Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER SIX

Zug,

Switzerland

It was raining when Scorpion stepped off the double-decker S-Bahn from Zurich. Even before he walked out of the train station in Zug, he spotted the surveillance.

It was a classic six-box shadow detail: two fore, two aft, two bracketing on either side in the center. The center pair-a man with a buzz cut wearing a Burberry trench coat, and a pert blond woman in a sweater and a North Face jacket who looked like a teenager-didn’t even bother to pretend they weren’t watching him.

Scorpion stood under an umbrella in the Bahnhofplatz in the rain and motioned to the Burberry to come over. At first the man pretended not to see him. When Scorpion persisted, the man threw a glance at the pert blond and came over. He was a big, bulky in his trench coat, a hand in his pocket.

“This is stupid,” Scorpion said. “Let’s go see Harris.”

A minute later he was in the back of a Mercedes sedan sandwiched between the Burberry and a man in a soccer hoodie. The pert blond climbed into the front passenger seat and turned, flashing perfect teeth and a 9mm Beretta at him. Scorpion handed both his Glocks-the 9mm from the small-of-the-back holster and the small Glock 28 from his ankle holster-to the hoodie. He kept the ceramic scalpel and polymer lock pick-nonmetallic to avoid metal detectors-taped with flesh-colored tape to the sole of his foot.

They drove through quaint alpine streets to the Upper Town and up a winding road toward the green hills. Less than a half hour south of Zurich, Zug looked like what it was: a picturesque backwater. Except for the fact that rented boxes in its local post office served as headquarters for more than thirty thousand international corporations and that most of the world’s commodities were traded in offices overlooking picturesque Lake Zug, which made it possibly the richest town in the world.

The Mercedes turned off onto a private road lined with trees and hedges. Scorpion caught a reflection from a scope that someone should have kept covered, spotting a guard in camouflage gear with an M4 rifle hiding in the bushes. There were security cameras and sensors in a 360-pattern around acres of green field and in trees along the road to the safe house, an ultramodern structure of glass and concrete that somebody with money to burn had spent millions on. It stood on its own at the end of a long driveway. A feature he knew he wouldn’t find in Architectural Digest was the silhouette of a sniper’s shoulders and head on the building roof.

Bob Harris was waiting with Shaefer in the living room on the second floor, with its panoramic wall of floor-to-ceiling glass providing a breathtaking view of the town, the blue lake below, and the snow-covered mountains. Shaefer, a lanky African-American, was sitting on a sofa, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Scorpion and Shaefer had been in Delta Force together, the only two survivors of an ambush by the Taliban at Forward Operating Base Echo in the Chaprai Valley in North Waziristan, an area in Pakistan where officially American troops didn’t exist, and it defined a bond between them.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have sent Soames to Nairobi,” Harris began. For a change, he wore glasses and wasn’t in a suit. In his preppy khakis and cashmere sweater, he could have been an aging postgraduate lecturer posing for a Tommy Hilfiger ad.

“Soames is just a prick. It’s you I can’t stand,” Scorpion said.

Shaefer, his old friend, shook his head, grinning. Same old Scorpion.

“Soames is useful,” Harris said. “Every executive needs someone everyone can hate, so they don’t hate him. Coffee?” he asked, indicating a silver coffee service and several plates of Swiss cookies, a Linzer torte, and what looked like a Black Forest cake on a side table.

“And what’s with all the firepower? Who are you expecting? The Chinese army?” Scorpion said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“We’re talking about people who took out a secure facility manned by specially trained United States Marines. Some presence is warranted,” Harris said, stirring sugar into a cup. “Tell me about Hamburg.”

“Harandi went back to his apartment. Warned him not to.”

“Did you see who did it? The motorcyclist?” Harris said, sitting in an armchair facing the view.

“Yes.”

“Could you spot him again?”

“Not likely. I killed him in Paris.”

Shaefer snorted a laugh. Harris looked at Scorpion sharply as the young blond woman with the teeth and the Beretta came in and began working a big-screen laptop computer set up on a dining room table.

“That was you?” Harris said, and when Scorpion didn’t answer: “When were you going to tell us?”

“I just did.”

“Pity you couldn’t have kept him alive for us to question,” tapping his finger impatiently on the coffee cup. “That might have been the ball game.”

