Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER SIX

Rome, Italy

On his second night in Rome, sitting in a restaurant on the Via della Croce near the Spanish Steps and running out of time, the Palestinian considered three problems that stood in his way, each inside the other like Russian dolls, each more difficult to solve than the one before. He thought about them as he stared out at the dark street, its cobblestones lit by streetlamps hung on the sides of the buildings and the electric signs of the shops and restaurants, aware of the pretty American college girl at the next table who kept glancing over at him before returning to the conversation with her friends.

The first problem was how to coordinate multiple attacks simultaneously and get it done without breaching security. Hidden within that was the second problem, the attack that could not be known to the others and required transporting a large object into a city ringed with security checkpoints. The third task was the hardest. How to stage an attack on a location that would undoubtedly be protected by extraordinary security and that was completely off-limits to the public?

For weeks he had been thinking about how to do it. Was it possible? the blind imam in Holland had asked him, and he had been tempted to say no. Even now he wasn’t sure whether he had said yes, it could be done, out of faith or vanity that he would be the one to bring down the enemy. Phase one was nearly complete. Phase two would be far more terrible. A day that would change things far beyond September 11 in ways they couldn’t imagine, a day they would never forget. Both phases presented difficulties, but this target was the greatest challenge. There were so many things that could go wrong: someone who didn’t do what he was supposed to at exactly the right moment, an undercover agent betraying them, an overly zealous policeman at a checkpoint. Even the weather was a factor in a complex plan where the variability of a single degree of temperature could make a difference. He’d considered and discarded a dozen different ways of carrying it out. Sooner or later, in each of the scenarios he had come up with, he found a fatal flaw. Going over locations well before he finalized plans, learning the terrain, measuring distances as he had in Cairo, helped eliminate some possibilities, but still, the three main problems, each inside the other, remained unsolved.

He had explored the city, focusing on traffic flow and geography rather than the tourist attractions of ancient and Renaissance Rome, using a golf range finder to exactly measure distances, which would be critical. He’d spent hours at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, studying municipal schematics and plans going back to ancient times. He drove out on the A91 to inspect the warehouse he had arranged to rent. It was in an industrial suburb with small factories and working-class apartment houses across from open lots, and most important, inside the A90 Ring Road that encircled the city and where there would undoubtedly be checkpoints. The business card he’d given the warehouse owners said he was the owner of a transport and material freight company in Germany. If they called to check on him, they would find that the company registration, address, phone numbers, and website were perfectly legitimate; all calls and inquiries would be promptly answered and handled by the office management company on Heidenkampsweg Street in Hamburg. He paid the warehouse owners the first three months rent in cash and they were clearly delighted. They reiterated that the discretion he’d demanded would be honored without question. The owners were two brothers from Palermo, and they assured him to non preoccupare. Sicilians, they told him, knew how to keep secrets.

By the time he’d gone to the restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna on the second day, he had solved two of the three problems. But the solution to the third and most difficult problem still eluded him. He looked up and caught the American college girl glancing at him. He smiled, and she smiled back. He wondered if he should have her or use her as a test for the police with explosives. With her long brown hair, she reminded him of someone, and then he remembered the young Bangladeshi woman in Queens with the haunting dark eyes. He recalled how she kept glancing not at the camera, but at him, when she made her martyr’s video. Or maybe it was the video he remembered. In a way, it was more real to him than she herself was.

She was not a true shaheedah martyr. She liked America and her job in Manhattan, but her brother was a coward. He owed money to a Bangladeshi gang, had sworn himself to jihad and martyrdom to get the money and then backed out because of his fear, trying to use his two small children as an excuse. She was doing it to keep the Bangladeshi gang members from killing her brother and leaving his children fatherless. She would never do it for herself or for the brother, but would do it for the children, and also because the way she looked at him when she made the video made him think she was attracted to him. Her martyrdom was a gift for him, he thought, glancing now at the American girl talking and laughing with her friends. The waiter came with the Campari and soda he’d ordered and he was about to tell him to give Camparis to everyone at her table when just like that, he had the solution.

