Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Galata Bridge,

Istanbul, Turkey

The three men met on the Galata Bridge shortly after midnight. Scorpion, in a leather jacket against the cool evening wind, came from the Beyoglu side. Lights from buildings and ships on both sides of the Golden Horn reflected on the dark water. He walked toward the other two men, leaning on the pedestrian rail near the middle of the bridge. A quartet of men in the shadows a hundred meters in either direction, Soames was one of them, secured the area and kept watch. There was little traffic on the bridge at this hour; just the occasional car or taxi. Scorpion came over and leaned on the rail next to Bob Harris.

“For the record, this meeting never happened,” said Yuval, head of the Israeli Mossad. “No recordings, no notes, nothing. I will never tell anyone. Bob Harris and you, Scorpion, will not reveal anything no matter what. Not to the director of the CIA, the DCI, or the President of the United States. Not one of us will ever mention this again, not even among ourselves.”

They looked out over the water and the city, landmarks like the mosques on the hills and the Galata Tower lit up at night. Scorpion could smell the roast kabobs from the restaurants below that crammed the bridge’s lower deck and the apple-tobacco smoke from the nargileh cafes.

“Pretty,” Harris said. “Can you imagine what it must have been like for some officer on some Roman, what-do-you-call-’em, quinqueremes, warship, a couple of thousand years ago? Byzantium. A major posting; at anchor in the Golden Horn. Probably thought he was in the big-time, on his way up.”

“Or missing his wife or thinking it was a shit hole and the whores in Rome were prettier,” Scorpion said.

“We Jews had our own share of troubles with the Romans,” Yuval said, lighting a cigarette.

“You Jews have trouble with everyone. With you, it’s never easy,” Harris said.

“It’s true. We argue even with God.” Yuval looked at Scorpion. “So you know, we had somebody watching your Dr. Sandrine Delange. A South African Jew before he made aliyah to Israel. She knows him as Van Zyl, an official from UNHCR. She’s in the refugee camp in Dadaab. Apparently she’s acquired two Somali children, a boy and a girl, along the way. Anyway, she’s safe.”

“Good to know,” Scorpion said, feeling something lift inside, a weight he didn’t know he was carrying.

“The least we can do,” Yuval said, exhaling a stream of smoke. He glanced at Harris next to him. “You could have told us what you were planning. An AC-130U Spooky gunship. Impressive.”

“Why the hell should we tell you?”

“We’re supposed to be allies.”

“Never stopped us from stabbing each other in the back before,” Harris said. “This is about the strike on the nuclear facilities and missile sites in Iran, right?”

Yuval smiled. “Ah, that. You know, I’m almost tempted to let you believe you’re going to find out something you don’t think we know you know.” He flicked the ash from his cigarette, the tip glowing orange in the darkness. “No, this is something more. .” He groped for the word. “What I’m about to tell you is the most critical, most highly classified secret in the state of Israel. I can’t even begin to tell you how many rules and laws I’m violating, not to mention an oath I took on Masada when I was eighteen years old.”

“I’m listening,” Harris said. “And I’ve agreed to the terms, even though it might be breaking a few oaths of my own. As for Scorpion. .” He gestured.

“In a curious way, we trust Scorpion,” Yuval said. “He belongs to no one, certainly not to us, but what I’m about to tell, he needs to know. Also it’s in his interest to keep this to himself.”

“I know part of it,” Scorpion said. “The other piece is why I’m here.”

Harris looked at him curiously.

“Like what?”

“Just before I terminated Farzan Sadeghi of Kta’eb Hezbollah, he said something that stuck in my brain. He implied that the Bern attack was because of me. It made no sense. I’m not that important in the scheme of things.”

“What were his exact words?” Yuval asked.

“He mentioned my code name. Scorpion. Aqrab in Farsi. The woman, Zahra, asked him why this Scorpion was so important, and he said, ‘What do you think this is all about?’ ”

“Is that why you terminated him?” Harris asked.

Scorpion shook his head.

“There were only two possible candidates for the Gardener: Sadeghi and Ghanbari. The only way to be sure the Gardener was eliminated was to eliminate them both. Plus, he was about to kill Zahra.” He turned to Yuval. “But that doesn’t explain why they were after me in particular or why they attacked the embassy. That’s why I’m here.”

Yuval nodded. He took a drag from his cigarette and flipped it over the rail. They watched the glow of its burning tip as it fell down to the dark water. He leaned on his side to face them.

“He was the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met,” he began. “You have to understand, I’ve-let’s just say I’ve been around. I’ve known prime ministers, kings-eight U.S. Presidents-all kinds, mass murderers, some people who will live in history, but never anyone like him. And certainly never anyone who did what he did.”

