Between Two Scorpions Read online

  But step by step, he struggled his way down the stairs. The first set of steps wasn’t so bad. By the second one, her yelling and wiggling was making it tougher. By the third one he was convinced she was deliberately trying to knee him in the chest, and by the fourth, he was certain he had pulled something and couldn’t tell if the sweat was from carrying her or from the fire. He gasped for air and reassured himself that he was almost done. He looked up at the stairwell wall.

  Two more floors to go. The old woman was howling now, and Alec understood schnell and dicker mann, which he was pretty sure translated to something like, “faster, fatso.”

  The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth sets of stairs were worse, and by the time he reached the hostel’s front door, his legs felt like jelly, the adrenaline was wearing off, he had sweat through his clothes, and he happily handed over the old woman to two burly German men. The first fire truck was emerging from around the corner.

  The old woman had a coughing fit, then started spitting out rapid-fire German and Arabic, pointing at Alec and sounding upset. Alec looked at one of the burly German men and asked in English, “Do you know what she’s saying?”

  The burly, mustached German listened for a moment. “She says that you should have asked permission before touching her. You’re an infidel, and she’s a believer.”

  “Oh, you’re”—he inserted a bunch of German swear words—“welcome!” Her face softened a bit.

  “Are you fireman?” the old woman asked.

  Alec looked at her and exhaled. “Nope. Forensic accountant.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Katrina was in the SCIF of the CIA’s Berlin Station, giving her boss, Raquel, a completely different message than she had planned when she left the café.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” Raquel said, making a mental note to yell at Katrina later for not letting her know she was alive sooner.

  For nearly two decades, Raquel Holtz’s position and title floated around on the ever-reorganizing organization chart of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Over that time, she and the small group of officers she supervised established relationships and roles with many corners of the US government involved in national security—the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Raquel’s deviously ingenious system was to collect funding from as many places as possible, with every agency believing she and her team were submitting expense reports to the other.

  “This wasn’t terrorism, or at least not just that,” Katrina said. Her residual shaking from adrenaline had finally stopped once she entered the SCIF. She closed her eyes and shook the image of the overturned carriage from her head again. “That bomb was meant to kill Rat. He said he needed protection; he said ‘Akoman’ was after him. I think this Akoman plugged a leak, and made it look like garden-variety jihadist terrorism.”

  Katrina was interrupted by the loud beeping signal that the SCIF door was opening. Alec entered, smelling like a fireplace and looking like a mess.

  “What happened to you?” Katrina gasped, rushing to him. “Are you all right?”

  “You would have been proud of me out there,” Alec groaned. “As Marv Albert would say, I was on fire!”

  She nearly choked when she caught a whiff of his jacket. “I don’t know which is worse, your judgment or your jokes. What did you find at the hostel?”

  “Hostility,” he said flatly, thinking of the old woman. “Rat said he needed protection for a woman, right?”

  Katrina nodded. She had listened to the surreptitiously collected audio three times with Raquel.

  “Whoever she was, she’s dead,” Alec said, his voice a low mumble. “Somebody got there before I did, torched the place with her in it. Destroyed everything Rat had except this.”

  He held up three crumpled papers with burned corners. “Looks like a blueprint and part of an operating manual for some plane. I can’t figure out the writing on this last one. Maybe this guy Akoman is planning a hijacking?”

  Katrina carefully examined the papers. “Stupid decision-making, good results,” she declared. She kissed his smoky hair. He smiled.

  “Don’t take any stupid risks again.” She looked very closely at the papers, then looked up. “Do you have a crayon?”

  Alec stared back at her. “What do I look like, a kindergarten classroom?”

  She didn’t answer; she just turned toward the SCIF door. Within a minute, the pair and the Berlin station chief were hurriedly sticking their heads in the doorways of embassy offices asking if anyone had any crayons. After the mom of a toddler pulled one from her purse, Katrina returned to the SCIF and rubbed a red crayon over one of the sheets from Rat’s room.

