The Scorpio Illusion: A Novel

  “I stand corrected, Colonel Abrams. What did we learn?”

  “We walked him through Bajaratt’s various phone calls from the United States, probing each for a word, a name, a phrase—anything that might lead to something. About two hours ago we found it.” The Mossad officer took a notebook from his shirt pocket and opened it. “Here are the words. ‘—an American senator … strategy successful … he’s come through for us … name is Nesbitt.’ ”

  “Who?”

  “A senator from the state of Michigan named Nesbitt. He’s the key. We’ll forward it to Washington, of course, but not by the usual channels. To be frank, I don’t trust the traffic; too many things have gone wrong.”

  “We would have caught her by now,” agreed the boyish-looking Mossad officer. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Arrogance doesn’t become us, Captain. We’re not there, and she’s an accomplished adversary. She’s also as dedicated as anyone I’ve ever studied. It all goes back to her childhood, and perhaps that’s the only way her fanaticism can be explained.”

  “The channel you wish to use, sir?” The female major was impatient.

  “You two,” replied the colonel. “We’re flying you over tonight; you’ll be there in the morning, Washington time. You’re to go directly to Secretary of State Palisser, no one else—you’ll be cleared for an immediate audience.”

  “Why him?” the captain half protested. “I’d think you’d choose an intelligence branch or the Secret Service.”

  “I know Palisser. I trust him. I don’t really think I know anybody else I can trust. That sounds paranoid, I guess.”

  “Yes, it does, sir,” said the major.

  “So be it,” said the colonel.

  Bajaratt stood by the airport hotel’s thick window that muted the sounds of the arriving and departing jets. The early sun was breaking through the mists, announcing the most important day of her life. The exhilaration she felt was not unlike the excitement she had experienced spreading through her so many years before when she led a Spanish soldier into the forest, a long-bladed knife strapped to her thigh under her dress. The similarity was there, for the brutish army pig was her first kill and filled her with purpose, but today was far beyond that child’s raw emotions. Today was the triumph of the woman, a thinking adult who had outthought the Praetorian guard of the most powerful nation on earth. She would go down in history, for she would change history, her life at last justified. Muerte a toda autoridad!

  The child that was smiled up at her, at the giant who was the woman, and in that smile was love and gratitude, vengeance for all that had been done to both of them. We walk together, my young self, into the bloodred glory of revenge. Be not afraid, my child who was me. You weren’t afraid then, be not afraid now. Death is a peaceful sleep, and perhaps the cruelest thing for us would be to survive. But if we do, you angry youngster, keep the fire in your eyes, the fury in your breast.

  “Signora!” exclaimed Nicolo from the bed. “What time is it?”

  “Too early for you to be awake,” replied the Baj. “Your Angel hasn’t even boarded her plane in California.”

  “At least it’s morning,” said the dock boy, yawning audibly and stretching. “I kept waking up, hoping to see sunlight.”

  “Call room service for one of your gargantuan breakfasts, and when you’re finished I have a chore for you. I want you to dress and take a taxi to the Carillon. Pick up the rest of our luggage, along with a package addressed to me at the concierge’s desk, and bring everything here.”

  “Good, it will pass the time.… Can I order something for you?”

  “Just coffee, Nico. After a cup. I’m going for a walk, a very long walk in the very bright sun that is climbing gloriously in the sky.”

  “Is that poetry, signora?”

  “If it is, it’s not very good, but for me it’s superb. The day is superb.”

  “Why do you stare out the window and speak so quietly?”

  The Baj turned and looked down at the dock boy from Portici on the bed. “Because the end is near, Nicolo, the end of a long and very difficult journey.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you said that after tonight I was free to do what I wished. To go back to Napoli and all the money you have left for me, and even to the great family in Ravello you say would welcome me as their own.”

  “You must do what you must do.”

  “I was wondering, Cabi. Of course I will return to Italy, and surely I will at least meet this fine noble family and thank them most graciously whether or not I stay with them, but can’t it wait a few days?”

