Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

  He eases up a little with his powerful forearms. Herman forces a pained smile, as much as the tube down his throat and the mass of tape around his mouth will allow. He swallows hard. His eyes open wide as he chokes a little.

  “That’s better. Don’t fight it. That’s it. Just relax and let the machine breathe for you. I know it’s hard.”

  He nods gently. His head settles back into the hollow of the pillow once more.

  I don’t tell him that, according to the surgeon, he flatlined twice during the four-hour operation. For much of the time he was on a heart-lung machine as they struggled to repair the damage to his right lung. Liquida had nicked a main artery. An inch more and he would have severed it. Herman would have bled out within seconds at the scene.

  I hold each of his arms near the wrist, trying to avoid any contact with the IV needle going into the vein at the back of his hand. If he continues to struggle, they will have to tie his hands off to the railings on the bed. Knowing Herman, I’m sure he would tear the bed apart.

  He lifts his head off the pillow once more and calls up a moaning sound from somewhere deep inside. His chest rises suddenly as if a million volts have been run through his body.

  “Herman! Herman! Stay with me,” I tell him. “Joselyn!!” I yell at the top of my voice. I look over my shoulder, hoping either the nurse or Joselyn will come into the room.

  When I turn back, Herman is trying to sit up. “No, no. Just stay still. Lie back.” He looks at me sternly in the eye as if maybe this is the last image his brain will ever register. He wants to say something, but he can’t. Herman’s most serious expression. Whatever it is, it’s important; at least it is to Herman.

  I could kill Thorpe for having the doctor reduce the sedatives.

  “Are you in pain? Lie back and I’ll get the nurse.” I can’t tell how much of what I am saying he understands.

  He shakes me off. That’s not it.

  “Relax. Let me get the nurse.”

  He shakes his head again, this time more violently.

  The cop steps into the room.

  “Get the doc,” I tell him.

  He leaves on the run.

  Herman grabs the sleeve of my coat to keep me from leaving. Then he reaches up with both hands, wincing in pain as he motions in pantomime, his right hand scribbling on the palm of his left. He wants something to write with.

  Frantically I look around, but there is no pencil or paper in the room. The best way to quiet him is to give him what he wants.

  “I have a pen in my pocket. If I let go, you won’t pull on the tube? You promise?”

  He gives me a quick sharp nod, anger in his eyes.

  I release his wrists and fish the pen from my inside coat pocket. I find a couple of loose business cards in the side pocket. “Sorry. Best I can do,” I tell him.

  He turns one of the business cards over and scribbles quickly on the back. With the needle inserted and taped to the back of his hand, the scrawl is barely legible. “Liquida?” He points at it with the tip of the pen.

  “You got him good,” I tell him. I am hoping this news may calm him. “The cops found blood all the way out of the garage and onto the street. He won’t get far. You may have killed him. He may be dead for all we know.”

  Herman shakes his head violently. He glares at me from under furrowed brows. He’s trying to tell me something, and I’m not getting it. He grabs the business card from my hand and starts to work the point of the pen over it again.

  I move up a little toward the head of the bed to watch as he writes. The word Sarah and then farm. He stabs the last word with the point of the pen.

  “Yes, Sarah is still there. She’s OK. I talked to her last night.”

  Herman shakes his entire body this time, bellowing through the tube so violently that I’m afraid he is going to rip it from his throat. Suddenly the sensor on the monitor over the bed goes off, a screaming tone that fills the room.

  “Herman, stay with me.” I pull away as if to get help. Where the hell is the doctor?

  Herman grabs my sleeve once more. As I turn back, he points to the words on the card Sarah, farm, and then the word Liquida. It is as if he is struggling to deliver one last message before the grave closes over him.

  The revelation suddenly seeps into my brain. “Liquida knows about the farm?”

  Herman’s stark eyes stare at me as he gently nods.

  “He knows where Sarah is?”

