Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (7 page)

“Where are they?”

“I’ve got ’em; they’re safe. I’ll get them to you the next time we meet.” Raji closed the door and headed for his car.

Chapter
Nine

W
hen Liquida failed to kill Madriani’s daughter, he knew instantly that he was operating on borrowed time. No doubt, the lawyer had already informed the FBI that Liquida was connected to the D.C. bombing. With the news of the attack at the farm, federal authorities would waste no time throwing up checkpoints in Ohio and the surrounding area. State patrols would be watching for him, a lone driver in a late-model sedan, dark hair, probably Hispanic. The description would become more detailed the longer Liquida waited.

The girl had gotten more than a good look at him. From the evident shock on her face, Liquida’s image was probably seared into her psyche like a woodcut engraving. The cops would have a solid description of him the minute they could shake her out of her catatonic trance. He now had a reason to kill her other than vengeance: his own survival—but it would have to wait.

Instead of driving west on the interstate where authorities would most likely be fanning out in their search, Liquida made a snap decision. He turned around out on the main highway and headed like a comet for the outskirts of Columbus less than twenty miles away. He made one stop at a hardware store just two miles from the airport. There he purchased a roll of plumber’s lead tape and headed for the restroom.

Fifteen minutes later, Liquida abandoned his rental car in a parking space at the airport, bought a ticket at the counter, and checked his luggage, including the rolled-up collection of stilettos from the trunk of the car. He killed a few minutes waiting outside the TSA security area watching people pass through the metal detector, a few of them being wanded as they set off the detector’s alarm.

He got in line; took off his shoes, watch, and belt; and emptied his pockets into one of the plastic trays. He pushed the tray along with his overnight bag toward the conveyor belt and waited his turn.

A few seconds later, the tray and the bag disappeared into the metal box housing the scanner. Liquida was directed to pass through the metal detector. He held his breath and walked through. A minute later he had his shoes on, his belt through the loops in his pants, with the bag over his left arm headed for the gate.

Plumbers use lead tape under hose clamps to tamp down vibration where it’s a problem. Golfers and tennis pros paste the stuff to their rackets and club heads to weigh them down and straighten out their swing. Liquida applied his lead tape to the area under his arm to prevent the surgical staples from tripping the alarm on the TSA metal detector. If they wanded his back and it buzzed, they would pat him down. And when they felt the staples and the puffed-up wound, they would invite him into the little room and tell him to take off his shirt. Even TSA staff could recognize a knife wound once they saw it.

Liquida caught his flight to Atlanta, where he scanned the departure boards inside the security area for the quickest exit out of the country, somewhere safe. He was burning money like kerosene. Soon he would have to start using stolen credit cards, something Liquida never liked to do. It only heightened the risk of detection.

He used his last set of foreign travel documents, a Spanish passport that was tucked away in the lining of his overnight bag. He purchased a ticket and boarded a Delta flight for the United Arab Emirates. It was a long trip, the longest of his life, at least in terms of stress and anxiety. He was under the gun of the FBI. Liquida didn’t relax entirely until he landed and made his way through customs and into a taxi outside the airport in Dubai.

He had the driver take him to the Royal Meridien Beach Resort, where he booked a room and took up residence as a vacationing Iberian businessman. The place was expensive, more than Liquida wanted to spend, especially now. But he had stayed there before, in better times when he was financially flush, and he knew the place. On the run Liquida had learned that there is an element of safety in surrounding yourself with the rich. A foreign national staying in a flophouse always drew more attention from the local authorities, especially in a conservative country like the Emirates. They were certainly more likely to roust you and ask questions. That was the one thing Liquida didn’t want.

The Royal Meridien and its grounds were the size of a small city. It was an easy setting in which to remain anonymous. The resort was crowded with wealthy tourists—Europeans, Asians, and Arabs—all cloistered in their own separate tribes lounging around the pools.

*  *  *

The next morning Liquida walked to a small convenience store just outside the resort. He purchased a dozen Etisalat prepaid cellular SIM cards from the clerk. Then he returned to the resort and found a quiet area near the edge of one of the pools. He ordered a drink from the wandering waitress and went to work.

Using a four-band unlocked cell phone and the stack of SIM cards, Liquida began collecting his messages.

Timing himself with the sweep second hand on his watch, he ended each call at three minutes on the dot whether he was finished collecting his messages or not. The Americans had a nasty way of using their listening posts in the sky to turn cell calls into party lines. After three minutes, he would remove the SIM card from the phone and grind it under the leg of the metal chair he was sitting on. When he was satisfied that he had destroyed the card’s miniature circuitry on the abrasive concrete of the pool deck, he would pick up the card, smudge any prints that might be on it, and drop it into a trash can just behind his chair. He would then slip a new SIM card representing a new telephone number into the phone and pick up where he left off.

It was a laborious process, but Liquida was paranoid when it came to the perils of government and the seductions of technology. Combine the two and get a good glimpse of hell. Too many of his friends were either dead or sitting out their lives in maximum-security dungeons, casualties of the digital disease.

Having won the Cold War and toppled the Evil Empire, the American government had now become what it had destroyed. Its political class was busy using technology to digitize its citizens into slavery. There was nowhere left for people to hide. Babies were registered at birth and given Social Security numbers like cattle with ear notches so that power-hungry politicians could track them throughout their lives and harness them as taxing units. The government was everywhere, listening to private telephone conversations, reading people’s mail and e-mail, watching them through cameras built into their laptops. They could turn on your cell phone and use it like an undercover wire to listen in on private conversations, all of this while they tracked you with GPS and filmed you from cameras on every light pole. In less than ten years, the United States, the leader of the free world, had become a prison without walls. Liquida was starting to feel like everybody else. He wanted the government off his back. The critics were right. They were killing the economy. In a world like this, how could any small businessman, someone like Liquida, make a decent living?