  “For what?”

  “Need you ask, bella signora? I should like to spend some time with Angelina.”

  “Do as you wish.”

  “But you said you would leave me after tonight—”

  “I said that,” agreed Bajaratt.

  “Then I will need a great deal of money, for I am the barone-cadetto di Ravello and must afford my station.”

  “Nicolo, what are you saying to me?”

  “Just what you heard, mia bella signora.” The young Italian threw off the sheet and stood up naked, facing his benefactress. “A part of the dock boy does not change, Cabi, although I hope one day he disappears. I’ve studied the fari al casos, the bills you order me to get for you from the hotels and the ristorantes, and I’ve watched you.… You make a telephone call and money is delivered to you, usually at night and always sent in a very thick envelope. Palm Beach, New York, Washington; it’s always the same.”

  “How do you think we live?” asked Bajaratt calmly, smiling sweetly. “With credit cards?”

  “How will I live after you’re gone? Here, where I wish to stay for a while. I do not think you’ve thought about that, and it concerns me that you have not. Dock boys stay close to their passengers for fear that they will vanish and the tips vanish with them.”

  “Are you telling me you want money?”

  “Yes, I am, and I think I should have it this morning, before tonight.”

  “Tonight …?”

  “Long before tonight. In one of those heavy envelopes that I will give to Angel when I see her this afternoon in the airport. I have even figured out an amount, based on the bills I bring to you,” continued Nicolo, overlooking the anger on Bajaratt’s face. “It is so expensive, the way we live.… Twenty-five thousand American dollars will be enough. Naturalment, you may deduct it from the money in Napoli, and I will sign a paper saying that I agree.”

  “You are an insect, a nothing! How dare you talk to me this way? Make such outrageous demands on me when I’ve opened your life for you? I refuse to continue this obscene conversation!”

  “Then I refuse to get our luggage or be here when you return from your walk.… As to this evening, which you’ve been so secretive about, you may go yourself. A great lady like you does not need an insect like me.”

  “Nicolo, you will meet the most powerful man in the world, I once promised you that! You are going to meet the President of the United States!”

  “I have no interest in him. Does he have an interest in me? Or in the barone-cadetto di Ravello, who I am not?”

  “Don’t do this to me!” screamed the Baj. “Everything I’ve worked for, lived for! You cannot understand!”

  “I can understand an envelope which I know Angelina will not open until I see her in Brooklyn. In my heart I know she will help me get rid of your dock boy.” Nicolo stood erect, his eyes locked furiously with those of Bajaratt. “Do it, Cabi. Do it or I am gone.”

  “You bastard!”

  “You taught me that too, bella signora. When we reached that strange island after those terrible storms, I called you a monster.… You are worse than a monster, you are something evil that I cannot understand. Go to the telephone and call one of your subalterni. Have the money here by noontime, or I am gone.”

  MI-6 HEADQUARTERS, LONDON

  It had been past midnight when the Afro-haired black man rushed into the strategy room, closed
the door, and walked rapidly to the first seat on the left side of the circular conference table. He was dressed in a sleeve-fringed brown suede jacket and flared rust-colored trousers. There were three other men present: at the north end of the table was the chairman, Sir John Howell; counterclockwise, a man in a dark pinstripe suit; and nearest the newcomer a figure draped in a caftan, his ghotra headdress next to the file folder in front of him. His skin was dark, neither white nor black. An Arab.

  “I think we’ve got an opening,” said the recent arrival, trying to smooth down his wild hair; his accent was upper-class English. “It came originally from the motor pool.”

  “How do you mean, originally?” asked the pinstriper.

  “One of Downing Street’s senior mechanics. On several occasions he noted that the bonnets of two diplomatic cars had been lifted, ostensibly to check the engines while the vehicles were away from the garage.”

  “So?” asked Sir John. “If there’s a problem with a bloody motor, how else does one find out what it is if not by raising the bonnet?”

