Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel by Steve Martini Page A

least in terms of stress and anxiety. He was under the gun of the FBI. Liquida didn’t relax entirely until he landed and made his way through customs and into a taxi outside the airport in Dubai.
    He had the driver take him to the Royal Meridien Beach Resort, where he booked a room and took up residence as a vacationing Iberian businessman. The place was expensive, more than Liquida wanted to spend, especially now. But he had stayed there before, in better times when he was financially flush, and he knew the place. On the run Liquida had learned that there is an element of safety in surrounding yourself with the rich. A foreign national staying in a flophouse always drew more attention from the local authorities, especially in a conservative country like the Emirates. They were certainly more likely to roust you and ask questions. That was the one thing Liquida didn’t want.
    The Royal Meridien and its grounds were the size of a small city. It was an easy setting in which to remain anonymous. The resort was crowded with wealthy tourists—Europeans, Asians, and Arabs—all cloistered in their own separate tribes lounging around the pools.
    *  *  *

    The next morning Liquida walked to a small convenience store just outside the resort. He purchased a dozen Etisalat prepaid cellular SIM cards from the clerk. Then he returned to the resort and found a quiet area near the edge of one of the pools. He ordered a drink from the wandering waitress and went to work.
    Using a four-band unlocked cell phone and the stack of SIM cards, Liquida began collecting his messages.
    Timing himself with the sweep second hand on his watch, he ended each call at three minutes on the dot whether he was finished collecting his messages or not. The Americans had a nasty way of using their listening posts in the sky to turn cell calls into party lines. After three minutes, he would remove the SIM card from the phone and grind it under the leg of the metal chair he was sitting on. When he was satisfied that he had destroyed the card’s miniature circuitry on the abrasive concrete of the pool deck, he would pick up the card, smudge any prints that might be on it, and drop it into a trash can just behind his chair. He would then slip a new SIM card representing a new telephone number into the phone and pick up where he left off.
    It was a laborious process, but Liquida was paranoid when it came to the perils of government and the seductions of technology. Combine the two and get a good glimpse of hell. Too many of his friends were either dead or sitting out their lives in maximum-security dungeons, casualties of the digital disease.
    Having won the Cold War and toppled the Evil Empire, the American government had now become what it had destroyed. Its political class was busy using technology to digitize its citizens into slavery. There was nowhere left for people to hide. Babies were registered at birth and given Social Security numbers like cattle with ear notches so that power-hungry politicians could track them throughout their lives and harness them as taxing units. The government was everywhere, listening to private telephone conversations, reading people’s mail and e-mail, watching them through cameras built into their laptops. They could turn on your cell phone and use it like an undercover wire to listen in on private conversations, all of this while they tracked you with GPS and filmed you from cameras on every light pole. In less than ten years, the United States, the leader of the free world, had become a prison without walls. Liquida was starting to feel like everybody else. He wanted the government off his back. The critics were right. They were killing the economy. In a world like this, how could any small businessman, someone like Liquida, make a decent living?
    Liquida was of the old school, the world of the Unabomber and Osama bin Laden. There was a lot to be said for a cave in the mountains or a shack in the forest where lighting