Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Eixample,

Barcelona, Spain

The handcuffs were made of nickel-coated steel and not connected by links but a hinge that allowed less movement. The keyholes for each cuff were in the extensions that formed the hinge. He thought about escaping, but there was no chance after they brought him out of the Metro and put him, along with a mosso to watch him, in the back of a mossos d’esquadra van to the police comisaria in the Eixample business district. It was a gray concrete fortress of a building off a smart, tree-lined street, Via Augusta, that he only caught a glimpse of before they hustled him inside.

They brought him to a room with no windows, empty except for a table and chairs, and frisked him. A mosso went through his pockets, dumping everything onto the table. When they found the knife and the bloodstained pieces of toilet paper, they looked significantly at each other. One of the mossos pulled on latex gloves and placed the knife and the toilet paper in separate see-through plastic bags. Throughout it all Scorpion said nothing. He barely glanced at the one-way glass on the wall or the video camera near the ceiling, but registered their locations.

They sat him in one of the chairs facing the one-way glass. One of them, an older, tanned police sergeant with long iron-gray hair, sat opposite him.

“Quin es el teu nom?” the sergeant asked him first in Catalan, then in Spanish, then English. What is your name? Scorpion didn’t answer.

The sergeant stood up, leaned across the table and smacked him hard across the face. The tiniest flicker of a smile ghosted Scorpion’s lips. “If you do that,” he remembered Sergeant Falco saying about smiling at his first interrogation during his Level C SERE training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when he was in JSOC’s First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta Force, “you’re letting the interrogator know he’s in for a fight.” At Level C SERE, interrogators were allowed to break no more than one major and two minor bones. In comparison, most other interrogations, even brutal ones, were walks in the park.

“Who are you?” the sergeant asked. Scorpion had left his Richard Cahill Canadian passport in the hotel safe and was carrying no ID. “Why did you kill Mohammad Karif? What was he to you? Did you know him? Where are you from? Are you Catalan? Spanish? I think you are a foreigner, yes?”

Scorpion just looked at him.

“We have you,” the sergeant said. “We have witnesses. We have the knife, the bloodstains. We will do scientific analysis and have a lot more. If you talk now, it will go more better for you.”

Scorpion didn’t respond.

“Say something!” the sergeant shouted, smacking the table with his hand. “Fill de puta!”

Scorpion stared at the one-way glass, where he knew others were watching. Think nothing, he told himself. Show nothing. Be nothing. Sooner or later they’d leave him alone for a minute and he could escape.

The sergeant went out, leaving him alone. There was no point doing anything; he knew they were watching. Probably trying to decide whether to send in someone else to question him. Good cop, bad cop. Meanwhile, his mind was racing ahead.

When he had knocked on Karif’s door, both he and Mustache had been surprised. Mustache had improvised, and it was likely he’d called the police to pin the blame on him for the murder. Assumption: Mustache worked for the Gardener, who was shutting his network down.

Why?

Because he didn’t want the attack on the embassy to be traced back to Kta’eb Hezbollah, thereby allowing the Americans to justify an attack on Iran, he decided. No witnesses, no proof. Total deniability. If the U.S. attacked, Iran could turn to Russia, China, and the rest of the Muslim world and talk about U.S. aggression.

He was getting a sense of the Gardener. He was careful, smart, devious, and ruthless as hell. The Gardener was as dangerous an adversary as he had ever faced, he decided as the sergeant came back into the room with four more policemen.

“We have two eyewitnesses who say they saw you go into Mohammad Karif’s apartment,” the sergeant said in Catalan, then in Spanish and English. “Unless you talk to me now, you will not leave prison for many years.”

Scorpion just looked at him.

The sergeant gestured to the policemen, who took him out of the room and down a long hallway to another room, where they prepared to photograph and fingerprint him. A television on top of a file cabinet was on. It showed a newscaster from Antena 3 Noticias in front of a screen showing a floodlit police nighttime scene. It was a European country, but not Spain, Scorpion thought. A subtitle on the screen read: ZURICH, SUIZA. Switzerland. One of the Swiss policemen on TV pointed at a body in what looked like a wooded or park setting. Then the camera showed more bodies. They started to turn Scorpion toward a table to be fingerprinted.

