Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER FIVE

Damascus, Syria

They were caught in a traffic jam on Choukry Kouwalty Avenue, the air shimmering from the heat rising from the pack of honking cars, yellow Star taxis and Service minibuses barely moving in the hot sun.

The taxi driver shrugged. “Ma’alesh. Damascus traffic is always shit.”

“Mafi mushkila,” Scorpion said. Not a problem. He glanced out the side window. In the distance beyond the buildings, he could see the brown slopes of Jabal Qassioun, the mountain looming over the city. In this most ancient of cities, it was said to be the mountain where Cain killed Abel.

He wasn’t concerned about the traffic; his errand wasn’t essential. He was on his way to 17 of April Square to interview the director of the Syrian Central Bank for Le Figaro. He had set up the interview because, as Koenig used to drill into them over and over, “Cover isn’t a false identity; cover is who you are.” The director was probably waiting for him in his office now, but Scorpion’s real interest was in the two cars-one a white Toyota SUV with four men in it three cars behind them, the other a blue Renault Megane a few cars ahead-that were tailing him. It was a standard front and back tail, and he’d recognized one of the men in the Renault as the man with the mustache and white shirt who followed him to his hotel last night. He had to find out who they were, his mental clock clicking down the precious seconds, wasting time dealing with tails while the Palestinian, who was likely no Palestinian, moved step by step closer to his target.

The taxi inched forward, the driver’s worry beads dangling from the rearview mirror swaying as they moved toward the cause of the jam, the crossroads where Choukry Kouwalty intersected with three main streets. Ahead, beyond the intersection, loomed the stone tower and wall of the Damascus Citadel at the entrance to the Old City. In the twelfth century the citadel had been the headquarters of Saladin, revered by Muslims as the leader who liberated Arab lands from the Crusaders. Scorpion thought about trying to lose the tail there, then glanced back at the white SUV in the rear window and made up his mind.

“Turn right on Al-Jabry,” he told the driver.

“The bank is the other way,” the driver said, turning his head for a second.

“I’ve changed my mind. Go right as fast as you can. I’ll tell you where to stop. Yalla! Go now, quickly! Dilwati!”

“Dilwati, inshallah,” the driver said, hitting the horn and swerving in front of another taxi, squeezing by with not an inch to spare and up on the curb, barely missing a pedestrian. They turned right onto Al-Jabry Boulevard, the traffic easing as they moved away from the intersection. Behind them, Scorpion saw that the Renault was too far into the crossroads over toward Port Said Street to follow, its way to the right jammed. But the SUV behind them was blaring its horn, and one of the men in it was leaning out of the window, shouting and holding up a badge, ordering traffic out of their way and pointing to the right toward Al-Jabry.

Now he knew who they were, his mind racing. Plainclothes authorities, probably GSD, the Idarat al-Amn al-‘Amm. The Syrian General Security Directorate. It was worse than Hezbollah. He had to get away. If they arrested him, it would take weeks, if ever, for him to get out of Syria, and by then, whatever the Palestinian was planning, it would be too late. He also had to find out if the Syrians were involved, and he had to do it now. But first he needed to escape the tail. It would’ve been easier if he were driving, remembering Koenig once saying, “Breaking a tail requires a very good driver to behave like a complete maniac.”

Ahead, he saw the General Post Office, a square gray concrete building hung with red, white, and black Syrian flag banners and two-story posters of the Syrian president. Waiting till the last second, Scorpion told the driver to make a sharp right turn and step on it. “Now! Now! Dilwati!” he shouted.

The driver swerved, barely missing an oncoming car full of wide-eyed Syrian men. “Now where you want?” he demanded. “Crazy guy. Can’t decide,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head.

“I’ll give you an extra five thousand pounds if you can get me to the Cham City Center Mall in less than five minutes,” Scorpion said.

“For five thousand, habibi, I’ll get you to Amman,” the driver replied, speeding up and honking on his horn as he knifed between two cars to his right. Through the rear window, Scorpion could see that the white SUV had been cut off by a bus while trying to make the turn.

“Turn here,” he ordered.

“It’s faster straight,” the driver said.

“Turn here, then go the way you know.”

The driver made a fast sudden turn and accelerated down the street, bystanders raising their fists and screaming at him. Within minutes they pulled up in front of a big modern shopping mall.

“Maashi? It’s okay?” the driver asked.

“Zein al-hamdulillah,” Scorpion said. Fine, thanks to Allah. He shoved money at the driver and got out, and just spotted the white SUV coming around out of the corner of his eye as he raced into the mall.

