A blow to the stomach doubled him over, knocking the wind out of him, followed by a savage kick in the mouth which sent him spinning to the floor. By the time he regained his senses, his hands had been tied behind him. He didn’t have to check to know that the knots were tight and professional. Although it wasn’t cold, he began to tremble.
He had recognized the voice.
“Is that you, Nick?” Harris asked in a shaky voice.
“Nick disappeared a long time ago,” the voice said.
“The Scorpion,” Harris managed to whisper.
“He’s dead, haven’t you heard?”
“How did you get into my apartment?”
“Come on, Bob. I thought security at the Watergate was a pretty clichéd topic,” the voice said.
“You wouldn’t do anything crazy … I mean, you’re too smart for that,” Harris squeaked unable to conceal the quaver in his voice.
“A scorpion only knows how to do one thing, Bob. It knows how to sting,” the Scorpion replied.
“Listen—I can explain—” Harris began.
“I know. You’re good at that.”
The Scorpion was seated in an armchair. He motioned Harris to the couch opposite him. Like Harris, the Scorpion wore a dinner jacket and black tie. Lounging across from each other like that against the backdrop of the city lights, they could have been posing for a whisky ad. For a moment they sat silently in the dark apartment, Harris watching the Scorpion, the Scorpion glancing away at the city lights.
From this side of the Watergate complex the floodlit dome of the Capitol Building sparkled white and clear, as if sculpted in snow. Below, he could see the lights of moving traffic reflected in the Potomac. In the distance the marble spire of the Washington Monument pointed at the sky like a rocket. It was the kind of view real-estate agents spend a lot of time talking about in order to avoid mentioning the price.
“Nice view,” the Scorpion commented, gesturing at the lights. The movement of his hand set the ice cubes in his drink tinkling. His other hand held Harris’s Smith and Wesson. 38.
“Are … are you going to kill me?” Harris asked.
“Sheikh Zaid once taught me that it is easier to kill a man than to trust him.”
“Trust was never a part of our relationship,” Harris snapped. Suddenly, what had happened earlier at the embassy began to make some sense.
“No, we’re not in the trusting business, are we?” the Scorpion admitted.
“I’ve been promoted. I’m deputy director now, Scorpion. You can’t do business without me—” Harris began. He leaned back and crossed his legs, trying to look relaxed. But with his hands tied behind him, he simply looked uncomfortable.
“How was the party at the French Embassy tonight?” the Scorpion asked, knowing Harris would understand and hate him for it.
“Where’s Kelly?” Harris demanded. His handsome all-American face suddenly looked very ugly. It made the Scorpion think of the picture of Dorian Gray.
“What’s the matter, Bob? Lose your girl?” the Scorpion mildly observed.
“You son-of-a-bitch!” Harris exploded. He tried to struggle to his feet. The Scorpion’s icy eyes narrowed. Harris subsided at once.
Harris swallowed hard and said, “How did you know? I didn’t see you at the party.”
The Scorpion grinned as widely as a Cheshire cat. He pulled out something dark and furry and tossed it onto the coffee table. It lay there like a dead animal.
“It never ceases to amaze me how unobservant people are. A bit of silly putty in the nostrils, some furry foliage”—gesturing at the phony beard—“a few chest decorations and you could fool your own mother,” the Scorpion said, watching comprehension light in Harris’s eyes as he remembered the bearded bore at the party complaining in atrocious English about the disastrous impact of U.S. interest rates on the franc.
“What made her run away? One minute she was fine and then all at once she turned white as a ghost and bolted,” Harris asked.
“In a way, she did see a ghost at the banquet. She saw you speak to Gerard,” the Scorpion said.
“Don’t worry about Gerard, He’s a dead man,” Harris said.
“He’s not the only one,” the Scorpion replied.
Harris looked away. He seemed to be glancing around his apartment. It was furnished in white and chrome in the kind of expensive yet sterile luxury which says nothing about the owner except that he has money. When Harris turned back, there was a queasy look in his eyes, as if he had swallowed something that didn’t agree with him.