The American girl raised her wineglass toward him, her eyes crinkling at the corners, confident of herself and her looks. Instead of responding, the Palestinian stood up, tossed some money on the table, and left in a hurry, the girl never knowing how close to death she had come.

He went back to his hotel near the top of the Spanish Steps, packed and got the rented Mercedes coupe from the underground parking garage. Once on the A1 and out of Rome, he drove through the darkness on the autostrada at over a hundred miles per hour, the radio blasting music by Euro groups like Tokio Hotel and Fettes Brot. Near Florence, he called ahead and made a late reservation. By midnight he was checking into the Principe di Savoia Hotel in Milan. In the morning he went to the San Vittore prison in the center of the city.

C armine Bartolo came into the visitors’ area and sat across the glass partition from him with a swagger, despite his shackles. Although he was of medium height, he looked bigger, almost hulking. His thick hair and heavy brows made his eyes seem small and dangerous. Inside the Naples Camorra, the mafia gang that virtually ran that city, Bartolo was known as “Il Brutto” for his perpetually nasty sneer and his legendary use of a butcher’s cleaver as his preferred form of intimidation. He said something in a rapid slang Italian that the Palestinian didn’t understand.

“Non capisco. Parla inglese? Francais? Deutsch?” the Palestinian asked.

“English,” Bartolo said, pronouncing it “Eengleesee.” He leaned closer toward the glass. “What are you? Turco? Musulmano? Muslim boy?”

“Businessman. I’m here to buy something.”

“You want buy, go to Rinacente store. This is prigione. Capisce?” Bartolo said, glancing sideways at the guard standing by the wall to see if his humor was being properly appreciated. The guard looked away, bored. He was paid to look away and not to hear.

The Palestinian motioned Bartolo closer. “I’ll pay you a hundred thousand euros cash for what I want.”

Bartolo’s eyes narrowed under his heavy brows. He looked like the brute killer he was, the Palestinian thought.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Someone who can pay,” the Palestinian said, and covering his mouth so a camera couldn’t pick it up, whispered what he wanted.

Bartolo’s eyebrows came together, forming a single ridge across his forehead, making him look almost like a Neanderthal.

“What you want for? A job, si?”

“None of your business. Part of what I’m paying for is no questions.”

“Figlio di puttana!” Bartolo said, standing up, hunching over slightly because of the shackles. “I don’t fare affare with Turco I don’t know.”

“A hundred thousand. I can always try the Zaza brothers or the Nuova Famiglia,” the Palestinian said quietly.

“You go Zaza, do business with those busones? Me ne infischio,” Bartolo said, jerking his chin at the Palestinian in lieu of the usual obscene gesture, because of his shackles. The Palestinian beckoned him closer to the glass.

“A hundred twenty thousand cash. Half now, half on delivery.”

Bartolo sat down again.

“Plus forty per cento what job you doing,” he said.

“Twenty-five percent-and no questions.”

“Trenta. Thirty. You talk my wife,” Bartolo said. He took a small pencil stub and wrote something on a scrap of paper. He slapped the paper against the glass so the Palestinian could read the telephone number he had written on it. Then Bartolo crumpled the paper up in his hand, spit on it, chewed and swallowed it, and stood up.

“You don’t pay, maybe you don’t look so good. Maybe don’t feel so good, Turco,” Bartolo said, shuffling toward the door, his shackles clanking.

“Andiamo,” the guard said, unlocking the door.

“Vaffanculo!” Bartolo cursed, shuffling out.

The Palestinian left the prison and drove the Mercedes out of town, heading for Turin. Along the way he bought two disposable cell phones and called a number in Turin from an Autogrill rest stop on the autostrada.

“Fee ay fis sinima il layla di?” he asked in Arabic. What’s playing at the movie tonight?

“Piazza della Republica, Porta Palazzo Nord,” a man replied, and hung up. The Palestinian used the second phone to call a number in Holland.

“Bitnazaam gawalaat?” he asked in Arabic. Do you arrange tours?

“Abu Faraj is dead. In his home in Damascus,” the voice at the other end said, using the nom de guerre of Dr. Abadi. The Palestinian watched the traffic on the A4 go by. Suddenly, it seemed as if every car was a potential danger. Impossible, he told himself. They couldn’t be on to him so quickly after Cairo. “Also his wife and three guards.”

