Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  “What?”

  “The supervisor looked, checked their system up one side and down the other, and couldn’t find them. After an hour and some disc diving by their IT people, they concluded that somebody had removed them from the system. They did find references to Pike and the photos on their website e-mail system, but the system was set up to strip attached images from incoming client mail in order to save space on the company’s servers. As a consequence, there are no copies of Pike’s digital images in their system.”

  Thorpe turned his attention to the file in front of him. “Aren’t these the pictures?”

  “No,” said Zink. “That’s what was sent to our man. Those are only two enlargements of what he was told is a single digital frame. There were additional photos, according to his source, either six or seven, he couldn’t remember.”

  “And unfortunately, the two enlargements don’t show facial features or any clue as to location,” said Britain. “The first one is a shoulder patch from a field tunic for a Russian missile brigade. We received background on it from military intelligence at the Pentagon. It’s old.”

  “The picture?”

  “No. The tunic,” said Britain. “Our man in the lab says his source, who is also a photo analyst with experience and skill, assured him that the digital images were shot about four months ago. He’s not sure if he was given a specific date. If he was, he couldn’t remember.”

  “Go on.”

  “The Russian missile unit dates to the early sixties and ceased to exist sometime around 1965, after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  “The next enlargement,” said Britain, “the name patch over the pocket, is from the same jacket, according to the source. The only portion of it we can read are the first two letters of the soldier’s name. They’re Russian Cyrillic. The English translation is NI.

  “Next is a series of documents,” said Britain. “The first set, marked ‘Top Secret—Classified,’ are from the executive committee of the National Security Council, most of them dating to the late fall, early winter of 1963. The last one, I believe, is dated just sixteen days before President Kennedy was assassinated. Behind those are a series of translations from Soviet military and intelligence files obtained by the CIA in the early nineties, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The original documents date back to the period between October and the end of December 1962. To save time we’ve summarized the critical items on a single page, yeah, I think you have it there.”

  Thorpe read the summary through once, very quickly. “Wait…wait…wait,” he said. “I remember hearing about this guy from some of the old fossils at CIA, musta been what, thirty years ago now, the legend of Yakov Nitikin. He’s a bag of smoke. Soviets floated the name after the Cuban missile mess so we’d chase ghosts. I can’t remember, what it was that they called him?”

  “The Guardian of Lies,” said Llewellyn.

  “That’s it.” Thorpe snapped his fingers and pointed at Llewellyn. “Always count on Herb for a good memory.”

  “It was a takeoff on Churchill’s famous quote,” said Llewellyn, “that in time of war the truth is so precious that it must always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

  “That’s what we thought at the time,” said Britain. “But it appears we may have been wrong. The old Soviet intelligence documents behind the summary, those were obtained from KGB files after the Soviet Union collapsed. According to those, Nitikin was real, and so was his secret.”

  “So what you’re telling me is, this guy Nitikin is the one wearing the jacket in the two enhanced photos?” said Thorpe.

  “It would seem to fit with the two first letters of the last name over the pocket,” said Britain.

  “Okay, let’s assume I buy into this. It’s all very interesting, but it’s ancient history. We’re talking 1962, almost fifty years. I mean, I guess it’s possible that the man could still be alive, maybe. But the item sure as hell isn’t. There’s no way.”

  Thorpe looked at Herb Llewellyn, seated across the table from him. “Tell me I’m right, Herb!”

  “I’d like to. In any other circumstance I wouldn’t hesitate, but in this case I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  Thorpe looked at his watch. He didn’t have time for a physics lesson. “Ray, do me a favor, go out and tell my secretary to call the director’s office and tell him I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. I’m running a little late.”

  Zink headed out of the conference room with the message.

  “Herb, for the moment I’ll assume there’s some basis in fact for your belief in perpetual shelf life, and we can talk about that. But I suspect that if this guy’s even alive, and he has anything at all, he’s probably in a wheelchair somewhere sitting on a pile of corroded metal.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Llewellyn.

  “We’ll talk about it when I have more time,” said Thorpe. “For the moment I think we’re chasing rainbows here. The stuff in the old Soviet files could be disinformation for all we know. Back during the Cold War, both sides were big on that. Put a fairy tale in your file and let the other side find it. In the meantime you’re spending a billion dollars looking for Goldilocks.”

  “What about Pike’s murder and the missing photo analyst?” said Britain.

  Zink came back into the room and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “I don’t know,” said Thorpe. “The whole thing just doesn’t smell right. The only thing we have linking the Russian’s name with Pike’s murder is a lot of hearsay from a photo analyst who’s missing. And even that’s tenuous. We’re reaching into fifty-year-old Soviet documents to make the connection.”

  “Not exactly,” said Zink. “Not anymore. Take a look at this.” He handed the sheet of paper to Thorpe.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s the booking sheet on the suspect in Pike’s murder. I had my secretary pull up what she could find off the law enforcement database on the state’s case while we were meeting. That was on my desk.

  “The suspect is a foreign national by the name of Katia Solaz. She’s in the country on a Costa Rican passport. According to my secretary’s note, the woman was living with Pike at the time he was killed. But check out the alias; one of the names she used was Katia Solaz-Nitikin.”

