Trader of secrets pm-12

by Steve Martini

  “I don’t know,” Sarah lied. “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because if you don’t, a lot of people may die. If we’re right and your government has lost control of Project Thor, that means that by now the items in question are probably in the hands of another government. If so, there is a good chance that Project Thor will be harnessed and turned against either the United States, Israel, or both. If it works, it has the potential to kill millions of people. If it doesn’t work, if they get it wrong, it could wipe out life on the planet.”

  “What are you talking about? What is this thing?”

  “Your father doesn’t have a clue as to what he’s gotten himself involved in. You have to trust me. I need to know where he is.”

  “Son, in order for that to happen, you’re gonna need to take us into your confidence.” The baritone voice came from the shadows in the hallway. Herman stepped out into the muted light of the entry. “The last time I looked, trust was a two-way street.” Apparently he had been standing there for a while, dressed in a robe and a pair of slippers. “Lady asked you a question. You want information. So do we. What exactly is this thing? This Project Thor?”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The operator answers one question for us. There are no other airports south of Playa del Carmen along the Mexican coast, nothing north of Belize. According to him, there are some small landing strips in the jungle, but he doesn’t recommend going near any of them except in the most dire emergency. He is sure that some of them are used to run drugs up from South and Central America-what he calls “the Coca Highway.”

  “Wonderful! How about flying me over Coba?” I ask him.

  “I could, I suppose,” he says. “But why would you want to go there? You can get much better pictures along the beaches. I can fly you over Tulum and you take some magnificent photos of the temple above the beach,” he tells me. “If we get lucky, you see porpoise, maybe a whale or two.”

  “No, I want to see Coba,” I tell him. “I’m willing to pay.”

  “How much?” He gets a glint in his eye. The eternal question.

  His usual flight along the coast above the beaches is ninety-nine dollars for twenty-five minutes. He pulls out a flight chart of the area, and we look at it together. The question for me is whether the little bird with two of us on board has enough range to get to Coba and back. He says it does, but he can’t guarantee how much time we would have in the air over Coba once we get there.

  “That looks like more than forty miles each way.” He takes out a pair of calipers and measures the distance. “Forty-three to be exact,” he says. “Eighty-six miles round-trip. That’s a lot. Even with extra fuel, I would not be able to give you more than ten minutes over the area.”

  “That’s OK.”

  “Figure two hours’ flying time. For that I would need at least five hundred dollars,” he says.

  I whistle. “That’s pretty steep.”

  “If I have motor problems above the beach, I can always land on the hard sand along the water. Over the jungle is another matter,” he says. “I am putting my airplane at risk. That’s the best I can do. Take it or leave it.”

  “Will you take a credit card?”

  “Visa?”

  I nod.

  “From an American bank?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can, but there will be a five percent service charge,” he says.

  I agree to the terms before he raises the price even more.

  He takes my credit card and hands it to the girl sitting in the office so that she can call and get the charges approved.

  He goes to gas up the plane while I talk with Harry and Joselyn out by the car.

  “You’re really gonna go up in that thing?” Harry is looking over the top of his sunglasses at the flimsy ultralight parked on the apron along the edge of the runway.

  “I thought you were going,” I tell him.

  “I might take a bullet for you, but I’m not going near that.”

  “You think it’s safe?” says Joselyn.

  “I don’t know. I’m told they leave divers behind in the ocean all the time down here. They forget to count heads,” I tell her.

  “Let’s hope the pilot remembers you’re behind him,” says Harry.

  “I won’t have to worry if Visa has cut us off,” I tell him. “Of course, we’ll be sleeping in the jungle and bathing in a cenote with the gators.”

  Joselyn shivers and hands me her camera. “Don’t talk like that. Here. It isn’t the best, but it’ll work. Just point and shoot,” she says. “If you see anything that you think looks like the description in those notes, take some pictures.”

  The tiny camera is only ten megapixels with a three power magnification on the lens, but Joselyn tells me that she can download the photos to her computer and doctor them from there. If we’re lucky, we might get enough detail to see what is happening on the ground.

  Before I know it, the Mexican pilot is back with a receipt for me to sign and a thin plastic helmet that looks like it’s more for show than anything else. He hands me some cotton.

  I look at him.

  “For your ears,” he says. “It’s very loud.”

  He is right. I feel as if I am strapped onto his back with a screaming lawn mower engine chasing me down the runway. The push propeller whips the air two feet behind me as the tricycle landing gears tries twice to leave the ground only to come back down hard, each time at an angle across the runway. It jars my lower back. On the third attempt, the front wheel lifts off followed by the other two, and we are airborne.

  We climb slowly with the small engine straining behind me. The pilot noses into the onshore breeze coming in off the ocean. The feeling of being in the air with a flapping fabric wing overhead and nothing below me except my feet on a metal rung is not something I would recommend to the nervous flier.

  For the first five minutes we follow the coast south as we gain altitude. The houses of Playa del Carmen and the rolling whitecaps piling up on the beaches below take on a miniature appearance as we climb. We clear the town to the south, and after a couple more minutes the pilot dips his right wing. We cross over the highway and head southwest out over the jungle.

