Scorpion Betrayal

CHAPTER NINE

Amsterdam, Netherlands

“Now that you have me, what are you going to do with me?” she asked. They were sitting in a brown bar just off the Prinsengracht, not far from the Anne Frank House.

“Why were you following me?” he said, poking at a fritte mayonnaise.

“I told you, I’m following a story,” she said, putting down her witte beer and lighting a cigarette. It gave her a chance to study his face. It was a strong face, with dark tousled hair and shadows under gray eyes that gave nothing away. There was a scar over one of his eyes that she suspected wasn’t a sports injury. His hands looked strong enough that she knew if he wanted to, he could tear her apart, and it made something shiver inside her.

“You’re doing it again,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Lying when you don’t have to. Whatever you were following me for, it wasn’t for the TV news.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re Najla Kafoury, a one-name talking head on TV. You’re national in Deutschland. You don’t do local breaking-and-entering stories, and nobody stakes out a mosque at night on the off chance the alarm’ll go off. Why were you there and why did you follow me?”

She exhaled cigarette smoke at him and didn’t say anything.

“Last chance,” he said.

“Or else what? What’ll you do if I don’t say? Tie me up? Spank me?”

“I wish I could. Sounds like fun,” he said, sipping his pils beer.

“What will you do?” she said, suddenly serious.

“Introduce you to people less willing to let you lie than I am. Trust me, you won’t like it.”

“I believe you,” she said. She exhaled a stream of smoke and looked around the bar. It was dark, crowded, and noisy, and a number of football fans were arguing loudly about the upcoming match between the leading Dutch rivals, Ajax and Feyenoord. “I could make a scene.”

“Not a good idea.”

She looked into his gray eyes, and whatever she saw made her go cold inside.

“You’re right,” she said. “It wasn’t a story. Islamic extremism is my enemy. You know that. You were at the demonstration, weren’t you?”

He nodded.

“I thought I had seen you,” she said. “There was something going on at the mosque. For weeks I’d been getting hints, e-mails, tweets, Muslims not from Hamburg coming and going. Something was about to happen. I could feel it. I was thinking maybe a terroristischen attack. Then tonight the alarm went off and you came out and I decided to follow. I thought you were a terrorist. When you first grabbed me, I thought you were going to kill me. Maybe you still are,” she added softly.

“Ja — and if Ajax loses Suarez as striker?! Then what?” a red-faced Dutchman at the bar wearing the Ajax team colors, red and white, demanded loudly.

“That call I made before,” Scorpion said, referring to a cell phone call he had made earlier, while they were still driving to Amsterdam. “I’m waiting to hear.”

“You’ll let me go?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”

“You could let me go right now. You could let me just stand up and walk out the door and no harm. You could do it,” she said, her hand resting on her handbag as if she were getting ready to leave.

“Drink your beer. Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

“You’re scaring me. I thought you liked me.”

“Flirting too. You’re putting on quite a show. Too bad we both know this isn’t personal,” he said. “What were you doing outside the Islamisches Masjid in the middle of the night-and please don’t tell me again you were waiting for a story to drop into your lap. We’re past the Girl Journalist Makes Good phase.”

“I told you. They’re up to something. I thought you were one of them. I’m beginning to think you really are.”

“Let’s go,” he said, standing.

She looked up. “Where are we going?”

“To get a room,” he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her close.

“Is that what this is?” she asked, looking into his eyes.

“I need to sleep. So do you. By morning we’ll know more,” he said, helping her into her Burberry.

Holding her by the arm, they left the bar. He hailed a taxi and told the driver to take them to the Rosseburt; the Red Light District. The driver dropped them off on a walking street with thinning groups of men and a few lingering tourists viewing the rows of red-lit windows filled with women in sexy lingerie and stockings. The windows cast a neon-red glow into the street. It was late. The night was cool and smelled of beer and hashish. Street hustlers selling drugs approached them and Scorpion shook them off.

“You already have me. How many women do you need?” Najla said as they walked by the windows where young women posed and beckoned male passersby.