“At the time the only life I was interested in saving was mine.”

At that, the young woman glanced back over her shoulder, smiling with her perfect teeth like he was the Black Forest cake, then went back to her work.

“So they spotted you in Paris? How?”

Scorpion shrugged. “You tell me. That’s one of the reasons I contacted you. Probably someone with the Kilbane ID photo covering De Gaulle. Or a bent gendarme at Passport Control.”

“We’ll follow up with the Swimming Pool,” Harris said, referring to the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service, so-called because their headquarters was located in Paris next to the French Swimming Federation.

“Because they’ve always been so forthcoming in the past,” Shaefer growled. He turned to Scorpion. “Did Harandi say anything before he died? Anything on the Iranians?”

“Wait,” Harris held up his hand. “Let’s get Rabinowich in on this.” He looked at the young woman. “Are we ready, Chrissie?” And back to Scorpion: “It’s some kind of Skype, only on JWICS,” which he pronounced JAYwicks. Scorpion understood. Whereas most U.S. federal agencies, the State Department, and the Department of Defense used both the government’s SIPRNET-for classified communications up to the Secret level-or the unclassified NIPRNET network to communicate, the CIA Clandestine Service and NSA used JWICS-Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System-the only network designed for highly secure encrypted Top Secret communications on up to the SCI/SAP-Special Compartmented Information or Special Access Program-level, the highest secrecy level in the U.S. government.

They got up and gathered around the big laptop on the dining room table. Dave Rabinowich was already on the screen, picking his nose as the others gathered around.

“Can you see us, Dave?” Harris asked. And to the young woman: “Thanks, Chrissie.”

They waited while she left and there were just the three of them in the room.

“Nice girl,” Shaefer said.

“She’s got a gun,” Scorpion said.

“My kind of girl.” Shaefer grinned. And to Rabinowich: “You can stop excavating your nose, Dave. It’s kind of killing my appetite.”

“Actually, the cilia, not the hairs, in your nose help create appetite through the sense of smell. Did you know they continue to beat after death? Their postmortem motility rate actually gives a more accurate reading of time of death than body temperature,” Rabinowich said, his face nearly filling the screen. With his close-set eyes behind glasses and bushy eyebrows slanting out at an up angle, he looked like a cartoon of a pudgy Horned Owl.

“Thanks, Dave. I think we’ve reached our Asperger quota for the day,” Harris interrupted. “Scorpion was about to tell us about Harandi in Hamburg.” He looked at Scorpion. “What about the Iranians?”

“Nothing. Harandi didn’t think it was the MOIS or Hezbollah. Said he would have heard if it was.”

“Christ,” Harris growled, frustration in his voice. “Was he saying it definitely wasn’t the Iranians?”

Scorpion understood his frustration. Things were in motion. While waiting in Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof Central Train Station, he had surfed the latest news from cnn.com on his cell phone.

The Americans had tightened security at their embassies around the world. Other Western nations, such as Britain, France, and Germany, were following suit. A news blackout had been imposed in Washington, and the White House, Department of State, and the Pentagon stated there would be no further announcements or press briefings until U.S. and “allied” intelligence sources had identified the Bern attackers, although it was widely speculated that al Qaeda had been behind the attack. The Pentagon did, however, acknowledge that the U.S. military had gone to DEFCON 3 status.

“That’s not what I said,” Scorpion said. “What about al Qaeda?”

No one said anything, but Rabinowich sat there shaking his head back and forth like a swivel-head doll.

“It’s not al Qaeda,” Rabinowich said. The fact that neither Harris nor Shaefer disagreed with him meant that as far as the CIA was concerned, they weren’t following that thread.

“How can you be so sure?”

“COMINT levels have shown zip. We’ve been monitoring nonstop. If someone even farts in Rawalpindi we’d have picked up something. It’s not them.”

“What else did Harandi say?” Harris said to Scorpion. “This thing about a snake?”

“The saw-scaled viper. It’s the most poisonous snake in the Middle East.”

“Nice,” Shaefer said, and to Rabinowich: “Have we heard anything, Dave?”

“Absolutely nothing. Zero. Bit of an outlier,” Rabinowich said.

