Scorpion Betrayal (24 page)

“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.

You couldn't just do it the way it was done in the movies. That was nonsense. You couldn't sandpaper your fingers and either feel or hear the tumblers click when you reached the right number. Safe manufacturers had long ago put in safeguards, such as false tumbler notches or lock wheels made of lightweight nylon, to frustrate hearing or feeling the tumblers click. As for the kind of autodialers that opened a safe in seconds in the James Bond movies, in reality, autodialers needed to be model-specific, could require hours to cycle through all the thousands of number combinations, and because of that were only practicable for three-number safe combinations, not for the six-plus number combination likely on a high security safe.

For such assignments, the CIA used an audio “soft drill” like the one Scorpion pulled out of his backpack and placed next to the lock after pulling on latex surgical gloves. The soft drill used sound waves, like a sonogram, to probe and detect the contact points as he slowly turned the dial. The LED display indicated where to “park the wheels”—there was one wheel inside the lock for each number; a six-number combination required six wheels—as a starting point, and a computer chip in the drill graphed the convergent points and displayed the six-number combination on the LED. There was a sound and Scorpion looked up, his hand on his gun. He saw Abdelhakim's silhouette in the doorway.

“What is it?” he asked.

“What are you doing?” the Moroccan asked nervously. “How much longer is this going to take?”

“Get away from the door, I'll let you know,” Scorpion said, waiting till Abdelhakim's shadow was gone from the doorway. The little Moroccan was antsy. Scorpion wanted to keep him alive if possible. Now that he was turned, they could run him for years, but if he got too antsy, there might be no choice.

He dialed the combination, then used a master key, tapping the key lock with the tapper tool to jump the tumblers. He turned the key and the locking handle and opened the safe.

It was filled with papers. He turned on the desk light and began to go through them one at a time, placing each one facedown on the rug so that when he was done he'd be able to put them back sorted in the original order. From time to time he took a photograph of a page with his cell phone camera. Sandwiched between two pages of an inventory of mosque supplies, he found a picture postcard of sailboats on the Aussenalster Lake in Hamburg with what appeared to be the same jumbled Arabic lettering code as on the postcard in the Ayatollah Khomeini book in Germany. He took a photograph of both sides of the postcard and put it back in the same position between the pages. Then he saw them and knew he had hit the jackpot: incorporation papers and stock certificates for a number of different companies.

One was a Netherlands property company. A second was Gelderland Sporting en Vuurwapens, BV, a Dutch sporting goods and firearms company. Two were of companies incorporated in Luxembourg: Utrecht Matériel Agricole, Sàrl, a farm equipment company; and Bukhari Nederland-Maroc Société de Financement, S.A., which looked like a holding company. They were all of interest, but the one that jumped out at him was FIMAX Shipping, headquartered in Kiev in the Ukraine. According to the papers, FIMAX was owned by the Bukhari Nederland-Maroc holding company and had as assets offices in Kiev and Odessa and two cargo ships, the MV
Donetsk
and the MV
Zaina,
both convenience-flagged in Belize.

Scorpion's mind was racing as he snapped photographs of the documents as fast as he could. They had planned it beautifully, like a big engineering project or a beautiful, complex work of art. Because of Luxembourg's secrecy laws, investigating companies headquartered there was next to impossible, even when international treaties were invoked. Farm equipment was a perfect cover for fertilizer for explosives. The sporting goods company could buy and sell as many guns and other weapons as they wanted. As for the Ukrainian shipping company, if you wanted to move something for which the logistics were almost impossible, like nuclear material or weapons from Russia, given the corruption in Russia and the Ukraine, a legitimate shipping company was perfect cover. He was so occupied, thinking and snapping photos under the lamplight, he didn't hear Abdelhakim come in.

“You have to stop. Someone's coming,” the Moroccan said from the doorway.

“Get rid of them,” Scorpion said, taking out the HK pistol.

“What if I can't?” he hissed.

“Who is allowed to come into the imam's office?”

“Only the imam and his sons,” Abdelhakim whispered, and ran toward the door. Scorpion grabbed the papers, making sure they were in the original order. He was about to put them back into the safe when he saw it: a contract in English between Baselux Pharma, Ltd., a Swiss-based pharmaceutical company, and the Bukhari Nederland-Maroc holding company. It was for the Swiss company's entire yearly output of an experimental gram negative antibiotic, Ceftomyacole. Scorpion remembered Rabinowich on the iPod talking about the plague bacillus: “resistant to virtually every antibiotic known.” It was a holocaust they were planning—only the Islamic Resistance was planning to survive.

Scorpion heard the front door open and Abdelhakim speaking to someone. He was out of time. He stuffed the contract into his pocket, put the rest of the papers back into the safe and locked it. He had just managed to turn off the desk light and grab his backpack when he heard voices coming toward him. He was trapped.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN