Trader of secrets

Chapter Twelve

By the time Bill Britain got to Thorpe’s office on the fourth floor of the FBI building, he was running late. Thorpe’s secretary had called him away from a staff meeting. She told him to drop what he was doing and come up immediately.

“Go on in, they’re waiting for you.” Thorpe’s secretary gestured toward the closed door.

Britain opened the door and stepped into Thorpe’s office. “What’s going on?”

“Close the door,” said Thorpe.

Britain knew it was something big the minute he saw Herb Llewellyn closeted inside with his boss. Britain was the head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. Llewellyn headed up the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Directorate.

“Take a seat.” Thorpe picked up the receiver to the phone on his desk and punched a button. He waited for a second. “Nancy, I don’t want to be disturbed. Hold all my calls and clear my calendar for the rest of the morning. I’m not sure when I’ll be available. Good.” He hung up the phone. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t go beyond the confines of this office, is that understood? I am told that any other assistance that we might need has to be cleared by the White House.”

Llewellyn and Britain glanced at each other and then nodded toward Thorpe. “Must be pretty bad,” said Britain.

“Less than an hour ago I received a phone call from the White House. I was told that a weapons program, something that DARPA has been working on with the air force and NASA for a number of years, now appears to have been compromised. We don’t know the full extent of the damage yet. NASA and DARPA are still doing an assessment.”

“When you say compromised, you mean information has found its way into the hands of a foreign power?” asked Britain.

“We don’t know for sure, but it’s a possibility,” said Thorpe.

“The White House wouldn’t get involved in something like this unless there was a top-of-the-line national security breach or the prospect of some lethal political fallout,” said Llewellyn.

“In this case it may be one and the same,” said Thorpe. “They wouldn’t give me any details, especially over the phone, other than to emphasize the magnitude. I was told that if there has been a complete breach of the program in question, the damage to national security could be on the order of the Soviet’s penetration of the Manhattan Project.”

“So it’s nuclear?” asked Llewellyn.

“No. I asked them that,” said Thorpe. “That’s the only thing they would tell me. It’s not nuclear.”

Llewellyn issued a subtle sigh and settled back into his chair, as if suddenly he was off the hook.

“According to what I was told, it could be much worse. What they said was that the loss of the information in question could be catastrophic.”

“What the fuck are they working on over at DARPA,” asked Llewellyn, “a doomsday device?”

DARPA was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the technologic black-ops tool designer for the Pentagon. It had been on the cutting edge of every advanced weapons system from the stealth bomber to the latest generation of aerial killer drones. DARPA possessed classified futuristic projects on its drawing boards and computer screens that made Star Trek look obsolete. It might have been fiction, except that the agency had a track record for making sci-fi dreams come true. It was through DARPA that the United States maintained its edge of technologic superiority on the battlefield.

“According to the phone call, the project was right down DARPA’s alley. They simply wanted to get a handle on it before somebody else did. That’s what I was told, and that’s their job,” said Thorpe. “We’ve got a big bull’s-eye painted on our ass. So if it’s that dangerous, whatever it is, we better find it, get it, and keep it. Otherwise somebody’s gonna use it to put an arrow in our butt.”

“Point taken,” said Llewellyn.

“Here’s what we do know,” said Thorpe. “Two NASA researchers scheduled to attend a conference at the European Space Agency in Paris failed to show up. They never checked into their hotel, and nobody knows where they are. They’ve been missing for two days now.”

“Maybe they’re off having a frolic,” said Britain.

“Yeah. That’s what I said. But it gets worse. NASA has information that somebody has been downloading data from the project. There’s only a handful of people with clearance to access the data. The two missing researchers were cleared since they were working on the project on a daily basis. They don’t know how long the unauthorized downloads have been going on, so they can’t be sure how much information may have been taken. DARPA had NASA install some security software on the system. From what I gather, this was fairly recent. Immediately afterward, the software indicated that data was being copied, downloaded to an unauthorized device. NASA figured it was probably a glitch in the new security software. They thought they’d take a look at it and test it before they got all excited. It wasn’t a glitch. The data was downloaded to a device connected to a computer on the desk of one of the two researchers who is now missing.”

“Any chance these guys might have fallen prey to foul play?” asked Britain.

“Anything’s possible,” said Thorpe. “I’ll get more information, names, and backgrounds later this morning. I’m scheduled to be in briefing at the White House in an hour. I’ll bring back as much as I can. But from what I gather, they’re going to be tight-lipped. I have a feeling it’s going to be on a need-to-know basis, and I’m afraid they’re going to be operating on the basis that we don’t need to know.”

“Find out if these two missing guys are critical to operations of whatever the device is. See if it’s just the data they’re worried about or if the two researchers could be part of a package,” said Llewellyn.

