Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER THREE

Beirut, Lebanon

Fouad was sitting by the window over a cafe au lait at an inside table at the Cafe de Paris. He was pretending to read a copy of Special magazine, a sexy Lebanese actress in a low-cut dress on the cover, as Scorpion entered the cafe. It was the signal that he was clean. If there had been any opposition, any one of the dozen different Lebanese factions opposed to his group, the March 14 Druze, the magazine would have been lying closed on the table.

Scorpion sat down across from Fouad and looked around. The cafe, with its orange awnings and multicolored chairs, was a Rue Hamra institution, and most of the clientele, he noted, was older. Gray-haired men who still wore suit jackets and en vogue women of a “certain age” who had kept their shapes. They looked like they dated from the nineties, when the cafe had been a hotbed of politicians, journalists, and spies.

“Salaam aleikem,” Fouad said, limply shaking Scorpion’s hand, passing a small plug-in flash drive as he did so.

“Wa aleikem es-salaam. This place is still here,” Scorpion said. “Un cafe turc, s’il vous plait,” he said to the waiter.

“The students all hang out at Starbucks now. The old Lebanon is dead,” Fouad said, lighting a cigarette. He spoke a Druze-style Arabic distinguished by the qaf, the guttural k sound. “The photo is on the flash drive,” he whispered, leaning closer and opening his cell phone to show Scorpion the image of a man in Western clothes and a checkered kaffiyeh draped around his neck, talking on a cell phone on an apartment balcony.

“Salim?” Scorpion said.

Fouad nodded. “It’s him.”

“How do I know it’s him? Man on a balcony with a long distance lens. Could be anybody.”

“You know Choueifat?”

“Druze village. East of the airport,” Scorpion said.

“Hezbollah came at night. They took four boys. One of them was my brother’s son, Badi. Before they killed him, they cut out his eyes. This is Salim,” Fouad said, tapping the cell phone. “How many will you need?” He stopped and they waited until the waiter served Scorpion the thick coffee and left.

“Depends. Does he ever leave?”

“Sometimes.” Fouad looked around. “He has a woman in Ashrafieh.”

“How do you know?”

“She is one of us.” Scorpion raised his eyebrows and didn’t say anything. “Her mother was Druze,” Fouad explained.

“And he trusts her enough to visit her?”

“You should see her. Dark-haired, dark-eyed…” Fouad tried to find the words, his hands in front of him as if to touch something exquisite. “A beauty.”

“Where’s the apartment?”

“On Baroudi, near Shari’ Abdel Wahab. You know it?”

“Near the football stadium? That’s an expensive neighborhood,” Scorpion said. “How does she afford it?”

Fouad shifted uncomfortably. “She is a singer. A patriot,” he said.

“She’s yours?”

Fouad nodded. “This will end it for her?” he asked.

“We’ll try to make it appear that she’s a victim too,” Scorpion said. “Maybe they won’t kill her. What floor is her apartment on?”

“The eighth. The building has ten floors.”

“How many men does he come with?”

“Seven usually. Two SUVs. Four in one and three with him in the second. All with AK-47s.”

“Do any of them come into the apartment with him?”

Fouad shook his head. “He leaves two to guard outside the apartment door, the rest downstairs or outside.”

“I’ll call and let you know after I check it out,” Scorpion said. “Probably need just the two of us plus two with a car for the getaway. But no one knows who the target is or what it’s for or where they’re going till the last second. Understood?”

“Of course. Only the two of us?”

“The fewer, the better.” He could see Fouad was worried. “It’ll be enough. Security’s a bigger concern than firepower.”

Fouad leaned forward and put out the glowing tip of the cigarette by slowly crushing it between his fingers. “We will kill him?”

Scorpion didn’t answer.

“He has to be killed,” Fouad said. “The price is agreed?”

