The Scorpio Illusion Read online

  “Would you rather return to Italy, to Portici and your family, and face certain death?”

  “No, no, of course not, Signora Cabrini.”

  “Then welcome to our world, my darling toy,” said the woman, smiling. “And believe me, you’ll want whatever I care to give you. You’re so perfect; I cannot tell you how perfect you are.… Over the side, my adorable Nico.… Now!”

  The young man did as he was told.

  DEUXIÈME BUREAU, PARIS

  “It is she,” said the man behind the desk in the darkened office. On the right wall was projected a detailed map of the Caribbean, specifically of the Lesser Antilles, a flickering blue dot centered on the island of Saba. “We can presume she sailed through the Anegada Passage between Dog Island and Virgin Gorda—that’s the only way she could survive the weather. If she survived.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t,” said an aide, sitting in front of the desk and staring at the map. “It would certainly make our lives easier.”

  “Of course it would.” The head of the Deuxième lit a cigarette. “But for a she-wolf who has lived through the worst of Beirut and the Baaka Valley, I want irrefutable proof before I call off the hunt.”

  “I know those waters,” said a second man, who stood to the left of the desk. “I was posted to Martinique during the Soviet-Cuban threat, and I can tell you the winds can be vicious. From what I understand of the battering those seas took, my guess is that she did not survive, not with what she was sailing.”

  “My assumption is that she did.” The Deuxième chief spoke sharply. “I cannot afford to guess. I know those waters only by the maps, but I see scores of natural recesses and small harbors she could have gone into. I’ve studied them.”

  “Not so, Henri. In those islands the storms blow first one minute clockwise, the next counterclockwise. If such inlets existed, they’d be marked, inhabited. I know them; studying them on a map is merely a distant exercise, not seeking them out, looking for Soviet submarines. I tell you, she did not survive.”

  “I hope you’re right, Ardisonne. This world cannot afford Amaya Bajaratt.”

  CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  In the white-walled subcellar communications complex of the CIA, a single locked room was reserved for a unit of twelve analysts, nine men and three women, who worked in shifts of four around the clock. They were multilingual specialists in international radio traffic, including two of the Agency’s most experienced cryptographers, and all were ordered not to discuss their activities with anyone, spouses no exception.

  A fortyish man in shirt-sleeves wheeled back his cushioned swivel chair and glanced at his colleagues on the midnight shift, a woman and two other men; it was nearing four o’clock in the morning, half their tour over. “I may have something,” he said to no one specifically.

  “What?” asked the woman. “It’s a dull night as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Break it up for us, Ron,” the man nearest the speaker said. “Radio Baghdad is lulling me to sleep with its bilge.”

  “Try Bahrain, not Baghdad,” said Ron, picking up a printout discharged from his word processor into a wire basket.

  “What’s with the rich folks?” The third man looked up from his electronic console.

  “That’s just it, rich. Our source in Manamah passed the word that a half a million, U.S., had been transferred to a coded account in Zurich destined for—”

  “Half a million?” interrupted the second man. “In their league that’s chickenshit!”

  “I haven’t told you its destination or the method of transfer. The Bank of Abu Dhabi to Zurich’s Crédit Suisse—”

  “That’s the Baaka Valley routing.” The woman spoke with instant recognition. “Destination?”

  “The Caribbean, the precise location unknown.”

  “Find it!”

  “At the moment, that’s impossible.”

  “Why?” asked the third man. “Because it can’t be confirmed?”

  “It’s confirmed all right, the worst way possible. Our source was killed an hour after he made contact with our embassy point man, a protocol officer who’s being pulled out posthaste.”

  “The Baaka,” said the woman quietly. “The Caribbean. Bajaratt.”

  “I’ll secure-fax this up to O’Ryan. We need his brains.”

  “If it’s half a million today,” said the third man, “it could be five tomorrow, once the D-route proves out.”

  “I knew our source in Bahrain.” The woman spoke sadly. “He was a good guy with a lovely wife and kids—goddamn it. Bajaratt!”

  MI-6, LONDON

  “Our field man in Dominica flew north and confirms the information the French sent us.” The chairman of Britain’s foreign service intelligence approached a square table in the center of the conference room. Covering the surface was a large, thick volume, one of hundreds in the bookshelves, that held detailed cloth maps of specific areas of the world. The gold lettering across the black cover of the volume on the table read: The Caribbean—Windward and Leeward Islands. The Antilles. British and U.S. Virgin Territories. “Index someplace called the Anegada Passage, would you please?” he asked his associate.

  “Of course.” The other man in the strategy room moved quickly as he noticed the frustration of his superior; it was not due to the situation but instead to his rigid right hand that would not obey his commands. The associate flipped the heavy cloth pages to the map in question. “Here it is.… Good God, no one could have traveled so far in those storms, not with a craft that size.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t make it.”

  “Make what?”

  “Wherever she was going.”

  “From Basse-Terre to the Anegada during those three days? I’d think not. She’d have to have been in open water more than half the time to reach it so quickly.”

  “That’s why I asked you here. You know the area quite well, don’t you? You were posted there.”