“How did you do it?” Harris wanted to know. Despite everything, he couldn’t suppress a note of professional curiosity.
The Scorpion shrugged and said, “Given the French connection, I knew Gerard had to be working for either the Sûreté or the SDECE …”
“SDECE,” Harris said.
“Yes, they go in for subcontracting the pushers and pimps. At that point, it was just a matter of putting out the word and offering the right amount.”
Harris nodded. He tried to force a smile. It looked like the smile on a politician’s face as he’s being grilled by reporters on his unreported taxes.
“You were jealous, weren’t you, Scorpion? You did it to hurt her,” Harris whispered.
“Not her, you.”
The sound of a police siren hee-hawing through traffic grew louder, then faded into the night. Other tragedies, the Scorpion thought. He glanced at the gleaming white monuments to dead presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; islands of light in a sea of darkness, like civilization itself, he mused. He thought about Kelly and sipped his drink.
Harris leaned forward. He looked longingly at the Scorpion’s drink and licked his lips. The Scorpion held it out and let him sip at it like a thirsty child.
“I couldn’t stand the idea of that greasy pig Abdul Sa’ad all over her. It kept getting in the way,” Harris said. His face was pained, as if something had broken inside and he was trying to hold it together.
“You really take the cake, Bob. Blaming Kelly for what was your fault, not hers,” the Scorpion sniffed.
“I can’t help it,” Harris confessed.
“Neither could she.”
For a long moment neither man spoke. They sat in their dinner jackets waiting for the conversation to resume, like two retired club members who never liked each other but who are the last survivors of the old crowd and have no one else left to talk to.
“How did you figure it out?” Harris asked quietly.
In some way, the shared knowledge that they had used each other and that each of them had used Kelly made it possible to talk.
“Oh, I’m pretty shrewd. When I get hit in the head by a two-by-four I’m bound to take notice. Like someone with your description seen leaving Bahrain with Kelly. Another thing: ever since the well I knew there was another man in Kelly’s life. You were my control, you should’ve briefed me about it, but you didn’t. That was a very odd omission. Seeing you tell Gerard to fuck off at the party was only the final nail in the coffin. I should have caught on long before,” the Scorpion said.
“How?” Harris asked, his eyebrows raised in a quizzical manner that made the Scorpion think of an intelligent chipmunk.
“All the things I should have spotted in the first place, but was too blind and stupid to see,” the Scorpion admitted.
“You were programmed. But never mind, we all are,” Harris responded.
“First, it was an outside operation right from the beginning. The President and the DCI in Langley never knew about it, that’s why you didn’t want me to go near the CIA stations in Arabia.
“The Molotov Plan was your idea, Bob. You knew Arabia was about to explode before it happened, so you had to have a mole in the Kremlin who either knew about it or set it up himself. You could have let the Russians know the game was up before it happened through a hundred different channels, but you didn’t.
“Because you wanted it to happen, didn’t you?” the Scorpion
insisted.
Harris nodded. “That’s quite a fairy tale you’re concocting. Go on.”
“But, because the director wasn’t involved, you needed someone to put his finger in the dike and make sure that the Russians wouldn’t actually pull it off. Me!” the Scorpion said, pointing at himself.
“You,” Harris agreed.
“And you had to be sure to run me yourself, so you could control the situation. So you chose Macready, knowing he would fuck it up and you’d be able to come in yourself,” the Scorpion continued.
“Poor George,” Harris said blandly, wearing an expression of mock sympathy that a politician might use at an opponent’s funeral.
“Poor George nothing! He did all right. He did so all right it almost came unstuck for you. He redeemed himself, Harris. Admit it,” the Scorpion insisted.
Harris shrugged. “You really are a rank sentimentalist, Scorpion. Forget Macready. Everyone else did. Just get on with the story.”
“The problem was how to hook me in. So you set up the perfect bait and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. The knight in shining armor charging off to rescue the fair maiden from the nasty dragon. Given my nature and what happened in Saigon, it was perfect. You must have consulted with a brilliant psychologist or something,” the Scorpion said, an edge of bitterness in his voice.
