Trader of secrets

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Liquida cleared French customs at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and stopped to purchase a few quick items, four separate French SIM cards for his unlocked cell phone and a small pocket French/English dictionary. He grabbed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Hotel Saint-Jacques on the rue des Ecoles.

In the backseat of the cab, Liquida slipped one of the SIM cards into his phone and then checked the dictionary. He had the driver get the telephone number for the hotel’s front desk from taxi dispatch. Liquida then called the number and asked to speak with Monsieur B. Merchand. It was an alias Bruno had used before; the B for Bruno, with the surname “Merchant” translated into the language of the country he was residing in at the moment.

A few seconds later he heard the familiar voice on the other end: “Hello!”

“WOD here.”

“Ah, good to hear from you. I got your message. Where are you?”

Liquida was both relieved and disturbed to learn that Bruno had retrieved his message from the Thai messaging system before it had been removed. He wondered if anyone else had. He quickly conferred with the driver, then back to the phone and Bruno: “We are about twenty minutes out.” Liquida checked his watch. “We should be there by eleven. I assume you have the documents?”

“I do,” said Bruno.

The Spanish passport Liquida had been using since his flight from the States was burning a hole in his pocket. He wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. French immigration would show airport entry of the Spanish businessman at Charles de Gaulle. Of course, Liquida was not so foolish as to list his residence in Paris as the Saint-Jacques on his entry immigration card. Instead he wrote down “The Ritz,” one of the few Paris hotels he could recall off the top of his head. Now Liquida would use the Spanish passport to send the FBI on a wild-goose chase.

“Is there a cafe where we can meet before I check in? Perhaps you can bring the documents?” asked Liquida.

Bruno got the message. Liquida was on the run, as usual. “There is a coffee shop directly across the street. La Petite Perigourdine. You can’t miss it.” They exchanged SIM card phone numbers in case Liquida got lost.

“I will see you in twenty minutes.” Liquida hung up.

The two men sat at a quiet table at the back of the cafe, Liquida’s rolling luggage next to him as he examined the three new passports Bruno delivered to him. The photograph on each was the same, a stock shot Bruno maintained just for this purpose.

“Good.” Liquida checked the entry and exit stamps, looked at the dog-eared pages, a few of which were suitably stained. All three of the passports were well worn. He noticed that one of them, the Italian passport, bore an entry stamp for the Charles de Gaulle Airport dated that day. “Very good. What about departure? Will it clear the French immigration computer?”

“There is no need to worry,” said Bruno. “You will not be going out through immigration. We have arranged private transport, a Gulfstream from a secluded runway near Marseilles. The plane belongs to the client. It’s long range. From there to Morocco for refueling and on to Mexico. Only one stop.”

To Liquida this was sounding better and better. “When do we leave?”

“When the job is done here.”

Liquida sipped an espresso from the small cup as Bruno gave him the details on the two NASA defectors. “There is only one problem,” said Bruno. “We cannot move forward until we get the missing data from the Iranian. His name is Raji Fareed.”

“You would think he would want to cooperate,” said Liquida. “Can’t you appeal to his patriotism?”

“We tried that. It seems that his family fled when the shah was toppled back in the seventies. He went to the States as a young boy. We’re not sure what’s going on. Perhaps he doesn’t like the current regime. If so, he’s not saying. He says he has the software, but he doesn’t want to deliver it. He wants to go back to the States.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Liquida.

“No. We thought perhaps he just wanted to renegotiate the deal. We tried that. It didn’t work. At this point, it’s neither here nor there. Bottom line is, we have to get the information and we have to do it quickly.”

“What about the other one? Maybe he can help,” said Liquida.

“You mean Leffort? No. There is bad blood between the two of them. Fareed seems to think that Leffort is getting a better deal. More money. It seems Leffort antagonized him before they even arrived.”

“Is he?”

“Is he what?” said Bruno.

“Getting a better deal,” said Liquida.

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Leffort is highly educated, very smart, lets you know it all the time. A real asshole, if you know what I mean. I suspect he has been playing mind games with the Iranian for some time. Telling him one thing, doing another. Keeping secrets, as well as most of the advance payments from what I gather. It’s been going on since before they left the States. By the time they arrived here, the two of them were barely talking. If it were up to me, I would have you cut both their fucking throats. Unfortunately, according to the client, we need to get the information from the Iranian, and Leffort is necessary to the project,” said Bruno.

“Which is?”

“Making money.” Bruno looked at him as if the Mexican had just walked on sacred ground. “I don’t ask. I don’t care as long as they pay me. And these clients pay very well. There is a bonus for all of us if we deliver the data and the necessary personnel to Mexico by the due date.”

“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.