Scorpion Deception s-4

by Andrew Kaplan

  “We further declare that the Zionist entity called Israel will be destroyed if there are any further provocations. Allahu akhbar, God is great and God is with us. Salam, my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters.”

  Zahra looked at them, the boulevard lights reflected on the car window next to her head.

  “Does it mean what I think it means?” she asked.

  “It means war,” Ghanbari said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Haft-e Tir Square,

  Tehran, Iran

  They bought new prepaid cell phones for each of them at an electronics shop next to the bus station in Tajrish Square. They went down the stairs to the Metro platform and waited for the Line 1 train. Scorpion and Ghanbari boarded a middle car; Zahra rode in the front car, reserved for women. As they rode, Scorpion captured Zahra’s and Ghanbari’s contacts from their phones and enslaved their new phones to his with the NSA software from his flash drive.

  “What will we do with the old phones?” Ghanbari asked.

  “They’re GPS tracking yours and Zahra’s,” Scorpion said. “That’s why I wanted the Metro.”

  “Clever. We leave them on the train,” Ghanbari nodded approvingly. “You’re an interesting man, Westermann agha.”

  Scorpion nodded. “Call me Laurent, Muhammad jan. By the time they find the old phones, we’ll have gone to ground.”

  “But then what? We’ll be wanted men. Everyone, the police, the Basiji, the VEVAK, Kta’eb Hezbollah, will be after us. And then there’s the crisis. And in the middle of Nowruz!”

  Scorpion’s mind was already at warp speed. He had to get the intel to Langley about Sadeghi possibly being the Gardener and that the call from Begur hadn’t been made to Ghanbari. All hell would break loose if they went public using such misinformation as a basis for war.

  Langley would ask for his assessment. Best guess: Sadeghi and Kta’eb Hezbollah were behind the hit on Bern. As to why, maybe Rabinowich could figure it out. Clearly, it was, as Vahidi had suggested, part of a power struggle for control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

  Another problem: he wasn’t sure if he could even get the intel out. One of the first things the Iranians would likely do would be to quarantine access to the Internet outside Iran, if they hadn’t done it already.

  As the train pulled into the Haft-e Tir station, Scorpion let his arm hang down and quietly deposited Zahra’s and Ghanbari’s old cell phones on the floor beside the bench, as out of sight as possible. With any luck, they wouldn’t be noticed. And if someone did take them, all the better. It would take that much longer for Scale and his men to track down the old cell phones.

  When they got off the train, Zahra joined them on the platform. They came up out of the Metro into a wide well-lit square. This was an older, poorer part of town. Even at night, the smog was thicker here. It smelled of trash and diesel fumes. Many of the women in the streets were dressed in head-to-foot chadors like black-robed ghosts, instead of Western clothes. People were shopping at market stalls in the square. Vendors called out, hawking flowers, goldfish in bowls, and green plants in clay containers shaped like animals.

  “Why the goldfish?” Scorpion asked.

  “Vay Khoda!” Zahra slapped her forehead. “It’s Monday.”

  “Goldfish Monday?” he asked.

  “No, beshoor.” Idiot. Then he understood. “Tomorrow is Tuesday; tomorrow night’s the eve of Red Wednesday.”

  “The last Wednesday before Nowruz, the Persian New Year,” Ghanbari explained.

  “They don’t seem very festive,” Scorpion said.

  “No, they don’t. It’s the crisis,” she said thoughtfully, walking with them out of the square down Karimkhan Zand, a wide boulevard with plane trees on both sides, crowded with cars and yellow buses. Despite the crisis, people were out with their families, shopping for the holiday.

  “I’ve never seen it like this. It’s not like any Nowruz ever.” She looked around. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “We keep an apartment. I’ll show you,” Ghanbari said.

  “We being al Quds?” Scorpion asked.

  “We have many of these,” Ghanbari nodded. “But this is one only I and two of my closest people know about.”

  “Except in a very short time they’re going to be told you’re a traitor,” Scorpion said.

  “They won’t believe it,” Ghanbari said. “I’m not the only one who will realize what’s happening, that Sadeghi and the Kta’eb Hezbollah are trying to take over.”

  “So Scale works for Sadeghi?”

  Ghanbari shook his head.

  “Scale works for the Gardener. In this case, he seems to be acting for Sadeghi. That would suggest. .” He stopped, leaving Scorpion to draw his own conclusions.

  “Sadeghi’s the Gardener. It must be,” Zahra said. “It all makes sense.”

  “How long do you think before Sadeghi gets to your people?”

  “We should be all right for tonight. They can’t check everywhere and there’s a lot going on,” Ghanbari said, turning off the boulevard. He led them to an apartment building on Second Street. “This is an interesting neighborhood. Lots of Armenians and Assyrians.”

  “Stop talking nonsense,” Zahra snapped as they went in and began walking up the four floors to the apartment. “What are we going to do?”

  “We counterattack,” Scorpion said. “It’s our only chance.”

  “Just the three of us? And the entire country mobilizing for war. How do we do that?”

  “Wait!” Scorpion said when they reached the door, stopping Ghanbari before he unlocked it. He checked for any signs of intruders, electronic monitoring or explosives, getting down and peeking at the crack between the door and the doorstep, then signaling Ghanbari to open the door. They went inside.

  The apartment was Scorpion’s kind of place. Half a dozen bunk beds, tables for desks, floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with computers and electronics and weapons, black curtains over the windows. It could have come from a CIA catalogue labeled “Safe house.” Zahra stood in the middle of the living room.

  “How?” she insisted. “What are we going to do?”

  “Not we,” Scorpion said. “You.”

  For weapons, he chose a Nakhir sniper rifle, an Iranian version of the Russian Dragunov, chambered for 7.62x54mm rounds. Effective range eight hundred meters, but with a 4x scope, the maximum range was 1,300 meters; eight-tenths of a mile. Plus a handful of ten-round mags. For a handgun he took another PC9 ZOAF. Ghanbari selected an MPT-9 submachine gun.

  “They might let you go. It might just be Muhammad jan,” Scorpion said to Zahra, indicating Ghanbari, “and me they’re after. If they do take you somewhere, try to stay visible. In public, or near a window. It’s the best way I can protect you.”

  “Maybe I don’t want protecting,” she said, looking in a mirror to put on lipstick and mascara, her weaponry. “Maybe they just want you and Muhammad jan.”

  “You’d give us up?” Ghanbari asked.

  “In a heartbeat. I want to be safe. I want to go home,” she said. Turning to Scorpion: “You’ve been in this country one day and you’ve already ruined my life. I knew you were trouble.” Going back to the mirror: “All men are trouble, but you’re something extra special, Westermann agha. You should come with a warning label.”

  Scorpion smiled ironically.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “You’re not the first person to say that,” he said.

  “It must be true,” she said. “What do I tell them when they take me?”

  “You’re giving us up. You alerted Sadeghi to the meeting. You’re working for him but we forced you to come with us on the assumption you’re on our side. Tell him where we’re hiding out, this apartment. Hopefully, he’ll believe you.”

  She lit a cigarette and exhaled thoughtfully.

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Stay visible,” he said again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

&n
bsp; 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 S
adeghi 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.