Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (41 page)

The motor on the mammoth satellite dish outside began to turn, making subtle adjustments in the orientation of the antenna. It would link up with the antennas on the rocket motors attached to A-1, the smaller of the two asteroids, on its next loop out beyond the edge of the moon. Within seconds the command codes would be fed into the microprocessor linking the four rockets, and the asteroid would be tipped from its balance point at lunar L2 and begin its journey.

Using lunar gravity and its own velocity, the asteroid would slingshot around the lunar surface in the same way NASA had done with its orbiters on moon missions.

The iron-core asteroid would begin its journey of nearly 240,000 miles. By the time it was picked up by astronomers on Earth, it would be too late to even think. Moving at more than 600 miles per minute, it would reach its target on the North American continent in just over six and a half hours.

Given its mass and velocity, a direct hit was not only unnecessary, it was inadvisable. If an impact was to look like a naturally occurring event, it would not make sense to strike a city center. Anywhere within a twenty-mile radius would be enough to level and incinerate almost all of the metropolitan area.

An elevated level of dust in the atmosphere would surround the earth for a few months, but would not, according to the calculations, result in anything approaching a nuclear winter.

The purpose behind this test was not unlike Trinity, the early Alamagordo tests of the atomic bomb. Leffort’s clients had to be sure they got it right before bringing the second weapon closer to home and risking self-annihilation. The people paying him had to know how much dust and rock would be ejected. They wanted to have some sense of the heat that would be generated, the volume and the range of any fiery ejecta that gravity carried back through the atmosphere. They had to know how far fires would spread, as well as the effect of the ground shock waves as the impactor mostly vaporized and buried what was left of itself a mile deep in the bedrock at ground zero. In the end, all that would be left would be a vast crater.

It was the similarities of the desert with its geologic characteristics so much like those of their homeland that gave Leffort’s clients the idea—setting up in the jungles of Mexico and targeting the area around Phoenix and Scottsdale in the state of Arizona would make for the perfect test.

Once the first asteroid was proven to work, they would know with a high degree of confidence what to expect when they launched the second, the larger of the two asteroids, into the desert just outside of the city of Tel Aviv in Israel. It was to be the fulfillment of the promise to wipe Israel off the map.

Leffort was confident that with enough practice and the right space rock, he could penetrate the earth’s atmosphere to create a supersonic shock wave that would level everything beneath it—a blast similar to the Tunguska event.

On June 30, 1908, a sudden flash of light, brighter than the sun, followed by an ear-shattering shock wave, struck the area over the Tunguska River in a remote region of Siberia. It leveled trees, stripped their foliage, and set wildfires over an area of more than eight hundred square miles. Virtually nothing was left standing.

It has been estimated that the offending meteor may have been no more than thirty to sixty feet in diameter. Scientists believe that it never actually impacted the earth but disintegrated in the skies above. Its mass coupled with its extreme velocity caused a massive shock wave as it collided with and finally exploded in the thickening atmosphere of the earth. Had it occurred over Manhattan it would have destroyed the city and killed almost every living thing in the five boroughs below.

Leffort watched the telemetry readings on the large left-hand screen as the rockets fired up. Within seconds they began to nudge the asteroid from its raceway behind the moon. Everything looked smooth until suddenly . . .

A hundred and twenty miles above the Mare Orientale, a largely featureless plain on the southeast rim at the far side of the moon, the rear lateral thrust rocket attached to A-1 began to vibrate. It shimmied and sent the asteroid into a yaw as it began to tumble.

The rocket was programmed to fire for a minute and forty seconds. At fifty-seven seconds a large amorphous section of iron, what rocket engineers at NASA had called the dorsal fin, tore itself free from the asteroid and began to spin toward the surface of the moon.

Leffort watched in horror as the telemetry data began to pile up on the screen. Something had gone badly wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was, but A-1 had given up any semblance of equilibrium. The readings for yaw, pitch, and roll all exceeded acceptable parameters for anything close to controlled flight. From all the readings, A-1 was nothing but a tumbling iron anvil in space. Caught in the moon’s gravity, flung like a stone from a blind man’s sling, it could end up anywhere.

Leffort stood there paralyzed. There was nothing he could do but watch as the numbers stacked up. With each passing second, the blood in his veins grew hotter. All he could do was turn off the monitors. The minute he opened the door, they would want to know what was happening. Dark screens would be a dead giveaway. Leffort’s mind raced. All he wanted now was to survive, to get away from them.

A quarter of a million miles away, beyond the edge of the moon’s southern hemisphere, the tumbling train of iron finally ceased its twisting tails of fire. The three remaining rocket motors shut down, though by now the tumbling asteroid was a perpetual motion machine.

Moments later a silent ball of fire erupted on the dusty plain below as the errant engine and the two tons of iron to which it was attached slammed into the surface of the moon. From space it looked like a pebble in a pond as the shock waves spread out into rings of ground matter rippling up, forming a new crater near the southern edge of the Orient Sea.

Chapter
Fifty-Six

L
iquida would have to leave most of his luggage behind. He grabbed a few things from his suitcase, including an extra stiletto from the bundle in his bag. He put one of the knives in a scabbard that was sewn inside the lining of his light jacket and slipped the other into a separate sheath and slid it into his pants along the side of his hip.

The prefabricated metal building was designed like a fortress, steel walls with small slits for windows in some of the rooms, none of them large enough to crawl through.

Liquida’s room didn’t even have that. It had only an air-
conditioning register high on the wall pouring cool air into the room. There was a larger rectangular return duct in the ceiling that sucked the warm air back through the system.

