The Merchant of Secrets Read online

  My name is Roger,” he said, “and I’m from Madrid.” His grooming habits, didn’t indicate someone from Madrid. He ordered a porterhouse steak with mashed potatoes and a bottle of red wine. Sara and I ordered almond encrusted Tilapia with green beans and white wine.

  I began the conversation with a question gently put, but which Sara found impolite and rude. “How did you happen to know where to find Sara this evening?” I asked.

  “Well you know,” he replied, looking downward to avoid eye contact and fidgeting with the silverware, “ I have a friend named Justin who is also Sara’s friend, and he invited me to join you here tonight.” He raised his head and saw me looking dead-straight at him. Unnerved, he diverted his eyes to the window to regain his composure, then he turned his eyes back into the room and fixed his gaze on Sara. Then he launched into a discussion of politics, joking about the weak field of candidates coming from the Republican party but not saying anything that indicated that he had knowledge beyond what had been printed recently in the press or discussed on political talk shows. Sara and I both recognized that he wasn’t particularly capable of holding a conversation on politics, so Sara tried to steer the conversation to alternate subjects such as Spanish art; El Greco in particular, and to vacation areas in Spain to make it easy for him. To her credit as a hostess, it worked and he talked freely and comfortably.

  But within a few minutes, the man calling himself “Roger” had singularly focused his attention on Sara and expended considerable efforts on winning her over with an abundance of flirty language, delivering one gooey line after the next, until finally I was tired of it, and cut-short his unbearable and sappy performance to ask a few questions surrounding his reasons for being in Washington. Then he sharply retrenched, and nervously began sputtering evasive answers.

  “I’m here to facilitate some transactions between two companies, in a sort of a merger,” he said abruptly.

  “What companies?” Sara asked, innocently.

  “I don’t think you’d know them,” he retorted.

  “What firm are you with in Madrid?” I asked, expecting him to drop the name of a prestigious firm to justify the arrogance dripping from his body language. Not that it would have been believable, but at least it would have rounded-out the character portrayal.

  “I don’t think you’d know it, it’s a small private investment company. The unfortunate reality is that I have to travel so much for business” he added with an expression that mimicked sorrow, trying to steer conversation back to travel or anything other than himself.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “New York , Washington and elsewhere,” he answered succinctly.

  “Is there that much investment banking here for you here in Washington?” I shot back.

  “Unless you’re in town to bid for government treasuries, what’s your business here?” I asked, while scrolling through my emails. His effusive and confident manner gradually subsided. He glared through the corner of his eyes, wearing nervous grin which pushed the fat in his cheeks upward until his eyes were forced into a squint. The questions were puncturing holes in his façade and he couldn’t risk being revealed so he withdrew to another subject.

  In the aftermath of 9-11-2001, money on defense and intelligence programs flowed like water through a canyon, and it crossed my mind that maybe he wanted to dip his bucket into the government money stream. Perhaps he was one of those who came to Washington with aspirations of gaining wealth at the expense of the American taxpayer, but this was 2011 and the U.S. had gone through the greatest financial crisis since the Depression and the defense appropriations landscape had changed.

  “Do you work?” he asked, turning in my direction, trying to ascertain my strengths.

  “Yes.”

  “Where? What do you do for a living?”

  “I work at a high-tech company,” I replied as Sara quietly grinned.

  “Doing what?” he queried, nervously rotating the rim of his wine glass with his fingers and bracing for the response.

  “I program websites, I write HTML5 coding.”

  He let out a faint sigh of relief.

  Sara was on the verge of exploding in laughter. He didn’t need to know what an “Intelligence and Computer Systems Analyst” was, or that I worked for the Department of Homeland Security and would be sure to make him a top priority as soon as I could get my fingers on a company computer. He was searching for something from us that night but it eluded me.

  “Sara, it’s 11:00 and there’s a ton of snow outside. We should probably get going, the roads are going to be challenging. I’ll be back in a moment and then we’ll go. Okay?” I said firmly before slipping away to the ladies’ room, where safely out of view, I pulled out my phone and Googled his name. As someone manages huge quantities of information I was losing my mind in the frustration that there wasn’t a single link with the name of the man having dinner with us.

  I called who Justin worked as an aid to a Senator from Wisconsin.

  “Hi Justin,” I said, “I’m a friend of Sara and am calling from the restaurant.” I paused to give him time to recognize me.

  “Oh sure! I remember you!” he replied, “Sorry I can’t join you for dinner, there’s about three feet of snow on the street-okay that’s a little bit of an exaggeration- but still, the streets are blocked with snow and I can’t’ make it across town. Shit, I’m really sorry. How’s Sara?”

  “Well I’m not sure, someone named Roger showed up and said that he was a friend of yours?”

  Justin seemed perplexed, “Roger? Uh….could be,” he answered. “I meet a lot of people in my job. I meet hundreds of people each week.”