  Thorpe took a deep breath as he looked at the name on the sheet. “You’re sure about this?”

  “I have to assume that if the police picked it up on the booking sheet, they must have gotten it from somewhere, either a passport or a driver’s license.”

  “Get a couple of agents out of the San Diego field office to go over to the courthouse and comb the police file on this thing. And don’t wait. Do it today. Tell them anything with the name Nitikin on it, we want to take a look. Also see if they can get additional background on the suspect, particularly as regards family, also where she’s from in Costa Rica.”

  Both Zink and Britain were scrawling notes on legal pads as Thorpe spit out instructions.

  “Tell the agents to look through everything, all documents and physical evidence, whatever the police have. Also anything they seized at the time of this woman’s arrest and anything they found at the scene, or anywhere else, that belonged to her. Oh, and see if the police found any computers at Pike’s house.”

  “Good point,” said Britain. “Why didn’t we think of that one earlier? Maybe we can find the digital images Pike sent to the lab. Who knows what else?”

  “Tell the agents to keep their eyes peeled for pictures, and be sure and tell them what they’re looking for, an older man in an olive drab fatigue jacket,” said Thorpe. “If they find photos fitting that description, tell them to sit on them and to call here immediately. I don’t want those pictures disappearing again unless we’re the ones doing the vanishing act.”

  Thorpe looked at his watch. “Damn it, I got to run, go prop up the human punching bag so he can get the crap kic
ked out of him again.” Thorpe was packing up his notes, grabbing the file. “Ray, check my calendar, let’s meet again, first opportunity, as soon as we find out what’s in the crime file. And, Herb, you and I still have to talk about the gadget.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Alim waited in the trees at the edge of the forest for one of his men to return with the information that he wanted. The man in question had been assigned a simple task, to watch Nitikin’s daughter whenever she wandered free in the camp. The man had failed. Because of this, the woman’s photographs of her father, along with Alim and his men, had found their way into the American’s laptop computer and from there to a laboratory for processing in the United States.

  Afundi’s first thought was that Nitikin’s daughter was working with the Americans. Together with the interpreter he cornered the Russian and braced him with questions.

  Nitikin assured him that his daughter knew nothing, and he wanted it to stay that way. The Russian knew only too well the perils of knowledge. He told Afundi that all she knew was that her father had deserted from the Soviet army many years before. She believed that to be the reason he was in hiding.

  To Afundi this made no sense. If desertion from the Soviets was his only reason for hiding, why had Nitikin not gone back to his family in Costa Rica when the Soviet Union ceased to exist? Surely she must have asked her father that same question many times.

  By then Afundi realized he himself had asked one too many questions. He could read in Nitikin’s eyes his fear for his daughter. Alim dismissed it all as a misunderstanding. He slapped the old man on the back and told him not to worry, that everything was now fine. But it wasn’t.

  Alim and his small troop of escapees from Guantanamo had been selected for the job not because they were trained fighters or because they had any special skills for completing the operation. They were picked because it was Alim who’d delivered the information to his country’s Cuban consul, and from there directly to Alim’s government.

  The message that came back was verbal and remained unwritten, but it was clear. Secrecy was vital not only for completion of the operation. It was critical to the republic’s continued existence once the mission was over. The information was to be confined to those who already knew and no one else; this meant Alim and his colleagues with whom he had already shared it. All further contact with Alim’s own government was, under any circumstance, forbidden.

  Alim first learned the secret from another old man who was still fighting another war. He was Cuban, and like the old Russian, he was also dying.

  Fidel Castro had been curious about the man who’d led the escape from the American compound at Guantanamo. And when Fidel was curious about something he always got answers, or rather others got them for him. As one of the great charismatic leaders of his time, Castro knew that the key to human conduct was motivation, and he wanted to know what motivated Alim Afundi.

  He learned that Afundi’s parents, his father a farmer and his mother a peasant, had perished under American bombs. The U.S. government claimed it was an accident. Ordnance dropped from planes flown off the decks of an American aircraft carrier sailing in the Persian Gulf had somehow found its way beyond the Iraqi border, a few hundred yards and onto buildings mistakenly identified as an Al-Qaeda outpost.

  Fidel learned that it was this single act of unrequited violence that had transformed the otherwise quiet son of a cattle herder into a fire-breathing freedom fighter, and a mortal enemy of the Great Satan.

  He invited Alim to dinner in his private quarters a few days later. The Cuban government had treated Afundi and his men as heroes. Now Alim was told that Castro wanted to honor him personally.

  Fidel was no longer the head of the Cuban government. He had long since stepped down because of illness. His graying beard looked thin and a bit withered but his eyes burned with a zeal that Alim had seen only in the fiery gaze of ardent mullahs.

  Over food, cigars, and Cuban rum, the last two of which Alim respectfully declined because of his religion, Castro spent the evening regaling his guest with recollections of the revolution, all of this through an interpreter.

