The Nano-Thief: A Lenny D. Novel (Lenny. D. Novels Book 1)

by Michael Lieberman

  At LAX he changed airlines, bought another ticket with cash, this time to Fresno, and landed well after dark. Spencer stayed at one of those generic motels that spring up around airports and live just off the interstate highway system. In the morning he found himself sitting at another McDonald's eating his breakfast staple Egg McMuffin.

  What was he seeking from this mad dash halfway across the country? What reassurance or sustenance? Place, he decided, the anchorage of place. His sister was certain not to be there—she worked in Seattle. And his parents? Maybe? No way to know. He called the house on a burner. No answer. Maybe his parents had caller ID and UNKNOWN flashed on the screen? Maybe his father had left for work early and his mother was at the supermarket? Or they were on one of their frequent jaunts to San Francisco or LA? What if there was trouble when he got there—unexpected visitors? He'd have to wing it. If he got lucky and made it to his room, he would be home free. The necessary instruments were available there.

  He gave the cabbie an address not far from Woodward Park, a few blocks from his house, paid the guy, and after he had driven away, hoofed it to Southby Street. It looked like no one was home. He rang the bell. No answer. After a second try, he went around back and found the key under the fourth flowerpot on the ledge. Inside, he heard the alarm beep, and he punched in the code to disarm it. Where was everybody? He opened the door from the kitchen to the garage: both cars were there. They must be out of town. Yes, both sets of car keys hanging in the kitchen by the door.

  He walked around the sprawling single story brick house his parents had bought when they first came to Fresno, the one he had grown up in. So many memories. It was here that he had been raised as Samuel Anderson—his father had legally changed the family name from Azzar before he entered school. Though they did not advertise it, they were in fact Egyptian Jews from Alexandria with strong ties to Israel.

  It had only been a few months since he had been to Fresno, but he assessed it with a fresh eye. The place felt comfortable but tattered. His parents had not refurbished it in many years. Yes, that was it, home. This was as home as it gets. The only real additions in years were a large flat panel TV in the family room and a new stove and fridge in the kitchen. He sat on the couch in the living room inhaling the house. The smells, the silence calmed him. Recentered him. The last few weeks, beginning with the ether explosion in his apartment right below Barry's, had sent him in a downward spiral. They had thrown him off center and narrowed his life until he found himself alone in a student apartment with nothing but two air mattresses, cash, and a laptop he was afraid to use.

  Odd how home revived him. Odder still that it was not family but place he needed. He walked into his room. It was exactly as he had left it. Even the files to the side of his desk. He had laid out the room to fit his work style. The large Formica top that served as his desk had kneeholes across from one another and two desk chairs. Behind these were file cabinets. The plan was made for someone who liked to spread out, do more than one thing at once. Which sometimes meant working on ideas in one space and building apparatus at another.

  At the far end of the room were drawers and cabinets filled with gear and chemicals. He opened one of these, inspected his collection of handguns, and pulled out his tiny six-shot Beretta, identical to the one he had left behind in Houston. He loaded it, checked to make sure the safety was on, then stuffed it in his pocket.

  On the two sides of the desk were the projects that preoccupied him: one side was devoted to nanotech and nanomedicine, and on the other were files and papers dealing with geopolitics, largely focused on Sino-Russian conflicts in the Far East.

  Sammy's nostalgic trip home might have had the steadying effect he hoped for, but events soon turned his experience on its head and intensified his growing paranoia.

  32.

  In Houston N.K. worried that something would screw up his interception of the cash UVL was going to transfer for the Chinese. In fact, there were a thousand places where he could get shut out. He and his team were doing everything they could to monitor UVL and the Chinese.

  The only loose end he might get hold of was Samuel Anderson. Why was he off the radar and where was he? Three possibilities, N.K. figured: Sammy was somewhere in Houston, but only God knew where. He had gone to Dearborn, but instinctively that didn't feel right. Or Fresno, where he was raised and his parents lived.

