Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER TWELVE

Les Corts,

Barcelona, Spain

Karif’s apartment was on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the Les Corts district, a few blocks from the tram stop. Normal protocol would have been to watch Karif and pick him up when he was isolated or go into his apartment when he wasn’t at home and wait for him to show up. But they were up against the clock. Scorpion checked the street one last time. From the get-go they’d been on the defensive, rushed and desperate to pull a rabbit out of the hat so the administration in Washington would be able to prove to the world and, most of all, to the American public, that if they were going to bomb someone, it was justified, and that they had the right bad guys in their gun sights.

He decided to simply knock on the door. If Karif was home, he would try to persuade him that the Gardener had sent him from Tehran. If not, he would pick the lock, black-bag the apartment and wait for him. While on the tram, he had plugged Yuval’s data into his iPad, and after studying half a dozen photos and a blurry eight-second time-stop video, was sure that if he saw Karif-a clean-shaven young man with dark hair and a gap-toothed smile-he would recognize him.

Looking up at the apartment from the street, he couldn’t tell if anyone was home. The curtains were drawn and no light escaped. The street wasn’t busy, only a few people out though it was not yet ten o’clock, early for Barcelona. It was just a normal weeknight in a residential neighborhood, light from a small pasteleria bakery-restaurant spilling into the street.

He used a credit card slipped between the door and the jamb to open the front door of the apartment building. There was a small lobby and an elevator, which he ignored, instead taking the stairs to the sixth floor. He walked down the hallway, stopping at every apartment door to listen. Inside each one he could hear a television, but when he got to Karif’s apartment-listening intently, his ear on the door-there was nothing. No TV, no one talking, no sound of any kind. He reached into his pocket for his Peterson universal key.

Just then the door of the apartment next door opened and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, came out, the sound of a sitcom with a loud laugh track blaring as they closed the door behind them. They looked at Scorpion curiously. Quickly improvising, he nodded at them and knocked on the door, unable even to put a hand behind him on the Glock pistol in the holster at the small of his back. He didn’t expect a response but the door suddenly opened.

It wasn’t Karif. A burly Iranian-looking man with a thick mustache, wearing a windbreaker, stared back at him. His shoulders were huge. Scorpion would have bet he’d done some wrestling, a national sport in Iran.

“Que quieres?” the burly man said in non-Catalan, heavily accented Spanish. What do you want?

“Where’s Mohammad?” Scorpion said in English, sensing the teenagers walking away down the hallway.

“Here. You coming in,” the man said, his English as bad as his Spanish, opening the door for Scorpion to enter.

He stepped into the apartment and started to turn to confront the man, his hand going back to the gun at the small of his back, when he felt a tremendous blow to the side of his head. For an instant the room tipped sideways, and then he saw nothing.

The first thing he saw was his hand, covered in blood. And then the knife in his hand, dripping blood. He was lying on the carpeted floor. How long had he been out? he wondered. Then the panic hit. The man who hit him might still be there. He jumped to his feet and whirled around, the bloody knife in his hand. He didn’t see him as he ran to the kitchen, holding the knife as far away from him as he could so the blood wouldn’t drip on his clothes. The apartment felt like the man with the mustache had gone.

He dropped the Spanish Navaja-style folding knife into the sink and ran the water, washing the blood off his hand and watching it stain the basin pink. He looked to see where he had been cut but couldn’t find anything. Using dishwashing liquid, he washed his hands, went to the bathroom and dried them off with toilet paper, then flushed the pink-stained paper down the toilet.

He felt for his guns, the one at the small of his back and the one in his ankle holster, which were still there. Odd, he thought. Then it hit him. He wasn’t thinking straight; the blow might have caused a concussion. If he wasn’t cut, where did the blood come from? And how long had he been out?

Checking his watch, he saw that he couldn’t have been out more than a minute or two. Maybe less. His head throbbed and there was a painful lump on the right side at the back. It felt like someone had been using it for a golf ball. Then he pulled the Glock from his back holster and started to go through the apartment.

There was just the living room, the kitchenette, a single bedroom, and a bathroom. A student’s apartment. Cheap furniture, a pile of books, college texts, a laptop on the coffee table in the living room. He inserted a flash drive into the laptop. Its NSA software would suck all the document files, e-mails and contacts, and Internet temporary files and history from the laptop in seconds. Then he saw the bottom of a shoe beside the bed. He crept into the bedroom, ready to fire.

There was no need. Karif was lying on the carpet next to the bed. He recognized the young man immediately from his photos and video. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear, and the carpet where he lay was soaked with blood. Scorpion backed away, trying to keep the blood off his shoes.

