Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

He paid the driver, who was now wearing his former T-shirt and, using the canvas-topped stalls for cover, slipped through the aisles between the market stalls toward the apartment building. He double-checked to make sure the Palestinian didn’t have someone covering his back, then studied the building before stepping out from under the cover of the stalls. He could see no surveillance. He tried the building’s front door. It was locked, but it only took a few seconds with a credit card to open it and step into the hallway, dim despite a shaft of sunlight from a window above the door. The floors were tiled and there was a faded wallpaper mural of the Roman countryside on the entryway wall. He looked around, pulled his gun out of the backpack and clicked off the safety.

There was an old narrow elevator and wooden stairs, and after listening intently and hearing nothing, he began to quietly climb the stairs, pausing at each landing to do a complete 360 up and down. He stopped at each apartment and pressed his ear to the door to listen. Nearly all of the apartments were silent, except one where he heard a television tuned to what sounded like an Italian game show. A smell of chicken cacciatore came from the apartment, and he thought whatever else the Palestinian had come there to do, it wasn’t cooking. He moved on to the next floor.

He stood outside an apartment on the third floor, his ear pressed to the door, when he heard a floorboard creak just on the other side. Someone was listening to him! He tried to make his breathing shallow and slow, leaning slowly back toward the doorjamb in case whoever it was fired through the door. He considered whether he should fire first, through the door, but it might not hit the target and it could be some innocent person, probably old, thinking a stranger had come to rob the apartment. Then he heard someone move inside and a sound like a slap. A woman gasped, and the gasp was cut off. The door looked solid, of heavy wood, perhaps oak, and he couldn’t tell whether it had been rigged like the one in Amsterdam. It was too risky. He backed away carefully, went to the door of the next apartment and knocked softly, his gun ready to fire.

“Gli ufficio postale, signora,” Scorpion said to the closed door in his best Italian. “Gli ho una lettera per expresso per voi.” I have a special delivery letter for you. He didn’t wait for a response, but tried to open the door with a credit card, and when that didn’t work, used his universal key to open it. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him as softly as he could.

The foyer had the dusty silence of an empty apartment, but Scorpion moved silently from room to room, richly furnished with antiques and old paintings, just to make sure. From the living room window, he looked down and saw the canvas tops of the market stalls clustered around the statue of Giordano Bruno in the piazza. He went to the kitchen, picked up a glass and went back to the foyer. Placing the glass against the common wall with the apartment next door, he pressed his ear against the bottom of it. He heard the sound of a man talking and moving things, like he was working, but no other sounds. He had to see what was happening inside that apartment.

Scorpion opened his backpack and removed his Leatherman tool. He got a chair from the dining room and found a place high up on the wall that would allow him a good view of the other apartment and wouldn’t be spotted unless someone happened to be looking for it. Then, with the Leatherman, he hand-drilled a tiny hole in the wall, making almost no noise, stopping from time to time to listen with the glass to the sounds next door. When he saw the light from the next apartment in the hole, he got a peephole scope from the backpack and fit it into the hole he’d just drilled.

Through the scope he saw the Palestinian finish rigging explosives around the woman, who was gagged with a tape across her mouth and tied to a chair in the middle of the room. She was moving in the chair, shaking her head, and he went over, slapped her in the face and said something Scorpion couldn’t make out. Abruptly, the Palestinian stopped. He looked around, listening intently, a gun in his hand. Scorpion froze, his heart pounding as the Palestinian moved toward the peephole. Scorpion got ready to fire through the wall when he heard what the Palestinian had heard. Someone was coming down the hall toward one of the two apartments.

He barely had time to see the Palestinian head toward the apartment door, out of the peripheral view of the peephole scope. He got down from the chair as quickly and quietly as he could, stood beside the apartment door as the key turned in the lock. The door opened and a middle-aged woman carrying a fishnet shopping bag walked in. Scorpion grabbed her from behind, his hand tightly over her mouth.

“Non una parola!” Not a word, he hissed in his bad Italian into her ear as she dropped the shopping bag with a clunk that had to have alerted the Palestinian. The woman squirmed and tried to struggle against him, but he held her tight. He put his gun to her head, making sure she saw it. Her eyes were wide with fear. He gestured with the gun toward the sofa. “Non parli,” he whispered, putting his finger to his lips, all the while straining to hear what was happening next door.

Suddenly, he heard the other apartment door open and close, and by the time he got to the door to look out, he heard the elevator door down the hall closing. He ran back to the chair, stepped up and looked into the peephole scope. The woman was still tied up, but the Palestinian was gone.

Having no time, he knew he had to make an instantaneous choice: the life of the woman next door or his only chance at stopping the Palestinian.

Grabbing his backpack, Scorpion told the woman on the sofa, “You have to leave. Esca della casa. Telefono per la polizia!”

“Get out my apartment,” she said in English.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He ran out of the apartment and raced down the stairs, leaping down almost an entire landing. Coming to the entrance hall, he tore open the front door and was almost blinded by the bright sunlight in the crowded piazza. He saw the Palestinian point a gun at a taxi driver and haul the driver out, then get in and drive off in the taxi.

Scorpion looked around. Next to a flower stall he saw a Vespa motor scooter chained to a lamppost. At this hour in Rome traffic, he might get through faster with the Vespa than a car. It only took a few seconds with the universal key and tapping with his Leatherman pliers to open the chain lock and the steering column lock and start the scooter. He roared off after the Palestinian as a man from one of the stalls ran after him, screaming, “Arresto! Ladro!”

He could see the Palestinian’s taxi ahead, weaving around cars into the opposing traffic lanes and back, while he just managed to keep up on the cobblestone streets. He raced between lanes of traffic, slipping past cars by inches and going up on the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians as he raced after the taxi, trying to keep it in sight and not get it confused with other Roman taxis, all of them painted white.

Approaching a red traffic light ahead, the Palestinian suddenly looked back, stuck out his arm and fired a shot at Scorpion that tore a spiderweb hole in a car window next to him, the driver of the car staring wide-eyed at it, too stunned to move. Scorpion hunched lower over the handlebars and drove even faster, squeezing between a van and a Fiat with less than an inch to spare on either side. The Palestinian’s taxi slowed at the red light, then sped up, darting into the intersection, then swerved to just miss a car. As the driver screamed and shook his fist, the taxi swerved again to avoid another car from the opposite direction and roared past the intersection.