  Should he try to intercept him or let things ride? he wondered. One more example of having to make a decision with too little data. Wait, he decided, Sammy would eventually come in from the cold on his own. Focus on UVL, he told himself. If he was in Fresno or even Dearborn, Sammy would come back. He had to or his nanotech caper was toast. As long as Sammy laid low, he wouldn't screw things up, and if he did, he and Fareed could play ping-pong together on one of God's tables.

  Barry's boss at UVL had reached a different conclusion. Sure, he had a certain interest in Sammy, but he had a far greater interest in keeping Barry on message. There was a lot of money to be made from the successful completion of Operation Amputation. In fact, Barry was very much on message. He knew there was no way he could desert UVL and his boss—he knew on which side his bread was buttered.

  It was Lenny who had forced the issue. He threatened to head off to Fresno on his own and take M2 along in case there were any IT issues. To forestall Lenny's impulsiveness, the boss agreed to dispatch a couple of UVL guys to check out Sammy's parents' place in Fresno, see what they could learn, and maybe even bring Sammy back. Could UVL hold Lenny against his will in the safe house till Operation Amputation was over? Sure, but the boss wanted the payload delivered on target and on time, and introducing any wobble in Barry's flight trajectory might abort the mission.

  33.

  Sammy sat on the nanotechnology side of his desk and ignored the stack of folders there and file cabinets behind him. His immediate concern was his thesis work and NAFRA. His own project was simple enough in concept. Under Professor Bessnager's guidance, his job was to make nanoparticles that would attach themselves to the nerve cells of a tiny worm, known as C. elegans. He would then attach a neurotoxin to these particles and see if he could kill the critter's nerve cells thus paralyzing it or killing it.

  His work had dizzying implications. How smart did you have to be to imagine NAFRA's interest in more advanced applications? Sammy assumed that, in secret, Bessnager was directing attempts to target the neurons of humans and to develop ways to alter the brain. If you could do that, the possibilities were limitless: everything from Parkinson's disease, to hitting respiratory centers, to causing blindness or vertigo, or to altering cognition and decision-making—most likely in the prefrontal cortex and its pyramidal cells. Sammy was sure that was the project behind the FDU/NAFRA firewall. It would be a perfect way to incapacitate people without their knowing what hit them.

  As he was thinking about NAFRA, Sammy heard someone pull up in front of the house. He looked through a slit in the blinds. One of those tiny postal service panel trucks with sliding doors and big side windows was parking. Odd, no, worrisome, he thought. Then he reconsidered. Since when did two mail carriers show up in one of those cracker boxes? Maybe one was training the other or maybe nobody was training anybody. His shit detector went into overdrive. One of them was now coming up the walk, a big rangy white guy, who looked like an ex-Navy SEAL. Mail carrying jobs were part of the upward mobility conveyer that carried blacks and Asians, Latinos too, and more and more women up a rung. This was trouble. Sammy waited. After a second ring and then a third with no answer, the guy walked back to the truck. He conferred with the driver, and when he turned toward the house, Sammy moved.

  He gathered his briefcase and laptop, snatched his father's Lexus key from its hook. In seconds the garage door opened to the alley behind the house, and he was headed down it. He made one of those instant calculations that didn't register in consciousness. Somewhere deep below the cerebral cortex, his brain told him that if they knew he was here, they knew a lot more, including what
kinds of cars his parents owned. Don't drive away, they will find you, was the message he got. So he pulled the Beretta from his pocket, and at the end of the alley, he turned left and left again back onto Southby. While the big guy was fiddling with the front door, he drove up to the van, and emptied the Beretta's six shots into the driver's head and neck. Blood was everywhere, possibly even on the driver-side door of the Lexus. At that instant the scene became fixed in his mind forever: the blood and brains driven against the opposite door and window, the torso pushed to that side, and what he took to be a look of amazement on the remains of a face.

