The Nano-Thief: A Lenny D. Novel (Lenny. D. Novels Book 1)

by Michael Lieberman

  "Okay, go ahead, find him and lose him," N.K. says. "That's all I need to know. But the problem is finding him. We don't even know for sure that he's back in Houston. Put Quick Draw and the others on it. I don't want any body found. That clear?"

  When Sammy saw the graphic news story, he shuddered. He had not realized how horrible the crime scene was. Most of the guy's head was gone. There was blood everywhere. When he viewed the event in the heat of the moment, it had seemed abstract, theoretical. But now it was a gruesome murder, and the video would rally law enforcement. It would not take long for the police to determine that one of his parents' cars was missing and they were away. He would at once become a person of interest. After that it was just a matter of time before he became the chief suspect. Did he really believe that painting the Kia gray and putting on Florida plates was going to protect him? More than ever he needed to get on with it.

  36.

  That evening a black SUV dropped Lenny and Barry at Ferndale's. When Barry offered Snorri a chance to participate, he jumped at it. He loved the idea of doing something besides pouring drinks and listening to people complain. It was arranged: plane tickets, cash, a hotel reservation if he needed it, and a one-page letter signed by Barry. He committed the operation's code name and the gym lock combination to memory.

  "Tell them why you're there in person—that it feels more secure," Barry said. "I don't think the truth will spook them. (He did not mention his worries about N.K.'s deep knowledge.) We're doing it this way, just to be prudent. Your job is to convince them that you're legit and come home with the time of transfer and the routing information. If you pull this off, there's a tip like you wouldn't believe.

  "One more thing, leave your iPhone at your place. Here's a burner. Call me at this number if you absolutely need me." He gives him a slip with his burner number."

  Snorri is in the air early the next morning. He arrives at Klastan's office on the fifth floor of a downtown office building. He thinks this is not how hedge fund offices are supposed to look. Then he decides that he is not sure how they're supposed to look.

  "Hello, I'm Snorri Samuelsson to see Mr. Klastan," he tells the receptionist.

  She's used to all kinds of people showing up. These days you could hardly tell the panhandlers from the billionaires by their dress. But the guy seems a little nervous like something is bothering him. "Just a minute," and she calls back. She says that Mr. Klastan doesn't recall meeting him.

  "Please tell him I'm a friend of Barry Weeks'. He asked me to stop by."

  Klastan greets him and shows him into a small conference room looking out over the street. He draws the drapes. "Now Mr., ah, Mr. Samuelsson. What's this all about?"

  Snorri explains that he is here about Operation Amputation and hands him the one-page letter from Barry.

  "Thank you. I expect that you will want to meet Mr. Faraday as well. He's about fifteen minutes away. Please make yourself comfortable. Someone will be in with coffee."

  Klastan is cautious on the phone with Faraday. "Come on over. There's a friend of mine here that I'd like you to meet."

  Snorri sits in the conference room with the drapes drawn, no reading material, no iPhone. It feels like he's been in solitary for hours when Klastan shows up with Faraday. "Okay, Mr. Samuelsson, friend of Barry Weeks, please tell us both again why you're here."

  "Look, I've told you. It's about Amputation, and I've given you Barry's letter."

  "How do you know Barry, again?" Faraday asks.

  Snorri explains the friendship is with Barry's father Lenny, that he's been working with them trying to track a character named Sammy, who seems to be working with some Israelis. And then he stops.

  "So?" says Klastan.

  "So if you'll give me the account numbers to route the money and an exact time of transfer, I'll be on my way back to Houston."

  "Honestly, that feels unlikely to me," Faraday says. "You could be anybody. You could be working for the Russians, the CIA, the Chinese, for Christ's sake. We need more."

  "So, Barry said you guys might be tough. Here's the combination to the lock on his gym locker."

  Klastan listens, "Fine, but that's not quite enough." Snorri tries to protest, but Klastan barges ahead. "In order for this to work I need two things; first I need to see your driver's license." Snorri pulls it out, and Klastan snaps a picture. "Next, I need to know what kind of pizza you like."

