Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Betrayal

“Where’s the apartment?”

“On Baroudi, near Shari’ Abdel Wahab. You know it?”

“Near the football stadium? That’s an expensive neighborhood,” Scorpion said. “How does she afford it?”

Fouad shifted uncomfortably. “She is a singer. A patriot,” he said.

“She’s yours?”

Fouad nodded. “This will end it for her?” he asked.

“We’ll try to make it appear that she’s a victim too,” Scorpion said. “Maybe they won’t kill her. What floor is her apartment on?”

“The eighth. The building has ten floors.”

“How many men does he come with?”

“Seven usually. Two SUVs. Four in one and three with him in the second. All with AK-47s.”

“Do any of them come into the apartment with him?”

Fouad shook his head. “He leaves two to guard outside the apartment door, the rest downstairs or outside.”

“I’ll call and let you know after I check it out,” Scorpion said. “Probably need just the two of us plus two with a car for the getaway. But no one knows who the target is or what it’s for or where they’re going till the last second. Understood?”

“Of course. Only the two of us?”

“The fewer, the better.” He could see Fouad was worried. “It’ll be enough. Security’s a bigger concern than firepower.”

Fouad leaned forward and put out the glowing tip of the cigarette by slowly crushing it between his fingers. “We will kill him?”

Scorpion didn’t answer.

“He has to be killed,” Fouad said. “The price is agreed?”

“Sixty M-16s, ten M203 grenade launchers, and two M-240B machine guns. A thousand dollars U.S. for each of your men, ten thousand for you,” Scorpion whispered in his ear as he stood up. “And no one touches him. He must be taken alive and unharmed or I pay nothing.”

“Maashi. Mafi mushkila.”

He’s lying, saying okay, Scorpion thought. He’d have to deal with it when the time came. “Inshallah, Ma’a salaama,” he said, touching Fouad on the shoulder as he left.

“Alla ysalmak, habibi,” Fouad said, not looking up.

Outside, Scorpion caught a Service taxi that he shared with two women, one in a head scarf, and a male student, heading toward the Corniche. He stopped the Service on Kuwait Street, crossed the busy street and jumped into a taxi heading the other way, toward downtown, making sure no one was suddenly reversing directions with him. He got out on Fakheddine, waited till the taxi left, then walked into a Japanese restaurant and out the back door. From there, Scorpion walked several blocks down a side street to the high-rise apartment building on Omar Daouk where he had rented a furnished flat earlier that morning. He nodded to the portier and took the elevator to the apartment. As soon as he got in, he went to the window and scanned the street below from behind the curtain, but there was nothing. Just ordinary street traffic. Beyond the street, he could see the side of the Ramada Hotel, and beyond that the Mediterranean, blue all the way to the horizon.

He went to the table, turned on his laptop computer, transferred the image on the plug-in drive from Fouad into the computer and opened it with Photoshop. The man in the photo was Salim Kassem, Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of the al-majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. It wasn’t his face Scorpion was interested in, but his cell phone. He enlarged the photo almost to the point of seeing individual pixels, till he was sure he knew the exact Nokia model Kassem used. Using an RSA token disguised as a functioning credit card, Scorpion logged into the website of the International Corn Association, which promoted American corn exports that Harris was using as cover for the operation. The randomly generated code number plus a password enabled Scorpion to initiate a Virtual Private Network with a special port on the site that used an advanced DTLS protocol. This created a highly secure network tunnel that was far more difficult to hack than the standard SSL used by most so-called secure websites, such as banks. Once he was connected, he made the arrangements he wanted.

Only then did he unpack his suitcase and methodically check his equipment, one piece at a time, including a 9mm Beretta pistol with a sound suppressor. From this point on he would be carrying a gun everywhere he went.

Leaving the apartment, he took a Service to Ashrafieh. He stopped in a real estate office and pocketed a few business cards from an agent who tried to interest him in a condo in the Gammayzeh district. “Pas maintenant,” not now, he told the agent, using French as part of his cover ID, then caught a taxi that let him off on Baroudi, two blocks from the target. He studied the street and the building as he walked past and then completely around it. In the lobby, he slipped the portier one of the real estate cards and thirty thousand lira, told him he had a client who was interested and to keep it to himself. After taking the elevator to the top floor, he walked down the stairs to the eighth floor and checked the corridor to determine how he wanted to handle it when he returned.

Finally, Scorpion went back outside and called Fouad. He spent the rest of the day changing taxis and making further preparations.

N ear sunset the next day Scorpion got the call from Fouad. He was seated at a cafe on the Corniche near Pigeon Rocks. The line of palm trees along the Corniche rustled in the breeze. A slim young woman in a miniskirt was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend in a black hijab scarf and skintight designer jeans, the two of them laughing, the sun turning the sea a fiery reddish gold and at that moment, Beirut was the most seductive place on earth. The waiter was talking with the bartender about Lebanon’s upcoming soccer match against Jordan in the Asian Cup, and on the TV behind the bar an Egyptian female singer was crooning about love.

It was good to hear Arabic again, Scorpion thought. It had been too long and he’d missed it; missed its musicality and expressiveness, and even more, a sense of his strange interrupted childhood in the desert of Arabia after his oilman father had been killed. It brought back the world of the Bedouin and Sheikh Zaid, who had been more of a father to him than his own father, whom he’d barely known, and the extraordinary nights of his boyhood when the stars filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon. He remembered how it was near the end, when it was all about oil and money and the Bedu way was gone, and when he went to America to go to Harvard, Sheikh Zaid telling him, “You have to find out who you are, my dhimmi.”

He was thinking about all that, and about dropping out of Harvard and going to war in Afghanistan and later the Delta Force-because in a way it was like going home-when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, said “D’accord,” and snapped the phone shut.

Scorpion slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked along the Corniche, the waves lapping at the shore as he went over it again in his mind. They had gotten lucky. An informant working in a garage in South Beirut spotted Kassem’s car being moved and called Fouad. That meant they would try soon, but there were multiple trouble spots. For one thing, there might be gunfire, and no guarantee that a stray-or not so stray-bullet would not get Kassem. Unless Kassem was unharmed, Scorpion knew his plan wouldn’t work. Also, the woman had to leave the balcony door unlocked or they might have to smash it in, alerting Kassem and the guards outside the door and precipitating a gunfight. And even if it all went as planned, keeping Kassem alive was a problem, since Fouad had a powerful motive to kill him. Plus, there was the matter of getting away, because Hezbollah, with informants everywhere in Lebanon, would be after them within the hour, probably a lot less. And he had to do it all in such a way that neither Kassem, who was perhaps the shrewdest mind in Hezbollah, nor anyone on the Central Council, would suspect his real plan.