“For the moment, none. You’re a complication, not an asset,” he said, pulling her into a sex shop. They went to the S amp;M section, where he picked out handcuffs, restraints, a leather gag, and a roll of duct tape.

“You are getting stranger by the minute.” She looked around at the leather restraints, masks, and whips. “In case you’re wondering, I’m not into this,” she said.

“Well, we don’t know what kind of a girl you really are, do we?” he said, paying for what he had picked out and then grabbing a taxi that took them to an inexpensive hotel near the Dam Square parking structure where he’d left the BMW. He checked them in using a Canadian passport that identified him as an engineer from Toronto named John Crane.

“Is that what I call you? Herr Crane?” she said as they stepped into the small hotel room smelling faintly of disinfectant. “Or maybe John. Like I am the prostitute and you are the john, ja?”

“Take off your clothes. Down to your underthings,” he ordered, tossing the sex paraphernalia on the bed.

“Why?” She stood in the middle of the room, her raincoat open, looking trapped.

“Because you don’t want your clothes wrinkled. You don’t have a change,” he said, taking off his jacket.

“You see. We play our roles. You are the john and I… Who am I in this little schauspiel? I am not Frau Crane, am I?” she said, tossing her raincoat on the chair before unzipping and taking off her dress and shoes, till she was down to panties and bra. “Now I look like one of those girls in the windows. Is this what you wanted?” she asked, striking a provocative pose.

In spite of himself, Scorpion felt his body respond. She was petite and lovely and she didn’t have to pose in order to look incredibly sexy. “Turn around,” he said, and pulling her hands behind her, put the handcuffs on.

“Bitte, you don’t have to do this,” she told him, turning her head.

“I can’t trust you,” he said. He put the leather gag in her mouth and secured it. “And I need the sleep.”

He helped her into the bed and under the covers, then took off his clothes down to his undershorts, got in next to her and turned out the light. The room was dark, except for light coming in the window from a streetlight outside. He could feel the warmth of her next to him, and it was difficult not to think about sex. It was going to be hard to fall asleep. He was about to close his eyes when he felt her moving against him. At first he wasn’t sure what was happening, and then he understood and turned and looked at her. Her eyes above the gag were wide and luminous from the light reflected from the window. He removed the gag.

“Are you sure you want this?” he whispered.

“God yes. Don’t you see me? Don’t you have any idea what you’re doing to me?”

He grabbed her face in his hand.

“Can I trust you enough to untie you?” he said.

“You don’t have to untie me. I’m helpless. You can do anything you want with me,” she whispered, moving her pelvis against his thigh. He touched her breasts, so smooth and silky to the touch, and felt her lips on his neck and down to his chest and belly. He pulled off his shorts and felt her mouth on him, making him crazy and rock hard, and he wasn’t sure he could hold it. When he could barely stand it, she pulled away.

“Take off my panties. Do you have something?” she gasped.

“A minute,” he said, and got the condom. A minute later he was inside her, going at her like he could never get enough.

“Gott!” she cried, and it came blindingly fast and was over.

They lay beside each other, catching their breath.

“I’m sorry it was so fast,” he said.

“Next time, you will take your time,” she replied, burying her lips against his neck. She kissed him, and then he felt her working her way down his body with her lips, taking him in her mouth, and for a moment he was stabbed with doubt at putting himself into such a vulnerable position with her, and then, incredibly, he was hard as a rock again.

He turned her over and came at her, this time taking his time and going on and on till she was moving her hips and moaning into the pillow, and this time when it came, she was pushing back against him as hard as he was pushing into her. He turned her around and kissed her, their tongues seeking each other, her lips so soft. Then he pulled away, because he knew he was losing control; the effect she had on him was unbelievable.

Just before falling asleep the thought came to him that with her hands tied behind her, it was as close to rape as he had ever come.

“S it down. Don’t turn on the light,” Scorpion said, showing him the gun. The dwarf, Hassan Tassouni aka Ali, started for the door, but stopped when he heard Scorpion cock the hammer of the HK pistol he had bought in Germany.

