Trader of secrets pm-12

by Steve Martini

  He got in line; took off his shoes, watch, and belt; and emptied his pockets into one of the plastic trays. He pushed the tray along with his overnight bag toward the conveyor belt and waited his turn.

  A few seconds later, the tray and the bag disappeared into the metal box housing the scanner. Liquida was directed to pass through the metal detector. He held his breath and walked through. A minute later he had his shoes on, his belt through the loops in his pants, with the bag over his left arm headed for the gate.

  Plumbers use lead tape under hose clamps to tamp down vibration where it’s a problem. Golfers and tennis pros paste the stuff to their rackets and club heads to weigh them down and straighten out their swing. Liquida applied his lead tape to the area under his arm to prevent the surgical staples from tripping the alarm on the TSA metal detector. If they wanded his back and it buzzed, they would pat him down. And when they felt the staples and the puffed-up wound, they would invite him into the little room and tell him to take off his shirt. Even TSA staff could recognize a knife wound once they saw it.

  Liquida caught his flight to Atlanta, where he scanned the departure boards inside the security area for the quickest exit out of the country, somewhere safe. He was burning money like kerosene. Soon he would have to start using stolen credit cards, something Liquida never liked to do. It only heightened the risk of detection.

  He used his last set of foreign travel documents, a Spanish passport that was tucked away in the lining of his overnight bag. He purchased a ticket and boarded a Delta flight for the United Arab Emirates. It was a long trip, the longest of his life, at least in terms of stress and anxiety. He was under the gun of the FBI. Liquida didn’t relax entirely until he landed and made his way through customs and into a taxi outside the airport in Dubai.

  He had the driver take him to the Royal Meridien Beach Resort, where he booked a room and took up residence as a vacationing Iberian businessman. The place was expensive, more than Liquida wanted to spend, especially now. But he had stayed there before, in better times when he was financially flush, and he knew the place. On the run Liquida had learned that there is an element of safety in surrounding yourself with the rich. A foreign national staying in a flophouse always drew more attention from the local authorities, especially in a conservative country like the Emirates. They were certainly more likely to roust you and ask questions. That was the one thing Liquida didn’t want.

  The Royal Meridien and its grounds were the size of a small city. It was an easy setting in which to remain anonymous. The resort was crowded with wealthy tourists-Europeans, Asians, and Arabs-all cloistered in their own separate tribes lounging around the pools.

  The next morning Liquida walked to a small convenience store just outside the resort. He purchased a dozen Etisalat prepaid cellular SIM cards from the clerk. Then he returned to the resort and found a quiet area near the edge of one of the pools. He ordered a drink from the wandering waitress and went to work.

  Using a four-band unlocked cell phone and the stack of SIM cards, Liquida began collecting his messages.

  Timing himself with the sweep second hand on his watch, he ended each call at three minutes on the dot whether he was finished collecting his messages or not. The Americans had a nasty way of using their listening posts in the sky to turn cell calls into party lines. After three minutes, he would remove the SIM card from the phone and grind it under the leg of the metal chair he was sitting on. When he was satisfied that he had destroyed the card’s miniature circuitry on the abrasive concrete of the pool deck, he would pick up the card, smudge any prints that might be on it, and drop it into a trash can just behind his chair. He would then slip a new SIM card representing a new telephone number into the phone and pick up where he left off.

  It was a laborious process, but Liquida was paranoid when it came to the perils of government and the seductions of technology. Combine the two and get a good glimpse of hell. Too many of his friends were either dead or sitting out their lives in maximum-security dungeons, casualties of the digital disease.

  Having won the Cold War and toppled the Evil Empire, the American government had now become what it had destroyed. Its political class was busy using technology to digitize its citizens into slavery. There was nowhere left for people to hide. Babies were registered at birth and given Social Security numbers like cattle with ear notches so that power-hungry politicians could track them throughout their lives and harness them as taxing units. The government was everywhere, listening to private telephone conversations, reading people’s mail and e-mail, watching them through cameras built into their laptops. They could turn on your cell phone and use it like an undercover wire to listen in on private conversations, all of this while they tracked you with GPS and filmed you from cameras on every light pole. In less than ten years, the United States, the leader of the free world, had become a prison without walls. Liquida was starting to feel like everybody else. He wanted the government off his back. The critics were right. They were killing the economy. In a world like this, how could any small businessman, someone like Liquida, make a decent living?

  Liquida was of the old school, the world of the Unabomber and Osama bin Laden. There was a lot to be said for a cave in the mountains or a shack in the forest where lighting was by candles and conversation consisted of an occasional grunt, where messages were written on rice paper so the words could be quickly eaten when you were finished reading.

  He worked the small cell phone, crushing and replacing SIM cards as he went, always keeping one eye on his watch. He rang up several message services, one in Spain, another in the States, one in Thailand, and a fourth one in Rio, in Brazil. He listened intently to his messages while he jotted down notes in a small pocket pad.

