Between Two Scorpions Read online

  BETWEEN TWO SCORPIONS

  A DANGEROUS CLIQUE NOVEL

  JIM GERAGHTY

  DISCUS BOOKS

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

  Copyright  2019 by Jim Geraghty

  Published in 2019 by Discus Books. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-7337346-1-5 (paperback)

  “To all cliques of close-knit friends, past, present and future.”

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  CAFÉ VERNUNFT

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  SATURDAY, MARCH 6

  Not even a ticking bomb under the next table could have distracted the eyes of Rafiq Tannous when Katrina entered the café.

  He felt a great sense of relief upon her arrival.

  She was an angel sculpted by the devil—tan, lean, Eurasian eyes set in an unforgettable face. Rafiq found it amusing the way she tried to blend in and failed so thoroughly. Every man in the room would remember her as head-turning and looking like she was “from somewhere else”—with guesses ranging from Mongolia to Turkey to Peru to Lebanon. Her name and surname, Leonidivna, suggested she was Russian, but Rafiq concluded she was far too dark. One of Rafiq’s sources had once implausibly insisted she was one of the last Bukhari Jews out of Uzbekistan.

  Wherever she had been born, she was American now, a long-ago contact at the CIA, and the only person Rafiq was certain he could trust.

  She spotted him instantly and strode through the café on stylish black leather flat-bottomed boots—she was always prepared to run, and never chased someone in heels if she could avoid it—and stood for a moment before sitting, sizing him up. Rafiq Abdel Tannous had always been rotund, but now he was obese, and unshaven. A half-hour earlier, Rafiq’s cab driver had called him “DJ Khaled” and Rafiq didn’t understand the reference. A bit of chicken remained stuck in his beard. Realizing his napkin was now a mess of stains and grease, he wiped his face with his hand. He offered his other hand, and she ignored it—the left hand was considered unclean in his culture, and for all he knew, in hers, too. She pulled out her seat, angling herself to move quickly to the door if needed.

  “Don’t waste my time,” she warned. “You lied to us before, Rat.”

  Years ago, the source with the initials and nickname “RAT” had been useful, selling information about arms deals in Lebanon to Katrina and the CIA. Then she found he was turning around and telling what the Agency knew to Hamas, Hezbollah, and anybody else who was willing to line his pockets. She had informed him of the end of their working relationship by leaving a pile of rotting fish heads in his bed. He hadn’t dealt with anyone in the CIA for a half-decade. But a week ago, he had walked into the US embassy in Beirut and begged them to send a message to his old handler, Katrina. He needed her to meet him in Berlin in a week at “the Stasi restaurant.”

  Café Vernunft—German for “reason”—was part of the complex of buildings that used to house the Stasi, the infamously ruthless secret police of East Germany, and the museum dedicated to the history of the organization was just across the street. The restaurant’s chairs and tables were allegedly reused from the old headquarters. For all Katrina knew, a cold-blooded interrogator may have previously sat where her cheeks were resting. She suspected the restaurant selection was Rat’s twisted idea of a joke.

  “Months ago, I started working for a man who I think is plotting terror attacks against the United States,” Rafiq blurted out. He had her attention.

  “I’m risking my life just telling you this,” Rat continued his sales pitch. “This man, goes by the name Akoman, isn’t some wannabe. He’s Iranian, walks and talks like he’s government. Big spender. First, he needed me to move some money for him. Then he asked for information about planes and chemicals. I kept copies of everything I gave him. I’m pretty sure he’s got somebody in Mexico who can get him across the border. Then I warn him about you guys—how the NSA hears everything. He says not to worry, he’s got somebody on the inside.”

  Katrina kept her poker face. But in her head, she checked a box: Rat’s last comment aligned with perpetual rumors within the halls of both Langley and Fort Meade about there being at least two serious moles.

  “I think he’s got plans to hijack planes, bomb cafés, poisons, chemicals. This is big. You have to believe me.”

  He paused and leaned forward and continued in a whisper. “I’m going to need money and protection, for myself and my woman.”

  When Katrina glared at a man, she made him feel like he had just jumped into a bathtub of ice water. Rafiq flinched when he realized how far from the mark his sales pitch had landed.

  “I know you, Rat. You’ve lied to us before and you’re a greedy bastard. You put guns in the hands of the worst people on the planet. I should have left something much worse in your bed. Something like scorpions.”

  “That was a long time ago. I’m a changed man,” he insisted, and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes.

  “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard tips like this?” Katrina asked. “The old Threat Matrix was full of this sort of stuff. ‘There’s a nuke on a train headed to Pittsburgh.’ ‘There are four sleepers in northern Virginia getting ready to bomb the DC Metro.’ Nine times out of ten, it’s just rumors from somebody looking for a payoff.”

