“You’ve got plenty of firepower on this. What’s the problem?” Scorpion asked finally.
“It won’t work. I have a feeling about this Palestinian. He’s good. Too good and absolutely ruthless. No matter what we do, he’ll find a way. That’s where you come in. I want you on your own, running your own operation, completely separate from everything and anyone else in the Agency. You’ll have unlimited access to anything we have anytime you want it. Spend as much money as you have to. If you want, I’ll give you the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ private cell number. Call out the goddamn Marines. You have one job. Stop the Palestinian. However you have to do it. No questions asked.”
“It’ll get dirty. You know what we’re dealing with.”
“Whatever it takes.”
Scorpion waited. He picked up the Beck’s but didn’t drink. The only sounds besides Springsteen were those of the port machinery and someone on the dock shouting in Urdu. As an independent agent, for Scorpion there was always the matter of payment. Finally, Harris said it.
“Double the usual fee plus a triple bonus when the Palestinian is—” He hesitated. “—no longer an issue. The first half’ll be in the Luxembourg account in an hour.”
Christ, they were scared shitless, Scorpion thought. Harris didn’t even bat an eye at so much money. What the hell was this?
“Hezbollah means Lebanon. I don’t trust Beirut station,” Scorpion said, putting down the beer.
“Rabinowich agrees. Keep it separate. Do it any way you like. There’s a backpack with a dozen passports, credit cards, money, contacts, some gear, the usual. Get it at the drop on 13th Street.” Then Harris told him the website they’d be using and the emergency password and countersign, what Scorpion’s old mentor, Koenig, used to call the pilot eject button. “Anything else?” he asked.
Scorpion stood up. “I have a plane to catch.”
“You have two weeks; probably less,” Harris said.
CHAPTER THREE
Beirut, Lebanon
Fouad was sitting by the window over a café au lait at an inside table at the Café de Paris. He was pretending to read a copy of Spécial magazine, a sexy Lebanese actress in a low-cut dress on the cover, as Scorpion entered the café. It was the signal that he was clean. If there had been any opposition, any one of the dozen different Lebanese factions opposed to his group, the March 14 Druze, the magazine would have been lying closed on the table.
Scorpion sat down across from Fouad and looked around. The café, with its orange awnings and multicolored chairs, was a Rue Hamra institution, and most of the clientele, he noted, was older. Gray-haired men who still wore suit jackets and en vogue women of a “certain age” who had kept their shapes. They looked like they dated from the nineties, when the café had been a hotbed of politicians, journalists, and spies.
“Salaam aleikem,” Fouad said, limply shaking Scorpion’s hand, passing a small plug-in flash drive as he did so.
“Wa aleikem es-salaam. This place is still here,” Scorpion said. “Un café turc, s’il vous plaît,” he said to the waiter.
“The students all hang out at Starbucks now. The old Lebanon is dead,” Fouad said, lighting a cigarette. He spoke a Druze-style Arabic distinguished by the qaf, the guttural k sound. “The photo is on the flash drive,” he whispered, leaning closer and opening his cell phone to show Scorpion the image of a man in Western clothes and a checkered kaffiyeh draped around his neck, talking on a cell phone on an apartment balcony.
“Salim?” Scorpion said.
Fouad nodded. “It’s him.”
“How do I know it’s him? Man on a balcony with a long distance lens. Could be anybody.”
“You know Choueifat?”
“Druze village. East of the airport,” Scorpion said.
“Hezbollah came at night. They took four boys. One of them was my brother’s son, Badi. Before they killed him, they cut out his eyes. This is Salim,” Fouad said, tapping the cell phone. “How many will you need?” He stopped and they waited until the waiter served Scorpion the thick coffee and left.
“Depends. Does he ever leave?”
“Sometimes.” Fouad looked around. “He has a woman in Ashrafieh.”
“How do you know?”
“She is one of us.” Scorpion raised his eyebrows and didn’t say anything. “Her mother was Druze,” Fouad explained.
