Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  For a moment I weigh whether I should have the cops come over and tag it. If it’s what I think it is, forensics already has five of them. One, more or less, isn’t going to make much difference.

  I turn to look. I can hear the sound of Harry’s voice in the distance. He has not yet reached the clutch of cops at the gate. He is waving with his arm in the air and talking as he approaches them. I position myself between the gathering at the gate and the bush. Using my back to block their view I reach into the bush and pluck the little bag from where it is hanging. The muslin is damp, probably from dew, and tied with string. As I handle it I realize it is heavier than it looks. There is something hard inside, two or three items that feel like small pebbles cushioned by something softer.

  Suddenly I hear Harry talking with someone as they approach from behind. Casually I slip my hand into the side pocket of my trousers and allow the tiny bag to slide down and join my change before removing my hand.

  Harry introduces the detective. I shake his hand and a couple of sec onds later he shows us where two of the sensors are located. One near the base of a tree, the other in a planter bed twenty yards away.

  “But they were off that night?” I ask.

  “That’s what it says. I didn’t write the report,” says the detective.

  “According to your investigating officers, the security company was forced to shut them down because of malfunctions.”

  “If that’s what it says.”

  “Do you know when the system was shut down?” I ask.

  “If it doesn’t say in the report, you’d have to talk to the security company.”

  I thank him and he goes back to join the small cabal of blue at the front gate.

  “Mister helpful,” says Harry.

  “Did forensics find anything else outside?”

  “Not as far as we know. No blood. No footprints, though I doubt they were looking very hard. No evidence of forced entry, nothing suspicious…”

  “Except for a security system that didn’t work,” I say. I stand looking toward the fence and the two motion sensors that are positioned less than a hundred feet apart. “We know one thing. The killer came this way, over that fence, probably right where we’re standing. He didn’t knock on the front door, so if I had to guess, I’d say he took those stairs.” I nod toward the back deck.

  “Because of the security camera,” says Harry.

  “Yep.”

  “That was my guess too,” he says.

  Pike’s house had two levels of security, the motion sensors and the cameras. All the other cameras were working that night. They showed nothing unusual until approximately ten thirty, when the cameras out in front caught a figure running down the driveway toward the gate. It was Katia on her way out. It showed her using the remote device to open the gate and then tracked her for only a few more seconds until she disappeared. This was in one of the reports. The only camera that wasn’t functioning properly was the one on this side of the house. It was blocked by a large magnolia leaf that the wind had blown and that somehow had lodged in front of the lens. At least that’s the theory the police are operating under.

  Harry looks toward the camera mounted on a pole near the fence behind us. “That’s a big lens. First thing I noticed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No magnolia leaves on the ground around it.”

  “Maybe Pike has a good gardener,” I tell him.

  Harry nibbles on his upper lip for a second, then shades his eyes with one hand. “No, that’s not it. You have to have a tree before you get leaves,” says Harry. “You see any magnolia trees out there?”

  Harry is a bit of an amateur arborist. He knows more about trees than I do, which may not be saying much.

  “Take my word for it, you don’t,” he says. “If the wind blew that magnolia leaf over that lens, it flew in on the jet stream from another county.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “As sure as I am that that leaf came by car. I’m getting a bad feeling,” says Harry, “the kind that sends little tingling pulses through what’s left of the hair on the back of my neck.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Our friend who jumped the fence and came this way, he seems abnormally inclined toward rearranging the things of nature,” says Harry. “And for some reason that scares the hell out of me.”

  ELEVEN

  The request for services came from across the country, about as far from Virginia as you could get without going to Hawaii or Alaska. But it wasn’t this that made it peculiar. Herrington Labs fielded work on a daily basis from customers all over the globe.

  The company had been in business doing special photo development, enhancement, and analysis, for more than sixty years. It had facilities in three states, all of them on the eastern seaboard.

  For the first thirty years of its existence, the company’s bread and butter were government contracts, mostly with the military, the Department of Defense, space, and various intelligence agencies. Aerial and early space photography and their development and analysis were among Herrington’s specialties. Much of its work was classified. It hired large numbers of former military photo analysts and darkroom technicians in its labs. Company executives wined, dined, and maintained tight rapport with officials in the Pentagon.

  At the time the name Herrington Labs, to those who recognized it, was nearly synonymous with the federal government. There were people, including some in the press, who believed that Herrington was owned by the government in the same way that Air America was owned by the CIA.

  In the early seventies things began to change. The secrets of digital photographic enhancement, the kind that allowed pictures from other planets to be shot back to Earth and clarified in brilliant colors and sharp contrasts, was like the discovery of fire. It had potential for highly classified military applications. Powerful forces in government did not believe this was something to be shared with commercial vendors. The thought that much of this technology would find its way onto store shelves around the world in little more than a decade never entered their minds. They were too busy building government computer labs and other facilities in a futile effort to corral it.

