Bruno rattled on, telling him to be patient, that everything would be fine. Sooner or later they would pay him with piles of cash that they kept in a safe down the hall. “I promised them that you would do one more job for them.”
“What is it they want?” said Liquida.
“They have asked me if you would mind disposing of Leffort.”
Before Bruno could move, Liquida turned and opened his suitcase. He pulled out his wrapped bag of stilettos. “No problem.” For Liquida this would be a labor of love. He would do it for nothing.
“Not now!” Bruno reached over and put his hand over the lace ties on the silverware bundle.
“When?” said Liquida.
“When they tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because they need him, at least for now.”
“Tell them I can do it now or they can do it later,” said Liquida. “But I am not prepared to stay any longer. They do it themselves, I will give them a discount if they like.”
“It’s not the money,” said Bruno.
“If it’s not about money, then pay me,” said Liquida. “Next you’re going to tell me it’s against their religion to kill. Tell them they can put on masks, cut off his head, and show it on television if they like. It’s no problem. Happens down here all the time.”
Bruno put a finger to his lips. “You should be careful what you say.” He looked around as if someone might be listening. “Let me remind you that they could just as easily kill the two of us.”
“So we are not free to leave, is that it?” said Liquida.
“That’s not what I am saying.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am asking you to be patient, to use your head. To think.” Bruno fixed him with a long hard stare. “Do you understand? Do that and you will be well paid,” said Bruno.
Yes, but only if I’m still alive, thought Liquida. “How long before they are finished with Leffort?” he asked.
“From what I am hearing, by morning they should be done. Tonight they are supposed to be very busy. Something is happening.”
“What?” said Liquida.
“I don’t know. I don’t ask. Leffort has no idea they plan to kill him. I do know that. He told me they are going to pay him in the morning. He showed me airline tickets they bought for him. An early afternoon flight tomorrow from Belize to Mexico City and from there with connections to the French Seychelles. He is convinced they are going to honor their bargain. To pay him for the secrets he’s given them.”
“But you know better.”
Bruno nodded. “By morning I am sure they will give us the word. Kill Leffort and our job is done.”
Of course, if they were lying to Leffort, they could also be lying to Bruno. Or Bruno could be lying to him. Either way the result was the same. By sunrise Liquida could be sharing a shallow grave with Leffort. It was the one sure way to keep overhead down and loose ends tied up. The question was, how much trust did Liquida have in any of these people? The answer was none. He smiled at Bruno. “Good! Then we shall wait until morning.”
“I knew that you could be relied upon to see reason. You have a good sense for business.” Bruno clasped his shoulders and embraced him, what Liquida took for the Chechen sign of death.
Whether Bruno realized it or not, Liquida was now working for himself. The first order of business was to find a way out.
The FBI finally managed to track down Adin’s flight from Langley Air Force Base. “Better late than never,” said Thorpe. “Right from under our noses. That little bastard is bold as brass.”
“They didn’t file a flight plan,” said Britain. “But radar tracked them out over the Atlantic heading due south. They were picked up again three hours later by Pensacola Naval Air Station on the Florida panhandle. By then they were out over the Gulf in international airspace. It was too late to stop them. But they tracked the heading south-southwest.”
“Mexico,” said Thorpe.
“What it looks like,” said Britain. “We may be able to narrow it down.”
Thorpe looked at him.
“Southcom, Southern Command out of Miami, had one of their AWAC flights loitering over the central Gulf track the C-130’s IFF signal from their transponder,” said Britain.
“I’m surprised the Israelis had it turned on,” said Thorpe.
“I guess they didn’t want to get shot down,” said Britain.
IFF stood for “identify, friend or foe.” It was a system of encrypted data sent by a plane’s transponder to provide radar data and identification as part of the early-warning air defense system.
“You can bet they’ll turn it off before they reach the Mexican coast,” said Thorpe.
“Yes, but by then we may have a fix at least as to heading. It gives us something to work with,” said Britain.
“What about the girl and Diggs?” said Thorpe. “Anybody at Langley see them board the plane?”
“No,” said Britain. “But there was no real reason for them to check. It was pretty much hands off. Hirst had it all well covered. According to the flight documents, they picked up a load of fuel and twelve boxes under consular seal from the Israeli embassy.”
“So nobody was watching,” said Thorpe.
Britain nodded. “Right.”
“He thought of everything.” Thorpe sat silent for a moment. “So what do we know?”
“We know Hirst and whoever else is on that plane is headed for Mexico, but we don’t know where,” said Britain.
“We can be reasonably certain that Madriani and his two companions are there, along with Liquida,” said Thorpe.
“That is, if anything Madriani has told us is accurate,” said Britain.
“I think what he’s told us is dead-on,” said Thorpe. “The problem is he hasn’t told us enough. No cell phone calls from him, right?”
“Nothing,” said Britain. “The last communication was an e-mail from Paris. That and the telephone call he placed to his daughter and the investigator in the condo.”
