Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

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 for 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.

  An elevated level of dust in the atmosphere would surround the earth for a few months, but would not, according to the calculations, result in anything approaching a nuclear winter.

  The purpose behind this test was not unlike Trinity, the early Alamagordo tests of the atomic bomb. Leffort’s clients had to be sure they got it right before bringing the second weapon closer to home and risking self-annihilation. The people paying him had to know how much dust and rock would be ejected. They wanted to have some sense of the heat that would be generated, the volume and the range of any fiery ejecta that gravity carried back through the atmosphere. They had to know how far fires would spread, as well as the effect of the ground shock waves as the impactor mostly vaporized and buried what was left of itself a mile deep in the bedrock at ground zero. In the end, all that would be left would be a vast crater.

  It was the similarities of the desert with its geologic characteristics so much like those of their homeland that gave Leffort’s clients the idea—setting up in the jungles of Mexico and targeting the area around Phoenix and Scottsdale in the state of Arizona would make for the perfect test.

 
; Once the first asteroid was proven to work, they would know with a high degree of confidence what to expect when they launched the second, the larger of the two asteroids, into the desert just outside of the city of Tel Aviv in Israel. It was to be the fulfillment of the promise to wipe Israel off the map.

  Leffort was confident that with enough practice and the right space rock, he could penetrate the earth’s atmosphere to create a supersonic shock wave that would level everything beneath it—a blast similar to the Tunguska event.

  On June 30, 1908, a sudden flash of light, brighter than the sun, followed by an ear-shattering shock wave, struck the area over the Tunguska River in a remote region of Siberia. It leveled trees, stripped their foliage, and set wildfires over an area of more than eight hundred square miles. Virtually nothing was left standing.

  It has been estimated that the offending meteor may have been no more than thirty to sixty feet in diameter. Scientists believe that it never actually impacted the earth but disintegrated in the skies above. Its mass coupled with its extreme velocity caused a massive shock wave as it collided with and finally exploded in the thickening atmosphere of the earth. Had it occurred over Manhattan it would have destroyed the city and killed almost every living thing in the five boroughs below.

  Leffort watched the telemetry readings on the large left-hand screen as the rockets fired up. Within seconds they began to nudge the asteroid from its raceway behind the moon. Everything looked smooth until suddenly . . .

  A hundred and twenty miles above the Mare Orientale, a largely featureless plain on the southeast rim at the far side of the moon, the rear lateral thrust rocket attached to A-1 began to vibrate. It shimmied and sent the asteroid into a yaw as it began to tumble.

  The rocket was programmed to fire for a minute and forty seconds. At fifty-seven seconds a large amorphous section of iron, what rocket engineers at NASA had called the dorsal fin, tore itself free from the asteroid and began to spin toward the surface of the moon.

  Leffort watched in horror as the telemetry data began to pile up on the screen. Something had gone badly wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was, but A-1 had given up any semblance of equilibrium. The readings for yaw, pitch, and roll all exceeded acceptable parameters for anything close to controlled flight. From all the readings, A-1 was nothing but a tumbling iron anvil in space. Caught in the moon’s gravity, flung like a stone from a blind man’s sling, it could end up anywhere.

  Leffort stood there paralyzed. There was nothing he could do but watch as the numbers stacked up. With each passing second, the blood in his veins grew hotter. All he could do was turn off the monitors. The minute he opened the door, they would want to know what was happening. Dark screens would be a dead giveaway. Leffort’s mind raced. All he wanted now was to survive, to get away from them.

  A quarter of a million miles away, beyond the edge of the moon’s southern hemisphere, the tumbling train of iron finally ceased its twisting tails of fire. The three remaining rocket motors shut down, though by now the tumbling asteroid was a perpetual motion machine.

  Moments later a silent ball of fire erupted on the dusty plain below as the errant engine and the two tons of iron to which it was attached slammed into the surface of the moon. From space it looked like a pebble in a pond as the shock waves spread out into rings of ground matter rippling up, forming a new crater near the southern edge of the Orient Sea.

  Chapter

  Fifty-Six

  Liquida would have to leave most of his luggage behind. He grabbed a few things from his suitcase, including an extra stiletto from the bundle in his bag. He put one of the knives in a scabbard that was sewn inside the lining of his light jacket and slipped the other into a separate sheath and slid it into his pants along the side of his hip.

  The prefabricated metal building was designed like a fortress, steel walls with small slits for windows in some of the rooms, none of them large enough to crawl through.

  Liquida’s room didn’t even have that. It had only an air-

  conditioning register high on the wall pouring cool air into the room. There was a larger rectangular return duct in the ceiling that sucked the warm air back through the system.

