Trader of secrets pm-12

by Steve Martini

  Behind us the landscape erupts in occasional sharp jutting hillsides, an indication that maybe this is volcano country. Ahead of us the lay of the land is low and flat for as far as I can see, and the sky has that kind of ethereal edge to it that makes me wonder if it might be kissing the sea. If I had to guess, I would say we are moving toward water, a shoreline somewhere off in the distance.

  “How much longer?” I ask.

  “He says maybe ten minutes,” says Harry.

  I look at my watch. At the airport I had changed the time to Bangkok time. It’s just after one in the afternoon. I decide to rouse myself so that I can move enough at least to get to the room.

  “What time is it back home?” says Harry.

  “I don’t have the slightest,” I tell him. My leaden brain is not up to those kinds of calculations, not at the moment anyway. Joselyn is sprawled across the backseat, her head on my lap. She is out cold. I am wondering if I can wake her or if we’re going to have to roll her inside with the luggage.

  Within minutes the traffic begins to thicken. Occasional small motorcycles, some of them spouting sidecars mounted with smoking braziers, begin to propagate along the sides of the road. Soon there is a growing herd of two- and three-wheeled traffic. Like a line of motorized wildebeest they hug the edges of the road with the riders bent over the handlebars as the cars and trucks speed past them using the main traffic lanes. As we draw closer to civilization I notice that some of the bikes are carrying four and five passengers, a few of them with small children clutching the handlebars and standing up front between their momma’s knees. None of them are wearing helmets. It looks like the motorbike equivalent of the family minivan.

  Doing sixty miles an hour you’d have trouble slipping a playing card between the grip on the handlebars on some of the bikes and the side of our car. How our driver is missing them is a mystery.

  “Damn!” says Harry. “This could be an ambulance chaser’s paradise.”

  “Maybe they don’t get that much for an arm or a leg off over here,” I tell him.

  “You think?” says Harry.

  “Not everybody has a jackpot tort system like ours. Why do you think all of our manufacturing jobs moved over here twenty years ago?”

  “I figured that was because of the thirty-cent-a-day minimum wage.”

  “That too,” I tell him.

  “Pretty soon I suppose the doctors will figure out a way to do intercontinental robotic surgery. Then we won’t be able to reach them anymore. And the way Washington wants to tax the rich, they’ll all be picking up and moving over here. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left to sue. So why should we bother going home?” says Harry.

  “I don’t know. You got me.”

  We pass under a high gold arch that spans the road. A short distance farther on, the road swings to the left. Here there are multiple lanes in each direction separated by a wide grass-covered median strip. We travel on this road for a few miles, moving at high speed. There are commercial buildings and businesses on both sides of the road, and traffic is starting to get heavy. It looks as if we’re getting close to the center of town.

  We come to a stoplight. The driver maneuvers into the far right lane, getting ready to cross traffic and make a turn. The light turns green; we go a couple of blocks and find ourselves stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The sidewalks here are crowded with pedestrians, vendors selling fruit, fish, chicken, anything you can eat from the sidecars of parked bikes. Now the slower two-wheel motorbikes get the upper hand as they stream between the stopped cars. They jump to the front of the line at each stoplight.

  “How much longer?” says Harry.

  “Not far. Maybe ten minute.”

  “That’s what you said a half hour ago,” says Harry.

  “You give tip?” says the driver.

  “I give tip if we get there today,” says Harry.

  The driver maneuvers into the left lane and a few feet farther up he turns into a narrow alley and starts to move. We twist through a maze of backstreets, dodging kids and dogs, Asian women with pushcarts selling food, and potbellied white men in tank tops and T-shirts hanging out in the beer bars, some of them tattooed like scrimshaw.

  A few more minutes and two more turns and we find ourselves on a broad four-lane one-way street with shops and businesses on both sides. Here the traffic is heavy once more. There are vendors all along the street and beer bars on every corner. “Seccon Road,” says the driver. “Marriott.” He gestures with his head up the street.

  Harry turns to glance at me from the front seat. I’m looking out the window to see if I can catch any street numbers. According to the note, the office for “Waters of Death” is somewhere along Second Road.

  “I don’t see any numbers,” I tell him.

  “Don’t worry about it. We can check with the front desk when we get to the hotel. Show them the address. I’m sure they can tell us where it is,” says Harry. “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna get some sleep before I go anywhere.”

  I look at my watch. “It’s a quarter to two. Hope to hell our rooms are ready.”

  “They better be,” says Harry. “Otherwise I’m gonna crawl over the counter and kill the clerk.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Liquida sat in a chair near the window of his room on the third story of the small hotel and listened to the prattle of motorbike engines, watching the traffic as it streamed by on Second Road.

  He had arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, three days ago and had been planted in the city of Pattaya ever since.

  He settled into the hotel because of its location. For a few extra Thai baht, he was able to get a room with a good view of the building across the street. It was the place where the lockbox was located.