  He drops the sleeve of my coat and nods once more as his body collapses onto the bed, his head slumped onto the pillow.

  Chapter

  Three

  Liquida motored slowly down the country road in front of the house, checking his watch as he drove. The place was dark inside, just a porch light and one of those bright yellow vapor lamps high on a pole near the barn. It lit up much of the front yard and cast an eerie glow out toward the road.

  He drove on three hundred yards or so, turned off his headlights, then swung a quick U-turn and headed back the other way.

  It wasn’t a working farm or by this time they would be out milking the cows or feeding the animals. No signs of life. He knew from earlier observation that, unless they were into eating dogs, it was a hobby farm. They raised guard dogs.

  It was what most gringos knew about farming. Food came out of a can or grew in plastic bags and cartons on grocery store shelves. All you had to do was add water and zap it in a microwave. If it had to be picked or killed, they didn’t want to do it or see it being done. It was how many of the twelve million Mexicans they now called illegals came to be living in the States.

  The gringos had borrowed all the money there was from foreign governments. Now they wanted to send all the Mexicans home. If they kept working at it, they could become the first empire in history to starve to death with bumper crops in the fields and feedlots full of cows and chickens, all dying of old age.

  He pulled off and parked along the side of the road behind a line of bushes where the car couldn’t be seen from the house. It was the area near the berry bushes where he had seen the girl the last time, near the edge of the property. In his present state, Liquida didn’t want to have to go far to get to his car if something went wrong. If they tried to run, Liquida, with the car parked as it was, would be in a good position to follow them. When it became light, he would move the vehicle to a less visible location, then watch and wait.

  He grabbed the binoculars from the passenger seat, stepped out of the car, and quietly closed the driver’s-side door. He went to the rear of the vehicle and opened the trunk. He leaned over as he fished with his one good hand inside an open zippered bag. He pulled out a cloth bundle about fourteen inches long. It was rolled and closed with laces that were stitched to the fabric and tied in a bow. It looked like a storage roll for silverware, which was, in fact, what it was.

  Liquida untied the bundle and rolled it out flat in the bottom of the trunk. Slipped into narrow pockets stitched into the fabric were a dozen textured metal handles, each one machined with a fine crosshatch design etched deep into the steel. This made for a better grip. It also prevented fingerprints from being lifted from the surface of the handle.

  Liquida slipped a leather glove on his one good hand, his left. Then he pulled one of the stilettos from its cloth pocket and examined the edges of the blade. They were razor sharp. The stilettos were made in a small machine shop in Tijuana, no wood or plastic, just a single piece of high carbide steel sharpened to a point, a five-inch handle with a nine-inch double-edged blade. The blade was very thin all the way to the needlelike point. It was designed for probing and piercing vital organs and slicing major blood vessels. In the hands of an expert, it could kill almost instantly or exact excruciating pain from its victim as the person twisted and squirmed in agony on the long spike of the blade.

  Liquida laid the stiletto on the floor of the trunk and rubbed both sides of the metal with a piece of cloth, making sure that any prints that might be on it were either smudged or polished cl
ean.

  Now that the FBI had the other stiletto, the one he had dropped on the floor of the garage in D.C., the one Liquida used to kill the investigator, he would leave this one near the body of the girl as a calling card. Liquida wanted to leave no doubt as to who killed her, not that there should be any question.

  He slipped the stiletto into the fold of the sling supporting his injured arm and quietly closed the lid on the trunk.

  * * *

  To the east, the Ohio horizon began to take on the hazy blue glow of a midsummer morning even as the last stars struggled to stay in the sky.

  Sarah Madriani slipped out of the house, easing the rickety screen door closed behind her so that no one inside would hear. They were asleep. It was four thirty in the morning and still dark outside.

  Today she was feeling a little better. Last night she had talked to her father on the phone, the first time in several days. The farm was isolated. She didn’t even have access to a television, no cable. And they wouldn’t allow her to get near a Wi-Fi signal for fear she might send an e-mail disclosing her location.

