“Stupid. Whoever you are, even your jokes are stupid. Get rid of him,” Dr. Abadi said, pointing the gun with a two-handed stance at Scorpion. One of the guards pressed the muzzle of his gun against Scorpion’s head as a second guard started to tie his wrists with a plastic zip-tie. Once his hands were tied, they’d relax, figuring they had him, he thought, waiting till two of the guards pulled him roughly to his feet.
As they started to shove him out, he did a Brazilian back leg sweep, taking down the guard to his right, then turning close into the guard behind him, he butted him under the chin while grabbing the single-edge razor blade hidden in his hair, a trick Houdini had used in his famous paper bag escape, and used it to cut the plastic zip-tie. Then he pulled the guard he had butted into a low choke hold below the level of the desk, so Abadi couldn’t see to shoot, and slashed his carotid artery with the razor.
The first guard Scorpion had taken down now aimed his gun at him. He used a Krav Maga move, blocking with the hand, stepping out of the line of fire, twisting the guard’s wrist and taking the gun away, all in less than two seconds. He whirled and shot the third guard in the face, and then, still on his knees, fired through the desk, hitting Abadi in the stomach. Scorpion rolled away as Abadi fired into the desk, missing him. As the first guard started to pick up the gun, he shot him in the head.
He stood up then, as Dr. Abadi, pressing his forearm against his bleeding stomach, aimed his gun. Scorpion fired, the bullet going through Abadi’s hand into his stomach. Abadi cried out as he fired, his shot going wide. Scorpion fired again at his chest, killing him.
The alarm was going off, and somewhere a woman was screaming. He only had seconds. Fortunately, Dr. Abadi had left his laptop computer on. Scorpion took out a special flash drive designed by the NSA and plugged it into the laptop’s USB port. The drive’s software took over the operating system with admin privileges. It grabbed Abadi’s e-mail files, gathering his account properties—the names and IP addresses of his incoming POP3 and outgoing SMTP mail servers and all of the document and Internet files on the hard drive—and downloaded them onto the flash drive. When it was finished, Scorpion pulled the flash drive out of the port and took it, along with two guns, including the SR-1 Gyurza.
He knew he had to leave fast, but there was something in the way Abadi had slipped the folder into his desk drawer that made him hesitate. The drawer was locked, but it only took a moment to pick the lock and pull out the folder. It contained what looked like a scientific report in Russian, and what appeared to be a typewritten translation in English titled “Modalities of Septicemic Yersinia Pestis Distribution.” The Russian paper was stamped “ ,” which meant Top Secret, the intelligence equivalent of the Holy Grail.
He could hear someone shouting outside, not far away, and knew he was out of time. Stuffing the paper in his pocket along with the flash drive, he walked out of the office. The woman and little girl stood in the hallway and stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Where’s the control box for the alarm?” he asked them.
They just stared at him, but the little girl involuntarily glanced at the hall closet. Scorpion opened the door, saw the metal box on the wall and opened it. He fired a bullet into the recorder drive for the security cameras and pulled all the switches. The floodlights went off outside, followed by shouts and dogs barking, and suddenly the front door was sprayed with bullet holes from automatic fire from a pair of Type 95 automatic rifles. The little girl screamed as her mother stared down at the blood blossoming on her chest a moment before collapsing. Scorpion shoved the girl down to the floor, and as the front door swung open emptied one of his guns at the opening. Then he ran back into the office, flung Abadi’s laptop at the window, shattering the glass, and leaped through the broken window and into the darkness outside.
Instead of heading for the front gate, he ran toward the back of the property. He heard one of the German shepherds growling as it raced toward him. It would jump, he thought. That’s how they were trained. To go for the hand or follow their instincts and go for the throat. It was almost upon him. He needed a stick or something, but all he had was the gun and the razor blade. As the dog leaped for his throat, he grabbed it by the fur on its neck and smashed his gun down on its nose. The dog yelped and lunged again. Hell of a dog, he thought, grabbing it and smashing its nose again. This time, the dog emitted a high-pitched animal scream and backed away, panting, its tongue lolling out.