“Who was it?” he asked.

“We don’t know. The Jews or the Americans. Pick one. Whoever, the dog got away,” the voice said.

“He was good enough to get past all the guards and alarms. That house was like a fortress.”

“Khalli baalak,” the voice said. Be careful. “Whoever it was is very dangerous. He also took a folder and may have accessed his computer. Is there anything on it of you?”

“Wala haaga.” Nothing, he said, his thoughts racing. This plus the near capture of Salim Kassem in Beirut meant they were after him. Even if they didn’t know who or where he was, someone was getting closer.

“Are you sure?”

“Nothing,” he said, remembering the long walk he had taken with Dr. Abadi in the Bekaa Valley after the 2006 July war with the Israelis. You do not exist. It is the only way, Dr. Abadi had said. There would be nothing of him on Abadi’s computer, or anywhere for that matter. He was certain of it. He waited, and when the voice did not continue, finally said it: “Do we go on?”

“Allahu akhbar!” the voice said. God is great.

“Allahu akhbar!” the Palestinian replied and hung up. It was as they had agreed. No matter what, there would be no turning back.

Making sure he wasn’t watched, he pulled out the SIM cards, placed the two cell phones and SIMs just behind his front tire, and backed the Mercedes over them. He jumped out, picked up what was left of the phones and tossed the pieces at intervals into the brush along the autostrada to Turin.

It was getting warm, the sun glittering on the Po River and on the mountains as he drove into Turin and parked in a structure near the Porta Palazzo. It was a working-class area, and he passed warehouses and cheap couscous restaurants as he walked to the piazza and waited on the sidewalk near a cluster of market stalls. Within minutes a van pulled up. Two Moroccan men jumped out and shoved him into the back. One of the Moroccans started to put a hood on his head.

“U’af!” Stop! “No hood. I want to study the area,” the Palestinian said sharply in Arabic. One Moroccan looked at the other, who didn’t say anything. He kept the hood in his hand. “Where are we going?” the Palestinian asked the driver.

“Across the river. Make sure no one is following,” the driver said, weaving through the traffic, mostly Fiats, of course, from the big Fiat factory in the suburbs of the city, past the lush green of the Royal Gardens and the towering four-sided dome of the Mole Antonelliana, Turin’s signature landmark. Designed to be a synagogue, the Mole was now Italy’s National Movie Museum, and was said to be the tallest museum in the world. They drove across the bridge over the Po River, then cut illegally across the oncoming lane to a side street, turning back on the Via Bologna and recrossing to the western side of the river. After another ten minutes going back and forth on side streets to make sure no one was following, the driver pulled up to the loading dock of a small warehouse a few doors down from a garage that had been converted into a mosque. They got out and went inside the warehouse.

There were six young Moroccan and Albanian men in work clothes, two of them wearing the green coveralls of Italian sanitation workers, and two women in hijabs. They stood around or sat on metal chairs near a stack of crates in a corner of the warehouse. A bearded young Moroccan man sat behind a folding table in the front of the group, sipping a bottle of Orange Fanta. An older man in an embroidered taqiyah cap, who the Palestinian assumed was the imam, sat beside the bearded Moroccan.

“Salaam aleikem,” the imam said.

“Wa aleikem es-salaam,” the Palestinian replied, taking a seat and turning the chair sideways so he could see the two men at the table and the rest of the group. The bearded man put a Beretta pistol on the table.

“You are welcome, Brother,” the imam continued in Arabic. “We have been instructed to assist you in all possible ways.”

“Assist, yes. But in Torino we lead,” the bearded man said, his hand touching the gun.

“You are GICM?” the Palestinian asked, naming the terrorist Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group responsible for a series of deadly bombings and kidnappings across northern Italy.

The bearded man nodded.

“Give me your gun,” the Palestinian ordered, standing and holding out his hand. The bearded man picked up the pistol and pointed it at him.

“I give the orders here,” he said.

“Do you submit to Allah? Have you said the Shahadah?” the Palestinian demanded, his eyes burning. “We are the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya. Do you know there is a fatwa against any who would lift a hand against me because of my work in our holy cause?” He stepped closer to the table and held out his hand. “Either kill me now and burn forever in jahannam or give me the gun, Brother.”

