Trader of secrets

Chapter Sixteen

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.”

“I wish he could tell us,” said Thorpe. He made a note.

“NASA moved Leffort out of the particle physics project early on, before it ran out of money. Congress cut it off after pouring eighty million down a rat hole.”

“Who says they’re stupid,” said Thorpe. “Maybe this Leffort could find some way to teleport Congress to the moon. Now that would be worth a grant. I’d give him my pension. Anything else?”

“Well, yeah.”

The way Llewellyn said it Thorpe knew it wasn’t good news. “Give it to me.”

“It seems science wasn’t the only thing on the fringe for our man Leffort.”

“Go on.”

“He had a kinky nightlife.”

Thorpe’s head snapped toward Llewellyn. His eyes opened wide as he held the smoking cigarette off to the side. “You’re gonna tell me he fell in with some Russian belly dancer,” said Thorpe.

“No. At least I don’t think so. You can read the details tonight before you go to sleep.” Llewellyn flipped a copy of a document onto the desk in front of Thorpe. “I’d recommend you take a cold shower first. It’s Leffort’s last fitness report for his security clearance.”

“Cut to the chase. What’s in it?” said Thorpe.

“More to the point, you might want to ask who did the investigation and wrote it up.”

“Who?”

“The National Security Agency,” said Llewellyn.

“Why not us?” This was normally something done by the FBI.

Llewellyn made a question mark out of the expression on his face. “You’ll find some large portions of their report are redacted. Anything and everything having to do with the project Leffort was working on, as well as some other things. According to the report, they had their eye on him all the time.”

“Then why don’t they tell us where he is?” said Thorpe.

“Good question. To read it, they were getting ready to cancel his security clearance, dump him from the project, and castrate him; that is, if you believe what’s written on those pages. Of course, NSA never got the chance. It was a matter of unfortunate timing according to them.”

“Leffort rabbited,” said Thorpe.

Llewellyn nodded. “It makes for interesting reading, but if you’re smart, you don’t want to be sitting upright in bed when you open it. Cuz all that self-serving crap inside, it’s gonna spill out all over you and make for a damn mess,” said Llewellyn. “You want to know what I think?”

“That’s why we’re talking here,” said Thorpe.

“I think that report and the investigation that goes with it were both done after the fact.”

“You mean after Leffort disappeared?”

“Exactly. You can read it for yourself. Form your own conclusions,” said Llewellyn. “NSA is trying to cover their skirts. They redacted the names of all the witnesses they talked to, including the women Leffort had trysts with. You have to wonder why.”

“Maybe Leffort was into pillow talk about the project?” said Thorpe. “Classified information.”

“To read the report, the only classified information any of these women had was as to the location of warts on Leffort’s tallywacker. There’s not the slightest hint that any of them knew squat about Leffort’s work. Nor is there any indication that any of them were extorting him for classified information. First thing I thought of was spies,” said Llewellyn. “But there’s nothing there. Not even the slightest whiff that any of them were in the employ of a foreign power. NSA doesn’t even bother to raise the specter. So why withhold their names?”

“You tell me,” said Thorpe.

“Because NSA doesn’t want us talking to them,” said Llewellyn. “They deleted the names because they knew we’d get the cart back behind the horse. They knew we’d find out that they didn’t interview the witnesses until after Leffort disappeared.”

“I don’t get it,” said Thorpe.

“You will in a moment, all nine yards,” said Llewellyn.

Thorpe didn’t like the sound of that.

“It explains how they found out somebody was lifting information from the NASA computers. After the fact. When Leffort was already gone. The same way they got the names of the women. This guy was running wild on a top-secret, highly sensitive program and they had no clue. And now the shit is about to hit the fan, and everybody in town, except us, is looking for a rock to crawl under.”

“The White House and the brass at the Pentagon are looking for somebody to blame,” said Thorpe.

“Right,” said Llewellyn. “And NSA is a little too close to home to crap in that particular backyard. So they’re looking for someplace else to take a dump.”

“Us,” said Thorpe.

Llewellyn nodded.

“Next you’re gonna tell me that NSA had lead responsibility for security on this mystery project,” said Thorpe. “Whatever the hell it is.”

“No, not just lead responsibility,” said Llewellyn, “exclusive responsibility. Everybody else was cut out, all the defense intelligence agencies, protective services, security management at NASA-they were all cut out of the loop. That should give you a hint as to what’s going on here. It’s why we weren’t asked to do the security background update on Leffort.”

“And NSA blew it!” said Thorpe.

“Yep.”

“I knew it. I knew it. This thing smelled the minute I got that call from the White House.” Thorpe got up out of his chair, waving the cigarette around like a torch. “So now they dump it on us to find these guys, and if we fail, it’s our ass in the flames. And if that’s not enough, they want to play hide the ball. They can’t tell us what it’s about. Son of a bitch,” said Thorpe. “Damn it!” He stood there, face full of fury, tendrils of smoke surrounding the shadow of his head on the wall, the fumes appearing as if they emitted from his ears. He swallowed hard. It was one of the few times that Llewellyn could remember ever seeing signs of fear on his friend’s face.

Thorpe took a deep drag on the cigarette and sucked it into his lungs to quell the anger. He held the smoke for a long moment and then expelled it toward the ceiling.

“That shit’s gonna kill you,” said Llewellyn.

“What, this?” Thorpe held it up in front of his face and looked at the cigarette. “This is therapy. It’s the fucking National Security Agency’s gonna kill me.”