Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ciutat Vella,

Barcelona, Spain

Scorpion sat over coffee and an omelet bocadillo sandwich at an outdoor cafe, tables lit by candles under the arches of a quiet square with trees, the Placa Vicenc Martorell. The night was clear, and with the arches and the candles, it seemed medieval, for all that it was only a few blocks from the noisy, crowded Las Ramblas. From somewhere, someone’s radio or iPod, came music, an enticing mix of flamenco, dub, and hip-hop that was uniquely Catalan. He was there to meet with Juan Marchena, an agent from the CNI, the Spanish intelligence service.

Shaefer had set up the RDV and it looked like the Spanish would cooperate. Going through Passport Control at Barcelona’s El Prat airport, the female Immigration agent checked his Richard Cahill Canadian passport, checked again, and asked him to wait. Two armed Spanish CNP uniformed officers appeared and asked him to follow. They led him to an office, handed his passport back to him and told him he could go, pointing to a side door. There would be no record of his ever having been in Spain.

Except Marchena hadn’t showed. The waiting was getting to him. In his hotel room, getting ready to come to the RDV, he had caught the latest news on television. Iranian foreign minister Gayeghrani was shown at a news conference, stating that not only was Iran innocent of any complicity in the attack on the American embassy in Switzerland, but if Iran detected any coercive or military action against it, they would not hesitate to act.

“We will not wait for the American Satan and their yapping dogs, the imperialist British and the Zionists, to attack the innocent Iranian people. If America dares consider action, Iran will strike first,” he declared.

They were running out of time, and for all he knew, he was chasing a ghost called the “Gardener.” The whole thing didn’t add up. If this Gardener was a major spymaster, how was it that no one had ever heard of him? Even more puzzling was the question Harris had hinted at: Why would the Gardener-if he even existed and was behind the Bern attack-want to provoke the world’s military superpower into attacking his own country? To use Harris’s catch phrase: “Where’s the profit?”

He sat an extra twenty minutes, growing more frustrated by the second, and was about to leave when a young woman who looked like a college student in shorts, carrying a backpack, brushed by his table and, as she passed, murmured in English, “Go left on Carrer de les Ramelleres to Elisabets.”

Scorpion watched her walk to a line of parked motor scooters, hop on one and take off on the narrow street bordering the plaza. He left money on the table and walked according to her instructions in the opposite direction toward the corner, where he stood and waited. A blue Seat Ibiza, a compact crossover SUV, stopped next to him and the rear door opened.

“Get in,” a stocky man in his sixties in the backseat said in English, beckoning him. Scorpion checked the street, then got into the SUV, which immediately took off down the narrow street. They went around the block several times, making turns to make sure no one was following, before heading toward Las Ramblas.

“Buenas tardes, Scorpion-” the man began.

“Where’s Marchena?” he interrupted, crossing his leg so his hand rested on his lower calf, near the hidden ankle holster with the Glock 28 pistol. They drove past lit shop windows and cafes, and the closer they got to Las Ramblas, the more it seemed like everyone in Barcelona was out in the streets. The driver, a fit-looking young man, had to honk a number of times to squeeze the SUV past people walking on the narrow cobblestoned street.

“How do you know I’m not Marchena? You never met him,” the man said.

“Your accent is Israeli, not to mention your lack of a Castilian lisp or any hint of Catalan when you said-or should have said-‘Bona tarda,’ not ‘Buenas tardes.’ So you’re not CNI. But you are in intelligence, and judging by your age, fairly senior. So what the hell is the Mossad doing in the middle of this?” Scorpion said, hand resting casually on top of his ankle gun.

“You see?” the man said to the driver, as if he had just proved a point he’d been trying to make. “I understand now your reputation,” he added, his eyes on Scorpion’s hand resting near his ankle. The driver’s eyes watched them in the rearview mirror. “Call me Avram,” the man said to Scorpion. “It’s not my real name, but then neither is yours. Is it, Mr. Cahill?” he said, using the cover name on Scorpion’s Canadian passport.

“Why don’t I call you, Yuval? Yuval Ofer, head of the Mossad,” Scorpion said. Who else, he guessed, would have knowledge of a Special Access operation or know his CIA 201 code name, Scorpion?

“Better still,” the man smiled, “Yuval.”

“Now that we’re all buddies, what do you want?” Scorpion said.