  The old charm of the block-long cream-colored colonial facade with its small curved balconies and masonry balustrades had become buried behind a vast picket of painted metal business signs. These jutted out over the sidewalk in such a bewildering array of sizes, colors, and shapes that it was almost impossible to focus on any single message. A thick tangled vine of black wires and cables meandered across the front of the building until the messy snarl reached over the sidewalk and snared the wooden power poles along the street out in front. The building sported corrugated metal add-ons on the front and the roof, where the penthouse looked like a flattened-out army Quonset hut.

  At ground level the building housed small retail shops, restaurants, and a grab bag of other businesses, some of them open air, others sealed behind the comfort of air-conditioned walls. On the sidewalk out near the curb, street vendors reduced the normally broad walkway to a narrow path, setting up business under canvas awnings or sheets of plastic to peddle their wares.

  Through all of this confusion, Liquida’s attention was riveted on a single green-painted wooden door. It was situated across the street about half a block south of the window in his room.

  The green door was located between a Pakistani tailor shop and a small pharmacy. It seemed almost invisible set against the harried sea of commerce taking place on the sidewalk in front of it.

  But every once in a while someone would either come or go, entering or leaving the building through the green wooden door. Whenever they did, Liquida would use his field glasses to study them closely. He looked at their faces to see if they were Asian or if they looked Caucasian, what the Thais called farang — foreigners. If they were leaving the building, he watched to see if they talked to anyone out on the street. He examined them for bulges on their ankles, heavy fanny packs on their sides, or coiled wires growing out of their ears.

  He had been doing this for two days. So far he had seen nothing unusual. There were no obvious signs of surveillance. Which only meant that if they were doing it, they were doing a good job. And, of course, the whole point of surveillance was not to be seen.

  Once we got up, got dressed, and got out, it took Harry, Joselyn, and me only a few minutes to find the right building. The concierge at the Mar
riott was able to give us some pretty fair directions and by 3:30 we found the place.

  It wasn’t an office building in the sense that I had envisioned. There was no main entrance with double glass doors and street numbers over the top. From the outside it looked as if the upper three stories could have been either apartments, condos, or commercial office space. Across the front of the building, French doors opened onto small balconies. But from where we stood about a block to the south on the other side of the street, it was impossible to tell what kind of furnishings might be inside.

  After watching for several minutes and by process of elimination, we concluded that the way in had to be a single door tucked away between two stores on the ground level.

  “Unless they put the main entrance in the back of the building,” says Harry.

  “Why would they do that?” asks Joselyn.

  “Look at the place; they’ve tacked on everything else, why not that?” says Harry.

  The privacy of the single lonely door unnerved us a bit. There was no way to tell what might lie beyond it without going in.

  “There could be security,” says Harry.

  “Or worse,” says Joselyn.

  “Or it could be locked,” I tell them. “So what do you think? Should we try it?”

  Beyond the green portal, up on the second floor, was another wooden door, this one with a translucent glass panel on top. There was no lettering or name on the glass other than the number 208.

  Liquida had seen the inside of the office only one time, the day he first established the account with the company known as TSCC Ltd. Some people used it as a place to store business records or other private papers that for one reason or another they didn’t want to keep at home or in their office. For others, including Liquida, it was an address of convenience.

  For a reasonable fee, TSCC, like any other private parcel service, would take receipt of packages or letters addressed to clients and hold them in a locked box or, in this case, the steel drawer of a filing cabinet assigned to the client. Unlike other parcel services, TSCC distinguished itself by not being particularly scrupulous in checking to see whether customs declarations and clearance documents accompanied packages coming in from abroad. This was particularly true when an item was hand-delivered by special messengers, otherwise known as mules.

  The company’s fee schedule also offered additional services, including use of its automated voice-mail system. This allowed gift givers and recipients to leave messages for one another; a message that a present was on the way and a verbal thank-you from the happy beneficiary were often well received. Clients and their friends were usually careful to employ obscure terms when communicating their largesse or happiness in these matters.

  Best of all, TSCC maintained its own courier service to forward items on to those clients who, for reasons of survival, preferred not to pick up their own mail. For this purpose, the company maintained a complete stable of global mules able to travel to the ends of the earth to deliver private parcels. You could get overnight service to your cave in Afghanistan if you wanted it. Depending on the paranoia of the client, TSCC’s couriers were also adept at sleight of hand, magic acts, and games of chance, this to entertain any government workers who might be watching for the handoff at the time of delivery. They could play “package, package, who has the package” all over the New York subway system if you had the time, inclination, and money to pay for it.

  Liquida had a key to the office as well as the locked cabinet drawer inside. But he was never stupid enough to use them, not in his line of work. He always used the forwarding courier service, and he never had anything delivered to the same place twice.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Herb Llewellyn generally had a pretty good handle on the science of weapons systems. As head of the FBI’s WMD Directorate, an office created after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, Llewellyn had become Thorpe’s go-to guy whenever an investigation involved questions of science or technology.