Harris looked irritably at his watch.

“Come on, Yuval,” he said. “Skip the commercial. I’m impressed, all right? Who the hell is he?”

Yuval smiled. “You’re such an ass, Bob. Aren’t you the one who looked at the Golden Horn,” gesturing vaguely at the lights on the Eminonu side of the bridge, “and talked about the Romans? What I’m talking about,” he tapped the metal rail. “This is history. This is what’s about to happen.”

“All right.” Harris frowned. “I’m listening.”

“I first met him when he was seven years old. This was in the 1980s. Reagan was the U.S. President. The boy had come from Isfahan in Iran, where he had seen his parents murdered before his own eyes. His father had literally been torn apart by chains attached to trucks pulling in opposite directions. They made him watch. They raped his mother. Many times. They cut off her arms and legs, then poured gasoline over her and his little brother and set them on fire right in front of him. A child. Can you imagine?

“They sent him to the Iraqi front to die. He was about to be executed by a firing squad when an unknown Iranian woman helped him get away and some of the few Jews left in Iran smuggled him to Israel. We called him David.

“I was his trainer. His first and only case officer. In a way, he was my creation. You must understand,” he said, biting his lip, and to Scorpion it seemed he was trying to defend himself to an invisible jury, “we don’t train children. Ever. It was hard enough for him, dealing with what he had just gone through, being in a new country with a new language, customs, new everything, but it was his idea. He insisted.

“Do you understand?” Yuval said, his face in shadow, only the lights from the bridge reflected in his eyes. “He knew what he was going to do. He knew what his revenge would be. He had formulated it, all of it. At age seven!

“That first time we walked on Gordon Beach in Tel Aviv, just the two of us, me and this child walking on the sand, I told him it was impossible, and he told me, ‘Today, Saddam Hussein is the Ayatollah’s enemy. Tomorrow, they will come for all the Jews.’ Seven years old-and this is how he talked!” he said, shaking his head.

“For two years I trained him. The Mossad became his school, his parents, his family. It wasn’t like training a child. He was brilliant. More than brilliant. Imagine you were the music teacher of Mozart or Mendelssohn. Your pupil not just more brilliant than you, but someone born to it in a way that you couldn’t even imagine. It didn’t just come naturally to him, it was as if compared to him you were a caveman, banging one stone against another. Mozart. Even while we trained and prepared, I tried to talk him out of it, not only because he was a child, but because what he was going to do, no one had ever done before.”

“He was a mole?” Harris said.

“More than a mole. Much more,” Yuval said.

“What more?”

“A weapon,” Yuval said. “But not for us. Not for Israel.” He looked at them. “For his parents. His life, his entire life, would be an act of revenge. Can you imagine what it must have been like to live your entire life as a lie? On guard every second of every day; even when he slept. Never dropping your guard for an instant. Never trusting a single human being, ever. Becoming with every fiber of his being the very thing he hated and despised most in the entire world. He would marry, have children, and none of them would ever know for a second who or what he really was, that what they thought was love was actually hate. All for a single purpose. Can you imagine? The psychic cost,” he said, shaking his head. “In the end, he would pay.”

“How’d you infiltrate him?” Scorpion asked. “Must have been something.”

“You have no idea. We had to create the most bulletproof cover ever created for any agent. We had to create perfect forged records in dozens of places and destroy others in a way so natural that no one would ever suspect; all in a country where a single mistake was death.

“He was an orphan from parents who were shahidan-martyrs of the Iranian Revolution. It took an entire year and cost the life of one of our top agents in Iran to make sure there wasn’t a single record, a single shred of evidence or a single human being anywhere, who could refute or even suspect that this child was not exactly who he was supposed to be.

“This was during the First Intifada of the Palestinians, when all our resources were strained. No one, not one single person in the government or the cabinet, knew anything about this operation except me and the prime minister. At the time, it was Yitzhak Shamir. In a way, out of all the prime ministers of Israel, it could have only been Shamir who would have approved such an operation. His entire family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Shamir himself once told me that when his father, who was in Poland, was facing execution, he said, ‘I will die. But I have a son in the land of Israel; he will take my revenge.’

“And he did. In 1948, during the War of Independence, Shamir was in Lehi. The most extreme of the radical groups. The British considered him the most dangerous terrorist in Palestine. Shamir never met the boy, David. But I always thought that in a way, he understood him better than anyone.

