Scorpion Betrayal

by Andrew Kaplan

  “I need you to listen,” Scorpion told the Moroccan.

  “I don’t want to hear what you say. I am willing to die. Allahu akbar, God is great,” Abdelhakim said. He looked small and defiant in the chair, still in his undershirt.

  “I’m from Damascus. Your help is needed.”

  “If my help is needed, Imam Ali will tell me.”

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?” indicating the door where Anika had gone out.

  “She lied. She said she was interested in Islamic culture,” Abdelhakim said sullenly, not looking at him.

  “Does not the hadith of the Prophet, sallallahou alayhi wasallam, peace be upon him, say that a woman’s witness is only half that of a man? What she did was for you. Now you must do something.”

  “Why should I?”

  Before you sink the harpoon, you have to lead him into it, Koenig used to say. First surprise him with what you know. Then make the Joe come to you, so that when it comes, it’s right between the eyes and he absolutely understands the implication. The threat had to be something he feared more than death, because if he was a true acolyte and death was an option, he’d take it.

  “How important is the imam to you, Brother? If you had to choose between your wife and two boys or Imam Ali, which would you choose?”

  “What are you saying? Why would I have to choose?” Abdelhakim asked, and Scorpion could see by the look in his eyes that Abdelhakim was shocked that he knew about his family. “Inshallah, I would die before I betrayed the imam.”

  “You already have. You are a kafir traitor. Everyone will know it.”

  “Kol ayre wle,” Abdelhakim hissed at him. “Allah knows I am no traitor.”

  “Yes, you are. Here’s the proof,” Scorpion said, tossing the bank ATM card onto the table next to Abdelhakim, whose eyes darted to look at it, though he wouldn’t pick it up.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your account at the ABN-Amro bank in Amsterdam.”

  “I don’t have an account there.”

  “Look at the card. It’s in your name. You have twenty thousand euros in your account. Go ahead, pick up the card. It’s your money.”

  “You’re crazy! Where would I get twenty thousand euros?”

  “It was transferred to your ABNA account from the Israeli Bank Hapoalim in Luxembourg.”

  “Israeli!” Abdelhakim gasped. “What have I to do with the Israelis?”

  “You see the problem,” Scorpion said. “Such bank transfers are easily traced. Everyone will know you’re a traitor, even the imam. It’s not just you, it’s your family, the ummah, all will be condemned.” Make him feel it, Koenig would say. Before you throw him a lifeline, twist the hook. You have to make sure the poor bastard understands what he’s about to lose. “If Hezbollah learns you are an Israeli agent, you will die. Your wife and sons will die. The imam and our cause will be in great danger. We cannot allow this. How many will die because of you? And do you know the worst of all, Brother?”

  Abdelhakim looked at him, numbly shaking his head, his eyes vacant as he stared into the abyss.

  “The worst is that you, a ‘good Muslim,’ will have dealt a terrible blow to the Palestinian cause, because truly, I have just come from Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya in Damascus and I must get something out of the imam’s office before the CIA or the AIVD can get to it. Unless you help me, we are lost.”

  “I don’t understand.” He blinked. “You need to get into the imam’s office?”

  “If you let me in tonight at midnight, no one will ever know about you or the Israelis or that I was there. You will keep the twenty thousand and you’ll be paid another ten thousand. As for the woman, if you don’t want her,” Scorpion snapped his fingers, “she’s gone. If you choose to forgive her for her female lie, you can have her whenever you want and your wife will never see this.” He turned on the camera and held it so the Moroccan could see the video and hear the sounds of the two of them having sex, Anika moving and groaning beneath him. “Inshallah, you will save the imam and yourself and your family.”

  Abdelhakim began fumbling in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled cigarette. His hand was shaking as he straightened it and he looked at Scorpion before lighting it. Scorpion sat back and waited. You have to let them feel the trap, Koenig said. They have to touch the bars and the sides of the cage, so they really understand there’s no other way out. Come on, he thought. Take the carrot. It’s the only rational choice, pick it up, you humar: thinking if it didn’t work, he’d have to kill the Moroccan.

