Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Singita Sabora,

Serengeti, Tanzania

They had dinner under an acacia tree near their air-conditioned tent, the table set with white linen, fine crystal and china, and good French wine. Their steward, Godfrey, and his assistant, Samwel, had hung the tree with lanterns, and it was magical, the lights seeming to float in the darkness over the Serengeti Plain. A zebra grazed nearby, and while they were eating, a baby elephant came within a dozen feet of the table, studying them curiously till its mother, a large female, nudged it away with her trunk.

“They say they’re as intelligent as we are,” Sandrine said. She was wearing a sky-blue cocktail dress, and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

“I don’t know about as intelligent. Certainly better, kinder than we are,” Scorpion said.

Afterward, Godfrey brought them Springbank scotch on the rocks as they sat on the raised wooden deck in front of their tent, looking out at the Serengeti under a sky filled with stars. From the lounge tent came music from an old hand-wound gramophone-all the furnishings were African Colonial, antiques dating from the turn of the century; it was as if they had stepped into another time-someone playing songs from the 1920s, like the Charleston and “Yes Sir, that’s My Baby” and “It Had to Be You.” Zebras and wildebeests wandered by and then scampered off, and they saw why, spotting the female leopard that came by every night at that time, eyes glowing like yellow disks in the darkness.

They made love in the big four-poster bed in the tent, open to the night except for the mosquito netting. They took their time, slow and soft and sweet and strong, exploring every part of each other. Letting it grow and grow until he couldn’t tell where he left off and she began, only a single intensity, filling to bursting through them, and as she cried out, part of it was the low rumbling roar of a lion.

They slept, and in the middle of the night she reached for him and they started again. They were like addicts, unable to get enough of each other until finally, sometime near dawn, they slept again. The sun came up over the horizon, and Godfrey brought them coffee and breakfast on their deck, and they sat and ate, never taking their eyes off each other, except to breathe in the gold and green grasses and the herds on the Serengeti and to laugh at a giraffe lowering himself splayed-footed to graze on the grass next to the tennis court.

“Dieu, I love Africa,” she said.

“So do I,” he said.

She bit her lip.

“I’m almost afraid to say it. I don’t want to break the spell,” she said.

“I know.”

“What do we do about the children?” she asked. Ghedi and Amina. She wanted to take them back to Paris to live, despite the massive bureaucratic mess it would entail with the Kenyan, Somali, and French governments. They also talked about bringing them to America.

“Are you sure it’s the right thing?” Scorpion said. “To turn them into little French people or little Americans. They have their own culture, their own language, their own world. Not necessarily inferior to ours, just different. They have to have a say in their lives too. I told Ghedi that.”

“What did he say?”

Scorpion smiled. “He said his sister was too little to understand such a big thing. I told him he would have to be the man and decide. He said, ‘I will,’ and showed me his belawa knife.”

“I know,” she smiled. “He’s ready to kill anyone who touches me.”

“I know how he feels,” he said.

“You think they should stay in Africa? They’ll never have opportunities like we could give them in France.”

“They’re African. Let’s not pretend the other kids in college will accept them like French kids or that they’ll be able to get into one of the grande ecoles. America is more accepting.”

“And you, Nick. What do you want?”

“Whatever part of you you’ll let me have.”

“Do I have that much power?”

“Look!” he said, standing up and pointing at a herd of wildebeests, thousands of them, crossing the plain in the distance; a lioness prowled on the edge of the herd. Godfrey and Samwel brought them binoculars and they watched for a while.

“It’s like the Garden of Eden,” she said, reaching her arm around him and pulling him close. She whispered: “And what about the people who tried to kill us? Is that over?”

“For now,” he said.

Later, after a day with the two of them on horseback, tracking the herds, the zebras, wildebeests, elands, giraffes, and elephants, they took turns in the thatched outdoor shower and he thought about the conversation he’d had with Dave Rabinowich during a middle-of-the-night layover in Doha, Qatar, on the flight from Istanbul to Nairobi. He was using a new SME PED Harris had given him, sitting in the airport, nearly empty at that hour, well away from the few Arabs in white thawbs and keffiyehs and bleary-eyed Western businessmen in traveling clothes, so as not to be overheard.

“Hawkeye,” Scorpion said. The Avenger character was the latest Flagstaff code word.

