Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER NINETEEN

New York, United States

The danger point was the U.S. Customs and Border booth at JFK Airport. If the border agent detained him, the Palestinian knew they would fail. This was something they had known from the beginning. The key to security for the entire operation was also its fatal flaw. He was the only one who knew all the pieces. The strategy provided perfect security so long as he was operational, but without him there was no operation. And he’d already had one close call too many, barely getting away in Utrecht.

He was traveling as a businessman, dressed in slacks and a jacket, no tie, with business cards and papers from his freight company in Hamburg, which they could contact and that would pass a superficial background check. His German passport was bulletproof, he told himself. Nothing Muslim about it, and the name he was using and RFID chip embedded in the front cover were in the German Auswartiges Amt database.

As for Liz, she was female, good-looking, and British, which already lowered her profile, since Americans tended to trust the English, not realizing that some of the most radical jihadis in Europe were in the UK. He hadn’t wanted to bring her, but it was too dangerous to leave her behind in Italy because she was still seething over Francesca, though she denied it. Women were always a complication, but he needed her for Rome, his throat going dry as he stepped up to the non-U.S. citizens booth in the crowded terminal hall and handed the border agent his passport and a filled-in U.S. Customs and Border Protection form. If they were to stop him, it would happen here.

The U.S. agent checked his face against the passport photo, looked up his preboarding screened data: name, digital fingerprint, and photograph against the Watch list on his computer. He checked the arrival form again.

“You here for business or pleasure, Mr. Groener?”

“Business,” the Palestinian said in English in his German persona accent, which hovered halfway over the Channel, somewhere between Hamburg and the BBC, sweat breaking out between his shoulder blades.

“What business are you in?”

“Material handling. Trucking. My card,” the Palestinian said, taking out one of his business cards, which the agent waved away.

“You came from Rome via Paris?”

“Yes, we do business with DHL and also with American companies throughout Europe,” he said, finding it hard to talk or swallow, his mouth was so dry.

“How long do you plan to be in the United States?”

“Just a few days,” attempting a smile. The agent didn’t smile back. The agent checked his computer screen again. The two men waited.

“Welcome to the United States,” the agent said after a long moment, and stamped his passport.

Liz was waiting for him at the luggage carousel, and together they stood in line for a taxi that took them to a midtown hotel near Grand Central Station. They barely spoke in the taxi. At one point she started to say something and he glanced significantly at the driver. Heeding that warning, she made meaningless conversation about the cool weather as he looked out the window at the row houses along the Van Wyck Expressway, not seeing them because all he could think of was the critical pieces of the operation he had left behind in Turin and Rome, and whether by coming to America and bringing her he had jeopardized the whole thing. They checked into the hotel in separate rooms, and once his luggage was delivered, he went down two floors to her room and she let him in.

“Why the bloody hell couldn’t we be together, you bastard. I had to fend off some palmy Belgian asshole who thought my tits were the business class bloody hors d’oeuvres,” she began, and never finished because he kissed her and started pulling off her clothes.

He had first met Liz two years ago in Mykonos. She was topless on the beach, with her mini-breasts and leggy post-Oxonian body, and within an hour they were going at it like rabbits in his room overlooking the port and the sea. Afterward, the two of them sharing a cigarette, she told him about joining the Oxford Movement for Palestinian Justice, her eyes gleaming with conviction, and he had alerted Utrecht to see what they could do about recruiting her. He visited her several times in London, a budding shaheedah she-wolf in Sloane Ranger guise, all boho short skirts and Hermes scarves and meetings to ban Israeli professors from British universities. He went shopping with her on Beauchamp Place, and at night they kept her flatmates awake while they went at it nonstop, as if Knightsbridge was Mykonos North, till one of the other girls wanted to join in. Then Liz’s jealousy flared up.

Looking for him, she had arrived in Turin the night before the move to Rome, making a big entrance at the warehouse, only to learn he wasn’t there. Mourad, whom he had left in charge, wouldn’t tell her where he was. In fact he was in Milan, in Francesca’s suite at the Savoia Hotel, making the final payment after the delivery in Turin that morning.

