Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Zafaraniyeh,

Tehran, Iran

They picked Zahra up from a street stall in the square, crowded with Red Wednesday shoppers. One minute she was standing there, holding a handful of red tulips she had just purchased, and the next, three men had hustled her into a black Mercedes sedan and she was gone.

Scorpion, on a Kavir motorbike arranged by Ghanbari, weapons and backpack bundled on the seat behind him, didn’t hurry after them. He waited and checked the laptop on which he had installed his NSA and tracking software to follow her. In addition to tracking her cell phone via GPS, he had glued a GPS transmitter to the back strap of her bra, just in case. The bugs showed as an intersecting double dot moving toward Modares Highway. They were going north, back to North Tehran.

Alerting Langley had been a problem. He had been right that the Internet would be blocked for transmission outside Iran. As an emergency stopgap he and Shaefer had arranged to send e-mail via an encrypted Virtual Private Network, for his Swiss firm, Glenco-Deladier, to his supposed superior, a mythical Monsieur Henri von Bergen, which would be immediately rerouted to Shaefer. The problem was how to get to a server outside Iran that would allow him to complete the routing.

Fortunately, Ghanbari had been able to provide a workaround-a server at the military base at Lavizan. Because Ghanbari’s group needed outside Internet access to communicate with Asaib al-Haq in Iraq, the server on the Lavizan base provided Internet access outside Iran, even when all other external communications were shut down. Scorpion used it to bounce a VPN connection from Lavizan to an Asaib al-Haq server in Kirkuk in Kurdish Iraq, and from there to Glenco-Deladier in Switzerland using IP routing addresses from an NSA database.

He prefaced the message with uozthgzuu, Flagstaff, in the simple reverse alphabet code they were using, even though the VPN already provided encryption security. In less than a minute Shaefer got back to him with “Mendelssohn” for himself and “Capablanca,” the famous chess champion from the 1920s, which Scorpion immediately understood meant that Rabinowich, a chess fanatic, was on the e-mail thread.

Scorpion responded: Tango-reverse code for Golf, or Ghanbari-not the Gardener. That ought to set the fox among the chickens, he thought. When Shaefer and Rabinowich reported that, it would leave the whole DEFCON preparation hanging in midair. Washington would go berserk.

Rabinowich wrote back, ???! meaning, “Who is?” The exclamation point was recognition that he had just tossed them a bombshell.

Scorpion typed in the reverse code: uziamazmhzwvtsr. Farzan Sadeghi.

Head of ZJU? from Rabinowich, reversing the acronym standing for AQF. Al Quds Force. Good man, Scorpion thought. Rabinowich knew who Sadeghi was and understood the implications.

Kta’eb Hezbollah, Scorpion responded.

Power struggle within IRG? Shaefer asked. Iranian Revolutionary Guards. So Shaefer understood now why the Iranians had attacked the embassy in Bern. Kta’eb Hezbollah was taking over the Revolutionary Guards, doing it by forcing the issue.

Scorpion typed back: yrmtl. Bingo. Then added: instructions?

There was a three minute delay, Scorpion getting more anxious as the clock ticked. Every second that went by made it more likely that the Revolutionary Guards and Scale would track his location. Shaefer and Rabinowich were probably connecting with Harris, he thought. He wasn’t sure how long he could afford to wait. What time was it in Washington? He glanced at his watch: 11:30 P.M. in Tehran; 3:00 P.M. Washington time. Harris would be in the middle of a meeting, probably somewhere on the Hill, he imagined, stepping outside into the hall, saying, “Excuse me, Senator.” Harris had it down to an art form.

Ghanbari came over and glanced at the laptop screen.

“I was right. You are CIA,” he said. “I should kill you,” fingering his pistol.

“For the last time, I’m not. Not that it matters.”

“So you say,” Ghanbari said, then hesitated. “What does matter?”

“I can help,” Scorpion said. “Sadeghi won’t leave you alive to talk. Do you want to leave?”

Ghanbari straightened.

“You mean asylum?”

“I mean whatever. Do you want out?”

“This is my country. I have a family. Let that madar sag leave.”

Just then Shaefer’s response came.

It took Scorpion a couple of seconds to translate gvinrmzgv. It meant terminate.