When trying to break a tail, he remembered Koenig saying, it was essential to change the image. He ran into a men’s clothing store, grabbed a different color shirt and changed into it. He handed the money to the clerk and went out another exit, where he caught another taxi just as two women with their children were getting out. He told the driver to take him to al-Azmeh. On the way, he called the director of the Syrian Central Bank on his cell phone, apologized for missing the interview because of the traffic jam, and rescheduled the interview. Inshallah, they would do the interview bukra — tomorrow-which in the Middle East, as they both knew, could mean anytime from tomorrow to when hell freezes over.

He assumed it was the GSD that was after him, as they drove past shops and buildings draped with more Syrian flags and posters of the president along al-Ithad Street. He had to find out how deep in this the GSD was. If Damascus was running the Palestinian through Dr. Abadi, that would change the equation and he just might need the Pentagon and the U.S. Marines after all. He decided it couldn’t wait, he had to find out now, while the Syrians were still off balance and trying to figure out who he was and what was going on.

The problem was, how to penetrate the innermost circles of Syrian intelligence? Normal trade-craft procedure was to ID a Joe inside the GSD and turn him. But that could take months. He didn’t have the time. Worse, this was their country. They would pick him up the second they could. He would have to do something more drastic. He remembered somebody asking Koenig about how you could be sure you were getting good intelligence, and Koenig said, “If you need clean water, you have to go to where the water is.” It gave him an idea.

Spotting an Internet cafe, Scorpion told the driver to pull over. He went inside, paid for a computer stall against the wall, got online, and in a couple of minutes found the address of the Ministry of Interior, headquarters of the GSD. He went back outside and after checking the street for tails caught another taxi.

At a juice bar on a side street off al-Marje, as the locals called Martyrs Square, he was propositioned by a long-haired teenage shoeshine boy turned pimp.

“You want farfourd?” the boy said, using the Arabic slang word for very young girls. “Iraqi girls. Very nice. Moroccan. Albanian. How old you want? Twelve? Thirteen? Very clean. Beautiful girls. They’ll make you feel good.”

“I need a hotel room close by, where no one asks questions,” Scorpion told him.

“Come,” the boy said, picking up his shoe-shine box and leading him down the street. “What else you need?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder.

“Rohypnol, the date rape drug.”

“Listen, boss. With these girls, believe me, you don’t need it.” The boy grinned.

“I want Rohypnol and I’ll give you ten thousand pounds for you to forget you ever saw me.”

“Mafi mushkila,” the boy said. No problems.

The boy stopped at a tobacco stand and came back with a plastic vial with tiny white pills that he handed to Scorpion. They walked on, turned a corner and went into a small hotel with a narrow doorway. The lobby smelled of insect repellent and stale cigarettes. An old man in a crocheted skullcap behind the desk nodded at the boy. He was toothless and had one eye with a drooping lid, suggesting he’d had a stroke. Scorpion told him he wanted the room for the night.

“We charge by the hour,” the old man said. The boy sniggered.

“I’ll pay five thousand pounds for the night,” Scorpion said.

“You have your bataqa shaksia identification card? It is required by the police.”

“No. No ID card and no questions,” Scorpion said, looking at him with cold gray eyes.

“Six thousand,” the old man said, his good eye blinking rapidly.

Scorpion handed him the money, then took the boy aside and gave him five thousand pounds. The boy looked at the money in his hand.

“You said ten thousand,” he said.

“The other five will be in the room. Get rope and a tube of glue and bring it to the room.”

“Sure, boss. Mafi mushkila,” the boy said. “Anything else?”

Scorpion pulled the boy close. “Don’t come back after you bring the rope and glue. Forget you ever saw me,” he whispered into his ear.

He waited till the boy left, then went up, checked the room, bare but for the bed and a dresser, left the money on the dresser and went out. He took a taxi, bought an al Baath newspaper and sat at a sidewalk table outside a small hummus restaurant across the street from the Ministry of Interior office building.

At noon, employees began to come out of the ministry for lunch. Scorpion waited, glancing up from behind his newspaper. It was logical that ministry employees would eat at the inexpensive restaurant so convenient to their office. A man in a white shirt and tie came over and sat at a nearby table. They were close enough in height and build, Scorpion decided. He got up and on his way to the bathroom nearly tripped a waiter, then caught the man to prevent him from falling. During the distraction, he slipped three pills into the ministry man’s juice drink.

A few minutes later, after Scorpion went to the bathroom and returned to his table, the ministry man was showing signs of the drug. He staggered to his feet, reached for the table to steady himself and knocked over his glass, sending broken glass and juice flying. The man swayed, staring stupidly at the broken glass as the waiter hurried over.

Scorpion stood up. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “This man is sick.”

