Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER ONE

Cairo, Egypt

He looks up from his coffee, careful not to make a move that would cause them to kill him. He has sensed a change, a faint electrical hum in the background sounds in the street, and at that moment the streetlights come on.

Normally, it is his favorite time of day. The evening hour after the Maghrib prayer, when the crowds spill out of the mosques and traffic on the al Kornish Road is a river of lights and all Cairo seems to catch its breath after the heat of the day. He is not alone. Sitting next to him at the outdoor table of the cafe is the Placeholder, a mustached Egyptian Secret Serviceman watching him, hand on his unbuttoned gun holster, though they had already frisked him twice for weapons. Three hard-faced Secret Servicemen watch from other tables. By their locations close to the street, he knows that within minutes they will be dead.

He sips the cardamom coffee, the Placeholder watching his every move. This is what he has lived for all these months. Everything magnified, almost too real: the electric blues and reds of scarves in the open-air shops of the Khan al Khalili, the smell of apple-tobacco smoke from the shisha hubble-bubbles of the older cafe patrons, the breathing of the Placeholder next to him. He looks away as a club-footed street vendor with a wicker tray hobbles around the corner and makes his way toward the cafe. The vendor squats on the cobblestones near the cafe, club foot twisted beneath him, and spreads his farsha: batteries, toothpaste, rubber shower shoes, the odds and ends of everyday life sold on every street corner in Cairo. He calculates the distance from the street vendor to the outer cafe tables with his eyes. It will be close, he thinks. Very close.

The Placeholder tenses beside him as a black Mercedes sedan approaches the cafe. He notices the Placeholder’s mustache is trimmed more neatly on the left side of his face than the right. Left-handed; haz wiheed, bad luck for him, he thinks, as the Mercedes pulls up. An aide jumps out of the Mercedes and opens the door for a compact man in a dark suit.

There is a gasp as someone in the cafe recognizes General Budawi, head of the Mabahith Amn al-Dawla al Ulya, State Internal Security Intelligence, said to be the most feared man in Egypt. Whoever gasped had heard the rumors, the whispers at parties or in mosques frequented by government officials, of men and women screaming for months in underground cells. It was said that an imam of the Muslim Brotherhood clawed out his own eyes in madness after only a month in the cells of the Mabahith. He watches as Budawi makes his way between the tables and sits in the chair vacated by the Placeholder, who stands at his elbow. As soon as he sits, a waiter in a striped shirt appears as if out of thin air.

“Shai,” the general orders, not bothering to look at the waiter. He takes in the man next to him. Slender, smooth-skinned, expensive white shirt and tan slacks, a gold Rolex on his wrist. Attractive to women, Budawi thinks, the type you run into at the pool at the Four Seasons on the West Bank of the Nile, surrounded by international models in bikinis while he does business on his cell phone.

“I know this cafe,” Budawi says.

“They say it was a favorite of Mahfouz, the writer.”

“They say that about every cafe in Cairo. If Mahfouz drank coffee in every cafe that claims him, his bladder would have exploded. You have something for me,” Budawi says. It is not a question.

“A demonstration,” he says, keeping his voice neutral, knowing it is being recorded somewhere, to make it more difficult to get a clean voiceprint over the noise of the cafe and the street. “Multiple demonstrations. Something they will not forget,” he adds, starting the sequence he has practiced for weeks. He removes his left loafer and sock with the toes of his right foot, then with the toes of his left foot removes the right loafer and sock-and the scalpel taped with flesh-colored tape to the sole of his right foot.

“Where?” Budawi asks.

“Lo samaht.” Please. “We haven’t discussed terms,” he says. He has the scalpel between his toes and raises it to his right hand that he drops casually below the table.

“When?”

“Three weeks. Perhaps less.” He has the scalpel in his hand, his heart racing.

“I’ll need more than that.”

“So will I,” he says, his body tensing for the shock wave, ready to dive to the ground, thinking, Dilwati! Don’t wait!

“Such as?”

“The two Brothers.”

“Indeed?” The general puts an American cigarette to his lips, which the Placeholder leans over to light. “Those particular Muslim Brothers are assassins. Why should I release them?”

“The Americans and their allies will owe you a debt,” he says, his hand tight on the scalpel.

Inshallah! Inshallah! God willing! Do it!

With a kind of relief, he sees the club-footed vendor turn to look at them, mouthing Allahu akbar. The general sees it too and starts to get up, the Placeholder reaching for his holster, but it is too late, the explosion deafening in the narrow street.

