Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

The truck loaded with thick bundles of qat turned the corner and rumbled down the street toward the building. When he saw the driver’s face he nodded, and the driver nodded back. As the truck rumbled past, someone pushed a heavy bale of qat leaves out of the back, then the truck sped up, turned a corner and was gone.

Along the street, a group of young men stopped what they were doing and for a second everything was still, then the street erupted. The young men rushed the bale of qat, everyone grabbing handfuls of leaves and stuffing them into their clothes and the bags they made out of their shaals. People began to pour into the street. It was like an instant holiday, everyone grabbing qat and shouting for his friends to come, women screaming and ululating, children running between adults’ legs to grab loose leaves and twigs. In all the commotion, Scorpion was able to slip unnoticed into the building.

A burly American with a military haircut sat at a desk near the front door, a pistol pointed at him. The man wasn’t in uniform, but he had U.S. Marines or Special Forces painted all over him. Standing next to the desk, a Latino man leveled the business end of an M-16 at him as well.

“What do you want, Mohammed?” the American demanded.

“Have you ever been to Biloxi?” Scorpion said.

“No, but I’ve been to Gulfport twice,” the man replied, completing the sequence. “Who are you?” he asked then, not putting the gun down.

“Where’s Ramis?” According to Rabinowich, someone new, Donald Ramis, was the CIA’s Alex Station Chief for Sana’a.

“He’s out. Talking with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” The American made a face.

“Who the hell are they?”

“Sorry. It’s our little nickname for Ali Abdullah and his council,” meaning the President of Yemen.

“Take this,” Scorpion said, handing him the hard drive.

“What is it?”

“From Peterman’s laptop. He’s dead,” Scorpion said.

“Jesus,” the American said, the light beginning to dawn. “Are we blown?”

“What do you think?”

“Shit,” the American said. “Time to get out of this shithole.”

“Tell Langley be careful with the hard drive. Probably got malware on it,” Scorpion said, peeking out the front door. There were men loading donkeys with sacks of qat from the fallen bale. Squinting against the sunlight, Scorpion scanned the street and the rooflines. It looked all right, but odds were better than even somebody was watching.

“Hey, amigo! Thanks,” the American called out, already talking on the phone, but by then Scorpion was gone.

B ack in Western clothes and minus the beard, on the way to the airport, he thought that however it turned out, his part in this was over. As his taxi turned onto Airport Road, he spotted a white Toyota Camry two cars behind them, switching lanes when his driver did.

“Make a U-turn,” Scorpion told the driver in Arabic.

“But the airport is this way,” the driver said.

“I’ll give you a hundred rials. Make the turn now!” Scorpion said, taking out the money.

After a moment’s hesitation, the taxi veered suddenly into the opposite lane. An oncoming car jammed on its brakes, the driver’s eyes wide, cars and trucks honking from both directions as the taxi sped back toward the center of the city. Looking back, Scorpion saw the Camry make the same turn, drivers cursing and shaking their fists. Although at this angle he couldn’t be sure, he thought that the two men in the Camry tied their shaals like Abidah.

He couldn’t help it. He thought about McElroy in the farmhouse. He told the driver there was another two hundred in it for him if he lost the Camry. The man weaved through the streets, turning corners and darting through gaps as they neared the old city. Scorpion looked back. For the moment the Camry was out of sight. He spotted a taxi parked by a small hotel, facing the opposite direction. But he needed to change the image.

“U’af!” Stop! “Give me your shaal,” Scorpion demanded, shoving rials at the driver.

They screeched to a stop. The man took off his turban and Scorpion put it on, grabbed his carry-on and jumped out of the taxi. He ran across to the other taxi, jumped in, and in seconds they were off.

As his driver made the turn toward the airport, Scorpion saw the Camry come barreling down the other way, the two Abidah men inside scanning the street like crazy, a farmhouse no doubt on their mind.

Porto Cervo

Sardinia, Italy

A heavy rain lashed the piazzetta, the little piazza near the marina in Porto Cervo. Standing in the shelter of an arcade, Scorpion, known to the locals as il francese, the Frenchman, looked for anything that shouldn’t be there. Normally, in Sardinia he shouldn’t have had to do that, but after Yemen there was no “normally.”

He waited until a layover in Dubai before he risked contacting Rabinowich through an iPad at the Apple store at the Deira City mall. They texted using a teenage chat site so heavily trafficked it was virtually impossible to monitor. Rabinowich was presumably a thirteen-year-old girl from Omaha named Madison, Scorpion was a fourteen-year-old boy named Josh from nearby Bellevue. u clear? Rabinowich texted.

4 the moment, Scorpion texted back. what about alby? whos she seeing? Rabinowich asked, referring to al-Baiwani. she broke up with ay kyoo and a-pee — AQAP- now all shes got is us, Scorpion typed. After Ma’rib, al-Baiwani had no choice. He had burned his bridges with al Qaeda. So long as the CIA fed him arms and money, they would own the Bani Khum. shes so 2-faced, Rabinowich texted, meaning he assumed that al-Baiwani was a double agent. Running al-Baiwani would be a sword that cut both ways. considering guys she dates, wouldnt you? Scorpion texted back, saying that after what had happened in Ma’rib and the way things were going in Yemen, it didn’t leave al-Baiwani with a lot of choices. He had to play both sides.

2 bad about pete. Peterman. u loco? he was like so nfg, Valley-speak plus CIA slang for no fucking good.

I miss u, qt. r u ok? u tell me, Scorpion typed, ending the call. Because it wasn’t just the mission failure in Yemen that no doubt had Langley scrambling like crazy. They’d made him run. No one had ever made him run before. It was a bad omen. Winter had come, he thought, looking out at the rain-swept piazzetta. And not just for the CIA. Something was wrong.

Shaking off the rain, he stepped into the small realty office nested among the luxury-designer-label shops around the piazzetta. Although it was after New Year’s, the office was still decorated with Christmas lights. They provided the only color in the gloomy day. He glanced out of the window to see if anyone had seen him go in.

Abrielle, the owner’s daughter, was alone in the office. Lithe, with long dark hair, she handed him his mail, and as he glanced at it, they chatted half in Italian, half in English, about his farmhouse in the mountains, an updated casa colonica that she looked after when he was away, which was much of the time. Then he saw the envelope.

She had picked it up from the harbormaster’s office. A simple request on a white card engraved with a yacht insignia to meet to “discuss matters of mutual interest” and a phone number. He would need to Google it, but Scorpion thought that the area code was Luxembourg, most likely meaning it was a holding company protected by that country’s secrecy laws.

“Where’d this come from?” he asked, going deadly still.

“Some sailors in a tender from a yacht brought it. I think they were Russi,” Abrielle said. “Is for a Signor Collins. He is a friend?”

“Is the yacht still there?” Scorpion asked, not answering her. He edged closer to the window and looked out. The piazzetta was empty in the rain. Beyond the buildings and the harbor, there was only the dark sea. Maybe it wasn’t just Alex Station in Yemen that was blown. He had to face the possibility that because of what might have been on Peterman’s laptop, he was blown as well. Christ, had they tracked him to Sardinia?