“I don’t feel so good,” the man said, his eyes bloodshot and nearly closed.

“He needs to go to the hospital. I’ll take him,” Scorpion said. “Come help me get him to a taxi,” he told the waiter, who waved down a taxi.

“Ilhamdulilah. You are a good man, Doctor,” the waiter said, helping Scorpion get the man into the taxi.

Scorpion told the driver the address of the hotel and tried to keep the man upright and awake in the taxi. By the time they got to the hotel, his eyes were rolling in his head and it was all Scorpion could do to get him out of the taxi. He half carried the man into the hotel.

The old man came from behind the desk and helped him get the ministry man to the room. When he was sprawling on the bed, the old man smiling knowingly at Scorpion, as if to indicate he now understood why he’d wanted to keep his homosexual rendezvous secret. Scorpion winked at the old man and gave him an additional thousand, locking the door behind him. He went through the man’s pockets and took out his wallet.

“I don’t feel so good. Need to call my office,” the man moaned. He looked like he was about to throw up, and tried to get up. Scorpion pushed him back down on the bed, took the rope and tied him up hand and foot, shoving a towel into his mouth as a gag. By then the man was out cold. He’d been right, Scorpion thought, finding the GSD ID card in the wallet. He memorized, then put it into his own wallet and went out. He would now be Fawzi al-Diyala, deputy supervisor for Ar Raqqah Province.

Within minutes Scorpion was back at the Internet cafe, where he printed out his own photo, scanned from his French passport, cut it to size and pasted it with the glue over the ministry man’s photo on the ID card. After taking a taxi back to the ministry, he used the ID to get past the security guards and into the building.

He took the elevator to the third floor and walked until he found an empty cubicle. The computer’s Web browser took him to the GSD internal home page. He checked the organization chart for the director’s name, office number, and telephone extension, then glanced around and dialed the extension.

The director picked up the phone at the first ring.

“Naam, what is it?” he said.

“Fawzi al-Diyala told me to call,” Scorpion said. “We have the man from the Cham Center. He’s a CIA agent. You must come!”

“What the hell is this?”

“Min fadlak, it’s urgent! You have to come at once!” Scorpion said, then hung up. He went out to the elevators and took one to the top floor. The director’s office was at the end of the corridor. Scorpion took out his gun, screwed on the silencer and walked in. As he had hoped, the office was empty. Najah al-Hafez had taken the bait and had gone down to Diyala’s office.

Scorpion sat down in al-Hafez’s chair behind the desk, put his gun on the desktop and began to go through the desk drawers. He found a button that he assumed was an alarm button under the desktop. In a top drawer he found a BlackBerry, and was about to pocket it when al-Hafez came back into the office.

“Who the hell are you? Get out of my office!” the director demanded.

“Eskoot. Close the door and sit down,” Scorpion said in Arabic, picking up the gun and pointing it at al-Hafez’s chest. When the man didn’t move, he added: “I will kill you.”

“El khara dah?” al-Hafez growled. What the hell is this?

Scorpion cocked the hammer of the gun. “Sit down. I almost never miss and I won’t tell you again,” he said.

Al-Hafez’s eyes darted around his office as if looking for a way to escape, then at the gun. He sat down in a chair facing his desk.

“You’ll never get out of this building alive,” he said.

“Yes I will. You’ll see to it. But first we have to talk.”

“Who are you? Mossad? CIA? DGSE? You’re the one who came in on a French passport,” he said. “But you’re not French. American?”

Scorpion nodded and put the gun down on the desktop.

“Maashi, CIA,” al-Hafez said, his eyes resting for a moment on the gun. “So tell me what you want. I’ll tell you why you can’t have it and I’ll even let you try to give me one reason why I shouldn’t have you interrogated and killed.”

“The Budawi assassination in Cairo.”

“You don’t think we had anything to do with that?!” al-Hafez said, looking discomfited.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“It makes no sense. What have we to gain?”

“So why are your men following me? You’ve been on me since the minute I arrived in Damascus.”

“Of course we’re on you. A French journalist shows up at the border late at night in a Service a short time after four people are murdered in Beirut; two that we know were Hezbollah, one a woman who must have had information because someone tortured her, and the last a Druze from the March 14 Brigade. We’d be derelict if we weren’t curious. That was interesting enough. When you escaped surveillance, that made you more than interesting. Now the fact that within a short time you went from hunted to hunter into my very office makes you more than a person of interest-it makes you dangerous to the state.”

“I had to find out who was after me. Normally, I would’ve been more discreet, but right now I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“Min fadlak, we were very impressed. What we don’t know is why you are here.”

“You know Salim Kassem, of the Hezbollah Central Council?”