What the hell was going on? Did the Israelis set him up? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t exclude the possibility. Or was Kta’eb Hezbollah, the saw-scaled snake maybe, shutting down the network? The call Norouzi’s girlfriend had made about the Gardener was proving fatal for everyone involved, so it was more urgent than ever that Shaefer pull the Gnomes off Norouzi. He would demand it or call Harris at Langley direct himself, he thought. So if it wasn’t the Israelis, then it was unbelievable timing that he had knocked on Karif’s door just after he was killed, before the murderer could get away. If so, why had the murderer left him alive?

From outside he heard the wail of a police siren. More than one. He ran to the living room window and pulled back the edge of the curtain. Two white bullet-shaped police cars had just pulled up in front of the building and police were getting out of the cars. Scorpion stepped back. Either he had been set up or the murderer himself had called it in to cover his tracks. Realizing he only had seconds to get away, he started toward the door, then stopped.

The knife! His fingerprints were on it. He ran to the sink, grabbed the knife and dropped it into his pocket. What else had he touched? The dishwashing liquid. He rubbed it down with the liquid soap and toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet. Had he touched the door handle? No, the killer had opened the door, he thought, as he opened the apartment door with toilet paper.

Scorpion started for the stairs and heard men’s voices and panting as they came up. In a few seconds he’d either be arrested or dead. He ran up the stairs on the tips of his toes. The roof door was locked, but he frantically managed to open it with the Peterson universal key. He stepped out onto the roof, closed the door as quietly as he could behind him, and ran to the edge. The roof of the building next to this one was just a few feet lower. He jumped down and raced across it to the next building. There was a narrow alleyway, perhaps two meters, between the buildings. If he missed, it was a seven-story drop. No other way, he thought, backing up five or six meters.

From behind, he heard sounds and glanced over his shoulder. Two policemen had run out on the roof of Karif’s building, guns drawn. They spotted him.

“Policia! Detente!” one of them shouted in Spanish, telling him to stop, then going into shooting position.

Don’t think about it, he told himself. If he thought about it, he wouldn’t do it. Just as he neared the edge he leaped off his right foot as hard and high as he could, and as he did so, heard a shot and sensed something whiz by his flailing arm.

He sailed over the alleyway, having only the briefest glimpse of the concrete and trash cans far below, and then he landed on the other roof, stumbling and waving his arms for balance. Even before he could right himself he scrambled to the roof door.

It was locked. He felt in his pocket for the Peterson key, glancing back at the other roof, where the two policemen were running across toward the gap between that building and his. He darted a glance over the parapet at the street below. There were at least a half-dozen policemen, hands on guns, watching the front door of Karif’s apartment building, one of them saying something to bystanders, who were starting to gather across the street.

The burly man with the mustache, the one who had clobbered him and had no doubt murdered Karif, was standing with the people on the sidewalk, watching the police. There was still had a chance to get him, he thought, pulling the Peterson key out of his pocket and going to the roof door. He tried the key, giving it a tap to jump the lock. He felt it click but the door still didn’t open. It was jammed. He turned the key and handle and slammed against it with his shoulder. It made a cracking sound but was still jammed. He looked back over at the other roof. There was no more time. Both policemen were lining up to shoot him.

He tried the lock again, slamming against the door with all his might, heard something crack, and then the door banged open with a loud snap. Anyone on the floor below would have heard it. Bullets cracked into the doorpost behind him as he dove through and raced down the staircase, no longer bothering about making noise.

An apartment door near one of the landings popped open and a woman in a robe, her hair up in curlers, popped out. One look at his face and she dived back into her apartment, shutting the door and shouting for her husband. Scorpion jumped down the last few stairs to the ground floor, where the hallway was dark. He left it that way and peered out the glass in the front door, the Glock in his hand inside his jacket pocket.

The crowd of spectators across the street from Karif’s building had grown larger, but he couldn’t spot the mustache guy. Someone upstairs in his building was shouting something. He couldn’t stay there any longer, he realized, and still had the murder weapon in his pocket. For the moment, no one among the spectators and police outside seemed to be looking at this building. They were all looking up at the other roof, where the shots had been fired. Heart pounding, he opened the door and walked slowly, carefully, across the street to the edge of the crowd.

Mustache guy was no longer standing among the spectators. Peering over the heads of other spectators, Scorpion saw the back of a burly man in a tan-colored windbreaker walking toward the corner. One of the police mossos glanced at the burly man but otherwise didn’t react. The mosso looked back toward the crowd and then up at the roof of the building, like the other spectators.

He only had a few seconds to decide. If he tried to push through the crowd to follow, he’d be sure to attract attention. That mosso might be too dumb to do anything now, but if he was to chase Mustache, even the mosso would be able to figure it out. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Mustache turned the corner. Probably headed toward Avinguda Diagonal, he thought, one of the main streets.

