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 és 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.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
El Born,
Barcelona, Spain
“You were there?” Scorpion asked.
“You kidding, hombre? I helped with the cooking,” Shehi said. The Albanian was a short man with a close-shaved head and a three-day beard that didn’t disguise the knife scar that ran down the side of his face from the hairline to the jaw.
They were in the back room of a small bar on the cobblestoned Carrer de l’Argenteria in the gothic El Born district. Starting with a Romanian whore on Calle Ramon in El Raval, it had taken Scorpion just four hours to work his way up the criminal food chain to the Albanian. It seemed odd for him to be there in the tiny room, dark and smelling of beer and mold, when the day had turned sunny, the trees green, and in an early sign of spring, girls were on the Ramblas in tank tops and brighter colors.
“How’d they kill him?” Scorpion asked. They were talking about a notorious incident that had echoed around the police and intelligence world in which the members of an Albanian Spanish mafia gang had killed, cooked, and eaten one of their own they considered a traitor.
“With a hammer,” Shehi said. “Why do you think they call Hayir ‘El Martillo’? Here.” He poured brandy from a bottle of Fundador and pushed the glass at Scorpion. “Stop with that cava piss and drink like a man.” Scorpion traded the sparkling wine for the brandy.
“Salud,” he toasted, and they drank. “So how’d you cook him?”
“We ground him up in a meat grinder. Then we made pimientos rellenos de carne. Stuffed red peppers. Everyone at a big table. Must have been at least twenty of us.”
“How was it?”
“You know . . .” The Albanian paused to reflect. “We fried the peppers, and let me tell you, with a nice onion sauce and vino tinto, he was pretty good. Better than he ever was alive, that culero.” He laughed, then looked at Scorpion speculatively. “So what kind of joda hijo de puta”—cop son of a bitch—“you looking for?”
“A joda who likes to chupame la polla.” A cop who’ll do oral sex; in slang, someone willing to do anything for money. “Even Muslims.”
Shehi looked at him sharply. “What kind of Muslims?” For Albanians, religion was dangerous territory.
“Shia,” Scorpion said.
“Hezbollah? You talking Hezbollah? That’s serious mierda you talking, hombre.”
Scorpion put a hundred euro bill on the table. Shehi didn’t respond. He put another hundred down, then a two hundred. Shehi put his hand over the money, and Scorpion stopped him from taking the money by touching his index finger to the back of Shehi’s hand. Neither of them moved.
“The joda you want is Pintero. Victor Pintero. A sotsinspector in the mossos d’esquadra in El Raval,” Shehi said, taking the money.
“He’d sell information to Hezbollah?”
Shehi shrugged. “For the price of a stink-faced whore, he’d sell his mother.”
“What makes you so sure he’s Hezbollah’s puta?” Scorpion asked, letting his right hand drop below the table to the pocket where he carried the Walther PK380 he had taken from the police station. Shehi was holding something back; he wasn’t sure wha
t. He put his hand on the gun. “You don’t want me to come back,” he added quietly.
“I shit on you too,” Shehi said. Then looking into Scorpion’s cold gray eyes, he reconsidered. “He’s on our payroll. I know definitely one hundred percent he deals with Hezbollah. So do we.”
“Like what?”
“Guns, drugs, money washing, putas. Romanian women, Moldovan, Russian. Good business,” rubbing his thumb on his fingers in the universal sign for money.
“And I should believe you because . . . ?” Scorpion said.
“Like you say, hombre,” Shehi said, taking a swig of the brandy and wiping his mouth with his hand. “I don’t want to see you again. You too hot. Too many people looking for you,” looking directly at Scorpion. “No good for business.”
So Shehi had recognized him from the police sketch shown on TV and in the newspapers, Scorpion thought. He would have to change his appearance beyond just growing a Van Dyke type beard. It also meant Shehi knew about the four policemen he had taken out at the comisaria who were all in serious condition at Clínic de Barcelona hospital. That’s why the Albanian didn’t want to mess with him.