“Ik heb niet veel geld,” the dwarf said.

“I don’t speak Nederlands. Speak in English or Arabic. Turn on the table lamp, no other lights,” Scorpion said.

The little man climbed up on a high stool by the small table and turned on the lamp, then sat, elbows on the table, his face in his hands. “Godverdomme. I knew this day would come. I should’ve killed myself,” Tassouni said. He had a flat, squashed dwarf’s face covered with a sparse reddish beard.

“Why? What did you do?” Scorpion asked. He sat on a threadbare sofa, which apart from the table and chair and a rumpled futon in the corner, was the only furniture in the apartment. The room was filled with the dwarf’s artworks, jagged sculptures vaguely reminiscent of twisted human limbs made of junkyard pipes, cables, and jagged wires resembling muscles and nerve endings, painted red and overlaid with random Arabic letters in white. The walls were covered with pasted newspapers and magazine pages spray-painted with the same random Arabic letters. The walk-up apartment was cold and smelled of fish, metal, paint, and water from the nearby Lijnbaansgracht Canal. In Amsterdam’s art world, Scorpion had learned, Tassouni had a small but growing reputation as a serious artist.

It had only taken him a few hours to find the dwarf. In the morning, after his normal morning workout, two hundred push-ups in four minutes, one hundred sit-ups in two minutes, twenty pull-ups by his fingers from the door lintel molding, he dressed and got coffee, water, and almond pastries from the corner cafe. Returning to his room, he and Najla had breakfast at a small table next to the window. The only view was of another building, and the morning light was gray, as if it might rain.

“I’m letting you go,” he said. “Story’s over. You’re free. Go back to Germany.”

She looked down at her coffee. She wore just a top and panties, her hair still bed-tousled, and he thought she was heartbreakingly beautiful and sexy.

“What if I don’t want to go?” she said, still not looking up.

“I don’t know where you fit in all this. I’m breaking every protocol in the business. I was planning to leave you tied up in here, because even that’s better than some of the other alternatives I have to think about.”

“I could help,” she said softly, looking at him with those incredible aquamarine eyes.

“No.” He shook his head. “Either you’re mixed up in this or you aren’t. If you are, you’re too dangerous to have you with me. If you’re not, it’s too dangerous for you. Either way, you’re either going back to Germany or I tie you up all day in this room till I get you vetted.”

“What about last night?”

“Last night I found out just how close to losing control with you I am. It’s because of last night that I’m letting you go. Go on, get out,” he said in a voice he didn’t recognize as his own.

She stood up, and it was all he could do not to grab her. She was close enough for him to still smell sex and the smell of her.

“You think I don’t know you are some kind of policeman or spy? What if I am involved? What if you are letting an enemy go free?”

“Others will find you. It won’t be me and it won’t be pleasant,” he said in the thick voice that didn’t seem to belong to him. It wasn’t much of a choice, he thought. Even if he left her tied up, there was a good chance the femme de chambre would free her before he could get back.

“You really are a cold bastard, aren’t you?” she said, angrily grabbing her clothes and pulling them on.

“Tell me you never exploited some poor bastard’s personal tragedy for a two-minute TV network feed? We’re all bastards,” he said. “It’s a bastard world.”

Two hours later he rode a rented bicycle to an RDV with someone named Piet De Jong of the Dutch Secret Intelligence Service, the AIVD. They met on a bridge over the Herengracht Canal. The water was cool and gray, reflecting clouds that promised rain. The canal along this section of the Herengracht was lined with trees and houseboats, and the outdoor setting and passing boat traffic made it less likely a sound receiver could pick up their conversation. They stood beside each other at the railing, gazing down at their reflections in the water. De Jong took his time stuffing and lighting his pipe.

“His name is Hassan Tassouni. Moroccan. An artist. Quite a good one, according to those who are supposed to know about such things. Here’s his address,” De Jong said in accented English, passing him a slip of paper. “Not a bad address.”

