“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.”
“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?”
“Well, yeah.”
The way Llewellyn said it Thorpe knew it wasn’t good news. “Give it to me.”
“It seems science wasn’t the only thing on the fringe for our man Leffort.”
“Go on.”
“He had a kinky nightlife.”
Thorpe’s head snapped toward Llewellyn. His eyes opened wide as he held the smoking cigarette off to the side. “You’re gonna tell me he fell in with some Russian belly dancer,” said Thorpe.
“No. At least I don’t think so. You can read the details tonight before you go to sleep.” Llewellyn flipped a copy of a document onto the desk in front of Thorpe. “I’d recommend you take a cold shower first. It’s Leffort’s last fitness report for his security clearance.”
“Cut to the chase. What’s in it?” said Thorpe.
“More to the point, you might want to ask who did the investigation and wrote it up.”
“Who?”
“The National Security Agency,” said Llewellyn.
“Why not us?” This was normally something done by the FBI.
Llewellyn made a question mark out of the expression on his face. “You’ll find some large portions of their report are redacted. Anything and everything having to do with the project Leffort was working on, as well as some other things. According to the report, they had their eye on him all the time.”
“Then why don’t they tell us where he is?” said Thorpe.
“Good question. To read it, they were getting ready to cancel his security clearance, dump him from the project, and castrate him; that is, if you believe what’s written on those pages. Of course, NSA never got the chance. It was a matter of unfortunate timing according to them.”
“Leffort rabbited,” said Thorpe.
Llewellyn nodded. “It makes for interesting reading, but if you’re smart, you don’t want to be sitting upright in bed when you open it. Cuz all that self-serving crap inside, it’s gonna spill out all over you and make for a damn mess,” said Llewellyn. “You want to know what I think?”
“That’s why we’re talking here,” said Thorpe.
“I think that report and the investigation that goes with it were both done after the fact.”
“You mean after Leffort disappeared?”
“Exactly. You can read it for yourself. Form your own conclusions,” said Llewellyn. “NSA is trying to cover their skirts. They redacted the names of all the witnesses they talked to, including the women Leffort had trysts with. You have to wonder why.”
“Maybe Leffort was into pillow talk about the project?” said Thorpe. “Classified information.”
“To read the report, the only classified information any of these women had was as to the location of warts on Leffort’s tallywacker. There’s not the slightest hint that any of them knew squat about Leffort’s work. Nor is there any indication that any of them were extorting him for classified information. First thing I thought of was spies,” said Llewellyn. “But there’s nothing there. Not even the slightest whiff that any of them were in the employ of a foreign power. NSA doesn’t even bother to raise the specter. So why withhold their names?”
“You tell me,” said Thorpe.
“Because NSA doesn’t want us talking to them,” said Llewellyn. “They deleted the names because they knew we’d get the cart back behind the horse. They knew we’d find out that they didn’t interview the witnesses until after Leffort disappeared.”
“I don’t get it,” said Thorpe.
“You will in a moment, all nine yards,” said Llewellyn.
Thorpe didn’t like the sound of that.
“It explains how they found out somebody was lifting information from the NASA computers. After the fact. When Leffort was already gone. The same way they got the names of the women. This guy was running wild on a top-secret, highly sensitive program and they had no clue. And now the shit is about to hit the fan, and everybody in town, except us, is looking for a rock to crawl under.”
“The White House and the brass at the Pentagon are looking for somebody to blame,” said Thorpe.
“Right,” said Llewellyn. “And NSA is a little too close to home to crap in that particular backyard. So they’re looking for someplace else to take a dump.”
“Us,” said Thorpe.
Llewellyn nodded.
“Next you’re gonna tell me that NSA had lead responsibility for security on this mystery project,” said Thorpe. “Whatever the hell it is.”
“No, not just lead responsibility,” said Llewellyn, “exclusive responsibility. Everybody else was cut out, all the defense intelligence agencies, protective services, security management at NASA—they were all cut out of the loop. That should give you a hint as to what’s going on here. It’s why we weren’t asked to do the security background update on Leffort.”
“And NSA blew it!” said Thorpe.
“Yep.”
“I knew it. I knew it. This thing smelled the minute I got that call from the White House.” Thorpe got up out of his chair, waving the cigarette around like a torch. “So now they dump it on us to find these guys, and if we fail, it’s our ass in the flames. And if that’s not enough, they want to play hide the ball. They can’t tell us what it’s about. Son of a bitch,” said Thorpe. “Damn it!” He stood there, face full of fury, tendrils of smoke surrounding the shadow of his head on the wall, the fumes appearing as if they emitted from his ears. He swallowed hard. It was one of the few times that Llewellyn could remember ever seeing signs of fear on his friend’s face.
Thorpe took a deep drag on the cigarette and sucked it into his lungs to quell the anger. He held the smoke for a long moment and then expelled it toward the ceiling.
“That shit’s gonna kill you,” said Llewellyn.
“What, this?” Thorpe held it up in front of his face and looked at the cigarette. “This is therapy. It’s the fucking National Security Agency’s gonna kill me.”
Chapter
Seventeen
What are they doing now?”
Two FBI agents from the embassy in Bangkok stood in a room on the third floor in the office building in Pattaya. They were two stories above the green door, the entrance to the building, watching Madriani and the two people with him.