  He is right about one thing. The ground below us looks ominous if for any reason we have to put down. Except for the occasional blue cenotes and the dull gray marshland around them, the blanket of green beneath us is nearly unbroken. The only human habitations and signs of life appear to be along the highway. The few sparse roads leading into the interior of the jungle go no more than a few thousand feet before they dead-end. After that there is nothing but jungle for as far as I can see.

  We fly for almost twenty minutes with nothing until I see a road that looks unpaved winding below us. Trekking its way through the bush, it goes a few miles and ends. What it is doing there I haven’t a clue. From this altitude, no more than maybe five or six hundred feet, there are no signs of life on or near the dirt track. I suppose small houses, concrete mud huts, could be tucked away under the trees along the edge of the road, but if they are I can’t see them.

  We fly on farther another ten minutes when I see a paved road in the distance. The pilot leans his head back toward me and yells above the screaming engine: “ Es the Tulum-to-Coba highway.”

  I nod. I wonder how far we are from Coba.

  He pushes the little plane forward until it crosses the ribbon of pavement below us. I watch as our winged shadow follows the road west.

  I begin scanning the green velvet jungle below, looking for anything that might qualify as a large facility with an antenna array. There is nothing, only a few bald areas where the jungle has been scraped clear for structures that are no longer there, mostly right along the highway. There are a few houses and ramshackle buildings, small settlements.

  A few miles farther on I start to see them: the line of cellular towers reaching out into the distance casting their tall shadows over the top of the green canopy, what I remembered from my
last trip along the two-lane highway from Coba.

  “You see the lake in the distance?” he yells back at me. “That is Coba. We are almost there. I will do a flyover. You want to take some pictures?”

  I nod. I have the little camera in my hand, but so far nothing to shoot.

  He begins to descend a little. I tell him no, to maintain altitude. This way I can see farther into the distance, my eyes straining for any break in the jungle.

  “You scared?” He glances back toward me.

  “No.”

  He notices that I am looking in a different direction. “What are you looking for?” He yells back. “Something special?”

  “I’ll know when I see it,” I tell him. “Have you flown in this area before?” I ask.

  “Not often. A few times,” he tells me. “People who do the digs on the ruins sometimes like to get pictures from the air. That way they know where to dig. You see over there?” He points off to the right. “Those little hills?”

  “Yes.”

  “They are not hills,” he says. “They are Mayan ruins under the jungle. Some perhaps temples or ball courts, maybe palaces. May have been there a thousand years. Covered over by the jungle.”

  “When was the last time you flew here?”

  He shakes his head a little. “I don’t know. Maybe three… four months. I don’t come here often.”

  “I am looking for a place that is supposed to have a large antenna array. You know antennas, like television. Perhaps a big dish. Supposed to be a new facility of some kind here in the jungle.”

  He looks back at me over his shoulder, squinting his eyes. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Tourist,” I tell him.

  “That is no place for turistas, ” he tells me.

  “You know where it is?”

  He nods.

  “Take me there.”

  He shakes his head no.

  “I just need to see where it is,” I tell him.

  He points off to the northwest. As we approach the area over the archaeological park at Coba, he banks to the right and flies for a few seconds until we find ourselves back out over the highway. It crosses an intersection, another paved road going due north. “There are many cenotes there. There used to be a small village. The landowners, the people with homes, have all been driven out. It is the cartels,” he says. “They cleared the jungle and made a landing strip, put up a big metal building of some kind. And what you call plato, umm…” He makes a cup with the open extended fingers and the palm of his right hand. He turns it up toward the sky and holds the flight stick with his other hand.

  “A satellite dish?”

  He nods. “There are three of them. Very big. Bigger than any I have ever seen before. One of them is the size of a large building. It’s no television?” he says.

  “No. We could fly just a little ways up that road,” I tell him, “then we could turn and go toward the coast if you like.”

  He shakes his head. “If I had known what you were looking for, I would not come,” he says. “Why do you want to go there?”

  “I was told about it by someone.”

  “Who?”

  “A man in Paris,” I tell him. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing there?” I ask.

  “No. And I don’t want to find out. Last time I flew over it, it was by mistake. They shot at me from the ground. No small stuff,” he says. “No pistols or rifles. Machine guns spitting out bullets of fire.”

  “Tracers?”

  He nods.

  “Antiaircraft fire.”

  “ Jess. They hit my wing. Punched holes in the fabric. Almost set it on fire. I was lucky to escape. I had to dive down just above the trees. I will not go near there again,” he says.

  “How far up the road?” I ask.

  He shakes his head as he starts the turn toward the coast. “You crazy if you go there,” he says.

  “How far?”

  “Kilometers, maybe twenty, perhaps a little more. Like I say, they forced the people from their homes. There is nothing there now except the big metal building and what you call the antennas. I am told that no one drives up that road any longer unless they are bringing materials or supplies. A man I know went up there in his truck a few months ago. He never came back.”

  “Why doesn’t your government do something?” I ask.