“That didn’t take long,” Scorpion said.

“Well, a Muslim dwarf in the Jordaan,” De Jong said. “You made it easy for us.”

“What else?”

“He doesn’t fit the usual profile. More likely to frequent the brown bars and the bordeels in De Wallen than a mosque. Then perhaps eight months ago he shows on the radar at the Moroccan Islamic Center in Osdorp.”

“You keep a close eye on them?”

“You know what we are dealing with in Nederland,” De Jong said, puffing on his pipe. “After two months going to the mosque, he is never there again. There was something about a woman.”

“Who was she?”

“A Muslim woman in hijab. There are a million of them.” He shrugged. “Peters said you would not share.”

Peters was the CIA station chief in Amsterdam. It was why he had hesitated about using Company resources to track Tassouni down. Given a day or two, he would have found the dwarf without them. As De Jong had said, finding a Muslim dwarf in the Jordaan district shouldn’t be that difficult, but the time factor was burning him. Somewhere, he knew, the Palestinian was en route to whatever was about to happen, and by now he would have heard about what happened in Damascus. Every second was beginning to count.

“No,” Scorpion said. “I won’t share.”

“It does not seem like good partners. We tell you, but you tell nothing. In Nederland we have many rules,” De Jong said, his eyes searching Scorpion’s face. “You do not seem a man for rules.”

“Did Peters tell you that?”

“No. That is my own judgment,” De Jong said. Scorpion looked at him: business suit, tall, sturdy, fair-haired; someone who did his job by the book.

“I’m not gezellig?” Scorpion smiled, using the word for cozy, comfortable, the Dutch ideal.

“Definitely not gezellig. I have the feeling you will deal with this Moroccan on your own and leave us to clean up the mess, Heer Crane,” De Jong said, deliberately using Scorpion’s current cover name to let him know they were aware of him. Before he left Holland, he would jettison it, he decided.

“What about his communications? Computer?”

“So far as we can tell, he doesn’t have one. Either old fashioned or he doesn’t want his communications tracked. And you haven’t answered my question. Amsterdam is not your, how you say, kinderbox, for children’s play.”

“Peters should’ve explained. I don’t exist. There are no rules.”

“And the artist? He is a Nederland citizen.”

“Stay away from him,” Scorpion said, walking away, toward where he had left his bicycle.

“Our patience is not unlimited,” De Jong called after him.

“Neither is mine. I don’t have a lot of time,” Scorpion called back as he got on the bike.

That afternoon in Osdorp near the Westhaven harbor, over a trade for cocaine with two members of the Moroccan Smitstraat street gang, Scorpion tried to find out about the dwarf’s girl.

“Who was she?” he asked. They were speaking in standard Fusha Arabic.

“Some girl. I don’t remember the name,” the Moroccan said. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, typical of heavy hashish use. “This is good coca.” He held up the plastic-wrapped packet. “Listen, you want ice-o-lator hashish? They use this ice water method makes the hashish so pure, you think you die it’s so good.”

“About the girl?” Scorpion asked.

“Doesn’t matter now,” the other Moroccan said, his eyes darting around the coffee shop, filled with the smell of marijuana and hashish. It was near the overpass to the port, a bare place with Formica tables for foreign dockworkers and local gangs to stop in for a quick high. The other Moroccan was the twitchy one; the one to keep an eye on, Scorpion thought.

“Why?”

“Someone killed her. Dood, Brother. Pretty girl, nice, then batoom,” he said, pointing his finger and making a sound like a gunshot.

“Who did it?”

The hashish user shrugged. “Who knows? Her family, maybe.”

“They didn’t want her to see the dwarf?”

“It looked stupid,” the twitchy one said. “She was, you know, tall for a girl. Her with that ugly little fatah!”

“I saw them at the mosque,” the hashish user said. “He was too old for her too. She was young. College girl. Nice, not some shlicke slut.”

“How’d they get together?”

The twitchy one stood up. He put one of his hands in his pocket.

