Scorpion Deception by Andrew Kaplan Page A

get back to Washington tonight,” and ended the call. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” he snarled, and looked at them. “Senator Russell got hold of the DNA data indicating it’s the Iranians. He’s leaked it. It’ll be all over tomorrow’s New York Times. ”
    â€œThat’s torn it,” Shaefer said disgustedly, getting up. He was supposed to be headed for Bern to dig up what he could from the Swiss federal and cantonal police. “They’ll be wanting to declare war before the week is out.”
    â€œThat’s not the only problem,” Harris said. “The real problem is not just who wants to pick a fight with the most powerful country in the world. Has it occurred to anyone to ask why? And who in Iran—if it is Iran? And if we don’t figure it out, we could be playing right into their hands. There’s something going on here that, unless we get it right, is going to come back and bite us in the ass.”
    â€œUnbelievable,” Rabinowich said.
    â€œWhat is?” Shaefer asked.
    â€œFirst time I ever agreed with Bob,” Rabinowich said.
    Scorpion looked at Harris with his cold, gray eyes.
    â€œTen days,” he said.
    â€œDid you not hear what I said? That asshole Russell just changed the equation. It’ll be a miracle if I can get us five,” Harris said, heading for the door, then stopping. A nerve in his jaw throbbed. “And Scorpion, they murdered our people in cold blood. No prisoners.”
    â€œI wasn’t planning on it,” Scorpion said.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Altstadt,
    Zurich, Switzerland
    T he two men sat in a corner restaurant near the Schwamendinger-Platz. It was a small place where locals stopped by for a quick lunch or for dinner and a beer after work. Scorpion sat with his back to the wall, facing the street door. Opposite him, Mathias Schwegler, the CIA’s man in Zurich, had opened his Armani suit jacket and taken off his Prada tie—as being out of place in the working-class restaurant—and was tearing into an eintopf , a veal and vegetable hot pot.
    â€œHe’s a good guy. You’ll like him,” Shaefer had said of Schwegler.
    â€œI don’t have to like him,” Scorpion had replied.
    Schwegler was a good-looking man, the kind you’d spot in the first-class lounge of an airline terminal, a sleek blonde beside him. They had chosen this place because it was across the street from the office building on Winterthurerstrasse, where the “Gnomes”—Harris’s joke name for the people he had left behind to help out, including Chrissie, she of the perfect teeth and the Beretta, plus two of Schwegler’s men—were setting up for the sting. Through the window Scorpion saw that the rain had stopped, the tram wires like black lines drawn on the gray sky.
    He leaned forward, holding a green bottle of Feldschlösschen beer close to his mouth, and whispered, “Who put Rabinowich onto Homer? You?” he asked. Named after the Homer Simpson cartoon character, Homer was the code name they’d assigned to Hooshang Norouzi, an Iranian businessman with offices in the Seefeld neighborhood in Zurich’s District 8.
    â€œThe other way around,” Schwegler said, glancing around to make sure they weren’t overheard, even though they were speaking English. “About eight months ago, Dave spotted a COMINT from No Such,” using the Company slang term for the National Security Agency, known on Capitol Hill as “No Such Agency,” because its existence had been denied for years. “A contact code he tied to K.H.”
    â€œGood catch,” Scorpion murmured. K.H. was Kta’eb Hezbollah, the ultrasecret paramilitary faction within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards he had asked Harandi about that night on the ferry.
    â€œWe already had our eyes on this guy because his company, Jamaran Trading International, SA, was negotiating deals for missile components