“They’re standing out on the sidewalk looking at the door from across the street. Can you beat it? Travel halfway around the world, then stand there with your thumb up your ass.” One of the agents looked through a spotting scope set up in the vacant third-floor office.
They had used a credit card to slide the cheesy lock open on the door and established a blind inside. They set up the spotting scope far enough back from the windows that with the interior lights out anyone looking in from the outside would see nothing. From here they got a bird’s-eye view of everything on the other side of the road. To cover this side, an agent in shorts and a tank top, looking like an expat, was camped out in a shop across the street. Another was in the Thai restaurant downstairs.
The radio crackled in the agent’s ear. “Do you see ’em?”
“Charlie One to Charlie Three, stay off the air if you can. They’re still on the street. We’ll let you know if they move.”
The problem was that the call for assistance from Washington had come without sufficient advance warning so that the embassy was unable to coordinate their actions with local Thai authorities. Consequently, the agents were on their own, using a communication channel that they couldn’t be sure wasn’t being used or monitored by the Pattaya police. Their instructions were to watch and report, to provide protection if necessary for the three U.S. nationals, and to watch for the man named Liquida, though they had no photographs, only a rough description.
* * *
We stand there on the sidewalk, parting the waters with throngs of pedestrians flowing around us as we watch the naked door across the street and debate what to do.
“Why don’t we go round back?” says Harry. “See what’s there.”
Looking at the door, not knowing what is inside, neither Joselyn nor I want to argue with him.
We walk down the sidewalk to the south, half a block closer to our hotel, and cross traffic where a narrow lane intersects Second Road on the other side.
It looks like more of an alley than anything else. But it must go somewhere. Cars and motorcycles are moving on it in both directions, so we follow it. A little farther on, maybe fifty yards, Joselyn stops. Harry and I keep walking.
“What about right there?”
Harry and I turn to look at her. She is pointing off to the left toward a narrow walkway between two buildings.
“It looks as if it might go through,” she says.
I take a peek. The walkway looks as if it passes between the buildings and widens out into a parking area behind the building with the green door.
“Let’s try it.” We start walking single file toward the narrow passage.
* * *
“Charlie One to Charlie Four, you got ’em?”
“No. This is Charlie Four. Give them a minute.” The agent was sitting in a restaurant next to the pharmacy just two shops down from the green door. He had a perfect view of the three Americans across the street. He watched them as they crossed over until they got too close to the sidewalk on this side where he couldn’t get an angle any longer. He was sure they were coming this way, heading for the entrance to the offices upstairs. If he panicked and raced out, he’d run right into them coming the other way.
“Charlie Four, do you have them?”
“No.”
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know. They could be hanging on the corner. Give ’em a couple more seconds.”
“Can you see them?”
“No, but I’m on it. Moving now.” Charlie Four tossed some Thai money at the waitress to pay for his iced tea, told her to keep the change, and hoofed it out onto the sidewalk. There was no sign of them at the corner. He looked south down Second Road against the direction of traffic. He couldn’t see them, though. The sidewalk was crowded. In running shoes and shorts, he’d have no difficulty catching up with them—if he only knew which way they went. “Got a problem here,” said Charlie Four. “Need help. They either went south on Second, in which case they’re probably headed back to their hotel. Or else they went down the side street. It’s Soi . . .” He looked for the street sign. There wasn’t one. “I’ll take the side street.”
“I got Second Road,” said Charlie Three.
Charlie Four turned left and headed down the narrow side street. There was no sign of the two men or the woman. Like everything else, the side sois were gettin
g crowded as people caught up in the rush hour looked for alternate routes.
There were cars and pedestrians, motorbikes and vendors with their pushcarts, all moving and jostling for space on the narrow side street. The agent caught a lift, jumped on the back of a moving baht bus, and tried to use the elevated height to see if he could find them in the crowd. The bus found an opening and headed down the street with the agent on the back, his eyes scanning the distance for the three Americans.
* * *
Liquida had no intention of going anywhere near the green door or the locked box upstairs. Nor did he want to take a chance on the company’s courier service, not now. One thing was certain; it was Bruno’s voice he had heard on the telephone message he picked up in Dubai. The question was whether the FBI had their hand up his ass playing puppet using the Chechen to try and hook Liquida and reel him in. If that’s what was happening, any deliveries from Bruno would be made by a courier with a government pension and a badge. Still, Liquida desperately needed the money that was in that drawer, assuming it was there.
He looked at his watch. It was after four. Traffic was beginning to thicken up out on Second Road. In a few minutes the street in front of his hotel would be a parking lot. He had things to do. He got up from the chair, slipped out one of the stilettos from the rolled cloth pack, and dropped his pants. He taped the long straight weapon to the inside of his left calf using a foot and a half of vet wrap. It was an area of the body that, unless police saw some bulge, they often didn’t frisk all that carefully. A piece of steel like the thin stiletto could easily slip by. He pulled his pants up and checked to make sure that nothing showed.
Then he grabbed a white canvas beach bag that was lying on the bed. The bag had two sturdy strap handles and was big enough to hold a couple of fair-sized phone books. He had purchased the bag earlier that day from an outdoor display on Beach Road, a place called Mike’s Department Store.
Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel Page 10