A guard was running toward him. The man stopped and went down into a shooting position as Scorpion hit the ground, rolled over and fired three times. After the first shot, the guard didn’t move. Scorpion waited a moment, then climbed a tree next to the estate wall, inched over the razor wire, hung down from the branch and dropped to the other side. He picked himself up and walked away. In the distance he could hear the sound of approaching police sirens.
Scorpion spent a restless night in a room rented from an Iraqi family in the Saida Zaynab district, the gun kept close to him. There was always a chance that al-Hafez might change his mind and come after him, not to mention Hezbollah and the Islamic Resistance. By the light of a bedside lamp, he tried to make sense of the translation of the Russian paper he’d taken from Abadi’s desk.
It was very technical, but appeared to be a report on secret experiments done at a lab at Vozrozhdeniya involving the use of aerosol sprays to transmit plague pathogens. He recalled that Vozrozhdeniya, once an island but now a peninsula because of a severe drop in the water level of the inland Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, had been a secret biological warfare research facility in the old Soviet Union. It was essential he get the paper to Rabinowich immediately, and hated having to wait till morning to cross the border. He had to get out of Syria.
On the morning TV news, an Al Jazeera reporter standing in front of Dr. Abadi’s estate said the murders were being blamed on Israeli agents. Syria was filing a formal complaint to the United Nations, and a majority of countries in the UN were already calling for a resolution condemning Israel for assassinating Abadi.
By mid-morning Scorpion was back in Beirut, having crossed the border as a Syrian auto salesman from Aleppo. At an Internet kiosk at Beirut airport, he uploaded the encrypted contents of the flash drive and a scanned-in copy of the secret Russian paper to the International Corn website. He learned from a Rabinowich-coded post on the site that the NSA had tracked Dr. Abadi’s e-mail servers. There had been frequent e-mails in a code they were working on but hadn’t broken, between Abadi and an e-mail account in Hamburg, Germany, belonging to someone named Mohammad Modahami.
Scorpion caught the Air France flight from Beirut to Paris. Over the Mediterranean, he played back what had happened with Dr. Abadi in his mind. There was something Abadi had said that kept nagging at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. At a rented computer in the business zone de travail at De Gaulle Airport, during a layover for his flight to Hamburg, he Googled Septicemic plague.
There were three versions of the plague, he learned: Bubonic plague, thought to be the disease that caused the Black Death of the Middle Ages; Pneumonic plague; and Septicemic plague. All were caused by the same Yersinia pestis bacteria. In each version of the plague, the pathogen infected a different part of the body. Bubonic plague infected lymph nodes, Pneumonic the lungs, and Septicemic the blood. The Bubonic and Septicemic plagues were typically transmitted by flea bites from infected rodents. Pneumonic plague was transmitted from human to human by airborne droplets from coughing. Of the three types of plague, Septicemic was the most insidious and deadly. The incubation period was normally two to five days, during which there were no symptoms. Once the patient realized he was sick, with symptoms ranging from flu-like chills, fever, coughing, and headache, to black and purple patches under the skin, the disease was nearly a hundred percent fatal. In most cases, the same day the patient realized he was ill was the day he died.
A chill went through Scorpion. The paper from Abadi suggested that the Russians had weaponized Sep
ticemic plague at Vozrozhdeniya during the Cold War and that somehow the Islamic Resistance now had that weapon. Rabinowich had put the intel about the missing weaponized plague together from his bits and bytes of “subtexture,” or maybe from a defector or an FSB mole, and connected it to the Palestinian, and Bob Harris hadn’t told him about it because they wanted independent confirmation. His conclusions were slender and based on conjecture, Scorpion realized, but the pieces fit. No wonder Harris had come all the way to Karachi! If there was such a thing as an airborne version of Septicemic plague and the Palestinian set it off in an American city, tens of millions could die. The only way to stop him was to track down this Mohammad Modahami, Dr. Abadi’s contact in Germany.