  "What?"

  "You see, Mr. Samuelsson, you are going to be our guest here overnight, and we don't want you to be hungry. If you check out, we'll give you what you need to take back in the morning. And if not, well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

  Snorri stands and looks toward the door. "Please don't do anything rash, Mr. Samuelsson. And before we show you to your quarters, I'd like your phone and any other electronics you have on you." They frisk him, take the burner, his keys and wallet, and sweep him with a metal detector. "Enjoy your time with us. We'll see you tomorrow morning."

  Klastan and Faraday are gone, and before he knows what's happened, he's in a small windowless bedroom with its own bath, a desk, and a TV. Snorri now thinks tending bar at Ferndale's looks pretty damn good. A jailer brings him lunch, the pizza he's expecting, and some hours later dinner, a cheeseburger and fries. He can't sleep. Suppose there's an earthquake, and he's locked in a windowless room on the fifth floor of a downtown office building. Is anybody going to come retrieve him from his aerial tiger cage? What if these guys dig deep into who Snorri Samuelsson is and is not? That could be trouble, real trouble.

  The next morning, he is ushered into yesterday's conference room. There's coffee along with Klastan and Faraday. Klastan begins. "Now, friend of Barry Weeks, there are about 330,000 Icelanders, give or take, and you're not one of them."

  "It's a long story. You see…"

  "It's not important. We know about your undergraduate experience at Northwestern and about your recent, let's call it a sabbatical in Iceland."

  "I can explain."

  "No need. We know enough. We don't even care about your cock and bull story about being from Duluth," Faraday says. "Here's a letter with what Barry needs. There is a Yellow Cab waiting at the front door. The driver's name is Meredith. She will take you to the airport. Good day."

  "Wait, my things. My wallet and keys. My phone."

  "Oh, yes." Klastan leaves for a moment and returns with a small basket containing his things. "Good day, Mr. Samuelsson."

  Once he's in the cab and has had time to collect himself, he decides he can trust Faraday and Klastan, but only so far. They are going to want to verify they have bet on the right guy. It's perfectly possible that he is a physical man-in-the-middle—that he will stop someplace and share what they have given him with a third party. When he gets back to Houston, Barry will assume everything is okay, when, in fact, the information is in the hands of a third party.

  He looks at his burner. Have they bugged it? No way to know. He decides he'll leave it at the airport. He examines his keys. They look okay, but how should he know? He opens his wallet. The money and his credit cards are all there, and the credit cards appear to be all his. As he's sliding them back into the leather pleats, he notices a tiny, square something-or-other deep in the bottom of one of the folds. That's new. He's without any experience, but this must be some sort of tracking device. What else can it be?

  Well, he thinks, two can play at this game. He slips it out of his wallet. And in the men's room at the airport he manages to drop it into the bag of some traveler. He has no idea of the guy's destination, but, what the hell, this will keep the two of them busy.

  He gets off the plane in Houston and walks out of the secure area toward the baggage claim and parking. There, he is greeted by two men in running suits. "Snorri, may we have a word with you? Barry has sent us."

  "Like hell he has. He would have said something."

  "He'd like to debrief you personally. He's very curious to see the letter you have."

  "A
nd if I don't come?"

  "We'll Taser you. And while we're pretending to do CPR, we'll search you, take the letter, and go."

  "How do I know you're for real?"

  "Barry said to tell you that Lenny first met Portia one night at Ferndale's. You were there."

  Snorri still looks dubious, but he's beginning to relax.

  "So, here's what a Taser gun looks like up close."

  Snorri is about to run. One of the guys grabs his arm with a grip that is almost paralyzing. "Don't be foolish, just come along." And he does.

  They head out of the airport and spend the best part of an hour driving around Houston, trying to make sure they are not being followed. Finally, they drive to a mall. Snorri thinks this is it. They're going to shoot him, take the letter from his dead body, and go. They drive into a multistory parking structure where there are two other identical SUVs. He is shunted to one of the others, and the three drive out of the mall and head in different directions. At last, he is delivered to the Wentfalter Trace safe house.