So that was how the NSC and CIA wanted to end the crisis. Identify and eliminate the attackers, put it out to the world what had happened and that U.S. intelligence had eliminated the threat and punished the guilty inside Iran itself, letting the Iranians and the rest of the world know the CIA could strike anywhere, anytime. U.S. Navy ships and minesweepers would open the Straits of Hormuz. Net result: Iran loses face and the White House manages to avoid a nasty war while at the same time coming out of it looking like a hero, like the Bin Laden killing. There’d be a photo of the President and the NSC in the Situation Room looking determined on the cover of Time magazine and prime-time network news. Worth a few million votes come election time. Scorpion turned to Ghanbari.

“Last chance, Muhammad jan,” he offered. “They want me to do something and then I’m gone. Are you coming?”

“You’re going to kill Sadeghi, aren’t you?” Ghanbari said. You had to give it to the Iranian; he may have looked like an academic, but he caught on fast, Scorpion thought.

“Whatever I do, they’ll call you a traitor. They’ll hang you for a Mossad or CIA spy,” he said.

“You know that’s not true.”

“What has truth got to do with anything in our business?” Scorpion said. “Last chance?”

“I’ll tell you after tonight,” Ghanbari said.

Scorpion nodded and typed: vcrg? Meaning what’s the exit strategy?

The answer was: xszofh. Scorpion translated: Chalus. A small Iranian port city on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, not far from either the Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan borders. A pickup by boat or seaplane, he thought, and in a short time out of Iranian jurisdiction. Perfect.

He took a deep breath. Shaefer and Rabinowich hadn’t been idle. They’d realized the only way to secure the operation was to handle the tactical issues so the Iranians didn’t get their hands on him for a show trial.

May be more than one coming, he typed, thinking of Ghanbari and Zahra, and after a few more details ended the session.

“What was that about?” Ghanbari asked.

“It’s not just the Gardener,” Scorpion said. “Who’s behind all this and why? If Sadeghi goes, who comes after him?”

Ghanbari stared at him, his eyes round behind his glasses.

“Zahra was right,” he said. “You are a very dangerous man, Laurent jan.”

They brought Zahra to a four-story stone house on Baghestan 5 Street in the Zafaraniyeh district, an exclusive neighborhood in the foothills of the Alborz, west of Vali Asr, North Tehran’s main street.

Three men in suit jackets hustled her out of the Mercedes and up to an office on the top floor of the building. A window faced out to the tree-shaded street, a curtain partially but not completely covering it. The room was luxuriously decorated with custom Italian furniture, a red Varamin carpet on the floor, and on the wall, portraits of the Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic and Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.

Sadeghi was a tall man, almost skeletally thin, in his fifties, in a dark shirt, no tie. He had first made his reputation, Zahra recalled, as one of the militant Islamist students who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. Sadeghi gestured for her to sit facing a marble table he used as a desk. One of his men, young, with a sparse, young man’s mustache, stood against the wall behind her, a ZOAF pistol in his belt.

“Salam. Are you all right, Sarkar khanom Ravanipour?” Sadeghi said sympathetically, not taking his dark eyes off her. “We were concerned about you.”

Zahra bit her lip. “Mersi, mersi. Khayli mamnun, jenab Sardar Sadeghi agha,” she whispered. Thank you. Thank you so much, General Sadeghi, sir, a tear glistening in the corner of her eye. “I was so frightened.”

“They forced you to go with them?” Sadeghi asked, lighting a cigarette. “Would you like chai?” gesturing for the young man to bring them tea, not waiting for her response.

“Mersi,” she said. “It was terrible. One minute we were prisoners being taken in the police van, and suddenly the Swiss, Westermann, somehow managed to get free and kill the two guards. I don’t know how. He is a demon, that one.”

“More than you know. You pretended to go along?” Sadeghi said, gesturing for her to go on.

“What choice did I have? Besides, I never thought we’d get away. He almost killed us!”

“How did you get away?”

“He stole a car and we came into the city and got on the Metro. I was alone with them. What was I to do? I thought you would follow us. I expected to be arrested again any second,” she said. She held her hands out. They were trembling. “Look at me. I thought I was going to die.”

“We followed your cell phone with GPS on the Metro. Some beshoor idiots had taken it and we had to waste time arresting them.” He grimaced. “They’ll never take anything again.”

The young man came back into the room with a tray of tea with a dish of nabat, candied sugar on a stick, with fried zoolbia pastries, which he placed on the table. Sadeghi took a glass of tea and poured one for her from a small silver samovar. Zahra bit into a sweet zoolbia and glanced at the window between the parted curtains, seeing only the light from the room reflected back at her.

“You know where they are now?” Sadeghi asked, stirring his tea with a nabat sugar stick.