  “Hey, no reason for our forensics teams to go over that document, go ahead, just rub all over it,” Raquel clucked sarcastically from the screen. But within a moment, Katrina smiled, and held it up.

  “Rat wrote on a piece of paper on top of these documents,” she said gleefully. “Left an impression on this sheet. Look, see? He wrote F-R-A-N-C-I-S …”

  “Francis.”

  “N-E-U-S-E.”

  “Neuse.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’ll have Dee tell NSA to begin a full-spectrum search for anyone using the alias Akoman,” Raquel declared through the SCIF’s connection. “Friendly services, INTERPOL. I’ll have Elaine check domestic databases, too.”

  Raquel knew the claim that an Iranian had committed a terror attack, and that he was preparing more against the United States, would hit a wall of skepticism. The US government and its European allies didn’t see eye to eye on the issue of Iran’s regime anymore. Without any incontrovertible proof, the Europeans invested in the tenuous peace with Tehran would be skeptical that an Iranian had just blown up a slew of Germans as they dined in a café. Raquel’s team could not withdraw from any savings account of accumulated goodwill or trust; they had built a reputation for going their own way and disregarding the assessments of other branches of the intelligence community.

  “If you say you believe Rat, then I believe you, full stop, to the end,” Raquel said. “But whatever report you write about Rat’s warning, there’s a good chance it will get ignored or just lost in the noise,” Raquel warned.

  “Unless I take matters into my own hands,” Katrina said quietly.

  “We,” Alec corrected. “Our own hands.”

  CHAPTER 6

  This was not the way anything was supposed to turn out, Katrina thought, staring out the window as the cab took her and Alec to the Tegel international airport in Berlin.

  It wasn’t just this particular mission to Germany. She hadn’t wanted to spend her entire career in counterterrorism. Years ago, taking her first steps in the adult world, the path ahead seemed so clear for both her and everyone else. When you’re twenty-one, the world looks like your oyster.

  Then one Tuesday the world changed, and Katrina found herself as one of only a small handful of agency employees who could speak Uzbek like a native, and her career path was more or less determined by fate. Weathered, gray-haired men who had worked in Central America—the Balkans and Iraq on missions no one ever was allowed to read about—suddenly were telling her that they needed her to get on a plane to some mountainous tribal region and help them negotiate with some warlord to change sides.

  That felt like a long time ago. Someone had spun the world off its axis; no one in her world could remember the last “slow news day.” Instead of calming after a crisis, the world just seemed to accelerate into the next one, often forgetting yesterday’s outrage or travesty as quickly as a vigorous shake erased the image on an Etch A Sketch. Terrorism, provocative threats, bluster, saber-rattling, political coalitions collapsing, alliances on the verge of collapse. Massacre, candlelight vigil, empty international joint communiqué; lather, rinse, repeat. Katrina’s faith was tested more than ever, now serving under her third consecutive deeply frustrating president, a man she in
stantly assessed as an ill-informed, erratic demagogue.

  As things got worse, people cared less, Katrina thought. It wasn’t just the madmen, zealots, and political allies of the Taliban who now controlled their own nuclear arsenals. It was the sense that the unthinkable had become commonplace, the wildly abnormal the “new normal,” the temptation to tune out and just refocus on Kim Kardashian’s rear stronger than ever. “LOL NOTHING MATTERS” was a cynical joke on social media to deal with the day’s latest madness, but somehow Katrina Leonidivna hadn’t yet made peace with the idea that nothing mattered.

  Yet.

  Day by day, year by year, the optimistic vision from Katrina’s youth unraveled. She and Alec were thinking about having children, and she heard that ticking clock a little louder each year. That assumed Alec would stop running into burning buildings and rushing into harm’s way, determined to prove that he could keep up with her.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Mexican man known as Jaguar had found the waiting the worst; Akoman’s communications methods traded security for speed. He had written the update about the café bombing and the hostel fire and sent it off to the hotel in Ashgabat. He wanted to get out of Berlin; there was always a chance someone who survived the bombing would remember a lean Latin man forgetting his backpack under a table. Jaguar wore a blue and yellow jacket of Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe soccer team, hoping that if anyone did remember him, they would describe him as a swarthy Turk. Tezcatlipoca knows, Berlin had enough of them.