“To help,” Yuval said as they turned right onto the wide Las Ramblas, in the direction of the port. The kiosks on the promenade that ran down the center of the boulevard were brightly lit. The pedestrian area was crowded with people, street musicians and performers, tourists, Gypsies, pickpockets and thieves, stalls selling flowers and souvenirs, music blasting from loudspeakers; the human parade under strands of lights strung between the trees.

“Why?”

Yuval shrugged. “We’re allies, after all. Mind?” he said, pulling a crumpled cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.

“Go wave the flag at somebody else. What do you want?” Scorpion said.

“I understand,” Youval said after lighting the cigarette. “Top Secret Special Access op, and all of a sudden another player steps on the field. Except when it comes to the attack on the embassy, we’re all thinking the same thing, aren’t we? Iran. And that, you must admit, concerns my little part of the world,” he added, picking a tobacco shred from the tip of his tongue.

“Not my problem,” Scorpion said, looking ahead. As they approached the port, the buildings were grander, more baroque, and on the promenade there were outdoor cafes under awnings strung with lights.

“No. Mohammad Karif is your problem,” Yuval said.

“Who’s he?”

“Someone we’ve had our eye on. An engineer, graduated with honors from the Universitat de Barcelona-and don’t tell me. I’m sure I didn’t pronounce it right,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke.

“And I should care because. .?”

“He’s Kta’eb Hezbollah. At least we believe so.”

Scorpion was instantly alert. It had been a contact code from Kta’eb Hezbollah that first alerted Rabinowich to Norouzi in Zurich in the first place. It meant either the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were indeed behind the embassy attack or-and this was the dangerous part-that their focus on Kta’eb Hezbollah was leading them from a single assumption further down the wrong path, And no way to know which was right. He wouldn’t put it past the Israelis to do that for their own purposes.

“Where’s this coming from? Who got Shaefer to set this little drive up?” Scorpion said. “Tell me now or I’m getting out. Was it Soames? You!” Calling out to the driver. “Stop the car.”

Ahead, a wide area fronting the marina and the sea was brightly lit, with massive columned government buildings and traffic circling the base of a column at least fifty meters high, topped by a large statue with an outstretched arm pointing out to sea. The driver slowed to pull over. Someone behind them honked his horn.

“That’s Columbus,” Yuval said, indicating the statue as the SUV turned right, heading, according to the sign, toward the Placa Drassanes and the port. “They say that’s the spot he landed when he came back from discovering America.”

“Just pull over anywhere,” Scorpion said, and put his hand on the door handle to get out.

“No, it was Dave. David Rabinowich,” Yuval said.

Scorpion settled back in his seat. It meant Rabinowich had been liaising with the Israelis, which neither Harris or Shaefer had told him. Need to know and all that Company baloney, he thought. Except he was the one on the line-and not knowing there was another player in the game could get him killed.

“Why?” he said.

Yuval said something in Hebrew to the driver and they started moving with the traffic again, down a wide palm-lined street parallel to the port.

“For years we’ve been warning Washington that the Iranians were creating resources in Europe and the U.S. to use against America and her allies,” Yuval said. “Dave’s one of the few who paid attention. Now it’s come.” He lit a new cigarette from the first and crushed the burning end of the first out on his thumbnail with fingers stained yellow by nicotine. He caught Scorpion looking at his hands. “I know,” he said. “These things will kill me. But given the fact I live in the Middle East, the odds are something else will kill me first.”

“Who’s this Karif?” Scorpion said.

“Smart, serious. A Bahraini, from Manama.”

“Shiite? Opposes the Al-Khalifas?” Scorpion asked. If Karif was a Shiite opposing the Bahraini ruling Al-Khalifa family, Sunnis allied with Sunni Saudi Arabia, it would make him an obvious recruiting target for either the Iranian MOIS or the Kta’eb Hezbollah; particularly since Bahrain served as the key base in the Persian Gulf for the U.S. Navy.

Yuval nodded. “He lives in Les Corts. Doing his MBA at ESADE.”

“And that matters because why?” Scorpion asked as they drove around a roundabout. On the left a big cruise ship docked at the port was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Listen,” Yuval said. He held up a cell phone. Then Scorpion heard it again. The same German sentence in the same woman’s voice he had been going over and over in his head since Zurich. Norouzi’s mistress saying, “Sagen Sie dem Gartner, muss das Gras zu schneiden.” Tell the Gardener, the grass needs to be cut. “We recorded this earlier today on Karif’s phone.”