Scorpion bought a disposable cell phone and dialed a local Paris number. As he did so, over the airport loudspeaker he heard the first call for his flight to Hamburg. He used the day’s sign, “Liverpool,” and heard the countersign, “Mary Poppins.” A woman’s voice—he assumed she was someone from the CIA Paris station—stated that according to the BND, and confirmed by the German Bundespolizei, no such person as Mohammad Modahami had ever existed.
CHAPTER SIX
Rome, Italy
On his second night in Rome, sitting in a restaurant on the Via della Croce near the Spanish Steps and running out of time, the Palestinian considered three problems that stood in his way, each inside the other like Russian dolls, each more difficult to solve than the one before. He thought about them as he stared out at the dark street, its cobblestones lit by streetlamps hung on the sides of the buildings and the electric signs of the shops and restaurants, aware of the pretty American college girl at the next table who kept glancing over at him before returning to the conversation with her friends.
The first problem was how to coordinate multiple attacks simultaneously and get it done without breaching security. Hidden within that was the second problem, the attack that could not be known to the others and required transporting a large object into a city ringed with security checkpoints. The third task was the hardest. How to stage an attack on a location that would undoubtedly be protected by extraordinary security and that was completely off-limits to the public?
For weeks he had been thinking about how to do it. Was it possible? the blind imam in Holland had asked him, and he had been tempted to say no. Even now he wasn’t sure whether he had said yes, it could be done, out of faith or vanity that he would be the one to bring down the enemy. Phase one was nearly complete. Phase two would be far more terrible. A day that would change things far beyond September 11 in ways they couldn’t imagine, a day they would never forget. Both phases presented difficulties, but this target was the greatest challenge. There were so many things that could go wrong: someone who didn’t do what he was supposed to at exactly the right moment, an undercover agent betraying them, an overly zealous policeman at a checkpoint. Even the weather was a factor in a complex plan where the variability of a single degree of temperature could make a difference. He’d considered and discarded a dozen different ways of carrying it out. Sooner or later, in each of the scenarios he had come up with, he found a fatal flaw. Going over locations well before he finalized plans, learning the terrain, measuring distances as he had in Cairo, helped eliminate some possibilities, but still, the three main problems, each inside the other, remained unsolved.
He had explored the city, focusing on traffic flow and geography rather than the tourist attractions of ancient and Renaissance Rome, using a golf range finder to exactly measure distances, which would be critical. He’d spent hours at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, studying municipal schematics and plans going back to ancient times. He drove out on the A91 to inspect the warehouse he had arranged to rent. It was in an industrial suburb with small factories and working-class apartment houses across from open lots, and most important, inside the A90 Ring Road that encircled the city and where there would undoubtedly be checkpoints. The business card he’d given the warehouse owners said he was the owner of a transport and material freight company in Germany. If they called to check on him, they would find that the company registration, address, phone numbers, and website were perfectly legitimate; all calls and inquiries would be promptly answered and handled by the office management company on Heidenkampsweg Street in Hamburg. He paid the warehouse owners the first three months rent in cash and they were clearly delighted. They reiterated that the discretion he’d demanded would be honored without question. The owners were two brothers from Palermo, and they assured him to non preoccupare. Sicilians, they told him, knew how to keep secrets.
By the time he’d gone to the restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna on the second day, he had solved two of the three problems. But the solution to the third and most difficult problem still eluded him. He looked up and caught the American college girl glancing at him. He smiled, and she smiled back. He wondered if he should have her or use her as a test for the police with explosives. With her long brown hair, she reminded him of someone, and then he remembered the young Bangladeshi woman in Queens with the haunting dark eyes. He recalled how she kept glancing not at the camera, but at him, when she made her martyr’s video. Or maybe it was the video he remembered. In a way, it was more real to him than she herself was.
