Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean with all the hysteria, the fact that Liquida came within a hairsbreadth of killing her, your daughter had the same thought, to leave the knife where it was, all the way back to the house. It took some courage,” says Harry.

  Chapter

  Eight

  Lawrence Leffort was tall and slender, six foot two, a hundred and sixty pounds. Built like a pencil. At forty-two he showed not even the slightest bulge of a paunch or love handles.

  Ever since he was a kid he’d worn spectacles thick as bottle glass, only now they were darkly tinted with circular wire frames, like the ones John Lennon used to wear. An astrophysicist with an advanced degree from MIT, he sported a ponytail that dangled to the center of his back. The hair, which was thinning, and the glasses were part of the metamorphosis from his milquetoast period—a midlife crisis that hit him like a runaway train two years earlier.

  In that time Leffort had gone from horn-rimmed academic to avant-garde edgy man at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on the campus of Caltech in Flintridge.

  Leffort was a researcher having little contact with the undergraduates, a couple of lectures a year and that was it. If he wanted to grow hair down to his ass and play an air guitar on his own time, the people in the department didn’t care as long as he got his work done.

  They might have taken more interest had they known about Larry’s darker side. Since emerging from his shell at forty Leffort had discovered women. The ones he dated liked to abuse their bodies, and Larry liked to help. Most of his ladies were tattooed like sailors and pierced like punch cards. For a man who never dated before the age of forty, this was a novelty he couldn’t seem to resist.

  With his new friends as tour guides, Leffort had taken to visiting private dungeons in West L.A. where he developed an Olympic-class appetite for bondage and sadism. He liked to sample the chemicals brewed by the warlocks in these places, mostly meth. After getting high, he would play Grand Inquisitor with women on the rack, or experiment by using some of the other exercise equipment. Larry learned about heightened awareness and experienced firsthand how Dr. Pepper’s lonely heart got poisoned. Whatever inhibitions he had, melted. In little over a year he cultivated a secret nightlife to rival Jekyll and Hyde.

  This afternoon, about nine days after the attack on Sarah Madriani, Leffort sat behind the wheel of his car in a parking lot on Foothill Boulevard a hundred yards from Starbucks sipping an iced latte as he listened to Raji tell him all the reasons they shouldn’t be doing what they had already done.

  “We need to think about this some more. There’s no reason that we should be in such a rush. What if we missed something?” said Raji. “Some small detail . . .”

  “We haven’t missed anything.” Leffort kept looking out the windshield, watching for any telltale signs that Fareed might have been followed to their offsite meeting. They didn’t dare discuss it in the office. There was no telling who might be listening. There were security cameras and microphones everywhere, with ID cards that limited access to restricted areas.

  “How can you be so sure we haven’t made a mistake?” Raji Fareed was a veritable engine of angst. On a normal day, his fret level usually ran a thousand degrees hotter than Leffort’s. During the last two weeks, his anxiety quotient had been off the scale.

  Fareed was born in Iran. Now in his early forties, he had come to the United States as a kid with his family. He worked for NASA as a computer programmer and had been thrown into the mix, assigned to work with Leffort on the Thor Project. The two men had been working together for almost a decade and at times rubbed each other raw.

  Raji designed programs to crunch numbers. Using supercomputers, he could craft software to solve complex equations and formulas that might otherwise take a couple of hundred lifetimes to work out on a chalkboard. Once he designed a program and loaded it into a computer, a thousand-line equation could be worked out in anywhere from seconds to minutes, and with near-perfect precision.

  “Trust me, everything’s covered. The only things left are the guidance programs. Did you bring them?” Leffort had been after Raji to produce the final guidance programs for almost a month. They were the key to terminal targeting. Without them, they had an incomplete package and nothing to sell.

  “I’ve got them,” said Raji.

  “Good.”

  “But I still think we ought to wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “So we can slow down a little, and think,” said Fareed. “Right now everything’s just going too fast.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when they decide to throw you under the bus,” said Leffort. “They don’t usually step on the brakes until after it runs over you.”

  After more than a decade of research, rumor had it that the Thor Project was about to be scuttled. With the economy on the skids and Washington looking for ways to cut costs, NASA was being chopped to pieces. Not only were the manned space programs being canceled, any item considered nonessential to national defense was on the block.

  “Fuckers would probably try and sell the moon to the Chinese if they thought they had a chance,” said Leffort.

  Theoretical programs were high on the hit list. At a meeting three months earlier, Leffort had tried to convince NASA that what he and Raji were working on was far more than mere theory. It would work. When the meeting was over, Leffort didn’t need a crystal ball or a cipher to tell him that he’d failed. Their research grant, with its five remaining years, was about to be shifted to other higher priorities. The smell of pink slips was in the air. It was then that he and Fareed started moving ahead with the plan.

  “We agreed we would go during the Paris conference,” said Leffort.

  “We did, but I figured by now we’d know whether they were going to pull the grant. We still don’t know. Maybe they’ve decided to leave it alone. If so, there’s nothing special about being in Paris. And there’s no reason to run.”