“Sixty M-16s, ten M203 grenade launchers, and two M-240B machine guns. A thousand dollars U.S. for each of your men, ten thousand for you,” Scorpion whispered in his ear as he stood up. “And no one touches him. He must be taken alive and unharmed or I pay nothing.”

“Maashi. Mafi mushkila.”

He’s lying, saying okay, Scorpion thought. He’d have to deal with it when the time came. “Inshallah, Ma’a salaama,” he said, touching Fouad on the shoulder as he left.

“Alla ysalmak, habibi,” Fouad said, not looking up.

Outside, Scorpion caught a Service taxi that he shared with two women, one in a head scarf, and a male student, heading toward the Corniche. He stopped the Service on Kuwait Street, crossed the busy street and jumped into a taxi heading the other way, toward downtown, making sure no one was suddenly reversing directions with him. He got out on Fakheddine, waited till the taxi left, then walked into a Japanese restaurant and out the back door. From there, Scorpion walked several blocks down a side street to the high-rise apartment building on Omar Daouk where he had rented a furnished flat earlier that morning. He nodded to the portier and took the elevator to the apartment. As soon as he got in, he went to the window and scanned the street below from behind the curtain, but there was nothing. Just ordinary street traffic. Beyond the street, he could see the side of the Ramada Hotel, and beyond that the Mediterranean, blue all the way to the horizon.

He went to the table, turned on his laptop computer, transferred the image on the plug-in drive from Fouad into the computer and opened it with Photoshop. The man in the photo was Salim Kassem, Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of the al-majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. It wasn’t his face Scorpion was interested in, but his cell phone. He enlarged the photo almost to the point of seeing individual pixels, till he was sure he knew the exact Nokia model Kassem used. Using an RSA token disguised as a functioning credit card, Scorpion logged into the website of the International Corn Association, which promoted American corn exports that Harris was using as cover for the operation. The randomly generated code number plus a password enabled Scorpion to initiate a Virtual Private Network with a special port on the site that used an advanced DTLS protocol. This created a highly secure network tunnel that was far more difficult to hack than the standard SSL used by most so-called secure websites, such as banks. Once he was connected, he made the arrangements he wanted.

Only then did he unpack his suitcase and methodically check his equipment, one piece at a time, including a 9mm Beretta pistol with a sound suppressor. From this point on he would be carrying a gun everywhere he went.

Leaving the apartment, he took a Service to Ashrafieh. He stopped in a real estate office and pocketed a few business cards from an agent who tried to interest him in a condo in the Gammayzeh district. “Pas maintenant,” not now, he told the agent, using French as part of his cover ID, then caught a taxi that let him off on Baroudi, two blocks from the target. He studied the street and the building as he walked past and then completely around it. In the lobby, he slipped the portier one of the real estate cards and thirty thousand lira, told him he had a client who was interested and to keep it to himself. After taking the elevator to the top floor, he walked down the stairs to the eighth floor and checked the corridor to determine how he wanted to handle it when he returned.

Finally, Scorpion went back outside and called Fouad. He spent the rest of the day changing taxis and making further preparations.

N ear sunset the next day Scorpion got the call from Fouad. He was seated at a cafe on the Corniche near Pigeon Rocks. The line of palm trees along the Corniche rustled in the breeze. A slim young woman in a miniskirt was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend in a black hijab scarf and skintight designer jeans, the two of them laughing, the sun turning the sea a fiery reddish gold and at that moment, Beirut was the most seductive place on earth. The waiter was talking with the bartender about Lebanon’s upcoming soccer match against Jordan in the Asian Cup, and on the TV behind the bar an Egyptian female singer was crooning about love.

It was good to hear Arabic again, Scorpion thought. It had been too long and he’d missed it; missed its musicality and expressiveness, and even more, a sense of his strange interrupted childhood in the desert of Arabia after his oilman father had been killed. It brought back the world of the Bedouin and Sheikh Zaid, who had been more of a father to him than his own father, whom he’d barely known, and the extraordinary nights of his boyhood when the stars filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon. He remembered how it was near the end, when it was all about oil and money and the Bedu way was gone, and when he went to America to go to Harvard, Sheikh Zaid telling him, “You have to find out who you are, my dhimmi.”