Scorpion looked at the Israeli. If they recorded it, it meant they had Karif bugged.

“Who’s the Gardener?” he asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Yuval said.

Scorpion shook his head. “What indicator do you have that Karif’s working for Kta’eb Hezbollah?”

“This man,” Yuval said, pulling an iPad out of his briefcase and turning it on. He scrolled till he found the photo of a smallish man in a rumpled suit, unshaven, with what looked like outsize hands. He was talking to someone on what appeared to be a European street, but because a fraction of a billboard at the edge of the photograph advertised Bonjus, a popular Lebanese juice drink, Scorpion assumed it was taken in Beirut. “Our agent-”

“Where? Beirut?”

Yuval smiled. “Good,” he said appreciatively. “Yes, Beirut. Our man heard him called ‘Said Dekhil Flauban.’ We suspect he was involved in the Ghanem assassination a few years back. Inside Hezbollah, mention of the Flauben is associated with Kta’eb Hezbollah.”

Scorpion’s mind was going a mile a minute. Said Dekhil Flauban was Arabic for the saw-scaled snake, the deadliest snake in the Middle East. Ghanem had been the Lebanese prime minister assassinated by a terrorist bomb that everyone assumed had been planted by Hezbollah. What Yuval was also telling him was that the Israelis had a mole inside Hezbollah in Lebanon. It was the only way they could have known about the Snake.

“What connects this ‘Snake’ to this guy Karif?”

“Karif was in Beirut at the same time. Apparently meeting with Salim Kassem. I believe you may have encountered him,” Yuval said carefully. “That’s how we got onto Karif in the first place.”

Scorpion understood. His encounter with Salim had been during the Palestinian operation. Salim was Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of Al-Majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. Ghanem could not have been assassinated without Salim’s involvement. Yuval was saying his Lebanese mole tied Salim and Hezbollah to both the Snake and Karif.

“Why come to me?” he asked. “Why am I so deserving?”

Yuval nodded as if he understood Scorpion’s cynicism. Intelligence services only liaised because they had to, and they never gave anything away for free.

“Two things,” he said, staring ahead at the traffic. They had turned from the port and were heading up Avinguda del Parallel, a broad avenue bordered by apartment buildings and stores. “First, we’re limited here. The Spanish don’t like us.”

“Not since Cast Lead,” Scorpion said, referring to the 2009 Israeli military incursion into Gaza, when there had been massive demonstrations in Madrid against Israel.

“Not since the Spanish Inquisition.” Yuval grimaced, a sour expression on his face as he gestured for the driver to pull over. They stopped at a spot not far from a Metro station. “This is your operation. Also, Ahmad Harandi. It wasn’t his real name, of course. It was Avi. Avi Benayoun. He had a wife and daughter in Netanya. We appreciate what you tried to do.”

The Israeli mole in Hamburg, Scorpion thought, feeling a stab of regret, recalling their last meeting on the ferry. He had liked Harandi and failed to save him. It wasn’t a victory.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he said.

“No,” Yuval agreed. “Here,” handing him a flash drive. “Everything we have on Karif. Photos, address, even a video. Everything.”

“Including spy software. A Trojan horse perhaps?”

Yuval smiled. “You have a suspicious mind.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Scorpion said, pocketing the flash drive and putting his hand on the door handle. “You’re out of it,” he told Yuval, getting out of the SUV. “Keep your people away. If I see an unknown on the field, as far as I’m concerned it’s the opposition. I’ll kill him, understood?”

Yuval raised his hands, a sign of surrender.

“It’s out of our hands. Kol tov,” he said as Scorpion got out and closed the car door.

Scorpion waited for a moment, watching the SUV pull into traffic and drive away, then turned and headed to the Metro station.

Going down the stairs into the Metro, he kept glancing over his shoulder, though he hadn’t spotted anyone tailing him. He had a prickly feeling at the back of his neck as if something terrible were about to happen. Already on this operation Harandi had been killed and they’d nearly gotten him and Sandrine in Paris. And you couldn’t turn on a TV without hearing war talk. It felt like he was blindfolded on a battlefield, something bad coming at him and he didn’t know what or from which direction, as he stood on the platform and watched the train with a sign that said L3 coming into the station. He had a lead. Karif. But was it a real lead, or were the Israelis pointing him at someone for their own reasons?

It was all coming down to one thing: Who was the Gardener?