The shock wave, scorching hot and far more powerful than he had imagined, smashes them with incredible force, flinging them aside. Chairs, debris, fragments of metal and bits of human flesh and body parts fly past as he dives to the ground, burying the scalpel in the general’s groin. The general screams once as he slices diagonally, cutting the femoral artery, bright spurts of blood instantly soaking the general’s trousers.

Stunned, the general struggles to get up, but his strength is draining too quickly and he falls back, legs twitching feebly on the pavement. For an instant everything is silent, except for the thudding of dust and debris still raining down, and then the screams begin, though he can barely hear them, his ears ringing from the explosion.

He whirls to face the Placeholder, who is dazed and struggling to get his gun out of the holster. He kicks hard at the inside of the Placeholder’s knee, and as the man starts to go down, slashes the scalpel across his throat in a single swipe. The Placeholder tries to speak, but only a bloody gurgle comes out as he topples over, his eyes not believing what has happened in just seconds as he falls to the ground.

Bending down beside the overturned table to retrieve his socks and shoes, he hears screams and the sound of people running. Straightening, he sees an elderly shisha smoker, face covered with soot and blood, staring at him with wide, stunned eyes. He nods at the smoker, gesturing, Maashi, everything is okay. He wipes his bloody hand on the general’s jacket and stoops to put on his socks and shoes, slippery with blood. He knows he has only seconds before the police arrive as he wipes his hands again with the general’s jacket and retrieves the Placeholder’s gun from the ground.

Don’t run, he tells himself, not looking at the shisha smoker as he makes his way to the street through the debris, the overturned tables and body parts. In the distance he hears the horns of police sirens and fire trucks blaring as they approach. He glances down at the farsha seller, but there is little left, only parts of his legs, scorched beyond recognition. He catches a glimpse of the first police sedan coming into the street as he ducks into the souk and turns down a narrow passageway he reconnoitered three days earlier. Inside the passageway, vendors and passersby have turned to stare in the direction of the blast and the sounds of the police sirens. He stops by a water vendor under an awning. The vendor looks at him wide-eyed, and he realizes there must be blood on his face and clothes.

“What has happened, ya hader?” the vendor asks.

“A terrorist attack. My hands, shokran,” he says, holding his hands out. The vendor pours water over them and hands him a towel, which he uses to wipe some of the blood and dirt from his hands and face.

“You are hurt, hader?”

He shakes his head and washes again.

“Ilhamdulilah,” the vendor says. Thanks to God. “Is it the Brotherhood?”

“Who can say?” he replies, handing the vendor twenty Egyptian pounds and keeping the towel.

“Shokran, hader. May Allah be with you,” the vendor says.

“And you,” he replies, already moving. He turns the corner into a narrow lane and enters a small men’s clothing shop, light from the shop spilling into the street. The owner is of the Brotherhood and immediately motions him to the back, drawing a curtain to shield them from the street. He strips off his shirt and shoes, and the owner brings him a gallabiya and turban.

“How did it go?” the owner asks.

“Burn this,” he says, handing him the bloody towel.

“Your blood?”

He shakes his head.

“Good,” the owner says, and throws the bloody towel into a metal bin. “The airports are closed. How will you get out of the city?”

He stares at the man. “Did I say I was leaving the city?”

“No, of course not,” the owner stammers. “ Lo tismah. Let me assist you with that,” he says, coming over to help smooth the gallabiya.

He touches the back of the owner’s head almost gently, then forces it down and slides the crook of his left arm under the man’s neck, locking it at the wrist with his right hand in a guillotine choke hold, cutting off the flow of blood through the carotid artery to the brain. Pulling his left wrist up toward his shoulder with his right hand, he tightens the hold even more as the owner struggles, jerking and hitting him with his fists.

Within seconds the owner is unconscious. He holds on until certain the man is dead, then lets the body slump on the floor. Stepping over it, he moves to the mirror and arranges the turban. His forehead is smudged with dirt, but he leaves it that way, to look like a typical street porter or farsha seller, and slips the Rolex into his pocket. He pours lighter fluid from the cache of cigarettes behind the counter, which every shopkeeper in Egypt keeps for customers, over the bloody towel and then lights it. An acrid wet cloth smoke rises from the metal bin as he checks outside from the shop doorway. It is almost dark, the last traces of light barely visible, the humidity creating haloes around the lights dangling from the arched doorways of the souk.

