“Did she get a good look at him?”
“Yeah. One she’s not likely to ever forget,” says Harry.
“Did she get a good look?” says Thorpe.
I nod.
Thorpe’s back to the other line. “Tell the agents to take a laptop with Identi-Kit software with them. They need to talk to the girl, Sarah Madriani, and work up a good computer-generated photo… What about any vehicle?” He is talking to me again.
“Did she see a car?” I ask Harry.
“Only from a distance. No license plate or vehicle description,” says Harry. Harry’s voice drops almost to a whisper. “He did leave a knife, however. A wicked-looking thing.”
“Where?”
“You don’t want to know,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“She is all right?” I ask.
“Yes. Physically she’s fine, a few bruises and scrapes,” says Harry.
“Can I talk to her?”
“Right now she’s in the other room with Susan. I’d give her a few more minutes and call back. Let her get herself together. She’s pretty upset.”
“I understand. Are the police there?”
“Sheriff’s deputies crawling over the place like ants,” says Harry. “He won’t be coming back, not here, not if he’s smart.”
“How did it happen? How did he get to her?”
“I’ll tell you later,” says Harry. “It’s a sore subject with Sarah. You might want to go easy. She made a mistake.”
“I see.” A few seconds of silence pass between us on the phone.
“Harry?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell her I called. Tell her I love her. Tell her that I’ll call back in just a few minutes and that I am making arrangements to get the two of you out of there and here to D.C. as quickly as possible.” I look directly at Thorpe as I say this last bit.
He nods. “Can do,” says Thorpe.
“Got it,” says Harry.
“And Harry, don’t let anyone touch that knife in case there’s prints,” I tell him.
Harry laughs a little. “I don’t think they’ll find any. But it is true what they say, that the fruit never falls far from the tree.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean with all the hysteria, the fact that Liquida came within a hairsbreadth of killing her, your daughter had the same thought, to leave the knife where it was, all the way back to the house. It took some courage,” says Harry.
Chapter Eight
Lawrence Leffort was tall and slender, six foot two, a hundred and sixty pounds. Built like a pencil. At forty- two he showed not even the slightest bulge of a paunch or love handles.
Ever since he was a kid he’d worn spectacles thick as bottle glass, only now they were darkly tinted with circular wire frames, like the ones John Lennon used to wear. An astrophysicist with an advanced degree from MIT, he sported a ponytail that dangled to the center of his back. The hair, which was thinning, and the glasses were part of the metamorphosis from his milquetoast period-a midlife crisis that hit him like a runaway train two years earlier.
In that time Leffort had gone from horn-rimmed academic to avant-garde edgy man at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on the campus of Caltech in Flintridge.
Leffort was a researcher having little contact with the undergraduates, a couple of lectures a year and that was it. If he wanted to grow hair down to his ass and play an air guitar on his own time, the people in the department didn’t care as long as he got his work done.
They might have taken more interest had they known about Larry’s darker side. Since emerging from his shell at forty Leffort had discovered women. The ones he dated liked to abuse their bodies, and Larry liked to help. Most of his ladies were tattooed like sailors and pierced like punch cards. For a man who never dated before the age of forty, this was a novelty he couldn’t seem to resist.
With his new friends as tour guides, Leffort had taken to visiting private dungeons in West L.A. where he developed an Olympic-class appetite for bondage and sadism. He liked to sample the chemicals brewed by the warlocks in these places, mostly meth. After getting high, he would play Grand Inquisitor with women on the rack, or experiment by using some of the other exercise equipment. Larry learned about heightened awareness and experienced firsthand how Dr. Pepper’s lonely heart got poisoned. Whatever inhibitions he had, melted. In little over a year he cultivated a secret nightlife to rival Jekyll and Hyde.
This afternoon, about nine days after the attack on Sarah Madriani, Leffort sat behind the wheel of his car in a parking lot on Foothill Boulevard a hundred yards from Starbucks sipping an iced latte as he listened to Raji tell him all the reasons they shouldn’t be doing what they had already done.
“We need to think about this some more. There’s no reason that we should be in such a rush. What if we missed something?” said Raji. “Some small detail…”
“We haven’t missed anything.” Leffort kept looking out the windshield, watching for any telltale signs that Fareed might have been followed to their offsite meeting. They didn’t dare discuss it in the office. There was no telling who might be listening. There were security cameras and microphones everywhere, with ID cards that limited access to restricted areas.
“How can you be so sure we haven’t made a mistake?” Raji Fareed was a veritable engine of angst. On a normal day, his fret level usually ran a thousand degrees hotter than Leffort’s. During the last two weeks, his anxiety quotient had been off the scale.
Fareed was born in Iran. Now in his early forties, he had come to the United States as a kid with his family. He worked for NASA as a computer programmer and had been thrown into the mix, assigned to work with Leffort on the Thor Project. The two men had been working together for almost a decade and at times rubbed each other raw.
Raji designed programs to crunch numbers. Using supercomputers, he could craft software to solve complex equations and formulas that might otherwise take a couple of hundred lifetimes to work out on a chalkboard. Once he designed a program and loaded it into a computer, a thousand-line equation could be worked out in anywhere from seconds to minutes, and with near-perfect precision.
“Trust me, everything’s covered. The only things left are the guidance programs. Did you bring them?” Leffort had been after Raji to produce the final guidance programs for almost a month. They were the key to terminal targeting. Without them, they had an incomplete package and nothing to sell.
“I’ve got them,” said Raji.
“Good.”
“But I still think we ought to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“So we can slow down a little, and think,” said Fareed. “Right now everything’s just going too fast.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when they decide to throw you under the bus,” said Leffort. “They don’t usually step on the brakes until after it runs over you.”
After more than a decade of research, rumor had it that the Thor Project was about to be scuttled. With the economy on the skids and Washington looking for ways to cut costs, NASA was being chopped to pieces. Not only