“Of course,” she said, and gave him the address of the safe house apartment on Second Street. Sadeghi gestured to the young man, who immediately left. The safe house would be stormed within minutes, she assumed.

“Are you taking over the al Quds Force?” she asked, sipping her tea, not looking at him. “I can’t believe Muhammad jan is a traitor,” referring to Ghanbari. “Is he?”

“How is it they let you go out on your own, Zahra jan?” Sadeghi said, putting a black rubber truncheon on the table.

“What are you saying?” she asked, panicked. “I did everything you told me. I called you and set it up so you could capture him. I’m working for you, Farzan Sadeghi jan. Not VEVAK, not Ghanbari, not General Vahidi jenab. You! You know it!”

“Do you imagine I’m a child that you can deceive me, you jendeh?” Sadeghi snapped, coming around the table, grabbing her by her hair. “You were working with the Swiss, Westermann. He is CIA. Do you think we don’t know this? And then he just lets you walk out on your own so you can call us? What do you take me for?”

“Why wouldn’t they trust me?” she cried. “I was arrested with them. Handcuffed. Taken to Evin Prison with them. They sent me out to shop for food, that’s all. They’re probably wondering where I am this second.”

“Because this Westermann madar sag is not stupid like you, you gav,” he said. Cow. He picked up a rubber truncheon and pulled her by her hair so she was bent over. “Do you think he hasn’t asked himself how we caught him and Ghanbari in the cabin in Dizin? Do you?” he shouted, smashing the truncheon on the peroneal nerve on the back of her thigh, above the knee. “Do you?” hitting her again.

She screamed. Her leg collapsed under her and she fell to the floor. She clutched the back of her thigh, unable to move.

“Please!” she sobbed. “I did what you told me. I’ll do anything. Don’t hurt me anymore, ghorban.”

“Khob,” he said, okay, pulling her up and putting her, curled in agony, back in the chair. “This time you’ll tell me everything, won’t you?”

“Yes, ghorban,” she muttered, looking desperately past him toward the slice of window between the parted curtains. “Anything.”

From his perch on the roof of a ten-story apartment building two blocks away, Scorpion listened intently through ear buds. This was what he had wanted to find out, beyond flushing Sadeghi out, why he wanted her to see Sadeghi. To find out what Sadeghi knew and how he knew it. And to confirm that he was the Gardener.

He checked the range finder again. It showed he was 450 meters from the office where Zahra and Sadeghi were on Baghestan 5. The length of about five football fields. Through the sniper scope he could make out the lighted interior of the room in the space between the parted curtains. He had only a glimpse of Zahra and only part of the back of a tall man in a dark shirt. He could take the shot now, he thought, settling the Nakhir rifle on top of his backpack, making sure it was secure for stability. He looked around. From this distance at night and wearing a dark jacket, he was virtually invisible, though that wasn’t why he had selected this building for the hit.

The key to any lethal operation, he knew, wasn’t the setup, but the exit. Finding a spot, say in an empty apartment across the street from the target, would make the shot trivially easy. Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy with an old 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a 4x scope at a maximum distance of eighty-eight yards-as a Marine sharpshooter, Oswald had routinely received high scores on head-sized targets at two hundred yards-with Kennedy’s car a slow-moving target heading away from the shooter at a steady rate of approximately eleven miles per hour. Great shooting wasn’t the issue. Getting away was.

On a single residential street in a neighborhood with plenty of local security, given the opposition’s ability to seal the street and nearby streets almost immediately, it would make escape next to impossible. Odds were, within 120 seconds of firing the shot he’d be dead or on his way to the torture cells in Evin Prison.

Firing from the roof of a tall building two blocks away meant there would be no direct visual by anyone or any security camera of the shot or its trajectory or the muzzle flash. Anyone on the scene would have a much more difficult time calculating the trajectory and source of the shot. There would be a half dozen or more full city blocks facing the target house that would have to be shut down and searched. Scorpion had timed the elevator and stairs in the building he was in and determined he could be down from the roof, out of the building, and on Pesyan Avenue in less than seventy seconds. And from there by foot to Vali Asr, one of the busiest streets in the city, in another two minutes or less.