  As a result Herrington found itself under pressure to market its services to corporations, businesses, and the few well-heeled individuals who could afford them. By the mid-nineties, the swing away from Uncle Sam to the private sector was complete, so that rarely did the company see an RFP, a request for proposal, from any government agency. Herrington was doing fine, but its orientation had changed.

  It was for this reason that the request that arrived by e-mail from California stood out. An analyst named Orville Honeycutt recognized the manner in which the request was fashioned. It was something he had not seen in decades, not since before the end of the Vietnam War. He guessed that this was the reason the assignment had finally been sent to him for processing, that and the fact that it was crap. It rattled around in one of the company’s servers for nearly three weeks while other staffers dodged it. In-house e-mail threads showed that four other analysts had sidestepped the job, saying they were too busy.

  Honeycutt was one of the last company dinosaurs, sixty-two and a former military orphan hired out of army photo intelligence in the late sixties. He was now literally counting his days until retirement. As a short-timer, he got all the crap.

  To top it off, the odious smell of paint was driving them all crazy. The painting contractor had been at it for two weeks. He was doing all of the offices and common areas. He may have been painting at night, but the smell lingered all day.

  Some of the staff were getting outwardly hostile because of the mess, plastic drop cloths and sheeting over their desks in the morning, and paint dust everywhere. But mostly it was the smell. They were even leaving windows open to air the place out at night, in violation of company security.

  Honeycutt tried to put it out of his mind and checked the directory of customer accounts on his computer, looking f
or Emerson Pike’s name or the name of his company, Pike’s Peak, which was on the signature of his e-mail along with his address. He needed to find an account number for billing before he could start the job. There was none. Emerson Pike was not a regular customer.

  Honeycutt shot him a quick e-mail telling him to go on the company’s website and either fill out the form setting up an account, or else provide credit card information for the billing. The job would not be started until one or the other was completed.

  But Honeycutt’s curiosity was piqued by some of the terminology used in Pike’s original e-mail that accompanied the digital images. These referred to techniques of enhancement that were applicable to older film technology. They were largely obsolete, but in their day were commonly used for intelligence work, most of it highly classified. This caused Honeycutt to wonder who Emerson Pike was, so he included a two-line postscript asking if Pike was associated with military or civilian intelligence and if so, what agency, as this might expedite the matter.

  After hitting the Send button, he snapped open the attached images and assembled them into the company’s holding software for processing. This way he could examine all of the images simultaneously on the large flat monitor on his desk. There were seven photographs in all, one of which was a botched attempt at enlargement that was disclosed in the original e-mail. The shots looked to be ordinary, outdoor pictures of a small group on some kind of outing.

  The pictures did not have the secret look of photos taken by a body-worn or hidden camera, no long angles or a single stationary viewpoint. Whoever took them was moving around and appeared to be mingling with the group. But the men in the shots weren’t smiling for the camera or posing. In fact, they didn’t seem to notice at all that the pictures were being taken. From the various gestures, hand and arm movements, and changes in body attitude captured in the still shots, Honeycutt guessed they were engaged in animated conversation.

  The group consisted of six men in all, though only four of them appeared in focus in two of the shots. They were standing in a clearing, and what appeared to be a small structure, probably a house, was in the background of one of the pictures. There was a heavy wooden table with a few chairs around it in the distance, closer to the structure. The setting was forested. In two of the pictures, Honeycutt could see that in the background there was a deep valley with mountainous terrain on the other side, off in the distance. The wispy vapor of clouds rose from the canopy across the valley.

  Only one of the figures appeared in all seven shots. It was an old man. Honeycutt couldn’t tell how old, but definitely up in years. The fact that each frame seemed to be centered on the old man led Honeycutt to conclude that whoever took the pictures had some special interest in him.

  He punched up the magnification on one of the images. The old man’s skinny body and spindly legs, the wiry cords in his neck, and the texture of his leathered face consumed the screen. Honeycutt adjusted the contrast, softening the stark lines between sunlight and shadow. The old guy was wearing camo-cargo pants cut off at the knees and left to fray. He looked ragged and unkempt. Except for the intense expression in his eyes, you might judge him to be forlorn. There was several days’ worth of beard growth on his face and he was wearing a pair of scuffed black leather boots, the kind you might find in an army surplus store. There were no socks showing above the leather tops. His feet were probably bare inside the boots and the shoes looked too large and clunky for such frail and skinny legs.

  Wherever the pictures were taken, it must have been chilly. The old man was zipped up almost to his chin in a faded weather-worn military fatigue jacket. One of the others was tarped in a blanket, Indian style, that hung around his shoulders. They all had on sweaters or jackets. Looking at the terrain, Honeycutt suspected that the temperature might be the result of altitude.

  He was wondering why anyone would be willing to spend so much money processing what appeared to be ordinary photographs of six men in ragged clothes somewhere in the wilderness. Enhancing their resolution and enlarging them to near poster size with the clarity requested in Emerson Pike’s e-mail would cost him several thousand dollars. He was just about to log off and return the images to the server when something caught his eye. It was only a few letters in the dappled sunlight, faded print over the breast pocket on the old man’s jacket in one of the pictures, but the letters were Cyrillic.