  The problem this time was that Llewellyn had run into a wall erected by political and policy operatives in the White House, and neither he nor Thorpe knew why.

  “Nothing,” said Llewellyn. “I can’t get a thing out of anybody at NSA or the Pentagon. People who usually talk to me, the minute they find out why I’m calling, are no longer taking my calls. Suddenly I’m Typhoid Mary. The two who did talk told me they were out of the loop. One of them, a fellow I used to work with, warned me not to ask too many questions.”

  “Did he say why?” Thorpe sat behind the desk in his office hoping for answers.

  “He wouldn’t talk on the phone. We met for a drink after work. He claims he doesn’t know anything, only that the strings on this thing are held so high that nobody below the level of the Joint Chiefs has a clue as to what’s going on. He warned me to be careful. According to him, partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge on this one could be dangerous.”

  “In what way?” asked Thorpe.

  “Whether he meant physical as in dead or just a career killer wasn’t entirely clear. But he warned me off and told me not to call him again. Not on anything having to do with the two missing NASA scientists, anyway.”

  “So they got the lid on tight,” said Thorpe.

  “All over town.”

  “So how are we supposed to find these guys? Unless we have some idea what they were working on, we don’t even know who the opposition is,” said Thorpe. “They could turn up in Moscow or Beijing on the morning news, the latest defectors from the land of liberty, and we’d be the last to find out.”

  “I know.”

  Thorpe turned in his chair, opened the top drawer to his desk, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out and lit up.

  “I thought you quit,” said Llewellyn.

  “I did. Tell it to the president.” The building was off-limits to smokers. Thorpe used the open drawer as an ashtray. “Anything on the background for our two missing scientists?”

  “One tantalizing tidbit maybe. Nothing we can really get our teeth into.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One of them, Raji Fareed, was born in Tehran. He came to this country with his parents as a kid, age eleven. His father was Iranian, deceased. Died of a heart attack about ten years ago. The mother is Jewish.”

  “That must have been difficult,” said Thorpe.

  “Difficult while the shah was in power, impossible after he fell,” said Llewellyn. “After the revolution, the family escaped. His father was a functionary in the government, nothing major, but apparently enough to get political asylum from the State Department.”

  Thorpe blew a smoke ring and picked a speck of tobacco from his tongue with his fingernail. “You think the kid’s a throwback?”

  “It’s possible,” said Llewellyn. “He could have been radicalized locally. Or he could be a sleeper, though I doubt it.”

  “Helping out the mother country,” said Thorpe. “The father could have poisoned him before he died.”

  “It’s a possibility. I’ve got the L.A. field office checking it out, seeing if Fareed hung out at the local mosque, who his friends were. State Department is looking to see if they can find any relatives in Iran that he might have been in contact with.”

  “Good,” said Thorpe. “Anything else?”

  “We know that the two men boarded the plane to Paris. They cleared French immigration and customs, but they never showed up at their hotel. It’s possible they may have met with foul play, but there’s no evidence of it. They simply vanished.”

  “Any indication at all as to what they were working on?” said Thorpe.

  “That’s a deep dark hole,” said Llewellyn. “Personnel records are sealed. NASA won’t give them to us. They’re under executive seal. Orders from the White House. What we know is that the two men…” Llewellyn looked at his notes. “Raji Fareed and Lawrence Leffort worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena in California. The people at the lab aren’t talking.”
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br />   “Great,” said Thorpe. “That helps.”

  “All they would tell us is that the Iranian, Fareed, was employed as a software engineer. The other one, Leffort, holds a degree in astrophysics. Ph. D. from MIT, bright guy. He’s listed as a principal research scientist by NASA, but as to what programs, we don’t know. The last public information was eleven years ago. He was involved in a short-term project having to do with particle physics, short-impulse force fields.”

  “In English,” said Thorpe.

  “Fringe science,” said Llewellyn. “Star Trek stuff. Tractor beams and teleportation theories. Credible scientists generally steer clear of it. You get a bad reputation among your peers if you spend too much time trying to figure out how to transport yourself from a phone booth in Pasadena to the moon.”

  “That’s what he was doing?” said Thorpe.

  “No. They probably had him in a holding pattern, paying him from funds on the particle physics project until they could work out funding for the mystery project they recruited him for. There’s a million ways to hide that money-black box projects, CIA, military budgets, DARPA, defense research projects. You can forget trying to trace any of that. You want my guess as to what he’s doing now, off the top of my head, given his background, the high level of classification, I’d say rail guns, lasers, something geared to star wars,” said Llewellyn. “Antiballistic missile systems. God only knows what’s going on there.”

  “I wish he could tell us,” said Thorpe. He made a note.

  “NASA moved Leffort out of the particle physics project early on, before it ran out of money. Congress cut it off after pouring eighty million down a rat hole.”

  “Who says they’re stupid,” said Thorpe. “Maybe this Leffort could find some way to teleport Congress to the moon. Now that would be worth a grant. I’d give him my pension. Anything else?”