“And he trusts her enough to visit her?”
“You should see her. Dark-haired, dark-eyed…” Fouad tried to find the words, his hands in front of him as if to touch something exquisite. “A beauty.”
“Where’s the apartment?”
“On Baroudi, near Shari’ Abdel Wahab. You know it?”
“Near the football stadium? That’s an expensive neighborhood,” Scorpion said. “How does she afford it?”
Fouad shifted uncomfortably. “She is a singer. A patriot,” he said.
“She’s yours?”
Fouad nodded. “This will end it for her?” he asked.
“We’ll try to make it appear that she’s a victim too,” Scorpion said. “Maybe they won’t kill her. What floor is her apartment on?”
“The eighth. The building has ten floors.”
“How many men does he come with?”
“Seven usually. Two SUVs. Four in one and three with him in the second. All with AK-47s.”
“Do any of them come into the apartment with him?”
Fouad shook his head. “He leaves two to guard outside the apartment door, the rest downstairs or outside.”
“I’ll call and let you know after I check it out,” Scorpion said. “Probably need just the two of us plus two with a car for the getaway. But no one knows who the target is or what it’s for or where they’re going till the last second. Understood?”
“Of course. Only the two of us?”
“The fewer, the better.” He could see Fouad was worried. “It’ll be enough. Security’s a bigger concern than firepower.”
Fouad leaned forward and put out the glowing tip of the cigarette by slowly crushing it between his fingers. “We will kill him?”
Scorpion didn’t answer.
“He has to be killed,” Fouad said. “The price is agreed?”
“Sixty M-16s, ten M203 grenade launchers, and two M-240B machine guns. A thousand dollars U.S. for each of your men, ten thousand for you,” Scorpion whispered in his ear as he stood up. “And no one touches him. He must be taken alive and unharmed or I pay nothing.”
“Maashi. Mafi mushkila.”
He’s lying, saying okay, Scorpion thought. He’d have to deal with it when the time came. “Inshallah, Ma’a salaama,” he said, touching Fouad on the shoulder as he left.
“Alla ysalmak, habibi,” Fouad said, not looking up.
Outside, Scorpion caught a Service taxi that he shared with two women, one in a head scarf, and a male student, heading toward the Corniche. He stopped the Service on Kuwait Street, crossed the busy street and jumped into a taxi heading the other way, toward downtown, making sure no one was suddenly reversing directions with him. He got out on Fakheddine, waited till the taxi left, then walked into a Japanese restaurant and out the back door. From there, Scorpion walked several blocks down a side street to the high-rise apartment building on Omar Daouk where he had rented a furnished flat earlier that morning. He nodded to the portier and took the elevator to the apartment. As soon as he got in, he went to the window and scanned the street below from behind the curtain, but there was nothing. Just ordinary street traffic. Beyond the street, he could see the side of the Ramada Hotel, and beyond that the Mediterranean, blue all the way to the horizon.
He went to the table, turned on his laptop computer, transferred the image on the plug-in drive from Fouad into the computer and opened it with Photoshop. The man in the photo was Salim Kassem, Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of the al-majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. It wasn’t his face Scorpion was interested in, but his cell phone. He enlarged the photo a
lmost to the point of seeing individual pixels, till he was sure he knew the exact Nokia model Kassem used. Using an RSA token disguised as a functioning credit card, Scorpion logged into the website of the International Corn Association, which promoted American corn exports that Harris was using as cover for the operation. The randomly generated code number plus a password enabled Scorpion to initiate a Virtual Private Network with a special port on the site that used an advanced DTLS protocol. This created a highly secure network tunnel that was far more difficult to hack than the standard SSL used by most so-called secure websites, such as banks. Once he was connected, he made the arrangements he wanted.
Only then did he unpack his suitcase and methodically check his equipment, one piece at a time, including a 9mm Beretta pistol with a sound suppressor. From this point on he would be carrying a gun everywhere he went.