  When Snorri walked in and saw Lenny and Barry, without so much as a hello, he was pissed. "Jesus, I've spent the last two days sure they were going to shoot the messenger. With friends like these, who needs enemies? What the hell's wrong with you?"

  "But you've got the data?" Barry wanted to know.

  He did, but he wasn't willing to part with it until he gave team UVL the drubbing they deserved. "Klastan and Faraday held me incommunicado overnight. They turned over every rock they could find to uncover the smallest detail about me. Amputation and your gym lock combination didn't do the trick. They weren't sure. They went through everything knowable about me, mostly, I guess, from the internet. At the end they gave me the info and turned me loose. The whole deal felt like Gitmo north. The last straw was a tracking device in my wallet. And then at the airport here in Houston, your goons intercepted me."

  "Sorry, Snorri, but if we pull this off, I'll get my boss to send $5,000 your way." Snorri nodded. To Barry the nod felt unenthusiastic. "By the way, Klastan sends his congratulations. He knew he had been had when one of his tracking devices had you at LAX (Snorri surmised that the burner must been bugged too) and the other showed you over the Pacific on your way to Tokyo."

  "Fine."

  "Look, don't be pissed. They are only doing their job. So, there's one more thing, and you're not going to be happy. You're with us for the duration. I can't let you out on the street knowing where we are and what you know. If you get intercepted, N.K. will get it out of you one way or the other. Anyway, I need you. Let me see the note."

  Snorri might have been displeased with the way he had been handled both in San Francisco and at the airport, but it thrilled him to be in the sights of the bad guys. And $5,000 was a lot of dry martinis tips. Yeah, this was the excitement he had hoped for when he was dispatched to San Francisco. "I guess I don't have a choice, but I'm good. Count me in." He handed him Klastan's letter.

  Barry smiled, "It's all here. Everything we need. And, oh, Klastan says that you have definite possibilities if you want to leave bartending for a more active life—and that was before he knew you snookered him. Okay, listen up everybody." By everybody he meant Lenny, M2 and Portia, who were listening anyway.

  He got his boss on a secure line and said, "Snorri brought home the bacon. I've got what we need. We are good for the day after tomorrow at 9:50 a.m. Central time. I'll let folks know their parts."

  He hung up and looked at Snorri. "You're about to be tested in ways you can't imagine. Let me know if you're really in, because if you're not, I have time to go to plan B."

  "Looking forward to it."

  37.

  Sammy is up bright and early the next morning. He is in a state. He is licking his wounds. His apartment is warm, but he is shaking. He has no way to steady himself. He knows he can't keep living this life: he's in a near panic, worried that, without backup or recourse, he'll be discovered. He'll be on the run until they hunt him down. He resolves that he'll spend today fine-tuning and tomorrow he'll move. Now he needs time to settle himself. Go through every move you've planned, he tells himself—for the caper at the BME building. It will work, he reassures himself. Keep your cool and stick to the plan. Fresno had been a disaster, but who could have predicted a hit squad was going to show up? Was there no way out other than killing the guy? No sense in rehashing what you can't fix.

  Yes, that was it, keep your cool, get the goods, and then show up at N.K.'s afterwards. They will welcome him. Or would N.K. take the data he brought and assess him? Wasn't that N.K.'s job too: to be cool under pressure? Would he bring in the goods, deliver them, and suddenly find himself remaindered to an Israeli dungeon? No, he decided, what he would bring them was so important he would be a hero. What if he stashed it and went to N.K. to negotiate safe passage? Get real. He knew their methods. They were his. No, his only option was to show up with the nanotech plan and take his chances.

  Sammy was certain Bessnager had detailed plans for a working prototype—maybe he was already testing it. He didn't know exactly how the professor had targeted cells to the prefrontal area of the human brain or how he could titrate the dose. But one way or another what lay behind the NAFRA firewall was incalculably valuable. A completely new approach to geopolitics was within his grasp and therefore Israel's grasp.

