The Merchant of Secrets (4 page)

“Where?”
I asked.

“New
York ,
Washington and
elsewhere,” he answered succinctly.

“Is there that much investment banking here for you here
in Washington?” I shot back.

 “Unless you’re in town to bid for government
treasuries, what’s your business here?” I asked, while scrolling through my
emails. His effusive and confident manner gradually subsided.  He glared
through the corner of his eyes, wearing nervous grin which pushed the fat in
his cheeks upward until his eyes were forced into a squint.  The questions
were puncturing holes in his façade and he couldn’t risk being revealed so he
withdrew to another subject.

In the aftermath of 9-11-2001, money on defense and
intelligence programs flowed like water through a canyon, and it crossed my
mind that maybe he
wanted  to
dip his bucket into
the government money stream. Perhaps he was one of those who came to Washington
with aspirations of gaining wealth at the expense of the American taxpayer, but
this was 2011 and the U.S. had gone through the greatest financial crisis since
the Depression and the defense appropriations landscape had changed.  

 “Do you work?” he asked, turning in my direction,
trying to ascertain my strengths.

 “Yes.”

“Where?
What do you do for a
living?”

“I work at a high-tech company,
”
 I
replied as Sara quietly grinned.

“Doing what?” he queried, nervously rotating the rim of
his wine glass with his fingers and bracing for the response.

“I program websites, I write HTML5 coding.”

He let out a faint sigh of relief.

Sara was on the verge of exploding in laughter.  He
didn’t need to know what an “Intelligence and Computer Systems Analyst” was, or
that I worked for the Department of Homeland Security and would be sure to make
him a top priority as soon as I could get my fingers on a company computer.
 He was searching for something from us that night but it eluded me.
  

“Sara, it’s 11:00 and there’s a ton of snow outside. We
should probably get going, the roads are going to be challenging. I’ll be back in
a moment and then we’ll go. Okay?”  I said firmly before slipping away to
the ladies’ room, where safely out of view, I pulled out my phone and
Googled
his name.  As someone manages huge quantities
of information I was losing my mind in the frustration that there wasn’t a
single link with the name of the man having dinner with us.

I called who Justin worked as an aid to a Senator from
Wisconsin.

“Hi Justin,” I said, “I’m a friend of Sara and am calling
from the restaurant.” I paused to give him time to recognize me.  

“Oh sure!
I remember you!” he
replied, “Sorry I can’t join you for dinner, there’s about three feet of snow
on the street-okay that’s a little bit of an exaggeration- but still, the streets
are blocked with snow and I can’t’ make it across town. Shit, I’m really sorry.
How’s Sara?”

“Well I’m not sure, someone named Roger showed up and
said that he was a friend of yours?”

 Justin seemed perplexed, “Roger? Uh….could
be
,” he answered. “I meet a lot of people in my job. I meet
hundreds of people each week.”

“He’s about six feet tall with medium brown skin, speaks
with an English accent, dressed in Armani,
wears
a red
scarf, about 40 …”

“Oh that guy,” he said recalling the face, “Yeah we had
drinks a couple of weeks ago. What the heck is Sara doing with him?”

 “She’s lonely, and he’s available,” I replied,
sarcastically and perhaps a bit harshly, but nonetheless it was accurate. “He
showed up at the restaurant tonight, claiming that you invited him.”

“Me?” he asked.
“No way!
 
Sara just called me a few days ago to suggest dinner, and I haven’t seen that
guy for about a month, I couldn’t have told him. Anyway, I wouldn’t have
invited him
  to
Sara’s dinner, I mean, what’s the
connection? I don’t even know the guy.”

Justin had just exposed Roger’s false identity but
couldn’t give me any more details because  he’d been given the same
limited version of Roger’s life story that we had just been given.  There
was no point in trying to drag anything more out of Justin.

“Thanks.”

 “No problem,” he said, “let’s all get together when
the snow melts.”

During my absence to talk with Justin, Roger jumped at
the advantage of catching Sara alone to offer her a ride home. Sara accepted
the ride and promised to call me in the morning. Her lack of judgment was
astonishing. “You just met him! You don’t know who he is! It’s
late,
you should let me drive you home. You’ve been drinking
and would be defenseless if he makes a move on you…” I protested using every
argument I could think of to stop her from leaving with him.

She grasped my forearm, smiling, and said “I’ll be fine,
don’t worry. He’s a friend of Justin so he must be okay. I’ll call you in the
morning.
Good-night!”

“He’s not really a friend of Justin…”  
I  yelled
, but she was already whisked out the door by
Roger who was in complete control.  I stood panicked and motionless for a
minute then rushed back to the table, snatched-up my car keys, and raced toward
the door. I flung it open and ran out into the snow, looking up and down the
street, but Sara and Roger had already disappeared. Using my cellphone I tried
to track her using the GPS embedded in her cell phone, but someone had turned
it off.  

 CHAPTER 6

When Sara didn’t return home for the rest of the next
day, my mind convulsed with a half dozen theories of who Roger was, and why he
had taken Sara. I was so worried about her that I couldn’t focus on my work,
and I decided to pass the time by baking chocolate chip cookies. After I had
baked four dozen, I started cleaning the closets.
Anything to
keep me from going crazy.
After twenty-four hours of nail biting
anxiety, my phone rang and it was the Sara, completely oblivious to the
tortuous worry she had caused. Bursting with
cheer  over
the phone, she said  “You’ll never guess what happened, Roger and I
returned to my house after dinner last night and the electricity was off. So we
went to the best hotel in Washington- the one that overlooks the White House-
and we watched the snow fall on the White House.” She inhaled, exhaled, and
continued “In the morning we decided we both needed a break from the snow and
caught a flight to Palm Beach.” Her voice was exceptionally chipper.