The bearded man’s eyes darted around, looking at his friends and followers. Everyone was riveted on the confrontation. One of the Moroccans from the van started to pull his gun out of a shoulder holster, then stopped halfway. From outside the warehouse came the sound of a car honking in traffic. No one moved. The bearded man’s fingers tightened on the gun. The Palestinian could see specks of dust floating in the shafts of sunlight coming through the high warehouse window, and he wondered if it would be the last thing he ever saw. At last the bearded man exhaled. Without a word, he pushed the gun on the table toward the Palestinian.

“Allahu akbar,” God is great, the Palestinian said, picking up the gun. The others started to echo “Allahu akbar” when the Palestinian aimed the gun and shot the bearded man in the head, the shot ringing unbelievably loud in the silence. One of the women gave out a muffled cry as the body slumped to the side of the chair.

The Palestinian turned on the group and stared at them. “Our moment of truth has come. There can be only one leader here,” he said, and told them what he wanted them to do.

“W here do you want the delivery?” Francesca said, tossing her long blond hair, her dark roots showing only at the part. They were having dinner in a small exclusive restaurant in Milan, near Sempione Park.

“In Torino,” the Palestinian said, and told her the name of the street. He was eating the best Piedmontese veal battutu he’d ever tasted, washed down with an excellent Sagrantino wine. “Just deliver it and walk away.”

“And the money?”

“Before your men go two meters, they will have the rest of the money.”

“You understand with the Camorra, you don’t get two chances?” she said.

“You aren’t afraid to talk about the Camorra here?” he said, looking around at the well-dressed diners at nearby tables.

“Why not? I own this place.” She had a rough contralto laugh. “Many others too. You are surprised to find a woman capa, yes? Of the Camorra, it is the custom when the husband dies or is in the prigione, for the wife to take over. Good custom. We hold it close,” she said, touching her chest. “But you were surprised. I see it in your eyes.”

“Only at how attractive you were.” She was in her forties, her skin tan, with a good shape shown off by the red designer dress she wore, her breasts so perfect that only a world-class surgeon who was half in love with her could have done them.

“Non c’e male,” she said-not bad-licking a drop of spaghetti sauce from the corner of her mouth. “Listen. You want to take me to the bed? What job is this? You tell me and this will be the best night of your life.”

“Tempting. Also dangerous-in more ways than one,” he said, glancing at the two bodyguards she’d come in with, now standing on either side of the front door, their suit jackets unbuttoned.

“You are not afraid. I can see you are not a man who fears. You understand, we women are curious, like cats. Arouse a woman’s curiosity and you can have her.”

“Any woman?”

“Any woman on earth-and in heaven too,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “You want me?”

“I won’t tell you. Ever.”

“Maybe I don’t care,” she said, tossing her hair. “Maybe I want to make chiavare with you in the bed,” she said, leaning forward so he could see the swell of her breasts.

“Maybe you’d rather have the money. Sixty thousand now as agreed.”

“You see! You do understand women. Where is it?” she said, getting up.

“A package. I gave it to the maitre d’.”

She leaned over and kissed him, her tongue darting into his mouth, tasting of the lobster ragout from the spaghetti sauce. “Next time I fuck you so good, caro,” she whispered. She got up and left, stopping at the maitre d’, who handed the package to one of her bodyguards.

When the Palestinian left the restaurant, he doubled back for nearly an hour, zigzagging through the dark city streets and autostrada exits, anticipating that Francesca would have him followed. When he thought he was clear, he drove to the Milan Central Station, where he caught the late night Red Arrow high-speed train to Rome. In the morning, he flew from Rome to Moscow.

The Camorra were dangerous enough, and what he had to do in Russia even more so, he thought on the long flight. All the while, the shadow hunting him nagged at the Palestinian, an unknown killer without a face or a name, like a nightmare from his childhood. Except he wasn’t a child anymore. Now, he was the one to be feared. Looking through the airplane window at the snowcapped Alps below, he remembered an old Arab proverb his father had told him when he was a boy: “An army of sheep led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.”