  He stayed in his hotel, watched television, worked out in the hotel gym, and ordered from room service. He itched to reach out to his love, Esmerelda, but an assignment like this required minimal electronic or phone communications of any kind. Akoman had demanded he travel with no computer and only put the batteries in his phone for short periods a few times during the day. He indulged himself by looking at a picture of Esmerelda before going to bed each night. He knew the NSA’s electronic eyes were everywhere.

  Finally, two days after the bombing, the front desk called his room and informed him a DHL Express envelope had arrived for him. They sent it up, and Jaguar opened it; a slim postcard slid out.

  I AM SORRY TO HEAR OUR FRIEND HAS PASSED, BUT GLAD YOUR TRIP IS GOING WELL.

  I URGE YOU TO COME VISIT ME. USE THE PATH I RECOMMENDED.

  Jaguar tried to book a hotel through his phone but found it a pain. He went to the hotel’s business center and used one of the hotel computers to book a flight to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.

  CHAPTER 8

  MONDAY, MARCH 8

  After a rapid burst of crisis-driven expansion two decades ago, the CIA Headquarters campus in Langley, Virginia struggled to cope with too many analysts and support staff crammed into too few workspaces. Each year, America’s intelligence community expanded into more generic-looking office complexes throughout the Washington area. Throughout the region’s suburbs, Washingtonians waved at their neighbors who dressed professionally, carried a strangely unlabeled photo ID card in a lanyard, and each weekday reported to office buildings with a lot of dishes and antennae on the roof, and unusually tight security provided by private firms. Asked where they worked, thousands of seemingly ordinary Americans would respond with an acronym or a perfectly generic name that sounded like it could be a federal agency, think-tank, or university department: “Special Collection Service.” “International Analysis Center.” “Office of Screening Management.”

  Raquel Holtz’s team operated in building LX-1 in the Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus on Lewinsville Road in Tysons Corner, not far from the intersection of the Capital Beltway and the Dulles Toll Road. The team deliberately changed its name in every administrative reorganization of the intelligence community, selecting randomly from a collection of important-sounding words that never quite defined their duties or jurisdiction. Alec had once suggested “Liaison for Analysis of Counter-Terrorism Organization, Support and Enforcement,” and had almost persuaded Raquel until she realized the name was an elaborate effort to create the acronym LACTOSE. When she refused, he accused her of being intolerant.

  As soon as she had concluded her videoconference with Alec and Katrina, Raquel tried to get a meeting as high up the chain of command as possible. She wanted CIA Director William Peck, but settled for a meeting the next morning with Deputy Director Richard Mitchell and Peck’s executive assistant, Patrick Horne. She braced herself at the door of the secure conference room at Langley. Horne was likely to be a problem, carrying a grudge against Alec that went back many years.

  She laid out everything Rafiq Abdel Tannous had told Katrina, and Alec’s account of the hostel blaze.

  “You want us to prioritize finding this Akoman character,” Mitchell guessed, in a tone that suggested Raquel had just asked for a pony for her birthday.

  “Yeah, but there’s more. I don’t think Rat’s comment about this Akoman having a mole is something we can ignore. So in addition to whatever CTC or JTTF or anyone else wants to do on hunting Akoman, I want you guys to give my team a lot of blank permission slips, unlimited access to the NSA Follow the Money databases, as much funding for travel as we need, and no questions asked until Akoman’s neutralized, one way or another.”

  Mitchell smirked at the audacity of her request, while Patrick scoffed. “All because some guy who we know is a liar—somebody who is nicknamed ‘Rat’!—claimed there’s a mole.”

  Raquel shook her head. “No, because a guy walks into our embassy in Beirut, sets up a meeting in Berlin, and then when he shows up, he gets blown to Kingdom Come. How many people in the agency knew where he would be?” She had already calculated at least a half-dozen CIA employees had known about the time and location.

