Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hamburg, Germany

Scorpion first saw her on TV in the giant Saturn electronics store, her image repeated on hundreds of televisions tuned to the same German N-TV News channel like a kind of surreal electronic art exhibit, before he saw her in the flesh, standing in the middle of the street outside the large turquoise-colored mosque with a loudspeaker, demanding an end to “Islam’s imprisonment of women.” On the TV panel of talking head commentators, her looks were striking. Her skin was a smooth gold, her sleek black hair, cut short, a stunning contrast with her aquamarine blue eyes, a touch of mascara underlining them hinting of the Levant. She wore no head scarf, and although the credit at the bottom of the screen identified her as “Najla Kafoury,” everyone addressed her only as “Najla,” as if she had already achieved the one-name status that, as Harris once wryly remarked, denoted real celebrity nowadays. “You are either a one-name or a no-name,” he’d said.

Now, seeing Najla Kafoury in the center of the demonstration outside the mosque, a slim figure in a belted Burberry raincoat, she was smaller than he had expected from her TV image. Her voice rang out in perfect German through the loudspeaker as she demanded that Islamic leaders stop “behandlung von frauen wie sklaven,” treating women as slaves. A line of helmeted Schutzpolizei stood between her and an angry crowd of Muslims, men and women, trying to shout her down, some carrying signs that read Feinde des Islam, Enemy of Islam; others, Verrater, Traitor, and Haretiker, Heretic.

“The Prophet said treat women well, but the only sura you know is the fourth sura, which tells you to beat women!” she shouted.

“A good Muslim woman is obedient and does not need to be beaten,” someone in the crowd shouted in Farsi.

“Das ist Europa, not sixth century Arabia. Fourteen centuries of abuse is enough! No woman should ever be beaten!” she shouted back in German.

Some in the crowd began to throw things at her, cushions, eggs, oranges. The line of Schutzpolizei started forward as she and the small band of men and women with her retreated, the TV cameramen edging forward to capture the shot.

“She got what she wanted,” a man near Scorpion in the crowd commented in German to a paparazzo photographer next to him. “She’ll be on Heute tonight,” he added, referring to the nightly TV news show.

“Naturlich. Najla delivers the only thing anyone cares about-ratings,” the paparazzo said, standing on his toes to try to get the shot of her holding a hand up to protect herself. “That’s meine liebsten,” he smiled as he got the shot.

“How much is it worth?” Scorpion asked.

“Depends. A shot like this, two, three hundred euros. If I could get Najla with her top off, she’d be worth twenty thousand.” The paparazzo grinned.

“She’s nothing. Just good looking,” the man next to him said.

“That’s why she’s worth every euro.” The paparazzo winked, pulling his gear together.

Scorpion drifted away in the crowd that was starting to disperse as the woman and her little group left in two cars and the Schutzpolizei began waving away the rest of the gathering. He walked the landscaped perimeter of the mosque grounds, blending in with passersby who had stopped to watch the demonstration and were now hurrying home for dinner. He studied the mosque grounds for alarms and communications. Spotting a Deutsche Telekom sticker on a phone line, he guessed they were using DSL to access the Internet. They had an alarm system, but it looked like a basic dual channel alarm, and shouldn’t be a problem.

A cool fog drifted in from Alster Lake as it grew dark, the streetlights glowing ghostly white. He had dinner in a nearby gaststatte and thought about the conversation he’d had on one of the disposable cell phones he bought in the Saturn store and afterward broke apart and dispersed into a number of trash cans.

According to the nameless male voice on the local number he called, the NSA had traced the Mohammad Modahami account through a series of e-mail aliases and proxy servers to the Hamburg Islamic Masjid in the Uhlenhorst district. They were still working on the code Dr. Abadi had used to contact the fictitious Modahami. The voice said nothing about the Syrian killings, so Harris had to be handling whatever Foggy Bottom political dustup he’d stirred up in Syria.

The voice had said, “R with M is sameach. Ditto for the prime confirm on the bug,” which Scorpion understood to mean that according to Rabinowich, the CIA had shared the information he’d retrieved from Abadi’s computer with the Israeli Mossad, and that both Rabinowich and the Israelis were sameach — Hebrew for happy-with what they were getting. It also meant that his own information about the weaponized plague, “the bug,” was confirmation of a threat Rabinowich already had from another source, which was the information Harris, citing the Prime Directive-need to know-had withheld from him in Karachi. Scorpion knew that his operating assumption now had to be that the Palestinian got his hands on an aerosol form of Septicemic plague.