  “He’s about six feet tall with medium brown skin, speaks with an English accent, dressed in Armani, wears a red scarf, about 40 …”

  “Oh that guy,” he said recalling the face, “Yeah we had drinks a couple of weeks ago. What the heck is Sara doing with him?”

  “She’s lonely, and he’s available,” I replied, sarcastically and perhaps a bit harshly, but nonetheless it was accurate. “He showed up at the restaurant tonight, claiming that you invited him.”

  “Me?” he asked. “No way! Sara just called me a few days ago to suggest dinner, and I haven’t seen that guy for about a month, I couldn’t have told him. Anyway, I wouldn’t have invited him to Sara’s dinner, I mean, what’s the connection? I don’t even know the guy.”

  Justin had just exposed Roger’s false identity but couldn’t give me any more details because he’d been given the same limited version of Roger’s life story that we had just been given. There was no point in trying to drag anything more out of Justin.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said, “let’s all get together when the snow melts.”

  During my absence to talk with Justin, Roger jumped at the advantage of catching Sara alone to offer her a ride home. Sara accepted the ride and promised to call me in the morning. Her lack of judgment was astonishing. “You just met him! You don’t know who he is! It’s late, you should let me drive you home. You’ve been drinking and would be defenseless if he makes a move on you…” I protested using every argument I could think of to stop her from leaving with him.

  She grasped my forearm, smiling, and said “I’ll be fine, don’t worry. He’s a friend of Justin so he must be okay. I’ll call you in the morning. Good-night!”

  “He’s not really a friend of Justin…” I yelled, but she was already whisked out the door by Roger who was in complete control. I stood panicked and motionless for a minute then rushed back to the table, snatched-up my car keys, and raced toward the door. I flung it open and ran out into the snow, looking up and down the street, but Sara and Roger had already disappeared. Using my cellphone I tried to track her using the GPS embedded in her cell phone, but someone had turned it off.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Sara didn’t return home for the rest of the next day, my mind convulsed with a half dozen theories of who Roger was, and why
he had taken Sara. I was so worried about her that I couldn’t focus on my work, and I decided to pass the time by baking chocolate chip cookies. After I had baked four dozen, I started cleaning the closets. Anything to keep me from going crazy. After twenty-four hours of nail biting anxiety, my phone rang and it was the Sara, completely oblivious to the tortuous worry she had caused. Bursting with cheer over the phone, she said “You’ll never guess what happened, Roger and I returned to my house after dinner last night and the electricity was off. So we went to the best hotel in Washington- the one that overlooks the White House- and we watched the snow fall on the White House.” She inhaled, exhaled, and continued “In the morning we decided we both needed a break from the snow and caught a flight to Palm Beach.” Her voice was exceptionally chipper.

  “Palm Beach? Why there? Where are you staying?” I asked.

  ‘We’re at his friend’s house, overlooking the ocean near Manalapan. It’s so beautiful here,” she said, glowingly.

  “What’s the address and the name of his friend?”

  ‘Um, we’re on North Ocean Boulevard, there’s a small shopping center with an ice-cream shop on the corner. I saw some mail in the kitchen with the name of David Jones. Why? Do you know him?”

  I didn’t know him, but I Googled his name quickly while she talked. He was the president of a small defense related company located in Virginia and Texas, and had served in Afghanistan, first in the Army and later returned as a hired contractor. “What was Jones doing” I wondered, “with this pseudo- businessman named Roger and how did they know each other?” Then it occurred to me that this defense company must be one half of the merger deal he was talking about.

  Sarah continued talking. “We woke up at about 10:30 and took a stroll along the beach, but we had to be careful because there’s a lot of jellyfish. Oh I’ve got news! I asked Roger to move in with me. We get along so well, we have a lot of fun, and I hope you get to know him better. He works in New York and Madrid mostly; he’ll live with me for the time-being and travel for business. Why don’t you come over for drinks when we get back tomorrow night?” she asked, trying to get me worked up into a positive mood but I wasn’t sharing her enthusiasm. In fact, just the opposite.

  “Sara, don’t you think this is going way too fast? You just met him a few days ago; you know very little about him, this is crazy,” I said, emphasizing the “crazy”.

  “Caroline, you worry too much, your job, whatever it is, has made you paranoid!” she said, emphasizing the “paranoid.” Our conversation was clearly at a standstill. Although there was a mountain of work for me to do to complete the network integration evaluation to get it ready to send to Ft. Bliss in the morning, there was also the palpable feeling of something gravely amiss that required investigation that night.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be there.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It was time to put some of our equipment to use in checking-out this arms dealer who dropped-in out of nowhere to chase Sara. In pursuit of that objective I put a voice digitalizer in my pocket, one that was loaded with software that put the sound of his voice into a code which when matched against a database at work would identify the person speaking.