“According to the transcript of the phone call, we should be looking for a large antenna array somewhere in the Mexican jungle,” said Thorpe, “but where?”
“What about Intel Sats?” said Britain.
“The CIA?”
Britain nodded.
“I thought of it, but unless we can narrow it down, at least give them some kind of a reliable vector from that plane when it crosses over into Mexican airspace, their analysts could be looking at images for days. Something tells me we don’t have that kind of time,” said Thorpe.
“What do we do?” said Britain.
“Let’s hope that Israeli pilot keeps his transponder turned on,” said Thorpe. “In the meantime, get ahold of drug enforcement. Tell them we’re going to need help. Boots on the ground. The Mexican army, the judicial police, the whole nine yards. But only people they can trust. Any kind of political or law enforcement juice they have with the Mexican government, tell them we may need it all.”
It was a helpless feeling, throwing himself on the mercy of another agency, and burning whatever goodwill the bureau may have amassed with a foreign country. Whatever was happening in Mexico was beyond the reach of the U.S. government unless they were prepared to go to war.
Thorpe picked up the phone. It was not going to be a pleasant conversation. He would have to call the White House and tell Fowler that the bureau had lost whatever information they might have gleaned from Herman Diggs and that the Israeli government appeared to know all about Project Thor.
Chapter Fifty-Four
We decide to time our reconnaissance of the road north of Coba for late afternoon, to drive slowly, and if need be, to wait until dark to take a closer look.
Harry and I select a pair of hundred-power binoculars from a local sporting goods shop. We buy a half-dozen bottles of water, put them in an Igloo container filled with ice, and pick up two large hunting knives for defense along with a handful of road flares, anything that might come i
n handy if we need help. We would buy guns but we can’t.
Possession of a firearm or even a single round of ammunition by a foreign national in Mexico will net the visitor a long and harsh prison term. Mexico is a testament to the failure of gun laws to curb bloodshed. It has among the most severe firearm restrictions in the world. Yet the country has become a veritable war zone of gun-fueled drug violence. Any Mexican teen with a trigger finger can buy a fully automatic assault rifle and bandoliers of bullets for a few pesos from black marketers. The fact that the transaction is illegal means only that the dead victims are all law abiding.
Since guns are not available to tourists, Harry and I have to make do with what we can find. We settle on two rubber-sling spearguns from one of the dive shops in Playa del Carmen. All the while Joselyn is laughing. “Why don’t you get the mask and flippers and finish out the outfit?”
Harry is in no mood for humor. He throws one of the spearguns onto the front seat and nearly ends up sitting on the tip as he gets into the car.
By three thirty we reach the highway intersection at Coba. I turn, and we head north. We turn off the air conditioner and open the windows so that all of our senses are alive as I drive slowly up the road. Within two miles, the absence of any other traffic becomes obvious to all of us.
“Get the feeling we’re in the land of the dead?” says Harry.
We pass occasional mud-brick huts and small concrete houses, all of them abandoned. Some have their windows broken out with their front doors off the hinges. A few show the scorch marks and black soot of fire.
To Joselyn it reminds her of some of the test sites in the Nevada desert, what she calls “atomic city.” “All that is missing,” she says, “are the mannequins strapped to posts along the road.”
Harry and I are in the front seat. Joselyn is in the back, her head almost on my shoulder as her eyes give the road the thousand-yard stare. The three of us strain constantly to see what is up ahead.
Each curve brings us to a near stop until I can creep around and see what’s there. The foliage is so thick that it crowds the road in places, growing over the edges of the asphalt as if to reclaim the offending ribbon that runs through the jungle.
We come to an intersection with a dirt road off to the right.
“Stop!” Harry is halfway out of the car before I can hit the brake. “If anything happens, don’t wait for me.” With the speargun in hand, he runs cautiously toward the dirt road as Joselyn and I sit in the hot car with windows open, my foot ready to hit the gas pedal to pick him up if I have to. He disappears down the dirt road, and a few seconds later comes back and waves me forward. Neither Joselyn nor I have to ask what Harry is doing. We all know that the road of death is likely to be a dead end. Without saying it, the thought of a vehicle getting behind us and blocking our retreat is ever present.
From the look of it, the pavement has not seen much in the way of recent traffic. There are sizable chunks of rock in the middle of the road.
Harry gets back in the car. “It’s OK,” he says.
About a mile farther on we pass several abandoned and wrecked cars along the shoulder.
“Slow down,” says Harry.
“I’m doing ten miles an hour,” I tell him.
“I know. Slow down.” Harry tightens his grip on the speargun, though what he is going to do with it if we run into trouble I’m not sure.
I tell him to watch where he’s pointing the thing. He tells me to keep my eyes on the road.
Several of the wrecked vehicles have the brown-rusted hue of burned-out metal, their tires gone as if eaten by fire. A light pickup truck, or what is left of it, appears to have been shot to pieces. The driver’s door panel is filigreed with enough holes that it looks like a lace doily.
