leaving the building, he watched to see if they talked to anyone out on the street. He examined them for bulges on their ankles, heavy fanny packs on their sides, or coiled wires growing out of their ears.
He had been doing this for two days. So far he had seen nothing unusual. There were no obvious signs of surveillance. Which only meant that if they were doing it, they were doing a good job. And, of course, the whole point of surveillance was not to be seen.
Once we got up, got dressed, and got out, it took Harry, Joselyn, and me only a few minutes to find the right building. The concierge at the Marriott was able to give us some pretty fair directions and by 3:30 we found the place.
It wasn’t an office building in the sense that I had envisioned. There was no main entrance with double glass doors and street numbers over the top. From the outside it looked as if the upper three stories could have been either apartments, condos, or commercial office space. Across the front of the building, French doors opened onto small balconies. But from where we stood about a block to the south on the other side of the street, it was impossible to tell what kind of furnishings might be inside.
After watching for several minutes and by process of elimination, we concluded that the way in had to be a single door tucked away between two stores on the ground level.
“Unless they put the main entrance in the back of the building,” says Harry.
“Why would they do that?” asks Joselyn.
“Look at the place; they’ve tacked on everything else, why not that?” says Harry.
The privacy of the single lonely door unnerved us a bit. There was no way to tell what might lie beyond it without going in.
“There could be security,” says Harry.
“Or worse,” says Joselyn.
“Or it could be locked,” I tell them. “So what do you think? Should we try it?”
Beyond the green portal, up on the second floor, was another wooden door, this one with a translucent glass panel on top. There was no lettering or name on the glass other than the number 208.
Liquida had seen the inside of the office only one time, the day he first established the account with the company known as TSCC Ltd. Some people used it as a place to store business records or other private papers that for one reason or another they didn’t want to keep at home or in their office. For others, including Liquida, it was an address of convenience.
For a reasonable fee, TSCC, like any other private parcel service, would take receipt of packages or letters addressed to clients and hold them in a locked box or, in this case, the steel drawer of a filing cabinet assigned to the client. Unlike other parcel services, TSCC distinguished itself by not being particularly scrupulous in checking to see whether customs declarations and clearance documents accompanied packages coming in from abroad. This was particularly true when an item was hand-delivered by special messengers, otherwise known as mules.
The company’s fee schedule also offered additional services, including use of its automated voice-mail system. This allowed gift givers and recipients to leave messages for one another; a message that a present was on the way and a verbal thank-you from the happy beneficiary were often well received. Clients and their friends were usually careful to employ obscure terms when communicating their largesse or happiness in these matters.
Best of all, TSCC maintained its own courier service to forward items on to those clients who, for reasons of survival, preferred not to pick up their own mail. For this purpose, the company maintained a complete stable of global mules able to travel to the ends of the earth to deliver private parcels. You could get overnight service to your cave in Afghanistan if you wanted it. Depending on the paranoia of the client, TSCC’s couriers were also adept at sleight of hand, magic acts, and games of chance, this to entertain any government workers who might be watching for the handoff at the time of delivery. They could play “package, package, who has the package” all over the New York subway system if you had the time, inclination, and money to pay for it.
Liquida had a key to the office as well as the locked cabinet drawer inside. But he was never stupid enough to use them, not in his line of work. He always used the forwarding courier service, and he never had anything delivered to the same place twice.
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