Al-Hafez gestured to indicate that of course he knew him.

“The first call he made after he escaped in Beirut was to a Dr. Samir Abadi here in Damascus.”

“How do you know that?”

Scorpion smiled.

“Americans and their technology. Amazing! Truly.” Al-Hafez shook his head. “How can you be so smart and yet so stupid?”

“Do you know Dr. Abadi?”

“There are many doctors in Damascus.”

“Don’t play stupid. It insults both of us,” Scorpion said.

“Why should I help you? How does that help Syria?”

“Because you don’t want to be on the wrong side of what is about to happen. This isn’t about the Golan or the Israelis or who killed Hariri. You’re right about us. We can be stupid,” Scorpion said, his fingers lightly resting on the gun on the desk.

“If you don’t report in… of course there will be repercussions. You could’ve just called for an appointment,” al-Hafez said.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“No, you couldn’t,” al-Hafez conceded. “We had nothing to do with Budawi. But you already know that or you wouldn’t be here. We’re not even sure it was Hezbollah.”

“Just when we were almost talking,” Scorpion sighed. “Tell me about Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance.”

“A myth,” al-Hafez said, shifting uneasily in his chair. “Aliases and half-baked groups consisting of two jihadis in ski masks and an imam who talks too much are more common in the Middle East than fake goods in the souks.”

“You say it wasn’t you, it wasn’t Hezbollah, and the Islamic Resistance doesn’t exist. There’s only one problem. Budawi didn’t kill himself. What do you know of the Palestinian?”

“Who?”

“Now you’re overplaying your hand, Najah. A man code-named the ‘Palestinian’ killed Budawi.”

Al-Hafez leaned forward. “Are you sure? How do you know that?”

Scorpion didn’t answer. For a moment they just looked at each other, the only sound the hum of the air-conditioning and the faint sound of traffic from the street. The phone on the desk began to ring.

“Don’t answer it,” Scorpion said.

The director let it ring till it stopped, then said, “They’ll be checking on me.”

“No. You’re too important to disturb,” Scorpion said.

Al-Hafez shrugged. “You’re sure about Cairo?”

Scorpion didn’t answer. Al-Hafez glanced out his office window at a superb view of Damascus, looking toward the Old City. From it, Scorpion could see the citadel and the Umayyad Mosque, where both the head of John the Baptist, revered by both Christians and Muslims, and the body of Saladin were entombed. Looming over it all through the smog haze was the distant ridge of Jabal Qassioun.

“It seems we both have secrets,” al-Hafez said finally. “May I smoke?”

Scorpion picked up the gun and gestured with it for al-Hafez to go ahead. Al-Hafez started to light a cigarette and asked, “How about shai? Shall I have some brought?”

Scorpion shook his head no. Al-Hafez lit the cigarette and exhaled.

“Of the Palestinian, I know only a little. Very little, and for that you have to shoot me,” he said.

Scorpion fired the pistol, the bullet hitting the seat between al-Hafez’s legs with a loud thunk. Al-Hafez stared at him, stunned, wide-eyed.

“The Palestinian,” Scorpion said. He cocked the hammer, and al-Hafez flinched involuntarily at the click. “Is he really Palestinian?”

“I have no idea. There was a rumor that he fought the Israelis in Lebanon in July 2006.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know, and if I did, I would not say,” al-Hafez said, raising his hand. It trembled, just slightly, and he was embarrassed by it. He took a deep breath. “Even if you shoot me, I can’t tell you. I’ve probably told you too much already.”

“How is it you don’t know? You support Hezbollah, you and the Iranians.”

“Against the Israelis, of course. And in Lebanon, where we have legitimate national interests. Lebanon was part of Syria for thousands of years, until the 1920s when the French came along and invented it as a country. But not against the Egyptians-or the Americans.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re surrounded by countries allied to you, including the strongest army in the Middle East, the Israelis, right on our border. We are not so smart like you with satellites and gadgets, but also not so stupid. It’s not in our interest, just as what happened to Budawi was not in our interest. And please, where is the BlackBerry that you took?” Scorpion placed the BlackBerry he’d found in al-Hafez’s drawer on the desk.

“I can’t let you walk out with that,” al-Hafez said.

“You can’t stop me. Unless…” Scorpion hesitated.

Al-Hafez nodded, accepting the implied offer. “We’ve heard rumors of a power struggle within Hezbollah,” he said. “The Islamic Resistance is the action cell of a violent radical faction. That’s why we weren’t surprised when you showed up on our radar, and why I’m telling you now. There are whispers of something very big about to happen, but we don’t know what and we are not involved. To prove it, in exchange for returning my BlackBerry and letting you walk out of here, I’ll give you Dr. Abadi’s address. Inside Islamic Resistance his nom de guerre is Abu Faraj.” He got up, walked over to his desk and wrote the address on a piece of paper. He started to hand it to Scorpion, then stopped. “Where is my man, Fawzi al-Diyala?”