  “If this Akoman was the bomber—and let’s remember that three jihadist groups are all claiming responsibility for the blast—he could have had Rat followed,” Patrick noted. “And you don’t know how many people Rat told about the meeting.”

  Raquel’s temper was about to flare when Mitchell raised his hand.

  “You do know what the Seventh Floor calls your team, right, Holtz?”

  She didn’t blink. “The Island of Misfit Toys.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t heard that one, but that one’s good, too,” Mitchell said. “No, the word I keep hearing is ‘clique.’ A dangerous clique. You never want to tell anyone else what you’re doing.”

  “We work the way we do because we’ve learned some hard lessons,” Raquel said, hoping she came across as reasonably wary instead of paranoid. “Every couple of years, somebody comes along and leaks every secret we have. Snowden, Assange, Ames, Hanssen … Heck, go back to Kim Philby. Bad enough we’ve got a slew of millennials who wake up one day and decide they don’t believe in keeping secrets anymore and that information wants to be free.”

  Mitchell nodded begrudgingly. “Admittedly, we’ve recruited some … real winners.”

  She smiled at his subtle joke. “Reality Winner!”

  “Look, sir, you and I have talked about this before. The CIA was built to watch a big, obvious foe—the Soviet military,” Raquel said, beginning an argument she had had with many officials on the seventh floor over the years. “Now our foes operate in small cells—ISIS, al-Nusrah, Boko Haram, Haqqani, the New People’s Army. We need our own small, nimble groups. Find problems and eliminate problems—any luck and you eliminate the next OBL when he’s just starting his career.”

  Patrick smirked. “I think everyone was a little more sympathetic to that idea before you poached one of our best, Katrina Leonidivna, from the Global Jihad Unit, and wasted her career on wild goose chases. Her hubby’s a walking liability, not smart enough to be an analyst, not tough enough to work in operations.”

  He’s never going to let that grudge go, Raquel thought.

  But Patrick wasn’t done. “And his buddy, the trigger-happy former Army Ranger? You might as well be working with Ted Nugent.”

  Raquel bristled. “Ward Rutledge was honorably discharged and applied to the clandestine service
for a paramilitary operations position. Patrick is wildly exaggerating what the Army psyche evaluation called an ‘irrational exuberance’ for using explosives.”

  “And your super-hacker, Alves, doesn’t think ‘secret’ applies to her and breaks down the rest of the intel community’s firewalls for kicks.”

  Mitchell shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “Is that true?” He suddenly recalled rumors about a “Dominica Alves,” the granddaughter of a Cuban exile and CIA informant against Castro, tearing up the NSA’s internal security protocols a few years ago.

  “If you tell Dee she can’t do something, she takes it as a challenge,” Raquel shrugged. “I’ll talk to her about it. Sir, Patrick’s just upset because the one time he joined Dee for a meeting with the FBI, she showed up in one of those fake FBI caps and t-shirts that the tourists buy.”

  “Our colleagues at the bureau didn’t think it was funny!” Patrick groused. “She could have blown their cover!”

  “What undercover FBI agents wear FBI t-shirts?” Raquel exclaimed incredulously.

  “Island of Misfit Toys indeed,” Mitchell decreed. “You’re so outside the system and established chains of command and conventional procedures that you might as well not be in the agency at all.”

  Raquel shrugged. “Hey, we’ll take help from FBI, NSA, DHS, military intelligence … the whole point is to leave us off the organizational chart.”

  Mitchell tapped his fingers on the table, then reclined his chair, looking at the ceiling, exhaling for a long time. While Mitchell’s tired eyes counted the tiles on the ceiling, Patrick made a what the hell is this crap? gesture and expression to Raquel. She made a you’re an idiot face back at him.

  They stopped the moment Mitchell sat up and returned his gaze to them. “Fine. Patrick, pass all of this along to CTC and anyone else who you think could use it. Raquel, do what you need to do, just keep Peck, Patrick, and myself in the loop through secure channels.”