  “If there’s such a thing as an expert, I suspect I qualify. I was the Sixer control for nine years, based on Tortola, and flew all over the damned place—rather a pleasant life, actually. I still stay in touch with old friends; they all thought I was a fairly well situated runaway with a penchant for flying my plane from island to island.”

  “Yes, I’ve read your file. You did outstanding work.”

  “The cold war was on my side and I was fourteen years younger—and I wasn’t a young man then. I wouldn’t get behind the controls of a dual engine over those waters now on a heavy bet.”

  “Yes, I understand,” said the chairman, bending over the map. “So it’s your expert opinion that she couldn’t have survived.”

  “Couldn’t is an absolute. Let’s say it’s highly unlikely, damn near impossible.”

  “That’s what your counterpart at the Deuxième thinks.”

  “Ardisonne?”

  “You know him?”

  “Code name Richelieu. Yes, of course. Good man, if rather opinionated. Operated out of Martinique.”

  “He’s adamant. He’s convinced she went down at sea.”

  “In this case, his opinion is probably justified. But, if I may, since you’ve asked me up here for whatever I can offer, might I ask a question or two?”

  “Go ahead, Officer Cooke.”

  “This Bajaratt woman is obviously somewhat of a legend in the Baaka Valley, but I’ve been poring over those lists for the past several years and I don’t recall ever having seen the name. Why is that?”

  “Because it’s not her own, not the Bajaratt part,” interrupted the head of MI-6. “It’s the name she gave herself years ago, the name she thinks preserves her secrets, since she believes no one has any idea where it came from or who she really is. On the assumption that we might be infiltrated, and in the projection that she could be on to larger things, we’ve kept that information in our black files.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, I see. If you know a false name and its origins, meaning the real one, you can trace
a background, build a personality, even a pattern of predictability. But who exactly is she, what is she?”

  “One of the most accomplished terrorists alive.”

  “Arab?”

  “No.”

  “Israeli?”

  “No, and I wouldn’t broach that speculation too broadly.”

  “Nonsense. The Mossad has a broad spectrum of activities.… But, if you will, please answer my question. Remember, I’ve spent most of my service on the other side of the world. Just why is this woman such a priority-red?”

  “She’s for sale.”

  “She’s what …?”

  “She goes wherever there’s unrest, rebellion, insurgency, and sells her talents to the highest bidder—with remarkable results, I might add.”

  “Forgive me, but that sounds balmy. A lone woman walks into caldrons of revolt and sells advice? What does she do, take out advertisements in the newspapers?”

  “She doesn’t have to, Geoff,” replied the chairman of MI-6, returning to the conference table and sitting down somewhat awkwardly as he adjusted the chair with his left hand. “She’s a scholar where destabilization’s concerned. She knows the strengths and weaknesses of all the warring factions, as well as the leaders and how to reach them. She has no lasting allegiances, moral or political. Her profession is death. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I don’t think that’s simple at all.”

  “The result is, not the beginning, of course, not where she came from.… Sit down, Geoffrey, and let me tell you a brief story as we’ve pieced it together.” The chairman opened a large manila envelope in front of him and removed three photographs, enlargements of rapidly taken candid shots of a woman in motion. The face in each, however, was clearly in focus, the sunlight bright. “This is Amaya Bajaratt.”

  “They’re three different people!” exclaimed Geoffrey Cooke.

  “Which one is she?” posed the chairman. “Or is she all three?”

  “I see what you mean …” said the foreign service officer hesitantly. “The hair is different in each—blond, black, and, I assume, light brown; short, long, and mid-length—but the features are different … yet not markedly so. Still, they are different.”

  “Flesh-toned plastic? Wax? Control of facial muscles? None is difficult.”

  “Spectrographs would tell you, I should think. At least with respect to the additives, the plastics, and the wax.”

  “They should, but they don’t. Our experts say that there are chemical compounds that can fool photoelectric scans, or even a refraction of bright light that can do the same—which means, of course, they don’t know and won’t risk a judgment call.”

  “All right,” said Cooke. “She’s presumably one or all three of these women, but how the devil can you be sure?”

  “Reliability, I suppose.”

  “Reliability?”

  “We and the French paid a great deal of money for these photographs, each from covert assets we’ve used for years. None of them cares to cut off a valuable financial source by providing us with a fake. Each believes he’s captured Bajaratt on film.”

  “But where was she going? From Basse-Terre to the Anegada, if it is the Anegada, is well over two hundred kilometers—during a couple of raging storms. And why the Anegada Passage?”

  “Because the sloop was spotted off the coast of Marigot—it couldn’t make it into the shore for the rocks, and the small harbor was being whipped to smithereens.”

  “Spotted by whom?”

  “Fishermen who service the hotels on Anguilla. The sighting was also confirmed by our man in Dominica.” Noting Cooke’s bewilderment, the chairman continued. “Our man flew to Basse-Terre, following our lead from Paris, and ascertained that a woman of the approximate age of the Bajaratt in these pictures chartered a boat with a tall, muscular young man. A very young man. That corresponded to Paris’s information that a female of her general age and description—presumably using a false passport—flew out of Marseilles in the company of such a youngster to the island of Guadeloupe, two islands, actually, as you well know, Grande- and Basse-Terre.”

