The Scorpio Illusion (2 page)

The wife looked up at the sand dunes and the cupped flares of matches and the glows of lighted cigarettes through the rain. With money and her false papers, she would cut a path through the despised Israel, leaving death in her wake. She would return to the Baaka Valley and reach the High Councils. She knew exactly what she was going to do.

Muerte a toda autoridad
!

The scorching noonday sun caked the dirt roads of the refugee camp, an enclave of a displaced people, many
beaten into submission by events they could neither fathom nor control. Their gaits were slow, trudging, their faces set, and in their dark, downcast eyes a hollowness that bespoke the pain of fading memories, of images that would never be real again. Others, however, were defiant, submission to be reviled, acceptance of the status quo unthinkable, something to be scorned. These were the
muquateen
, the soldiers of Allah, the avengers of God. They walked rapidly, with purpose, their ever-present weapons strapped to their shoulders, their heads moving sharply, constantly aware, their eyes focused and filled with hatred.

It was four days since the massacre at Ashkelon. The woman clad in a green khaki uniform, its sleeves rolled up, walked out of her modest three-room structure; “house” would be misleading. Its door was covered with black cloth, the universal sign of death; passersby stared at it and raised their eyes to the sky, mumbling prayers for the departed; every now and then a wail emerged, asking Allah to avenge the dreadful death. For this was the home of the Ashkelon Brigade’s leader, and the woman striding down the dirt road had been his wife. But more than a woman, more than a wife, she was among the great
muquateen
in this convoluted valley of submission and rebellion, she and her husband symbols of hope for a cause all but lost.

As she strode down the caked street past an open market, the crowd dispersed for her, many touching her gently, worshipfully, uttering continuous prayers, until all, as one, began chanting “
Baj, Baj, Baj … Baj
!”

The woman acknowledged no one, instead pressing forward to a wooden, barracklike meeting hall at the end of the road. Inside, waiting for her, were the leaders of the Baaka Valley’s High Councils. She walked inside; a guard closed the door and she faced nine men seated behind a long table. The greetings were brief, solemn condolences offered. The chairman of the committee, an elderly Arab, spoke from the central chair.

“Your communication reached us. To say that it was astonishing would be a grave understatement.”

“Grave, in a word, says it,” said a middle-aged man dressed in one of the many uniforms of the
muquateen
. “For that’s what you’ll be buying, I hope you know that.”

“If that’s so, I’ll join my husband quicker, won’t I?”

“I wasn’t aware that you subscribed to our beliefs,” said another.

“Whether I do or not is irrelevant. I ask only that you support me financially. I believe that over the years I’ve earned that support.”

“Unquestionably,” agreed yet another. “You’ve been a remarkable force, and with your husband, may he rest with Allah in His gardens, even extraordinary. Yet, I see a difficulty—”

“I, and those few I choose to go with me, will be acting alone, solely in revenge for Ashkelon. We will be a provisional wing accountable to no one but ourselves. Does that answer your ‘difficulty’?”

“If you can do it,” replied another leader.

“I’ve already proved that I can. Do I have to refer you to the records?”

“No, it’s not necessary,” said the chairman. “On numerous occasions you’ve sent our enemies searching in such outrageous directions that several brother governments were penalized for acts they knew nothing about.”

“If it’s necessary, I shall continue that practice. We—you—have enemies and traitors everywhere, even among your
‘brother
governments.’ Authority everywhere corrupts itself.”

“You don’t trust anyone, do you?” asked the middle-aged Arab.

“I resent that statement. I married one of you for life. I gave you his life.”

“I apologize.”

“You should. My answer, please?”

“You shall have whatever you need,” said the chair
man of the committee. “Coordinate with Bahrain, as you have done in the past.”

“Thank you.”

“Finally, when you reach the United States, you will operate through another network. They will watch you, test you, and when they are convinced that you are truly a stealth weapon of your own making and no threat to them, they will reach you and you will become one of them.”

“Who are they?”

“They are known in the deepest channels of secrecy as the Scorpions—
Scorpios
, to be precise.”

1

S
undown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles. During the past three days, before the dead calm descended, this section of the Caribbean had suffered not only a hurricane with the force of the infamous Hugo, but sixteen hours later a tropical storm whose bolts of lightning and earth-shaking thunder had set fire to a thousand palms and caused a hundred thousand residents of the island chain to look to their gods for deliverance.

The Great House on this island, however, had survived both catastrophes. It was made of iron-bolted stone and steel and built into the huge rising hill on the north side, impenetrable, indestructible, a fortress. That the nearly destroyed sloop had managed to survive and find its way into the sweeping rock-hewn cove and the small beach was a miracle, but it was an ominous miracle, not of her God’s making, that caused the tall black maid in a white uniform to rush down the stone steps to the water’s edge and fire four shots into the air from the gun in her hand.

“
Ganja
!” she yelled. “No lousy
ganja
here! You go ’way!”

