Free Scorpion Betrayal by Andrew Kaplan Page A

curious. Wait five minutes before you press the button under the desk, Najah,” Scorpion said. Something al-Hafez had said was setting off alarm bells in his head, but he wasn’t sure what.
    â€œI want you out of my country, Monsieur Leveque,” al-Hafez said, using Scorpion’s cover identity, his eyes narrowing. “You have twenty-four hours. After that,
bi ‘idni allah,
you will never leave Syria. Not even as a corpse.”
    T he night goggles cast a greenish glow over the trees and the wall and the guardhouse outside the gated estate. Scorpion studied the layout from his rental car down the street. Dr. Abadi’s compound was well protected, all right, he thought. In addition to the guardhouse by the gate and the razor wire atop the high concrete walls, he spotted a number of security cameras, wireless alarms, and motion detectors along the perimeter, and more no doubt were strategically located on the grounds and in the house. And he heard the barking of guard dogs from inside the walls.
    He put the night goggles in his backpack. There wasn’t any choice. He’d have to go in. The question was how. Al-Hafez had kept his word about the tails. He’d been free of them all day. He’d been given twenty-four hours because al-Hafez wanted to distance Syria and the GSD from whatever the Islamic Resistance was planning. As for him tackling Dr. Abadi’s compound, for al-Hafez it was a no-lose situation. The Syrian GSD and Mukhabarat were tied to the traditional Hezbollah leadership. From al-Hafez’s point of view, whether he killed Abadi or Abadi killed him, the director won.
    Scorpion had spent the day making preparations. He’d rented a Renault Megane, a car they’d used to tail him, obviously popular with the GSD. At an Internet café, he’d posted what he learned from al-Hafez about the Islamic Resistance to the International Corn Association website. Enough to keep them scrambling and to keep Rabinowich happily digging through databases. In response to a cryptic coded post by Rabinowich, Scorpion indicated that so far as he could tell, al-Hafez was most likely telling the truth about no Syrian involvement in the Cairo bombing, but he would know more after tonight.
    That afternoon, he had gone to a number of shops in Saida Zaynab, a slum district filled with refugees from Iraq where, for a price, you could buy anything or anyone. Later he’d mingled with the evening crowds in the lanes and shops blazing with light in the Souk al-Hamidiyeh, in the walled Old City next to the citadel, where he bought an inexpensive suit like the one his cover, Fawzi al-Diyala, would wear. He was prepared as he could be. If Abadi’s men captured him and he had to get out, he was counting on the Houdini trick, the one that had enabled the magician to make his famous escapes. But there was no way to stop the dryness in his mouth or his heart rate from going up. He knew there was a good chance he’d end the night as a headless corpse floating in the Barada River.
    He’d made his choice that afternoon. Basically, there were only two ways in.
    He could sneak in, deal with the perimeter guards, and tranquilize the guard dogs with Diazepam. As for the alarms, a preliminary drive-by earlier in the day convinced him that for such a large compound, they were likely using wireless alarms. Trying to eliminate alarms individually meant getting to the alarms or the controller without setting off motion detectors and other sensors that were probably all over the place, and then required someone who knew what he was doing to disconnect them. The system was almost certainly multichannel, so that the instant you disconnected one, the other channel would set off the alarm. But all wireless devices were based on RF technology, and a better way would be to disable them all at the same time with an electromagnetic pulse. All that required was a powerful enough transmitter—say a 2.4 GHz