Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (34 page)

Adin stepped inside, and Sarah closed the door. There was something strange about him. It was the way he was dressed. He was wearing dark slacks, a black turtleneck slipover jersey, and a navy blue blazer. It was a strange outfit for the middle of the night.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I am. I’ll be leaving in just a few minutes.”

“Where?” asked Sarah.

“There’s no time for that now. Listen to me. I have to tell you something.”

“Come in and sit down. I’ll turn on some lights.” Sarah started to turn toward the living room.

“No.” Adin grabbed her arm. He was still whispering. “Listen! I have something very important to tell you. And then I need your help.”

“Sure, if I can,” said Sarah.

“First I have to tell you the truth. I am not who you think I am.”

“Excuse me?” said Sarah.

“Part of what I told you is true, but not all of it. I am with the Israeli government, that much is true. But I am not with the Israeli Security Agency, and I didn’t come here to be trained. I’m assigned to the Mossad, Special Operations, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. I came here to gather certain information and to send it back to my handlers in Tel Aviv.”

“What are you telling me? That you’re a spy?”

“It’s not a nice word, but the answer is yes.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I need your help.”

“That’s not a good way to get it,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to sugarcoat it. It’s a long story. There are things I cannot tell you. I’m just going to have to ask you to trust me.”

“Go on,” said Sarah.

“Do you know where your father is at this moment?”

“Why? Why do you want to know?”

“Because I suspect he’s in a great deal of danger. I know you’ve talked to him in the last few days. I was here when he called. Listen, I may be able to help him.”

“How?”

“If you tell me what he’s doing and where he is, I can help. Trust me. Tell me, when you talked to him, did he ever say anything about something called Project Thor?”

Sarah thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. I would have remembered that. What is it?”

“It’s a highly classified weapons research program. The U.S. government, the Department of Defense, and NASA have been working on it for almost ten years. I can’t tell you much. But I can tell you this. The system has the potential to kill millions of people. Also, from what we now know, it appears that your government has lost control of the program. It may be in the hands of others.”

“If this thing is so highly classified, how do you know so much about it?” asked Sarah.

“We had someone on the inside. That is, until two days ago. He was working on the project. What you might call a mole. As long as he was there we believed that we had some kind of a handle in case anything went wrong. The problem is that two nights ago he was murdered. His body was dumped in an alley in Paris.”

Sarah looked at him.

“The same place your father was,” said Adin.

“How do you know?”

“There is no time for that now. I know he called you because I overheard part of the conversation. From the little I picked up, it sounded as if he might be on his way to Mexico. Is that where he is now?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah lied. “Why should I trust you?”

“Because if you don’t, a lot of people may die. If we’re right and your government has lost control of Project Thor, that means that by now the items in question are probably in the hands of another government. If so, there is a good chance that Project Thor will be harnessed and turned against either the United States, Israel, or both. If it works, it has the potential to kill millions of people. If it doesn’t work, if they get it wrong, it could wipe out life on the planet.”

“What are you talking about? What is this thing?”

“Your father doesn’t have a clue as to what he’s gotten himself involved in. You have to trust me. I need to know where he is.”

“Son, in order for that to happen, you’re gonna need to take us into your confidence.” The baritone voice came from the shadows in the hallway. Herman stepped out into the muted light of the entry. “The last time I looked, trust was a two-way street.” Apparently he had been standing there for a while, dressed in a robe and a pair of slippers. “Lady asked you a question. You want information. So do we. What exactly is this thing? This Project Thor?”

Chapter
Forty-Seven

T
he operator answers one question for us. There are no other airports south of Playa del Carmen along the Mexican coast, nothing north of Belize. According to him, there are some small landing strips in the jungle, but he doesn’t recommend going near any of them except in the most dire emergency. He is sure that some of them are used to run drugs up from South and Central America—what he calls “the Coca Highway.”

“Wonderful! How about flying me over Coba?” I ask him.

“I could, I suppose,” he says. “But why would you want to go there? You can get much better pictures along the beaches. I can fly you over Tulum and you take some magnificent photos of the temple above the beach,” he tells me. “If we get lucky, you see porpoise, maybe a whale or two.”

“No, I want to see Coba,” I tell him. “I’m willing to pay.”

“How much?” He gets a glint in his eye. The eternal question.

His usual flight along the coast above the beaches is ninety-nine dollars for twenty-five minutes. He pulls out a flight chart of the area, and we look at it together. The question for me is whether the little bird with two of us on board has enough range to get to Coba and back. He says it does, but he can’t guarantee how much time we would have in the air over Coba once we get there.

“That looks like more than forty miles each way.” He takes out a pair of calipers and measures the distance. “Forty-three to be exact,” he says. “Eighty-six miles round-trip. That’s a lot. Even with extra fuel, I would not be able to give you more than ten minutes over the area.”

“That’s OK.”

“Figure two hours’ flying time. For that I would need at least five hundred dollars,” he says.

I whistle. “That’s pretty steep.”

“If I have motor problems above the beach, I can always land on the hard sand along the water. Over the jungle is another matter,” he says. “I am putting my airplane at risk. That’s the best I can do. Take it or leave it.”

“Will you take a credit card?”

“Visa?”

I nod.

“From an American bank?”