The voice had asked if he was staying in a “B and B,” and he said no. They meant did he want the German BND and the BPOL-the Bundespolizei-to raid the Islamic Masjid? Saying no would indicate to Harris that he would do it himself, he thought. A raid by the BPOL in Hamburg was the last thing they needed. After Beirut and his taking out Abadi in Damascus, it would set alarm bells off all across the Hezbollah grid. Even worse, it would let the Palestinian know exactly where they were and how close or far behind him. The Palestinian might even move up the target date, and then they’d have even less time to try to stop it.

That was always the problem when Washington got involved, he mused. They tended to overkill everything, using a cruise missile with a thousand pound warhead when what you needed was a dart. “Sure you obliterate the target,” Koenig used to say, “but how much intel do you get from an obliterated target?”

He paid the check and walked back to the mosque. The streets were nearly empty now, the Alster invisible in the darkness and fog, except for the glow of streetlights along the shore. He walked the grounds around the mosque with its twin Iranian-style minarets and a light from someone working late in an office toward the back. He looked for wire connections and had to go more by touch than vision in the darkness, finding a wire connected to an outside alarm and a security camera. After peeling away the insulation from the wire with his pocketknife, he wrapped the wire with a piece of steel wool and connected it to a cell phone with two wires to an AA battery and a little capacitor he’d picked up in the Saturn store. If he called the cell phone, the current would cause the steel wool to burst into flame and short-circuit the alarm.

Scorpion scanned the silent street, looking for something out of place, a car with someone in it, a commercial van parked where it shouldn’t be. But the fog made it difficult to see anything except the hazy light from the center’s second story office window. Something wasn’t right. His internal antenna, honed after years in the field, was sending him a signal, but with the darkness and the fog, he couldn’t see where the danger was coming from. If this were a standard RDV or a break-in, he could wait them out or reset for another time, but on this mission there was no time. It forced you to take risks that were normally unacceptable.

There was only one alarm lead, and a single security camera covering the front entrance. He disabled the alarm with his pocketknife, removed the camera’s recorder and put it in his pocket. He picked the lock to the front door and then hesitated. If there was another lead that he’d missed, the alarm would go off. He held his breath as he opened the door, but nothing happened. He crept up the stairs and at the corner held a small pocket mirror angled to see who was in the lighted office. The area was open, with a number of empty desks and a bearded Iranian man with glasses working at a computer.

Scorpion tiptoed quietly down the hallway, away from the general office area, and entered the imam’s office at the end of the hallway. It was dark, and he turned on the desk lamp and looked around. The fog pressed against the windows, closing him in. Nothing could be seen outside. If there was danger, he would have to rely solely on hearing it. He went through the imam’s desk and turned on the computer, plugging in a USB flash drive with special NSA software that could break any OS and log him in with administrator privileges. Once in, he explored the shared directories and exchange accounts on the center’s local area network.

He quickly found the fictitious Mohammad Modahami e-mail account, which apparently was only used to receive encrypted messages that NSA was still trying to break. The account never sent any e-mails or responded to those from Abadi in Damascus. It’s a one-way relay cutout, he thought. They were aware of Western intelligence services surveillance and were using some low tech way of forwarding messages from Damascus to the Palestinian’s contact in Europe or the United States.

He copied the contents of the Modahami files onto the flash drive and shut the computer down, then moved on to the books on the shelves, most of them religious texts in Farsi and Arabic. He went through them quickly, looking and putting them back. Every once in a while he stopped and went to the door, listening for noises from outside or down the hall. He heard nothing from the other office where the bearded Iranian was working. He could have been alone in the world. He checked for a wall safe, but found only an electronic bug behind a photograph hanging on the wall. It was of the golden-domed shrine of the Imam Reza, the so-called Shi’ite “Eighth Imam” in Iran. He used his penknife to disable the bug.

Turning off the desk light, he went to the office of the imam’s assistant next door. Intel from the BND had indicated that the assistant, Parviz Mostafari, ran the Islamic Center on a day-to-day basis. Scorpion began rummaging through Mostafari’s desk and shelves, pausing for a moment to look at a framed photograph on the desk of a young Iranian woman in a hijab and black chador robe with a small boy taken on a beach somewhere. Another framed photo on a bookshelf showed a bearded Iranian man he assumed was Mostafari getting some kind of certificate from an older man, most likely the imam, Ayatollah Kazimi. Then he found it.