Edging away from the crowd, Scorpion walked in the opposite direction, toward the next corner. Checking the reflection in a store window, he saw no one following him and began to believe he might get away when he heard shouts. The police mossos on the roof were pointing at him, and several mossos and spectators on the street were now chasing him. He turned the corner to a street parallel to the one Mustache had gone and ran toward Avinguda Diagonal.

People in the street stared curiously at him as he ran by. He looked around, feeling conspicuous. It was a one-way street of brick apartment houses with shops on the ground floor. There were lights on some of the balconies, where people were eating or drinking despite the cool evening. There was nowhere to get rid of the bloody, incriminating knife. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that no one chasing him had turned the corner yet, but that would change any second and then people on this street would start chasing him as well. He had to change the equation-and fast.

A yellow Seat Mii, a tiny three-door subcompact car, emerged from an apartment building underground parking garage, a young woman at the wheel. As she stopped to check the street traffic, Scorpion ran over and rapped on the driver’s window with the Glock. For an instant, the woman froze. He pointed the gun at her, motioning for her to roll down the window. She hesitated, then complied. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a mosso round the corner and shout, followed by a dozen or more men and mossos.

“Get out!” Scorpion told her in English, and when she didn’t move, shouted “Fuera!” and pressed the Glock’s muzzle to her head.

Eyes wide, she unfastened her seat belt with trembling fingers and opened the car door. Before she could get out, he yanked her from the seat and got in. Scorpion jammed the gear stick into first and took off, turning into the street. He hit the accelerator and upshifted, the little car’s engine revving into the red-line RPMs. In the rearview mirror the running mossos were falling behind, everyone in the street staring at him, but in the distance he could hear the wee-you wee-you of a police car siren in pursuit.

A man on a motorcycle was pulling out between parked cars, and Scorpion hit the horn and the accelerator simultaneously, swerving to squeak by him. With parked cars on both sides of the narrow street, there was only a single lane. Ahead, a Renault sedan was stopped at a traffic light. Scorpion upshifted to the top gear and, horn blaring, turned and bounced up onto the sidewalk, around the Renault, and into the intersection, just missing an oncoming sedan, the driver’s eyes wide with terror. Cross traffic all around him was screeching to a halt, cars crashing into each other and horns blaring as he tore across one street and on down another, which was one-way. Ahead he could see a commercial van stopped, blocking his way.

He swerved diagonally into a no-parking zone and again up onto the sidewalk. Blasting on the horn, he downshifted and dodged to get around pedestrians who froze in place, staring. A man and a woman walking just ahead stopped when they heard the horn as he came right at them. Yanking hard on the wheel, he swerved back into the street, the little car coming up on two wheels, teetering precariously before slamming down onto the pavement. Ahead he could see trees and traffic at the Avinguda Diagonal intersection.

Making the turn into traffic on the wide avenue with its grassy divider and car and tram lanes in the center, Scorpion glimpsed Mustache boarding a red and green tram at a stop barely a hundred meters ahead. He gunned the little engine and upshifted, shooting the car diagonally across traffic. He felt a nudge as someone hit his rear fender, threatening to spin the little car completely out of control. Fighting the wheel, he compensated for the hit, fishtailing onto the grassy center divider, slaloming between trees and onto the tram tracks in the center of the avenue. Wheels skidding on the metal tracks, he followed the tram as it picked up speed. Although the little Seat’s engine was desperately underpowered, he dodged left and right between cars, trying to weave between lanes and catch up.

After whipping around two cars, he saw another tram coming straight at him. He could see the driver’s wide-eyed horror as, at the last second, he slotted in behind the red and green tram, slip-streaming behind it. The sound of sirens came blasting from behind. He spotted a police car in the rearview mirror shooting out from the street he had come from. Siren wailing, it swerved onto the outer traffic lanes of Avinguda Diagonal.

As the tram ahead began to slow for the next stop, Scorpion scanned the street. It wouldn’t take long for the police to catch his little yellow subcompact. Inside the brightly lit tram, he could see Mustache looking around before taking his seat.

Scorpion pulled around the tram, skidding on the tracks before sliding ahead of the tram car, which for an instant blocked the police car from spotting the little yellow Seat. He pulled ahead then, moving with the flow of traffic, watching the tram recede behind him as the wailing of the police siren grew closer.

The tram behind him was moving again. As he watched it grow in his rearview mirror, he heard the deafeningly loud police siren right behind him. It swerved right next to him. A helmeted mosso looking out the passenger window motioned furiously for him to pull over. Scorpion looked around.