“Espera,” Scorpion said, the first word he had spoken. Wait.

Surprised, they stopped, and like him, they turned to watch the TV.

Although he couldn’t follow the rapid Spanish, he could catch some of it from the news ticker crawl at the bottom of the screen. It was Bergholz Park in Zurich. Five men and one woman found dead. Murdered. Some of the dead may have been Americans. They showed the face of the dead woman taken from a passport photo, a pretty blonde, and even before they showed it, Scorpion knew it was Chrissie.

It hit him like a pile driver. The Gnomes. Chrissie. Glenn. All four of them dead. He felt like throwing up. He’d warned Shaefer! Told him to pull them off. It was his fault. He’d asked Harris to leave the Gnomes in Zurich to help him pull off the movie for Norouzi. Soames, he thought. If he got the chance, he’d rip his guts out.

Five men dead, the announcer said. Who was the fifth?

Norouzi, he thought. It had to be.

The announcer’s next words, which he read in the crawl at the bottom of the screen, confirmed it.

“According to Swiss authorities, one of the dead has been tentatively identified as an Iranian businessman, Hooshang Norouzi, whose company had an office in Zurich.”

First Norouzi, then Karif, he thought. The Gardener was covering his tracks. He felt an anger grow inside him, a sick rage that almost made it impossible to think. He was as angry as he had ever been in his life. Breathe, he told himself. Control it. Use it.

“Bueno, let’s take his photo,” the photographer said in Spanish, assuming the prisoner would understand Spanish if he didn’t speak Catalan.

Two of the policemen faced Scorpion away from the TV. One of the them stood him against a wall in front of the camera. He tried to control his breath as he took in what had happened in Zurich. He had to get out of here now, he thought. As the guard positioned him for the photograph, the man grabbed between his legs as if to frisk him again but whispered in Scorpion’s ear in Spanish, “Estare esperando por ti, puta.” I’ll be waiting for you, bitch.

Thinking, Boy, did you pick the wrong time, asshole, he slipped his leg behind the guard’s leg and swung his handcuffed hands with all his might at the side of the man’s head, smashing him so hard into the wall with the cuffs that he could hear the skull crack. He didn’t wait for the guard to fall, the legs already buckling, but turned toward the other three policemen. Two of them had started toward him, while the third fumbled for his police whistle. The police photographer, who had been about to take his mug shot, reached for a telephone.

As the biggest guard reached out to grab him, Scorpion executed a Brazilian high kick to the head while using an aikido grab and throw to take down the other charging guard. With the two of them on the ground, he jumped with both knees on the first guard, knocking the wind out of him, and smashed his cuffs across the bridge of his nose, effectively blinding him. Jumping to his feet, he kicked the man in the head to finish him, whirling to face the second guard, who was getting up from the floor.

A straight-fingered thrust to the windpipe with both handcuffed hands had the second guard gasping and choking. Then he grabbed the man by his hair and smashed his head against the corner of a desk. The guard crumpled, the side of his head pouring blood.

The fourth guard had managed a small bleat with his whistle and was starting to blow again, his cheeks bulging, when Scorpion caught him with a knee to the groin. As the doubled over, expelling air with a whoosh, Scorpion smashed him into the photographer, taking both men and the camera down. He jumped on top of the photographer, landing on his face with his knees, ramming the man’s head against the floor. The fourth guard, getting up, swung at him. Scorpion sidestepped the punch and caught him in a guillotine choke hold in the crook of his elbow, cutting off his air and, more critically, the flow of blood in his carotid artery. The guard went unconscious within a long fifteen seconds. Then Scorpion got up, saw the photographer stir, and kicked him in the side of the head, finishing him off.

He looked around. The entire fight had taken less than forty-five seconds. Catching his breath, he searched the first guard’s pockets and found the handcuff keys. The fact that the cuffs were hinged made the positioning of his hand and wrist awkward, but not impossible. The lock clicked and the first cuff opened. With his left hand free, it was even faster opening the second cuff.