“So, what more can I do for you, caro?” Francesca had whispered, kissing him after he had given her the money.

“Let’s say I need to get rid of something.”

“Disposal,” she said, nibbling on his ear, “is a Camorra specialty.”

“I think,” he said, his arm around her waist, “we should continue this conversation in the bedroom.”

When he got back to Turin, Liz found a long dark hair on his shirt and smelled Francesca, sniffing at him like a cat and letting him know about it till he slapped her in the face and explained it to her. She got up and started to leave and he showed her the gun. He called Jamal in then and had him show her the bodies in the refrigeration locker, and when Jamal brought her back, she was quieter. Afterward they made love and she cried and told him she still loved him and how much she hated the Israelis. But he knew he couldn’t trust her, and decided to take her with him to New York after the migration from Turin to Rome in a big rig with COMPAGNIA BOLOGNA PARTES DI CAMIONS ALL’INGROSSO on the sides and the rest of the team making the trip down the autostrada in separate vans and cars.

Now, their first stop after leaving the hotel in midtown was at the office he had rented in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. They went there to pick up the package he had FedExed from Calexico. From Brooklyn, they took the subway to the 169th Street station in Jamaica, Queens, exiting on Hillside Avenue. The street was lined with small East Asian stores and curry restaurants with signs in Bangla and English. They walked a few blocks to the apartment he had rented six months earlier at the same time he set up the office in Brooklyn. He unlocked the door and turned on the air-conditioner units. The apartment was almost completely bare of furniture, except for a large freezer and, in the bedroom, a few shopping bags of supplies. He gave Liz the address where the girl lived with her brother and told her to wait for him there.

“I want to stay,” she said.

“It’s dangerous,” he said. “Once I start making it, it could explode any second. This mixture, HMTD, is the most volatile thing you can imagine. The slightest jar, ordinary room temperature, anything can set it off.”

“I want to be part of this,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, looking at him like a soldier with Palestine her flag, and the two of them kissed, her tongue darting into his mouth, a portable Mykonos.

While they waited for the apartment to cool, he put on latex gloves and took the backpack out of the FedEx box, tearing up and flushing any identifying labels from the box down the toilet. He took the spray equipment stamped APASNAST! — Danger! — in Cyrillic lettering out of the backpack and made sure it was ready. When the apartment was cold enough, Liz helped him carry the shopping bags from the other room to the bathtub along with a big mixing bowl and other implements.

“Here we go,” he said, opening the first jar. He took a deep breath before pouring the liquid into the bowl. “This is a very bad explosive. I hate it.”

“If it’s so bad, why do you use it?”

“It’s terrible to work with, but it has one enormous advantage. We don’t have to take it through customs. You can make it anywhere from ordinary household ingredients: hair bleach, a food flavoring, and something you can buy at any camping or sporting goods store. It’s powerful, completely legal, and the authorities never know a thing until it blows up,” he said, and despite the coldness of the bathroom, which was making her shiver, he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow.

When he was done, he had about a dozen pounds of solid HMTD, which he set with a detonator connected to leads from a cell phone, before putting it in a plastic bag. He placed the bag in the backpack surrounded with pellets of dry ice to keep it cold. Then he put the spray equipment back into the backpack on a piece of canvas on top of the dry ice. He put the backpack on, turned everything off in the apartment, locked it, and they walked the four blocks to the apartment of the young Bangladeshi woman and her brother, careful not to jar the backpack and calling first to make sure the brother and sister were both home from work.

Bharati opened the door and let them in. Her brother, a small dark man with longish hair, who called the Palestinian “Bahadur” and Liz “Begum,” led them toward the kitchen. The Palestinian took off the backpack and carried it like a priest with a chalice of holy wine to the kitchen, but there wasn’t enough room in the refrigerator and he had them empty food out to put the backpack in.

They sat in the living room and the young woman, her large dark eyes glancing first at Liz and then at the Palestinian, served them tea. After they had sipped the tea, the brother blurted: “About the money?”