  “How did Marseilles customs make the connection between the boy and the woman?”

  “He couldn’t speak French; she said he was a distant relative from Latvia placed in her charge after his parents died.”

  “Damned improbable.”

  “But perfectly acceptable to our friends across the Channel. They disregard anything north of the Rhône.”

  “Why would she travel with a teenager?”

  “You tell me. I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  “And to repeat, where was she going?”

  “A larger conundrum. She’s obviously an experienced sailor. She’d know enough to get into shore before it struck, especially since the sloop had a radio, and alerts were being broadcast all over the area in four languages.”

  “Unless she had a rendevous that had to be met on time.”

  “Naturally, it’s the only plausible answer, but at the all too conceivable loss of her life?”

  “Again, improbable,” agreed the former MI-6 control. “Unless there were circumstances we know nothing about.… Go on; you’ve obviously built something.”

  “Something, not a great deal, I’m afraid. On the premise that a terrorist is rarely born a terrorist but becomes one through events, and on the strength of reports that although multilingual, she was heard speaking a language that was damn near impossible to understand—”

  “For most Europeans that language would be Basque,” interrupted Cooke quietly.

  “Precisely. We sent a deep-cover unit into the provinces of Vizcaya and Alva to see what they could dig up. They traced down the story of a particularly nasty incident that took place a number of years ago at a small rebel village in the western Pyrenees. The sort of thing that’s memorialized in mountain legends, passed down through generations.”

  “Something like My Lai or the Babi Yar?” asked Cooke. “Wholesale slaughter?”

  “Worse, if possible. In a raid against the rebels, the entire adult population of the village was executed by an unsanctioned rogue unit—adult being twelve years and older. The younger children were forced to watch and left to die in the mountains.”

  “This Bajaratt is one of those children?”

  “Let me try to explain. The Basques living in those mountains are very isolated. Their custom is to bury their records among the northernmost cypress trees in their territory, and attached to our unit was an anthropologist, an expert in the mountain people of the Pyrenees who could speak and read the language; he found those records. The last few pages were written by a young female child who described the horror, which included the beheading of her parents in front of her eyes by bayonets, sharpened as her father and mother watched their executioners honing their blades against the rocks.”

  “How horrible! And that child is this woman Bajaratt?”

  “She signed her name Amaya el Baj … Yovamanaree, which is the closest thing in Basque to the Spanish ‘jovena mujer,’ young woman. There followed a single phrase in perfect Spanish. ‘Muerte a toda autoridad’—”

  “ ‘Death to all authority,’ ” Cooke translated. “Is that it?”

  “No, two things more. She added a final note, and, mind you, a child of ten wrote it. ‘Shirharrá Baj.’ ”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Roughly, a young woman soon to be ready for conception but who will never bring a child into this world.”

  “Certainly macabre, yet quite understandable, I suppose.”

  “The mountain legends talk of a child-woman who led the other village children out of the hills, avoiding scores of patrols, who even killed soldiers with their own bayonets by luring them into traps all by herself.”

  “A girl of ten … it’s incredible!” Geoffrey Cooke frowned. “You said there were two things more. What’s the other?”

  “The last piece of evidence that for us confirmed her identity. Among th
e buried records were family histories—certain more isolated branches of the Basques live in fear of inbreeding, which is why so many young men and women are sent away. At any rate, there was the family ‘Aquirre, first child a female baptized Amaya,’ a common name. The surname Aquirre was scratched out—furiously scratched out as if by an angry child, the name Bajaratt replacing it.”

  “Good heavens, why? Or did you ever find out?”

  “We did, and it was a nasty business. Without going into the messier parts, our lads leaned hard on our counterparts in Madrid, going so far as to threaten them with our total withdrawal where they needed us most unless they opened certain sealed records pertaining to the Basque raids. You used the word macabre; you don’t know how apt that is. We found the name Bajaratt, a sergeant—mother Spanish, father border French, accounting for the name—who had been part of the outrageous, buried assault on that mountain village. In short words, he was the soldier who cut off the head of Amaya Aquirre’s mother. She took that name for all it represented to her in horror, certainly not in honor, but for a dedicated purpose—she would never forget for a moment as long as she lived. She would become a killer as loathsome as the man she watched pulling the bayonet through her mother’s neck.”

  “It’s warped in the extreme,” said Cooke, barely audible, “but so very understandable. A child assumes the mantle of a monster, fantasizing vengeance through identification. It’s not unlike the Stockholm syndrome, when prisoners of war in brutal circumstances identify with their captors. How much more so with a child.… So Amaya Aquirre is Amaya Bajaratt. Yet, although denying her true surname, she never spelled out the Bajaratt.”

  “We brought in a psychiatrist who specializes in children’s disorders,” added the chairman of MI-6. “He told us that a young female of ten is somewhat more advanced than her male counterpart—and since I have numerous grandchildren, I must reluctantly agree. He said that a girl of that age who’d gone through such ultimate stress and pain would have a tendency to reveal only part of herself, not all.”