“Pull over,” says Harry. He wants to check it out.
I pull in front of the burned-out pickup and put the car in park, but I leave the engine running. Harry and I get out.
As we approach the burned-out vehicle, we realize that the passenger compartment is not empty. Slumped across the narrow bench seat is a partially burned and decomposed body.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Part of DARPA’s mission, along with the Department of Defense, was to anticipate new weapon systems and to study and explore them before they could be developed and used by adversaries against the United States. It was for this reason that the Defense Department drew NASA into the web on Project Thor.
If they could prove that the concept of using Near-Earth Objects as weapons was feasible, the plan was to publish the findings. Once it was known to the world, it would become infinitely more difficult for any nation to use asteroids in a preemptive strike against a foe and to hide their actions behind the blind of nature.
Any unexplained catastrophic impact would be followed by a thorough investigation, and the possibility of devastating reprisals would act as a deterrent once more. At least that was the theory. Now they had created a monster. Worse, they had lost control of it.
The information Leffort traded away gave up mastery over the two iron-core asteroids. More damaging was the fact that this transfer of knowledge had been grasped without difficulty by the talent pool of scientists assembled at Coba. Where these people had obtained their training Leffort did not know, possibly Europe, perhaps the United States. It really didn’t matter. The fact remained, they knew their business. They could easily build on what they had been given.
So far they had managed to park and conceal the two asteroids at the lunar Lagrange point without any real assistance from Leffort. The problem he had now was to keep them away as he prepared the final targeting software for the asteroid’s final trajectory around the moon.
Leffort was not at all comfortable doing this. The problem was that the targeting software was not his product. It had been developed by Raji and his crew, none of whom were present. The software was designed to deal with fine-tuning as to deflection, the timing and angle of entry into the earth’s atmosphere, which would be critical for targeting.
Because it was not part of his turf at NASA, Leffort had not spent much time familiarizing himself with many of the aspects of final targeting. His specialty was the selection, harvesting, and macro movements of the asteroids in space. When he turned his back on Raji in Paris and allowed him to be killed, Leffort didn’t realize the box he was putting himself in. Raji’s death suited his purposes because Fareed’s portion of the payment would be wired into Leffort’s account. But now he had to perform. If anything went wrong, Leffort knew he would be held responsible. They would kill him in a heartbeat, or send the Mexican in to do it.
Over protests by several of the other scientists, Leffort cleared everyone out of the small control room. He wanted the others out so that he could do the final preparations and make the last lunar course corrections to escape the Lagrange point without a crowd looking over his shoulder. He promised that he would review everything with them in fine detail when he was done.
The last thing Leffort needed was people who knew what they were seeing if the telemetry readings on the monitors revealed that something had gone wrong.
He locked the door to the room and went to work. Leffort reached into his pants pocket and took out a plastic pill container. He popped the cap and took two of the pills, a double dose of slow-release amphetamines that helped focus his mind.
He spent the next several minutes checking the software to make sure it was properly installed. Then he began the procedural checklist. Ordinarily this would be a two-person job, one person reading the checklist while the other verified that each of the command codes was properly entered into the computer. Twice he lost his place on the checklist and had to go back to reconfirm the proper command sequence in the computer.
Twenty minutes later he was finished. He checked both clocks, the one on the wall and the one in the computer. The computer clock controlled the mission schedule. Timing was critical. There existed only a small window of about six minutes in which a launch f
or accurate targeting could be made. Once past the window, Leffort would have to wait twenty-four hours for the next rotation of the earth. It was, after all, a moving target, not only rotating on its axis but also moving through space at more than sixty-six thousand miles per hour.
He kept his eyes on the computer clock as it counted down to single digits. He watched it reach zero and waited two more seconds before he pushed the entry key on the computer.
The endless list, long chains of numbers, began racing up the screen as the software took over.
The motor on the mammoth satellite dish outside began to turn, making subtle adjustments in the orientation of the antenna. It would link up with the antennas on the rocket motors attached to A-1, the smaller of the two asteroids, on its next loop out beyond the edge of the moon. Within seconds the command codes would be fed into the microprocessor linking the four rockets, and the asteroid would be tipped from its balance point at lunar L2 and begin its journey.
Using lunar gravity and its own velocity, the asteroid would slingshot around the lunar surface in the same way NASA had done with its orbiters on moon missions.
The iron-core asteroid would begin its journey of nearly 240,000 miles. By the time it was picked up by astronomers on Earth, it would be too late to even think. Moving at more than 600 miles per minute, it would reach its target on the North American continent in just over six and a half hours.
Given its mass and velocity, a direct hit was not only unnecessary, it was inadvisable. If an impact was to look like a naturally occurring event, it would not make sense to strike a city center. Anywhere within a twenty-mile radius would be enough to level and incinerate almost all of the metropolitan area.
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