  She looked around the café, starting to fill up as the dinner hour approached. Shoppers with bags, businessmen with briefcases, students with backpacks—any one of them could
be surreptitiously watching Rat. One guy, probably Turkish, in a Fenerbahçe jacket, had looked over at them twice—difficult to tell if he was taking an interest in what he could overhear from Rat, or whether he was just checking out Katrina. If the Germans were watching Rat, they hadn’t told the CIA.

  “Please!” Rat whispered desperately. “This isn’t just about money. Right after I helped Akoman make his arrangements, I ran into a monk on the street. I helped him up and he just asked me, out of the blue, what I thought awaited me after I died. I took it as a sign.”

  Katrina allowed herself to laugh. In her experience, arms dealers rarely grew consciences in midlife crises.

  “Here’s how this is going to work,” she declared evenly. “I’m going to see if anything you told me checks out. Iranian, alias ‘Akoman,’ asking about sneaking into the country from Mexico. If it checks out, we’ll discuss this further.”

  “I’m telling you, this Akoman is a dangerous man,” Rat whispered. “I need protection.”

  Katrina laughed again, a reaction that was only half-calculated. “Everybody needs protection,” she shrugged. “We can discuss that when I know you aren’t lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying,” he said solemnly. “You know how to reach me.”

  “I know how to find you,” she corrected. “And if this doesn’t check out, Rat … I will …”

  She let the implied threat hang in the air a moment, then got up from the table and headed for the door. Rat frowned; he had ordered and eaten with the expectation that she would pick up the check.

  Katrina suspected Rat’s duplicitous habits had finally caught up with him, and he wanted the CIA to protect him from whoever he had double-crossed this time.

  She pushed the cafe door open and turned toward Ruschestrasse, where her husband and partner, Alec, was sitting in a car, listening through the microphone on her lapel. She would give their boss, Raquel Holtz, an earful when she got back to the States. Raquel had pitched the meeting with Rat as a quick “working vacation” for them in Berlin, then in the face of Katrina’s reluctance, Raquel asked again as a personal favor. Rat’s message indicated he would only meet with Katrina. Katrina thought it was simply because he had enjoyed staring at her cleavage in their meetings all those years ago.

  What a waste of time, Katrina thought. She was about to turn the corner onto Ruschestrasse when—DOOOOM!—she felt like someone played the lowest key on the piano of the world. Katrina felt the thunderclap of an explosion behind her, and the shock wave knocked her down to her hands and knees. She turned and saw that the Café Vernunft was now a cloud of black smoke. She heard a twisted chorus of screams. Every window for a block in every direction had simultaneously shattered. The reverberating echo of the blast sang over the car alarms going off and the shouts and cries from other pedestrians. After a moment, bloody patrons stumbled and staggered out of the screen of smoke.

  Katrina rose to her feet and immediately ran back to help the elderly woman who had collapsed a few meters behind her. Within a few moments, police and ambulance sirens sliced through the din.

  “Bombing cafés,” she whispered to herself. Maybe Rat wasn’t full of it after all. She stepped closer to the café, then froze in horror at what the clearing smoke now revealed.

  An overturned baby carriage and a bloodied mother, holding her child, both sobbing with shock.

  CHAPTER 2

  Within moments, Katrina’s partner in work and marriage, Alec Flanagan, was out of the car and by her side outside what remained of Café Vernunft. The pair helped a bleeding man through the smoldering doorway. By then, police, firemen, and paramedics were descending upon the scene; Katrina had already checked; Rat hadn’t made it. She had left him sitting at the table, probably close to the middle of the blast.

  “Not a coincidence,” she declared.

  Alec nodded, and started muttering a mental checklist. “Okay, what do we know? Somebody would have been here close to monitor the detonation. We gotta call this in. You’ve got to get to the SCIF” – the Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility in the CIA’s Berlin Station – “but I can dig around. Wait, who knew Rat was in Berlin? Who knew he was meeting here? Where was he staying?”

  She started the car, steered around the approaching fire trucks, ambulances, and news vans, and headed in the direction of the American embassy. After a minute, Alec took out his phone and dialed.

  “Dee, Katrina and I are fine. Somebody blew up the café. Listen, I need to know where Rat was staying, and I need to know it now.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Rat’s accommodation was a once-grand, now-dreary thirty-six-room hostel in Neukölln, where the pale yellow paint was fading unevenly, now resembling a smear of mustard that had been left out on a cookout table all day. Dee—their NSA-trained teammate and hack-of-all-trades—had confirmed that a credit card matching the name of one of Rat’s known aliases had rented one of the hostel’s few solo rooms in the establishment, on the top floor.