“What about this ayatollah? What’s his name?” Harris demanded, turning to Shaefer and Scorpion.

“Ayatollah Ali Nihbakhti. From Qom,” Shaefer said, glancing at Scorpion as if to confirm he had it right.

“What do we know about him?” Harris asked.

“It’s a cover ID. He doesn’t exist,” Rabinowich said, wiping his glasses. Without them, his eyes looked softer, more vulnerable.

“Or the Iranians don’t want us to know about him,” Harris said, pursing his lips. He turned to Shaefer. “What are we getting from the Swiss?”

“You won’t like it,” Shaefer said, uncrossing his legs.

“They’re Swiss. I know I won’t like it. What?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s impossible. There must be something.”

“None of the dead attackers had any ID or any papers, anything of any kind,” Shaefer said. “There’s no record of them ever staying at a hotel or pension or anyplace in Switzerland. Their clothes were cheap, bought locally for cash. No credit cards, debits, anything. According to the Kantonspolizei, it’s as if until the day of the attack these guys never existed.”

“This is bullshit,” Harris said. “There must be something. Dental work, Immigration control photos, a check of Swiss drivers’ licenses, Interpol records, something. They didn’t just materialize out of thin air.”

“They knew we’d be looking,” Rabinowich said. “This attack was very carefully planned.”

“Impossible. There’s always something,” Harris said. “Come on, guys. What is it?”

“DNA,” Rabinowich said. “On the attackers in Bern. Just preliminary, of course. One of the four bodies from the attack is an Arab. Possibly Iraqi. DNA from the female bomber’s foot suggests she may have been Kurdish, possibly a Syrian Kurd; we need more markers before we can nail it down. The other three bodies are Persian. Give us a couple more days and we can say with 99.999 percent certainty that they’re Iranians.”

“So that’s what we go to war on?” Harris snapped. “Iranians are everywhere. They could’ve come from England, Turkey, Sweden, even California. We could bomb Beverly Hills. There’s not one damn thing to prove they came from Iran.”

For a moment no one spoke. Scorpion sipped his coffee and looked out at the view, the trees and fields, the town below, the blue lake and mountains. Thinking the female Kurd was an anomaly, but three Iranians and an Iraqi, ten-to-one a Shiite, wasn’t a coincidence. Neither was the Russian VKS rifle of the sniper in Paris, the al Quds Force’s sniper rifle of choice. Proving it to the UN and the media on a world stage, though, was something else.

“Red rose,” Rabinowich said, pursing his lips and looking more like a horned owl than ever.

“What?”

“Gol ghermez,” Rabinowich said. “In Farsi it means red rose. According to cell tracking coordinates, someone made a mobile call from Gerten Mountain in Bern to Zurich approximately forty minutes after the attack. All they said was ‘Gol ghermez,’ and hung up.”

“Could be anything. A guy calling his girlfriend. A florist,” Shaefer said facetiously.

“It could be a completion code,” Scorpion said. “Maybe signaling success after the attack.”

“That’s what NSA thinks,” Rabinowich said. “They’re the ones who picked it up. It just took them a while to sort through all the COMINT traffic in God-knows-how-many-languages in Switzerland.

“And the number in Zurich?”

“Prepaid cell phone purchased with a phony ID.”

“Of course. What was the ID?” Shaefer asked.

“According to Swisscom phone records,” Rabinowich said, “the purchaser was Ferka Chergari. The name is of Roma origin, obviously. Domiciled in Biasca, southern Switzerland,” he added.

“So do we have watchers crawling up this Gypsy’s ass even as we speak?” Harris said, his blue eyes glittering.

Rabinowich shrugged. “Difficult, seeing he died in 2007.”

“Is that it?” Harris said. “Is that everything we’ve got? Because I’m beginning to love going back to square one. I may take out a mortgage on it. Come on, guys. Is this the best we’ve got?” He regarded them defiantly. It made him look older, Scorpion thought, noticing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes in the light from the windows.

“Zurich,” Scorpion said.

“What about it?” Harris snapped.

“It was a cutout.”

“Of course! Nice one,” Rabinowich said, slapping the desk, his head rising up, grinning from ear to ear.

“You two girlfriends want to let the rest of us in on it?” Harris said, suddenly interested.