He took off his clothes down to his underwear. The fourth guard, the one with the whistle, was closest to his size. He stripped the police uniform, ID, and the PK380 pistol and holster off the man, checking the magazine before putting on the uniform, then walked out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. By the time he reached the ground floor he could hear shouts from above. At the main entrance he nodded to the desk sergeant, who looked at him oddly, as if trying to remember who he was, but didn’t say anything. As he walked out the front door he felt a tingling in his back, as if any second the desk sergeant would call him back.

He passed a pair of mossos dragging in a Gypsy, who was shouting in Catalan, “Creus que tots els gitanos es un lladre!” Something about the cops thinking every Gypsy was a thief.

“Only because it’s true,” the mosso said as Scorpion passed them. Walk, don’t run, he told himself, coming around the corner to Via Augusta. He knew there wasn’t much time. The police would be after him any second.

There were dozens of motor scooters parked in a line in the tree-lined passageway bisecting the street. He was about to steal one when he spotted a taxi and waved him down. The driver hesitated, perhaps wondering why a mosso needed a taxi, but picked him up. As they drove down the avenue, the driver kept eyeing his uniform. When they were a good kilometer from the comisaria, he told the driver to pull over.

“Take off your clothes,” Scorpion told him in his bad Spanish.

“Que?” the driver asked.

“Your clothes. I want them,” he said.

The driver shook his head. “No, senor.”

Scorpion fished in the pockets of the uniform, found forty-five euros in the wallet and pointed the Walther at the driver.

“I’ll give you forty-five euros,” he said, “o te mato.” Or I kill you.

The driver hesitated. He looked at the Walther, then at Scorpion’s eyes, and nodded slowly. They sat in the taxi and took off their shirts and pants. In a few minutes the driver wore the police uniform and Scorpion was in the driver’s clothes. He handed the man the money, got out of the taxi and motioned him to drive away.

When the taxi was gone, Scorpion walked for several blocks. He was on a quiet street of older apartment buildings with balconies and wrought-iron railings. Here, as in many places in the city, scores of motor scooters were parked in rows on the street. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he used the lock pick taped to the bottom of his foot to unlock one and start it. He drove down the street, crossing Avinguda Diagonal, not far from where he had run from the tram, and drove on for several kilometers. In a narrow street, almost an alley, he left the scooter and walked back to his hotel.

The minute he got back to his room-before he even washed his hands, which still had traces of Karif’s blood-he grabbed one of his prepaid cell phones and called Shaefer’s number. Although it was after midnight, he wasn’t surprised when Shaefer picked up on the first ring.

Before Shaefer could speak, Scorpion said between clenched teeth into the phone: “Flagstaff. I told you to pull them, you son of a bitch.”

“You realize this is an open line?” Shaefer said.

“Go to hell,” he said.

“I’m already there,” Shaefer said, and Scorpion knew the deaths of the Gnomes had hit him hard too. “The Pickle Factory’s going nuts,” suggesting the CIA, not to mention everybody in Washington, was scrambling trying to find someone to blame for the deaths of four agents.

“They deserve it,” Scorpion said.

“You’re on hold, pending further notice,” Shaefer told him. What Shaefer didn’t say was that he was in the crosshairs of someone higher up looking to hang him out to dry for the four deaths.

“No, I’m not,” Scorpion replied.

For a long moment Shaefer didn’t say anything. He was Scorpion’s closest friend in the CIA and knew him well enough to know that regardless of what the DCIA ordered, Scorpion was going forward. Scorpion could feel Shaefer trying to decide. Because of orders from higher-ups, Shaefer had betrayed their friendship in the Ukraine operation and regretted it. Now he had to make the same decision again. Scorpion waited for him to figure it out.

“What do you want?” Shaefer said finally.

“Get rid of Soames.”

“Not happening.”

“Do it-or I will.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Shaefer muttered. “Anything else?”

“I need an SOG,” Scorpion said.