“Three psychiatrists actually,” Harris remarked drily.
The Scorpion nodded. “The next step was to arrange for the kidnapping. That’s where I should have figured it out because there were French footprints all over it and I never bothered to check it out. The snatch took place in Paris. Back in Peshawar you told me the data came from the rue des Saussaies, the Sûreté and the SDECE, all French intelligence agencies. And you set it up with the oldest trick in the book. Recruiting an amateur like Kelly for what she thought was one organization, in this case, the Mossad, and actually running her for another, namely your own little op within the CIA,” the Scorpion finished.
Harris sat like a sphinx, not giving anything away. “What makes you think she thought she was working for the Israelis?” he asked drily.
“In a minute. First let’s talk about why you chose Kelly. The bit about the Israelis comes out of that. You needed a beautiful blond because of Abdul Sa’ad’s slimy little fantasies. Someone you could place in the right place at the right time. Then, because of who Kelly was, Max Ormont’s daughter. Ormont’s family came from France originally. I should have spotted it sooner. The name ‘Ormont’ translated from French into Yiddish is ‘Goldberg!’
“Max achieved the American dream. He married a beautiful wealthy shicksa and made millions in oil. But he didn’t want his WASP friends, not to mention his Arab business partners, to know he was born Jewish. And here was Kelly, rebelling against her father and going to France and maybe Israel to try to find her roots.
“It must have been like taking candy from a baby to recruit her for the Israelis. Did you share your little Zionist dreams with her? Run off to a kibbutz and make the desert bloom?” the Scorpion sneered.
“Go on, finish it,” Harris growled.
His eyes glittered with anticipation. He wanted to hear it told, the Scorpion realized, like an actor anxious for a critic’s review.
“That’s all of it. You used the little fish Kelly to catch a bigger fish, me. And me to catch Abdul Sa’ad. And Abdul Sa’ad’s fall to catch Braithwaite and then Nuruddin and the Russians, who thought it was their op all along and never knew that you were the one who knocked over the first domino and set them all toppling. It was brilliant, Bob, a four-star performance. And the only thing left to ask is ‘Why?’
“Why did you do it, Bob? Or should I ask, how much?” the Scorpion finished.
Harris straightened up. An odd gleam of pride came into his eyes, like a teacher watching his best pupil win a prize. He raised his eyebrow in acknowledgement, as if it were a checkered flag.
“Six million dollars, Scorpion. That’s a little better than civil service pay,” Harris said, a winning smile breaking across his face.
“You maniac! You risked World War Three for a lousy profit,” the Scorpion said, contempt almost choking him.
Harris was indomitable. He grinned with the guilty charm of a small boy with his hand in the cookie jar.
“You have to admit, six million isn’t exactly a lousy profit,” he said.
The Scorpion raised his glass in a silent toast to Harris. He had a certain con man’s style. No wonder Kelly fell for his line, he mused. The thought of her sobered him again.
“That was my final mistake, Bob. Not spotting it when you made that slip about somebody making a fortune in oil futures. That was how you did it, didn’t you?” Harris nodded amiably.
“Once the crisis hit the media, oil futures went sky-high,” he admitted.
“Who staked you? Who put down the cash to buy up six million bucks’ worth of futures?”
Harris leaned forward, his eyes twinkling with impish evil. “Can’t you guess?” he whispered.
The Scorpion sat stunned, scarcely able to believe what his mind was telling him was the obvious truth.
“Max Ormont,” he breathed.
Harris grinned. “The great Max Ormont! Pillar of Society, millionaire, congressman, statesman, friend of presidents, power in the party caucus. He sold his own daughter into slavery to keep her quiet and to make a killing in the market,” he agreed.
The Scorpion picked up his drink and sipped. It had gone flat. So had everything else somehow.
“His own daughter,” he repeated, shaking his head. With a weary sigh, he aimed the gun at Harris. “Is that why you tried to terminate me in Bahrain? To keep me quiet and make a killing in the market?” he asked quietly.