Leaving the apartment, he took a Service to Ashrafieh. He stopped in a real estate office and pocketed a few business cards from an agent who tried to interest him in a condo in the Gammayzeh district. “Pas maintenant,” not now, he told the agent, using French as part of his cover ID, then caught a taxi that let him off on Baroudi, two blocks from the target. He studied the street and the building as he walked past and then completely around it. In the lobby, he slipped the portier one of the real estate cards and thirty thousand lira, told him he had a client who was interested and to keep it to himself. After taking the elevator to the top floor, he walked down the stairs to the eighth floor and checked the corridor to determine how he wanted to handle it when he returned.
Finally, Scorpion went back outside and called Fouad. He spent the rest of the day changing taxis and making further preparations.
Near sunset the next day Scorpion got the call from Fouad. He was seated at a café on the Corniche near Pigeon Rocks. The line of palm trees along the Corniche rustled in the breeze. A slim young woman in a miniskirt was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend in a black hijab scarf and skintight designer jeans, the two of them laughing, the sun turning the sea a fiery reddish gold and at that moment, Beirut was the most seductive place on earth. The waiter was talking with the bartender about Lebanon’s upcoming soccer match against Jordan in the Asian Cup, and on the TV behind the bar an Egyptian female singer was crooning about love.
It was good to hear Arabic again, Scorpion thought. It had been too long and he’d missed it; missed its musicality and expressiveness, and even more, a sense of his strange interrupted childhood in the desert of Arabia after his oilman father had been killed. It brought back the world of the Bedouin and Sheikh Zaid, who had been more of a father to him than his own father, whom he’d barely known, and the extraordinary nights of his boyhood when the stars filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon. He remembered how it was near the end, when it was all about oil and money and the Bedu way was gone, and when he went to America to go to Harvard, Sheikh Zaid telling him, “You have to find out who you are, my dhimmi.”
He was thinking about all that, and about dropping out of Harvard and going to war in Afghanistan and later the Delta Force—because in a way it was like going home—when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, said “D’accord,” and snapped the phone shut.
Scorpion slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked along the Corniche, the waves lapping at the shore as he went over it again in his mind. They had gotten lucky. An informant working in a garage in South Beirut spotted Kassem’s car being moved and called Fouad. That meant they would try soon, but there were multiple trouble spots. For one thing, there might be gunfire, and no guarantee that a stray—or not so stray—bullet would not get Kassem. Unless Kassem was unharmed, Scorpion knew his plan wouldn’t work. Also, the woman had to leave the balcony door unlocked or they might have to smash it in, alerting Kassem and the guards outside the door and precipitating a gunfight. And even if it all went as planned, keeping Kassem alive was a problem, since Fouad had a powerful motive to kill him. Plus, there was the matter of getting away, because Hezbollah, with informants everywhere in Lebanon, would be after them within the hour, probably a lot less. And he had to do it all in such a way that neither Kassem, who was perhaps the shrewdest mind in Hezbollah, nor anyone on the Central Council, would suspect his real plan.
In a way, what he was doing was the opposite of normal intelligence gathering, where you ran embedded assets who would turn over everything they could to an operations officer. Normal spycraft was like spreading a net across a river and taking in and analyzing everything till you got the fish you were after. Here, he was forcing the issue because there was a clock ticking and no way of knowing when it would go off, and he had to do it in such a way that the intelligence was absolutely real—so much so that the enemy didn’t suspect they were helping him, he thought as he waved down a taxi and headed downtown to the RDV location.
An hour later they waited in the restaurant for Fouad to come back from the telephone by the bar. The waiter had told them there was a call for “Hamid.” No more cell phone calls for the woman, Scorpion had told Fouad. After this, Hezbollah would analyze every call she had made. Scorpion watched the street and the headlights of the cars outside through the reflection of the interior of the restaurant in the window. Fouad came walking back to the table, and by the look on his face Scorpion knew they were on. She had called, alerting them Kassem was on his way.
“Yalla!” Fouad said. Let’s go. They headed out to the SUV.
Scorpion and Fouad left the two Druze gunmen parked in an underground parking garage around the corner, their lights and engine off and close enough to hear any gunfire, while the two of them made their way around to the rear entrance by the garbage bin. Scorpion picked the lock and they climbed the stairs, pausing at any sound until they were out on the roof. They unpacked their gear and night vision goggles and set up their equipment. He cautioned Fouad again against making a sound or letting himself be seen from below or from another building, then left him crouching below the line of the roof as he went back inside and down the stairs to the landing above the woman’s apartment. The only sound he made was while cutting the wires to the light on the landing, putting it in shadow, and the barely audible metallic whisper as he screwed the silencer onto his gun.
Scorpion waited, sweating in the darkness. Somewhere, he heard the sound of a television. It came from an apartment where someone was watching a popular reality TV show to find the next Lebanese singing star. When his cell phone vibrated, it startled him so much he almost dropped it, and at that moment he heard the elevator coming. He pressed into the shadow of the wall to make himself as small as possible. The elevator door opened and he heard men moving quietly. He sensed one of them approaching, just beyond his line of sight, probably peering up into the darkness of the landing. It could end here, he thought, aiming the gun.
Then he heard a voice that had to be Kassem’s: “I won’t be more than an hour,” a knock on the door, and the woman letting him in, saying “Haayil, habibi. Can you stay?”
At the sound of the door closing, Scorpion glanced at his watch. He would wait twelve minutes. He wanted them occupied in bed.
One of the guards coughed and shuffled his feet. One of them murmured something about the TV show and the other chuckled. Scorpion crept downstairs, one stair at a time. He was almost in their line of sight. He checked his watch; it was time. He pulled on his ski mask and pressed the Send button on his cell phone to let Fouad know. One of the guards said something but he couldn’t catch it. He tried to control the sound of his breathing. Yalla beena, he thought. The first move had to be Fouad coming down the rappelling line and in from the balcony.
Suddenly, they were shouting in the apartment and a woman screamed. Scorpion stepped into the line of sight in shooting position. One of the Hezbollah guards was pounding on the door, the second was aiming his AK-47. He shot them both in the head before either could turn around. He moved toward the apartment door, the shouting louder inside, and had just reached the door when it opened. Kasse
m, stark naked except for his undershirt, started to run out then stopped, stunned as Scorpion put the muzzle of the silencer against his forehead and motioned him back into the apartment.
“Kes emmak!” Kassem spat at him, not moving.
Scorpion smashed him in the face with the gun, knocking him back and putting him into a choke hold as Fouad, also in a ski mask, tied Kassem’s wrists behind him with plastic zip-tie handcuffs.
“Be polite,” Scorpion said in Arabic before kneeing Kassem in the groin. He and Fouad heaved Kassem onto the dining room table on his back. Scorpion hit Kassem hard in the mouth with the gun, knocking out some of his teeth. Kassem lay there, moaning softly, blood bubbling out of his mouth. Scorpion grabbed a dish towel and used it to blindfold him. The woman, clad only in black panties, stared wide-eyed at them.
“Take care of her. Make it look real,” Scorpion whispered to Fouad as he bound Kassem’s feet with another plastic zip-tie. The woman screamed as Fouad grabbed her by her hair and began slapping her hard, shouting “Eskoot!” for her to shut up. He slammed her against the wall, knocking her down, then dragged her to the bedroom and tied and gagged her.
Scorpion opened the apartment door, checked the corridor to the elevator and listened. The TV show in the other apartment was still on. Either they had heard nothing or, more likely, didn’t want to get involved. There was no sound of the elevator moving or anyone coming up the stairs. They had a few minutes, he thought as he pulled the bodies of the two guards and their AK-47s into the apartment. He locked the door from the inside and joined Fouad, who had already started to question Kassem.
“Where is the Palestinian? The one who killed the Egyptian general Budawi? Tell us!” hissed Fouad in Arabic.
Scorpion Betrayal Page 3