He was thinking about all that, and about dropping out of Harvard and going to war in Afghanistan and later the Delta Force-because in a way it was like going home-when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, said “D’accord,” and snapped the phone shut.

Scorpion slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked along the Corniche, the waves lapping at the shore as he went over it again in his mind. They had gotten lucky. An informant working in a garage in South Beirut spotted Kassem’s car being moved and called Fouad. That meant they would try soon, but there were multiple trouble spots. For one thing, there might be gunfire, and no guarantee that a stray-or not so stray-bullet would not get Kassem. Unless Kassem was unharmed, Scorpion knew his plan wouldn’t work. Also, the woman had to leave the balcony door unlocked or they might have to smash it in, alerting Kassem and the guards outside the door and precipitating a gunfight. And even if it all went as planned, keeping Kassem alive was a problem, since Fouad had a powerful motive to kill him. Plus, there was the matter of getting away, because Hezbollah, with informants everywhere in Lebanon, would be after them within the hour, probably a lot less. And he had to do it all in such a way that neither Kassem, who was perhaps the shrewdest mind in Hezbollah, nor anyone on the Central Council, would suspect his real plan.

In a way, what he was doing was the opposite of normal intelligence gathering, where you ran embedded assets who would turn over everything they could to an operations officer. Normal spycraft was like spreading a net across a river and taking in and analyzing everything till you got the fish you were after. Here, he was forcing the issue because there was a clock ticking and no way of knowing when it would go off, and he had to do it in such a way that the intelligence was absolutely real-so much so that the enemy didn’t suspect they were helping him, he thought as he waved down a taxi and headed downtown to the RDV location.

An hour later they waited in the restaurant for Fouad to come back from the telephone by the bar. The waiter had told them there was a call for “Hamid.” No more cell phone calls for the woman, Scorpion had told Fouad. After this, Hezbollah would analyze every call she had made. Scorpion watched the street and the headlights of the cars outside through the reflection of the interior of the restaurant in the window. Fouad came walking back to the table, and by the look on his face Scorpion knew they were on. She had called, alerting them Kassem was on his way.

“Yalla!” Fouad said. Let’s go. They headed out to the SUV.

Scorpion and Fouad left the two Druze gunmen parked in an underground parking garage around the corner, their lights and engine off and close enough to hear any gunfire, while the two of them made their way around to the rear entrance by the garbage bin. Scorpion picked the lock and they climbed the stairs, pausing at any sound until they were out on the roof. They unpacked their gear and night vision goggles and set up their equipment. He cautioned Fouad again against making a sound or letting himself be seen from below or from another building, then left him crouching below the line of the roof as he went back inside and down the stairs to the landing above the woman’s apartment. The only sound he made was while cutting the wires to the light on the landing, putting it in shadow, and the barely audible metallic whisper as he screwed the silencer onto his gun.

Scorpion waited, sweating in the darkness. Somewhere, he heard the sound of a television. It came from an apartment where someone was watching a popular reality TV show to find the next Lebanese singing star. When his cell phone vibrated, it startled him so much he almost dropped it, and at that moment he heard the elevator coming. He pressed into the shadow of the wall to make himself as small as possible. The elevator door opened and he heard men moving quietly. He sensed one of them approaching, just beyond his line of sight, probably peering up into the darkness of the landing. It could end here, he thought, aiming the gun.

Then he heard a voice that had to be Kassem’s: “I won’t be more than an hour,” a knock on the door, and the woman letting him in, saying “Haayil, habibi. Can you stay?”

At the sound of the door closing, Scorpion glanced at his watch. He would wait twelve minutes. He wanted them occupied in bed.