“Mostly I remember the boy, David’s last day in Israel, before we infiltrated him back into Iran. We walked on the beach. It was late afternoon; the sun casting long shadows. Young men with their rackets playing matkot on the sand, girls in bikinis, mothers with children in the playgrounds, some of the children not much younger than he was. Everyone watchful because of the Intifada. Can you see how insane it was? I felt like a father to him. I think he knew how I felt, but I don’t think it mattered to him. We were using him-and he was using us. And he knew it.

“ ‘Even now, I can stop it. You can have a life, David,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have to do this.’

“ ‘Yes, I do.’ That was all he said.”

Yuval stopped and lit another cigarette, cupping the match flame against a faint breeze coming from the Bosphorus.

“From the beginning,” he continued, “he was positioned to be a leader in the Revolutionary Guards. The cover was critical. An orphan child, the only survivor of an Iranian shahid and his wife, martyrs of the Revolution. He distinguished himself in the madrasa. By age twelve he knew the Quran by heart, and by fourteen he could quote chapter and verse of the Shiite hadith, al-Kulayni, al-Qummi, all that. Even among the most extreme, the most radical of the Revolutionary Guards candidates, he was extreme.”

“The perfect Jesuit,” Harris murmured.

“The perfect spy,” Scorpion said.

“By the time he graduated with top grades from Tehran University, he was already a rising star,” Yuval continued. “And of course, he married well. The daughter of a very powerful man within the Supreme Leader’s inner circle. ”

“The intel he gave was good?” Harris asked.

“Beyond good,” Yuval said. “Essential-and pure platinum.”

Harris frowned. “You could’ve shared the wealth.”

“Once in a while we did. Including the most precise data about the Iranian nuclear and missile programs. You didn’t always believe us.”

“That’s the trouble with our profession-we’re a distrustful lot.” Harris grimaced, pulling up the collar of his suit jacket against the wind.

“There’s distrustful and there’s politics,” Yuval said. “The uranium enrichment memo, from Fordow. 89.5 kilos at ninety-two percent purity. The smoking gun. Proof positive the Iranians were close to a bomb. You did nothing.”

Harris turned on Yuval.

“We did put it in the President’s Daily Brief. But we had to mark it ‘Unconfirmed.’ What choice did we have?” he snapped. “You wouldn’t reveal the source.”

“How could we without blowing Absalom-that was his internal Mossad code name-the most important asset we ever had? So the President and his National Security team assumed it was just us pressuring America to act against Iran.” Yuval sighed. “On such stupidities, wars are lost.”

Harris turned to Yuval. “You asked us to contact Scorpion for you a while back. Was that why?”

Yuval nodded. “For us, that’s when the crisis really intensified. Four months ago Absalom suddenly went silent. First weeks, then months went by-and nothing. We had no word from him. And no way of getting in touch with him either. His identity had been buried deep inside Iran’s inner circle. Here he was, Israel’s most essential asset, the key to Iran, and all we had was silence. For all we knew, he was dead, or blown, or worse. We had no idea.”

“You panicked?” Scorpion put in.

“Worse than panicked. We started to secretly prepare for full-scale war. Only war with our eyes blindfolded and our hands tied behind our back. At that point, without Absalom, we believed the very existence of Israel, of the Jewish people, was at stake. That’s when we contacted Rabinowich to try to recruit you,” he said to Scorpion.

“Did you ever hear from him?” Harris asked.

“In a way,” Yuval said, ducking his head into his shoulders as if about to receive a blow. “This is the hard part. This is why we had to meet here, the three of us, in person.”

“Jesus Christ!” Scorpion said. Suddenly all the pieces came together. He looked out at the city and the water; a single ferry, a row of windows lit along its side, was plying its way along the Beyoglu shore. The world was suddenly different. “Bern. It was a message,” he said, and looked at Yuval. “You miserable son of a bitch. You bastard!”

Yuval exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked away.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t us. On my grandchildren’s lives, it wasn’t us. It was him. Absalom. What he had become. What we made him.” He stared out over the rail. “What I made him.”

“Son of a bitch,” Harris growled. “So Absalom aka the Gardener aka Ghanbari orders the hit on the embassy in Bern to send us a message. Why couldn’t he use an e-mail or a dead drop or whatever the fuck other mechanism you guys had set up? Why did people have to die? What was he trying to say?”

“Because the message wasn’t for the Israelis,” Scorpion put in. “He wanted to force America’s hand.”

“Meaning what?” Harris demanded.

“The Iranians crossed the line,” Scorpion said. “They have a nuclear bomb and they were going to use it. Probably give it to Kta’eb Hezbollah.”

“He did it to force the United States to stop them?” Harris asked.

“No,” Yuval said, shaking his head. “He did it because he wanted the United States to attack. To bring them down. Samson in the temple.”