“Take this,” Scorpion said, handing him the hard drive.
“What is it?”
“From Peterman’s laptop. He’s dead,” Scorpion said.
“Jesus,” the American said, the light beginning to dawn. “Are we blown?”
“What do you think?”
“Shit,” the American said. “Time to get out of this shithole.”
“Tell Langley be careful with the hard drive. Probably got malware on it,” Scorpion said, peeking out the front door. There were men loading donkeys with sacks of qat from the fallen bale. Squinting against the sunlight, Scorpion scanned the street and the rooflines. It looked all right, but odds were better than even somebody was watching.
“Hey, amigo! Thanks,” the American called out, already talking on the phone, but by then Scorpion was gone.
B ack in Western clothes and minus the beard, on the way to the airport, he thought that however it turned out, his part in this was over. As his taxi turned onto Airport Road, he spotted a white Toyota Camry two cars behind them, switching lanes when his driver did.
“Make a U-turn,” Scorpion told the driver in Arabic.
“But the airport is this way,” the driver said.
“I’ll give you a hundred rials. Make the turn now!” Scorpion said, taking out the money.
After a moment’s hesitation, the taxi veered suddenly into the opposite lane. An oncoming car jammed on its brakes, the driver’s eyes wide, cars and trucks honking from both directions as the taxi sped back toward the center of the city. Looking back, Scorpion saw the Camry make the same turn, drivers cursing and shaking their fists. Although at this angle he couldn’t be sure, he thought that the two men in the Camry tied their shaals like Abidah.
He couldn’t help it. He thought about McElroy in the farmhouse. He told the driver there was another two hundred in it for him if he lost the Camry. The man weaved through the streets, turning corners and darting through gaps as they neared the old city. Scorpion looked back. For the moment the Camry was out of sight. He spotted a taxi parked by a small hotel, facing the opposite direction. But he needed to change the image.
“U’af!” Stop! “Give me your shaal,” Scorpion demanded, shoving rials at the driver.
They screeched to a stop. The man took off his turban and Scorpion put it on, grabbed his carry-on and jumped out of the taxi. He ran across to the other taxi, jumped in, and in seconds they were off.
As his driver made the turn toward the airport, Scorpion saw the Camry come barreling down the other way, the two Abidah men inside scanning the street like crazy, a farmhouse no doubt on their mind.
Chapter Four
Porto Cervo
Sardinia, Italy
A heavy rain lashed the piazzetta, the little piazza near the marina in Porto Cervo. Standing in the shelter of an arcade, Scorpion, known to the locals as il francese, the Frenchman, looked for anything that shouldn’t be there. Normally, in Sardinia he shouldn’t have had to do that, but after Yemen there was no “normally.”
He waited until a layover in Dubai before he risked contacting Rabinowich through an iPad at the Apple store at the Deira City mall. They texted using a teenage chat site so heavily trafficked it was virtually impossible to monitor. Rabinowich was presumably a thirteen-year-old girl from Omaha named Madison, Scorpion was a fourteen-year-old boy named Josh from nearby Bellevue. u clear? Rabinowich texted.
4 the moment, Scorpion texted back. what about alby? whos she seeing? Rabinowich asked, referring to al- Baiwani. she broke up with ay kyoo and a-pee — AQAP- now all shes got is us, Scorpion typed. After Ma’rib, al- Baiwani had no choice. He had burned his bridges with al Qaeda. So long as the CIA fed him arms and money, they would own the Bani Khum. shes so 2-faced, Rabinowich texted, meaning he assumed that al-Baiwani was a double agent. Running al-Baiwani would be a sword that cut both ways. considering guys she dates, wouldnt you? Scorpion texted back, saying that after what had happened in Ma’rib and the way things were going in Yemen, it didn’t leave al-Baiwani with a lot of choices. He had to play both sides.
2 bad about pete. Peterman. u loco? he was like so nfg, Valley-speak plus CIA slang for no fucking good.
I miss u, qt. r u ok? u tell me, Scorpion typed, ending the call. Because it wasn’t just the mission failure in Yemen that no doubt had Langley scrambling like crazy. They’d made him run. No one had ever made him run before. It was a bad omen. Winter had come, he thought, looking out at the rain-swept piazzetta. And not just for the CIA. Something was wrong.
Shaking off the rain, he stepped into the small realty office nested among the luxury-designer-label shops around the piazzetta. Although it was after New Year’s, the office was still decorated with Christmas lights. They provided the only color in the gloomy day. He glanced out of the window to see if anyone had seen him go in.
Abrielle, the owner’s daughter, was alone in the office. Lithe, with long dark hair, she handed him his mail, and as he glanced at it, they chatted half in Italian, half in English, about his farmhouse in the mountains, an updated casa colonica that she looked after when he was away, which was much of the time. Then he saw the envelope.
She had picked it up from the harbormaster’s office. A simple request on a white card engraved with a yacht insignia to meet to “discuss matters of mutual interest” and a phone number. He would need to Google it, but Scorpion thought that the area code was Luxembourg, most likely meaning it was a holding company protected by that country’s secrecy laws.
“Where’d this come from?” he asked, going deadly still.
“Some sailors in a tender from a yacht brought it. I think they were Russi,” Abrielle said. “Is for a Signor Collins. He is a friend?”
“Is the yacht still there?” Scorpion asked, not answering her. He edged closer to the window and looked out. The piazzetta was empty in the rain. Beyond the buildings and the harbor, there was only the dark sea. Maybe it wasn’t just Alex Station in Yemen that was blown. He had to face the possibility that because of what might have been on Peterman’s laptop, he was blown as well. Christ, had they tracked him to Sardinia?
Abrielle shook her head. “They said they were heading for Monte Carlo.”
“Big yacht?” he asked.
“ Molto grande. Sixty meters, maybe more,” she said. Scorpion trusted her judgment about the yacht. The Sardinians were used to big expensive boats. Porto Cervo, with its picturesque harbor and multimillion dollar villas with red-tiled roofs on the hills above the town, was the scene of the annual September regatta, when some of the biggest mega yachts and richest people in the world came to party on the Costa Smeralda. There weren’t that many yachts in the world over sixty meters. It meant the note came from someone extremely rich and powerful.
“What makes you think they were Russians?”
She shrugged. “I asked. They said they were Ukraini. It’s a kind of Russi, yes?”
He told her he was leaving the island. As usual, while he was gone she was to take care of the casa and the two Doberman watchdogs, Hector and Achille. Her face fell when he said he was leaving.
“Quando tornorai?” she asked, a touch wistfully. When will you be back? She had always thought il francese, with his gray eyes, like those of a wolf and that scar over his eye, attractive enough that if he wanted, she would have locked the office door and let him have her right there and then. But he was always leaving.
“A few weeks. I’ll be back soon,” he said, not knowing if he would ever return to Sardinia again.
D riving back in the rain to his casa colonica away from the coast, Scorpion kept glancing in the rearview mirror. The road wound up into the mountains. He pulled over at a turnout at the edge of a cliff. Grabbing binoculars from the glove compartment, he got out of his Porsche and scanned the hills and the road all the way back to Porto Cervo. It appeared no one was following him. With any luck, he still had time; unless they were waiting for him at the casa. He wondered if he was being paranoid. In his business, the line between paranoia and spycraft was razor thin. He remembered Rabinowich joking once, saying, “Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”
He looked down again at the card. Just two handwritten lines under a logo from a yacht, the Milena II,