“Do we know whether either of them has any kind of ideological bent, political, philosophic, religious?” said Britain.

“I don’t know. I’ll try to find out,” said Thorpe. He made a note.

“And try and see if they’ll tell you anything about the nature of the device itself,” said Llewellyn. “If we don’t know what we’re looking for, we’re going to be terribly hobbled trying to guess who might be in the consumer pipeline.”

“That’s why you’re here,” said Thorpe. “From the telephone conversation, I got the distinct impression that that’s the one thing they’re probably not going to want to talk about. For whatever reason, unless we run into a brick wall. And by then it may be too late. I was wondering if perhaps I could get enough information as to the background on these guys, where they got their education, their field of study, maybe a resume if we get lucky, do you think you might be able to piece together some clue as to what they were working on?”

“It’s possible,” said Llewellyn. “But it’s probably a long shot. I mean, they’re gonna have science backgrounds of some kind. You can be sure of that. It depends how much information they’re willing to give you.”

“I’ll try to get as much detail as I can,” said Thorpe.

“Get it,” said Llewellyn, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Beyond that, we do have one lead. What’s the latest information we have on Bruno Croleva?” Thorpe looked to Britain for a response.

“Last time I looked he was still near the top of our hit parade. We don’t know where he is, if that’s what you mean. Probably in the Middle East somewhere,” said Britain.

“Who’s Bruno Croleva?” said Llewellyn.

“International arms merchant,” said Britain. “Supplier of merchandise to needy warlords and aspiring terrorists.”

“Bruno Croleva is an upwardly mobile jack-of-all-trades” said Thorpe. “If you check his jacket in the file, you’ll find that at one time, in another life, Bruno trafficked in drugs. He had extensive connections in Colombia and North Africa as well as in Marseilles in the south of France. Narcotics is where he got his start. It was from his connections there that he moved into arms sales. A lot of his early deals were to the cartels in Colombia.”

Thorpe had a file on his desk containing two intelligence reports from the CIA. Together with the sparse information given to him over the phone from the White House, he was beginning to connect the dots.

“Bruno is becoming a regular rainmaker of violence,” said Thorpe. “He’s been slipping into the middle of some really big international transactions and making himself indispensable.”

“In what way?” said Britain.

“He’s no longer just selling guns, bullets, and explosives. He’s now peddling some major ordnance. Just before you came over here today I pulled a couple of intelligence reports. It seems Bruno was partnered up with Victor Soyev.”

“Soyev peddled the thermobaric device that landed in the rail yard at Union Station,” said Britain.

“Right. When we took Soyev down, Bruno inherited the entire business,” said Thorpe.

“Now, do you remember the Mexican assassin, the one the cartels called Liquida?”

Britain had to change gears for a second to think. “Yeah, I remember. We kept wondering why his name was popping up around the fringes in the two terrorist attacks. The one in Coronado, at the naval base, and the aerial bomb that hit the rail yard here.”

“Liquida is always around the edges,” said Thorpe. “Never in the middle. We were wondering what a contract killer for the cartels was doing involved in the two terror attacks. The answer is Bruno Croleva,” said Thorpe.

“According to the intelligence reports, Croleva has done business with the FARC in Colombia,” Thorpe went on. “He has connections in Cuba where he has sold weapons as well as in the Middle East, in Iran …”

“And we know he had a connection in North Korea because that’s where Soyev got the thermobaric device,” said Britain.

“Correct,” said Llewellyn.

“All the places where weapons were used in the last two terrorist attacks were either obtained or transited during their shipment to the United States,” said Thorpe. “And it seems that in addition to peddling blockbuster ordnance, Bruno has become a major talent agent. He doesn’t just sell the weapons. If you require it, in a pinch, he can rent you the services of specialists who can wield them and do so with great discretion. According to the CIA, one of his principal artists in this field is a professional assassin known only by the alias ‘Liquida,’ which in Spanish means ‘water.’ In other words, if you’ve got a deal going down and suddenly somebody’s getting ready to drop sand in the works, Bruno can commission Liquida to lubricate the gears with blood.”

“OK, I understand all that,” said Llewellyn, “but how does that give us a leg up on whatever it is that has the White House in such a shit storm?”

“That’s the thing about information,” said Thorpe. “Whoever has it possesses power. In this case, the power to know more. During the telephone conversation, the White House let it drop that apparently the National Security Agency has no file on Bruno.”

“I don’t understand,” said Britain.

“The NSA managed to track some Skype traffic, Internet telephone communications, and apparently a chat line message left by one of the missing researchers from NASA to someone named Bruno Croleva. They wanted to know if the bureau had anything in its files on a man by that name. I’d suggest that gives us two leads, not one, Croleva and Liquida. And we’d better find them fast,” said Thorpe.