S tepping outside the shop, he wove through the crowds of locals and tourists, a common street sight in his gallabiya, not drawing any attention. He stopped at a vegetable seller’s stall, picked up an onion, tossed a fifty piastre coin to the seller and continued walking as he bit into the onion. The smell of it would dissuade people in the Metro from getting close to him, he thought, eating it quickly, his eyes tearing.

Hearing motion behind him, he moved to the side. Three policemen, riot guns at the ready, ran toward him. Heart pounding, he watched as they jogged past. As planned, he’d been almost invisible to them, an ordinary arzuiya day laborer who wanted no trouble with the authorities. He did not hurry, despite the fact that he had to get through quickly in case they shut the Metro down.

One of two Egyptian women in Western clothes and headscarves wrinkled her nose at the onion smell as he passed. Good, he thought as he crossed the avenue and joined the crowd headed toward the Metro station; she had seen him only as a smelly arzuiya.

He was now approaching the danger spot, the choke point. Spotlights had been set up, turning the area near the Metro entrance bright as a movie set. Three police riot vans blocked the street and dozens of helmeted riot police fanned out, forming a perimeter and scanning the crowds as they approached the Metro past the farsha sellers’ tables on the sidewalk, the sellers calling, “Come and buy! Fresh juice! Come and look!” If he was going to be caught, it would be here, or later on, when he left Egypt. He had no illusions about what the Mukhabarat would do to him if he were captured. It was why he’d had to kill the store owner, whom he decided was either too curious or could not have withstood the torture cells.

He spotted one of the policemen, a young man, studying him as he approached the Metro stairs. But then the man’s eyes moved on to a pretty young woman in a pink head scarf, who was being jostled and groped by a male office worker as she started down the stairs. The young policeman smiled and nudged the policeman next to him as the woman tried to move away in the crowd.

The subway platform was packed with commuters, the women moving toward the center, where the women-only cars would stop. Next to him, two men were talking about the attack at the cafe, and he felt a shiver of joy as they blamed it on the Israelis.

“What can you expect from the Israelis? They don’t care who they kill,” one of them said. “Women, children. It makes no difference.”

“It’s not just the Israelis. It’s all the Jews. Have you read the Protocols of Zion? It opened my eyes. It’s all documented,” the other said, motioning him closer, their voices drowned by a rush of air and the sound of the train coming.

There was a surge on the platform as soon as the train stopped and the doors opened, men shoving to get out of the train against the rush of men pushing into the car. He squeezed in and checked the map. There were eight stops to Shobra, the working-class district where he had rented an apartment a week earlier. He glanced around. No one was looking at him. One or two office workers had sniffed and tried to move away from his onion smell, which was stronger than the omnipresent smell of sweat and cigarette smoke that permeated Cairo Metro trains.

At the next stop, riot police were deployed at intervals on the platform. He tensed as a policeman got on and began asking to see passengers’ identity cards, the card every Egyptian carried, without which it was impossible to get services or shop in any of the state-run supermarkets. The policeman looked at each passenger’s card one at a time and then at faces and hands.

As the policeman approached, he reached under the gallabiya and into his pants pocket, fingers touching the Placeholder’s gun. He felt inside his wallet and retrieved the fake ID card supplied by the Brothers. It still looked too new for a poor arzuiya coming home from work, and he worried that it wouldn’t hold up. He had tried to scuff and dirty it when he first got it, but it still looked fresh. With the policeman only a few passengers away, he cupped the fake ID in his left hand as his right closed on the Placeholder’s gun. The policeman grabbed for a pole to keep from falling as the train pulled into the Road El-Farag station, then glanced at the remaining passengers as if suspicious of all of them. The doors opened and the policeman suddenly got off. He watched the policeman on the platform as more passengers got on. When the doors closed again, he realized he had stopped breathing.

At the last stop he exited the train and climbed the stairs. Night had fallen. The tables and trays of the farsha and food sellers clustered near the Metro exit were lit with kerosene lanterns. All at once, he was hungry. He bought a lamb shwarma grilled over coals and wrapped in aysh bread. As he ate, he tensed as an army jeep and a truck filled with soldiers passed. It was something rarely seen in this neighborhood.

“Have you heard of the bombing?” he asked the shwarma man.

“ Allahu akbar. The government will find the killers,” the man said.

“Inshallah,” he said. God willing.