“Shem et Duat!” Go to hell! “Who cares about this zarba? You want to buy or not, ya khawal?”

“Wait! We’re doing business, right?” the hashish user said.

“Kess emmak,” Scorpion said, insulting the twitchy one’s mother. As the twitchy one started to pull a Spanish folding knife out of his pocket, Scorpion grabbed his wrist in the Krav Maga move, making him cry out in pain, and took the knife away.

“Neem het buiten!” the burly Dutch counterman shouted, pulling out a police club from under the counter. Take it outside! “Nu!” Now! The dockworkers at other tables, some Dutch, some foreign, turned to watch. The hashish user’s eyes blinked rapidly. Suddenly, he stuffed the cocaine in his pocket and ran out. By the time Scorpion and the twitchy one got outside, he was running down the street.

“The coca’s gone. There’s nothing to fight about,” Scorpion said.

“Give me my knife,” the twitchy one said.

Scorpion flung it across the street.

The Moroccan shouted in Arabic that Scorpion’s mother had committed adultery with a thousand monkeys as he ran to retrieve his knife, but by then Scorpion was already down the block, pedaling away on his bicycle.

“L ook at me,” the dwarf said. “One of Allah’s jokes. Bitter, a cynic. Never go to a mosque. Religion’s a farce. I despise people; the ones who mock me and my art, and I hate even more the ones who feel sorry for me and pretend not to see the grotesqueness of a grown man in this ridiculous misshapen child’s-size body. The only women I’ve ever been with are whores. So who should I love? Tell me, who should I love if not the most beautiful, most innocent, young, tall, slender, gentle, exquisite creature who ever lived?! It was my fate.”

“One of Allah’s ironies,” Scorpion said, glancing around the apartment. He had searched it before the dwarf came home. He found nothing except a photo of Tassouni with a tall young woman wearing a hijab in a park, and in the trash, two torn night train tickets on successive days from the Amsterdam Central Station to Utrecht.

“She had come to an exhibit where my work was appearing. I didn’t know why she was there. It is haraam for Muslims to make images, so of course they despise me, and yet there she was, in a hijab no less. But we spoke and she was so gentle and her face was like an angel. So beautiful, like Christ’s mother in her perfect youthful moment of illumination. I had to have her. I had to paint her. Can you understand? It was beyond idolatry. She was more than art. She was the thing itself. The thing that art in its clumsy, self-glorified way tries to get at.”

“You were obsessed.”

“Obsession is a small word. She was my soul. Until I met her, I didn’t believe in souls or any of that kak, but there she was. She talked to me. We held hands. We walked and talked in Vondelpark. I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly see in me. I was too old, too small and grotesque, too ugly, not pious. It was impossible, but I didn’t care. I dreamed of her. I thought of nothing but her. Her face, her smell, her touch. I had to have her. I would have done anything. Murder, anything. And then they told me what they wanted.”

“Who was it?”

“Her uncle. Her father’s brother. An elder in the mosque. And another. I never knew his name.”

“Why you?”

“Exactly,” Tassouni said, pouring them both glasses of Dutch jenever gin that he had gotten from the refrigerator. “Sante!”

“Sante,” Scorpion toasted, and sipped the gin. The little man swallowed his in a gulp, poured himself another and downed that as well.

“I asked them. They said the mosque had been infiltrated by informers for the Dutch. They needed someone no one would ever suspect. Someone not religious or who even gave a kak about the Muslim community. What difference did it make?”

“You would have done anything.”

“Anything. If they had told me to put on a suicide vest and kill half of Amsterdam, I would have done it.”

“They promised her to you.”

“Suggested. They said they would not object. For a Muslim girl, that is much.”

“And she-what was her name?”

“Salima. They killed her,” Tassouni said, staring into space.

“For ikram?” Family honor?

“I don’t know. For being defiled just kissing me on the cheek once that day in the park. For knowing too much. What difference? They’re coming for me now,” the little man said, emptying the glass and pouring himself another.

“How do you know?”

