Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER THIRTY

Narvskaya, Saint Petersburg, Russia

The warehouse was a gray building that seemed to blend into the gray dawn sky. It was near the port, with its smell of the sea and diesel fuel and machinery. There were no lights in any of the windows, only exterior lights, and Scorpion wondered if he had gotten lucky and they were all asleep. There were security alarms and cameras over the main and side doors, but they were old-fashioned single-circuit setups that shouldn’t present any problems.

Keeping to the shadows across the street from the warehouse, he walked around the building. Apart from the main door and the loading dock, there was a side entrance and, in back, a fire escape that led down from the roof with no security cameras. He decided to go in that way. He looked toward the port and then down the empty street toward Prospekt Stachek, where he’d had the taxi drop him off. The drizzle had stopped and there was a thin ribbon of blue on the horizon. It was going to be a nice day. He wondered if he would live to see it.

Checking around one last time, he pulled down the ladder of the fire escape and climbed up to the roof, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Passing a second story window, he peered inside, but it was dark and it didn’t look like there was anyone about. He went up on the roof and looked around 360 degrees. From up there he could see the gantry cranes of the port and the Gulf of Finland. It reminded him of Karachi, where he had started this mission. It seemed a thousand years ago. Back then, there hadn’t been anyone he cared about. Now there was, and he was on his way to kill her.

Scorpion tried the metal roof door, but it was locked. He used his universal key with a tap of his gun to open it. The door was rusty and hard to move. It creaked as he forced it open, and he froze at the sound, listening intently, his gun ready. He thought he heard something but wasn’t sure. He tiptoed carefully down iron stairs to an open walkway high above the main floor of the warehouse, found a steel column to hide behind and peeked down.

Most of the main floor was still in shadow, but there was a light at one end, and then someone turned on a television. A man said something and another man answered and the first man laughed. That section of the warehouse floor looked like a dormitory with a half-dozen bunks. He heard the sound of a toilet flushing. The sound gave him cover to move silently along the walkway toward an office by the far wall. Looking around one last time, he opened the office door.

The office had been converted into a kind of bedroom, and there was no need to wake her. He could see the burning tip of a cigarette glowing in the darkness. Keeping his eyes on her, he locked the door behind him, pulled down the window shade and turned on a lamp. She was sitting up in bed in a black slip, her eyes on him.

“Have you come to kill me?” she asked.

He leaned over and slapped her across the face as hard as he could, sending the cigarette flying.

“You’ll start a fire,” she said.

“They say hell’s a hot place. Get used to it,” he replied, and sat on the bed.

“I know. I lied about the Summer Garden,” she said, holding her hand to her cheek, the marks of his fingers on her skin.

“That doesn’t count. I didn’t believe you. It’s the part about trying to have me killed that I resent.”

“It’s killing me. I don’t know what’s worse, having you dead or alive,” she said, clutching at him, her eyes filling with tears.

“Stop it! Stop the play-acting, inti sharmoota, you whore,” he said in Arabic, shoving her back against the wall. He put the muzzle of his gun against her forehead. “We’re done playing. Where’s the bomb?”

“It’s not here,” she said.

“You’re lying,” he said, slapping her again and pressing the muzzle of the gun against her forehead deep enough to leave an imprint. “Where’s the fucking bomb?”

“I can’t tell you,” she cried, tears sliding down her cheeks.

“I will kill you. I don’t want to, but I will,” he said, cocking the hammer. “Do you really want to kill a million people? Women, children? Is that who you really are?”

“Who I am?” she laughed, with a touch of hysteria. “Don’t you understand? That’s the whole point! I’m a Palestinian! Who am I? What am I? I don’t belong! Don’t you see? I don’t belong anywhere. No family, no country, nothing! I wanted to belong to you, that’s the horrible joke!” She laughed wildly. “To the enemy!”

“Keep your voice down,” he said, putting his hand over her mouth. He put the gun to her head again and took his hand away. “I won’t ask again. Where’s the bomb?”