“Yes.”

“I can, but there will be a five percent service charge,” he says.

I agree to the terms before he raises the price even more.

He takes my credit card and hands it to the girl sitting in the office so that she can call and get the charges approved.

He goes to gas up the plane while I talk with Harry and Joselyn out by the car.

“You’re really gonna go up in that thing?” Harry is looking over the top of his sunglasses at the flimsy ultralight parked on the apron along the edge of the runway.

“I thought you were going,” I tell him.

“I might take a bullet for you, but I’m not going near that.”

“You think it’s safe?” says Joselyn.

“I don’t know. I’m told they leave divers behind in the ocean all the time down here. They forget to count heads,” I tell her.

“Let’s hope the pilot remembers you’re behind him,” says Harry.

“I won’t have to worry if Visa has cut us off,” I tell him. “Of course, we’ll be sleeping in the jungle and bathing in a cenote with the gators.”

Joselyn shivers and hands me her camera. “Don’t talk like that. Here. It isn’t the best, but it’ll work. Just point and shoot,” she says. “If you see anything that you think looks like the description in those notes, take some pictures.”

The tiny camera is only ten megapixels with a three power magnification on the lens, but Joselyn tells me that she can download the photos to her computer and doctor them from there. If we’re lucky, we might get enough detail to see what is happening on the ground.

Before I know it, the Mexican pilot is back with a receipt for me to sign and a thin plastic helmet that looks like it’s more for show than anything else. He hands me some cotton.

I look at him.

“For your ears,” he says. “It’s very loud.”

He is right. I feel as if I am strapped onto his back with a screaming lawn mower engine chasing me down the runway. The push propeller whips the air two feet behind me as the tricycle landing gears tries twice to leave the ground only to come back down hard, each time at an angle across the runway. It jars my lower back. On the third attempt, the front wheel lifts off followed by the other two, and we are airborne.

We climb slowly with the small engine straining behind me. The pilot noses into the onshore breeze coming in off the ocean. The feeling of being in the air with a flapping fabric wing overhead and nothing below me except my feet on a metal rung is not something I would recommend to the nervous flier.

For the first five minutes we follow the coast south as we gain altitude. The houses of Playa del Carmen and the rolling whitecaps piling up on the beaches below take on a miniature appearance as we climb. We clear the town to the south, and after a couple more minutes the pilot dips his right wing. We cross over the highway and head southwest out over the jungle.

He is right about one thing. The ground below us looks ominous if for any reason we have to put down. Except for the occasional blue cenotes and the dull gray marshland around them, the blanket of green beneath us is nearly unbroken. The only human habitations and signs of life appear to be along the highway. The few sparse roads leading into the interior of the jungle go no more than a few thousand feet before they dead-end. After that there is nothing but jungle for as far as I can see.

We fly for almost twenty minutes with nothing until I see a road that looks unpaved winding below us. Trekking its way through the bush, it goes a few miles and ends. What it is doing there I haven’t a clue. From this altitude, no more than maybe five or six hundred feet, there are no signs of life on or near the dirt track. I suppose small houses, concrete mud huts, could be tucked away under the trees along the edge of the road, but if they are I can’t see them.

We fly on farther another ten minutes when I see a paved road in the distance. The pilot leans his head back toward me and yells above the screaming engine: “
Es
the Tulum-to-Coba highway.”

I nod. I wonder how far we are from Coba.

He pushes the little plane forward until it crosses the ribbon of pavement below us. I watch as our winged shadow follows the road west.

I begin scanning the green velvet jungle below, looking for anything that might qualify as a large facility with an antenna array. There is nothing, only a few bald areas where the jungle has been scraped clear for structures that are no longer there, mostly right along the highway. There are a few houses and ramshackle buildings, small settlements.

A few miles farther on I start to see them: the line of cellular towers reaching out into the distance casting their tall shadows over the top of the green canopy, what I remembered from my last trip along the two-lane highway from Coba.

“You see the lake in the distance?” he yells back at me. “That is Coba. We are almost there. I will do a flyover. You want to take some pictures?”

I nod. I have the little camera in my hand, but so far nothing to shoot.

He begins to descend a little. I tell him no, to maintain altitude. This way I can see farther into the distance, my eyes straining for any break in the jungle.

“You scared?” He glances back toward me.

“No.”

He notices that I am looking in a different direction. “What are you looking for?” He yells back. “Something special?”

“I’ll know when I see it,” I tell him. “Have you flown in this area before?” I ask.

“Not often. A few times,” he tells me. “People who do the digs on the ruins sometimes like to get pictures from the air. That way they know where to dig. You see over there?” He points off to the right. “Those little hills?”

“Yes.”

“They are not hills,” he says. “They are Mayan ruins under the jungle. Some perhaps temples or ball courts, maybe palaces. May have been there a thousand years. Covered over by the jungle.”

“When was the last time you flew here?”

He shakes his head a little. “I don’t know. Maybe three . . . four months. I don’t come here often.”

“I am looking for a place that is supposed to have a large antenna array. You know antennas, like television. Perhaps a big dish. Supposed to be a new facility of some kind here in the jungle.”

He looks back at me over his shoulder, squinting his eyes. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Tourist,” I tell him.

“That is no place for
turistas,
” he tells me.