“Don’t get all ‘holier-than-thou’ on me Scorpion. You made a million dollars on this business too,” Harris snapped.
“But not as much as you, Bob. I obviously still have a lot to learn,” the Scorpion said. He cocked the gun to a hair-trigger and moved the muzzle forward until it touched Harris’ sweat-slicked forehead.
“Wait, Scorpion. I did it to save your life and usefulness,” Harris stammered.
“Go on, Bob. Show your hole card. I’ve paid a hell of a lot to see it,” the Scorpion said.
Sweat beaded on Harris’s forehead. The Scorpion watched a drop of sweat trickle down to the tip of his nose and hang there, tempting gravity. Harris took a deep breath and began.
“First of all, the Molotov Plan was always a Russian idea. For centuries it’s what they’ve really wanted. We just deflected it our way because it gave us the chance to remove hardliners like Fyedorenko from power. That’s avoiding nuclear war, not causing it.
“You’re damn right we have a mole in the Kremlin. And thanks to the Molotov op he’s moved to the very top. Do you understand? The Politburo itself! You’re an intelligence professional. You tell me what a coup like that is worth?
“As for terminating you, that was Ormont’s idea. He had the Russian connection and the only motive to keep you silent. You were a danger to him, not to me. On the contrary, you got me a big promotion. In fact, you were my insurance policy against Ormont, so I deflected that one too.
“But I had to let everyone think you were dead. The president wanted to give you a medal, for Chrissakes. Blow you and the whole op wide open. And if the media had caught wind of the Molotov Plan it would have been a political disaster. We would have performed the almost impossible feat of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” Harris said hurriedly.
“Go on,” the Scorpion said. He watched the drop hanging from Harris’s nose, glimmering in the reflected lights like a seed pearl. He wondered when it would fall.
If Harris fell, he would take the government with him, the Scorpion thought. Like Humpty Dumpty, not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would put it together again. Not that he gave a damn about the president. One politician was little better than another. But he cared deeply about America. His father had tau
ght him that much. He’d had so little time with that oil redneck who had left him with little beyond the memory of a tweedy embrace and the smell of pipe tobacco. But Tim Curry had left the Scorpion with that love for what America wanted to be, if not for what it was.
“Besides, if they thought you were alive, every KGB agent in the world would be on your trail right now. You’re good, Scorpion. But nobody’s that good. Sooner or later they’d corner you. Bad for you, bad for us.
“This way, you’ve been marked KIA. All records to be archived, purged and forgotten. You’re as safe as I can make you, until the KGB picks up your trail again. Bahrain was the old ‘possum’ ploy. Al-Amir was supposed to let you go,” Harris finished.
The Scorpion pressed the muzzle against Harris’ forehead as if he wanted to push it into his brain.
“Was it for Kelly? Is that why you did it? Or didn’t do it, if I’m supposed to believe you?” the Scorpion demanded harshly.
“Neither,” Harris whispered. He closed his eyes. “I did it because you were too good an asset to lose,” he smiled lamely.
The Scorpion watched the drop finally fall from Harris’ nose. After a second, he stepped away and released the hammer on the. 38. He stood for a moment, silhouetted against the skylight. The hell of it was that everything Harris said made sense.
“I have a little business to take care of and then I’m going to see her again,” he said, not looking at Harris.
Harris exhaled loudly like a diver coming up for air. “Am I to assume that an off-year election to fill Ormont’s soon-to-be-vacated congressional seat is anticipated?” he asked innocently.
The Scorpion said nothing.
“He won’t be missed. Not by anyone. Especially Kelly,” Harris added.
“You never had her, you know. It was all bullshit. You’re not the kibbutz type,” the Scorpion said, turning to face Harris.
“Do you know where she’s going?” Harris asked.
“I can make a pretty educated guess.”
“It won’t work, you two,” Harris insisted.
“I know,” the Scorpion said.
Scorpion Page 31
