Trader of secrets pm-12

by Steve Martini

  Chapter Six

  Liquida could now hear the faint padding of her running shoes as the soles slapped the harder ground leading toward the opening in the brush. A second later he picked up the sound of her labored breathing. Crouched down behind the reeds, he inched toward the path until he was no more than two feet from the well-worn ground of the trail.

  He reached into the sling with his gloved left hand and felt the handle of the needle-sharp stiletto. Slowly he drew it out and held it down low, close to his body, parallel to his left thigh.

  If he timed it right, he would spring up from behind the reeds just as her leading foot cleared the end of the wooden plank on this side of the creek. When he jumped, his sudden movement would cause her eyes to be instinctively riveted on his face. She wouldn’t notice the blade until her own forward momentum carried her body onto the point as Liquida thrust it upward under her rib cage. It would be over in an instant.

  Liquida dipped his head low as he heard the rustle of brush on the other side of the creek. A second later the footfalls slowed as she negotiated her way carefully down the embankment; then came the first flat thud as the sole of her shoe landed on the wooden plank.

  He could see her through the reeds. Two more hollow drumbeats followed as she raced across the narrow wooden bridge over the water.

  She was close enough now that Liquida could smell her. He waited half a beat, then launched himself up onto his feet. He took one quick full stride forward directly into her path, closing the distance between them before the girl realized what was happening.

  I am out of Herman’s hospital room like a bullet racing for the telephone at the nurses’ station. The doctor with a crash cart is working over Herman.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on?” The cop is out in the hall again after getting the doctor.

  I turn back and skip sideways as I yell to him, “Call Thorpe. See if he’s still in the building. If not, get one of his agents up here-now. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just call him.”

  By the time I reach the nurses’ station and the phone, I realize that I don’t have the number, and the phone number at the farm is unlisted. It’s in my cell phone, but Thorpe or one of his minions has that. God knows where it is, probably back at their office in a lockbox with other property.

  I head for the elevator just as Joselyn steps out of the ladies’ room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Liquida knows where Sarah is.”

  “What?”

  “They’re working on Herman!” I point to the room. “Liquida must have told him just before he went unconscious.” I am hammering the button on the elevator over and over again. The doors can’t open fast enough.

  “Call the farm,” she says.

  “I don’t have the number. It’s in my phone.”

  “Shit!” says Joselyn.

  “I got him,” says the cop. He’s talking into a handheld radio from his belt. “He’s in the building. He’s on his way.”

  “Are you sure?” says Joselyn to me. “Maybe Herman doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  I shake my head. “He wrote it out.”

  “It’s not too late,” says Joselyn. “It would take Liquida a while to get there.”

  “Not if he left yesterday.”

  “Oh, God!”

  A second later the elevator doors open. Just as I’m about to jump in, Thorpe steps out. “What’s going on?”

  The abrupt motion startled Sarah. She saw him flash in front of her. The evil in his eyes caused the blood to drain from her head. The fleeting electric impulse of having flushed some homeless vagabond living along the creek instantly evaporated. In the split second before they collided, Sarah knew she was in trouble.

  She reached up with both hands toward his shoulders, trying to ward off the collision as she screamed, but it was too late. His clenched hand came up fast from underneath, catching her low in the abdomen, driving powerfully up into her stomach. The blow collapsed her diaphragm, forcing the air from her lungs.

  The impact of his punch stopped her forward motion in midstride. He pushed again, another shot, jammed up under her ribs, leaving her feet to grapple for traction in the soft mud along the edge of the water. Sarah stepped back with one foot, turned it on a rock, and fell backward into the creek.

  Chapter Seven

  The instant the blade went in, Liquida knew something was wrong. The sharp point hit a hard surface as if it had glanced off a bone. It penetrated maybe two or three inches before the blade stuck as if it were caught in a vise. He pulled back and the stiletto moved as if it were free, but it wouldn’t come out.

  His upper body was up against the girl’s. He couldn’t look down to see the blade. He was in too close.

  Instinct flexed his right arm in the sling as he tried to reach out to hold her in place so he could force the stiletto up into her body. But the burning pain under his arm reminded him not to do that. He punched again with the handle, this time harder.

  The girl stepped away from him, lost her footing, and tumbled backward into the creek. As she fell she ripped the stiletto from Liquida’s grip, taking it with her into the water.

  Liquida took one faltering step toward her when he heard barking in the distance.

  The girl was crawling on her hands and knees in the water, whether wounded or stunned he couldn’t tell.

  He retreated a few steps up the embankment so he could see over the top. Two hundred yards away the Doberman was coming this way across the open field, devouring the ground ahead of him like a jet on afterburners. He must have heard the girl’s scream. Puppy or not, he had sharp teeth.

  Liquida looked back at Sarah Madriani. She was lying dazed in the water. She was defenseless. A couple of shots with a heavy rock and he could crack her skull like a walnut.

  By the time Liquida looked back, the Doberman had closed half the distance to their location on the creek. He considered the equation for a nanosecond, then turned on his heels and ran.

  I catch Thorpe as he steps out of the hospital elevator. I tell him about Herman’s message that Liquida knows the location of the farm and that Sarah is there. Before I am finished, Thorpe has his cell phone out.

  “Do you know the area code for the farm?” he asks.

  I give it to him. “But the number’s unlisted.”

  “Relax.” He punches in the area code and the number for information. “What’s your brother-in-law’s name?”

  I tell him and give him the rural mailing address. In less than a minute, Thorpe has a supervisor on the line. He identifies himself and a few seconds later has the number at the farm. He dials it.

  “Hello, is Sarah Madriani there? My name is Zeb Thorpe. I’m with the FBI.”

  He listens for a moment. “Is she all right? Why can’t she come to the phone?” He lifts the phone away from his ear for a second. “What’s Hinds’s first name again?”

  “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 dista
nce. 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

  Lawrence 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.