Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  By the time Fidel finished pouring his drink, Afundi’s eyes were back on him, though his mind was not.

  “I am certain,” said Fidel, “that given enough diplomacy and time, your own government will see the wisdom of my plan. And that you yourself will come to understand its opportunities. Of course, it must be handled with a good deal of care and discretion. But I’m sure you already know that. You see,” said Fidel, “it is a grand opportunity delivered to you and to me, by destiny.”

  Destiny or not, for the moment Afundi had problems. The old Russian was sick once more. He was resting in the three-room hut with his daughter. One of the doctors had looked in on him that morning. The physician told Alim that it was not serious, just that the old man was tired. They were working him too hard. He needed more rest. If they were lucky he might be down only for the day, perhaps two. But without him they could make no further progress.

  If this were not enough, now there was something else, one more problem to worry about.

  Alim saw his man rushing back toward him from the hut. The man had exited from a back window. The fact that he had nothing in either hand told Afundi that the search had been unsuccessful.

  “You didn’t find it?”

  “No.” The man was breathless.

  “You went through everything?”

  “All of her bags and her clothing. Besides, I haven’t seen her with it. And I have been watching her closely this time. I don’t think she has it.”

  “Then where is it?” said Afundi.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she took it with her when she went home. If so, it could still be there, in Costa Rica.”

  Afundi thought for a moment. It was a delicate subject, and not one that he wanted to raise either directly or indirectly with the Russian or his daughter.

  The man from the Mexican cartel had sent three items to them after killing the American at his home in California and trying to kill Nitikin’s granddaughter. He sent the dead man’s laptop, a printed photograph that none of them recognized, and a small digital camera in a pink leather case.

  Afundi had directed the killer to look for a camera because Nitikin’s daughter had told them she borrowed her daughter’s camera to use during her last trip to Colombia. It was the camera that had taken the photos of Nitikin, Alim, and his men.

  When Alim checked the camera sent to them from California, he found nothing except photographs apparently taken there, in California. Initially Afundi was relieved. He assumed that the original photographs from Colombia had been erased.

  But the reprieve was short lived. That morning, through the interpreter, he had gone out of his way to ask Nitikin’s daughter if she could help him with a new camera he had purchased. He showed her the camera from California without its pink case and with none of the photographs of the Russian’s granddaughter still in it. The mother didn’t recognize it. She told him she had never seen one like it. It was much nicer, newer, and smaller than the one she had used. It was all Alim needed to know. The camera and perhaps the Colombian photographs were still out there.

  It was possible that no one would find them, at least not before it was too late, but then again, given his luck so far…

  EIGHTEEN

  Harry and I are wearing a rut in the road, twenty miles each way every time we need to meet with Katia at the women’s lockup in Santee. But today Harry doesn’t seem to mind. “I think we found one of the coins taken from Emerson’s study,” he tells me. “And this one wasn’t in Arizona.”

  According to Harry it showed up in a probate estate, an old man who’d succumbed to a heart attack a couple of weeks ago. His executor found the coin in his safe along with a printed card showing its provenance. The police now have the card and the coin.

  “Please don’t tell me they identified Katia as the seller,” I tell him.

  “No, according to the records the seller was a man named John Waters. We don’t know if there’s any identification on him yet. I’m told Templeton’s people are checking it out.”

  “Stay on top of it.”

  “You bet,” says Harry.

  This morning when we get to the jail Katia knows by the expression on our faces that there is a problem. We are closeted in one of the lawyer-client cubicles.

  “What’s wrong?” she says.

  “I want you to think very carefully before you answer the next few questions,” I tell her.

  She looks to Harry, then to me. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Did you ever have any difficulty sleeping at night when you were living with Emerson Pike at his house?”

  “Sometimes. Sure. I was in a strange house. Especially at the end, I was scared.”

  “Did you ever take anything for it, any medication to help you sleep while you were there?”

  “No.” She shakes her head.

  “Did you ever borrow any medication from Mr. Pike?” I ask.

  When she turns to look at me, her eyes are alight with the sudden realization of where this is going. “You’re talking about Emerson’s sleeping medicine.”

  “Then you knew about it?” says Harry.

  “You want to know if I gave Emerson medicine to sleep the night I left.”

  “Did you?” says Harry.

  “Yes.”

  “Damn it.” Harry turns away from her, looks at the opposite wall, and swears under his breath, several choice words.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Aye, aye…I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Not important!” Harry’s voice goes up a full octave as he turns to look at her again.

  “Let’s keep it to a mild roar,” I tell him.

  When Harry looks at me, I nod toward the door and the guard stationed outside. “We don’t want them calling the Dwarf’s office with a blow-by-blow and color commentary when we leave.”

  “How the hell could this not be important?” This time Harry whispers, but the venom is still in his eyes.

  “But Emerson didn’t die of drugs. You told me he was stabbed to death,” says Katia.

  “That’s not the point,” I tell her. “The problem is, you didn’t tell us and you didn’t tell the police about the medication you gave him. Now they have a toxicology report showing that Pike had an elevated level of sleeping medication in his system when he died.”