“You can’t threaten me, habibi, habib albi, love of my heart,” she said, touching the gun with her fingers as if to push it away. “You see, I die today no matter what. Both of us do.”

Scorpion started to pull the trigger, looking into her dark shining eyes, then unable to stop himself, leaned over and kissed her, his hand to the back of her head. She kissed him back as if she knew it was the last thing she would ever do. Whatever happened, he knew he would never forget it.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since we met,” he said.

“I know. I almost went crazy lying next to you in that room in Amsterdam.” She put her hand to his cheek and looked into his eyes. “What do we do now?”

“Tell the truth. It’s all we have left.” He eased the hammer down and rested the gun on his thigh. He glanced at the door. They would be coming, he knew, but for now there was time. “How did we come to this? Who are you?”

“I can’t,” she said, her eyes welling again with tears.

“You have to,” he said.

“Let me have a cigarette,” she said. He found her pack of cigarettes on the table next to her handbag and handed it to her. She lit it and inhaled deeply. “I’ve been Najla Kafoury for so long. My real name is Alia. When I told you I was from Lebanon, I told you the truth, habib albi, but not the whole truth. No one knows the whole truth, not even Allah.”

“How old were you when you left Lebanon?”

“Five.”

“What about your parents?”

“Dead, both of them on the same day. Do you really want to know?” looking at him while holding the cigarette, and he thought that in the brightening light creeping through the edges of the window shade, her hair covering part of the side of her face, that she had never looked so beautiful.

“This is all about Lebanon, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You know about that, do you?” She smiled wryly. “You know everything and understand nothing,” tapping the cigarette ash into a little dish by the bed. “You want to know who I am? That day made me who or what I am, only it wasn’t what you think. Losing my parents. It was something else that happened that day. It began in the morning when Israeli tanks surrounded the camp.”

“You were in the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut?”

“It wasn’t the killing,” she said. “In Lebanon, there was always killing, especially if you were a Palestinian. And it wasn’t just the Israelis or the Maronites or the Druze. You had Palestinians killing Palestinians. If you disagreed with them, the PLO would kill you. We weren’t citizens of Lebanon, we were refugees, even though we had lived there as long as most Lebanese. If you were a Palestinian you couldn’t get a passport or even a job. Still, we lived. As a child I was happy there, playing in the narrow streets, running past the men working in makeshift shops in the street amidst the garbage and the dust. Everyone knew everyone on our street, even what you were cooking for dinner and my mother would comb my hair and call me ‘Princess Alia’ and tell me someday a prince would come to our little street and everyone would see I was a princess. And he would take me away and marry me. Even when the Israelis came and the PLO left, we felt we would live, but then somebody murdered Bashir Gemayel, the president of Lebanon. I didn’t understand any of it, but my father, who was an educated man, even though he had no work and sometimes made money fixing auto parts, which he had taught himself to do, told us, ‘You will see, they will blame the Palestinians. They will want their revenge,’ and although I did not know it, he made a plan.

“The Israelis came with their tanks in the dark before dawn. That day, when the sun came, was burning hot. Maybe it’s a trick of memory, but in my mind that was the hottest day in my life. The heat in our little apartment was stifling, the air so hot it felt like it was burning your skin even with every window open and a fan going, and when you breathed, you could feel it burning your lungs. I wanted to go outside and play, but my father said no one would go out to play that day. I looked out of our window at the dusty street, baking in the sun, but no one went outside. Then we heard the shooting.

“All that day we heard shooting and shouting, sometimes far away, sometimes closer. You could not make out the words they were saying, only the sounds, and I clung to my mother’s skirt and would not leave her. My mother did not cook that day. We ate day-old bread and water from the sink, and Father made us fill up every bottle and basin with water, in case it stopped flowing. I don’t remember that day. All I remember was the heat and the shooting and the smell of gunpowder and garbage rotting in the sun.

“My father came into the apartment-I didn’t even know he had gone out-and said, ‘It’s the Phalange.’ He started to say something else, but my mother said, ‘Not in front of the children,’ looking at my brother and me. I wanted to go to the window to see the Phalangists, the Christians, whoever they were, because I had never seen one, but my mother kept me away from the window and I saw nothing. But the night, I remember.