  “Yeah, there is. We’re outside the country. And that’s where all the data is, parked on a server in Paris, remember? Besides, after the conference it may be much harder to slip away. If they pull the plug and can us, you can bet they’re gonna be watching us, at least for a while,” said Leffort. “Anybody with a high security clearance who’s out of work is going to be seen as a potential risk in terms of classified information. You try to leave the country, you’re liable to find yourself on a no-fly list.”

  “You think they’re gonna be watching us?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why, if nobody else knows what we’ve done? I mean, nobody else knows, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Leffort. “You tell me.”

  “What are you saying?” Raji glared at him. “You accusing me? You think I told somebody?”

  “I don’t know. You seem awfully nervous lately. I thought we were both committed. Now you want to slow down, take your time. What am I supposed to think?”

  “Hey, I don’t need this.” Raji reached for the door handle, ready to get out and hoof it to his own car.

  “Hey, relax. Calm down.” Leffort put a hand on Fareed’s arm. “Don’t get mad. I didn’t mean anything. You know me, I shoot from the hip. I’m just tired, strung out. And like you, I’m getting a little nervous.”

  “That’s no reason to accuse me,” said Fareed.

  “I know. It’s just that we’re both under a lot of stress right now. And the longer we have to hang here under the gun, the worse it’s gonna get. That’s why the sooner we can leave, the better,” said Leffort.

  “I never gave you any reason not to trust me,” said Raji.

  “I know that.”

  “For all I know, maybe you told somebody.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Raji. “But you don’t trust me, why should I trust you?” He was back to the door handle again, only this time Leffort could tell Raji wasn’t serious. He was fondling the handle either for more sympathy or for
leverage.

  “Who said I didn’t trust you? I never said I didn’t trust you. I’m just wondering why you’re having all these second thoughts. Especially now, when we’re almost home. Hey, buddy, listen. Look at me.”

  Raji was still turned, looking out the passenger window, leaning in his seat toward the door.

  “Come here.” Leffort leaned across the seat and grabbed Raji to give him a hug, something he’d never done before. “We’ve been together too long to let something like this come between us.” He needed Fareed, at least until he got his hands on the final guidance programs. After that, fuck him.

  He got Raji turned toward him, put his arms around him, then squeezed and patted him in a male bonding moment.

  The move made Fareed very uncomfortable. Two guys sitting in a car hugging—Raji kept his hands to himself, out in the open where anybody looking in could see them. “Hey, come on. Cut it out. OK. I forgive you.”

  Raji tried to pull away, but Leffort wasn’t having any part of it. He was busy smoothing Fareed all the way down to the small of his back, feeling around for any small cord, bumps, or little boxes that the feds might have taped to his body if Fareed was wearing an electronic wire.

  “I know it’s been tough on both of us. We need to learn to trust each other,” said Leffort. “After all, we’re in this together. We just need to calm down and relax. Everything’s gonna be fine.” Leffort sat up, dragging his hands up and down both sides of Raji’s torso inside of his outstretched arms as if he were trying to warm him up.

  “That’s enough.” Raji finally pushed Leffort’s hands away. “You worry me. You’re getting strange.”

  “You have to learn to be tolerant,” said Leffort. “We’re all different. Don’t be so uptight. Thing to remember is that in a month you and I are gonna be up to our eyeballs in money. We’ll be sitting on a beach somewhere counting it all and wondering why we worried about any of this. So where’s the guidance programs?” Having finished with the frisk, Leffort was back to the important stuff. “Why don’t you give ’em to me so we can get ’em on their way.”

  “I think I know why I’m worried,” said Raji.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s all this ‘we’ shit. We have never loaded anything onto the computer. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where the computer is, the one you’ve been using to send all the data to Paris. And the server you keep telling me about. I don’t have the slightest idea where it is, or whether it’s leased or owned or what.”

  “It’s leased, I told you that. We’ll download everything out of it when we get there. It’s gonna take one hell of a big SATA drive to hold it all. You think you can get ahold of one? I’ll leave that to you. There, you see?”

  “In the meantime, I still don’t know where anything is,” said Raji.

  “So what are you saying? That you don’t trust me? That I’m trying to cheat you?”

  “No, it’s just that you have control over everything and I have none.”

  What Leffort wasn’t telling him was that he, Leffort, had made the decision to bail out at NASA more than a year earlier. He had been sending stolen program data to the overseas buyers for more than two years, and taking money for it. He knew from the responses he was getting and the technical questions they asked that the people on the other end were well staffed with technicians and scientists who knew what they were doing. And they were much further along than anyone could have guessed. Whoever was backing them had deep pockets. The buyers were already geared up, having built a test site with a massive antenna array. They were getting ready to do a dry run, tracking objects and doing computer simulations. All the things that Leffort had encouraged NASA to do, but they refused. If Raji knew how far along they were, his cold feet would have turned to blocks of ice. He would back out, and Leffort would be unable to deliver the rest of the program. Leffort was in far too deep for that. Unknown to Raji, Leffort had already piled up a significant stash of cash, salted away in a numbered account down in the Cayman Islands. If he could get his hands on the software programs for the final targeting sequence, Raji’s work would be done. Leffort wouldn’t need him any longer. He would still have to take Raji to Paris, though, if only to keep him quiet until Leffort could disappear or figure out what to do with him.

