Scorpion Betrayal (41 page)

Hassani struggled furiously, his left hand pounding at Scorpion's face and banging his head against the marble as Scorpion tightened the chokehold on his neck with every fiber of his strength. For a second Scorpion almost blacked out, and then he felt Hassani weaken. Hassani punched him in the eye, but it was weak, almost a push, and then Scorpion felt Hassani go slack. Tightening his grip with his last bit of strength, he hung on, counting to thirty, and then let go, utterly exhausted.

Putting his fingers to Hassani's neck, he checked for a pulse. There was none. He'd thought he would feel some sense of triumph, but he was so exhausted he could feel nothing.

He rolled over, his legs still around Hassani, then got up and went through Hassani's pockets, finding another cell phone, a contact number on the screen. It had been damn close, he thought. His hands shaking, he just had time to remove the SIM chips from both cell phones so they couldn't be used, when a heavily armed squad of real Carabinieri came into the room and placed him under arrest.

L
ate that night, his face and clothes still stained with Hassani's blood, Scorpion was taken in handcuffs from his jail cell and put into a windowless police van. When the van stopped, they led him out to a piazza bordered by a large multistory building, lit ghostly white by floodlights. The area was surrounded by armed Carabinieri, their hands on their guns as the
polizia
led him toward the building.

“What place is this?” he asked one of the policemen.

“Il Palazzo Chigi,” the
guardia
replied. “That is the Colonna of Marcus Aurelius,” he said, pointing to a marble column in the center of the piazza. They led him past the towering column, into the palazzo building and up to the Italian prime minister's office.

“Buona sera!
The man of the hour, lo Scorpione,” said a tanned middle-aged man in shirtsleeves and tie, seated behind the desk. Moretti and Bob Harris and another man in a dark suit, who looked like an aide to the prime minister, were also in the room.

“Take the handcuffs off him,” Moretti said in Italian to the two policemen who had come in with Scorpion. One of the
guardia
fumbled for a moment and then unlocked the cuffs. Moretti gestured for them to go, and they both immediately left the large ornate room.

“Please, sit,” the prime minister said, gesturing to Scorpion. “You like cigar? It is Cubano.” He nodded to his aide, who held out an open box of expensive cigars from the prime minister's desk.

“Grazie,”
Scorpion said, picking out one of them. He waited while the aide lit it for him. “Didn't know you were in Rome, Bob.” Seeing Harris gave him a bad feeling. All through this mission, there had been the thought in the back of his mind that, as always, Harris was dealing from the bottom of the deck, and that he would be the one to pay the tab.

“I was in London coordinating with MI6, the AISE,” Harris said, gesturing to Moretti, “and some of the other services, when I heard what happened. I want you to know, the DNI is very pleased. He's approved your bonus. He's convinced keeping you under deep cover on the Palestinian op was his idea and is citing this success as a result of cooperation between the DIA, NSA, and CIA that he implemented.”

“In Italy, it is the same. The big fish takes the credit,” Moretti said.

“As it should be,” the prime minister said. “But we in this room know the truth. This man,” pointing at Scorpion, “saved many lives—and the honor of the Italian nation. I am curious. How did you know that the Palestino was coming in a truck disguised as a
camion di Carabinieri
?”

“You had to look at it from Hassani's point of view,” Scorpion said. “His problem was how to get past the barriers of the
polizia
in order to attack the conference. When I recognized him on the TV with
la donna inglese,
I couldn't figure out why he would risk his entire operation just to attend a street demonstration. And then it hit me. He needed a symbol, like a female victim of the
polizia,
to ensure that there would be violent demonstrations the day of the conference, so the
polizia
at the barricades wouldn't question the necessity of a Carabinieri truck coming through with reinforcements.”

“Why didn't you give us the photograph and let the AISE and the Carabinieri try to find him?” the aide asked.

“It would have alerted him. He could have detonated the bomb remotely anytime. We had to get him and the bomb together,” Scorpion said.

“Generale Lombardi of the Carabinieri and I came to the same conclusion,” Moretti put in. “The only place where both the Palestino and the bomb would be at the same time was at the Congresso.”

“A dangerous strategy,” the prime minister said, looking at Moretti.

“Ours is a dangerous business, Prime Minister,” Harris said. “Happily, there's more good news. Thanks to the lead on the English girl—Welsh, actually—and you won't be surprised to learn that the photograph of her covered with blood and beaten by the Italian police was a fake.”

“Of course. This I knew all the time,” the prime minister snapped.

“We were able to round up most of the Islamic Resistance network. The young woman was a pawn. She didn't know she was being used by the Palestinian.”

“She lied about the beatings. We must investigate. Arturo, make a note,” the prime minister said to his aide.

“Of course, Prime Minister,” Harris said. “You'll have to work that out with the British, although you may want to wait till after Scotland Yard is done. She is cooperating with them. She gave them the lead that her girlfriend—English, named Liz—was Hassani's girlfriend, and that before they came to Rome, Liz and Hassani had been staying with jihadis in Turin. After that, it was just a matter of tracking down all the foreigners and Muslim jihadi types who had been in Turin at that time, with I must say a great deal of help from the AISE and the Carabinieri.” He gestured to include the prime minister and Moretti. “Also, the NSA, tracking down all the cell phone messages with the phrase ‘al Jabbar.'

“We now know that in Europe, in addition to Rome, there were four additional attacks planned: London, Brussels, Paris, and Madrid. Thanks to the leads from Turin, we were able to stop three of the four. The only one who slipped through the net and wasn't picked up in time was a young Tunisian student in Madrid, who managed to detonate his suicide vest at a bus stop—prematurely, we think—killing two and injuring a young girl.”