“Put it together,” Scorpion said. “Gol ghermez, red rose in Farsi, means the cutout is an Iranian in Zurich. What’ll you bet the cutout’s a trader doing business for the Revolutionary Guards or one of the factions? Right out in the open, because Switzerland’ll do business with Satan himself as long as it ends up in Swiss francs on the Bahnhofstrasse. Can’t be that many Iranian trading companies paying the kind of astronomical prices they charge in Zurich’s high-rent district.”

For the first time, Harris smiled. He rubbed his hands together.

“All right, boys and girls, we are live. You make the approach,” he said, pointing at Scorpion. “And let’s not alternate this operation with the Ring Cycle. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“He might have to go to Iran,” Shaefer put in. “They’re prepping for war over there. The minute somebody climbs over the fence, they’ll pop him.”

“He’s a big boy. He’ll just have to watch himself, won’t he?” Harris said, looking at Scorpion.

Scorpion got up. He walked over to the plate glass and looked out at the view. Switzerland was like a picture postcard, he thought. So different from Africa, from Sandrine, from everything he cared about. He turned around.

“How much time do we have?”

“None,” Harris said. “Things are moving fast. Right now this is our op, but in a little while people with bigger dicks take control.”

“For once, he’s telling the truth,” Shaefer said. “We’re talking days, hours.”

“I need at least a couple of weeks. Maybe more,” Scorpion said. “This isn’t some 24 type bullshit where you smack a joe in the mouth and he tells you everything he knows. If it is Iran, penetrating them when they’re already paranoid as hell is going to take resources and time.”

Harris got up.

“I’ll talk to the Director, try to buy you ten days. He’ll have to get the President to approve it. After that. .” He shrugged.

“Three weeks,” Scorpion said.

“Ten days. But you better come up with something fast.” Harris looked at Shaefer, Scorpion, and Rabinowich on the screen. “As of right now, you three are a special task force. Special Access Program Critical. No one outside us knows anything. Shaefer,” he said, nodding at the lanky African-American, “will coordinate. He will speak with not just my authority, but the DCIA’s. The Director’s already on board, by the way. Use any assets you deem necessary. The entire U.S. military if we have to. Dave,” Harris said, turning to the laptop screen. “This is your full-time assignment. And talk to no one inside Langley but me, understood? Anyone gives you shit, send them to me.”

Harris looked at all of them.

“We’re back in business, guys. Just like old times,” he said, winking.

“Better not be,” Scorpion said, remembering Rome and St. Petersburg and Kiev.

“You’ve got the easy job.” Harris grinned, the smile that had gotten half the female interns in Washington to drop their pants. “I’ve got to convince the President to slow-dance with the Washington press corps for ten days in the middle of a crisis.”

Harris’s L-3 phone chimed. It was a Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device, a combination cell phone and PDA for Top Secret calls, texts, e-mails and surfing via JWICS. He took the call, holding up his hand to indicate that they should wait.

“Shit!” he said tersely into the phone, then: “Tell ’em do nothing till I get back to Washington tonight,” and ended the call. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” he snarled, and looked at them. “Senator Russell got hold of the DNA data indicating it’s the Iranians. He’s leaked it. It’ll be all over tomorrow’s New York Times.”

“That’s torn it,” Shaefer said disgustedly, getting up. He was supposed to be headed for Bern to dig up what he could from the Swiss federal and cantonal police. “They’ll be wanting to declare war before the week is out.”

“That’s not the only problem,” Harris said. “The real problem is not just who wants to pick a fight with the most powerful country in the world. Has it occurred to anyone to ask why? And who in Iran-if it is Iran? And if we don’t figure it out, we could be playing right into their hands. There’s something going on here that, unless we get it right, is going to come back and bite us in the ass.”

“Unbelievable,” Rabinowich said.

“What is?” Shaefer asked.

“First time I ever agreed with Bob,” Rabinowich said.

Scorpion looked at Harris with his cold, gray eyes.

“Ten days,” he said.

“Did you not hear what I said? That asshole Russell just changed the equation. It’ll be a miracle if I can get us five,” Harris said, heading for the door, then stopping. A nerve in his jaw throbbed. “And Scorpion, they murdered our people in cold blood. No prisoners.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Scorpion said.