  When he was finished, Liquida sat up straight, adjusted his dark glasses, and sipped a little of the mojito from the tall glass on the table in front of him. He set the glass down and slowly licked his lips, savoring the flavor of the rum as he studied the last entry in the small notepad.

  It was a message from Bruno Croleva, a Chechen who in the last two years had risen in Liquida’s eyes to become his favorite rainmaker.

  Business from Bruno had lifted him from the squalor of Tijuana and the limited possibilities of the cartels, where retirement usually came in the form of a bullet.

  Bruno had connections with Islamic militants as well as other injured and angry ethnic and religious groups. These were people highly committed to killing their enemies, which at any given time might include half the world’s population, mostly Westerners.

  The clients were well funded and paid far more than the chump change offered by the cartels. Prices of a good assassination in Mexico had been driven to rock bottom by an army of itchy-fingered teenagers possessing no proper sense of values. Best of all, the foot soldiers used by Bruno’s clients were willing to die for their beliefs. This was an extremely efficient arrangement. It left many fewer tongues to wag when the job was done. Liquida didn’t have to dirty his own blade arranging for the sounds of silence. These were his kinds of people.

  According to the message, there was forty thousand euros in cash in a drop box belonging to Liquida, delivered there by Bruno’s courier as final payment for a job Liquida had completed several months earlier.

  Liquida had almost forgotten about it. He had given up on the money, thinking he would never see it. He assumed that Bruno was angry with him and that he might never hear from the man again. The last two ventures had not gone well, though it was not for want of trying on Liquida’s part.

  Bruno was now paying up. What’s more, according to the message, he was offering Liquida another job and dangling a very tempting commission. The details, along with the money, were in the drop box.

  For Liquida the money couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. He was low on cash and he needed the work. You might have thought that Liquida would be happy, but he wasn’t. His first response was caution.

  Ordinarily he would have called t
he courier service and made arrangements to have the stuff in the box collected and delivered by giving them a temporary forwarding address, someplace where Liquida could move in and out quickly and safely.

  But things were now much more complicated. The U.S. government had put a price on his head. Liquida had seen it earlier that morning, using one of the guest computers in the hotel lobby to check the FBI’s website. It was something he did on a frequent basis. It wasn’t there yesterday. But this morning he turned up, not on their most wanted fugitive list, but instead, on their terrorist site. There was no picture or sketch, at least not yet. But they were offering two million dollars for tips that would lead authorities to a man known only under the alias of “Muerte Liquida.” There was other information, some of it accurate and some of it not. That was the thing about government; they had a hard time getting things right. If Liquida could have figured a way to stay safe and collect on the reward, for that kind of money, he might have called in a tip or two himself.

  Now he had to worry about Bruno. In Liquida’s line of work, two million dollars could turn an associate into beef on the hoof in less time than it took to say the word tip.

  His natural paranoia was telling him that the stuff in the drop box could be a trap. He looked at the date on the message. It was two days old. Unless Bruno somehow knew about the reward before it was posted on the FBI’s site, he could not have known about it when he sent the message. In which case it might not be a trap at all. Or else

  … Liquida’s mind searched for the hook and its jagged barb.

  What if the message wasn’t from Bruno at all? What if the FBI had somehow found the box? Liquida had been using the drop box for about seven months. That was too long. It was time to get a new one, to find a fresh location. But it was too late to think about that now. If the message was real, then the money was there. But if the FBI knew about the box, they could know about the messaging service as well. They might be using the box as bait.

  Chapter Ten

  How many times do I have to tell you? I just want to go home,” said Raji. “This is not going to work. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It will work if you help us,” said Bruno.

  “I already told you, no. I made a mistake. I admit that. I should never have come to Paris.”

  “It’s too late for that,” said Leffort. “There’s no way back. They already know. The authorities will be looking for both of us by now.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Raji.

  “Unfortunately, that is no longer possible.” Bruno Croleva was an equal opportunity merchant of death. There was no cause he would not fuel with guns or munitions. He was totally nonpartisan in the same way politicians are who take donations from all sides on every issue. Bruno was in it for the money. Warm bodies or cold steel, it didn’t matter to Bruno. If there was a profit to be made, he would deliver it.

  “You know what I think?” said Bruno.

  Raji sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “I think you are a little homesick, is all. Maybe you have someone waiting for you back there. A nice woman perhaps?” Bruno wrinkled an eyebrow at him with the delivery of this diagnosis.

  Raji looked up at him and winced, as if to tell Bruno that he had an air bubble trapped somewhere between his ears. “No. You’re wrong.” Raji shook his head.

  “No need to be embarrassed.” Croleva fancied himself a mind reader, a delusion fostered by the fact that most people were sufficiently terrified of him that any semicivil suggestion from Bruno was generally followed by the word yes.

  Larry Leffort sat on the couch against the far wall in Raji’s Paris hotel room. He knew that playing twenty questions with Bruno could end with piano wire being used to make something other than musical notes.

  “Listen to me,” said Raji. “You don’t understand.”

  Bruno’s forced smile compressed the furrows above his eyebrows. The no-man’s-land between there and the shiny bald dome up top looked like a crooked plowed field. “Tell me. What is it that bothers you? Why do you want to go back?”