  Then he gunned the car, turned the corner at the end of the block and kept driving. The Lexus with his father's plate was like a neon sign that said here I am. He parked a few blocks from a rental car agency, walked over, and Spencer Altwater rented a midsized Chevy. He told the agent he would drop it in San Francisco. He wondered if the rental company was tracking his car. He decided it didn't matter. It was no crime to change destinations. He headed south toward Los Angeles. In Bakersfield he abandoned the Chevy. There he went to another rental car place, and Sean Alcott rented a car. He would return it in San Jose. He drove to Los Angeles and parked in a public lot downtown. From a nearby hotel, he took a taxi to LAX. He ditched the gun in a men’s room trash container, and Sean Abernathy bought a ticket for cash to Houston.

  As he walked to long-term parking in Houston, he realized he needed the Kia, but not his faded red one. He took a detour on the way home, stopping at a Quik Paint and had them paint it gray. He paced and drank hot chocolate from a vending machine as he waited for it to dry. At a nearby junkyard, he bought some old Florida plates.

  He was trembling by the time he opened his apartment door and walked into a space that was as empty as his life. You murder someone, probably someone with connections, and people will look for you. You better get your shit together and be ready to move. The only good news was that the rest of the cash, the ketamine and the syringes, his tools and the Berretta he had purchased were where he had put them.

  He wondered how long he would be stuck in this little shit way-station apartment. It was as if he had bought a train ticket with an open destination, and could not see down the tracks past the next curve. Get a grip, Sammy, get a grip. You are the engineer. You know the route and destination, and if there is a detour, if you get rerouted, you are still at the throttle.

  34.

  Barry's boss goes through the roof when he gets the call about Fresno: "The guy comes racing down the street. I'm at the front door. I hear the car. It's his old man's Lexus. Before I can get back down the front walk, he stops, puts maybe five or six shots into Les, head shots, and he's down the street. I call the police with the make and model. Right now they can't find the guy. We've got nothing. I'll let you know when I know something. Somebody from the ME's office is here now."

  The boss calls Barry with the news that Sammy has taken out Les and they can't find the bastard. "It's a fucking shame, but be glad we didn't let your father loose." Now everyone has skin game: Sammy has incinerated Edie, abducted and terrorized Portia, and killed one of the boss's best operatives. "He's vanished. Totally off the grid. Hiding out in East Bumblefuck. Sooner or later, he'll be back, but in the meantime…." His voice trails off. "In the meantime, I don't…we need to work this through. Think about it and get back to me."

  "What do we have—besides a mess, I mean?" Barry says to Lenny, M2 and Portia. He wants to do some planning, and he needs their help. They're still holed up in UVL space and going a little stir crazy. He lays out the problem so that everyone is on the same page. First the UVL money-transfer deal: the Chinese government, doing business through some folks in Tbilisi, want to purchase a hotel in San Francisco, as a way to funnel money to a third party. They want UVL and another firm in San Francisco to do the deal as investment bankers, much as, say, Goldman Sacks or Morgan Stanley would. Basically they want UVL to bless the purchase of the hotel for about four times as much as it's worth. The extra money goes to buy something, they're not sure what. The best guess is advanced armaments. The long-term goal of the Chinese seems to be to position themselves to take over the Russian Far East.

  "Glad to know this is small potatoes," Lenny says. "Otherwise, I'd be worried."

  "The problem is the Israelis. There isn't anybody better than N.K. He's seasoned, super smart, a fierce competitor, a Mossad plant in the Israeli Consulate. We're sure he wants to divert the funds we're supposed to transfer. Either they want the money or they want to stymie the Chinese. We're not sure why. Here's the tough part. We don't know how much they know. They're great at electronic eavesdropping, and they do it seamlessly. We are assuming the worst."

  "Then, there's the problem of Sammy, who works with them or for them. He's a killer and on the loose," M2 says.

  "So, boil it down. What's the problem?" Lenny says.

  "To arrange for the details of the transfer and to do it without N.K getting wind of it. And then, of course, to complete the transfer."

  "Sounds simple to me," Lenny says. "Boots on the ground. You need old-fashioned technology. Don't arrange things electronically. Set it up face to face so that there will be nothing to intercept—as long as your cloak and dagger guys go undetected."

