Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

“That had occurred to me,” Scorpion said. In fact, after leaving the television studio he went from one student hostel and cheap hotel to another, checking out places where the demonstrators tended to stay. By late afternoon a fifty euro note had convinced a desk clerk at a hotel near the Stazione Termini to admit that la donna inglese might be staying there with her ragazzo, a long-haired Italian student. From the photograph taken at the demonstration that Scorpion had printed at the Internet cafe, the clerk identified the other Englishwoman as a friend who sometimes came to see her. Scorpion decided to go back and stake out the hotel as soon as he left Moretti.

“You know what he looks like, don’t you?” Moretti said. “You have a photograph? Perhaps we should alert the Polizia di Stato and the Carabinieri. This becomes a simple security matter.”

“Or let the DIA handle it? They won’t stop him, and if you get close, he doesn’t have to be near the bomb and whatever else he has planned. He just presses ‘Send’ on a cell phone and arrivederci. I have to get to him first.”

“You look tired,” Moretti said, studying the man across from him, Scorpion’s eyes were shadowed, a two-day stubble on his face. He wore jeans and a black SAVE THE WHALE T-shirt under a jacket, presumably to blend in with the demonstrators. It wasn’t a pretty-boy face, but his eyes, gray like the sea, and his look, like a wolf that never stopped moving, must attract women like crazy, Moretti thought. “What will you do when this is over?”

“Sleep. For at least a week.” Scorpion grinned. “Preferably someplace where I can hear the sound of water on sand.”

“You go back to America?” And when Scorpion shook his head, “You should come to Italy. Only Italians know how to live.”

“Why? Do you have an apartment you want to rent?”

“No!” Moretti laughed. “But a place for you, we can always find. I have to go,” he said, putting his napkin down.

“Family?”

“I have that also. Three bambini,” he said, holding up three fingers. “No, I have a mistress. Blond, sexy,” using his hands to portray her breasts, “but, Dio mio, she is crazy! Women, when they love you, they go a little bit crazy, you know? But so bella,” he sighed, getting up.

“You’re right. Maybe I should live in Italy,” Scorpion said, tossing money on the table and also getting up.

“I look forward to our next encounter, il mio amico. Good luck. In bocca al lupo,” Moretti said, shaking his hand.

“And may the wolf die,” Scorpion replied.

Moretti started to walk away, then turned back.

“By the way,” he said, “the capitano of the ship Zaina. He died of asphyxiation, but is curious.”

“In what way?”

“He had enough Demerol in the body to kill him ten times over, even without all the whiskey he drink. There are Demerol pills next to bed, but no pills in stomach. Yes, and there is an injection place with trace residue of Demerol between his toes.”

“So someone shot him full of Demerol and smothered him when the injection started to wake him up,” Scorpion said.

“That is also what the coroner said. He ruled it a omicidio. We will talk again soon. Ciao,” Moretti said, and gestured goodbye.

Scorpion watched him walk toward the Piazza Navona and disappear into the crowd. Then he went to a Vodafone store on the Via del Corso that he knew was open late, bought two new cell phones and SIM cards, and used one to text Rabinowich.

Venice V Cross cousins hot bath pickup. nose HA. Scorpion used Venice to indicate that it was urgent. He knew Rabinowich would recognize that he was talking about immediately notifying the “V Cross cousins,” MI6, whose headquarters were at Vauxhall Cross in London, which Harris had once called “the worst intersection in Europe, in every conceivable way,” to pick up someone who had flown into Heathrow, located on Bath Road. It was “hot” that MI6 interrogate Liz’s friend, whose name he had discovered-from the hotel registry, thanks to the clerk-was Alicia Faring, and grill her because she “nose” HA: Hearing Aid. The Palestinian’s girlfriend might’ve let something drop to Alicia, perhaps a hint about where the Palestinian was staying in Rome or where in Italy, if not Rome, he had gone after leaving Genoa.

Hoo? Rabinowich asked. Scorpion needed to use the quick and dirty Vigenere cipher they had agreed upon in Castelnuovo, employing the keyword YANKES with only one E, because Dave was a lifelong New York Yankees fan. The advantage of the Vigenere cipher was that it was impervious to frequency analysis, which made it hard to break without the keyword, and you didn’t need a computer or anything fancy. You could draw the Vigenere Square anywhere and destroy it when you were finished. Scorpion did it on a piece of toilet paper in a stall of the men’s room in the Vodafone store. ylvmmsdaesry he texted to Rabinowich, to indicate Alicia Faring.

Friends in blk house looking 360 4 mrvyr, Rabinowich typed.

Scorpion assumed that the “friends” in the black house referred to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Using the Vigenere Square with the keyword YANKES, he translated mrvyr to mean Orion. The message meant that the NSA was monitoring all communications, 360 degrees worldwide, for any reference in any language to the constellation Orion, aka al Jabbar.

Scorpion ended the call and tore up and flushed the paper with the Vigenere Square down the toilet. He caught a taxi on the Corso and took it back to the hotel near the Stazione Termini. After slipping another twenty euros to the clerk, he camped out on the lobby couch, to all appearances just another backpacker making do.

At just past five-thirty in the morning, the sky still dark, while pretending to be asleep, his arm over his eyes to help obscure his face, he saw the attractive female friend of the Englishwoman, Alicia, from the video enter the hotel and go up in the elevator. Later that morning, as he watched from across the street, the sky bright and promising heat, he saw the three of them-the Englishwoman, Alicia, the female friend, and a boyfriend-come out of the hotel with their wheeled luggage.

He followed them to the Stazione Termini, where he was stunned to see Hassani, the Palestinian himself, come up and join them. Scorpion reached into the backpack where he kept the SIG Sauer 9mm that Harris had given him at Castelnuovo. Do it now! he told himself. He’d never get a better chance. At this distance it was almost impossible to miss, and if any of the others got in the way, it didn’t matter. They were obviously co-conspirators. He took a deep breath to lower his heart rate as his hand closed on the gun. Then he hesitated. Even if he killed Hassani, that would still leave the bomb, with no way to find it and maybe a time mechanism or someone else to set it off. His sense of the Palestinian was that he left little to chance, always arranged a backup. He realized he couldn’t do it, not yet, and let go of the 9mm in the backpack with reluctance, wondering if he wasn’t making a fatal error.

The Palestinian and the woman got into a taxi outside the station. Scorpion followed in another taxi, telling the driver not to get too close, “non troppo vicino,” but not to lose them in the traffic on the Via Cavour. Although the Palestinian might not have recalled seeing him at the train station, if he saw him again, it would click.

Knowing he had to alter his appearance, Scorpion offered the driver an extra thirty euros to trade shirts, exchanging his SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt for a checked cotton shirt that he wore unbuttoned and outside his pants on the theory that he wanted anyone, at first glance, to look at the shirt instead of his face. The taxi ahead dropped the Palestinian and the woman off near the market stalls in the Campo dei Fiori. He told his driver to stop, and waited till he saw them head into an apartment building bordering the piazza.