Scorpion Betrayal (23 page)

“They will be talking about this,” Hicham said, indicating the bodies.

“I want them to,” the Palestinian said.

He felt the buzz of a text message on the cell phone in his pocket. It was his emergency phone. Only one person in the world had the number and it was never to be used unless it was absolutely critical. He read the screen message, decoding the text with growing anger and disbelief. The message threatened the entire operation; everything he had worked for all this time. Either the world had turned upside down or it was a death trap.

He had no choice. He would have to leave Italy at once.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kanaleneiland, Utrecht, Netherlands

“D
o you like her?” Scorpion said in Arabic.

Abdelhakim stared at him from the chair, his eyes burning. He had tried to make a break for the apartment door, and Scorpion had to use the Kimura shoulder lock on him, taking him down and pushing the wrist till the pain was so intense the Moroccan had agreed to sit still in the chair. The woman, Anika, had gotten dressed and left. As she did, her hands were shaking and Scorpion had to whisper to her that there would be another thousand euros for her if she would just wait somewhere nearby for his cell phone call.

“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.

S
corpion 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.”