  “I just want to go home, that’s all.”

  “There is nothing there for you,” said Bruno.

  “I want my life back. Can’t you get that through your head?” Raji was afflicted more by anger than fear at the moment. “I know that coming here was a mistake. We all make mistakes. I’m sorry if I caused you problems. But now I just want to go home. That’s all there is to it. Understand?” Raji looked up at Bruno, all three hundred and sixty pounds of him and gave the man an annoyed expression, like what part of no don’t you understand.

  “I knew it,” said Bruno. “It is a woman. I can see it in your eyes. You miss her. You are in love. Admit it. Dat’s only natural. Young man like you. But soon you will be a rich man. You must learn to cast your net into the open sea, where there are many fish.” Having divined the problem, Bruno’s brain didn’t allow for conflicting messages even from the patient. “You want a woman, I get you one. Beautiful woman. No problem.”

  “I doubt he’s ever been with a girl,” said Leffort.

  “Fine. You want a boy, I get you…”

  “No!!!” Raji glared up at Bruno and shouted. “You’re not listening.”

  “OK, OK. You want more than one woman? I can do that.”

  Raji just sat on the bed, looking up at the ceiling and shaking his head.

  “How many can you get?” asked Leffort. “Women, I mean.” Leffort knew there had to be piercing and tattoo parlors in Paris. Just think what he was missing.

  Bruno shot him a harsh glance that crossed the room like a bolt of lightning. The two Americans were driving him crazy. He couldn’t wait for Liquida to arrive so the Mexican could take them off his hands.

  “You, outside!” Bruno gestured to Leffort. “You stay here. I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Raji.

  Croleva and Leffort stepped from the room into the hallway outside. Bruno said something in Russian to the man seated in the chair at the end of the hall. They had already bolted the window in Raji’s room closed so that he couldn’t crawl out on the ledge and try to escape.

  Leffort and Bruno walked a short distance down the hall, out of earshot of Bruno’s thug sitting in the chair.

  “We are going to have to put something in his food to sedate him,” said Bruno.

  “You think that’s necessary?” said Leffort.

  “Yes. And you will have to keep an eye on him.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you are his friend. He trusts you.”

  “Right,” said Leffort.

  “And because, if you had done your job, you would already have the rest of the materials, in which case we wouldn’t need him any longer.” Bruno was talking about the final targeting programs. “You are certain that he has them?” Croleva watched Leffort’s face closely as he asked the question.

  “Yes. Absolutely. He has them. I know it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he told me. And because he ran the programs and plugged in the targeting data for a computer simulation the day before we left. And it worked.”

  Bruno studied Leffort’s eyes for any hint of deception.

  “He completed the programs three weeks ago.” Leffort couldn’t afford to show even the slightest equivocation on this. If Bruno thought for a moment that Raji didn’t have the final targeting software, he would kill both of them now and make whatever excuses were necessary to his clients. Without that software the rest of the project materials were worthless, and both Leffort and Bruno knew it.

  “You say he loaded them into a computer for the simulation? Then why couldn’t you get them from the computer?”

  “Because he deleted the software the moment the test was done. He’s no fool,” said Leffort.

  “Then where are they? We have been through his luggage. They are not there. At least not that we could see. You have checked his
working papers and you say they are not there. I have had my people scan everything from his laptop. There is nothing there. So maybe he left the programs behind. That could be the reason he wants to go home. He knows he cannot deliver when the time comes.”

  “No, he either has them or he has access to them at some remote location online,” said Leffort. “He would never have gotten on that plane otherwise. I’m sure of that.”

  “So where are they?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” said Leffort.

  “You had better,” said Bruno. “I cannot allow you to leave Paris until I am certain that you have them. Do you understand?”

  Leffort nodded.

  Liquida had two more tasks to complete before leaving Dubai. The first was done using one of the hotel’s guest computers. He typed up an anonymous letter addressed to the U.S. Embassy in Dubai. It was one of Liquida’s “white-glove specials,” for he always wore gloves when he printed them out. Fingerprints on the paper were a no-no. It was an anonymous tip to law enforcement. He used them occasionally to take down competitors or to drop sand in the gears of a client who failed to pay. He sealed the letter in a blank envelope and delivered it to a private courier service in downtown Dubai. He paid for the delivery in cash, used a pseudonym to set up the account, and left firm instructions that the letter was to be held in their offices until he called. At that time he would give them the delivery address. Liquida didn’t want to give them the address now in case they screwed up and delivered it early, in which case it would be his ass in the flames.

  The second task was more painful. Back at the hotel, Liquida downed some of the pain medications given to him by the doctor in D.C. He used the sharp point of one of the stilettos to spread the ends of each of the thirteen surgical staples. Then, gritting his teeth, he plucked them out one by one from the pursed-up wound under his right arm. Liquida found it difficult maneuvering the sharp point of the blade with his left hand. He stopped periodically to steady himself and to dab the bleeding pinholes around the wound with tissue from a dispenser on the bathroom counter.