“Do you have a computer?” the Palestinian asked. The brother nodded. “Check your account.”

While they waited, the Palestinian asked the young woman if she was ready. She looked down, glancing shyly at him from under her lashes, and nodded.

“I have two children. My sister loves them. She will do what is needed,” the brother said, coming back in.

The Palestinian told him to leave.

“She is my sister. I should be here,” the brother said.

“In that case, I’ll have to kill you,” the Palestinian said, taking out a gun. The brother blanched. “We need to talk of operational matters. Afterward, the police may come to you. You can’t tell them what you don’t know.”

The Palestinian went into a shooting stance. The brother couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. After a moment he nodded and left.

The Palestinian turned to the young woman. He went over how to use the spray equipment in the backpack and showed her the photograph of the helicopter pilot, Atif Khan, on his cell phone screen. When she was sure she would be able to recognize the pilot on sight, he erased the image. He spread out an MTA map of the New York subway system they got at the hotel and went over when and how she would rendezvous with Khan. The Palestinian took a photo of her with his cell phone to show Khan.

“You understand we considered other alternatives,” he told Bharati. “The simplest would have been to do it in the subway, but there was no way you could have gone through a train spraying and not attract attention. We want days for the pathogen to incubate before the authorities know what has happened.”

“My brother’s children, my family, will be safe?” she asked, her eyes searching his face. Liz watched her like a hawk.

“They must use the antibiotic I have given you. No other kind will work. Do not go near the refrigerator till it is time. The explosive must be kept cold, but the spray should not be frozen. If you need to, eat out. Here’s money,” he added, giving her cash. “You will know the exact day when you get a phone call that uses the phrase ‘al Jabbar, the Giant, is high in the sky.’” He showed her how to use the cell phone for the explosive. “Remember, the explosive is only if something goes wrong. They would do things, you understand? I don’t want them to hurt you.”

“We have to go,” Liz said, standing up.

“Will I see you again?” the young woman asked softly, not daring to look at him.

“It will be a long time before it’s safe for me to be in America,” he said.

On the train back to Manhattan, after they left the apartment, Liz turned on him: “What the bloody hell was that? If she could’ve, she’d have gobbled you up like a Cadbury.”

“She wanted me to save her,” he said. “Her brother got into money trouble with a local Bangladeshi gang. She’s doing it to save her nieces from being without a father. She doesn’t want to die.”

“I could scratch her eyes out. She could barely keep her hands off you.”

“I brought you with me to see her, didn’t I?” he demanded over the screech of the wheels on the track. “Don’t make me think you’re a liability.” He looked hard at her, forcing her to look away. When she looked back, her eyes were swimming. She tried to smile.

“Will she go through with it?” she asked finally.

“She’s a good Muslim girl. I trust her more than some of these bullshit young men who talk jihad and killing and in the end piss themselves like children when it comes time to do something.”

“I hate to admit it, but she’s worth ten of the brother,” Liz said.

“Yes, but she and the brother won’t see it that way.”

They took the train back to Grand Central, where they parted; he to meet with the helicopter pilot, while she checked out of the hotel and left for the airport. They would meet in Chicago. He took the BMT Brighton line to the Midwood section of Brooklyn, getting out at the Avenue H station and walking to the apartment house where the Pakistani helicopter pilot lived with his wife and two young boys. The Palestinian knew that, Khan, the Pakistani wasn’t a true believer. Khan had a Brazilian girlfriend, and the money was for a new start for him and his girlfriend in Brazil.

They sat in the small living room after Khan told his wife to get out and bring them chai. A few minutes later she brought them green qehwa tea and a plate of qalaqand sweets and left, silent as a ghost. The Palestinian showed the photo of the young woman, Bharati, to Khan, and they went over the plan and the al Jabbar code sign. The helicopter pilot demanded more money.

“You any idea how expensive it is in Fortaleza? That’s where her family’s from. Once I leave here, there’s no coming back, bro’,” Khan said.

