Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (5 page)

“Harry . . .” My heart is pounding so hard it feels as if it’s going to penetrate the wall of my chest. “Here, give it to me.” I rip the phone from Thorpe’s hand. “Hello—who is this? Fred, this is Paul. Is Sarah there? Is she OK?”

Before Fred can answer, Harry is on the line. “Where the hell have you been?” he says. “We’ve been calling your cell, but there has been no answer.”

*  *  *

Sarah was conscious of movement behind her, thrashing in the brush, and the shallow water washing around her body. She was able to breathe again. She rolled over. The shock of the ice-cold water on her back sharpened her senses. The tight pain in her stomach began to ease.

She came to just as Bugsy streaked past her, shot across the creek, and up the embankment on the other side. In the flash of an eye he was gone, heading at the speed of light toward the road.

Sarah struggled to her feet, stumbled around the rocks in the creek half dazed, and slowly made her way up the path in the direction of the dog. When she reached the top, she saw Bugsy in the distance. He was racing toward the embankment leading up to the road.

Before he reached it, a small sedan parked on the other side started up, turned on its lights, and skidded in the gravel along the shoulder as it pulled away. Sarah watched as the car’s taillights disappeared around a bend. When she looked back, Bugsy’s lean militant body stood silhouetted in the middle of the highway.

Only then did she look down and notice the steel handle and the narrow blade of the stiletto dangling from a hole in her fanny pack. She unzipped the top of the bag and found the point of the blade embedded in the aluminum water bottle. Like a cork on the tip of a knife, it had saved her life.

*  *  *

“Liquida paid us a visit,” Harry says, “earlier this morning.”

“Sarah . . . ?”

“She’s all right, shaken up, but no serious wounds. She had a very close call. She was lucky. If she had nine lives, eight of them are gone now. I’ll tell you what happened when we see each other. If you have a god, you’d be wise to thank him tonight,” says Harry.

“Liquida?” Thorpe is over my shoulder.

I nod.

“Is she all right?”

I nod again.

“How long ago?” says Thorpe.

I shake my head. I don’t have a clue.

Thorpe grabs the phone from the nurses’ station and dials a number. Within seconds he is talking to someone on the other end.

“Liquida is in Ohio, a place called Groveport.” He gives them the farm address. “He hit the place earlier this morning. He’s on the run again. Contact the nearest field office. It’s probably Columbus. Tell them to get some agents out there ASAP. If they need to use a chopper, do it. Get whatever information they can. Put out an APB. Just a second.”

I am listening to Harry with one ear and Thorpe with the other.

Joselyn is back from Herman’s room. She leans in over my shoulder and whispers in my ear, “The doctor has stabilized him.”

I look at her and nod.

“Do we have a vehicle description, license number, anything?”

“I don’t know. . . . Harry, listen, can you put Sarah on the phone?”

“She’s pretty upset. Shaking like a leaf,” he says.

“I understand.”

“Did she get a good look at him?”

“Yeah. One she’s not likely to ever forget,” says Harry.

“Did she get a good look?” says Thorpe.

I nod.

Thorpe’s back to the other line. “Tell the agents to take a laptop with Identi-Kit software with them. They need to talk to the girl, Sarah Madriani, and work up a good computer-generated photo. . . . What about any vehicle?” He is talking to me again.

“Did she see a car?” I ask Harry.

“Only from a distance. No license plate or vehicle description,” says Harry. Harry’s voice drops almost to a whisper. “He did leave a knife, however. A wicked-looking thing.”

“Where?”

“You don’t want to know,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

“She is all right?” I ask.

“Yes. Physically she’s fine, a few bruises and scrapes,” says Harry.

“Can I talk to her?”

“Right now she’s in the other room with Susan. I’d give her a few more minutes and call back. Let her get herself together. She’s pretty upset.”

“I understand. Are the police there?”

“Sheriff’s deputies crawling over the place like ants,” says Harry. “He won’t be coming back, not here, not if he’s smart.”

“How did it happen? How did he get to her?”

“I’ll tell you later,” says Harry. “It’s a sore subject with Sarah. You might want to go easy. She made a mistake.”

“I see.” A few seconds of silence pass between us on the phone.

“Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell her I called. Tell her I love her. Tell her that I’ll call back in just a few minutes and that I am making arrangements to get the two of you out of there and here to D.C. as quickly as possible.” I look directly at Thorpe as I say this last bit.

He nods. “Can do,” says Thorpe.

“Got it,” says Harry.

“And Harry, don’t let anyone touch that knife in case there’s prints,” I tell him.

Harry laughs a little. “I don’t think they’ll find any. But it is true what they say, that the fruit never falls far from the tree.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean with all the hysteria, the fact that Liquida came within a hairsbreadth of killing her, your daughter had the same thought, to leave the knife where it was, all the way back to the house. It took some courage,” says Harry.

Chapter
Eight

L
awrence Leffort was tall and slender, six foot two, a hundred and sixty pounds. Built like a pencil. At forty-two he showed not even the slightest bulge of a paunch or love handles.

Ever since he was a kid he’d worn spectacles thick as bottle glass, only now they were darkly tinted with circular wire frames, like the ones John Lennon used to wear. An astrophysicist with an advanced degree from MIT, he sported a ponytail that dangled to the center of his back. The hair, which was thinning, and the glasses were part of the metamorphosis from his milquetoast period—a midlife crisis that hit him like a runaway train two years earlier.

In that time Leffort had gone from horn-rimmed academic to avant-garde edgy man at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on the campus of Caltech in Flintridge.