“Albuquerque. I’m having dinner. The Knicks are on,” Rabinowich complained, using the new countersign.

“Like interrupting frozen dinner is a hardship. You know why I’m calling?”

“I was wondering when you’d knock on my door. There’s a loose end. Knowing you, you can’t let it go, can you?”

“You shouldn’t be so clever. They’ll demote you.”

“No chance. They’re too busy patting each other’s backs about how brilliant they all were on Iran. You figure it out yet?”

“Partly. You won’t pass this on.”

“And upset everyone’s apple cart, especially after POTUS went on national TV acting like John Wayne? Uh-uh. I plan to collect my pension.”

“I’m the loose end. First the way they came after me in Paris. Then Sadeghi’s comment to Zahra that the whole thing was about me. What was so important about me?”

“Come on. You know why. You’re just fishing for confirmation,” Rabinowich said, sounding like he was talking while eating.

“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full. You might choke.”

“Wouldn’t give Harris and Soames the satisfaction. Come on, give,” Rabinowich said, with a strange grunt that was his version of a laugh.

“First they nailed Harandi in Hamburg. Then Paris, coming after me with a ton of resource. Harandi had given me a key lead in the Palestinian business. It all ties back to Bassam Hassani, the Palestinian in Rome, which was ultimately an Iranian operation. Correction, the Gardener’s operation.”

“Finally! Somebody besides me knows how to actually use a few brain cells,” Rabinowich said. “Keep going.”

“A power struggle over control of the Revolutionary Guards.”

“Exactly. You eliminate Sadeghi and Ghanbari and who wins?”

“Beikzadeh. Now he’s head of both the Expediency Council and the Revolutionary Guards.”

“So now he owns the brain and the muscle. Makes him the most powerful man in the country; more powerful even than the Supreme Leader,” Rabinowich said.

“Now comes the loose end,” Scorpion said. “Sadeghi didn’t know who I was when he saw my photo. Meanwhile, Ghanbari set up Zahra instead of me till he tried to have Scale take me out at the end. What does that tell you?”

“You’re warm. Hot even. You know, you might actually make it as an intelligence analyst here in McLean.”

“Can’t stand the CIA cafeteria food.”

“Come on, say it. Nobody here but us girls,” Rabinowich said.

“What if neither of them was the real Gardener? What if he’s still alive?”

“Indeed. What if? Think about it,” Rabinowich said. “The beauty of it. The sheer symmetry. The Gardener provokes an action that forces you out from wherever you’re hiding and into the game. If he takes you out, he eliminates the key person who spiked the Palestinian op and killed one of his key operatives. He’s a hero and he’s eliminated a big threat. If he doesn’t take you out, he’s set it up so you eliminate not just one, but both his rivals for him, which he then uses to justify him taking over. No matter what happens, he wins. It’s so elegant. Like a perfect equation.”

Mozart, Scorpion thought. That’s what Yuval called him. Mozart. They’d all been doing arithmetic; he’d been doing calculus.

“So-and this is purely hypothetical. .”

“Totally.”

“Just a wild-ass theory, mind you; the question is, who’s the Gardener?”

“Think about it,” Rabinowich said. “Who wins?”

“Beikzadeh.”

“Head of the class, pal. Gold star.”

Except Rabinowich was wrong, Scorpion thought. Beikzadeh wasn’t the Gardener. Wrong age. Beikzadeh, the man he’d seen on TV, was in his fifties. Based on what Yuval had told them, Absalom would have to be in his late thirties, early forties.

“So what do you think? Is he still after me?”

“Doubt it,” Rabinowich said. “Everybody in the Pickle Factory thinks the Gardener is dead. This totally theoretical person we’re talking about loves that. But if you get hit, especially given that I’m around, suddenly everyone on Planet CIA knows he’s alive. Why risk it? Besides, they’ve got their hands full with the Israelis who might attack any second. Can I go back to my dinner now?”

“One more thing. Who’s Beikzadeh’s hatchet man? Who does his shovel work? I need a name. Somebody connected with him.” Whoever ran Beikzadeh’s dirty work was the real Gardener, Scorpion thought. Someone, like Absalom, in his thirties.

“Give me some time. Whoever it is, is really buried.”

“Come on, Dave. Give me something. A wild-ass guess, anything.”