  Honeycutt sat back in the chair for a moment. He studied the complexion of the old man’s face. It was weathered, like tanned leather, but underneath you could tell he was fair skinned. The lack of excess flesh on his face, its sharp angles, gave him almost a Nordic look. What hair was left appeared to have been blond at one time, and might be again if he washed it. Now that he noticed, the old man was different from the other figures in the photographs, all of whom appeared dark complected, perhaps Latin, southern European, or Middle Eastern, he couldn’t be sure.

  Honeycutt leaned forward, took the mouse, and drew a flickering box around the area of the lettering on the old man’s chest. He punched up the program, blowing the boxed image to nearly full-screen size. The resolution dipped to a fuzzy haze. The light was not good, but the letters he could see were definitely Cyrillic.

  He punched out and reduced back to the original image as he danced the computer’s cursor over the figure, searching for another target. He didn’t find one. He selected one of the other photos and pulled it onto the larger screen. This time the old man was farther away, maybe twenty feet from the camera lens, his body was turned sideways, and his left arm was raised in a gesture, as if making a point.

  Honeycutt found what he wanted. He enlarged the view of a shoulder patch. Its colors were muted for combat; frayed at the edges and faded by the sun, it showed an oval wreath of leaves surrounding a central circle. In the center was a round shield. A perpendicular sword behind it pointed upward, with two crossed arrows bisecting the center. A smaller patch below it bore the numeral 79.

  He hit the keyboard and printed the item, then swung around in his chair and scanned the bookcase behind him looking for an old blue denim three-ring binder. Honeycutt was hoping that he hadn’t tossed it in the trash during one of his exuberant getting-ready-to-retire office cleanup parties.

  TWELVE

  Liquida picked up one of the gold coins, what collectors called a cob, an irregular hand-stamped Spanish escudo. He flipped it over and noticed the numbers and letters stamped on the other side. From a small book he had taken from Pike’s house the night of the murder, he knew that the coin had been poured and stamped in Lima, Peru, probably three hundred years ago.

  He dropped it into the bubbling crucible knowing that he had just dissolved several thousand dollars of its value. The risk of fencing the coins was too great. The authorities would be looking for them in every pawnshop in the country. For this reason he had decided that he could save only one of them, a single coin worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, so rare and valuable that he could not bring himself to destroy it. He set it aside on the table as he continued to work.

  Liquida was huddled all alone inside a dingy auto-body shop a few miles north of the Tijuana border station at San Ysidro. It was a front for a “chop shop” owned by an acquaintance, a place where they cut up and sold parts of stolen cars, or changed out VIN numbers if it was a high-end boost destined for some rich mogul in Asia.

  For a few dollars, the owner gave Liquida the keys and let him use the chop shop at night when the place was closed.

  Liquida stood next to the steel table of a forge, holding the torch in one hand as he fired the bottom of the small crucible with oxygen. He used only an occasional spurt of acetylene to speed things up. He wanted to avoid cutting up the crucible in the process.

  Every couple of minutes he dropped a few more coins into the brew. Six shiny small ingots lay steaming in their little molds, cooling on a table a few feet away.

  He looked at them admiringly, as if they were freshly baked pies on a windowsill. At the same time h
e was beginning to understand the saying that being rich doesn’t mean you’re happy.

  He goosed the acetylene one more time and tried to digest the latest veiled e-mail from his masters down south. He’d decoded it on the small computer earlier that day. They were beginning to drive him crazy. The latest was another frantic message, this time with another job, more pressing than the last. Of course there would be more money. They gave him a name and an address and again instructions on things to look for after the wet work was done. They had found something on Pike’s laptop, the one Liquida had grabbed that night and sent south in a box filled with plastic packing peanuts, along with the photo from the desk and the woman’s camera.

  Liquida informed them that he had not yet had time to cut the head off the serpent. He wished they would make up their minds. They told him the serpent could wait and sent him scurrying to Travelocity for an airplane ticket.

  As if this wasn’t enough, Liquida was discovering that killing the woman now locked away inside the female section of the county jail was like dealing with affirmative action, ladies only. If you were a man trying to do the deed, you had to go to the back of the line and wait.

  If she were in the men’s side of the jail, she would have been dead four times by now. A single phone call to a number in Tijuana by nine in the morning and she would have been suicided all alone in her cell before noon.

  But the women’s jail was something else. This would require him to make his own arrangements directly with some angel of suicides at the jail, and Liquida drew the line at this. It was one thing to kill people for a living; it was another to talk directly with some idiot inside a jail about having it done, especially a woman.

  If she was facing serious time, she might give Liquida up just to get a little slack on her term. And if she tried to choke the snake and screwed it up, she would roll over on him in a Mexican minute. Liquida would go down for something that he didn’t even dirty his own hands on. This was against his religion.