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.
Driving 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, getting wet in the rain. For Scorpion, it had red flags all over it.
First, it had been delivered to the harbormaster in Porto Cervo. That was a backdoor emergency network known only to Rabinowich, and even he didn’t know at any given moment which of several dozen ports in the world, if any, Scorpion might be at. The envelope had been addressed to “Arthur Collins,” a pseudonym for a supposed sailing friend of the Frenchman. Scorpion only used the Collins alias at various marinas and sailors’ pubs around the Mediterranean where they held mail.
What made it more ominous was that it had come, according to Abrielle, from a “Russian” yacht. That made no sense. If Ivanov, aka Checkmate, head of Russia’s FSB Counterintelligence Directorate, was after him, there would be no note. It would be Spetsnaz-trained operatives in the night, and Scorpion knew he would never see them coming. The only thing he could think of was that either the SVR—the Russian equivalent of the CIA—was after him, or some private Russian outfit had been contracted by someone else he had pissed off, like al Qaeda or Hezbollah.
The worst of it was, they had managed to find him in the one place in the world he thought was safe.
No one in the world knew he lived in Sardinia, not even Rabinowich.
For Scorpion, Sardinia was the answer to a unique business problem. As an independent intelligence agent, a freelancer, he sometimes made very dangerous enemies. His only protection was to be able to make himself invisible. After the realtor, Salvatore, Abrielle’s father, had shown him the escape tunnel hidden underneath the old farmhouse in the hills, no doubt used by bandits years ago, he’d decided to make Sardinia his base. The locals had a history of banditry and isolation and tended to mistrust outsiders. They even had their own language, Limba Sarda, in addition to mainland Italian. Sardinia was convenient to Europe and the Middle East, where he did much of his business.
That still left one problem. Anyone who came after him would be looking for an American. He had taken great pains—hacking into databases both outside and within the Swimming Pool, as the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, was known because their headquarters in Paris was located next to the French Swimming Federation—to ensure that his French cover identity was bulletproof.
Now all of that might have been blown, and he had no idea how—or who was after him. Unless, and this was worse, he had gone over the edge.
On the flight to Nice, deliberately booked with the Collins ID—he could either find them or make it easy for them to find him—he went back over what he’d learned about the yacht. Using a computer at Fiumicino Airport, he discovered that the Milena II was convenience-flagged in Malta, and as he suspected from the telephone area code, it was registered to a privately held company in Luxembourg. Landing in Nice, he used the Arthur Collins British passport for the rental car, spotting two burly-looking men in leather jackets near the car rental counter.
Using a disposable cell phone, he called the phone number on the card from the yacht. He left a message in response to a recorded voice, telling it in English that he would be waiting at Le Carpaccio, a waterside restaurant in Villefranche, a resort town on the coast east of Nice, not far from Monaco. He picked a public place to try to minimize the damage if they were going to come right at him.
A few minutes out from the airport, Scorpion spotted the gray Mercedes sedan following him. The men in leather jackets he had seen near the car rental were in it. Just to be sure, he pulled into an Agip station and knelt down to check the air in his tires, watching the Mercedes drive by. The two men barely glanced at him. He waited five minutes, then drove the Basse Corniche road between the hills and the sea toward Monaco, and a few minutes later saw the Mercedes waiting at a turnout. As he drove past, they started up and followed. A blue BMW pulled in front of him, with two men in that car as well. He was boxed in.
He had an armed escort to Villefranche.