Outside, Scorpion caught a Service taxi that he shared with two women, one in a head scarf, and a male student, heading toward the Corniche. He stopped the Service on Kuwait Street, crossed the busy street and jumped into a taxi heading the other way, toward downtown, making sure no one was suddenly reversing directions with him. He got out on Fakheddine, waited till the taxi left, then walked into a Japanese restaurant and out the back door. From there, Scorpion walked several blocks down a side street to the high-rise apartment building on Omar Daouk where he had rented a furnished flat earlier that morning. He nodded to the portier and took the elevator to the apartment. As soon as he got in, he went to the window and scanned the street below from behind the curtain, but there was nothing. Just ordinary street traffic. Beyond the street, he could see the side of the Ramada Hotel, and beyond that the Mediterranean, blue all the way to the horizon.
He went to the table, turned on his laptop computer, transferred the image on the plug-in drive from Fouad into the computer and opened it with Photoshop. The man in the photo was Salim Kassem, Nazrullah’s deputy secretary and a member of the al-majlis Al-Markazis, the Hezbollah Central Council. It wasn’t his face Scorpion was interested in, but his cell phone. He enlarged the photo almost to the point of seeing individual pixels, till he was sure he knew the exact Nokia model Kassem used. Using an RSA token disguised as a functioning credit card, Scorpion logged into the website of the International Corn Association, which promoted American corn exports that Harris was using as cover for the operation. The randomly generated code number plus a password enabled Scorpion to initiate a Virtual Private Network with a special port on the site that used an advanced DTLS protocol. This created a highly secure network tunnel that was far more difficult to hack than the standard SSL used by most so-called secure websites, such as banks. Once he was connected, he made the arrangements he wanted.
Only then did he unpack his suitcase and methodically check his equipment, one piece at a time, including a 9mm Beretta pistol with a sound suppressor. From this point on he would be carrying a gun everywhere he went.
Leaving the apartment, he took a Service to Ashrafieh. He stopped in a real estate office and pocketed a few business cards from an agent who tried to interest him in a condo in the Gammayzeh district. “Pas maintenant,” not now, he told the agent, using French as part of his cover ID, then caught a taxi that let him off on Baroudi, two blocks from the target. He studied the street and the building as he walked past and then completely around it. In the lobby, he slipped the portier one of the real estate cards and thirty thousand lira, told him he had a client who was interested and to keep it to himself. After taking the elevator to the top floor, he walked down the stairs to the eighth floor and checked the corridor to determine how he wanted to handle it when he returned.
Finally, Scorpion went back outside and called Fouad. He spent the rest of the day changing taxis and making further preparations.
N ear sunset the next day Scorpion got the call from Fouad. He was seated at a cafe on the Corniche near Pigeon Rocks. The line of palm trees along the Corniche rustled in the breeze. A slim young woman in a miniskirt was walking arm in arm with a girlfriend in a black hijab scarf and skintight designer jeans, the two of them laughing, the sun turning the sea a fiery reddish gold and at that moment, Beirut was the most seductive place on earth. The waiter was talking with the bartender about Lebanon’s upcoming soccer match against Jordan in the Asian Cup, and on the TV behind the bar an Egyptian female singer was crooning about love.
It was good to hear Arabic again, Scorpion thought. It had been too long and he’d missed it; missed its musicality and expressiveness, and even more, a sense of his strange interrupted childhood in the desert of Arabia after his oilman father had been killed. It brought back the world of the Bedouin and Sheikh Zaid, who had been more of a father to him than his own father, whom he’d barely known, and the extraordinary nights of his boyhood when the stars filled the desert sky from horizon to horizon. He remembered how it was near the end, when it was all about oil and money and the Bedu way was gone, and when he went to America to go to Harvard, Sheikh Zaid telling him, “You have to find out who you are, my dhimmi.”
He was thinking about all that, and about dropping out of Harvard and going to war in Afghanistan and later the Delta Force-because in a way it was like going home-when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment, said “D’accord,” and snapped the phone shut.
Scorpion slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked along the Corniche, the waves lapping at the shore as he went over it again in his mind. They had gotten lucky. An informant working in a garage in South Beirut spotted Kassem’s car being moved and called Fouad. That meant they would try soon, but there were multiple trouble spots. For one thing, there might be gunfire, and no guarantee that a stray-or not so stray-bullet would not get Kassem. Unless Kassem was unharmed, Scorpion knew his plan wouldn’t work. Also, the woman had to leave the balcony door unlocked or they might have to smash it in, alerting Kassem and the guards outside the door and precipitating a gunfight. And even if it all went as planned, keeping Kassem alive was a problem, since Fouad had a powerful motive to kill him. Plus, there was the matter of getting away, because Hezbollah, with informants everywhere in Lebanon, would be after them within the hour, probably a lot less. And he had to do it all in such a way that neither Kassem, who was perhaps the shrewdest mind in Hezbollah, nor anyone on the Central Council, would suspect his real plan.
In a way, what he was doing was the opposite of normal intelligence gathering, where you ran embedded assets who would turn over everything they could to an operations officer. Normal spycraft was like spreading a net across a river and taking in and analyzing everything till you got the fish you were after. Here, he was forcing the issue because there was a clock ticking and no way of knowing when it would go off, and he had to do it in such a way that the intelligence was absolutely real-so much so that the enemy didn’t suspect they were helping him, he thought as he waved down a taxi and headed downtown to the RDV location.
An hour later they waited in the restaurant for Fouad to come back from the telephone by the bar. The waiter had told them there was a call for “Hamid.” No more cell phone calls for the woman, Scorpion had told Fouad. After this, Hezbollah would analyze every call she had made. Scorpion watched the street and the headlights of the cars outside through the reflection of the interior of the restaurant in the window. Fouad came walking back to the table, and by the look on his face Scorpion knew they were on. She had called, alerting them Kassem was on his way.
“Yalla!” Fouad said. Let’s go. They headed out to the SUV.
Scorpion and Fouad left the two Druze gunmen parked in an underground parking garage around the corner, their lights and engine off and close enough to hear any gunfire, while the two of them made their way around to the rear entrance by the garbage bin. Scorpion picked the lock and they climbed the stairs, pausing at any sound until they were out on the roof. They unpacked their gear and night vision goggles and set up their equipment. He cautioned Fouad again against making a sound or letting himself be seen from below or from another building, then left him crouching below the line of the roof as he went back inside and down the stairs to the landing above the woman’s apartment. The only sound he made was while cutting the wires to the light on the landing, putting it in shadow, and the barely audible metallic whisper as he screwed the silencer onto his gun.
Scorpion waited, sweating in the darkness. Somewhere, he heard the sound of a television. It came from an apartment where someone was watching a popular reality TV show to find the next Lebanese singing star. When his cell phone vibrated, it startled him so much he almost dropped it, and at that moment he heard the elevator coming. He pressed into the shadow of the wall to make himself as small as possible. The elevator door opened and he heard men moving quietly. He sensed one of them approaching, just beyond his line of sight, probably peering up into the darkness of the landing. It could end here, he thought, aiming the gun.
Then he heard a voice that had to be Kassem’s: “I won’t be more than an hour,” a knock on the door, and the woman letting him in, saying “Haayil, habibi. Can you stay?”
At the sound of the door closing, Scorpion glanced at his watch. He would wait twelve minutes. He wanted them occupied in bed.
One of the guards coughed and shuffled his feet. One of them murmured something about the TV show and the other chuckled. Scorpion crept downstairs, one stair at a time. He was almost in their line of sight. He checked his watch; it was time. He pulled on his ski mask and pressed the Send button on his cell phone to let Fouad know. One of the guards said something but he couldn’t catch it. He tried to control the sound of his breathing. Yalla beena, he thought. The first move had to be Fouad coming down the rappelling line and in from the balcony.
Suddenly, they were shouting in the apartment and a woman screamed. Scorpion stepped into the line of sight in shooting position. One of the Hezbollah guards was pounding on the door, the second was aiming his AK- 47. He shot them both in the head before either could turn around. He moved toward the apartment door, the shouting louder inside, and had just reached the door when it opened. Kassem, stark naked except for his undershirt, started to run out then stopped, stunned as Scorpion put the muzzle of the silencer against his forehead