  “Just this one night and no more?” Abdelhakim said, picking up the bank card and staring at it as though he had never seen one before.

  “Just tonight. Nothing will be disturbed or taken. No one will ever know.”

  “And I get to keep the thirty thousand?” he said, and Scorpion smiled inwardly. Get greedy, he thought. The greedier the better.

  Abdelhakim tapped the card thoughtfully, then put it in his wallet. Scorpion let out the breath he’d been holding.

  “Do you like the woman? She’s very pretty.”

  “I never touched such a woman. So beautiful,” Abdelhakim said softly.

  “She likes you; she told me.”

  “And my wife never knows?”

  “I’ll give you the chip from the camera before I leave tonight.”

  “I have to go to work,” he said, getting up and putting on his shirt and windbreaker, then hesitated. “And it’s good for the Muslim ummah?”

  “Ilhamdulilah, it is a good thing you’ll have done, Brother. Come,” Scorpion said, walking him to the apartment door.

  Scorpion watched the mosque through night vision goggles from the BMW parked down the block. The night was cool and the wind had come up, blowing dust and scraps of paper in the street. The greatest danger was when Abdelhakim had second thoughts; something that Koenig cautioned was inevitable once the Joe was out of the immediate confrontation. Scorpion could only hope that greed and sex and the threat of public humiliation would outweigh his old loyalty. “Most people,” Koenig had said, “would rather be a traitor than be thought of as a traitor.”

  If Abdelhakim did have second thoughts, it could go either of two ways. Either he would tell someone and there would be militants lying in wait for him at the mosque, or it could come days, months, or even years later, when Abdelhakim put a bullet through his own head. The only way to know was to watch the mosque and wait, so there would be no surprises and he could try to figure out what the hell was happening, because nothing made any sense after what Professor Groesbeck had told him over beers at a brown bar near the university earlier that evening.

  Rabinowich had responded to his Web question with a code that turned out to be Groesbeck’s cell phone number. The bar was noisy and crowded with students, some of whom were still carrying books from late classes. Groesbeck wasn’t what he had expected—an older academic along the lines of Rabinowich, someone whose brilliant sarcasm could fall like a guillotine on an unsuspecting undergraduate. But the professor was young, in his thirties, dark-haired, and with an eye for female students.

  “Did Rabinowich tell you anything about me?” Scorpion asked him.

  “He said don’t bother asking you anything because anything you told me would be a lie, including hello and good-bye,” Groesbeck said in English, with only a slight accent, meanwhile checking out a statuesque blonde in a yellow tank top and tight jeans at the bar. “Of course, that told me exactly who you are, not that it matters.”

  “He said you were on the IAEA inspection teams in Iran and North Korea.”

  “Mmm … she’s something, ja?” Groesbeck said, and for a moment the two men contemplated the blonde’s chest.

  “Healthy girl,” Scorpion said.

  “Lovely. So you want to know how to make a nuclear bomb? It’s easy. All you need is enough Uranium-235. Just slap it together and—pop!” he illustrated by splaying his fingers open like an explosion.

  “Why not plutonium?”

 
“Nasty to work with, Pu-239. The radiation will kill you, and it’ll start fires at ordinary room temperature unless you have an extensive, dry—because ordinary water makes it worse—inert gas facility. U-235, on the other hand, is beautiful stuff. You can work it, shape it, you don’t need an elaborate facility, and the radioactivity is so mild, you could put it under your pillow and sleep on it.”

  “So how much U-235 do I need to make a bomb?”

  “Depends,” Groesbeck said, putting down his beer and trying to make eye contact with the blonde.

  “I have top security clearance. I’m sure Dave told you,” Scorpion said.

  “It isn’t security. It’s just not a simple number. It varies depending on how pure the U-235 is. For an ordinary nuclear reactor, all you need is four or five percent purity. For a weapon to go supercritical, much more. For the Hiroshima bomb, they used 64.1 kilos, about 141 pounds, of ninety-plus percent pure U-235, and the bomb was so inefficient that only one percent, perhaps one pound or so, went supercritical. The other ninety-nine percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb was wasted.”