One of the guards coughed and shuffled his feet. One of them murmured something about the TV show and the other chuckled. Scorpion crept downstairs, one stair at a time. He was almost in their line of sight. He checked his watch; it was time. He pulled on his ski mask and pressed the Send button on his cell phone to let Fouad know. One of the guards said something but he couldn’t catch it. He tried to control the sound of his breathing. Yalla beena, he thought. The first move had to be Fouad coming down the rappelling line and in from the balcony.

Suddenly, they were shouting in the apartment and a woman screamed. Scorpion stepped into the line of sight in shooting position. One of the Hezbollah guards was pounding on the door, the second was aiming his AK-47. He shot them both in the head before either could turn around. He moved toward the apartment door, the shouting louder inside, and had just reached the door when it opened. Kassem, stark naked except for his undershirt, started to run out then stopped, stunned as Scorpion put the muzzle of the silencer against his forehead and motioned him back into the apartment.

“Kes emmak!” Kassem spat at him, not moving.

Scorpion smashed him in the face with the gun, knocking him back and putting him into a choke hold as Fouad, also in a ski mask, tied Kassem’s wrists behind him with plastic zip-tie handcuffs.

“Be polite,” Scorpion said in Arabic before kneeing Kassem in the groin. He and Fouad heaved Kassem onto the dining room table on his back. Scorpion hit Kassem hard in the mouth with the gun, knocking out some of his teeth. Kassem lay there, moaning softly, blood bubbling out of his mouth. Scorpion grabbed a dish towel and used it to blindfold him. The woman, clad only in black panties, stared wide-eyed at them.

“Take care of her. Make it look real,” Scorpion whispered to Fouad as he bound Kassem’s feet with another plastic zip-tie. The woman screamed as Fouad grabbed her by her hair and began slapping her hard, shouting “Eskoot!” for her to shut up. He slammed her against the wall, knocking her down, then dragged her to the bedroom and tied and gagged her.

Scorpion opened the apartment door, checked the corridor to the elevator and listened. The TV show in the other apartment was still on. Either they had heard nothing or, more likely, didn’t want to get involved. There was no sound of the elevator moving or anyone coming up the stairs. They had a few minutes, he thought as he pulled the bodies of the two guards and their AK-47s into the apartment. He locked the door from the inside and joined Fouad, who had already started to question Kassem.

“Where is the Palestinian? The one who killed the Egyptian general Budawi? Tell us!” hissed Fouad in Arabic.

“Kul khara!” Kassem cursed, the words muffled by the spray of blood that came flying out of his mouth.

“Tell us!” Fouad said, grabbing a small saucepan from the stove and smashing it down on Kassem’s groin. Kassem moaned. “The Palestinian. Where is he?”

“Kis em ick!” Go do something obscene with your mother, Kassem cried out as Fouad hit him again.

Fouad put the saucepan back on the stove, turned the flame on, and went back to questioning Kassem, while Scorpion worked on the reason why he’d planned this in the first place. He found Kassem’s cell phone in his pants pocket, crumpled on the floor in the bedroom, and examined it for any scratches or noticeable smudges. There was a single small scratch on the outside casing, and a nicked corner. He pulled an identical model from his pocket, made a tiny scratch and nicked the corner with a Swiss pocketknife to mimic the first phone and smudged the screen with his sleeve. Using a port-to-port connector, he copied the memory from Kassem’s cell phone into his phone, then took the SIM from Kassem’s cell and put it into the new phone. Checking the new phone to make sure all Kassem’s contacts and messages were there, he put the new phone back in Kassem’s pants pocket.

It had an NSA-supplied computer chip and DSP processor inside. Any call Kassem made on it would be relayed via satellite to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, the “Black Building,” so-called because of the color of the outside window glass, and from there to Scorpion’s cell phone.

