Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

Abrielle shook her head. “They said they were heading for Monte Carlo.”

“Big yacht?” he asked.

“ Molto grande. Sixty meters, maybe more,” she said. Scorpion trusted her judgment about the yacht. The Sardinians were used to big expensive boats. Porto Cervo, with its picturesque harbor and multimillion dollar villas with red-tiled roofs on the hills above the town, was the scene of the annual September regatta, when some of the biggest mega yachts and richest people in the world came to party on the Costa Smeralda. There weren’t that many yachts in the world over sixty meters. It meant the note came from someone extremely rich and powerful.

“What makes you think they were Russians?”

She shrugged. “I asked. They said they were Ukraini. It’s a kind of Russi, yes?”

He told her he was leaving the island. As usual, while he was gone she was to take care of the casa and the two Doberman watchdogs, Hector and Achille. Her face fell when he said he was leaving.

“Quando tornorai?” she asked, a touch wistfully. When will you be back? She had always thought il francese, with his gray eyes, like those of a wolf and that scar over his eye, attractive enough that if he wanted, she would have locked the office door and let him have her right there and then. But he was always leaving.

“A few weeks. I’ll be back soon,” he said, not knowing if he would ever return to Sardinia again.

D riving back in the rain to his casa colonica away from the coast, Scorpion kept glancing in the rearview mirror. The road wound up into the mountains. He pulled over at a turnout at the edge of a cliff. Grabbing binoculars from the glove compartment, he got out of his Porsche and scanned the hills and the road all the way back to Porto Cervo. It appeared no one was following him. With any luck, he still had time; unless they were waiting for him at the casa. He wondered if he was being paranoid. In his business, the line between paranoia and spycraft was razor thin. He remembered Rabinowich joking once, saying, “Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”

He looked down again at the card. Just two handwritten lines under a logo from a yacht, the Milena II, getting wet in the rain. For Scorpion, it had red flags all over it.

First, it had been delivered to the harbormaster in Porto Cervo. That was a backdoor emergency network known only to Rabinowich, and even he didn’t know at any given moment which of several dozen ports in the world, if any, Scorpion might be at. The envelope had been addressed to “Arthur Collins,” a pseudonym for a supposed sailing friend of the Frenchman. Scorpion only used the Collins alias at various marinas and sailors’ pubs around the Mediterranean where they held mail.

What made it more ominous was that it had come, according to Abrielle, from a “Russian” yacht. That made no sense. If Ivanov, aka Checkmate, head of Russia’s FSB Counterintelligence Directorate, was after him, there would be no note. It would be Spetsnaz-trained operatives in the night, and Scorpion knew he would never see them coming. The only thing he could think of was that either the SVR-the Russian equivalent of the CIA-was after him, or some private Russian outfit had been contracted by someone else he had pissed off, like al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

The worst of it was, they had managed to find him in the one place in the world he thought was safe.

No one in the world knew he lived in Sardinia, not even Rabinowich.

For Scorpion, Sardinia was the answer to a unique business problem. As an independent intelligence agent, a freelancer, he sometimes made very dangerous enemies. His only protection was to be able to make himself invisible. After the realtor, Salvatore, Abrielle’s father, had shown him the escape tunnel hidden underneath the old farmhouse in the hills, no doubt used by bandits years ago, he’d decided to make Sardinia his base. The locals had a history of banditry and isolation and tended to mistrust outsiders. They even had their own language, Limba Sarda, in addition to mainland Italian. Sardinia was convenient to Europe and the Middle East, where he did much of his business.

That still left one problem. Anyone who came after him would be looking for an American. He had taken great pains-hacking into databases both outside and within the Swimming Pool, as the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, was known because their headquarters in Paris was located next to the French Swimming Federation-to ensure that his French cover identity was bulletproof.

Now all of that might have been blown, and he had no idea how-or who was after him. Unless, and this was worse, he had gone over the edge.

O n the flight to Nice, deliberately booked with the Collins ID-he could either find them or make it easy for them to find him-he went back over what he’d learned about the yacht. Using a computer at Fiumicino Airport, he discovered that the Milena II was convenience-flagged in Malta, and as he suspected from the telephone area code, it was registered to a privately held company in Luxembourg. Landing in Nice, he used the Arthur Collins British passport for the rental car, spotting two burly-looking men in leather jackets near the car rental counter.

Using a disposable cell phone, he called the phone number on the card from the yacht. He left a message in response to a recorded voice, telling it in English that he would be waiting at Le Carpaccio, a waterside restaurant in Villefranche, a resort town on the coast east of Nice, not far from Monaco. He picked a public place to try to minimize the damage if they were going to come right at him.

A few minutes out from the airport, Scorpion spotted the gray Mercedes sedan following him. The men in leather jackets he had seen near the car rental were in it. Just to be sure, he pulled into an Agip station and knelt down to check the air in his tires, watching the Mercedes drive by. The two men barely glanced at him. He waited five minutes, then drove the Basse Corniche road between the hills and the sea toward Monaco, and a few minutes later saw the Mercedes waiting at a turnout. As he drove past, they started up and followed. A blue BMW pulled in front of him, with two men in that car as well. He was boxed in.

He had an armed escort to Villefranche.

Milena II

French Riviera

The main salon of the mega yacht, Milena II, was furnished in white Italian leather, soft and buttery to the touch, and looked out to the aft pool deck. The designer had gone for Metro modern, and what looked like a genuine Rothko painting hung on an interior wall. They were cruising eastward along the French coast. Through the salon windows, Scorpion could see seaside villas and the villages in the mountains. The sun broke through the clouds and sparkled on the sea.

The yacht’s tender had come into the harbor at Villefranche and picked Scorpion up on the stone quay just steps from the restaurant. When he boarded the ship, the two shaven-headed men from the Mercedes asked him in accented English for his gun. He handed them the Glock 9mm from the holster at the small of his back.

Vadim Akhnetzov came into the salon with a rush of energy. He was a medium-sized man, trim, with blond hair cropped almost to the skull. He wore a striped Armani suit and under it a blue and red T-shirt from Arsenal Kyiv, a Ukrainian soccer team. An attractive blond woman in a Chanel suit followed him in.

“Mr. Collins-or are you going to throw that name away-what you are drinking?” Akhnetzov asked in serviceable English as he sat down opposite Scorpion.

“Bloody Mary with Belvedere,” Scorpion said. The blond woman tapped on her BlackBerry as if taking notes.

“Not Russian?” meaning the vodka. “Would you like some Beluga caviar? Dimitri?” Akhnetzov said, glancing at the white-jacked bartender behind the mahogany bar, who began preparing dishes.