  He just shakes his head. “I don’t ask,” he says. “Sometimes it is best not to know.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Sedrick Fowler was a political party animal, the kind Thorpe detested most. Managing partner of a powerful law firm in Boston and courtier to three presidential administrations, Fowler and his connections in national politics went back forty years.

  Those who knew him well called him Foul behind his back. His religion may have been liberal, but he didn’t slum in the wards with the unwashed masses.

  His law firm had a long list of billionaires and gold-plated corporate clients. Between stints doing good works in government, and for a substantial fee, he could get regulatory agencies to bend and the IRS to genuflect. The mere mention of his name could seal an international trade deal and give your company a generational monopoly on government contracts. The by-product of all this nuclear influence was a radioactive amount of political cash. It fueled the revolving door to power, kept the donkey greased between campaigns, and fed the illusion of the party of the poor, money available for Foul’s friends and benefactors.

  To Thorpe he was just a high-class fixer and bagman. But for the moment, none of that mattered. Fowler was now the gatekeeper, and there was no way to get around him. He was hardwired into the White House as the president’s chief of staff. He had Thorpe on a string like a yo-yo coming and going from meetings, railing at the bureau, and demanding to know why they couldn’t find the two NASA scientists. Now one of them was dead, and Thorpe had questions of his own.

  He had requested this morning’s audience and thought they would be meeting alone. Instead Fowler had invited Henry Janda, a four-star army general and director of the National Security Agency. NSA was the government’s master code breaker. It was their job to gather signals intelligence, to listen in and read the communications of others, and to make sure they weren’t doing the same to us.

  “Have a seat. I don’t have much time. I apologize for the hour, but it was the only time I could build you into my schedule.”

  It was six o’clock in the morning. Much of the West Wing was still dark.

  “I appreciate your seeing me on short notice,” said Thorpe.

  Fowler looked up at Thorpe from behind his big desk. “You know General Janda.”

  “Henry.”

  “Zeb.”

  The two men exchanged tight smiles. The fact that the FBI was out of the information loop on critical details involving Project Thor had strained the relationship between the two agencies.

  “You called the meeting. I assume you have something for us.” Fowler leaned forward in his chair and put his beady eyes on Thorpe.

  “We have a lead. We’re checking it out. We’ll know more in a few hours.”

  “You found Leffort?”

  “Not yet,” said Thorpe. “But we may be getting closer.”

  “Where is he?”

  “If the information pans out, he may be in Mexico,” said Thorpe.

  Fowler leaned back in his chair and shot a glance at General Janda. “What the hell’s he doing there?”

  Janda shook his head.

  “How good is this information?” said Fowler.

  “We think it’s solid. It would help if we knew more,” said Thorpe.

  “Where in Mexico?” Fowler ignored the appeal for information.

  “That’s what we’re working on,” said Thorpe. “In the meantime, it might help a great deal if we knew who the other man was, the one who’s dead. Raji Fareed?”

  The darting look in Fowler’s eyes as he glanced at Janda told Thorpe what he needed to know. This was one of the ite
ms they weren’t talking about.

  “He worked for NASA,” said Fowler.

  “It looks as if he was also working for somebody else,” said Thorpe.

  “What do you mean?” Janda couldn’t resist.

  “It seems that he was keeping notes,” said Thorpe.

  “What did you find?” Fowler nearly came across the desk.

  “We didn’t find anything. Not yet. But someone else did.”

  “Who?”

  “We intercepted some communications.” Thorpe looked at Janda as if to drive home the point; mess on our turf and we’ll crap on yours. “According to the information, your man Fareed was equipped with some fairly sophisticated computer media, a concealed micro flash drive in a pair of glasses. Not something you could whip up yourself. From what we’re told, this device would require the expertise of a pretty sophisticated spy shop, and not the kind you find in your local mall. It works remotely and has enough storage capacity to hold most of the secrets of the Western world, and then some.”

  “Do you know what’s on it?” said Fowler.

  “What was characterized as machine language by the person who found it. Computer software, as well as some notes written in plain English by Fareed indicating very clearly that he was working with someone else, somebody for whom he was writing these notes.”

  “Who?” said Janda.

  “We don’t know,” said Thorpe. “But I thought perhaps you or Mr. Fowler here could enlighten us. It might help if we knew what we were up against.”

  “This flash drive, do you know where it is?” said Fowler.

  “We’re looking for it now.”

  “Who has it?”

  “We hope to know more in a few hours.” Thorpe put him off. He wasn’t about to give him Madriani’s name or to oversell what the lawyer had said on the phone to his investigator until Thorpe knew more. “Bureau agents are about to descend on the other party to these communications shortly. We should have more information then.”

  Thorpe had left instructions for agents to question Herman Diggs at the FBI safe house and to find out where in Mexico Madriani was headed. The two men had used cryptic terms to describe the location. Apparently Madriani and Diggs were familiar with the area because both of them had been there on business some years earlier. Madriani must have assumed that the FBI was listening. He fed in all the details he could about the flash drive and what was on it but skirted the question of where he and his companions were going, perhaps out of fear that the bureau might have Mexican authorities find and detain them once they arrived. For the moment the only one who knew that was Herman Diggs.