He walked past apartment houses, their paint faded and cracked, laundry hanging from windows, and past a garbage-strewn lot where ragged boys played soccer by the light of a single streetlight. Was it his imagination or did the street seem emptier than usual? Just before he got to his building, he studied the street again, carefully. He saw no unmarked vans or cars with anyone sitting in them. No one loitering near one of the other buildings. No broken silhouettes on the rooflines, or street workers working late. Through some of the windows, he could see the glow of television sets.

Crossing to his building, he climbed the stairway. It smelled of poverty, fuul, and cigarettes. He opened his door and snapped into a shooter’s position, ready to fire the Placeholder’s gun, but the apartment was empty, the only light coming through the window from the streetlights outside. He went over and turned on the small TV.

The news announcer, a heavyset man with a slow, serious voice, reported that a number of suspects in the cafe bombing had already been rounded up. General Budawi’s photograph was displayed. According to a breathless reporter standing outside the Presidential Palace in Heliopolis, only Budawi, whose heroism and patriotism was esteemed by all, and a single aide were killed. In the meantime, air travelers could expect delays because of enhanced security following the attack.

The program then returned to a popular Egyptian soap opera, where the lead actress was suggestively approached by her doctor in his office while her husband was out of town on business with his attractive female assistant. On another channel, an attractive female TV newscaster in a head scarf said that authorities were looking for a foreigner suspected in the cafe bombing in the Khan al Khalili. He was described as being tall and fair-haired, she said. He shut the TV off.

They were downplaying the number of casualties and rounding up the usual suspects, he thought. Budawi’s deputy was probably scrambling like crazy and under intense political pressure to pick up all the pieces. As for the description of him, it was of a generic foreigner. More important, they hadn’t given the media a photograph. Budawi had probably assumed he would arrest him at the cafe and get all the photos he needed then. With any luck, all they had of him was a voiceprint. It was obvious they were watching the airports and looking for a foreigner matching his description heading north. That was what he had expected and planned for. Still, it wouldn’t be easy. They would be watching every exit from Egypt.

He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his gallabiya. He was still sweating. Next door, the neighbor’s teenage son was playing Egyptian hip-hop music. The music echoed in the building and the empty street outside as he worked on bending and smudging the ID card and cleaning the gun and scalpel. He took a long shower, the water cool and rusty, and before he went to sleep he retaped the scalpel to the bottom of his foot.

He left the apartment shortly before dawn, the sky streaked with gold over the Nile. He took the East Delta bus from the Eltorgan bus station in the center of the city to the small port city of Hurghada some three hundred miles south on the Red Sea coast. Just before boarding the bus, he bought a live chicken at the open-air souk. The bus was stifling hot and when he glanced at a passenger’s Al Ahram, the headline said only that the authorities were making progress in the bombing investigation.

At an army checkpoint ten kilometers outside Hurghada, two soldiers came on board and checked everyone’s ID. They were looking for a foreigner; he could pass for a working-class Egyptian, he told himself, his heart pounding. His battered ID card and the chicken made them pay him little attention. They asked where he was going, and he said he was visiting his cousin in Hurghada. He hoped to work in a hotel there. The soldier shrugged and went on to the next passenger.

He traded the chicken for lunch in a worker’s restaurant in Hurghada near the port and caught the ferry in the harbor to Sharm el Sheikh, the resort city at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula. When the ferry landed, he went into a public bathroom stall and changed out of his gallabiya and turban into a “Rock for Africa” T-shirt, shorts, and sunglasses, more suited to the beach scene with its bikinis and Four Seasons and Starbucks cafes. At the beach at Naama Bay he connected with a pair of Danish backpackers. They went for drinks at the Camel, a rooftop bar where they were joined by a spectacular Swedish blonde who was, she said, a lingerie model in Sharm for the scuba diving “and the beautiful Arab men.” She touched his forearm with her fingers and suggested they could see the sunset better from her room.

In the morning, he left her snoring on the bed and took the ferry to Aqaba in Jordan. There were army patrols by the ferry before he left Sharm el Sheikh, but they took one look at his backpack, sunburned face, and German passport and let him pass. By mid-afternoon he was sipping a Bloody Mary in the first class cabin of a Lufthansa flight from Amman to Frankfurt, leaving behind what was to become the most intensive manhunt in human history. Before it was over, it would nearly destroy the CIA and force everyone involved into the most terrible choice of their lives, including the American agent known only as Scorpion.