“You never saw a night like that, habib albi. Here in the North you have White Nights, where the sun is up most of the night in summer, but that night was no night. The air was still hot from the day, and the sky was intensely bright from the flares the Israelis shot into the sky. So many flares, trailing light like lightning floating in the sky. It was like a football stadium lit up at night. The light cast sharp shadows into the room where we huddled on the floor, now and then hearing the crack of a rifle or the firing of a machine gun, and once, a terrible scream. I must’ve fallen asleep, because when I woke, my parents and my older brother were asleep on the floor, and for a moment I was afraid to touch them in case they were dead.

“I crept to the window and I saw the body of a man lying in the street below. He was just lying there as though he had gone to sleep. And then my parents got up, and when my mother turned on the water in the sink, there was no water. That day was just as hot as the day before, only now we could hear the sounds of jeeps and trucks and men shouting and more shooting, much more shooting, only it was getting closer. We were thirsty and hungry, but there was no more food. My mother couldn’t cook and we drank the water from the bottles and the bowls my father had us fill the day before.

“My father made my brother and me hide in the closet. He told us to huddle down next to the panel in the wall he had put in. He told us not to come out, no matter what happened. I didn’t want to get into the closet. It was hot and dark, with only cracks by the side of the door that let slivers of light through. It was too hot and I refused, but my father gave me that look he sometimes did, and my brother took my hand and we went in and sat on the closet floor and my father closed the door. I could hear the guns and the men and the trucks coming closer and I held tightly onto my brother’s shirt in the dark. Then I heard sounds of shooting outside. It was very loud and very close, and there was shouting and then a woman screaming ‘Ibni, ibni, my son, my son,’ over and over until I thought it would never stop.

“Then I heard men coming up the stairs and loud voices and screams and they were banging on our door. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would come out of my chest. I couldn’t help myself. I peeked through the crack and saw men dressed like soldiers come into the apartment. They started smashing everything and they grabbed my father and tied his hands with those plastic ties.” She looked at Scorpion. “When you tied me up like that in Amsterdam, you have no idea what you did to me,” she said softly, and lit another cigarette. “Do you know why they bothered to tie his hands? Because they wanted him to watch.

“Four of them grabbed my mother. At the time, I didn’t understand what they were doing. I just thought they were pushing her, but when I was older, in Germany, it came back to me and I understood, one at a time, the others holding her down and laughing, and when the last one was zipping himself up, one of them took out a knife and carved a cross on her naked chest, the cross bar right across her breasts, the cut dripping blood like Christ himself. My mother was begging and screaming, and my father was yelling, ‘Don’t beg, min fadlik, don’t beg!’ and then they shot her, and carved a cross on my father’s chest with the same knife.

“My brother was tugging at my arm. I had to watch. I couldn’t pull away from the crack by the side of the door. But he pulled me back and pushed me into the opening of the panel at the back of the closet, which led to the closet of the apartment next door. I heard them shooting in our apartment, very close and loud, and I’d never been so scared in my life. My brother just had time to follow me through the opening and close the panel as they opened the closet door and light came in.

“My brother and I stood in our neighbor, Assayeda Sayegh’s, apartment. My brother was ten and he was embarrassed because there was a big stain in front, where he had wet his pants, but he took my hand and pulled me away. I wanted to say something, but he put his fingers to my lips to stop me and we started to run. I don’t know how we got out of the building. All I remember is that we ran out into our street and we saw the bodies of young men, at least twenty of them, lying along the wall, blood leaking from their heads. We ran and ran. I didn’t know where we were going, hiding from the Christians as they went from street to street, and then we came to an open street and there was a crowd of people. The Christians were around them with guns and loading them into trucks. We stopped and tried to run the other way and two soldiers caught us.