  To save her sanity, Sarah had taken to running with one of the dogs, a Doberman named Bugsy. Each morning before the crack of dawn, without anyone knowing, she would turn off the security alarm at the control keypad in the kitchen, unbolt the front door, and head out.

  She worked with Bugsy for a week around the farm and they bonded. There was nothing else to do. The dog gave her a sense of security and someone to run with. She needed a little exercise without being under Harry’s gaze or the watchful eye of her aunt and uncle. Harry Hinds was her father’s law partner.

  The two of them had been stuck on the farm for two weeks. Sarah was climbing the walls. She was tired of it, and so was Harry, though he took pains not to show it.

  Fearing for her life, her father had shipped her off to her Aunt Susan and Uncle Fred. Fred was a gun enthusiast with an arsenal in his basement and contacts with the local police, some of whom seemed to live on the farm. They were always there. The place felt like the county honor farm. The couple bred and raised Dobermans. Her father figured she’d be safe here. Safe was one thing, imprisoned was another.

  For almost a week now, Sarah and the Doberman had gone for a morning romp through the fields past the berry bushes and the fence line, well beyond view from the yellow wood-framed house owned by her aunt and uncle. At a good clip Sarah could do a mile and a half out and back before any of the lights came on in the house. She would reset the alarm in the kitchen, head up to take a shower, and no one was the wiser.

  She wore a pair of running shoes, shorts, and a jersey along with a light fanny pack strapped around her waist. The pack contained an aluminum water bottle she had purchased during the trip east with Harry. Sarah wasn’t used to the elevated humidity in Ohio. Depending on how far and how fast she ran, she might swallow a little water or spit it out along the way.

  This morning she skipped down the porch steps, kicking up pebbles along the gravel path as she headed for the dog run. A light morning breeze ruffled the frizzy tendrils of hair that framed her face. At least for a few minutes she would be free.

  Chapter

  Four

  Liquida couldn’t believe his eyes as he tried to focus the binoculars. She was halfway down the path before he even looked up. There in the yellow glow of the vapor lamp was a young woman. She was in running shorts and a top, moving quickly toward the barn. He checked through the field glasses. Same hair. Same build. Her height looked right. It was her. It had to be. Liquida recognized her from his earlier stakeout of the farm, when he had lain in wait but couldn’t get close enough. That was before he was called to Washington to deal with Madriani and his investigator.

  Now suddenly the girl was alone in the darkness with no signs of life in the house. Liquida couldn’t believe it. He had been perched behind the bushes along the road for less than ten minutes, and here she was as if served up on a platter.

  The thought settled on him. It was too convenient. If the house was under surveillance, they would have seen him when he drove up. They could have called the house to set the trap. Maybe they were waiting for him.

  He swung around with the binoculars half expecting to see the gumball lights of police cars screaming in on him from both directions along the road. He looked ahead as far as he could peer into the darkness, cutting through it with the field glasses, searching for any hint of headlights. There was nothing. He looked behind him, toward the parked car. The road was dark for as far as he could see. There was only the cool still air of the night, broken by an occasional breeze rustling through the branches of the trees. If it was a trap, they were using night vision, and the girl as bait, waiting for him to make his move.

  She could be a policewoman, someone fitted out to look like Madriani’s daughter. If so, the minute he made a move she would shoot him, or a police tactical unit would have their snipers cut him down from a distance. The thought played on Liquida’s mind that he might not even hear the crack of the shot that killed him.

  He aimed the binoculars back at the girl. It could be a double. Still, from what he remembered it looked like her. She was still moving toward the barn. Liquida had to make a decision, either cut and run, head for the car and try to escape, or make his move now.

  * * *

  Forty yards out Sarah could see Bugsy behind the chain link as he started to jump in the air, anxious to get out of his cage. He had come to expect her each morning at the same time. It was as if he had a clock.