“Except maybe you’ll think to call the mossos the minute I leave.”
Shehi grinned. “The thought occurred.”
“Sure. Kill two birds with one stone. Make a little extra.” Scorpion winked, easing the Walther out and pointing it, under the table, at Shehi’s belly. Another word and he would have to kill him.
Again Shehi shrugged. “Not a bad idea.”
“It’s a very bad idea,” Scorpion said, finger tightening on the trigger.
“You think I don’t know, hombre? I shit in the milk of any joda’s mother,” Shehi said, giving no sign he knew how close to death he was. “I never tell mossos nothing. Nada. And if I did, what would I tell them? We talk. ‘And where did he go?’ they will ask. What can I say? I don’t know nothing. I don’t want to know nothing.” He looked shrewdly at Scorpion. “We finish, hombre?”
Scorpion slid the Walther back into his pocket as he got up.
“Cell phone,” he said, holding out his hand. Shehi handed his over.
Scorpion stood over him. “So long as you forget you ever saw me, that we ever had this conversation, we finish,” he said.
When he got outside, the sun was so bright he had to shade his eyes. As he walked the narrow street toward the Santa Maria del Mar church, he used Shehi’s phone to make a call. When he was done, he took out the SIM and battery, tossed the cell phone into a trash bin, then dropped the SIM and battery into a storm drain a block away before heading to the Metro.
The clock was ticking. And all he could think about was not the mission, but Sandrine. He wondered where she was now and if she was safe.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dharkenleey,
Mogadishu, Somalia
She was being watched. It was the South African, Van Zyl, a lanky bearded man with blue eyes. He was from UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, at the improvised horror show called Badbaada Camp on the western outskirts of Mogadishu. The Badbaada refugee camp made the one at Dadaab in Kenya seem like the Ritz Carlton. Plastic sheeting was the only shelter, no food or toilet facilities, nothing; just dirt on the wrong side of Dharkenleey Road and a single water faucet for sixty thousand people and hundreds more arriving every day to escape the fighting and starvation in Afgooye and Lower Shabelle. Van Zyl had shown up just three days after she arrived.
She had flown in from Nairobi. Coming in from the airport, Mogadishu was a city of blazing sun and battered white Toyota vans so packed with people that men and boys rode clinging to the outside, standing on rear bumpers as they bounced along the rutted streets; a city of open-air markets selling vegetables, guns, and ammunition; concrete cinder-block buildings, some blasted to ruins by the recent fighting, women in multicolored direhs with children moving among the armed green-bereted African Union troops and Somali government soldiers that were everywhere.
Whenever Van Zyl was around, she sensed his eyes on her. Not the normal way men looked at a woman, particularly if she was reaching or bending over to get something. She was a grown woman and understood that kind of a look. This was different. As if he was watching to see what she would do.
The boy, Ghedi, the one saved by the American she called David Cheyne, even though she knew it wasn’t his real name, noticed it too. When she had come back to Dadaab from Paris, the boy was gone. He disappeared after learning his little sister might still be alive in Mogadishu. God only knew how he’d made it through the war zone, but somehow he was here now, still looking for his sister.
“That mzungu,” Ghedi said, using the Swahili slang word for a white man that he had picked up in Dadaab, “he watch you.”
“Yes,” she nodded, wiping her forehead with her forearm. Under the stretch of plastic tarps that served for a hospital tent, it was unbelievably hot, at least forty-five degrees Celsius. If her patients weren’t already dying, the heat and the flies only compounded the misery. But they never complained. Even though she could do so little for them, they were grateful. They were wonderful, and it was hopeless, and what was she doing here and where was the American and why couldn’t she get him out of her mind?
The Hawiye women in their beautiful direhs and graceful gestures would say she was bewitched. Maybe it was true, she thought. Why else was she here?