Scorpion turned off the dresser lamp he’d been using and went over to the woman, lying bound and gagged on the bed. Her face was swollen and bruised from where Fouad had hit her. She stared up at him, a man in a ski mask, and whatever was in her dark eyes, he couldn’t read it. He put his finger to his lips and removed her gag.

“If you want to live, you need to come with us,” he whispered.

She looked at him with her dark eyes but didn’t answer.

“I don’t think you should stay,” he said. “I can give you asylum in America, but you have to come right now.”

She shook her head, her long dark hair a mane on the pillow, the movement making him aware of her superb, nearly naked body. “This is my country,” she said softly.

“They’ll have to suspect you. Once I leave this room, no one can protect you.”

“Ana fahim.” I understand. She smiled wistfully, wincing as she did, and despite the swelling and bruises, he could see how attractive she was. “I don’t want to go anywhere. Let Hezbollah and the Syrians leave.”

Scorpion heard a terrible muffled high-pitched squeal in the next room, almost like an animal’s. He replaced her gag and hurried into the dining area. Fouad was grinding the red-hot saucepan onto Kassem’s privates. Scorpion pulled him away, then put a choke hold on Kassem, cutting off the carotid artery and rendering him unconscious.

“We have to go. Did he say anything?”

“He said it wasn’t the Central Committee. He didn’t know the ‘Palestinian’. He said Cairo was the work of the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya.”

“The Islamic Resistance? Who are they?”

“A secret cell within Hezbollah. More radical than Nasrullah. We’ve heard only whispers. No one knows anything about it, or if they do, no one speaks. Do we kill him now?” Fouad asked, taking out his gun.

Scorpion saw Kassem starting to stir. Whatever he did, he would have to do it quickly.

“He has to escape,” he whispered into Fouad’s ear. “That was the plan.”

Fouad shook his head. “You don’t understand Lebanon,” he said, and pointed his gun at Kassem.

As Fouad started to squeeze the trigger, Scorpion reached over and, with a Krav Maga maneuver, twisted the gun away from Fouad and fired it at him three times, killing him instantly. From another apartment he heard a scream, and then gunshots from below. Kassem’s men had heard the shots and were no doubt already on their way.

Scorpion ran into the bedroom, untied the woman and pulled her with him back into the next room. He grabbed one of the AK-47s from the floor, fired it at Fouad’s body, opened the balcony door, stepped out and fired the gun at it from outside, shattering the glass, then ran back in and handed the AK-47 to the woman. Lights were going on in apartments in buildings all around, and he could hear shouting and gunshots and dogs barking. He only had seconds.

“You freed yourself and killed him,” he said, indicating Fouad. “You saved Kassem. I ran away. Understand?”

“I understand,” she said, pushing him. “Go with Allah.”

“Stay away from the door. They’ll come in shooting,” he said as he grabbed the backpack.

Running out to the balcony, he hooked up to Fouad’s rappelling line from the roof and leaped over the rail as the apartment door was shredded with AK-47 fire, shots ripping into the apartment wall. He rappelled wildly down the side of the building, not daring to take a second to look up. The instant his feet touched the concrete of the alleyway, he detached from the line and ran into the shadows.

Behind him, Scorpion heard the sound of bullets pinging off the concrete. As he ran he pulled off his ski mask, stuffed it into the backpack, and pressed his cell phone to alert the Druze getaway drivers. He raced down the alley to the side street. Just as he got to the sidewalk, the SUV screeched to a stop. He jumped in and they sped into the darkness.

“Where’s Fouad?” one of the Druze asked in Arabic.

Scorpion shook his head. “Keep driving,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to stop.”

The two Druze gunmen drove around to make sure they weren’t followed and dropped him off on Avenue Clemenceau. He waited till they drove away, cautioning them to say nothing and not to go home. Once Hezbollah discovered Fouad’s identity, there would be retaliations against the Druze. He was walking the few blocks to the apartment on Omar Daouk, the streets still active with pedestrians and traffic despite the late hour, the streetlights spaced like lonely sentinels in the darkness, when Kassem’s call came.

