the Corniche Kennedy. The street was lined with buildings and hotels fronting the bay.

“They’re all dead.”

“You don’t trust anyone, do you? Especially me.”

“I don’t know anything about you.”

“Nor I you. As if you are really South African, scheisse.”

“Where were you born?”

“Lebanon. My parents brought me to Germany when I was a baby.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“What is this?” she snapped. “You know me. I hate the Islamists! You saw me at the demonstration.”

“In my business we call that ‘deep cover.’ Five minutes,” he told her as the taxi pulled up to the hotel. She went up to the room as he retrieved his laptop from the front desk clerk.

“Are there any messages?” he asked.

“No, monsieur,” the clerk said, not looking at him.

“Check again,” Scorpion said.

The clerk checked the room box and the computer and shook his head, still not looking at him.

“Has anyone asked about us, anyone suspicious, maybe more than one? N’ayez pas peur.” Don’t be afraid. He slipped the clerk a fifty euro bill. The man glanced around and nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Merde, Scorpion thought in French as he headed for the elevator. It only took a few seconds to kill someone; Najla was in the room alone.

Their room was on the next to top floor. He took the elevator up to the top floor and walked downstairs to his floor. He took out his gun, put the silencer on, cracked the stairwell door a fraction of an inch and peered out at the corridor. It was empty. Stepping out, he walked silently to the door and, careful to stay out of sight range of the peephole, listened. The room was silent; there were no sounds of her moving around. He went to the room next door, listened and then knocked.

“Service d’etage, madame,” he called softly. There was no answer. He slid a credit card between the door lock and the frame, opened the lock and stepped inside. The room was dark and empty. He closed the door behind him, walked to the balcony door, opened it and stepped outside. The night was cool and clear, the lights from the hotel windows reflected in squares of light on the water of the bay. The balcony of his and Najla’s room was empty, and glancing over, there was just enough curtain to give him cover. There was about two feet of space between the rails of the two balconies, where he could fall three stories to the concrete yard below. The key, he knew, was not to make a sound.