“You’re getting half a million dollars. You’ll be a king in Brazil,” the Palestinian said. “But if you really aren’t interested…” He got up to leave. Khan grabbed his arm. The Palestinian looked at him, and there was something in the look that made Khan let him go.

“Who said I’m not interested?” he protested. “I just need more.”

“I got false passports for you and her. What more do you want?”

“Another two hundred thousand. That’s it, I swear.”

“A good Muslim doesn’t swear.” The Palestinian started to leave. “What you ask is impossible.”

“Wait! One hundred thousand.”

“I don’t have it,” the Palestinian said. He’d expected the Pakistani to pull something like this, and it could destroy the entire American operation. His bluff had to work. “I’ll find another pilot.”

“Fifty thousand. That’s all! I’ll fly so low she’ll be able to count the fillings in people’s teeth.”

The Palestinian stopped. “Fifty thousand. Five now, the rest after-in Brazil.”

“Fifty,” Khan agreed, and they shook hands.

The Palestinian took the subway to Sunset Park. He went to the bank, got the five thousand, and FedExed it to Khan. The rest of the money didn’t matter. He knew he’d never have to pay it.

That evening he caught a flight to Chicago. He met Liz on the curb outside Terminal 5 at O’Hare Airport. She had set up the Chicago part of the operation with an Afghani college student from Marquette Park. The American operation was almost finished. She would fly to London, say hello to Mum, because she wasn’t talking to Daddy, then fly back to Rome to help at the warehouse; he would go to Los Angeles and join her the next day in Rome. He kissed her, and for a moment she clung to him. People pulled their wheeled luggage around them on their way to the terminal entrance.

“It’s really going to happen, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“Inshallah, yes. God willing.”

“I don’t like being without you,” she said, pressing against him.

“I’ll see you in Rome,” he said, pulling away and heading over to the shuttle.

On the flight to Los Angeles he wondered whether these extra actions were worth the risk. What happened in Chicago and L.A. didn’t matter. At best they were diversions. In fact, if there were any problems, he might call the FBI himself with an anonymous tip. Anything to keep them from focusing on the Bangladeshi girl and her cargo. He landed in Los Angeles before noon, and by nightfall he was back at LAX to catch the Lufthansa flight via Frankfurt to Rome.

Sitting in business class and pretending to read a Stern magazine over a Bloody Mary, he tried to sort out the thousand pieces that still needed to come together: the group, training, and fitting that still needed to be completed, the final arming, the forged papers. So many pieces. The biggest piece was the twenty-one kilos that weren’t enough to make a bomb, and whether they could complete the circle. He couldn’t be sure till he got back to Rome.

And then, whether it was the vodka or his letdown at having the American part of the operation finally in place, or the sheer femaleness of Liz, the memory of the day that had made him who he was came to him like a nightmare. His hand gripped the arm of the seat as he remembered the night lit bright by the flares and the intense heat, the sounds of soldiers, the fear that made him wet himself, and her eyes looking at him.

He finished his drink and tried to get control of himself. He pressed the button for the stewardess to bring him another. This jihad he had committed himself to was so hard, so schwierig, he thought in German. He checked his watch. Hamburg was nine hours ahead of Los Angeles. It was just after six in the morning there. No one would be in the management company office yet, but he could leave a message to be forwarded. He wondered if he should chance it. He was losing a full day on the flight to Europe due to the time change, and was almost certain that in less than a week he would be dead.

His hand trembling, he started to reach for the phone in the seat back in front of him and was about to call when he remembered all the security cameras at the Frankfurt airport and that all in-flight calls were monitored, and knew it was impossible. It was stupid to have even thought of it. He took a deep breath and reminded himself who he was. “You are the most important man in the world,” the blind imam in Utrecht had told him.

“Dankeschon,” he said to the stewardess when she brought him the drink. He finished it and, once more in control, his hands dead steady, tilted the seat back to try to get some sleep. He would kill the nightmare, he thought. He felt better now. He was ready to die.