There was a moment of silence. Scorpion could hear the sound of a basketball game on TV in the background over the phone.

“There was this one thing I came across a few years ago,” Rabinowich said. “A wedding announcement in Fars, the Iranian news agency. Something about Beikzadeh’s daughter getting married.”

That’s it, Scorpion thought. What was it Yuval had said about Absalom? “Of course, he married well. The daughter of a very powerful man within the Supreme Leader’s inner circle.”

“The article mentioned something about him working in one of Beikzadeh’s departments. Now I remember. It was odd.”

“Why?”

“Because there was no other mention of him anywhere. Not even university. Nothing. It’s as if he never existed except to marry Beikzadeh’s daughter.”

“What was his name?” Scorpion asked, excitement building. It was the Gardener. That was exactly how he’d do it.

“That was even odder,” Rabinowich said. “They didn’t say. Can you imagine writing an article about a prominent wedding and not mentioning the name of the groom?”

“They must have said something. Anything. What department was he in?”

“Let me think,” Rabinowich muttered. “It was years ago.”

Come on, Scorpion thought. Rabinowich was stalling. A genius with a near photographic memory, Rabinowich was taking his time because he hadn’t decided whether to tell him.

“Ministry of Islamic Guidance,” Rabinowich said finally. “I think that was it. Shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Soames, on the other line.”

“Tell him your poem,” Scorpion said, and ended the call.

That night, after dinner, they made love on the four-poster bed. Afterward, she lay with her head on the pillow, looking out at the night.

“How does this work?” she said.

“I don’t know. If you had any sense, you should run as fast and as far as you can in the opposite direction.”

She raised herself on an arm to look at him, her eyes reflecting the light from the half-moon risen over the plain.

“Is that what you want?”

He pulled her close, inhaling the smell of her, the feel of her.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

“Hypothetically, where would we live? What would we do?” she asked.

“Whatever you want. I have a house on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. A sailing ketch. We could go there. We could stay in Africa, America, Paris,” he said. He’d already told her everything. His real name, Nick Curry. That he was born in Santa Monica, California, and his father took him to Saudi Arabia as a child after his mother died and then his father was killed and his strange childhood, raised by the Bedouin in the desert. All of it. Tehran University, the Sorbonne, Harvard. U.S. Special Forces, JSOC, the CIA, and how he left and became an independent agent. Whatever she wanted to know.

“And from time to time, you go away and kill people. I don’t know if I can live with that,” she said, raising her head and looking at him with those luminous eyes.

“Except if I didn’t, many innocent people-sometimes thousands, tens of thousands, millions even-will die. What’s the moral calculus on that?”

He got up and walked out onto the deck in his jockey shorts. A zebra yawned and trotted away, and the sky was so bright with the moon and stars he thought he could almost read by it. Godfrey had left out clean glasses, the bottle of Springbank scotch, Evian water, and an ice bucket on the off chance they’d want a late nightcap. He poured himself a drink and took a sip. In the distance, he heard the sound of an elephant’s trumpeting.

There was something else, he thought. Because Harris was right. He’d lied about his meeting with Harandi in Rome before any of this had happened. He had deceived them. Yes, he’d turned the Israelis down about Absalom, but before they parted, Harandi had said to him, “Promise me. If anything happens to me, you’ll go to Iran.” He’d promised because in his world, until Sandrine, it was the only thing he had to hang onto. When you lose someone, you can’t just let it go. Things have to be made right. Oddly, he sensed he shared that with his enemy. Absalom. The Gardener. The man who had run the Palestinian. The man behind the embassy attack in Bern.

He wondered if the Israelis had attacked Iran. He and Sandrine had avoided cell phones, the Internet, anything to do with the outside world. Oddly enough, at that moment he didn’t want to know.

He felt her come up beside him, her lithe body naked under a sheer nightgown. It was all he could do not to grab her as tightly as he could. Instead, he handed her the glass and she drank.

“Where’d you go just now?” she asked.

“Just a drink,” he said.

“No. I mean in your mind.”

He didn’t answer.

“It isn’t simple, is it?” she said.

“No, it isn’t.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said, gazing out at the acacia tree and the endless African plain under the moon and the stars. She slipped her arm around him and leaned against him. “What are we going to do?”

“We’ll think of something,” he said.