Ahead there was a roundabout bordered by office buildings, traffic feeding from multiple side streets joining the flow, curving around trees and grass in the center of the roundabout. He hit the accelerator, shifting to the top gear and feeling it catch as the little car hurtled forward into a gap between two lanes of traffic. Cutting across the center circle, he bounced up onto the grass, barely scraping between two trees. The police car tried to follow but was too big to get between the trees. The driver, jamming his brakes on the grass, hit one of the trees, then had to back up and swerve back onto the roundabout to follow him.

The next tram stop was a block ahead. Behind Scorpion, despite the police chase, the tram was coming steadily on, as was the police car. He slammed on the brakes and braced for the impact as the car behind him plowed into the back of the little Seat, smashing it forward into another car. People were honking their horns and shouting as he unbuckled and leaped out of the car, pulling out his Glock. He ran to the tram, which had stopped, banged on the door, and showing the driver his gun, shouted, “Policia! Policia!”

The driver opened the doors and Scorpion climbed in. He shouted “Policia!” again and showed the Glock to the passengers while searching for Mustache. He was in the middle of the car, already getting up. Scorpion moved toward him, pointing the Glock. Mustache grabbed a middle-aged woman and hurled her at him as easily as tossing a Frisbee, then leaped from the train and ran toward the street corner. It took a second for Scorpion to disentangle himself from the woman, and when he got out of the tram, Mustache was already a good thirty meters ahead. He was running hard toward a lit-up Metro sign, glowing red, like a traffic light in the night.

Scorpion took off after him. Behind him, he heard shouts and a mosso screaming, “Detente! Stop! Policia!”

Over his shoulder he saw the mosso in a shooting position, a pistol aimed at him. Scorpion dodged left, then around a man with a boy so that they were between him and the mosso, who resumed chasing him. When he looked ahead, Mustache had already gone into the Metro station.

Scorpion ran to the entrance and using his free hand for leverage leaped over the turnstile. Mustache was shoving people aside on the escalator, pushing his way down to the platform. Scorpion could hear the sound of a train coming into the station. He leaped onto the incline by the escalator handrail, jumping and sliding down beside the escalator to the platform, people shouting at both Mustache and him and shaking their fists.

By then a train was waiting at the station, its doors about to close. Mustache ran to it, shoving at a door with his meaty hand so he could get through. The closing doors stopped and opened for a second, then started to close again. Scorpion leaped, just getting his hand between the two doors. It felt like the train was going to start with just his forearm inside as he strained to spread the doors open. They did open then, a few more inches, and he managed to slip in before they slammed closed and the train began to move. Behind him, he saw the mosso bursting onto the platform, and seeing the train pull out of the station, call on his cell phone.

Then Scorpion turned and scanned the car for Mustache. The car was full, about twenty or so passengers standing and swaying as the train picked up speed. There was no sign of Mustache, but at the far end of the car he saw the door to the next car open. He couldn’t see who it was, his view blocked by a group of high school or college students standing near the door, but thinking it might be Mustache, heading toward the front of the train, he followed.

Hand on the Glock in his jacket pocket, he made his way through the car as it sped through the tunnel. He knew he might come upon Mustache at any time, and the bulky Iranian had already shown how fast he could move. The floor space between cars was covered with an accordionlike material, binding the cars together. After opening the door, but before stepping into the next car, he scanned ahead, spotting Mustache standing at the far end of the car, holding onto a steel pole and staring right at him, his hand in his pocket.

As Scorpion stepped into the car, the train slowed as it pulled into a station and he felt the momentum pulling him forward. Mustache’s gaze flickered for a moment at the station platform moving by, then back to him. If there was shooting, Scorpion thought, people were going to be killed, his eyes darting at the platform, knowing there would be a bunch of mossos waiting for him. If shooting started, both he and Mustache, plus a bunch of bystanders, would be dead. In any case, he was trapped. The only question was what to do about Mustache.

He struggled to push toward the burly man through the crowd of people getting up to leave the train, the momentum as it stopped lurching him forward. Pushing through, he saw Mustache join those people getting off through the far door. He started to push out through the nearest door but was met with a scrum of passengers coming onto the train. There was no way through, and he watched desperately as Mustache walked past a large squad of mossos, who ignored him as they scanned the train.

He had to wait for the crowd boarding the train to ease, and then, as he started to get out, one of the mossos pointed at him, shouting, “Ahi esta! Es el!” It’s him!

Seven or eight mossos rushed the train, shoving their way into the car, their guns drawn. People shrank away from them as two of them ran up to Scorpion, who took his hand out of his pocket and just stood there, while the train loudspeaker announced in Catalan and Spanish that the train would not be moving because of police activity.

Two of the mossos roughly grabbed his arms, and a third put handcuffs on him.

“Voste esta sota detencio,” one of them said. You’re under arrest.