“Should I kill him, isuroon?” the boy asked, using the Somali word for a woman deserving of respect, holding up the belawa knife he wore on a leather thong around his neck. He had seen her with the American and had appointed himself her protector till the American returned.
“La,” no, she said, touching his hand with the knife. “Not yet.”
“If you say, I will kill him,” he said, looking at her.
“I know,” she said. “But now you must go. This is for women. A ragol,” a man, “may not be here.”
She felt him leave as she turned back to the patient, a little girl on a shred of blanket on the ground. Small, shriveled with a swollen belly, she looked barely four years old, though her mother said she was seven. The child was severely malnourished and dehydrated. Too malnourished to use an IV, which could overhydrate and kill her. And she was dangerously lethargic. It could be shock or sepsis, she thought, looking at the mother, whose face had so little flesh it was like looking at a skull.
“Voici.” She gestured to the mother, handing her one of the few Baggies of liquid ReSoMal she still had left and showing her how to give it to the girl orally, even as she debated with herself whether to use it or save it for another because this child was so far gone. Except she couldn’t do that, could she? she told herself. She raised the tiny torn direh and then saw it. The gaping bloody wound at the child’s genitals.
“Mada? Mana?” What? Who? she asked the mother, pointing at the wound and using two of the few words of Arabic she knew.
“Digil, Al-Shabaab,” the woman said. Al-Shabaab soldiers from the Digil clan.
It was rape, Sandrine thought, feeling nauseous. The thought of grown men with this tiny child made her try to swallow to keep from throwing up. I can’t do this anymore, she thought, looking at the girl’s wasted body. She took a breath. This petite didn’t do anything to have this happen to her, she thought, pulling out a thermometer strip to take the girl’s temperature: 40.2 degrees Celsius. High fever. Sepsis from the wound. She looked around despairingly. By rights she should order a CBC, start skin tear repair, but the only thing she had—and damn little of it—was penicillin. This wasn’t medicine, it was witch-doctoring!
She took out the ampule, gave her the injection, and bandaged the wound as best she could. The child barely reacted to the needle. She had to get out of here, Sandrine thought. She patted the mother on the arm and ran out into the blazing sun.
Van Zyl, in his ratty Kaizer Chiefs football T-shirt and shorts, was standing there. Not doing anything, just standing there.
“Stop watching me, you bloody son of a bitc
h!” she screamed at him. “So help me, I’ll have someone shoot you! And do something useful for once! Get the medicines I ordered!”
“Take it easy, bokkie. I’ll catch you later,” he said, holding up his hands in mock surrender and walking away.
She put her hands to her face. She wasn’t helping these people or herself. Why was she here? And an inner voice whispered: Because you know he’ll find you here.
She shook her head. Ce n’est pas moi, she told herself. It’s not me. She went back into the hospital tent. The heat and stench were overpowering.
“Merde,” she said aloud, and went back to work.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Gràcia,
Barcelona, Spain
Marchena, the CNI agent who hadn’t showed at the RDV set up by Shaefer at the Plaça Vicenç Martorell, was a tall balding man in a gray suit and dark shirt. He had the look of casual authority, like a professional soccer coach, Scorpion thought as he watched him get into his car, a bright red BMW Series 6 coupe in the office building’s underground garage. The Barcelona branch of the Spanish intelligence service, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, was headquartered in the building, using the cover of a construction machinery company, Grupo Puentas y Gracia. He treats himself well, this Marchena, Scorpion mused as he walked over and rapped on the driver’s window with the Walther pistol.
“Qué diables!” Marchena exclaimed in Catalan. What the hell!
Scorpion motioned with the Walther for Marchena to unlock the passenger door. It took Marchena a second to figure it out that there wasn’t enough time to start the car and drive before the stranger with the gun and wearing a blond surfer boy wig could shoot. Marchena pressed the unlock button and Scorpion got in.
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