The lone figure, kneeling on the deck of the boat, was a woman in her mid-thirties. Her features were sharp, her long hair stringy and unkempt, her shorts and halter abused by the weather she had endured … and her eyes were enigmatically cold as she rested her powerful rifle
on the gunwale and peered through the telescopic sight; she squeezed the trigger. The loud report shattered the stillness of the island cove, echoing off the rocks and the hill beyond. Instantly, the uniformed maid fell facedown into the gently lapping waves.

“There’s shooting,
gunshots
!” A shirtless, strapping young man, well over six feet in height and seventeen years of age, burst out of the cabin below. He was well-muscled and handsome, with cleanly chiseled, even classic Roman features. “What’s happening? What have you done?”

“No more than had to be done,” said the woman calmly. “Please get to the bow and jump over when you see the sand; it’s still light enough. Then pull us into shore.”

He did not move to obey, but stared at the slain white-uniformed figure on the beach, rubbing his hands nervously over his cutoff jeans. “My God, she’s just a servant!” he cried, his English accented with his native Italian. “You are a monster!”

“It is ever so, my child. Am I not in bed? And was I not when I killed those three men who bound your hands, whipped a rope around your neck, and were about to throw you off the pier, hanging you for murdering the dock
suprèmo
?”

“I didn’t kill him. I’ve told you that over and over again!”

“They thought you did and that was enough.”

“I wanted to go to the police. You wouldn’t let me!”

“Foolish child. Do you think you would ever have reached a courtroom? Never. You would have been shot in the streets, a piece of garbage blown away, for the
suprèmo
benefited the dockworkers with his thefts and corruption.”

“I had angry words with him, nothing more! I went away and drank wine.”

“Oh, you certainly did, a great deal of wine by yourself. When they found you in the alley, you were incoher
ent until you realized that a rope was around your throat, your feet at the edge of the pier.… And for how many weeks did I hide you, racing from one place to another while the scum of the waterfronts were hunting you, sworn to kill you on sight?”

“I never understood why you were so good to me.”

“I had my reasons … I still have them.”

“As God is my witness, Cabi,” the young man said, still staring at the white-uniformed corpse on the beach. “I owe you my life, but I never … never expected any thing like this!”

“Would you rather return to Italy, to Portici and your family, and face certain death?”

“No, no, of course not, Signora Cabrini.”

“Then welcome to our world, my darling toy,” said the woman, smiling. “And believe me, you’ll want whatever I care to give you. You’re so perfect; I cannot tell you how perfect you are.… Over the side, my adorable Nico.…
Now
!”

The young man did as he was told.

“It is she,” said the man behind the desk in the darkened office. On the right wall was projected a detailed map of the Caribbean, specifically of the Lesser Antilles, a flickering blue dot centered on the island of Saba. “We can presume she sailed through the Anegada Passage between Dog Island and Virgin Gorda—that’s the only way she could survive the weather. If she survived.”

“Perhaps she didn’t,” said an aide, sitting in front of the desk and staring at the map. “It would certainly make our lives easier.”

“Of course it would.” The head of the Deuxième lit a cigarette. “But for a she-wolf who has lived through the worst of Beirut and the Baaka Valley, I want irrefutable proof before I call off the hunt.”

“I know those waters,” said a second man, who stood to the left of the desk. “I was posted to Martinique during the Soviet-Cuban threat, and I can tell you the winds can be vicious. From what I understand of the battering those seas took, my guess is that she did not survive, not with what she was sailing.”

“My assumption is that she did.” The Deuxième chief spoke sharply. “I cannot afford to guess. I know those waters only by the maps, but I see scores of natural recesses and small harbors she could have gone into. I’ve studied them.”

“Not so, Henri. In those islands the storms blow first one minute clockwise, the next counterclockwise. If such inlets existed, they’d be marked, inhabited. I
know
them; studying them on a map is merely a distant exercise, not seeking them out, looking for Soviet submarines. I tell you, she did not survive.”

“I hope you’re right, Ardisonne. This world cannot afford Amaya Bajaratt.”

In the white-walled subcellar communications complex of the CIA, a single locked room was reserved for a unit of twelve analysts, nine men and three women, who worked in shifts of four around the clock. They were multilingual specialists in international radio traffic, including two of the Agency’s most experienced cryptographers, and all were ordered not to discuss their activities with anyone, spouses no exception.

A fortyish man in shirt-sleeves wheeled back his cushioned swivel chair and glanced at his colleagues on the midnight shift, a woman and two other men; it was
nearing four o’clock in the morning, half their tour over. “I may have something,” he said to no one specifically.

“What?” asked the woman. “It’s a dull night as far as I’m concerned.”

“Break it up for us, Ron,” the man nearest the speaker said. “Radio Baghdad is lulling me to sleep with its bilge.”

“Try Bahrain, not Baghdad,” said Ron, picking up a printout discharged from his word processor into a wire basket.

“What’s with the rich folks?” The third man looked up from his electronic console.

“That’s just it, rich. Our source in Manamah passed the word that a half a million, U.S., had been transferred to a coded account in Zurich destined for—”