She was not a true shaheedah martyr. She liked America and her job in Manhattan, but her brother was a coward. He owed money to a Bangladeshi gang, had sworn himself to jihad and martyrdom to get the money and then backed out because of his fear, trying to use his two small children as an excuse. She was doing it to keep the Bangladeshi gang members from killing her brother and leaving his children fatherless. She would never do it for herself or for the brother, but would do it for the children, and also because the way she looked at him when she made the video made him think she was attracted to him. Her martyrdom was a gift for him, he thought, glancing now at the American girl talking and laughing with her friends. The waiter came with the Campari and soda he’d ordered and he was about to tell him to give Camparis to everyone at her table when just like that, he had the solution.
The American girl raised her wineglass toward him, her eyes crinkling at the corners, confident of herself and her looks. Instead of responding, the Palestinian stood up, tossed some money on the table, and left in a hurry, the girl never knowing how close to death she had come.
He went back to his hotel near the top of the Spanish Steps, packed and got the rented Mercedes coupe from the underground parking garage. Once on the A1 and out of Rome, he drove through the darkness on the autostrada at over a hundred miles per hour, the radio blasting music by Euro groups like Tokio Hotel and Fettes Brot. Near Florence, he called ahead and made a late reservation. By midnight he was checking into the Principe di Savoia Hotel in Milan. In the morning he went to the San Vittore prison in the center of the city.
Carmine Bartolo came into the visitors’ area and sat across the glass partition from him with a swagger, despite his shackles. Although he was of medium height, he looked bigger, almost hulking. His thick hair and heavy brows made his eyes seem small and dangerous. Inside the Naples Camorra, the mafia gang that virtually ran that city, Bartolo was known as “Il Brutto” for his perpetually nasty sneer and his legendary use of a butcher’s cleaver as his preferred form of intimidation. He said something in a rapid slang Italian that the Palestinian didn’t understand.
“Non capisco. Parla inglese? Français? Deutsch?” the Palestinian asked.
“English,” Bartolo said, pronouncing it “Eengleesee.” He leaned closer toward the glass. “What are you? Turco? Musulmano? Muslim boy?”
“Businessman. I’m here to buy something.”
“You want buy, go to Rinacente store. This is prigione. Capisce?” Bartolo said, glancing sideways at the guard standing by the wall to see if his humor was being properly appreciated. The guard looked away, bored. He was paid to look away and not to hear.
The Palestinian motioned Bartolo closer. “I’ll pay you a hundred thousand euros cash for what I want.
”
Bartolo’s eyes narrowed under his heavy brows. He looked like the brute killer he was, the Palestinian thought.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Someone who can pay,” the Palestinian said, and covering his mouth so a camera couldn’t pick it up, whispered what he wanted.
Bartolo’s eyebrows came together, forming a single ridge across his forehead, making him look almost like a Neanderthal.
“What you want for? A job, sì?”
“None of your business. Part of what I’m paying for is no questions.”
“Figlio di puttana!” Bartolo said, standing up, hunching over slightly because of the shackles. “I don’t fare affare with Turco I don’t know.”
“A hundred thousand. I can always try the Zaza brothers or the Nuova Famiglia,” the Palestinian said quietly.
“You go Zaza, do business with those busones? Me ne infischio,” Bartolo said, jerking his chin at the Palestinian in lieu of the usual obscene gesture, because of his shackles. The Palestinian beckoned him closer to the glass.
“A hundred twenty thousand cash. Half now, half on delivery.”
Bartolo sat down again.
“Plus forty per cento what job you doing,” he said.
“Twenty-five percent—and no questions.”
“Trenta. Thirty. You talk my wife,” Bartolo said. He took a small pencil stub and wrote something on a scrap of paper. He slapped the paper against the glass so the Palestinian could read the telephone number he had written on it. Then Bartolo crumpled the paper up in his hand, spit on it, chewed and swallowed it, and stood up.
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