Leffort was a researcher having little contact with the undergraduates, a couple of lectures a year and that was it. If he wanted to grow hair down to his ass and play an air guitar on his own time, the people in the department didn’t care as long as he got his work done.

They might have taken more interest had they known about Larry’s darker side. Since emerging from his shell at forty Leffort had discovered women. The ones he dated liked to abuse their bodies, and Larry liked to help. Most of his ladies were tattooed like sailors and pierced like punch cards. For a man who never dated before the age of forty, this was a novelty he couldn’t seem to resist.

With his new friends as tour guides, Leffort had taken to visiting private dungeons in West L.A. where he developed an Olympic-class appetite for bondage and sadism. He liked to sample the chemicals brewed by the warlocks in these places, mostly meth. After getting high, he would play Grand Inquisitor with women on the rack, or experiment by using some of the other exercise equipment. Larry learned about heightened awareness and experienced firsthand how Dr. Pepper’s lonely heart got poisoned. Whatever inhibitions he had, melted. In little over a year he cultivated a secret nightlife to rival Jekyll and Hyde.

This afternoon, about nine days after the attack on Sarah Madriani, Leffort sat behind the wheel of his car in a parking lot on Foothill Boulevard a hundred yards from Starbucks sipping an iced latte as he listened to Raji tell him all the reasons they shouldn’t be doing what they had already done.

“We need to think about this some more. There’s no reason that we should be in such a rush. What if we missed something?” said Raji. “Some small detail . . .”

“We haven’t missed anything.” Leffort kept looking out the windshield, watching for any telltale signs that Fareed might have been followed to their offsite meeting. They didn’t dare discuss it in the office. There was no telling who might be listening. There were security cameras and microphones everywhere, with ID cards that limited access to restricted areas.

“How can you be so sure we haven’t made a mistake?” Raji Fareed was a veritable engine of angst. On a normal day, his fret level usually ran a thousand degrees hotter than Leffort’s. During the last two weeks, his anxiety quotient had been off the scale.

Fareed was born in Iran. Now in his early forties, he had come to the United States as a kid with his family. He worked for NASA as a computer programmer and had been thrown into the mix, assigned to work with Leffort on the Thor Project. The two men had been working together for almost a decade and at times rubbed each other raw.

Raji designed programs to crunch numbers. Using supercomputers, he could craft software to solve complex equations and formulas that might otherwise take a couple of hundred lifetimes to work out on a chalkboard. Once he designed a program and loaded it into a computer, a thousand-line equation could be worked out in anywhere from seconds to minutes, and with near-perfect precision.

“Trust me, everything’s covered. The only things left are the guidance programs. Did you bring them?” Leffort had been after Raji to produce the final guidance programs for almost a month. They were the key to terminal targeting. Without them, they had an incomplete package and nothing to sell.

“I’ve got them,” said Raji.

“Good.”

“But I still think we ought to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“So we can slow down a little, and think,” said Fareed. “Right now everything’s just going too fast.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when they decide to throw you under the bus,” said Leffort. “They don’t usually step on the brakes until after it runs over you.”

After more than a decade of research, rumor had it that the Thor Project was about to be scuttled. With the economy on the skids and Washington looking for ways to cut costs, NASA was being chopped to pieces. Not only were the manned space programs being canceled, any item considered nonessential to national defense was on the block.

“Fuckers would probably try and sell the moon to the Chinese if they thought they had a chance,” said Leffort.

Theoretical programs were high on the hit list. At a meeting three months earlier, Leffort had tried to convince NASA that what he and Raji were working on was far more than mere theory. It would work. When the meeting was over, Leffort didn’t need a crystal ball or a cipher to tell him that he’d failed. Their research grant, with its five remaining years, was about to be shifted to other higher priorities. The smell of pink slips was in the air. It was then that he and Fareed started moving ahead with the plan.

“We agreed we would go during the Paris conference,” said Leffort.

“We did, but I figured by now we’d know whether they were going to pull the grant. We still don’t know. Maybe they’ve decided to leave it alone. If so, there’s nothing special about being in Paris. And there’s no reason to run.”

“Yeah, there is. We’re outside the country. And that’s where all the data is, parked on a server in Paris, remember? Besides, after the conference it may be much harder to slip away. If they pull the plug and can us, you can bet they’re gonna be watching us, at least for a while,” said Leffort. “Anybody with a high security clearance who’s out of work is going to be seen as a potential risk in terms of classified information. You try to leave the country, you’re liable to find yourself on a no-fly list.”

“You think they’re gonna be watching us?”

“Yep.”

“Why, if nobody else knows what we’ve done? I mean, nobody else knows, right?”

“I don’t know,” said Leffort. “You tell me.”

“What are you saying?” Raji glared at him. “You accusing me? You think I told somebody?”

“I don’t know. You seem awfully nervous lately. I thought we were both committed. Now you want to slow down, take your time. What am I supposed to think?”

“Hey, I don’t need this.” Raji reached for the door handle, ready to get out and hoof it to his own car.

“Hey, relax. Calm down.” Leffort put a hand on Fareed’s arm. “Don’t get mad. I didn’t mean anything. You know me, I shoot from the hip. I’m just tired, strung out. And like you, I’m getting a little nervous.”

“That’s no reason to accuse me,” said Fareed.

“I know. It’s just that we’re both under a lot of stress right now. And the longer we have to hang here under the gun, the worse it’s gonna get. That’s why the sooner we can leave, the better,” said Leffort.

“I never gave you any reason not to trust me,” said Raji.

“I know that.”

“For all I know, maybe you told somebody.”