Trader of secrets

Chapter Fifty-Eight

In his heightened state of fright, Leffort wasn’t sure what he was hearing at first. With the iron asteroid out of control and the monitors in the room all dark, his mind was seized with thoughts of escape. The noise went on for several seconds before it even registered in his brain.

When it did, it hit him like a shot of adrenaline. The sound was muted by the solid steel door of the control room and the heavy insulation in the walls and ceiling around him. But there was no mistaking what it was. An alarm pierced the silence in the hallway outside, the buzzing Klaxon on the wall.

Leffort was sure he had triggered it. Either the result of the unbalanced telemetry data being fed into the computers or the fact that he had powered down the large monitors on the wall-something had set it off.

There was nowhere to go. Leffort was trapped in the room with two armed guards outside the door. Someone pounded on the other side. Finally despondent, he picked up his card key and unlocked it from the inside. When he heard the electronic bolts snap open, he waited for several seconds. Leffort expected the guards to storm in and take him, but they didn’t. He opened the door a crack and looked out.

The corridor was a sea of pandemonium. The Klaxon horn on the wall blaring in his ears was deafening. Guards were running in every direction. Two of the scientists Leffort had thrown out of the room were standing there gesturing frantically as they spoke.

Leffort stepped out and closed the door behind him. “What is it?”

One of them who spoke English looked at him wide-eyed. “Radar warns of a large unidentified aircraft.”

“What?”

People racing by were bumping into the two men. One of them, the one he was talking to, tried to edge toward the closed control room door. “I must get inside to take some readings.”

“Where was the plane? How far out?” Leffort changed the subject.

“Very close,” said the man. “One of the guards outside saw it. Only a quick glimpse but he said it looked like a military plane.”

“The Mexican government?” said Leffort.

“We don’t know. They have ordered all technical staff to the underground bunker.” The alarm was the signal to battle stations. “The rest have already gone. I was waiting for you to open the door.” He reached for it.

“Never mind!” Leffort blocked him with his body. “I’ll grab the printouts, lock up, and meet you at the bunker.”

The man smiled. “Good. Thank you. You are a prince.” He was still genuflecting toward Leffort as the two of them disappeared into the sea of human chaos flowing down the hallway.

Leffort stepped back into the room, closed the door, and tried to collect his thoughts. The printer was off. He had never turned it on. For a man who was an agnostic, Leffort was beginning to believe. If there was a God, surely he had intervened.

He stepped out and closed the door to the control room behind him. This time he made sure it was locked. Then he headed down the hall the other way, away from the bunker and the other scientists.

The shock of the blaring sound was sudden and loud enough that Liquida banged his head against the sheet metal ducting above the pay room.

He didn’t know what the alarm was, but he figured there was a good chance Bruno or someone else had discovered him missing from his room.

He watched through the louvered vent as the man at the desk below him stood up and listened for a moment. First the guy turned and looked at the locked door to the hallway outside. When he turned to glance at the open safe, Liquida moved. The guy started gathering up his papers and books on the desk.

Using the stiletto, Liquida quickly popped the catch on the register cover. He allowed the vent cover to swing open and pushed the filter out of the way.

The thin flat filter floated toward the floor like a leaf. As it brushed past the man’s shoulder, the accountant looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of Liquida’s sinister smile. The Mexicutioner descended on him headfirst with his arms straight out as if to embrace his victim with the point of the stiletto.

The bookkeeper threw up a hand to ward it off, but he was too late.

Liquida fell on him. The needle-sharp tip of the blade slipped smoothly into the right side of the man’s neck as if the wound were a ready-made sheath. With all of Liquida’s weight behind it, the stiletto buried itself to the handle in the victim’s upper chest just inside the clavicle.

The shocked man broke Liquida’s fall, and they both collapsed onto the floor. The two of them lay sprawled, the bookkeeper pulsing a river of blood as Liquida wiggled the blade in the wound. The tip had either punctured the upper chamber of the heart or severed the aorta. Either way the man would be dead within seconds.

Liquida waited a few counts for the convulsing body to become still. Then he got to his knees, stood, and pulled the stiletto from the deep wound. Liquida wiped the blade and his bloodied hand on an unsoiled portion of the victim’s pant leg.

Without another thought, he turned his attention to the open safe behind him. For the first time Liquida realized that the stacked wall of greenbacks inside the two yawning steel doors was nearly as tall as he was and four times as wide.

He walked across the room and grabbed one of the enclosed bundles from the top shelf. They were five-dollar U.S. banknotes, all of them vacuum packed in plastic. Liquida could tell from the way it was packaged, as well as from the residue of white film on the shrink-fitted wrapper, that it was cash from one of the cartels. No one else in the world bundled bills like that. They had to protect their money from seawater, chemicals, and fuel during storage and transit. To Liquida the narco seal of approval was better than a certificate from the U.S. Treasury. He knew it wasn’t counterfeit and no one would have a list of the serial numbers.

What better way to launder it than to transfer the narco dollars to Bruno’s clients, who in turn would wire excess oil revenues into a cartel account overseas. In the meantime, Bruno’s clients could use the narco bills to meet their payroll in the jungle. It was the perfect symbiotic relationship.

The second shelf was stacked with tens. The shelf below it held twenties.

Liquida worked his way to the floor of the safe. It was stacked at least three feet high with bundles of hundred-dollar banknotes, each one a tight plastic brick. The safe was at least two feet deep and four feet wide. If true to form, each plastic-wrapped brick of hundreds would contain ten thousand dollars.

Just like the post office, the cartels had to weigh everything for transport. Otherwise overloaded planes would nose into the jungle and their jury-rigged diesel-powered semisubs would be littering the seafloor. Liquida knew from his work with the cartels that a million dollars in hundreds would weigh just under twenty pounds. He had no idea how much money was in the bottom of the safe, but it was more than he could carry without wheels.

His worst enemy now was time. Keeping one eye on the door to the hallway outside, Liquida searched the cabinets under the counter. He found a stack of heavy canvas bags, each one the size of a twenty-five-pound sack of flour. They were cash bags without lettering on the outside. Each one had a tie string stitched near the open top of the bag.

Liquida quickly filled four of the bags with hundred-dollar bills and tied them closed with double knots. He lifted each by the tie string until he was satisfied that the thick canvas tie would hold the weight of the bag without breaking.

He went back to the cadaver on the floor and stripped the dead man’s belt from his pants. The alarm outside was still blaring. Liquida fished for the guy’s electronic key card and found it in his pants pocket.

He went back to the money bags and made a separate loop from the remaining ends of the ties on each of the bags. He threaded the leather belt through the loops and then buckled it. He hoisted the load over his shoulders so that the bags were evenly balanced, two in front, two behind, roughly eighty pounds total. It was heavy. The weight swayed as he moved, but Liquida could handle it.

What he couldn’t do was take his eyes off the safe. He had barely made a dent in the bottom stack of bills. He set the load down and grabbed two more canvas bags.