  The oversize commercial air-con system was one of the few concessions to comfort in the facility. Liquida assumed it was necessary to maintain cool temperatures for the electronics, banks of large industrial computers housed in a room down the hall. Beyond that was the control room where Leffort worked. Armed guards were installed at several locations along the corridor. The entrances and exits were all sealed by solid steel doors, each one controlled by an electronic passkey.

  Bruno hadn’t given Liquida a key. When Liquida asked for one, Bruno apologized, claiming it was an oversight, and told him he would get him one as soon as he could. But the key was never produced.

  Earlier in the day when Liquida made a bid to take a walk outside, he was turned back by one of the guards. He was told that without a key he was not allowed to leave the building. Liquida didn’t press the matter. Instead he went back to his room. He poked around carefully, looking for hidden camera lenses. He didn’t find any. At least they didn’t have him under surveillance. It was while looking for cameras that he realized his only way out was through the air-conditioning register in the ceiling.

  He put on his jacket, stood on a chair, and found the catch on the hinged metal vent over the register. He opened it, dropped the covering vent down so that it hung open from the two hinges, and pulled out the rectangular fiberglass filter.

  Liquida stepped down from the chair and looked for a good place to hide it. A cheap particleboard cupboard that served as a closet rested against one wall. He slid the thin rectangular filter behind it and walked back to the chair in the center of the room.

  He looked up. The opening into the sheet metal duct system was easily large enough for Liquida to fit through. It was a good two and half feet wide, and at least eighteen inches deep. He had shimmied into much tighter spaces before. The only problem now was, the partially healed muscles under his arm from the knife wound given to him by Madriani’s detective, the big black guy Liquida had killed in Washington. This was still painful and weak.

  Liquida grabbed a spool of heavy thread from the sewing kit in his luggage. He took a stick of chewing gum from a package in his jacket pocket, popped the gum in his mouth, and pulled out a good length of thread from the spool. He looped the thread over itself several times until he had four strands, each one about fifteen feet long. Then he snipped the end of the thread with his teeth. He passed one end of the four-strand thickness around the top slate on the back of the light metal chair, then tied the ends of the thread together so that the entire fifteen feet formed a single continuous loop. The other end of threaded strands he passed through his belt. He tugged on it to make sure it wouldn’t come free.

  Then Liquida stood on the chair and took a deep breath. He chewed the gum. It was better than breaking his teeth on a bullet. As he reached up with his hands inside the frame of the register, he felt the first twinge of pain under his arm. He didn’t wait. Instead, with a pull from his arms and a healthy jump from his legs off the chair, Liquida hoisted his upper body up into the opening in the ceiling.

  He felt the sharp pain, the tearing of scar tissue as the muscles under his arm reminded him of the slashing cut. He paused, his weight on his chest just inside the sheet metal duct, his legs dangling into the room as the sweat dripped off his forehead.

  Liquida breathed heavily and chewed on the gum as he waited for the searing pain to pass. It took almost half a minute to subdue the agony before he could move.

  Slowly he slid his hands forward and pulled his body along the inside of the sheet metal tunnel. Each move was a new experience in pain. Finally everything but his toes was up inside the metal ceiling duct.

  Then slowly he reversed the process. He shimmied backward, pushing himself back over the hatch in the ceiling until only his head and shoulders remained over the open register.r />
  With his right hand he reached back and fished for the end of the threaded loop under his belt. He found it and pulled it free.

  Liquida took up the slack in the thread and pulled on it gently until all four legs of the chair cleared the floor. Slowly swinging the chair like a pendulum, back and forth, he made three full passes toward the wall near the head of the bed. On the fourth pass, he let out the thread and dropped the chair so that it landed neatly with the back against the wall.

  Liquida smiled to himself as he nibbled through the four strands of thread. Once he had severed them he pulled the continuous loop from the back of the chair and reeled it in until all of the thread was in his hands. He balled it up and stuck it down the neck of his shirt as the forced air from the conditioning system whistled past his ears.

  He reached down and lifted the vented register cover closed. He took the chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it to the metal edge of the frame around the louvered vent, then pulled it tightly closed. The gum sealed the cover in place. Anyone looking in the room now would think Liquida had simply vanished.

  * * *

  At a point roughly a hundred miles north of Havana, the flight engineer on Adin’s C-130 radioed to the base in Israel. He asked to have an uncoded message sent to Joselyn Cole at her e-mail address, making an urgent request for information using Herman’s name. He needed to know Madriani’s location as well as the precise location of the antenna array and the facility in the jungle. It was now two hours later and they had heard nothing.

  Forty miles out, the pilot turned off the plane’s transponder. He dropped down to wave-top height and hugged the water, trying to stay below ground radar.

  Twenty minutes later the C-130 crossed over the white-foamed breakers and sugar-sand beaches of the Mexican Riviera. The pilot nosed the plane up to clear some low-lying cliffs and the buildings on top of them. They were just south of the island of Cozumel on the Yucatán Peninsula.