Scorpion told him the name of the hotel.

“Is he alive?”

“He’s tied up and he’ll have a filthy hangover and won’t remember much, but otherwise he’s unharmed.”

Al-Hafez offered the slip of paper. “Call off your men. If anyone else follows me, I’ll kill them,” Scorpion said, putting the slip of paper in his pocket.

“It’s in the al Mouhajarine district. Be warned. He’s well protected,” al-Hafez said.

“So were you.”

“Extremely well protected.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Scorpion said, leaving the BlackBerry on the desktop and getting up.

Al Hafez walked around and sat down behind his desk. Scorpion stuck the gun in his belt, pulled his shirt over it and headed for the door.

“By the way,” he said, pausing at the door. “What’s Abadi a doctor of?”

“He’s a medical doctor.”

“What’s his specialty?”

“Infectious diseases. Why?”

“Just curious. Wait five minutes before you press the button under the desk, Najah,” Scorpion said. Something al-Hafez had said was setting off alarm bells in his head, but he wasn’t sure what.

“I want you out of my country, Monsieur Leveque,” al-Hafez said, using Scorpion’s cover identity, his eyes narrowing. “You have twenty-four hours. After that, bi ‘idni allah, you will never leave Syria. Not even as a corpse.”

T he night goggles cast a greenish glow over the trees and the wall and the guardhouse outside the gated estate. Scorpion studied the layout from his rental car down the street. Dr. Abadi’s compound was well protected, all right, he thought. In addition to the guardhouse by the gate and the razor wire atop the high concrete walls, he spotted a number of security cameras, wireless alarms, and motion detectors along the perimeter, and more no doubt were strategically located on the grounds and in the house. And he heard the barking of guard dogs from inside the walls.

He put the night goggles in his backpack. There wasn’t any choice. He’d have to go in. The question was how. Al-Hafez had kept his word about the tails. He’d been free of them all day. He’d been given twenty-four hours because al-Hafez wanted to distance Syria and the GSD from whatever the Islamic Resistance was planning. As for him tackling Dr. Abadi’s compound, for al-Hafez it was a no-lose situation. The Syrian GSD and Mukhabarat were tied to the traditional Hezbollah leadership. From al-Hafez’s point of view, whether he killed Abadi or Abadi killed him, the director won.

Scorpion had spent the day making preparations. He’d rented a Renault Megane, a car they’d used to tail him, obviously popular with the GSD. At an Internet cafe, he’d posted what he learned from al-Hafez about the Islamic Resistance to the International Corn Association website. Enough to keep them scrambling and to keep Rabinowich happily digging through databases. In response to a cryptic coded post by Rabinowich, Scorpion indicated that so far as he could tell, al-Hafez was most likely telling the truth about no Syrian involvement in the Cairo bombing, but he would know more after tonight.

That afternoon, he had gone to a number of shops in Saida Zaynab, a slum district filled with refugees from Iraq where, for a price, you could buy anything or anyone. Later he’d mingled with the evening crowds in the lanes and shops blazing with light in the Souk al-Hamidiyeh, in the walled Old City next to the citadel, where he bought an inexpensive suit like the one his cover, Fawzi al-Diyala, would wear. He was prepared as he could be. If Abadi’s men captured him and he had to get out, he was counting on the Houdini trick, the one that had enabled the magician to make his famous escapes. But there was no way to stop the dryness in his mouth or his heart rate from going up. He knew there was a good chance he’d end the night as a headless corpse floating in the Barada River.

He’d made his choice that afternoon. Basically, there were only two ways in.

He could sneak in, deal with the perimeter guards, and tranquilize the guard dogs with Diazepam. As for the alarms, a preliminary drive-by earlier in the day convinced him that for such a large compound, they were likely using wireless alarms. Trying to eliminate alarms individually meant getting to the alarms or the controller without setting off motion detectors and other sensors that were probably all over the place, and then required someone who knew what he was doing to disconnect them. The system was almost certainly multichannel, so that the instant you disconnected one, the other channel would set off the alarm. But all wireless devices were based on RF technology, and a better way would be to disable them all at the same time with an electromagnetic pulse. All that required was a powerful enough transmitter-say a 2.4 GHz transmitter with a miniparabolic dish-and something to create an electromagnetic interference wave. An iPod playing Bruce Springsteen would do.