  Once part of the American sector when Berlin was divided, locals now called the neighborhood “Little Istanbul.” After Katrina dropped him off and continued on her way back to the SCIF, Alec passed more headscarves than high heels on the streets approaching the hostel; his pale skin was only slightly more common than the tan hues of the Turkish, Arab, and Lebanese immigrants and their children. More than a few Syrian refugees had ended up living in store backrooms, or multiple families crammed into small apartments. Those on the street spoke with a nervous energy to one another and into their phones; the bombing across town meant trouble was coming their way in the days and weeks to come. They were veiled, but the suspicions were not.

  Alec didn’t belong here, by any measure. He was trained as an analyst specializing in terror financing but had spent years jumping into the field with the ops side, against the better judgment of just about everyone. Katrina’s reputation within the Agency was sterling; his … wasn’t. Despite widespread skepticism and more than a few encounters that had gone very wrong very fast, he had managed to keep himself in one piece.

  So far.

  Alec grabbed the hostel door as a man in a blue and yellow soccer jacket departed. He straightened his posture and walked through the lobby with a look of authority; he had learned you could walk right into a lot of restricted areas just by looking and acting like you belonged. He quickly realized the effort wasn’t necessary. The front desk clerk never looked up from his phone, watching coverage of the bombing elsewhere in the city. Alec looked around the lobby and started wondering how he could get anyone else out of Rat’s room and get rid of any potential witnesses. He spotted a fire alarm just a bit down the hallway, just out of the clerk’s line of sight. Alec figured he could pull the alarm, which would clear out anyone else in Rat’s room, as well as any witnesses to see him entering it

  He had almost gotten to the alarm when it suddenly went off by itself. For a second, Alec wondered if he had set it off with his thoughts.

  The clerk started shouting instructions in German, and heads started to pop out of the hostel room doors. Alec realized someone else must have just pulled the alarm.

  Not a coincidence, Alec concluded.

  He stepped into the stairwell, and quickly found himself trying to run against the tide of the guests descending the cramped staircase. He blurted out “Excuse me, pardon me, coming through, excuse me” as he squeezed past a cavalcade of college students, folks who looked like they might be Syrian refugees, and assorted odd fellows exiting the building. It didn’t matter, no one could hear him over the alarm and chaos of the panicking residents. As he reached the third floor, Alec realized that he smelled smoke and the people coming down the stairs had genuine fear in their eyes and were shouting. This was no prank.

  Alec coughed as bit as he climbed through a thin haze of smoke, and it was much thicker and worse when he reached the fourth floor. He dropped to the floor, and realized the smoke was streaming out of a door that was open a crack at the end of the hallway –
Rat’s room, Dee had said. Everything he knew about fires told him that opening that door was a quick way to get barbecued; but if Rat had left any useful evidence, it was in there—probably burning up at that very moment.

  He crawled on his belly down the rest of the hallway. He brought around his legs and kicked the door open. A horrific fwoosh brought a wave of flame and heat as the fire within the room voraciously devoured the new oxygen from the open doorway. Alec grimaced, figuring he was making things worse.

  He wished he had a bandana; he tried to tie his handkerchief around his face to make a mask, and it barely fit. He held the handkerchief in place, crouched as low as he could and peered around the corner into the burning room.

  He saw nothing good, to the extent he could see anything at all. A metal wastepaper basket was practically melting; the room’s curtains were ablaze. The fire had spread to the wallpaper—a mercy killing of a hideous pea-soup-colored paisley pattern from the 1970s—and what was left of the bed roared like a Yule log. Alec scanned the floor and found three pieces of paper that had not yet been reduced to ash. He grabbed them, stamped out the burning edges, and stuffed them in his pockets.

  But within moments, the heat grew overwhelming, and he backed out of the room, rising to a crouch. He took a last look and froze in horror.

  The burning bed had a body in it.

  It was far too late to save whoever it had been; from what Alec could see, she had been bound by the arms and legs and gagged—not merely arson, but murder. He crossed himself, turned, and ran back into the hallway …

  … where he nearly knocked over an old woman who had been struggling to get to the stairwell.

  Alec swore. The old woman yelled something in a panic—maybe in Arabic, maybe in German, in between awful, cholera-worthy coughs. He coughed himself and concluded he couldn’t just leave her here. He reached out and, much to her surprise, threw her over his back.

  Alec’s knees nearly buckled when he tried to walk with her doubled over on his shoulder. Apparently, her breakfast had been bricks and cement. She yelled, and not in gratitude.