“‘Here’s two more kids,’ one of them shouted, and they pulled us by our hair and forced us to climb up into one of the trucks. There were only women and children in the trucks and some of the children were crying, but they kept loading the trucks. I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. I thought they were going to take us somewhere and kill us. One woman asked, ‘Where are they taking us?’ and another said, ‘Our men are dead, now they want us too,’ and I knew I was about to die.

“When they had filled the line of trucks, they began to roll toward the gate of the camp. I wanted to ask my brother what was happening and what I should do, because he was everything to me then, but he shook his head and indicated that I should say nothing. He was sitting with his hands over his lap to cover the wet stain on his pants. The sun baked down on us. The sides of the truck were too hot to touch. The trucks moved through the dusty streets, and there were bodies on every block. If bodies were in the way, the trucks rolled over them. The bodies had begun to bloat in the sun and the stench was unbearable. I wanted to throw up, but I was so afraid I could barely breathe. We came to the entrance to the camp where I had lived all my life. I had never been outside before. There were Israeli tanks lined up outside and I thought, ‘I am going to die now.’ And then the thing happened that I told you about, the thing that changed who and what I am.

“Two trucks were in the front of our column. They were filled with Christian Phalangist soldiers. They stopped at the gate of the camp, and then an army jeep pulled up in front of them and a man got out. He walked in front of the trucks with all those soldiers and their guns and said to them in Arabic, ‘No more killing. You have a half hour to get all your men out of the camp. It’s finished.’ He was a lone Israeli officer. He didn’t even have a gun. And just like that, he stopped the massacre. Can you imagine? To have that power. To be able to decide life or death without even holding a gun. They could’ve stopped it at any time, but they chose to let it happen. They chose death. Do you understand? That’s the Palestinian option. When given a choice, to choose death.”

“How’d you get to Germany?” Scorpion asked.

“A German refugee organization brought my brother and me to Germany. They had to split us up. I cried and clung screaming to my brother. I didn’t want to go. My new family in Germany was Lebanese. They wanted me to change my name. My brother told me to do it, that it would be safer. You see, he was already planning.”

“You mean his revenge.”

“No, not revenge. Power! The power of that Israeli who didn’t even have to carry a gun. Even at that young age, my brother knew what he had become, what we had both become,” she said, finishing her cigarette and stubbing it out.

“Why Russia? Why Saint Petersburg?”

She shrugged. “They reneged on a deal, or so I was told.”

“With the Iranians?”

“You know too much. I was right to follow you in Hamburg. I knew you were dangerous.”

“When you were split up, your brother was sent to Cologne?”

“How did you-” she looked at him sharply.

“His name was Bassam Hassani. Hassani was your family name in Beirut.”

“Was?” she said, her breasts rising and falling rapidly with her shallow breathing.

“He was one of the terrorists killed in Rome.”

She got up off the bed, went to the window and raised the shade. The sun was up and he could see the building across the street. She was a silhouette against the bright light.

“I must look a mess,” she said, and went to the table and picked up her handbag. Her hands were shaking. “Did you kill him?” she asked, not looking at him.

“Yes,” he said.

She screamed at the top of her lungs. It was like nothing human. Still screaming, she began tearing through her purse and then picked up her cell phone. She was so fast, she had caught Scorpion by surprise. He didn’t have time to reach her before she sent the call.

He raised his gun and fired, the bullet hitting her in the head and spraying out blood and fragments of brain matter as she crumpled to the floor. He grabbed the cell phone out of her hand, opened it and pulled the SIM card out. She lay exposed on the floor, her slip hiked up on her hips, blood leaking from her head. She looked helpless, her face spotted with blood, still beautiful. They had to have heard, there was no more time, he thought. He pulled her slip down so she was covered.

Suddenly, there was shouting and the rattle of automatic weapons down on the main floor of the warehouse. A savage firefight erupted and his ears rang with the sound of shattering glass and bullets flying everywhere. He heard bursts of firing and the pounding of feet coming closer on the walkway and toward him. He put his gun down and stood up, moving to the side, so if they shot through the door there was a chance they wouldn’t hit him. He raised his hands over his head as a blast of bullets tore holes through the door.