  “If you don’t trust me, just say so,” said Leffort.

  “It’s not that.” Raji always shied away from a frontal confrontation. It was cultural as much as anything else. “It’s just that if we’re going to be partners, at least until the money is divided, then I need to know everything you know. So why don’t you tell me once more how the deal works, how we get our money and when?”

  “We’ve been over all that. It’s still the same. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Help me out. Refresh my memory.”

  Leffort wasn’t nearly as upbeat now. He was wondering if he was still going to get the final guidance programs. “Payment is on delivery to a numbered Swiss account. I told you that.”

  “Do we have a name for the bank and a number for the account?” Raji took out a pen and a small notepad from his pocket.

  “What, you expect me to memorize the account number? I have it at home. I’ll get it for you, next time we meet.”

  “What else?” said Raji.

  “We won’t know where the data is to be delivered until we get to Paris.”

  “And you say you don’t know who these people are?” asked Raji.

  “Not the end buyers, no. But as I told you before, we’re dealing with a middleman who has an international reputation for brokering these types of matters. He is for real. I’ve checked him out. I’ve spoken to him on Skype, got a good video cam image of the man, compared it to a known photograph. It’s him, all right.”

  “So, hopefully, at least we’re not dealing with the FBI on the other end,” said Raji.

  “No. Not to worry,” said Leffort. “The way I figure it, it could only be one of two, or possibly three, foreign countries, emerging nations that would have the missile and rocket technology to take advantage of Thor.”

  Raji had come to the same conclusion.

  “The telemetry stuff we deliver will give them a quantum leap,” said Leffort. “It will allow them to close the gap with the major powers in months instead of years. The rest is up to them. In return, they give us twenty million euros, ten for you, ten for me. The broker is making his own deal with them for a finder’s fee.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” said Raji. “Still, it doesn’t seem like that much when you look at everything we’re giving them. NASA is already into the program for more than half a billion dollars.”

  “You can’t expect them to pay that. Besides, it’s unproven technology,” said Leffort. “If NASA or the air force had already tested it and we could verify that it worked, then you’re right. We could get a lot more. But as it is, they’ll be using our data to invent the wheel. Question is, will it roll? As far as you and I are concerned, it won’t matter. We’ll be set for the rest of our lives.”

  “OK, so after we do all of this, they get the data, we get the money, what then? Where do we go?” said Fareed.

  “As part of the deal, the broker will provide new passports, not forgeries, the genuine item, as well as all the necessary documents to fashion new identities. The man has connections.”

  “Passports from where? You can’t get far with something from North Korea,” said Fareed.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you. I’ve taken care of all the details. The passports will be from a Western country, one of the member states of NATO. Not to worry.”

  “Then what?”

  “After they transfer the money into our Swiss account, we do a couple of wire transfers out. You’re gonna want to set up an account under your new passport name as soon as you get it. I’ll have to do the same. One transfer to you, one to me. We take the passports, the money, and disappear. You go wherever you want. You have a new identity and, depending on exchange rate
s, something north of thirteen million U.S. dollars. I’d say that’s a pretty good nest egg to make a fresh start.”

  Raji just sat there in the passenger seat thinking, mostly about all the things that could go wrong.

  “You have to admit it’s better than an unemployment check.” Leffort looked over at Raji. “You don’t look happy. Do you have some problem living like royalty?”

  “Hardly,” said Raji. “That’s not even as much as some state lotteries.”

  “Yes, but our chances of winning are much more certain. The money is clean, there’s no way to trace it. And you’re a very smart guy. Turn your skills to the investment markets, and in a few years—I know you—you’ll double it. Especially in Asia. China is booming. Southeast Asia is not far behind, and Brazil. So smile.”

  “I’ll smile when I see the money,” said Raji.

  Leffort’s biggest fear, though he didn’t tell Raji, was that NASA might cancel their trip to Paris. With unemployment edging toward double digits, it didn’t look good having two guys who worked for the agency jetting off to the city of lights.

  If NASA called off the trip, he and Raji would have to run for it and hope they could slip out of the country before somebody wised up and stopped them at the airport.

  The European Space Agency Conference had been scheduled for more than a year. The money for the trip was already budgeted and accounted for. This was probably the only thing saving the junket, that and the fact that it was probably their last hurrah before they were cashiered and put out on the street. He was sure this was what the administrators at NASA were thinking. Leffort was thinking they were leaving the gate open, his last chance to get out of the country before the roof caved in.

  “The critical thing is, we have to hold to the original timetable,” said Leffort. “We have no choice. The Paris conference. All we have to do is keep our heads for a few more days and we’re out of here, winging our way to France. Otherwise the deal’s gonna be off the table. We will have done it all for nothing.”

  “What if NASA doesn’t cancel the grant?” said Raji.