“And?”
“Nothing. Nada. They’ve come up empty. We’ve come up empty. MI-6, the BND, the Israelis…” Harris shrugged. “Nothing. Every intelligence service on earth’s come up zero.”
“Or so they say,” Scorpion said carefully. The last time he had worked with Harris was on the attempted coup in Arabia, and whatever there was between them, trust wasn’t any part of it. The only time Harris ever told the truth, went the saying around Langley, was when he thought no one would believe him. “What’s this about? You think the hitter’s in Pakistan?”
“Listen,” Harris said, touching an icon on his cell phone screen, then handed Scorpion a plug-in earpiece. “The second voice is General Budawi.”
“A demonstration. Multiple demonstrations. Something they will not forget. ”
He heard a man speaking in an uninflected Fusha standard Arabic, not Egyptian or Iraqi or any particular country’s accent. It was hard to hear. The bug wasn’t close, and there was background noise and other indistinguishable conversations from the outdoor cafe and street sounds where the bombing had occurred.
“Where?” a second voice, Budawi’s, said.
“Lo samaht.” Please. “We haven’t discussed terms,” the other man said, his neutral voice soft. He knew he was being recorded, Scorpion thought, and listened till the man said, “The Americans and their allies will owe you a — ” The recording suddenly ended.
“Photos?” Scorpion said, looking up.
Harris shook his head. “It was a condition of the RDV. They wanted to hear what he had to say first.”
“Really? Not even one? For the first time in history the Egyptian Mabahith kept their word?”
Harris grinned. “There was a partial the Mukhabarat retrieved from a piece of a cell phone chip. The phone itself was destroyed by the blast. It shows part of a sleeve. For what it’s worth, he was wearing a white shirt.”
“What’s the problem? Just go around the world looking for a man in a white shirt,” Scorpion said. He and Harris had history, and he knew Harris hadn’t come because he enjoyed Scorpion’s company. “What do you want, Bob? We’re a long way from Georgetown.”
Harris motioned him closer. Their heads were almost touching.
“We think they were sending a message with the killing of Budawi. Not just that they can reach anyone they want. We think the threat is real. Something big. He said, ‘a demonstration.’ An odd word to use. He knew he was being recorded and he said it twice.”
“How big?”
“We don’t know. It could be anything. Planes into buildings. Assassinations. Kidnappings. Bombings. Poisoning the water supply. Killing all the kids in an elementary school like Russia. A new war in the Middle East. We don’t know anything! We don’t know who. We don’t know where or when or how. For all we know, it could be disinformation. For the record, we don’t think it is.”
“Who’s ‘we’? The same geniuses who gave us Saddam’s yellowcake in Africa?”
“Rabinowich in D.I. He said to tell you,” Harris said.
Dave Rabinowich was a world-class mathematician from MIT, a Juilliard graduate violinist who had turned down a concert career and was hands-down the best intelligence analyst in the CIA. It was said that when he was bored, he would play mental chess games while simultaneously calculating prime numbers in his head. In fact, Scorpion had seen him do it once while at lunch at Clyde’s in Georgetown. Rabinowich was also the odd man out who never bowed to pressure from the top or softened his dissents. His reports were precise, methodical, exhaustively researched, and rarely if ever wrong. If Dave was sending him the message personally, the threat was real.
Now he understood why Harris had flown halfway around the world to see him when he could’ve heard the same thing from any operations officer, and why they didn’t wait to set up a safe house: to make sure he got the message. This wasn’t a job for the CIA. This was coming from higher up. At a minimum, from the the Director of National Intelligence, who oversaw all U.S. intelligence agencies.
“He mentioned ‘the Americans and their allies’,” Harris said. “That puts us in the line of fire, only we don’t have a clue, except that the messenger they sent is as good as it gets and is probably long gone from Egypt, and we don’t have any idea who he is or who he represents, or how he got out of Egypt either.”
“Multiple simultaneous attacks. You thinking al-Qaida?”
Harris shook his head. His hair was peppered with touches of gray, but at that moment he almost looked like the fair-haired graduate he’d once been. “Like a more sophisticated Brad Pitt,” a female analyst had once said, dreamily looking at an old photo, to which a male colleague had replied, “Yeah, with the social instincts of Hannibal Lector.”
“That’s what the NSC thinks,” Harris replied. “So does Homeland Security and the DCIA.” He motioned Scorpion close again. “Rabinowich thinks Hezbollah.”
“Hezbollah and the Muslim Brothers? Those are strange bedfellows.”
“That’s certainly the conventional wisdom,” Harris said mildly, as if he were the Saint Francis of the CIA instead of its dirtiest infighter.
“But Rabinowich doesn’t buy it. Why not?”
“Two things: One-the notation on Budawi’s computer for the RDV at the cafe read, ‘The Palestinian.’ Just that. ‘The Palestinian.’ Nothing else in the Mabahith’s files. Whatever else Budawi knew, he took with him when he died. Two-little ripples in the net. An NSA COMINT intercept here, a bit of MASINT from the DIA there, the odd BND rumor from an underworld informer not considered particularly reliable. No leads. Nothing definite. Nothing you can put your hands on. Not even odds and ends. What Rabinowich calls ‘subtexture.’ He says it’s his word, that he invented it. He’s actually filed a copyright application.”
“So why kill Budawi?”
Harris shrugged. “Maybe as a gesture from Hezbollah to the Brothers. A bowl of figs to seal the deal.”
“Or as you said, to send a message.”
“But to whom? The Egyptians, the Israelis, or us?”
“The other Arab regimes. Letting them know there’s a new player in the game.”
“Interesting, that’s what Rabinowich said,” Harris said.
“I thought you didn’t like Rabinowich.”
Harris grimaced. “I don’t. He’s not a team player. Neither are you.”
“No, I’m not,” Scorpion said. Now it was out in the open between them. “What do you want, Bob?”
“You’re a smart boy. You tell me,” Harris said, leaning back, his arms folded across his chest.
“Rabinowich is right. And if he is, it’s your ass on the line, which doesn’t bother me in the least. Not after Arabia.”
“Except it’s not about us, is it?” Harris said.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Scorpion took a sip of the beer and put the bottle down.
“Does Rabinowich think it’s a Palestinian? What about Hamas?”
“We don’t know. The consensus is, probably not. It’s probably a cover name to throw us off. Truth is, we have nothing. A voice. That’s it.”
“And that bothers you more than anything else, doesn’t it?” Scorpion paused. From somewhere in the ship there was a clang of steel banging against steel, a container, hitting the side of the hatch. It was like an omen, he thought. Things go wrong. He had been lucky for a long time, but you couldn’t be lucky forever. Something inside him tightened, telling him not to do it. He watched Harris take a sip of beer, pretending they were colleagues instead of men who hated each other’s guts. Harris hadn’t wanted to come all this way. He did it because he had no choice. Scorpion took a deep breath. “What’s the mission?” he asked.
“This is a Special Access Critical operation. We’re coordinating with NSA, DIA, FBI, State, and every foreign intelligence service in the world, including the ones that according to Congress we’re not supposed to talk to. I’m personally running it. Foley’s coordinating for Langley. Anderson for the FBI. General Massey for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Security will be tightened in every major U.S. city and every capital in the world. We’ve already launched the most massive worldwide manhunt anybody’s ever heard of. Every agency and DOD department is running 24/7 shifts to handle all the data streaming in.”
“All this because of Budawi? This is bullshit. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing,” Harris said, inspecting his nails. If it were possible for someone as deceitful as Harris to reveal