But the problem with breaking in was you never knew what you would run into. Sooner or later there would be a confrontation with other guards, and gunfire and police to deal with. And all that so at best he could briefly interrogate Abadi under pressure where the value of information from torture was always suspect. Anything you got from such interrogations was always a mixture of lies and half-truths, and that’s if you had time, and he had none.

The second way in was to make an appointment and try to talk himself in. As with what he had done with Kassem in Beirut, the real intelligence would come not from what was said, but how Abadi reacted afterward. Except they were not stupid, and his cover was thin, and if they started to question his cover, he might be the one screaming in a dark cellar trying to think of lies and half-truths they’d believe. From somewhere, a dog barked just once, and he realized his heart was pounding.

A car came down the street, its headlights carving the only light in the darkness except for a dim red glow from the interior of the guardhouse. As it passed, Scorpion started his rental car and drove it to the gate. A guard in olive-drab fatigues stepped out of the guardhouse. At the same instant, a second guard appeared on the other side of the car with a Chinese Type 95 assault rifle pointed at him. It looked brand new and very lethal.

“I have an appointment with Abu Faraj,” Scorpion said in Arabic, using Abadi’s cover name and showing the guard the GSD ID card that identified him as Fawzi al-Diyala. A bead of sweat trickled down his back. If al-Hafez had alerted Abadi, they would let him in and it would go bad very fast. The guard glanced at the card, then at his face, and nodded to the other guard.

“Ahlan wa sahlan,” he said, pressing a button to open the gate and gesturing for him to drive in.

He drove around a circular driveway, a marble fountain splashing water in the middle of a lawn, and parked in front of the villa, bathed in white light from outside floodlights. As he got out of the Renault, he spotted a guard with a German shepherd patrolling beyond the floodlit area, and surveillance cameras on the side and roof of the villa. He walked up to the entrance, and three armed men appeared and asked him to take off his suit jacket. They checked the jacket and frisked him thoroughly, taking pistol from the holster at the small of his back. It was a Russian SR-1 Gyurza, standard issue for the Russian FSB and former allies like the Syrian GSD, which he had bought that afternoon in Saida Zaynab. When they were done, one of the guards took him inside and asked him to wait.

The foyer was marble and sleek, an interior designer’s dream. After a moment the double door to a living room opened and a paunchy middle-aged man with a goatee and wearing glasses came out. In the gap of the door just before Dr. Abadi closed it behind him, Scorpion caught a glimpse of a well-dressed woman and a young girl watching a big screen TV. He was glad he hadn’t come in shooting.

“Min fadlak, this way,” Dr. Abadi said. He led Scorpion into a small office, the walls covered with books. The guard who had taken his gun waited outside the door. “Would you like some juice? Turkish coffee?” the doctor asked, sliding a folder on the desk into a drawer.

Scorpion looked at the books on the walls. They were on medicine, mostly infectious diseases, anthropology, and Islamic studies.

“You come from Najah al-Hafez?” Scorpion didn’t answer. “So what does the Idarat al-Amn al-’Amm want at this hour?”

“Where’s the Palestinian?” Scorpion said.

“There are millions of Palestinians under brutal Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza,” Dr. Abadi replied.

“Just the one,” Scorpion said.

“Why is this of interest?”

“You know why! Do you take us for idiots? We’re having to deal with the Egyptian Mukhabarat now!” Scorpion shouted, standing up. Behind him, he heard the door open and the guard come rushing in. Dr. Abadi held up his hand to stop the man from attacking Scorpion. “You live here because we allow you to live here!” Scorpion continued.

“Because it is in your interest for me to be here,” Dr. Abadi said, signaling the guard to leave.

“Maybe after Cairo, it is not so much in our interest anymore,” Scorpion said, and sat down. “Where’s the Palestinian?”

“Not in Syria. Or Lebanon.”

“And therefore none of our business? Hardly. Tell me about him.”

“The Palestinians are a people oppressed. There is nothing else to know.”

“Trained in Iran?”

“Palestinians are not the only ones trained in Iran,” Dr. Abadi said, his meaning obvious. Syrian GSD and Mukhabarat officers often collaborated and trained with the Iranians. “Nor is Iran the only country sympathetic to the Resistance.”

“Is he in Europe?”

“What do you care? The Palestinian is an operative. Policy is decided here,” Dr. Abadi said, tapping his own chest. Just then his cell phone rang.

“As-salaam aleikum,” he said into the phone, then listened. He looked at Scorpion and said nothing. Scorpion began to get a bad feeling. He was about to move when Dr. Abadi pulled a gun from beneath the desk and pointed it at him. “Ahmed!” he called out, and the guard outside the door rushed in, saw what was happening, pointed his gun at Scorpion and shouted to the two other guards.