  “How about a terrorist with twenty-one kilos at seventy-six percent?”

  “I already told you.” Groesbeck shrugged. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Many factors. The shape and fit when the pieces of uranium are pushed together. The temperature. The density when fission starts to expand the uranium. What kind of a reflector around the U-235 is used to bounce the neutrons back into the uranium. What kind of emitter you use to start the reaction. Of course, the big problem is how do you slam the separate pieces of uranium together.”

  Groesbeck leaned closer. “The simplest way, the way I would do it if I were a small group instead of a government, is the gun mechanism. As you know, the basic principle of all explosives is that explosive force is directed perpendicular to the surface of the explosive material. By shaping the material you can aim the force of the explosion like a gun. Using a small regular explosive, just shoot one piece of U-235 into another, like a bullet into a cylinder made from the second piece of U-235, and have the impact start the neutron emitter. The whole thing should take less than a second or the bomb won’t work.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong but it doesn’t seem like twenty-one kilos would be enough?”

  “At seventy-six percent, extremely unlikely.” Groesbeck shook his head and motioned having a drink at the blonde, who signaled back Why not? “Unless you have a very sophisticated device, I would say fifty kilos of ninety-plus percent pure U-235 would be the minimum.”

  “I get the feeling you don’t believe the seventy-six percent figure.”

  “Seems unlikely. It’s not that hard to go from seventy-six to over ninety percent. Why would you stop? Of course, there is another possibility, I’m sure you thought of.”

  “You mean, what if there’s more? The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Suppose your imaginary terrorist already has, say, another thirty or so kilos of almost pure U-235 sitting somewhere to add to the twenty-one, which is maybe already ninety-plus. Then, my friend, I would definitely worry. Actually, I would worry more about your terrorist selling it to someone who does have the resources to do something with it, like the Iranians. Listen, I have a colleague I absolutely have to speak to,” Groesbeck said, getting up and going over to the blonde at the bar. Which now left Scorpion sitting in a car in Utrecht in the middle of the night with the pieces to a puzzle that didn’t fit. What in hell did the Palestinian want with the twenty-one kilos of U-235, which probably cost millions, if it wouldn’t make a bomb?

  He had other concerns too. His only lead to the Palestinian had suddenly become what Groesbeck would have called a “supercritical” red zone. According to the detective, Zeedorf, whom he had called on his cell phone from the BMW after meeting with Groesbeck, the imam of the Kanaleneiland mosque hadn’t been seen in over a month.

  “The imam’s name is Ali el Alechaoui, age seventy-four,” the Dutch detective had said. “He is an immigrant from Rabat, Morocco; a widower, with three grown sons and sixteen grandchildren. The only address listed for him is the mosque. He receives a disability pension from the government.”

  “What’s his disability?”

  “He’s blind, despite which, he has written a book. A commentary…” Zeedorf paused, and Scorpion waited while he consulted his notes. “…on the Hadith of Sahih Bukhari, which is, I gather, some sort of Muslim religious text. I have a copy of his identiteitsbewijs card if you wish. One interesting thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He regularly led services at the mosque, but for the past five or six weeks he seems to have dropped out of sight. I have been unable to get any information from our sources with either the Utrecht or the KLPD National police as to whether the imam is or was under surveillance. Although he has not been seen, no one has filed a missing person report. Of course, he may be traveling or ill. I have not had a chance to check the hospitals.”

  “Anything else?”

  Zeedorf hesitated, and Scorpion sensed he was debating with himself before he said it.

  “What is it?” Scorpion asked, prodding the detective.

  “Nothing definite, but something curious.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t confirm it, but apparently it’s not just the imam—one of his sons and a number of his grandsons also seem to have recently dropped out of sight, not even appearing for Friday prayers.”

  Scorpion arranged payment and ended the call, his mind racing. They were going operational. Whatever happened, he had to get into the imam’s office in the mosque.