Liquida was of the old school, the world of the Unabomber and Osama bin Laden. There was a lot to be said for a cave in the mountains or a shack in the forest where lighting was by candles and conversation consisted of an occasional grunt, where messages were written on rice paper so the words could be quickly eaten when you were finished reading.

He worked the small cell phone, crushing and replacing SIM cards as he went, always keeping one eye on his watch. He rang up several message services, one in Spain, another in the States, one in Thailand, and a fourth one in Rio, in Brazil. He listened intently to his messages while he jotted down notes in a small pocket pad.

When he was finished, Liquida sat up straight, adjusted his dark glasses, and sipped a little of the mojito from the tall glass on the table in front of him. He set the glass down and slowly licked his lips, savoring the flavor of the rum as he studied the last entry in the small notepad.

It was a message from Bruno Croleva, a Chechen who in the last two years had risen in Liquida’s eyes to become his favorite rainmaker.

Business from Bruno had lifted him from the squalor of Tijuana and the limited possibilities of the cartels, where retirement usually came in the form of a bullet.

Bruno had connections with Islamic militants as well as other injured and angry ethnic and religious groups. These were people highly committed to killing their enemies, which at any given time might include half the world’s population, mostly Westerners.

The clients were well funded and paid far more than the chump change offered by the cartels. Prices of a good assassination in Mexico had been driven to rock bottom by an army of itchy-fingered teenagers possessing no proper sense of values. Best of all, the foot soldiers used by Bruno’s clients were willing to die for their beliefs. This was an extremely efficient arrangement. It left many fewer tongues to wag when the job was done. Liquida didn’t have to dirty his own blade arranging for the sounds of silence. These were his kinds of people.

According to the message, there was forty thousand euros in cash in a drop box belonging to Liquida, delivered there by Bruno’s courier as final payment for a job Liquida had completed several months earlier.

Liquida had almost forgotten about it. He had given up on the money, thinking he would never see it. He assumed that Bruno was angry with him and that he might never hear from the man again. The last two ventures had not gone well, though it was not for want of trying on Liquida’s part.

Bruno was now paying up. What’s more, according to the message, he was offering Liquida another job and dangling a very tempting commission. The details, along with the money, were in the drop box.

For Liquida the money couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. He was low on cash and he needed the work. You might have thought that Liquida would be happy, but he wasn’t. His first response was caution.

Ordinarily he would have called the courier service and made arrangements to have the stuff in the box collected and delivered by giving them a temporary forwarding address, someplace where Liquida could move in and out quickly and safely.

But things were now much more complicated. The U.S. government had put a price on his head. Liquida had seen it earlier that morning, using one of the guest computers in the hotel lobby to check the FBI’s website. It was something he did on a frequent basis. It wasn’t there yesterday. But this morning he turned up, not on their most wanted fugitive list, but instead, on their terrorist site. There was no picture or sketch, at least not yet. But they were offering two million dollars for tips that would lead authorities to a man known only under the alias of “Muerte Liquida.” There was other information, some of it accurate and some of it not. That was the thing about government; they had a hard time getting things right. If Liquida could have figured a way to stay safe and collect on the reward, for that kind of money, he might have called in a tip or two himself.

Now he had to worry about Bruno. In Liquida’s line of work, two million dollars could turn an associate into beef on the hoof in less time than it took to say the word
tip.

His natural paranoia was telling him that the stuff in the drop box could be a trap. He looked at the date on the message. It was two days old. Unless Bruno somehow knew about the reward before it was posted on the FBI’s site, he could not have known about it when he sent the message. In which case it might not be a trap at all. Or else . . . Liquida’s mind searched for the hook and its jagged barb.

What if the message wasn’t from Bruno at all? What if the FBI had somehow found the box? Liquida had been using the drop box for about seven months. That was too long. It was time to get a new one, to find a fresh location. But it was too late to think about that now. If the message was real, then the money was there. But if the FBI knew about the box, they could know about the messaging service as well. They might be using the box as bait.

Chapter
Ten

H
ow many times do I have to tell you? I just want to go home,” said Raji. “This is not going to work. That’s all there is to it.”

“It will work if you help us,” said Bruno.

“I already told you, no. I made a mistake. I admit that. I should never have come to Paris.”

“It’s too late for that,” said Leffort. “There’s no way back. They already know. The authorities will be looking for both of us by now.”

“I’ll take my chances,” said Raji.

“Unfortunately, that is no longer possible.” Bruno Croleva was an equal opportunity merchant of death. There was no cause he would not fuel with guns or munitions. He was totally nonpartisan in the same way politicians are who take donations from all sides on every issue. Bruno was in it for the money. Warm bodies or cold steel, it didn’t matter to Bruno. If there was a profit to be made, he would deliver it.

“You know what I think?” said Bruno.

Raji sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“I think you are a little homesick, is all. Maybe you have someone waiting for you back there. A nice woman perhaps?” Bruno wrinkled an eyebrow at him with the delivery of this diagnosis.

Raji looked up at him and winced, as if to tell Bruno that he had an air bubble trapped somewhere between his ears. “No. You’re wrong.” Raji shook his head.