  “These are diplomatic automobiles, sir,” said the Middle Eastern MI-6 officer. “Tampering cannot be permitted.”

  “And every driver is checked, double-checked, and damn near given an encephalograph.”

  “That’s the point, Mr. Chairman,” interrupted the black with the Oxford speech. “All engine difficulties are to be reported to the dispatchers regardless of how minor. Furthermore, each vehicle has an automatic inner seal on the bonnet’s release mechanism; if it’s been broken before routine inspection, a yellow dye appears on the tape. Neither of the cars in question had been reported as having problems, and each was driven by the same driver.”

  “You’re saying that perhaps an encephalograph malfunctioned?” observed the man in the pinstripe suit, permitting himself a weak smile as he glanced at the chairman.

  “Or the subject is extremely talented and terribly well trained,” answered the black officer. “Enough so as to get a job in the motor pool.”

  “Let’s get on with it. You obviously have the name of this driver and no doubt far more.”

  “A great deal more, sir. He’s passing himself off as a naturalized Egyptian, a former chauffeur for Anwar Sadat’s household, but his papers are meaningless; they’re obviously fakes, although superb ones.”

  “Why was he permitted naturalized status?” asked the pinstriper. “That is, according to those papers.”

  “The army officers’ coup against Sadat included the killing of his entire staff. He was granted asylum.”

  “Damned clever,” interjected Howell. “Sadat was a special friend to the Foreign Office. Those chaps bent over backwards for his associates, far more than we would have liked for just this reason; too many rotten fish in the rescue nets. Go on.”

  “He goes by the name of Barudi, and I’ve been following him for a good part of the evening. He went into Soho, to the most disreputable places, I might add, and met with four different people at four separate bars.… I really must pause here, sir, and give credit where it’s due.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The training course at the estate in Sussex. It was truly outstanding, sir. I refer to the relieving of personal articles from our subjects when we desire further information that’s not readily available.”

  “Oh?”

  “I believe James is referring to the craft of pickpocketing,” said the man in the pinstripe suit. “He’s apparently raised it to an art form.”

  “I managed to cop billfolds from two of the gentlemen; the woman’s purse was heavily clasped, and the other fellow didn’t seem to have pockets. I took the billfolds into a stall in the loo, scanned all the materials with my hand copier, and returned the property to our subjects, one, to my dismay, in a different pocket, but it was unavoidable.”

  “I’d say it was remarkable,” said the chairman. “What did you learn about our driver’s rather odd associates?”

  “Again, the usual items such as driver’s licenses and bank cards appeared authentic, and probably are except for the names. However, in each billfold, squared together so tightly they were barely larger than two postal stamps, and recessed into the bottom of the leather, were these.” The MI-6 officer reached into the pocket of his suede jacket, pulled out four small packets of rolled-up copy paper, and with flicks of his wrist spread them out across the table like tentacles. “I ran my duplicator down the columns on the two sheets of paper and these are the results.”

  “What are they?” asked the pinstriper as he and the other two men picked up the strips of paper.

  “The typed lines are classical Arabic,” said the Middle Easterner. “The handwritten inserts are translations.”

  “Arabic?” Howell had interrupted. “Bajaratt!”

  “As you can see, they’re lists of dates, times, and locations—”

  “They’re ruddy good translations,” broke in the Arab MI-Sixer, “and some of these places are damned near untranslatable. Who did this?”

  “I called our head Arabist in Chelsea and went over there around nine o’clock. It didn’t take him long.”

  “I’d think not,” said the robed officer. “He was familiar with the locations, and after the first several, saw the key and used phonetics. Good man.”

  “What do they mean?” persisted the chairman. “Are they drops?”

  “That’s what caused my delay, sir. For the past three hours I drove from one location to another—there are twelve on each list—and to begin with, I was totally bewildered. Then I reached the fifth place and it became clear. I rechecked the first four and was convinced. They’re not drops, sir, they’re public telephones.”