“Palm Beach? Why there? Where are you staying?” I asked.

‘We’re at his friend’s house, overlooking the ocean near
Manalapan. It’s so beautiful here,” she said, glowingly.

“
What’s
the address and the name
of his friend?”

‘Um, we’re on North Ocean Boulevard, there’s a small
shopping center with an ice-cream shop on the corner. I saw some mail in the
kitchen with the name of David Jones. Why? Do you know him?”

I didn’t know him, but I
Googled
his name quickly while she talked. He was the president of a small defense
related company located in Virginia and Texas, and had served in Afghanistan,
first in the Army and later returned as a  hired contractor. “What was
Jones doing” I wondered, “with this pseudo- businessman named Roger and how did
they know each other?” Then it occurred to me that this defense company must be
one half of the merger deal he was talking about.

Sarah continued talking. “We woke up at about 10:30 and
took a stroll along the beach, but we had to be careful because
  there’s
a lot of jellyfish. Oh I’ve got news! I asked
Roger to move in with me. We get along so well, we have a lot of fun, and I
hope you get to know him better. He works in New York and Madrid mostly; he’ll
live with me for the time-being and travel for business. Why don’t you come
over for drinks when we get back tomorrow night?” she asked, trying to get me
worked up into a positive mood but I wasn’t sharing her enthusiasm.
In fact, just the opposite.

“Sara, don’t you think this is going way too fast? You
just met him a few days ago; you know very little about him, this is crazy,” I
said, emphasizing the “crazy”.

“Caroline, you worry too much, your job, whatever it is,
has made you paranoid!” 
she
said, emphasizing
the “paranoid.” Our conversation was clearly at a standstill. Although there
 was  a mountain of work for me to do to  complete  the
 network integration evaluation to get it  ready to send to  Ft.
Bliss in the morning, there was also  the palpable feeling of something
gravely amiss  that required investigation that night.  

“Okay, okay. I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER 7

It was time to put some of our equipment to use in
checking-out this arms dealer who dropped-in out of nowhere to chase Sara.
  In pursuit of that objective I put a voice
digitalizer
in my
pocket,
one that was loaded with software that
put the sound of his voice into a code which when matched against a database at
work would identify the person speaking.

That night I drove to Great Falls and pulled into Sara’s
circular driveway.  The gravel crunched beneath the tires so that Roger
and Sara must have heard my arrival. The house was a large sprawling,
French-style, country estate. The landscape was perfectly symmetrical and
orderly, with 4 small cement statues, two children standing in the flower beds,
and two dogs with baskets clenched in their teeth on either side of the door.
When I rang the doorbell Roger answered, beckoning me inside with a grand
gesture of his arms as if he
were
the master of the
house and we were old friends.

Sara had done a lot of work on the house over the past
month,
everything about the house was impeccable. Entering
through the front door, the living room was to the left, painted in pale gray.
 Around the windows hung custom-made silk drapes from Thailand in a deep
purple, which were hemmed, sashed and
tasseled.
 A  French chandelier from the 18
^th
century dangled from
the ceiling. The mantle was of Italian marble, and upon it
she
 had
placed a bust of George Washington. Eighteenth century
landscapes hung on three walls, the fourth wall was covered with book cases
filled with antique leather bound volumes. The dining room to the right was
beautifully done in deep blue with an eye for classical detail, wainscoting up
to the level of the windows and a mahogany dining room table in the center with
a silver vase stuffed with roses, as a center piece. The kitchen was done in
yellow and white, with granite countertops,
and  French
chairs surrounding a heavy, round, pine kitchen table.  In the foyer next
to the circular staircase, there was a marble-top table with a gilded wooden
base where I normally dropped my keys.
But not this time.

  I headed down the hallway leading to the kitchen.
As the aroma of garlic sautéing and olive oil flowed through the air, the
environment would have had a warm, homey feel to it if only different man were
sitting in the living room. Inside the bathroom, the smell of scented soaps
filled the air. I twisted the lock on the door then extricated from my purse a
voice
digitalizer
borrowed from a colleague earlier
in the week, inserted the battery, turned it on, and slid it into my pocket. I
untwisted the lock on the door and walked back down the hallway to the front of
the house. The maximum storage on the portable device was about twenty minutes;
Roger had to keep talking long enough to get a good digital print, hopefully,
for the full twenty minutes to fill the storage on the device. His narcissism
brought about his boasting, and he went on and on, until the storage on the
device was full.

When Sara re-entered the room Roger directed conversation
to their few days in Florida, the restaurants, the sunshine, the beach, the
boat. Sara had regained that bright shiny optimism that had disappeared when
Taylor died. And she was eating again.

 It was time to get the equipment to a lab for
analysis so I devised the excuse of a friend waiting for me for dinner in
Georgetown. I didn’t like to lie to Sara, but it was for her own good. As we
stood up and they walked me to the door  I channeled the actress inside
 of me and said  ”Good to see you again, Roger, hope to see you again
soon,” although an entirely different sentence  ripped through my mind.

I drove quickly around the beltway and exited on a lonely
stretch of highway headed north along    a long open road with
winter- bare forestation on both sides, giving the impression that it would
have been a bad place to have a car break down at night.  While the moon
shined down on the road, the deer inhabiting the area, luckily, were in no mood
to drift across the highway in front of my car and to bloody accident, that
type of accident is common in the Washington metropolitan area.  

At the entrance to Ft. George Meade, Maryland, the guard
was shivering in the cold and didn’t want to budge from his warm spot. I
flashed my badge, and he nodded and waved me through.