Blowback

It had been months since he had last been able to make contact with his mentor. Bin Laden was constantly on the move, and he expected his followers to be able to think on their own and make their own decisions. He couldn’t be expected to hold their hands like children. Throughout the grueling assignment, Alomari had tried to remind himself to be thankful. The Scorpion could have selected any number of other assassins to do this job. Alomari knew that bin Laden had played some part in recommending him, and that only made him feel doubly guilty for having failed. At first, it had seemed as if Allah himself was smiling down upon him by handing him this assignment. But he had no idea why Allah would want to halt his progress when he was so close to closing out his list and collecting his much-needed money.

The Scorpion was someone Alomari had never met face-to-face. They had only spoken by telephone. Any actual face-to-face contact was always through his second, a man named Gökhan Celik. As Alomari watched Celik enter the taverna and make his way toward the table, he slid his hand along the outside of his sport coat, just to reassure himself that the ultra-compact Taurus PT-111 pistol was still there. He cared little for whatever relationship existed between bin Laden and the Scorpion; he was taking no chances, not even with this wiry shadow of a man who was the Scorpion’s second.

Gökhan Celik was seventy-five years old if he was a day, with a pair of narrow, dark eyes and a long pointed nose that floated above a set of terrible teeth. The man was devoid of any chin, and as a result, his face seemed to be only an extension of an otherwise twig-thin neck.

Despite his appearance, Alomari knew the man was brilliant. It was said that Celik had been the Scorpion’s counselor since he was a teen, and almost everything the Scorpion had learned, he had learned from Gökhan Celik. In other words, Celik was not a man to be underestimated either.

Dressed in a chic linen suit, Celik could have been any aging Greek businessman out for an early, run-of-the-mill business lunch with a colleague, except that Celik was no Greek and this was no run-of-the-mill luncheon. Celik had come to pink-slip one of the world’s deadliest assassins.

Ever affected by his mother’s cultured influence on his upbringing, Alomari asked his guest if he cared for something to eat or drink before they began.

Celik looked at him and replied, “Let’s not waste any more time, Khalid. You know why I’m here.”

“To discuss the remaining scientist.”

“No. That subject is no longer open for discussion. I’m here to dismiss you. You’re fired.”

“Fired?”

“Of course you can keep the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar deposit you were paid, but that’s all you are going to receive.”

“But that doesn’t begin to even cover my expenses.”

“Too bad. You knew the deal when you took it-all the items on the list were to be taken care of. You failed.”

Alomari had suspected that this was the reason Celik had demanded the meeting, but true to his Arab heritage, he haggled desperately for a few moments in an attempt to keep the assignment alive.

“The contract is canceled, and that’s final,” said Celik as he placed his gnarled hands on the table and rose from his chair. “I thought we owed it to you to tell you in person.”

That was the least they owed him, and if nothing else, it should have been the Scorpion himself sitting across from him, but Alomari let it slide. “I can still finish the assignment, “He said. “There’s still time.”

“No, there isn’t, and this has gone far beyond your capabilities.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? I mean that if you had acted faster, maybe you would have gotten to Tokay before he talked.”

“He talked? To whom?”

“That’s what we’re going to have to find out. Now, we not only need to locate and silence Tokay, but we also need to silence anyone else he may have talked to. But we’re going to do that without you. Consider yourself lucky that your ineptitude isn’t getting you silenced as well.”

Alomari was seething, and subconsciously his hand began to move for his pistol. When he realized what he was doing, he tried to calm himself. Not here. Not now. It must be someplace else, away from witnesses.

As Gökhan Celik left the taverna, the assassin came to the conclusion that the Scorpion had made a very grave error in underestimating him. For that, Gökhan Celik was going to lose his life. The key would be in making it look like an accident, but accidents were the al-Qaeda operative’s specialty.