  The first day he had barked twice before she could get to him to keep him quiet. Sarah was sure somebody in the house would hear him. If they did, they never looked out. The side of the barn where the dog run was located was lit up like a prison yard by the overhead vapor lamp.

  Since that first morning Bugsy hadn’t made a peep. When he saw her, he would jump up, six or seven feet, his head soaring over the top of the gate. Inches away, he never once hit the chain link. It was all he could do to vent his excitement. Somehow the dog knew that the two of them were engaged in a conspiracy of silence. How he knew it, Sarah wasn’t sure. As if by osmosis he absorbed it from the secretive ether in the atmosphere around them. Sarah had no way of training him. The dog seemed smarter than many of Sarah’s friends, including almost all of the guys her age that she dated.

  She reached the run and lifted the metal latch on the gate. The dog quivered with excitement on the other side as the gate swung open. He rushed out and rubbed himself against her, his long lean body wiggling and squirming like a fish out of water. Sarah felt the warm wetness as he licked her hand and tried to nibble on her fingers with his sizable teeth, the big canines up front. Bugsy was almost three years old. He had the build and bite of an adult Doberman, but he was still a puppy at heart. His docked tail was missing; otherwise he would have beat the hell out of the open gate, making enough noise to wake the dead.

  Sarah was hunched over him with her back to the barn and facing the house, trying to calm him, when suddenly she saw the light in the upstairs guest bathroom come on.

  Harry was out of bed. She wondered if somehow he heard the gate open or the commotion outside the dog run. She didn’t want to wait to find out. Sarah grabbed the dog by the collar and pulled him around the corner of the barn toward the shadows and the darkness of the barn door yawning open. Quickly she disappeared inside, into the darkness with Bugsy in tow.

  There was nothing she could do now but wait and hope that Harry wouldn’t look out the window and see the open gate on Bugsy’s cage. She was praying he would go back to bed, that the bathroom light was nothing but an urgent call of nature. Harry didn’t usually get up before seven, though her aunt and uncle were usually up and about by six thirty.

  She waited several minutes, then peeked out through the open door. From where she stood she couldn’t see the bathroom window. She crept along the front of the barn, pulling Bugsy along with her until she reached the corner of the building. When she looked up, the bathroom
light was out.

  Sarah breathed a deep sigh. She unsnapped the dog’s collar to free him from the underground electric fence and turned him loose. She sprinted toward the open field and the barbed-wire fence beyond, with Bugsy running out ahead of her.

  * * *

  Using the binoculars, Liquida surveyed the girl’s movements through a bald spot in the bushes as he huddled along the side of the road. He watched every detail, the dog and the chemistry of chaos that went on outside the gate when she let him out. For a second he thought the animal might make love to her.

  This was not your usual disciplined German Nazi dog, the kind of Doberman Liquida had learned from long experience to treat with respect. He liked to keep an impenetrable fence between himself and the snarling doggy breath and bared foam-covered fangs. A good Doberman was smarter than your average Jurassic Park raptor, and almost as lethal.

  This dog was young and not well trained. Liquida was betting that within forty yards, he’d be off on a frolic after a rabbit or rolling in the alfalfa stubble trying to kill the smell and the sting in his eyes from that weird cat with the stripe down its back. By the time Liquida got to the girl, the dog would be off in the next county.

  Liquida saw the light come on in the window upstairs. He watched the girl’s reaction as she grabbed the dog and slinked around to the front of the barn where they both disappeared inside.

  She didn’t come out again until the light went out. When it did, she checked it. Then she turned and ran the other way as if it was a prison break. It told Liquida all he needed to know.

  The girl had given her protectors inside the house the slip, including Madriani’s law partner. Why, Liquida didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. The only thing important now was that she was out in the field without backup, moving farther away from the house with each stride, and no one inside the place knew it.