  He studied the building and the dark street, where nothing moved but bits of trash stirred by the wind. It was after midnight, and for the past few hours there had been no one coming or going to the mosque. The only sign of life was the silhouette of Abdelhakim occasionally appearing in a window, ghostly green in the night vision goggles. Scorpion got out of the BMW. He wore his motorcycle helmet with the visor down to prevent security cameras from identifying him and carried all the gear he would need in a backpack. He went to the front and side doors and, keeping out of the line of sight, disconnected the security cameras, then knocked on the side door to the mosque.

  After a moment Abdelhakim opened the door and gaped at him till Scorpion flipped the helmet visor up and said, “It’s me.” He checked for internal cameras and spotted them in the usual places, near ceilings and in the musalla prayer area on the wall to the right of the qiblah wall that in every mosque faces Mecca.

  “No one must ever know I was here. Where’s the recorder for the cameras?” Scorpion asked, looking around. There were no wires, so it was an RF setup.

  “Come, I’ll show you,” Abdelhakim stammered. He led Scorpion to a panel in the wall that he removed. Scorpion set the replay on the recorder to essentially have the last five minutes recorded over with nothing happening.

  “They won’t know something was erased?” the little Moroccan asked nervously.

  “Not unless you tell them. If anyone ever does ask, tell them there was a brief electrical surge outage and you think the recorder reset itself. Where’s the imam’s office?”

  Abdelhakim led him to a small room at the back of the building. He was about to turn on the light and Scorpion stopped him and turned on his flashlight instead. The room was sparse, with a few bookcases, a desk, a low bronze table with cushions on the floor to serve food, and a battered metal teapot for making Moroccan mint tea. There were no computers in the room, and then Scorpion remembered that the imam was blind. He was chilled by the terrible thought that he had gone to all this effort and had come up empty.

  “Where does the imam keep important papers?” he asked.

  Abdelhakim, watching from the doorway, just shrugged.

  “What about computers?”

  “In the office. I’ll show you,” he said.

  “La.” No. “I’ll find it. You go back to your usual post. Pretend I’m
not here. I’ll be gone soon.”

  “Then I get the extra ten thousand euros?” Abdelhakim asked.

  “That’s right,” Scorpion said, thinking, I’ve got you, ibn hamar. The little Moroccan was hooked, all right. He’d be able to turn the Joe over to Peters, or whomever Peters’s replacement would be, to run for as long as they wanted. As a center for the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, Utrecht was compromised from here on out. But that didn’t get him any closer to the Palestinian, he thought as his eyes ranged over the walls and ceiling. He went over to the bookcases and looked behind them, but there was nothing. There were no pictures on the walls. The imam is blind, he reminded himself.

  He quartered the room with the beam from the flashlight. There had to be something. The imam had written a commentary on Bukhari, considered by many Muslims as the most authentic collection of the Hadith or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and second only to the Qu’ran itself in holiness. It was inconceivable that Imam Ali would be such a highly regarded religious authority and not be either at the center of things or at the least had given the Palestinian his spiritual blessing. And the imam had disappeared, which meant they had gone operational. There had to be something in the office, he thought while staring at a rug on the floor under the desk. It was the only rug in the room, he realized, and it was not where people might walk on it or sit or pray, but under the desk.

  Scorpion moved the desk, lifted the rug up and saw the panel in the floor. He sat down beside it, pulling his backpack next to him, the flashlight in his mouth, and opening the panel, saw a high security floor safe. It was the type that had a three-inch thick solid steel body, a spoke locking handle, and two locks—a combination lock and a key lock—and you would need both in order to open it. Normally, it wasn’t that hard to crack a safe. You either used explosive on the lock or drilled a hole next to the lock—or at the back of the safe if the door had a hardened cobalt plate to prevent drilling—inserted a flexible fiberoptic bore lens to see the changes in the lock mechanism as you turned the combination or digital dial, and that was that. But he couldn’t do that. He had to open the safe in such a way that no one would ever know it had been touched.