Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Summer Garden, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Scorpion came up to street level from the Gostiny Dvor station. It was almost dark, a hint of light lingering on the horizon as he crossed Sadovaya Ulitsa. Although the rain had stopped, the air was wet and the street glistened under the streetlights. He caught a gypsy Lada taxi and took it through the empty streets and across the bridge to the Summer Garden. The park was deserted, the wrought-iron gate dripping wet as he pushed it open. Inside, a plastic map on a post showed where the Coffee House was. The path through the overhanging trees was barely visible in the near darkness and there were a hundred places for an ambush. They had picked the perfect spot, he thought. Scorpion took out Ivanov’s gun and clicked off the safety.

They would expect him to take the most direct path. Instead, he set off toward one side of the park. He would circle around and approach the Coffee House from the opposite Neva side of the park. Seeing the shadow of a figure cast by a streetlamp, Scorpion instantly snapped into shooting position before he realized it was a Grecian statue on a pedestal beside the path. He studied the dim outlines of the trees. Realizing it was too dangerous to stay on the paved path, he stepped off and moved through the dark tangle of the trees, thick as a forest, the ground soft and carpeted with wet leaves underfoot. He thought about Najla and the feel of her lips and the closeness of her body when she kissed him at the club. Even now he still didn’t know if she was playing him. Even if she was, he didn’t know if he had it in him to kill her.

Vasiliev had been another surprise, he thought, pushing silently through the wet branches. They had taken him to the second floor of the club to a private elevator that required a key and a number code to enter. The elevator took them up two floors to a hallway carpeted with Persian rugs and lined with expensive oil paintings; landscapes by Levitan and portraits by Serov from the Soviet era. Two men in suits stood by a metal detector like those in an airport. He had emptied his pockets, including the gun, into a plastic tray.

“Paspart,” one of the men said.

Scorpion handed him his McDonald passport, which the man pressed on a scanning machine. Then he went through the detector and one of the men pressed a button next to a steel door that looked like it had been designed to survive a bomb blast. They waited while someone inside checked the security camera and buzzed them in.

Scorpion walked in alone, the others taking their places in the hallway beside the door as it closed behind him. Inside, Vasiliev sat behind a Louis XV desk in an office that could have been a library in an English manor house, if not for the bank of TV flat screens arrayed on one wall and a row of computers on a table. Vasiliev wore gold-rimmed glasses and an impeccable Armani suit. He looked like a banker, sitting with his left hand resting on the desk, until Scorpion realized that although lifelike, the hand was artificial. A tough-looking Russian with prison tattoos and a shaved head sat next to the wall behind Scorpion, holding a Beretta pistol with a silencer in his lap.

Vasiliev said something in Russian as Scorpion sat down.

“Izvinitye, I only speak a little Russian,” Scorpion said.

“Mr. McDonald,” Vasiliev said in good but heavily accented English, “you said something about moving an item through the port and a beautiful woman. It aroused my curiosity.”

“It was meant to. I need to locate a shipment. The woman, I’ve already located.”

“Ah.” Vasiliev tilted his head. “Where is she?”

“Downstairs, or at least she was till your men pulled me away. What someone told me was right. Everyone comes to the Dacha Club.”

“The Dacha is like the turnstile of the New Russia. Sooner or later everyone must pass through-and pay the toll,” Vasiliev said. “She is beautiful, of course, this woman. Otherwise, you would hardly risk talking to me about it. Suppose I take her from you?”

“She can look out for herself,” Scorpion said. “She is dangerous, even for the Tambov.”

“I’m not so easy to kill,” Vasiliev said, showing Scorpion his artificial hand. “Point her out,” he added, gesturing at the bank of TV screens showing different interior and exterior views of the club. Scorpion looked but didn’t see her or the Iranians.

“She’s not there. She must have left.”

“Or she doesn’t exist. As for tracking a shipment, go to a freight agent. I’m a simple club owner. Why come to me?”

“Not this shipment.”

“What’s so special about this one? Guns? Drugs? You’re wasting my time.” Vasiliev said something in Russian and gestured dismissively with his good hand to the shaven-headed man, who stood up.

“Because this involves the FSB and state security,” Scorpion said.

“We do business with the FSB every day. There is no problem.” Vasiliev raised a finger to indicate to the shaven-headed man that he should wait a moment.

“An Iranian ship called the Shiraz Se just left the Ekateringofskiy port. She may have unloaded an atomic device. This is not business as usual and it involves more than the FSB.”

“An atomic bomb, no less. Beautiful women who disappear. The CIA. You do weave stories, Mr. McDonald; no doubt not your real name. And how do I know this is true, instead of a rare form of insanity, baiting me this way?”

“Because you’ll check me out with your contacts in the FSB and you’ll kill me if I’m lying. Probably painfully,” Scorpion said, standing up. He reached over, took a pen off Vasiliev’s desk and wrote something on a slip of paper.

“You cannot imagine,” Vasiliev said, looking at him as if memorizing his face.

“This is my cell phone number,” Scorpion said, handing him the paper. “Call me when you have something. Oh, and tell your byki to give me back my gun. It has sentimental value. Checkmate himself gave it to me,” he added as he went to the door.