  “Our subjects are receiving calls, obviously not placing them,” offered the Middle Easterner.

  “Why do you say that?” asked the Englishman on his left.

  “It would be simple to write out the numbers to be reached in Arabic, no doubt using a differential plus or minus, to eliminate memory error. There’re none here, but then there would have to be a minimum of ninetysix and a maximum of a hundred eighty digits to memorize.”

  “Suppose there’s just one number?” said James.

  “It’s possible,” replied the Arab, “but that presupposes the receiving party remains in one place, which would exclude Bajaratt. Furthermore, it’s too dangerous to use a single number in any operation such as this, and lastly, every profile we’ve all worked up on Bajaratt indicates her manic obsession with secrecy, which means that wherever possible, she refuses to use intermediaries. She talks directly with her associates.”

  “I’m convinced,” said Sir John. “When and where is the next contact?” he asked, scanning the tape nearest him.

  “Noon, tomorrow, Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, outside Harrods,” answered the black intelligence officer. “Seven in the morning, Washington time.”

  “The lunchtime crowd of shoppers here,” the pin-striper observed. “It sounds like an IRA strategy.”

  “The next after that?” pressed the head of MI-6.

  “Twenty minutes later at the corner of Oxford Circus and Regent.”

  “More crowds,” suggested the olive-skinned officer. “Heavy traffic.”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you what to do, James,” said the chairman. “A communications van at each location, open lines to both Washington and the underground telephone computers with the two public numbers. We’ll need instant traceability, and I mean instant.”

  “Yes, sir. I took the liberty of alerting our communications division, but I’m afraid you’ll have to reach the telephone people; they’d never accept it from me. I think it takes a High Court order to activate traceability.”

  “High Court order, my ass!” exploded the head of MI-6, suddenly slashing his damaged right hand across the table, instantly aware that it was not what it once was. “God help me, I sent Geoffrey Cooke to his death from this room. The maps were right here on this table, and he had to turn the pages for me, te
ll me what I didn’t know!… I want that maniacal bitch dead! Do it for me; do it for Officer Cooke!”

  “We’ll be up to speed, sir, I promise you.” James rose from his chair.

  “Wait!” Sir John Howell paused, his intense eyes suddenly unfocused, his head angled down, his mind obviously racing. “I said open lines to Washington—that’s too broad, too damned inclusive. Bajaratt has her own moles lined up over there. We have to restrict. One line only.”

  “To whom?” asked the pinstriper.

  “Who’s taken over for Gillette at the CIA?”

  “His first deputy, temporarily. Handpicked and considered a fine chap by our fellows there,” answered James.

  “That’s good enough for me, I’ll reach him on scrambler. Also that fellow who’s running Hawthorne. What’s his name?”

  “Stevens, sir. Captain Henry Stevens, naval intelligence.”

  “Whatever comes out of this remains in-house, and I mean totally secret until the three of us decide where to take it.”

  The midnight conference had taken place ten hours and thirty minutes earlier. The vans were now in place in Knightsbridge and Oxford Circus. It was approaching seven o’clock in the morning at Dulles Airport.

  32

  Bajaratt walked up the airport hotel’s cement path, then strolled across the borderine grass, and slipped around the corner of the building, her head at the edge, her eyes on the entrance. She glanced at her diamond-encrusted watch; it was 6:32. She had stayed in the hotel room watching Nicolo dress and devour a breakfast fit for a wolf pack, urging him to hurry, but not so harshly as to alarm him further.

  The Baj watched the hotel’s entrance as the dock boy, resplendent in his expensive navy blue blazer and gray flannel slacks, hurried to the curb and a waiting taxi. He was, without doubt, the perfect male Galatea, sculpted by the mistress of all Pygmalions—quite simply, a magnificent-looking human being, young, beautiful, and vibrant. It was only just that such a creation should die in pursuit of a magnificent kill.