  That night I drove to Great Falls and pulled into Sara’s circular driveway. The gravel crunched beneath the tires so that Roger and Sara must have heard my arrival. The house was a large sprawling, French-style, country estate. The landscape was perfectly symmetrical and orderly, with 4 small cement statues, two children standing in the flower beds, and two dogs with baskets clenched in their teeth on either side of the door. When I rang the doorbell Roger answered, beckoning me inside with a grand gesture of his arms as if he were the master of the house and we were old friends.

  Sara had done a lot of work on the house over the past month, everything about the house was impeccable. Entering through the front door, the living room was to the left, painted in pale gray. Around the windows hung custom-made silk drapes from Thailand in a deep purple, which were hemmed, sashed and tasseled. A French chandelier from the 18th century dangled from the ceiling. The mantle was of Italian marble, and upon it she had placed a bust of George Washington. Eighteenth century landscapes hung on three walls, the fourth wall was covered with book cases filled with antique leather bound volumes. The dining room to the right was beautifully done in deep blue with an eye for classical detail, wainscoting up to the level of the windows and a mahogany dining room table in the center with a silver vase stuffed with roses, as a center piece. The kitchen was done in yellow and white, with granite countertops, and French chairs surrounding a heavy, round, pine kitchen table. In the foyer next to the circular staircase, there was a marble-top table with a gilded wooden base where I normally dropped my keys. But not this time.

  I headed down the hallway leading to the kitchen. As the aroma of garlic sautéing and olive oil flowed through the air, the environment would have had a warm, homey feel to it if only different man were sitting in the living room. Inside the bathroom, the smell of scented soaps filled the air. I twisted the lock on the door then extricated from my purse a voice digitalizer borrowed from a colleague earlier in the week, inserted the battery, turned it on, and slid it into my pocket. I untwisted the lock on the door and walked back down the hallway to the front of the house. The maximum storage on the portable device was about twenty minutes; Roger had to keep talking long enough to get a good digital print, hopefully, for the full twenty minutes to fill the storage on the device. His narcissism brought about his boasting, and he went on and on, until the storage on the device was full.

  When Sara re-entered the room Roger directed conversation to their few days in Florida, the restaurants, the sunshine, the beach, the boat. Sara had regained that bright shiny optimism that had disappeared when Taylor died. And she was eating again.

  It was time to get the equipment to a lab for analysis so I devised the excuse of a friend waiting for me for dinner in Georgetown. I didn’t like to lie to Sara, but it was for her own good. As we stood up and they walked me to the door I channeled the actress inside of me and said ”Good to see you again, Roger, hope to see you again soon,” although an entirely different sentence ripped through my mind.

  I drove quickly around the beltway and exited on a lonely stretch of highway headed north along a long open road with winter- bare forestation on both sides, giving the impression that it would have been a bad place to have a car break down at night. While the moon shined down on the road, the deer inhabiting the area, luckily, were in no mood to drift across the highway in front of my car and to bloody accident, that type of accident is common in the Washington metropolitan area.

  At the entrance to Ft. George Meade, Maryland, the guard was shivering in the cold and didn’t want to budge from his warm spot. I flashed my badge, and he nodded and waved me through.

  Inside the campus I looked for a friend of mine, Keisha, nicknamed “Boots,” who works long hours and would have access to the software that could read the digital code from the portable device in my pocket and scan the database for identities associated with the numeric code. We had the same software back at my company’s headquarters but it would have aroused suspicion because my job didn’t have anything to do with voice identification databases. Typically, Keisha in her office well past 9:00 p.m. on a Sunday. Her desk was piled high with folders and discs, photos of her parents, both in military uniform, pinned to the memo board. She was wearing her earplugs, stretched back in her chair, arms outstretched and waving from side to side, singing her heart- out and assuming that nobody was around on a Sunday night to hear her. I leaned forward to get her attention “Boots!” She didn’t hear me. “Boots!” I said a little louder. Again she didn’t hear. I gave-up and touched her gently on the shoulder. She swirled around violently grabbing a metal paperweight from the top of her desk, folding her elbow backward so that it could lung forward with the metal ammunition firmly gripped in her hand, to smash the head of her attacker. Then seeing it was only me, she re
laxed and put it back down on her desk and unplugged the earphones. “Caroline, whaaat the heck are you doing here?”

  “Hey Boots. Sorry, but I really need your help.”

  “I could’ve killed you, Caroline!”

  “Hey, army brat, I can pull a few moves myself.”

  “Haha,” she laughed.

  “Seriously, I need some help,” I said again.

  “Sure, anytime,” she said, slowly calming down. “Whacha got?”

  “I need you to run a profile for me.”

  We inserted the portable device in the USB port and waited for the encrypted data to be read and for the system to pull up a numeric code to identify the person on the recording. She scribbled the number on a purple pad and carried it with her down the hallway to a locked room which she unlocked by pressing the secret access code. Located high on the walls were red lights which were part of an old alarm system designed to give notice that someone without a security clearance had entered a Top Secret office. There was no alarm now, only the lights remained. That system had been replaced long ago by more high tech solution but nobody had bothered to remove the red lights.