Scorpion Betrayal (38 page)

Having no time, he knew he had to make an instantaneous choice: the life of the woman next door or his only chance at stopping the Palestinian.

Grabbing his backpack, Scorpion told the woman on the sofa, “You have to leave.
Esca della casa. Telefono per la polizia!”

“Get out my apartment,” she said in English.

He couldn't wait any longer. He ran out of the apartment and raced down the stairs, leaping down almost an entire landing. Coming to the entrance hall, he tore open the front door and was almost blinded by the bright sunlight in the crowded piazza. He saw the Palestinian point a gun at a taxi driver and haul the driver out, then get in and drive off in the taxi.

Scorpion looked around. Next to a flower stall he saw a Vespa motor scooter chained to a lamppost. At this hour in Rome traffic, he might get through faster with the Vespa than a car. It only took a few seconds with the universal key and tapping with his Leatherman pliers to open the chain lock and the steering column lock and start the scooter. He roared off after the Palestinian as a man from one of the stalls ran after him, screaming,
“Arresto! Ladro!”

He could see the Palestinian's taxi ahead, weaving around cars into the opposing traffic lanes and back, while he just managed to keep up on the cobblestone streets. He raced between lanes of traffic, slipping past cars by inches and going up on the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians as he raced after the taxi, trying to keep it in sight and not get it confused with other Roman taxis, all of them painted white.

Approaching a red traffic light ahead, the Palestinian suddenly looked back, stuck out his arm and fired a shot at Scorpion that tore a spiderweb hole in a car window next to him, the driver of the car staring wide-eyed at it, too stunned to move. Scorpion hunched lower over the handlebars and drove even faster, squeezing between a van and a Fiat with less than an inch to spare on either side. The Palestinian's taxi slowed at the red light, then sped up, darting into the intersection, then swerved to just miss a car. As the driver screamed and shook his fist, the taxi swerved again to avoid another car from the opposite direction and roared past the intersection.

Scorpion followed, trying to calculate which way the Palestinian was heading. He darted into the same intersection, cars screeching around him, people shouting and cursing, and then he was through and realized that the taxi was headed toward the Tiber River. He had to decide: Would the Palestinian try to go against the one-way traffic or cross over to Trastevere?

Against the traffic, he decided, based only on his sense of his adversary. Scorpion swerved up onto the sidewalk and down a stone stairway to an alley that brought him to the Tebaldi Road along the riverbank. He thrilled to see he had guessed right. He was just fifty feet or so behind the Palestinian's taxi, which was going against the one-way traffic, cars screeching to a halt and drivers gesticulating furiously. The taxi ran up onto the walkway along the Tiber, heading toward the Garibaldi Bridge. A woman walking with a little boy didn't see the taxi coming up fast behind them. At the last second she turned and screamed. The taxi cut back into a gap in the traffic, then bounced back onto the walkway, still charging at pedestrians who had to leap out of the way.

Scorpion raced on the walkway to stay with the taxi, his tires skidding as he whipped around the woman and the child who stared wide-eyed at him. The Palestinian glanced back and fired again, Scorpion swerving the Vespa to the side then back. The taxi had gone past the bridge, so the Palestinian was staying on this side of the river, Scorpion realized as they raced past Tiverina Island. Then a truck passed, blocking the view, and the Palestinian swerved back into and across the traffic lanes, heading up the Aventine hill.

Scorpion had to gear down and rev up on the incline, cutting into the opposing traffic lane to keep up. An Alfa Romeo was headed straight at him. He saw the driver blink in horror, the car's brakes screeching as Scorpion just raced past, the Alfa's bumper nearly grazing him. He could see the taxi pulling ahead as it raced around the Circus Maximus. Instead of going around, Scorpion drove past the barrier, the Vespa slowing on the green turf as he rode in a direct line across the open field to intercept the Palestinian. He got his 9mm ready to fire, holding the gun on the handlebar.

The Palestinian's taxi weaved through heavy traffic, scraping other cars and cutting into the opposite lane to get around a car in front of him before dodging back onto his side of the road. Now Scorpion could see the Coliseum ahead. The Palestinian was heading directly at a giant tour bus that was turning off the street toward the parking area for Coliseum tours. Suddenly, the Palestinian turned and slowed so he was directly across from the bus driver, who looked down at the taxi, startled. The Palestinian fired through the passenger window, hitting the driver in the head, killing him instantly. The bus lurched forward and slammed into a car, crushing it and completely blocking the street.

Jumping out of the taxi, the Palestinian ran around the bus, showed the gun to a woman in a Fiat sedan with two children in the backseat, ordered her and the screaming children out, and when they complied, drove off.

By the time Scorpion got to the bus, the street was completely blocked with cars, people, and passengers screaming and trying to get out of the bus. He crawled under the bus to the other side, but the Fiat was nowhere to be seen. For a moment he stood there, sweating from the ride, his mouth tasting like ashes as he realized he'd made a terrible mistake. He should've killed Hassani when he'd had the chance on the train platform. Even worse, he'd lost the element of surprise, and now Hassani knew what he looked like. It was a disaster. Then he remembered the woman in the apartment.

He caught a taxi at a stand near the Coliseum and went back to the Campo dei Fiori. The taxi driver wanted to talk about the bus
incidente,
but Scorpion just kept saying,
“Non lo so,”
I don't know, till the driver stopped talking.

The sun was high and hot over the market as he got out of the taxi and wondered how he would disarm the bomb. The Palestinian had likely rigged it to the apartment's front door. It struck him then that there were no
polizia.
The woman in the apartment hadn't called the police! She was still there!

He'd started toward the building when there was a tremendous explosion and a fierce rush of hot air knocked him off his feet. An orange fireball exploded out of the side of the apartment building. The roof immediately caught fire and began collapsing onto the wrecked lower floors, raining flaming debris on the canvas tops of the market stalls, which began to smoke with fire.

The piazza filled with smoke and the smell of explosive, and he could hear people screaming as he tried to clear his head, his ears ringing as he got to his feet. Most of the top three floors of the building were gone. The two women up there were certainly dead. He could hear the wailing sounds of approaching
polizia
sirens and fire engines. There was nothing to be done. He had failed completely.

Scorpion brushed himself off, and wiping the dirt off his face with his sleeve, began to walk through the debris and the burning market stalls, vendors desperately trying to save their stock.

As a final failure, he realized he'd figured out why the Palestinian had risked everything to be at the demonstration at the Palazzo delle Finanze. Only now it was too late.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Villa Ada, Rome, Italy/New York, United States

“W
hy didn't you call?” Moretti said. “We could have had a thousand Polizia di Stato. It would have been finished.”

Scorpion shook his head. It was almost midnight. They were sitting at an outside table in a café in the small Piazza di Sant' Eustachio near the Pantheon. The lights from the café spilled out onto the cobblestones.

“He would've triggered the bomb with a cell phone before anyone could stop him. Even if we got him, you don't do this on your own. He has confederates. We wouldn't have stopped anything. I had no choice. I had to get him and the bomb together,” Scorpion said. He could hear the bitterness in his voice.

“E'
un disastro.
Now he knows we know he's in Rome. Maybe he even knows what you look like?”

“I never got close enough.” Scorpion grimaced, taking another sip of the grappa.

“Is no good,” Moretti said.

“We know that,” Scorpion snapped.

“I told my wife I have work, but
naturalmente
she thinks I am with my mistress. We lose the Palestinian and I am here with you and not my blond mistress. I lose twice. Is no good,” Moretti said, making Scorpion smile in spite of how he felt. “What if this
figlio di gotta
changes his plan? All our preparation goes for nothing.”

“He won't.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he thinks it's his destiny,” Scorpion said.

Moretti lit a cigarette and studied the American's face, partially in shadow from the light from the café.

“You begin to know him, don't you?”

“Maybe,” Scorpion said.

“What will you do?”

“Get drunk.”

“Seriously.”

“Alert Langley. After what happened today, he probably sent the signal.”

T
he next day, Scorpion got the call from Rabinowich before noon. A half hour later he was sitting next to Moretti looking at a closed-room bank of TV monitors inside Carabinieri headquarters on the Via Romania near Villa Ada Park. It was 6:00
A.M.
in Washington and New York, and the FBI Hostage Rescue Teams were fully operational.

Before he sat down, Scorpion verified that his face was blurred on the TV monitor, as he'd requested. Other TV monitors showed Wade Anderson, head of the FBI task force on the Palestinian operation; Dave Rabinowich, viewed at his desk via his Web cam; a heliport by the water in what was clearly lower Manhattan; an apartment building in a run-down New York neighborhood, viewed from a camera in an apartment or on a roof across the way; a two-story building in another New York neighborhood; a subway station; and a tac ops coordination center filled with men in SWAT gear.

As soon as Scorpion sat down, Anderson said, “You're here at my request. I have a FISA warrant,” and waved a sheaf of papers he picked up from his desk, the shades drawn over the office window glass behind him. “It's for two individuals whose names were supplied to us on a Special Access Critical basis by NSA and your buddy Rabinowich in Langley. I understand this was done based on information supplied by you. We've got multiple HRT teams deployed in Manhattan. Supervisory Special Agent Forrester's heading that up.” A crew-cut man in a bulky SWAT outfit in one of the monitors nodded. “In fact, we're using every damned HRT in the country, so this better be right,” Anderson said, glaring at the camera.

“These are people in the U.S. who received cell phone messages last night mentioning al Jabbar,” Rabinowich put in. “There's also one in Chicago and another in L.A. that NSA is still running down. All the calls were made from a single cell phone in the Portonaccio district in Rome that subsequently went dead, so there's no GPS track.”

“I assume that has something to do with why you are in Rome, Scorpion,” Anderson said.

“The Palestinian is in Rome,” Scorpion replied. Moretti looked hard at him.

“For our part, Langley's telling us to focus on New York. Correct?” Anderson asked.

“That's right,” Rabinowich said.

“Well, we're not doing it just because Langley says so, but because it matches our analysis as well,” Anderson growled. “But we have critical tactical decisions to make and I wanted your input, Scorpion.”

“Who are the two individuals?” Scorpion asked.

“One's a woman in her twenties, named…” Anderson squinted at his BlackBerry. “… Bharati Kabir. The family's from Bangladesh; she came here when she was a kid. Lives in Queens with her brother's family and works in an insurance office in midtown Manhattan. Frankly, we have concerns. She doesn't fit the profile. The second is a Pakistani male from Brooklyn. Name is Atif Khan.”

“What about the girl's brother?” Scorpion asked.

“Name's Zahid Kabir. Works in a shoestore.” Anderson frowned. “We only got these last night, so we're still digging stuff up.”