“What about America?” the prime minister asked.

“There were three attacks planned,” Harris replied. “We stopped two, the big one, the bioweapon attack in New York and one in Chicago; a Pakistani college student who was planning to blow up a train. There were three deaths: the Bangladeshi woman and a Pakistani helicopter pilot in New York, and an incident in Los Angeles. So far we've been able to angle the media so the public has been reassured that they were all under surveillance and that the major threat was stopped. Nothing about the bio threat has been given to the press.”

“So many attacks. This time we were lucky,” the prime minister said.

“We were good,” Harris said.

“Thanks to lo Scorpione. Tell him,” the prime minister gestured at Moretti, “what we found in the
camion di Carabinieri.”

“One hundred and sixty-five kilos of RDX, plus more than twelve hundred kilos of fertilizer and diesel fuel and three kilos of Cesium-137,” Moretti said.

“A dirty bomb. It would have been a total disaster,” the prime minister said, shaking his head.

“What are you talking about? What about the uranium?” Scorpion asked.

“What uranium?” the prime minister said, looking at Scorpion and Harris.

“The twenty-one kilos of highly enriched U-235 missing from Russia. That uranium!”

“There was nothing in the
camion,”
Moretti said. “Only the cesium. That would have been bad enough. Cesium-137 has a half-life of thirty years and it bonds with everything—walls, paint, metal, dirt, trees, air. Much of Rome might have been made uninhabitable.”

“The uranium was a false alarm,” Harris said. “It may have been disinformation from the Russians.”

“This is bullshit!” Scorpion said, standing up. He stubbed the cigar out in an ashtray on the prime minister's desk, a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Where's Dave Rabinowich? Get him on the line now.”

“Take it easy,” Harris said, glancing over at the prime minister. “Remember where you are.”

“Get Rabinowich now,” Scorpion said through clenched teeth. Two Italian agents stepped into the room, their hands inside their suit jackets, but the prime minister waved them off, indicating that they should leave.

“Dave's been reassigned,” Harris said, standing up. “He's not on this operation anymore. Neither are you. This case is closed. Prime Minister, I'm afraid we've taken up enough of your time.”

“Where's Dave?” Scorpion said, not moving.

“He's on vacation. Hawaii, I think. He said he'd be incommunicado. No e-mails, no cell phones. His fat ass is probably in a beach chair right now, ogling girls in bikinis,” Harris said, walking to the door.

The prime minister stood up and extended his hand for Scorpion to shake.
“Arrivederci,
Scorpione. We owe you much.”

“Prego,
but this is
merda,”
Scorpion said again, shaking the prime minister's hand but looking at Moretti.

“You should clean your face. It still has dried blood on it,
il mio amico,”
Moretti said, his eyes sympathetic. “There is a restroom down the hall.”

Harris was waiting for Scorpion in the hallway outside the office.

“What the hell did you think you were doing in there? You don't work for the Italians, you work for us. Although maybe not anymore,” he said.

“What was
I
doing?” Scorpion snapped. “How about twenty-one kilos of bullshit from Ozersk that supposedly doesn't exist? Or an Iranian ship from Bushehr that disappeared into thin air? Did I imagine that too or did I hear it from you, you son of a bitch? And now all of a sudden Rabinowich has disappeared too? This isn't an intelligence operation, it's the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Keep your voice down,” Harris said. “You know the rules. You tell the runner just what he needs to know. That's all.”

“Yeah, but what you tell him is supposed to be good,” Scorpion said. “So what operation was I on, Bob, old buddy?”

“Your job was to terminate the Palestinian. You did it. He's dead. You saved Rome—and a lot of other people too. You've been paid in full plus the bonus. Case closed,” Harris said, adjusting his suit jacket cuffs as he headed for the elevator. The door opened and Harris stepped in. Scorpion watched him from the hallway. “You coming?” Harris said.

“With you? That's always a mistake,” Scorpion said.

The two men watched the elevator door close between them, then Scorpion walked to the men's room and washed his hands and face in the basin. Not looking, he sensed Moretti come in. Scorpion wiped his face with a hand towel and looked at himself in the mirror. He'd had so many identities, the man who looked back at him was almost a stranger, face bruised and needing a shave, his gray eyes catching the overhead light like a cat's eyes.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” Scorpion said. “There's something very wrong.
Buona notte
to that bucket of yours.”

“I know. There were traces of radiation from uranium, as well as cesium, in the hold of that ship, the
Zaina,”
Moretti said. “He's holding something back. What will you do?”

Scorpion looked at the two of them in the mirror: the stranger with gray eyes and the little Italian spy. There were only two possibilities, he thought. Either it was all Russian disinformation, or his operation against the Palestinian was, in CIA parlance, “window dressing,” a diversion from the real operation. If that was the case, whatever the operation was, it was still running. Either way, the feeling in his stomach was like something twisting inside, saying something truly terrible was about to happen. Worse, if he stayed with it, he was completely on his own. Harris had cut him off from both Rabinowich and the Company. Anything he did could be considered treason.

“Arrivederci, Aldo,”
Scorpion said, putting his hand on Moretti's shoulder. “This isn't over.”

“Bene.
You go to Torino? The air is good there this time of year.”

“Perhaps. Rome's getting a little hot for me.”

“Keep in touch, Scorpione,” Moretti said. When Scorpion left him, the Italian was peering at the mirror, snipping at his mustache and nose hairs with a pair of tiny penknife scissors.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN