and motioned him back into the apartment.
“Kes emmak!” Kassem spat at him, not moving.
Scorpion smashed him in the face with the gun, knocking him back and putting him into a choke hold as Fouad, also in a ski mask, tied Kassem’s wrists behind him with plastic zip-tie handcuffs.
“Be polite,” Scorpion said in Arabic before kneeing Kassem in the groin. He and Fouad heaved Kassem onto the dining room table on his back. Scorpion hit Kassem hard in the mouth with the gun, knocking out some of his teeth. Kassem lay there, moaning softly, blood bubbling out of his mouth. Scorpion grabbed a dish towel and used it to blindfold him. The woman, clad only in black panties, stared wide-eyed at them.
“Take care of her. Make it look real,” Scorpion whispered to Fouad as he bound Kassem’s feet with another plastic zip-tie. The woman screamed as Fouad grabbed her by her hair and began slapping her hard, shouting “Eskoot!” for her to shut up. He slammed her against the wall, knocking her down, then dragged her to the bedroom and tied and gagged her.
Scorpion opened the apartment door, checked the corridor to the elevator and listened. The TV show in the other apartment was still on. Either they had heard nothing or, more likely, didn’t want to get involved. There was no sound of the elevator moving or anyone coming up the stairs. They had a few minutes, he thought as he pulled the bodies of the two guards and their AK-47s into the apartment. He locked the door from the inside and joined Fouad, who had already started to question Kassem.
“Where is the Palestinian? The one who killed the Egyptian general Budawi? Tell us!” hissed Fouad in Arabic.
“Kul khara!” Kassem cursed, the words muffled by the spray of blood that came flying out of his mouth.
“Tell us!” Fouad said, grabbing a small saucepan from the stove and smashing it down on Kassem’s groin. Kassem moaned. “The Palestinian. Where is he?”
“Kis em ick!” Go do something obscene with your mother, Kassem cried out as Fouad hit him again.
Fouad put the saucepan back on the stove, turned the flame on, and went back to questioning Kassem, while Scorpion worked on the reason why he’d planned this in the first place. He found Kassem’s cell phone in his pants pocket, crumpled on the floor in the bedroom, and examined it for any scratches or noticeable smudges. There was a single small scratch on the outside casing, and a nicked corner. He pulled an identical model from his pocket, made a tiny scratch and nicked the corner with a Swiss pocketknife to mimic the first phone and smudged the screen with his sleeve. Using a port-to-port connector, he copied the memory from Kassem’s cell phone into his phone, then took the SIM from Kassem’s cell and put it into the new phone. Checking the new phone to make sure all Kassem’s contacts and messages were there, he put the new phone back in Kassem’s pants pocket.
It had an NSA-supplied computer chip and DSP processor inside. Any call Kassem made on it would be relayed via satellite to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, the “Black Building,” so-called because of the color of the outside window glass, and from there to Scorpion’s cell phone.
Scorpion turned off the dresser lamp he’d been using and went over to the woman, lying bound and gagged on the bed. Her face was swollen and bruised from where Fouad had hit her. She stared up at him, a man in a ski mask, and whatever was in her dark eyes, he couldn’t read it. He put his finger to his lips and removed her gag.
“If you want to live, you need to come with us,” he whispered.
She looked at him with her dark eyes but didn’t answer.
“I don’t think you should stay,” he said. “I can give you asylum in America, but you have to come right now.”
She shook her head, her long dark hair a mane on the pillow, the movement making him aware of her superb, nearly naked body. “This is my country,” she said softly.
“They’ll have to suspect you. Once I leave this room, no one can protect you.”
“Ana fahim.” I understand. She smiled wistfully, wincing as she did, and despite the swelling and bruises, he could see how attractive she was. “I don’t want to go anywhere. Let Hezbollah and the Syrians leave.”