At 450 meters, the shot wasn’t especially difficult. The real issue was calculating the elevation and windage correctly for the mil-dot scope. Elevation, because a bullet starts slowing and dropping the instant it leaves the barrel; windage, because a single mil in diameter off at a distance of 450 meters would result in a gap of about eighteen inches at the target. The sniper scope had a dial with 0.1 mil increments. After checking and calculating twice, he set it for fourteen clicks elevation. As for windage, he could feel just the barest touch of wind on his face at about a forty-five degree angle coming toward him. There were no flags or clothes on lines to check, but holding a strip of cloth in front of him, it barely stirred. He estimated a three mph wind, which at forty-five degrees gave a value of seventy percent on a 4.5 MOA, or Minute of Angle. It wasn’t worth a horizontal adjustment in the scope. At 450 meters the shot would be off by two inches at most to the right. He would simply aim a hair to the left to compensate.

At this point, when he aimed, he should be dead on.

The only other concern was the sound of the shot, which might alert the target in the event of a miss about a second after he fired. But the urban setting would make the sound reverberate, and thus harder to alert the target or identify the shooting source. Also, he didn’t intend to miss.

The downside was that from his location, if Zahra got into trouble, he would be too far away to help her. And then he heard one of Sadeghi’s men come in and say something.

“Hold her,” he heard Sadeghi respond, followed by a slap. “You jendeh!” Sadeghi shouted. “The safe house! They weren’t there!”

“Of course they weren’t there,” Zahra said. “Did you think they would wait around for you? They’re probably halfway out of the country.”

“No. Ghanbari wouldn’t just leave. He’d fight me. But it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s just say his closest associates are no longer in a position to help him,” Sadeghi said.

“Dead?”

“Forget about them. It’s the Swiss, Westermann, that concerns me.”

“You keep saying he’s CIA. What makes you so sure?” she asked.

What Sadeghi said next riveted Scorpion, sending a chill down his spine.

“I’m going to ask you something,” Sadeghi said. “It’s the most important question you have ever been asked. I’m only going to ask it once. Have you ever heard of ‘Scorpion’?” He used the Farsi word, aqrab. It was unmistakable. Scorpion.

He took his prone shooting position and sighted in, taking deep breaths to calm the sudden rapid beating of his heart. My God, what was this about? Through the scope he could see Sadeghi’s back. It blocked his view of Zahra, but he could just make out part of the face of one of Sadeghi’s men behind her, holding her arms.

But it confirmed that Sadeghi was the Gardener. Only the Gardener would know about Scorpion from the Bern CIA files.

“I don’t understand. Scorpion. No. Never,” she stammered. “Why?”

“Are you protecting him, jendeh?” Sadeghi demanded. “Did you sleep with him?” using the vulgarity.

“No!” she cried. “I would have. It’s what VEVAK and General Vahidi jenab wanted, but I fell asleep. I think he put something in my drink.”

“Too late,” Sadeghi said. Through the scope, Scorpion saw him holding a pistol. “You’re tainted. And you haven’t told us where you are supposed to meet him.”

“I don’t know!” she pleaded. “Please, I don’t know where he is. I’d tell you if I did. I swear.”

“Don’t blaspheme, you jendeh whore. No one can trust you now. And the war coming,” Sadeghi said, aiming his pistol.

Scorpion aimed as well, held his breath and tightening his finger on the trigger.

“I don’t understand. .” she wailed. She knelt before him, grabbing at his knees. “I’ll find out. I’ll get him for you. I will. ”

“We need to know who this Westermann is. This is his visa photo. This is him, correct?” He showed her something.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is it possible he’s American, not Swiss?”

“I don’t know. He speaks French and English. And Farsi. I’ll find out for you,” she whispered.

“You’re wasting my time! You either know or you don’t,” Sadeghi said.

Scorpion took a long deep breath and held it; all his focus in the scope was on top of Sadeghi’s back. Sadeghi was going to kill her. He couldn’t hold off any longer.

“But why?” Zahra wailed. “Who is this Scorpion? Why is he so important?”

“You little fool! What do you think this is all about?” Sadeghi said, aiming at her head.

Scorpion fired.

The crack of the shot echoed over the buildings. A squadron of pigeons flew up from a distant roof. Through the scope, he saw Sadeghi jerk up for an instant and then he was gone. There was the briefest glimpse of Zahra’s terrified blood-splattered face looking up toward the window, the young man next to her moving forward, and then nothing, because Scorpion was already moving.

Even as he cleaned the gun with an antiseptic wipe and left it there, grabbing his pack and already running for the roof door, he felt his stomach heave. Zahra was on her own. He hoped she’d run and get away, but there was nothing he could do to help her. Worse, the entire universe had just shifted, and as he got into the elevator and rode down to the building lobby, Sadeghi’s statement blotted everything else out of his mind.

What do you think this is all about?