“What do you think? They’re going to kill her who was so innocent and leave me alive?”

“I can help you,” Scorpion said.

“How? By bringing her back to life? That’s the only way you can help me,” he said.

“What did you do for them?”

“Carried messages. I would pick them up in a place and leave them in another place. I would put them behind a loose brick in an alley wall or under a specific seat in a cinema, places like that.”

“Dead drops, they’re called. Did you go to Utrecht?”

“So you know already. I wasn’t even good at that,” Tassouni said.

“Where in Utrecht?”

“Different places. Once near the university. Most were in the Kanaleneiland district.”

“Muslim neighborhoods?”

“Obviously,” Tassouni grimaced.

“What were they? Moroccan? Turkish? Farsi?”

“Maghrebi. You could smell the cinnamon and cumin in the streets.”

“What did the messages say? Did you read any of them?” Scorpion’s cell phone vibrated.

“I don’t know. They were all in some kind of code,” Tassouni said.

His phone vibrated again. He took it out and looked at the text message. It was from the default number and read: 000. It was in response to his Internet cafe query to the International Corn website on Najla Kafoury. It meant they had come up empty. They would have run checks on her through all the U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies, Interpol, the German BND and Bundespolizei, and the response indicated they had found no alerts or evidence of criminal, intelligence, or radical Islamic connections. Too late, he thought. He had let her go.

“I have to go. You have to come with me. You’re not safe here,” Scorpion said, motioning with the gun.

“No, I’ll stay here. You can shoot me,” Tassouni said. “Do it now. Without her…” He looked at Scorpion. “Better to shoot.”

“I can make you come.”

“Then I stop talking. It’s not worth it for you. A man who doesn’t care if he dies can be very difficult.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“They kill me, you kill me. What difference?”

“I have to take care of something, but I’ll be back. Keep the door locked. Don’t let anyone in till I return,” Scorpion said, getting up. He had to find out about Najla. He had left her in the hotel room, washing her hair in the bathroom.

“Why should I trust you? I don’t know you. You come in with a gun-and listen to a fool’s story.”

“Because I’m the only one, including you, who wants you alive.”

“Then that makes two of us who are fools.”

“Lock the door. If anyone comes, no matter how well you know them or what reason they give you, don’t let them in. I’ll be back soon,” Scorpion said, opening the door.

He left the dwarf staring into his drink, and waited in the dimly lit hallway till he heard the door lock. He pulled a hair from his head and wrapped it from the doorknob to a screw he loosened in the doorjamb as a simple trap. He left his bicycle by the apartment house rack to help discourage anyone who might show up, by letting them think Tassouni had company, and caught a taxi back to the hotel. On the way, he tried calling her cell phone-he had taken the number off the phone in her purse in the morning before he got breakfast-but she wasn’t using it and it went immediately to voice mail.

He thought about it in the taxi. Langley had cleared her, but he didn’t buy it. Najla had earned her chops as a TV reporter, yet according to the BND and Bundespolizei, she didn’t have a single questionable contact. He’d been with her. She was smart and tough and hadn’t done it all on her looks. And it still didn’t explain why she’d followed him after staking out the mosque in the middle of the night. Langley was missing something. Being a reporter was classic cover for an operative, he thought. He had made a mistake letting her go. The sex had colored his judgment. He had to find her again, and if he were honest with himself, wanted to see her again.

Night had fallen, the lights of the city blurred by a drizzle. He could smell the canals. Going by the Dam Square in the taxi, the Royal Palace with its cupola, the Nieuwe Kerk church and the tall pillar of the National Monument were brightly lit. They gleamed wetly in the rain. The restaurants and the brown bars were open, and despite the weather, the streets were filled with people out having a good time. Back at the hotel, he raced back up to the room. The prive card he had put into the card key lock was gone. When he opened the door, the room was empty.