“Who are you?” Dr. Abadi demanded.

“You know who I am. Fawzi al-Diyala of the GSD. Director Najah al-Hafez sent me, as you were told,” Scorpion snapped.

Dr. Abadi shook his head. “One of my men is with al-Diyala at his apartment this minute. It seems he doesn’t feel too well. Someone slipped a drug into his juice today. Are you a Jew? Mossad? BND? Who are you?” he asked.

“What do you care? Policy is decided elsewhere,” Scorpion said, his mind racing. Someone, not al-Hafez, had tipped Abadi off. An Islamic Resistance agent inside the GSD. Of course Abadi had suspected Mossad, but of all the intelligence services in the world, why had he mentioned the German BND? Did that mean the Palestinian was in Germany? Wherever he was, Scorpion realized, it didn’t look like the information was going to do him much good.

“Stupid. Whoever you are, even your jokes are stupid. Get rid of him,” Dr. Abadi said, pointing the gun with a two-handed stance at Scorpion. One of the guards pressed the muzzle of his gun against Scorpion’s head as a second guard started to tie his wrists with a plastic zip-tie. Once his hands were tied, they’d relax, figuring they had him, he thought, waiting till two of the guards pulled him roughly to his feet.

As they started to shove him out, he did a Brazilian back leg sweep, taking down the guard to his right, then turning close into the guard behind him, he butted him under the chin while grabbing the single-edge razor blade hidden in his hair, a trick Houdini had used in his famous paper bag escape, and used it to cut the plastic zip-tie. Then he pulled the guard he had butted into a low choke hold below the level of the desk, so Abadi couldn’t see to shoot, and slashed his carotid artery with the razor.

The first guard Scorpion had taken down now aimed his gun at him. He used a Krav Maga move, blocking with the hand, stepping out of the line of fire, twisting the guard’s wrist and taking the gun away, all in less than two seconds. He whirled and shot the third guard in the face, and then, still on his knees, fired through the desk, hitting Abadi in the stomach. Scorpion rolled away as Abadi fired into the desk, missing him. As the first guard started to pick up the gun, he shot him in the head.

He stood up then, as Dr. Abadi, pressing his forearm against his bleeding stomach, aimed his gun. Scorpion fired, the bullet going through Abadi’s hand into his stomach. Abadi cried out as he fired, his shot going wide. Scorpion fired again at his chest, killing him.

The alarm was going off, and somewhere a woman was screaming. He only had seconds. Fortunately, Dr. Abadi had left his laptop computer on. Scorpion took out a special flash drive designed by the NSA and plugged it into the laptop’s USB port. The drive’s software took over the operating system with admin privileges. It grabbed Abadi’s e-mail files, gathering his account properties-the names and IP addresses of his incoming POP3 and outgoing SMTP mail servers and all of the document and Internet files on the hard drive-and downloaded them onto the flash drive. When it was finished, Scorpion pulled the flash drive out of the port and took it, along with two guns, including the SR-1 Gyurza.

He knew he had to leave fast, but there was something in the way Abadi had slipped the folder into his desk drawer that made him hesitate. The drawer was locked, but it only took a moment to pick the lock and pull out the folder. It contained what looked like a scientific report in Russian, and what appeared to be a typewritten translation in English titled “Modalities of Septicemic Yersinia Pestis Distribution.” The Russian paper was stamped “,” which meant Top Secret, the intelligence equivalent of the Holy Grail.

He could hear someone shouting outside, not far away, and knew he was out of time. Stuffing the paper in his pocket along with the flash drive, he walked out of the office. The woman and little girl stood in the hallway and stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Where’s the control box for the alarm?” he asked them.

They just stared at him, but the little girl involuntarily glanced at the hall closet. Scorpion opened the door, saw the metal box on the wall and opened it. He fired a bullet into the recorder drive for the security cameras and pulled all the switches. The floodlights went off outside, followed by shouts and dogs barking, and suddenly the front door was sprayed with bullet holes from automatic fire from a pair of Type 95 automatic rifles. The little girl screamed as her mother stared down at the blood blossoming on her chest a moment before collapsing. Scorpion shoved the girl down to the floor, and as the front door swung open emptied one of his guns at the opening. Then he ran back into the office, flung Abadi’s laptop at the window, shattering the glass, and leaped through the broken window and into the darkness outside.

