Gabir looked at him. “Truly. But it is not good for a captain to die.”
No, it wasn’t, the Palestinian thought. He hadn’t wanted to do it. That yebnen kelp son of a dog Ukrainian was just so stubborn. Still, Ademovic and the second officer, the Turk, Duyal Ghanem, had both been paid off. It was in Ademovic’s interest to go to Genoa, especially with a dead captain, although the Palestinian knew he wouldn’t be able to stop worrying until the ship passed Cap Corse at the northern tip of Corsica and he saw its heading bound for Genoa and not Marseilles.
“Ma’alesh,” it’s okay, “things happen.” The Palestinian shrugged.
“Did you see anything?” Gabir whispered.
“La, I was on watch. Anyway, no one has suggested the captain’s death was anything other than natural. He was a sakran. Everyone knew it. You said so yourself.”
“Inshallah, that will be the end of it. This is becoming an unlucky ship,” Gabir said, touching the silver Hand of Fatima hanging on a chain around his neck. The Palestinian went back to work. He hoped what Gabir said about an unlucky ship wasn’t true. He was so close, and at that moment felt a sliver of dread that he didn’t have a haz sa’eed good luck charm that like Gabir he could touch too. He would need the luck. Once he was ready in Europe, he would have to go back to America.
Thirty hours later the Zaina berthed at the terminal port in Genoa. Officers of the polizia di stato and gray- uniformed guardia di finanza came aboard to examine the captain’s body in his quarters, while the dockside gantry cranes unloaded the containers marked for Genoa. As the Palestinian left the ship, he squinted in the sun, looking back at the bridge, but couldn’t see the first officer. The Italian inquiry must be keeping him busy, he thought as he went down the gangplank, unnoticed by anyone. There was no sign of the Camorra on the dock or terminal building, but the containers came through the Italian dogana with the crates stamped and unopened in a record six hours.
Less than a half hour later Moroccan seaman Hassan Lababi no longer existed. The Palestinian, without the Moroccan passport and seaman’s card he’d torn into pieces and flushed down a toilet in the terminal building, was now using an Algerian passport and Italian resident card that identified him as Mejdan Bonatello, a nod to the fact that many Algerians had Italian surnames dating from World War Two. He got into the first of two big Mercedes armored trucks bearing the logo of BANCA POPOLARE DI MILANO, into which the crates containing the uranium had been loaded. The other crates from Volgograd were loaded into the second truck: As he boarded the first truck, the Moroccan who had driven the van that picked him up that first day in Torino handed him an armored truck guard’s uniform and a gun.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Utrecht, Netherlands
It took Scorpion a critical day and a half that he could ill-afford to set up the Moroccan. By then he’d gotten the bad news from Harris. He’d spent the night in the BMW parked near a mosque in the Kanaleneiland neighborhood. It was a long shot, but now that the dwarf was dead, it was the only lead he had. There were at least a dozen mosques, masjids, and Islamic community centers in Utrecht. Any one of them might have been associated with the dead drops Tassouni had used.
Scorpion knew that while most Westerners, including many Dutch, tended to lump Muslims together, there was a lot of hostility between the different immigrant communities and they almost never mixed. Turks, for example, wouldn’t be caught dead in a Moroccan mosque, and vice versa. The dwarf had said the neighborhood of most of the drops was Maghrebi, North African, and that you could smell the cinnamon and cumin. That meant Moroccan, so he’d parked the BMW near a Moroccan mosque in Kanaleneiland that had a reputation for radicalism.
His target was the night security guard, whom he glimpsed once an hour on his rounds checking outside during the night, and otherwise as a shadow at a back window. He was a small man with a Vandyke beard, wearing an FC Utrecht football T-shirt under a worn leather jacket. If this mosque had a link to the Islamic Resistance in Damascus-a hell of a big if, Scorpion admitted to himself-the night guard wouldn’t be just anyone. He’d be a fanatic, prepared for a martyr’s death to protect whatever operational information they had. And you couldn’t just take him out. If this mosque were a link to the Palestinian, taking anyone out would set off an alarm that could trigger exactly what he was trying to prevent before he could get to it. The only way to do it was to flip the guard; what Koenig in his vaguely Catholic way used to call “conversion” or “getting the Joe to see the light.” And he only had a day to do it.
In the morning, when the mosque finally opened and the night shift was over, he tailed the Moroccan as he bicycled back to his apartment. He lived in an area of identical, anonymous apartment buildings, reminiscent of Eastern Europe. The Moroccan’s was dotted with TV satellite dishes, one for nearly every apartment. As he studied the building from the BMW, Scorpion made a call to a private detective agency in Amsterdam he’d found on the Internet. He gave the detective on the line the security guard’s description and address and, using a South African ID, hired him at a double rate to get all the information he could on the guard within eight hours.
Having earlier torn up and flushed the Crane passport and driver’s license down a public toilet at the Utrecht railroad station, his latest passport identified him as Damon McDonald, a lawyer from Johannesburg. Being an attorney, like being a journalist, was a good catchall profession, providing an instant cover explanation for poking into other people’s private affairs.
“You understand this is a legal matter,” he told the detective. “No one must know about your inquiry, especially the subject. No talking to neighbors, coworkers, anything like that. Strictly computer lookup and distance surveillance.”
“We understand,” the man replied. “In such cases, we typically act as a Belastingdienst tax agent, or sometimes we wear the uniform and go as the gas meter reader. It is quickly done. There are no questions and everything is normal.”
“I also want surveillance photographs. Wife, children, mistress, anyone he talks to. Anyone. Again, it must be long distance. He must not see or know anything or I pay nothing. Also, copies of identity papers and anything the government has on file, and a copy of a utility bill, something that shows residence. And no reports, nothing. You tell me everything verbally and give me all your notes and photographs when we meet and then forget it. You hand me the photographs personally along with the memory drive and I pay in cash.”
“It is understood, meneer.”
Scorpion drove to a nondescript business hotel near the Utrecht Central Station and caught a few hours of sleep. Later, he rented a furnished two-bedroom apartment near the Nieuwegracht Canal for a week and checked out De Rode Brug, the local red light street, prostitutes sitting in the windows of a line of houseboats tethered along the canal bank. The women seemed tired and ordinary. He didn’t see what he was looking for and it was past time that he needed to get on the Internet so he headed to the university. After stopping a few students and asking around, he found a combination Laundromat/Internet cafe near the campus.
He sat at a laptop facing the wall, surrounded by students doing laundry, drinking coffee and chatting, checking Facebook and playing video games on the Internet, the hum of the washing machines and dryers drowning out the conversations and noises from the video games. Even before he logged onto the International Corn Association site, he went looking for a beautiful woman online. There were two problems. Utrecht didn’t have any high quality escort services, so he would have to get a woman from Amsterdam, and there was no way of knowing what type of woman the Moroccan might be attracted to. He guessed that a beautiful Dutch blonde might be something the working-class Moroccan might have fantasized about without ever having had a chance at one.
He found a knockout-looking twenty-two-year-old blonde named Anika on an escort service website and booked her online for an entire day in Utrecht. He texted to set it up, and texting back, she assured him the photograph of her on the site was only about six months old. He arranged to meet her at the Grand Hotel Karel in the center of Utrecht, then logged onto the International Corn Association site, where he got the message mentioning the code word Venice and a coded Amsterdam phone number. There was no indication what had broken loose, but he assumed that Peters, the CIA’s Netherlands station chief, would know.
Following the emergency procedure, he left the BMW where he’d parked it in a structure near the train station and rented a Kawasaki motorcycle for easy street parking and in case he had to make a getaway through