“You shouldn’t have called,” a voice said. Scorpion’s cell phone screen showed the phone number of a Dr. Samir Abadi in Damascus, Syria.

“They wanted to know about the Palestinian,” he heard Kassem say, his voice sounding surprisingly normal, despite the pain he had to be in.

“And?”

“I told them nothing.” There was a pause. “They know of Al-Muqawama.”

The phone in Damascus clicked off.

Scorpion took the elevator to the apartment and within minutes had uploaded the contents of Kassem’s cell phone to Rabinowich via the Corn Association website from his laptop. He cleared out anything in the apartment that might identify him, wiping down whatever he’d touched with antiseptic wipes. At the bus station near the port, he caught a night Service taxi to Damascus that he shared with a Syrian businessman who had come to Beirut to see his dentist and a Shi’ite woman who was going to visit her sister. They drove through the city and up the winding mountain roads in the darkness to the Syrian border.

Scorpion hadn’t wanted to do this at night, but Hezbollah would already be mobilizing, and he knew it would be harder to cross the border if he waited till morning. As it was, there was a chance of Hezbollah gunmen stopping them anywhere in the Bekaa Valley or in one of the Shi’ite villages in the mountains. As for the border, the Syrians would soon be alerted. His best chance was to get through before they were all over the border station. The Service stopped at the border and they were ordered out of the taxi. He handed the Lebanese border officer a French passport and a press pass that identified him as Adrien Leveque, a journalist from Le Figaro.

News about the killing was on a television on the wall behind the officer. A reporter standing outside the building on Baroudi Street said that two bodies had been found in the apartment, a man and the nude body of a woman. There was no mention on the TV of the two gunmen Scorpion had killed or Hezbollah. The police assumed the female body was the woman who had rented the apartment, but identification would take time because she’d been badly tortured and mutilated before she died. The reporter said police were focusing on the sex angle, with speculation about a sadomasochistic game between two lovers that had gotten out of control.

The officer looked at Scorpion’s passport and press pass photos, then at him and typed something into the computer.

“Etes-vous ecrit une histoire sur la Syrie?” the officer asked.

“Sur l’effet de la crise financiere sur le commerce libanais et syriens,” Scorpion said. He was concerned that they were doing a computer check. The credentials from the CIA were supposed to be rock solid, so it wasn’t that, and Le Figaro often featured financial stories, such as the one on the financial crisis he claimed he was covering. That usually made people less interested, which was why he had chosen it. The officer glanced at the television screen behind him, then at Scorpion while they waited for the computer. Scorpion felt a bead of sweat slide down his back. Every second increased his danger. The Lebanese border police were staffed with Shi’a, often from either Amal or Hezbollah. And crossing the border into Syria didn’t mean anything. They were on both sides of the border.

The officer checked the computer, then with a blank expression handed him back his passport. It was the time of night that had made him suspicious, Scorpion thought. But he’d had no choice. Sooner or later someone would remember seeing someone who looked like him with Fouad. The police wouldn’t put him together with Fouad and the woman, but Hezbollah might.

He went outside and got back into the Service. They’d tortured her before they killed her. This is my country, she had said. The mission had barely started and already he had casualties.

They stopped at the Syrian border station and went through the procedure again, then got back in the Service and drove on. The only light came from the headlights of the Service carving into the darkness of the road.

They arrived in Damascus before midnight, dropped off at the main bus station in Soumaria. Although it was late, there were still a few vendors selling roasted meat kabobs over glowing charcoal braziers and a line of taxis waiting at a stand. Scorpion took a taxi to Le Meridian, the type of hotel a French journalist would stay at. As he handed his luggage and backpack to the hotel porter, he spotted two men he had seen standing near the taxi stand at the bus station, one with a mustache in a white shirt and blue pants, the second in a dark patterned shirt, both with bulges for holsters under their shirts. He was being followed.