“You don’t seem the sentimental type.”

“I’m not,” Scorpion shot back as the door slid open.

Outside, coming to the edge of the line of trees, he spotted the Coffee House in a clearing next to a lake. It was a rectangular building that looked like a nobleman’s summer house from the time of the tsars. The house was closed and the clearing empty; the only sound the water dripping from the trees. He saw something move near the edge of the clearing, and through the underbrush spotted the barely visible silhouette of a man hidden in the foliage, kneeling in a shooting position, rifle aimed at the clearing. Najla had been with two men, and there might well be more, he thought, studying the trees. His eyes scanned the same spot three times before he saw another man, well camouflaged and wearing night goggles, holding a pistol with a silencer. Fortunately, the man was looking at the clearing and not at him. They hadn’t expected him to come from this direction. Although in this light he couldn’t be sure, he thought he recognized the man with the night goggles as one of the Iranians at the club. He had to assume at least two, possibly more, in the ambush. And where was Najla? If he shot one of the gunmen, the other would take him out. He would have to take one out quietly and then try to get the other.

Scorpion put his pistol back in the holster at the small of his back. He crept forward on all fours toward the first man; silently, only his fingers and toes touching the soft ground. He could smell the wet earth. The man ahead of him was holding what looked like an AK-104, a compact version of the AK-47. The trick was how to come at him silently from behind without the man turning the rifle around.

He moved close enough to see the Iranian breathe, and then launched himself out of his crouch, the man already starting to turn around at the sound. Scorpion got him in a choke lock with his right hand while grabbing and breaking the man’s trigger finger with a sudden twist with his left hand. The Iranian gasped, the sound choked off by the choke hold, as Scorpion did the Krav Maga wrist lock to twist the rifle away. The Iranian countered by smashing back with his elbow at Scorpion’s head, causing him to drop the choke hold, switching into a wrist lock to force the Iranian to his knees. The man cried out in pain, “Son of a bitch!” in English.

Scorpion wondered what was going on as he stepped over the Iranian and bent his left leg at the knee, catching the man, who was struggling furiously, in a leg choke hold to his neck. Kneeling down, he applied the choke pressure with his weight through the crook of his knee.

“Are you American?” Scorpion asked. He could feel the man try to nod yes and was about to release him when he heard the soft pfffft of silenced shots. The man sagged, suddenly dead weight. Scorpion dived behind his body as silenced bullets thunked into the man’s body and the tree he’d been hiding behind. He grabbed the AK-104 and was about to shout “Don’t shoot!” when automatic weapon fire with the unmistakable staccato sound of AK-47s opened on his position from two different directions. What the hell? he wondered again as he rolled behind a tree and came to his feet, hidden behind it. It sounded like one of the shooters was moving, getting closer. He had to get out of here.

He began running in a zigzag pattern, using the trees for cover. A bullet ripped a spray of wood from a tree next to his leg as he passed it. Still running, he pointed the AK-104 back and fired an automatic three-shot burst, then leaped to the side to avoid a burst of return fire at the spot from where he’d fired. Panting, he broke out of the trees and onto a path. Knowing he couldn’t stay in the open for more than a few seconds, he threw himself behind a statue of a female nude in a gap in a hedge beside the path. He rolled into a prone firing position with the AK-104, panting for breath and struggling to hold the rifle still. A shadow emerged from behind a tree and he fired a full burst at it. The shadow went down, and before it hit the ground Scorpion was up and running again. He ran out the park gate and across the street bridge over the canal, then down a side street, where he broke into a parked car and jump-started it. He drove around the block to make sure they weren’t on his tail yet and abandoned the car on a street near the Metro station, leaving the rifle in the trunk.

He descended what seemed an endless escalator, looking back up behind him all the way down, his hand near his gun in the holster at the small of his back. The city of Saint Petersburg is built on swampland, and because of it, the subway is the deepest in the world-some of the stations were used as bomb shelters during World War Two, when the besieged city was called Leningrad-and it seemed forever till the escalator reached the platform, where he watched the entrance. If anyone came from the park, it was essential he get a shot off first. He waited, every nerve straining, but only an old tired-looking babushka came. At last a train pulled in. Scorpion waited till the few people who were on the platform boarded. As it pulled out again, he walked to the underground passageway to the Nevsky Prospekt station and took the long escalator back up to the street.

He walked back to his hotel and went back up to his room, washed his hands and face, looked at himself in the mirror and tried to understand what had just happened. He wondered if he’d imagined the dead Iranian saying “Son of a bitch” in English, because if he had heard it, nothing made any sense. But he knew he had, and that meant everything he thought he understood about the mission was wrong.

He went to his laptop computer and turned it on. The software Ivanov had given him and the GPS tracking were working perfectly, as though he were living in a rational universe. It was superimposed on a street map of the city. The transmitter he had slipped into Najla’s Burberry pocket when he bumped into her at the club showed that she was stationary at a location in the Narvskaya area near the port complex in the western part of the city.

After changing his clothes and checking his gun, Scorpion caught a taxi outside the hotel. Najla had set him up, he decided as the taxi drove through the city, the sky already starting to lighten in the east with the predawn. He no longer had a choice. He would get to the bottom of things or he would have to kill her.