There was no sign of Najla. He searched the room carefully. There was nothing of hers, and so far as he could see, no bugs or traps left behind. She had gone through his carry-on; the way he’d arranged the location of things, like his disposable razor and toothbrush, had all been moved. She couldn’t have found out anything about him anyway. His important things-passports, money, laptop, extra cell phones, and such-were all locked in the roll-on carry-on he had taken from the BMW and put into a locker in the train station before moving the BMW to the station’s car park. The room was clean and the bed was made, so the chambermaid had come in. The sexual restraints he had used to tie her up were gone. She was really gone, he thought, acknowledging that he’d been hoping she would have waited for him, although he still had no way to know whether she was just a journalist who went back to Germany or part of whatever the Islamic Resistance still had going on. With a jolt, he realized that his body physically missed the touch of her. The whole thing felt strange, and he still had to get back to the dwarf. There was something wrong, and he didn’t know what it was as he went down to the lobby.

“The woman I was with, did she check out? Did she leave anything?” he asked the young man behind the desk. The man said something in Dutch to the young woman beside him, also wearing the hotel’s blue jacket.

“No, meneer. She left earlier today, but she left no message,” the young woman said.

“Was she with anyone?”

“I did not see, meneer,” the young woman said.

“It happens, meneer,” the young man said sympathetically, automatically assuming he was dealing with a jilted lover.

Scorpion nodded and headed out to the car park by the train station. He’d need the car and some of the things in it in case he had to evacuate Tassouni. On the drive to the dwarf’s apartment, he decided there were only two options. Either Langley was right and Najla had nothing to do with the Palestinian and was heading back to her normal life in Hamburg, glad to be free and out of jeopardy, or she was somehow involved in this and was searching the city for him or the dwarf. He pulled up to the corner of the street of Tassouni’s apartment building and parked the car illegally at the corner. One way or another, he wouldn’t be there long.

He took his time approaching the building, scanning the parked cars and the street and the rooflines. The street was quiet except for a small party in one of the ground floor apartments, the light and sounds of voices spilling out, cobblestones glistening from the drizzle. The approach to the building looked clean, but that meant nothing. There were lights in one of the windows, but not on the third floor, where Tassouni’s apartment was. He picked the front door lock and eased inside, walking carefully up the stairs to the apartment door. The hallway light was dim and there was no sound. He checked for the hair trap. It was broken. Someone had gone inside.

Scorpion took out his gun and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still nothing. He didn’t think the dwarf had gone out again. His instincts were telling him it was a trap. It’s just nerves, he told himself. Najla had thrown him off. Langley was right. If she’d been involved in anything, they would’ve found it. Except he remembered something Koenig had said once. “When you don’t find anything on someone, in our line of work we call it ‘deep cover.’” He looked at the doorknob, afraid to touch it. He had to get in to see Tassouni; the little man was his only lead. Except his one certainty about his adversary was that he knew how to make bombs.

He went back out to the BMW, got the roll of duct tape from the trunk and went back to Tassouni’s apartment. He wrapped the tape around the doorknob and unrolled it until he was down the stairs and the hallway and well away from the apartment. Then he took a breath and pulled.

The explosion was deafening, slamming him against the wall. It rocked the building. He could smell flames and smoke as he raced back up the stairs to the shattered apartment. Two fingers of a small human hand were lying on the hallway floor. He could feel the heat of the flames coming from the door opening, what was left of the door hanging from a single hinge. He raced through the building knocking on doors, screaming, “Help! Vier! Politie!” Fire! Police! He heard people shouting and moving as he ran out of the building and back to the BMW. In the distance he could hear the horns of approaching fire engines.

Scorpion drove out of Amsterdam toward the A2 highway, the windshield wipers beating steadily against the drizzle. Along the way, he stopped in Zuid-Oost, broke the cell phone he had used in Amsterdam into pieces, and dropped them in different sections of a canal near the center of town. On the E35 to Utrecht, he realized he’d have to find an Internet cafe and let Harris know the mission had gone off the rails. He had a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. He shouldn’t have let Najla go. Now she was gone, the dwarf-their only lead-was dead, and worse, the opposition was onto him. The hunter had become the hunted.