Scorpion heard a terrible muffled high-pitched squeal in the next room, almost like an animal’s. He replaced her gag and hurried into the dining area. Fouad was grinding the red-hot saucepan onto Kassem’s privates. Scorpion pulled him away, then put a choke hold on Kassem, cutting off the carotid artery and rendering him unconscious.
“We have to go. Did he say anything?”
“He said it wasn’t the Central Committee. He didn’t know the ‘Palestinian’. He said Cairo was the work of the Al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya.”
“The Islamic Resistance? Who are they?”
“A secret cell within Hezbollah. More radical than Nasrullah. We’ve heard only whispers. No one knows anything about it, or if they do, no one speaks. Do we kill him now?” Fouad asked, taking out his gun.
Scorpion saw Kassem starting to stir. Whatever he did, he would have to do it quickly.
“He has to escape,” he whispered into Fouad’s ear. “That was the plan.”
Fouad shook his head. “You don’t understand Lebanon,” he said, and pointed his gun at Kassem.
As Fouad started to squeeze the trigger, Scorpion reached over and, with a Krav Maga maneuver, twisted the gun away from Fouad and fired it at him three times, killing him instantly. From another apartment he heard a scream, and then gunshots from below. Kassem’s men had heard the shots and were no doubt already on their way.
Scorpion ran into the bedroom, untied the woman and pulled her with him back into the next room. He grabbed one of the AK-47s from the floor, fired it at Fouad’s body, opened the balcony door, stepped out and fired the gun at it from outside, shattering the glass, then ran back in and handed the AK-47 to the woman. Lights were going on in apartments in buildings all around, and he could hear shouting and gunshots and dogs barking. He only had seconds.
“You freed yourself and killed him,” he said, indicating Fouad. “You saved Kassem. I ran away. Understand?”
“I understand,” she said, pushing him. “Go with Allah.”
“Stay away from the door. They’ll come in shooting,” he said as he grabbed the backpack.
Running out to the balcony, he hooked up to Fouad’s rappelling line from the roof and leaped over the rail as the apartment door was shredded with AK-47 fire, shots ripping into the apartment wall. He rappelled wildly down the side of the building, not daring to take a second to look up. The instant his feet touched the concrete of the alleyway, he detached from the line and ran into the shadows.
Behind him, Scorpion heard the sound of bullets pinging off the concrete. As he ran he pulled off his ski mask, stuffed it into the backpack, and pressed his cell phone to alert the Druze getaway drivers. He raced down the alley to the side street. Just as he got to the sidewalk, the SUV screeched to a stop. He jumped in and they sped into the darkness.
“Where’s Fouad?” one of the Druze asked in Arabic.
Scorpion shook his head. “Keep driving,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to stop.”
The two Druze gunmen drove around to make sure they weren’t followed and dropped him off on Avenue Clemenceau. He waited till they drove away, cautioning them to say nothing and not to go home. Once Hezbollah discovered Fouad’s identity, there would be retaliations against the Druze. He was walking the few blocks to the apartment on Omar Daouk, the streets still active with pedestrians and traffic despite the late hour, the streetlights spaced like lonely sentinels in the darkness, when Kassem’s call came.
“You shouldn’t have called,” a voice said. Scorpion’s cell phone screen showed the phone number of a Dr. Samir Abadi in Damascus, Syria.
“They wanted to know about the Palestinian,” he heard Kassem say, his voice sounding surprisingly normal, despite the pain he had to be in.
“And?”
“I told them nothing.” There was a pause. “They know of Al-Muqawama.”
The phone in Damascus clicked off.
Scorpion took the elevator to the apartment and within minutes had uploaded the contents of Kassem’s cell phone to Rabinowich via the Corn Association website from his laptop. He cleared out anything in the apartment that might identify him, wiping down whatever he’d touched with antiseptic wipes. At the bus station near the port, he caught a night Service taxi to Damascus that he shared with a Syrian businessman who had come to Beirut to
