Steve Martini - Trader of secrets

“How much?” said Liquida.

“To you, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, U.S.”

“When is the deadline?”

“Five days from now.”

If Bruno was telling him a quarter of million to expedite delivery, Liquida knew that Croleva was getting three or four times that much.

“Which takes us back to the Iranian,” said Bruno.

“There are ways to make a tongue wag,” said Liquida.

“Yes, I know, electrodes and car batteries. The problem is that here we are talking sophisticated computer software programs. Something you and I would not know from a Chinese anagram. Once we torture him, we alienate him. The man, Raji, he is no fool,” said Bruno. “Beyond that, he is Persian.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“His pride has already been injured. He is feeling insulted because of the way Leffort has treated him. If we torture him, he may decide not to talk and force us to kill him.”

“Of course, I don’t know the man,” said Liquida, “and all of his body parts might not be working so well anymore, but I’m pretty sure I could persuade him to cooperate before he takes his last breath.”

“In which case he may give us something worthless,” said Bruno. “With these clients you don’t want to jam a piece of software in their machine and find out you have the original version of Pac-Man.”

“The other one, this Leffort. He wouldn’t be able to look at it and tell us?” asked Liquida.

“No. He says he won’t know if the final software is good until he is able to test it at the facility in Mexico.”

Liquida liked to work alone. It was how he had stayed alive this long. Strip Bruno’s chitchat to the essentials and the message was clear; the two guys from NASA were the walking dead. The minute their jobs were finished, so were they. Liquida didn’t want to be standing around them when it happened. It could be contagious. A call to do the wet work on them wouldn’t have twitched a brow on his forehead. But not this. To Liquida this sounded like an invitation to a funeral-his own. Although he didn’t like it, at the moment he didn’t have much choice. “One thing I don’t care for here is the location. You have them set up in the hotel across the street, right?”

“What’s wrong with it?” said Bruno.

“It’s just that the Latin Quarter is a tourist area. The Iranian gets away from you here, you’re going to have your hands full. There are too many prying eyes and nosy sightseers,” said Liquida. “Let me take them out to the suburbs.” Liquida wrinkled an eyebrow at Bruno. He was talking about neighborhoods to the northeast where angry Arab immigrants burned hundreds of cars each night, whenever they felt a grievance coming on. “Let the Iranian see what’s going on out there. It may loosen his tongue.”

“No time for that,” said Bruno. “Besides, there are too many police and French intelligence out that way. My people are already set up in the hotel. Just keep your knife in its sheath and use your head. A little finesse. That is what is called for here. I am sure you can do it. I have confidence in you.”

“Whatever you say.” The reason Liquida wanted out of the hotel was not because it was a tourist site. He had left the name “Hotel Saint-Jacques” on the message machine in Thailand. Liquida began to sweat, wondering if the FBI might already have the place under surveillance. With a fresh passport and another hotel, Liquida would have had a new lease on life. Time to figure out what to do. Now he would have to cross the street and walk into the hotel with his luggage and hold his breath as he did so.

On the way in from the airport, after talking to Bruno on the phone, Liquida had made one more call. This one was to the private courier in Dubai, the dispatch service that was holding his anonymous letter. He told them to deliver it and gave the address of the U.S. Embassy in Dubai, Office of the Legal Attache.

Liquida had checked on the hotel computer in Dubai just before leaving. His FBI poster on their website was now updated with a sketch. This had to be courtesy of Madriani’s daughter. It wasn’t a very good likeness. He felt it failed to properly display the strength of character in his face. It looked like a picture made by a machine. Still, it was one more fly in the ointment, something to contend with whenever he flew commercial.

Liquida’s anonymous letter was in reference to the FBI’s most wanted website, not the old one used for gangsters, but the new one on terrorism. In the letter Liquida claimed to be a physician in Dubai. Liquida had postdated the letter by two days, knowing that he would be out of the country by then. He withheld his name, explaining that he could not take the chance of publicly assisting the American FBI since he resided and worked in such a dangerous region of the world. He explained that a foreigner had come into his office requesting medical attention. The man claimed to be a guest staying at the Dubai Beach Resort. He wanted the doctor to remove some surgical staples from what he claimed was a wound under his arm. While the doctor was happy to assist, he recognized the injury as a knife wound and immediately became suspicious. Later after the man left, he checked the few sources available to him online and discovered a wanted poster on the FBI website showing a sketch that looked very much like his patient. One of the aliases posted under the sketch was the name “Liquida.”

If the FBI found anything in Thailand, Liquida was hoping to send them in another direction, back to Dubai. By the time they checked out the lead in the Arab Emirates and discovered that the Spanish passport had moved from there in the other direction, to Thailand and then on to Paris, Liquida planned to be long gone, under a different name and on a different continent. He hoped that by then the Americans would be hooked on the Spanish passport. Liquida had plans for that as well.

He didn’t dare tell Bruno that the FBI was breathing up his ass and that the Paris hotel might be compromised. Bruno would pull out of the Latin Quarter all right, but only after one of his henchmen pumped a bullet into Liquida’s brain and dumped his body in the Seine. The only way out now was to work and work fast, to get out of Paris and back to Mexico where he knew the lay of the land. Perhaps it was all a matter of perspective, but for Liquida, suddenly the old cartels were not looking nearly so bad.

Waiting for our flight from Bangkok to Paris, I borrow Joselyn’s laptop. She is an Apple user. I am not. She sets up the e-mail for me, and I send two quick e-mail messages.

The first message goes to Thorpe telling him about the Hotel Saint-Jacques and Liquida’s message on the tape along with the number code to get into it. I tell him that we are on our way to Paris, hoping that maybe he will have someone there to meet us. The second e-mail I also send to Thorpe but with a request that it be delivered to Sarah. I tell her we are headed to Paris, but I give her none of the details. I tell her not to worry, that we hope to be back in just a few more days.

I would have called Thorpe’s office, but since it is the weekend, and with a twelve-hour time difference between Bangkok and Washington, all I would get was his voice mail.

When I finish with the laptop, Joselyn takes it back and treats us to the mysteries of Earth Google and Google Maps. Within less than a minute she shows us the street view of the Hotel Saint-Jacques in Paris using Google Maps. Moving the camera’s perspective she is able to glide in front of the place, adjust the angle of view to look at the hotel from the ground level to the roof, and move down the side streets as if we were there. Cars on the road and pedestrians on the sidewalk are all stopped in freeze-frames as if frozen in time.