The oversize commercial air-con system was one of the few concessions to comfort in the facility. Liquida assumed it was necessary to maintain cool temperatures for the electronics, banks of large industrial computers housed in a room down the hall. Beyond that was the control room where Leffort worked. Armed guards were installed at several locations along the corridor. The entrances and exits were all sealed by solid steel doors, each one controlled by an electronic passkey.

Bruno hadn’t given Liquida a key. When Liquida asked for one, Bruno apologized, claiming it was an oversight, and told him he would get him one as soon as he could. But the key was never produced.

Earlier in the day when Liquida made a bid to take a walk outside, he was turned back by one of the guards. He was told that without a key he was not allowed to leave the building. Liquida didn’t press the matter. Instead he went back to his room. He poked around carefully, looking for hidden camera lenses. He didn’t find any. At least they didn’t have him under surveillance. It was while looking for cameras that he realized his only way out was through the air-conditioning register in the ceiling.

He put on his jacket, stood on a chair, and found the catch on the hinged metal vent over the register. He opened it, dropped the covering vent down so that it hung open from the two hinges, and pulled out the rectangular fiberglass filter.

Liquida stepped down from the chair and looked for a good place to hide it. A cheap particleboard cupboard that served as a closet rested against one wall. He slid the thin rectangular filter behind it and walked back to the chair in the center of the room.

He looked up. The opening into the sheet metal duct system was easily large enough for Liquida to fit through. It was a good two and half feet wide, and at least eighteen inches deep. He had shimmied into much tighter spaces before. The only problem now was, the partially healed muscles under his arm from the knife wound given to him by Madriani’s detective, the big black guy Liquida had killed in Washington. This was still painful and weak.

Liquida grabbed a spool of heavy thread from the sewing kit in his luggage. He took a stick of chewing gum from a package in his jacket pocket, popped the gum in his mouth, and pulled out a good length of thread from the spool. He looped the thread over itself several times until he had four strands, each one about fifteen feet long. Then he snipped the end of the thread with his teeth. He passed one end of the four-strand thickness around the top slate on the back of the light metal chair, then tied the ends of the thread together so that the entire fifteen feet formed a single continuous loop. The other end of threaded strands he passed through his belt. He tugged on it to make sure it wouldn’t come free.

Then Liquida stood on the chair and took a deep breath. He chewed the gum. It was better than breaking his teeth on a bullet. As he reached up with his hands inside the frame of the register, he felt the first twinge of pain under his arm. He didn’t wait. Instead, with a pull from his arms and a healthy jump from his legs off the chair, Liquida hoisted his upper body up into the opening in the ceiling.

He felt the sharp pain, the tearing of scar tissue as the muscles under his arm reminded him of the slashing cut. He paused, his weight on his chest just inside the sheet metal duct, his legs dangling into the room as the sweat dripped off his forehead.

Liquida breathed heavily and chewed on the gum as he waited for the searing pain to pass. It took almost half a minute to subdue the agony before he could move.

Slowly he slid his hands forward and pulled his body along the inside of the sheet metal tunnel. Each move was a new experience in pain. Finally everything but his toes was up inside the metal ceiling duct.

Then slowly he reversed the process. He shimmied backward, pushing himself back over the hatch in the ceiling until only his head and shoulders remained over the open register.

With his right hand he reached back and fished for the end of the threaded loop under his belt. He found it and pulled it free.

Liquida took up the slack in the thread and pulled on it gently until all four legs of the chair cleared the floor. Slowly swinging the chair like a pendulum, back and forth, he made three full passes toward the wall near the head of the bed. On the fourth pass, he let out the thread and dropped the chair so that it landed neatly with the back against the wall.

Liquida smiled to himself as he nibbled through the four strands of thread. Once he had severed them he pulled the continuous loop from the back of the chair and reeled it in until all of the thread was in his hands. He balled it up and stuck it down the neck of his shirt as the forced air from the conditioning system whistled past his ears.

He reached down and lifted the vented register cover closed. He took the chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it to the metal edge of the frame around the louvered vent, then pulled it tightly closed. The gum sealed the cover in place. Anyone looking in the room now would think Liquida had simply vanished.

*  *  *

At a point roughly a hundred miles north of Havana, the flight engineer on Adin’s C-130 radioed to the base in Israel. He asked to have an uncoded message sent to Joselyn Cole at her e-mail address, making an urgent request for information using Herman’s name. He needed to know Madriani’s location as well as the precise location of the antenna array and the facility in the jungle. It was now two hours later and they had heard nothing.

Forty miles out, the pilot turned off the plane’s transponder. He dropped down to wave-top height and hugged the water, trying to stay below ground radar.

Twenty minutes later the C-130 crossed over the white-foamed breakers and sugar-sand beaches of the Mexican Riviera. The pilot nosed the plane up to clear some low-lying cliffs and the buildings on top of them. They were just south of the island of Cozumel on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Herman sat up front behind the pilot looking out the windows for any landmarks that seemed familiar. “You’re too far north,” he told them.

The pilot dipped the left wing and took a heading due south.

Herman could see the coast highway out in front of them through the plane’s windshield. The white sand beaches and resorts along the water’s edge raced by beneath the belly of the plane. “Just follow the highway,” said Herman.

Every once in a while the pilot would have to pull the nose of the plane up to avoid a building or the fronds of an occasional tall palm tree. The shadow of the large four-engine plane rippled along on the beaches and bluffs beneath them as they flew.

Eight minutes later the reflection of the sun on the white coral facade of the ruins at Tulum appeared just above the nose of the plane.

“There!” Herman pointed over the pilot’s shoulder. “See those ruins up ahead?”