  Why was N.K. so much more interested in Operation Amputation? As Sammy thought about it, it seemed to be all about the money. A short-term choice, a way for Mossad to support its own operations for the next few years, while neglecting the larger long-term gain of mind dominance.

  What was he missing? Why did N.K. care so much? He logged on to have another look at Google World. He pulled up the Sino-Russian Far East. A glance was sufficient to remind him that an energetic push with enough manpower and support could sever the Vladivostok peninsula from the rest of Russia. With that toehold and the Russia port, China's might, population, and proximity made their dominance only a matter of time.

  So why the money? What did the Chinese hope to buy and why did N.K. and Mossad want to short circuit the process? For the moment he was out of ideas, and his attention shifted elsewhere. What's going on with Bessnager and his group? Anything he needed to know before tomorrow? He logged onto the FDU biomedical engineering website and found his intranet mail. Don't want to miss something important. And then the lights went on.

  "Holy shit, here's trouble," he said out loud. "Dumb me. How could I be so fucking stupid?" He knew that if anybody who cared was watching, they could find him in a second. Who might be watching from…where? Maybe FDU. Maybe N.K. He didn't know, but the world was too small and the NAFRA project too important for them not to be monitoring every log in. "I'm fucked," he said.

  Panic swamped him. He was on his feet in a frenzy of activity. In minutes he had gathered up everything essential and placed them either in his computer case or the briefcase with the cash: the ketamine and syringes, the little Beretta, thumb drives, documents, pliers, screwdriver, bump key set, emergency pills. He put on his coat, walked out the door, and hustled to his now gray Kia with the Florida plates.

  He put the key in the slot and gave it a twist. The car turned over sluggishly, but did not catch. He pleaded with the ignition system in three languages. It cranked again. Nothing. And then: "Yes, yes." Three really was the charm. He pumped his fist in the air as if he had achieved the day's most important goal. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a bare forearm. The South Korean beauty was purring. It took forever for the electric gate to roll open. Then he was out and driving. He wasn't sure who would arrive first: N.K.'s agents or the UVL guys with or maybe without Barry.

  To his misfortune, Sammy, the swami, had accurately predicted the future. When he logged on to the FDU system, an alert popped up on Ephraim Zorante's screen. The adversary of my friend is my adversary, he thought. In seconds he had found Sammy. He fished a slip of paper with a 14-digit number from his wallet, and used a simple memorized algorithm to convert it into the
10-digit number of M2's virgin burner. It rang a long time. Please pick this up, he worried. It's important.

  When her phone rang, Barry gave her a chilly, admonishing look. "Hello," M2 said.

  "Hello, beautiful, here's an address you might be looking for. Near the Astrodome. 7398 Benevento St." He hung up.

  "That was my friend Zoo at FDU network security. I've got Sammy's address near the Astrodome. Let's go."

  "I hate to have to say this again, but this is way, way above your pay grade and mine," Barry said. "This is the guy who deals drugs, set the apartment fire in my building, and shot a UVL agent half a dozen times in the face two days ago in Fresno. You're the gal who has never fired a gun. Give me that street address again."

  He called his boss, listened for a moment and said, "The boss says he's on it."

  It took the UVL almost an hour to get organized and drive across town. They looked at the old three-story, red brick apartment building, a sixplex.

  "Okay, Plan B," the lead said, "one of you take the front door and the other the back. Scott and I will knock on some doors."

  When the lead showed Sammy's picture to a guy in a first floor apartment, he said, "Yeah, quiet dude, keeps to himself." He waited. "So he's upstairs, maybe the second floor. I don't know for sure."

  Scott bump-keyed the lock to the first apartment. "This can't be him. This is some married couple for Christ's sake. Look at all the dishes, and the bed's made."

  They opened the other second floor apartment door. "Bingo," the lead said. "Yes, this is it. Maybe I should say: this was it. The guy was camping out here. Look at the air mattresses, no sheets. A microwave and a TV. Not exactly family living." There were no clothes in the closet and in fact nothing else, but a gray T-shirt and a pair of briefs on the floor. "He's gone and it doesn't look like he's coming back."