Steve Martini - Trader of secrets

For a reasonable fee, TSCC, like any other private parcel service, would take receipt of packages or letters addressed to clients and hold them in a locked box or, in this case, the steel drawer of a filing cabinet assigned to the client. Unlike other parcel services, TSCC distinguished itself by not being particularly scrupulous in checking to see whether customs declarations and clearance documents accompanied packages coming in from abroad. This was particularly true when an item was hand-delivered by special messengers, otherwise known as mules.

The company’s fee schedule also offered additional services, including use of its automated voice-mail system. This allowed gift givers and recipients to leave messages for one another; a message that a present was on the way and a verbal thank-you from the happy beneficiary were often well received. Clients and their friends were usually careful to employ obscure terms when communicating their largesse or happiness in these matters.

Best of all, TSCC maintained its own courier service to forward items on to those clients who, for reasons of survival, preferred not to pick up their own mail. For this purpose, the company maintained a complete stable of global mules able to travel to the ends of the earth to deliver private parcels. You could get overnight service to your cave in Afghanistan if you wanted it. Depending on the paranoia of the client, TSCC’s couriers were also adept at sleight of hand, magic acts, and games of chance, this to entertain any government workers who might be watching for the handoff at the time of delivery. They could play “package, package, who has the package” all over the New York subway system if you had the time, inclination, and money to pay for it.

Liquida had a key to the office as well as the locked cabinet drawer inside. But he was never stupid enough to use them, not in his line of work. He always used the forwarding courier service, and he never had anything delivered to the same place twice.

Herb Llewellyn generally had a pretty good handle on the science of weapons systems. As head of the FBI’s WMD Directorate, an office created after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, Llewellyn had become Thorpe’s go-to guy whenever an investigation involved questions of science or technology.

The problem this time was that Llewellyn had run into a wall erected by political and policy operatives in the White House, and neither he nor Thorpe knew why.

“Nothing,” said Llewellyn. “I can’t get a thing out of anybody at NSA or the Pentagon. People who usually talk to me, the minute they find out why I’m calling, are no longer taking my calls. Suddenly I’m Typhoid Mary. The two who did talk told me they were out of the loop. One of them, a fellow I used to work with, warned me not to ask too many questions.”

“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.”