  In a few minutes they have worked out a skeleton plan. Snorri would be perfect. He is below everybody's radar. He could fly to San Francisco and present a simple typed note for Faraday and Klastan. He could verify his identity with a name they would recognize like Amputation. They would give him an exact time to expect the money, destination banks and account numbers into which UVL should make the deposit.

  M2 scoffed at the idea. "They'll never buy it. A bartender shows up at the office and wants to talk to one of them. He presents the note and mentions the name of the operation. And they're supposed to provide transfer information to a complete stranger? I don't think so. I wouldn't do it. And neither would you."

  "So what would you suggest?" Barry says.

  "There are any number of ways to set up secure email communications. It's not very hard."

  "But can you be absolutely sure it's secure?"

  "Of course, it's done all the time."

  "Can you guarantee it?"

  "It will be secure. There are no guarantees in this life," M2 says.

  "I take your point, but I like my dad's idea. You know, we send email and there is always some possibility—a small one, I grant you—of a man-in-the-middle scheme that we can't recognize—that someone is impersonating each party to the other and collecting the information. Here's what I think will turn the tide. Faraday and Klastan and I agreed to a simple numeric code that we have memorized. It was a just-in-case idea. They have the combination to my gym lock. That's virtually undiscoverable on the net. So after Snorri gives them the code name of the operation, if they are dubious, he gives them the numeric code, the gym lock. That should do the trick."

  Barry's boss was succinct. "I like it. Let's do it."

  35.

  N.K. and Ari, his top IT guy, were together when they got the information from a cable news story under the headline: Brutal Slaying of Postman in Fresno. The announcer explained that a postal worker was shot to death on a quiet residential street in Fresno. After hearing gunshots, a neighbor came out and videoed the scene with a smart phone. After a viewer-discretion warning, footage showed a small postal service panel truck parked in front of a house. As the camera panned in, you could see a body at the wheel, slumped to one side. It and the cab were covered with blood, globs of white tissue, and flecks of bone. It was a gruesome scene. The report said that the person's wallet and postal badge were missing, and authorities were looking into the victim's identity. Police had no suspects and were unsure of the motive. Anyone having any information should contact authorities.

  N.K and Ari put the pieces together. "Go ahead and check," N.K. said, "but I'm sure when you pull up pictures of Sammy's parents' house, this is going to be it. So we now know where Sammy has been, at le
ast for part of the time. Best guess is that Sammy was there, someone, probably UVL's people, got wind of it and showed up. The service truck, in this case from the postal service, is a ruse as old as the hills: two workers in a truck doing routine something or other."

  "Yeah, must be at least two." Ari says. "They're in a postal truck as cover. Sammy realizes they're moving in, somehow slips away, and shoots one of them. Sammy must have been driving. Or else the second guy would have shot him or taken him prisoner."

  "Exactly. There must have been a second guy, because they wouldn't send a guy in alone, and that's why there is no wallet or badge. The UVL guy took them from the body so he couldn't easily be identified, and then he fled. They don't want to be exposed. Of course, there's a completely different scenario. Sammy's inside. The 'postal workers' have him under surveillance, and someone else knocks the guy off. But who could that be?"

  "So," Ari says, "that isn't likely. There are too many moving parts. Let's keep it simple. We have to ask ourselves why Sammy shot the guy. Two possibilities, he's losing it and isn't thinking clearly. Or he may not have driven there and he's trapped. So he needs one of his parents' cars to escape. He figures that if they have found him, they know the makes and models of the family cars and will enlist help to track him and bring him down."

  "Anyway, let's look at the damage," N.K. says. "Someone is onto Sammy in a big way. You know, well, we've already said it, probably UVL or Barry Weeks. Maybe his dad's in the loop. We have to assume they are smart enough to suspect he is working with someone else. Whether they know who we are is another story, but we have to suppose they do."

  "Look, Sammy isn't doing us any good out there. Let's call him what he is at this stage: at best he's a liability, at worst a rogue. We might have to cut our losses with the nanotech project and focus on UVL and the Chinese."