He discovered the postcard in a copy of Velayat-e Faqih, the book on Islamic government by the Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Revolutionary government in Iran. It was an ordinary picture postcard of a canal in Amsterdam with no postmark, so it had been hand-delivered. It was written like a postcard message, but the text was a jumble of Arabic letters, not real words. It occurred to him that was how they avoided NSA electronic surveillance. They were hand-delivering coded messages by courier. He was just slipping the postcard into his pocket when the bearded Iranian man with glasses suddenly appeared in the doorway, aiming a 9mm pistol at him.

“Wer sind sie?” the Iranian said. Who are you?

“Salam. I’m a friend of Parviz Mostafari,” Scorpion replied in Farsi. He knew it was his ability in Farsi as well as Arabic, Urdu, and a number of European languages that had made him uniquely qualified for this mission, and why Harris had come all the way to Karachi to see him. “We know each other from Tehran,” he added.

“You’re lying. You’re from Tehran?” the Iranian said in Farsi, scrutinizing him.

“Khoshbakhtam. I’ve been there.”

“What’s your favorite coffee shop?”

“The White Tower,” Scorpion said.

“The one on Jomhuriyeh Eslami?”

“Na,” Scorpion said. The Iranian was testing him. “On Pasdaran Avenue.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” the Iranian asked.

“Someone who’s not supposed to be here. Why don’t you call the Schutzpolizei? Go ahead,” Scorpion said, nodding.

“I could shoot you now,” the Iranian said, aiming the gun. “You’re a thief. You broke in.”

“You won’t,” Scorpion said, his hand in his pocket on the cell phone, ready to set off the alarm. “Both of us have things we don’t want to talk to the Schutzpolizei about.”

“What’s your name?”

“What difference does it make? If you want, I’ll give you my name and a very convincing ID. But it won’t convince you. So please, make up your mind. You can shoot and learn nothing, or we can talk.”

“Talk about what?” the Iranian asked.

“Let’s talk about the Palestinian.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. You say you’re from Tehran?”

Scorpion shook his head. “Damascus. I have orders. Inshallah, I’m here to help you.”

“What orders? Who sent you?” the Iranian demanded.

“Same as you,” Scorpion said.

“That’s not an answer. You speak Farsi, but you’re not Iranian.”

“You speak German, but you’re not exactly the blond, blue-eyed type, are you?”

“You could be anyone on either side,” the Iranian said. “You could be BND or CIA. You could be Hezbollah or Iranian MOIS. You are not a friend of Parviz.”

“Whoever I am, we both know you are not who you appear to be either, are you?” Scorpion said, feeling for the Send key on the cell phone in his pocket. “We seem to be at an impasse.”

The Iranian appeared to make up his mind. Scorpion tensed.

“Stand up and turn around. I’m going to tie you up,” the man said.

Scorpion got up, and as he started to take his hand out of his pocket and turn his back to the Iranian, pressed the cell phone. A loud alarm went off outside.

“Scheisse!” the Iranian said. He looked sharply at Scorpion. “Did you meet Mostafari in Venice?” he asked abruptly.

Scorpion’s mind raced. “I’ve never been there. I’ve heard the art is interesting,” he said. Venice was the CIA’s emergency password. The Iranian was a mole, he thought, the alarm blaring.

“I like the Veronese paintings in the Doge’s Palace,” the Iranian said, completing the sequence. “Are you the Scorpion?”

“Who are you?” Scorpion said.

“Call me Ahmad. Ahmad Harandi. I’ve heard whispers of you. It’s an honor. Kol ha kavod,” Harandi said in Hebrew. A Mossad mole, Scorpion thought.

“How much time do we have?”

“Less than two minutes. We have to go,” Harandi said. They ran out and down the stairs. “Whatever is happening isn’t happening here in Hamburg,” Harandi added as they headed for the back exit. “This is just a cutout to relay information from Damascus.

“I know,” Scorpion said when they reached the back door and paused. “The Palestinian’s contact is in Amsterdam, isn’t it?”

“No one knows for sure except the imam’s assistant, Mostafari. He’s the one who’s really running things here. I’m not sure how much the imam knows.”

“Who’s the contact in Amsterdam?”

“His cover name is Ali. I overheard Mostafari say it once.”

“What’s Ali’s last name?”

“I don’t know. Mostafari doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t trust anyone.”

Outside, they could hear the wail of an approaching Schutzpolizei car siren.

“What else about Amsterdam?” Scorpion asked.