Instead of heading for the front gate, he ran toward the back of the property. He heard one of the German shepherds growling as it raced toward him. It would jump, he thought. That’s how they were trained. To go for the hand or follow their instincts and go for the throat. It was almost upon him. He needed a stick or something, but all he had was the gun and the razor blade. As the dog leaped for his throat, he grabbed it by the fur on its neck and smashed his gun down on its nose. The dog yelped and lunged again. Hell of a dog, he thought, grabbing it and smashing its nose again. This time, the dog emitted a high-pitched animal scream and backed away, panting, its tongue lolling out.

A guard was running toward him. The man stopped and went down into a shooting position as Scorpion hit the ground, rolled over and fired three times. After the first shot, the guard didn’t move. Scorpion waited a moment, then climbed a tree next to the estate wall, inched over the razor wire, hung down from the branch and dropped to the other side. He picked himself up and walked away. In the distance he could hear the sound of approaching police sirens.

Scorpion spent a restless night in a room rented from an Iraqi family in the Saida Zaynab district, the gun kept close to him. There was always a chance that al-Hafez might change his mind and come after him, not to mention Hezbollah and the Islamic Resistance. By the light of a bedside lamp, he tried to make sense of the translation of the Russian paper he’d taken from Abadi’s desk.

It was very technical, but appeared to be a report on secret experiments done at a lab at Vozrozhdeniya involving the use of aerosol sprays to transmit plague pathogens. He recalled that Vozrozhdeniya, once an island but now a peninsula because of a severe drop in the water level of the inland Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, had been a secret biological warfare research facility in the old Soviet Union. It was essential he get the paper to Rabinowich immediately, and hated having to wait till morning to cross the border. He had to get out of Syria.

On the morning TV news, an Al Jazeera reporter standing in front of Dr. Abadi’s estate said the murders were being blamed on Israeli agents. Syria was filing a formal complaint to the United Nations, and a majority of countries in the UN were already calling for a resolution condemning Israel for assassinating Abadi.

By mid-morning Scorpion was back in Beirut, having crossed the border as a Syrian auto salesman from Aleppo. At an Internet kiosk at Beirut airport, he uploaded the encrypted contents of the flash drive and a scanned-in copy of the secret Russian paper to the International Corn website. He learned from a Rabinowich-coded post on the site that the NSA had tracked Dr. Abadi’s e-mail servers. There had been frequent e-mails in a code they were working on but hadn’t broken, between Abadi and an e-mail account in Hamburg, Germany, belonging to someone named Mohammad Modahami.

Scorpion caught the Air France flight from Beirut to Paris. Over the Mediterranean, he played back what had happened with Dr. Abadi in his mind. There was something Abadi had said that kept nagging at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. At a rented computer in the business zone de travail at De Gaulle Airport, during a layover for his flight to Hamburg, he Googled Septicemic plague.

There were three versions of the plague, he learned: Bubonic plague, thought to be the disease that caused the Black Death of the Middle Ages; Pneumonic plague; and Septicemic plague. All were caused by the same Yersinia pestis bacteria. In each version of the plague, the pathogen infected a different part of the body. Bubonic plague infected lymph nodes, Pneumonic the lungs, and Septicemic the blood. The Bubonic and Septicemic plagues were typically transmitted by flea bites from infected rodents. Pneumonic plague was transmitted from human to human by airborne droplets from coughing. Of the three types of plague, Septicemic was the most insidious and deadly. The incubation period was normally two to five days, during which there were no symptoms. Once the patient realized he was sick, with symptoms ranging from flu-like chills, fever, coughing, and headache, to black and purple patches under the skin, the disease was nearly a hundred percent fatal. In most cases, the same day the patient realized he was ill was the day he died.

A chill went through Scorpion. The paper from Abadi suggested that the Russians had weaponized Septicemic plague at Vozrozhdeniya during the Cold War and that somehow the Islamic Resistance now had that weapon. Rabinowich had put the intel about the missing weaponized plague together from his bits and bytes of “subtexture,” or maybe from a defector or an FSB mole, and connected it to the Palestinian, and Bob Harris hadn’t told him about it because they wanted independent confirmation. His conclusions were slender and based on conjecture, Scorpion realized, but the pieces fit. No wonder Harris had come all the way to Karachi! If there was such a thing as an airborne version of Septicemic plague and the Palestinian set it off in an American city, tens of millions could die. The only way to stop him was to track down this Mohammad Modahami, Dr. Abadi’s contact in Germany.

Scorpion bought a disposable cell phone and dialed a local Paris number. As he did so, over the airport loudspeaker he heard the first call for his flight to Hamburg. He used the day’s sign, “Liverpool,” and heard the countersign, “Mary Poppins.” A woman’s voice-he assumed she was someone from the CIA Paris station-stated that according to the BND, and confirmed by the German Bundespolizei, no such person as Mohammad Modahami had ever existed.