  Afundi was not wealthy, and in terms of world history he was not well educated. He knew almost nothing of the Cuban revolution. To Castro, who had stood before legions of captive audiences, people ordered to bake in the hot Cuban sun for hours and who had heard it all before, the young, eager face at his dinner table was a clean slate upon which to write.

  Castro started where it all began, with the failed assault on the Moncada barracks in his youth, before he knew what it was to be a revolutionary. He told Alim about his capture along with his brother Rául and their imprisonment and of their later journey to Mexico to train for the coming revolution. He talked about the return to the island with a force of fewer than a hundred men and the ambush by Batista’s militia that had nearly wiped them out.

  “It is why you never leave an adversary breathing and aboveground when you fight a war. They had two opportunities to kill me, one in prison, which they passed up, and the second in the ambush, when they missed,” Castro told him.

  To Alim, the man may have been old and in ill health, but you would not have known it from the stamina he exhibited that night. The gathering lasted nearly twelve hours. It did not end until long after a rooster sounded in the yard outside and sun streamed through the windows of the dining room where they sat.

  Castro conversed all night in what was largely a one-way monologue. Alim sat nodding politely, grinning appropriately when he needed to and listening as the interpreter conveyed in Farsi Fidel’s recollections and, to the degree possible, his passion for the subject. He talked of Che and the capture of the government munitions train at Santa Clara that sealed Batista’s fate, and of how he, Fidel, had swept into Havana at the head of an army. He spoke of going to New York to speak to the United Nations, of plucking chickens in the presidential suite of the hotel, of the U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the many failed attempts by the Americans to assassinate him over the years.

  He talked about the American CIA on whose direction his friend Che had been executed in Bolivia. He talked about American efforts to crush the revolution and to impoverish the Cuban people through forty years of economic embargoes, actions that Fidel said were similar to those America had imposed on Alim’s own homeland.

  As the night went on, Alim realized that even with the rum Fidel had consumed, he was going to outdistance his guest. By three in the morning, Afundi was dying. He had experienced sleep deprivation as torture, but Castro’s form was more potent because of Alim’s need to show continued respect toward his host. By six he could no longer make even the pretense. Alim fell asleep.

  At some point, he didn’t know how much time had passed, he was startled from his slumber by Castro’s shouting. He lifted his sleepy head just in time to miss the next blow landed by Fidel’s closed fist on the table’s surface. Through the interpreter, Castro’s words came streaming in: “…betrayal by a trusted ally in the face of imperialist aggression.”

  Fidel’s voice climbed to a roar and bristled with anger as he chomped on his cigar. Then he turned to look angrily at Alim.

  Afundi was mortified. He was certain he had offended his host by falling asleep.

  It took him a few seconds and a few discreet questions to the interpreter before he realized he was wrong. Alim came to grips with the snippets of Fidel’s message he had missed while dozing. It was something to do with Castro’s alliance with the Soviets and Russian missiles placed on Cuban soil for defense. Apparently, Castro’s fury had not been quelled by the passage of more than forty years.

  “In the end,” said Fidel, “the only Russian who remained true to the revolution has spent his life hiding from his own government in the mountains of Colombia.” Then he turned his blazing eyes on his guest. “In the event that you are wondering, it is the reason I have invited you here this evening.

  “By the way, before I forget, I have for you and your men a
present. It isn’t much, perhaps just a small taste of home.” Castro reached over to the shelf under a table alongside his chair and pulled out a newspaper. Immediately, Alim saw the stirring banner on the front page, the large cursive letters in Farsi. He recognized the newspaper. It was the provincial sheet published by his own government and circulated in the mountains near his home. Afundi hadn’t seen news from home in nearly two years.

  “I had it delivered in one of our diplomatic pouches,” said Fidel. He tossed it to Afundi across the table. “Share it with your men. They need to hear from home.”

  Alim took the newspaper and a drink of water in an effort to wake himself, and tried to glance at the newspaper as he listened.

  After spending the entire night reliving his life, it took Fidel less than five minutes to come to the point.

  There was a stark contrast between the sentimental old man who lived in the past, the one who had talked Alim to sleep, and the operational warlord Afundi had woken up to in the morning. Alim recognized the difference immediately.

  Fidel told him about Nitikin, how they’d met and about the secret they shared. It was Fidel’s sense that fate had delivered Alim and his men to him at a critical moment, when all the stars were aligned, while he still had breath to deliver the message, and his old Russian friend still had the strength to act upon it.

  As Castro spoke, Afundi held the newspaper on his lap and glanced at it occasionally with one eye. When Fidel turned to grab the decanter of rum once more, Alim quickly flipped the newspaper over to see the back side. There he saw the photograph of a large American warship. The moment he read the caption printed beneath the photograph, his eyes seemed fixed on the four-column photograph.

  According to the paper: “The American warship Ronald Reagan plies the waters of the Persian Gulf on its most recent tour. Its warplanes routinely kill innocent women and children in cities and villages throughout the region. It delivers without mercy the infidel’s poisonous bite on other nations where the Great Satan seeks to impose his will on true believers and the faithful throughout the Islamic world.”