“Very little. I only went once,” Harandi said. “They sent me as a courier to pick up a package in my car. I left it at a coffeehouse drop in the Jordaan district and kept watch. An Arab, a very small man, ein zwerg — how do you say, a dwarf-came out with the package. I tried to follow, but lost him near the train station.”

“Where? What street?”

“Haarlemmerstraat. You have to go now,” Harandi said, opening the door.

“What will you tell them?”

“An intruder. You got away.”

“Khodchafez. You know, we broke all the rules, you and I,” Scorpion said.

“Maybe our bosses would’ve preferred it if we killed each other,” Harandi said as he started to close the door.

“Maybe,” Scorpion whispered back as he stepped into the darkness outside. He crossed the open area of the grounds staying close to the bushes. All at once, the sound of the alarm stopped, leaving his ears ringing.

The night pressed close, wrapping him in anonymity as he walked back to where he had parked his rented BMW. The streets were empty except for the occasional passing car, headlights carving cylinders of smoky light in the fog. Suddenly, he was face-to-face with a young couple, and they startled each other, abruptly appearing, like ghosts.

“Entschuldigen sie,” he muttered as they passed.

He turned a corner and waited, listening for footsteps coming from behind, but there was nothing. After a moment he walked on. The streetlights were pale globes of light and the sounds of cars were muted as they passed. Once, he thought he spotted a shadow behind him, but it was impossible to see for certain in the fog. He got in the BMW and drove carefully out of the city, across the Elbe River and down the E22 toward Bremen.

Once out of Hamburg, the fog lifted and the visibility on the autobahn made for faster driving. With luck, he would be in Amsterdam before two in the morning, he thought, checking the headlights behind him in the rearview mirror. By the time he was forty kilometers outside Bremen, he knew he was being followed. An A4 Audi had been with him since before he’d crossed the Elbe into Wilhelmsburg.

Up ahead he saw the blue sign and crossed knife and fork of a Rasthof service area. He signaled and moved over carefully to make sure that whoever was tailing him stayed with him. He exited the autobahn, parked, and went to the gaststatte, its neon sign and lighted windows a pool of light in the dark parking area. In the reflection of the headlights of traffic on the autobahn in the restaurant window, he saw the Audi pull into the parking area.

He went into the restaurant and out the side exit, then waited in the shadow of a corner of the outside toilet cabin. In a few minutes he heard the sound of a woman’s high heels on the pavement. An overhead light above the toilet door cast the shadow of someone approaching the frauen toilette. As she reached the restroom door, he stepped out and, with a hammerlock, twisted her wrist out and leveraged it behind her back so she was completely immobilized. She cried out in pain as he twisted her around, and he found himself staring into the frightened yet stunning face of the female TV journalist, Najla Kafoury.

“Why are you following me?” he demanded.

“Bitte, sie verletzen mich,” she said.

“I’ll hurt you a lot more if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

“Bitte, let me go. I won’t run,” she said, looking at him with those strange aquamarine eyes.

“It’s a waste,” he said, looking around to see if anyone was taking an interest. Someone, possibly a truck driver, was leaving the gaststatte, but hadn’t seen them. “Using that wonderful tone of sincerity in your voice on such an obvious lie.”

“I’m not lying,” she said.

“Of course you are. You’re scared. It’s to be expected,” he said, forcing her toward the BMW.

“Don’t do this. I just want a story. Bitte, please,” her voice soft and, despite her fear, with an undercurrent of sexiness. He applied a touch of pressure to her arm and she gasped at the pain.

“Get in or I’ll break it,” he said.

“What about my car?”

“Get in,” he said again, opening the door and shoving her in. He went around the other side, got in and drove out of the parking area and back onto the autobahn.

“I’m a journalist,” she said. “On television. N-TV 24 Nachrichten.”

“I know who you are.”

“I’m supposed to check in. I’ll be missed,” she said.

“See, that works better. More believable, but you’re still lying.”

“I have to call. They’re waiting,” she said.

“No one’s waiting.”

For the first time she really looked at him, at his shadowed profile lit only by the dashboard light. “What makes you so sure?”

“No crew. No links. No satellite van. You followed me from the mosque on your own.” He held out his hand. “Give me your cell phone-and don’t be cute. Any kind of a struggle at these speeds and we could both be killed.”

She found the cell phone in her handbag and handed it to him. He shut it off and slipped it into his pocket. He drove at high speed, truck lights flashing by in the darkness as he passed them. Neither of them spoke till they were well past Bremen, nearing Oldenburg.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked finally.

“That depends on what’s waiting for us in Amsterdam,” he said.