  “And they have your fingerprints on the bottle from the medicine cabinet in his bathroom,” says Harry.

  The look on her face says it all. “No. No. I didn’t try to poison him, if that’s what you’re thinking. I only gave him the medicine so that he would sleep, so that I could get away. When everything happened, when they arrested me and I found out that he had been stabbed to death, I didn’t think about the medicine. I would have told you if I had remembered, if I thought it was important, but it wasn’t.”

  “We can all take bets, but I doubt that the police are going to see it that way,” says Harry.

  “When he didn’t fall asleep, when Emerson refused to go to bed and instead took a shower, I realized that the medicine was not going to work. I thought I must not have given him enough, so when he went into the shower I ran. I can tell, you don’t believe me.”

  “The question is not whether we believe you,” I tell her. “It’s what the prosecutor will do with the toxicology report and your fingerprints on the pill bottle.”

  “He has the dagger with your prints, now the medication,” says Harry. “Tell us everything. No more surprises. I want to know everything and I want to know it now.”

  “It’s what I told you. Emerson would not let me out of his sight.”

  “He allowed you to go to the grocery store alone, where we met,” I remind her.

  “True, but it was only because he had a meeting a few blocks away with a customer. He gave me a few dollars and told me to buy food for a practice dinner I was going to cook. He knew where I was, and that I couldn’t go far. Every time I moved during the night, he would wake up. That’s why
I gave him the medicine.”

  “Had you ever given him any medication or other drugs before that night?” says Harry.

  “No, never, but that night I knew it had started to work. I could tell he was sleepy. I told him to go to bed but he wouldn’t do it. He kept shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. He said he was going to take a shower and that it would wake him up, because he had work to do. He always had work to do. That’s when I realized he wasn’t going to fall asleep. I knew if I didn’t leave that night, I would never get away.”

  “So what did you do, put it in his food?” says Harry.

  “I put it in his coffee when we had dessert. I crushed up two pills and mixed the powder into his coffee. I gave him decaf hoping he would sleep. You remember when we first met?” She looks at me and smiles. “I told you the man I was living with never had any good coffee in his house. He always drank bad coffee.”

  “I remember.”

  “Emerson didn’t know the difference. I knew the coffee was so bitter he would never taste the medicine. But I gave him just two pills. If I had wanted to kill him, I could have given him the whole bottle. I knew two pills would not harm him.”

  “What about the maid, she was there?” says Harry.

  “I didn’t know she was going to be there until later. That’s when Emerson told me he had called her. I told him it wasn’t necessary, that I could clean up, do the dishes. But he said no. He wanted the maid to do it and he didn’t want to wait.”

  “So you’d already given Emerson the pills when you found out the maid was coming,” I say.

  “That’s right. I figured it was not a problem. She would be working downstairs in the dining room and the kitchen. When Emerson got sleepy I would help him to bed, then get my bag with the passport, money from his wallet, some coins from the study, enough just for an airline ticket, and go out through the garage. The maid would never know I’d left. And if I was lucky, Emerson would not wake up until morning. That’s what I thought. But he refused to go to sleep.” She gives Harry a kind of plaintive expression. “I know now it was probably not the right thing to do. It must look very bad, but at the time it was all I could think of.”

  Given the low dose, the cops would never have given the sleep meds a second thought. It’s a common enough prescription. The natural assumption would be that Pike had taken the stronger dose himself, especially if he’d built up a tolerance to the medication over time. But all the assumptions went out the window when they found Katia’s fingerprints on the prescription bottle.

  Alone, by itself, and given the sum of other conflicting evidence in the state’s case, this might not be cataclysmic.

  What worries me is the wild card, the prosecutor Larry Templeton and the artful ways he might try to use this. We may get a peek at the Dwarf’s crystal ball tomorrow when Harry and I meet with him on another issue.

  It’s a courtesy call. Why Templeton has asked for this meeting we’re not sure. It happens all the time. A clerk puts something in the wrong box in the evidence lockup, and it takes them a few days to find it. It seems the evidence clerks have misplaced the six photos taken by Katia’s mother in Colombia, the photographic prints made by Emerson Pike, reclaimed by Katia the night he was murdered and seized from her by the police the day she was arrested.

  NINETEEN

  We have to assume that as long as the man in question is alive, the item is viable,” said Llewellyn.

  Herb Llewellyn was in his early forties. He had a shock of tousled salt-and-pepper hair over horn-rimmed glasses. His dress shirts, the sleeves of which were always rolled above his thin, bony elbows, seemed to bear a perennial spot of ink, either fresh or faded, from a pen that leaked in his breast pocket. This morning he was meeting with Thorpe in Thorpe’s corner office at FBI headquarters.

  “Explain to me how that works,” said Thorpe. “I’m still not convinced on the issue of shelf life. Everything I’ve ever read says ten, maybe twelve years tops, after that it may be dirty but that’s it, and even that’s minimal.”

  Thorpe wanted to be sure he knew what he was dealing with before he went up the chain and got his head handed to him by someone who didn’t like the message he was delivering, especially if there was any chance he was wrong. The acting director had now fallen on his own sword. Thorpe wasn’t even sure if he knew what higher authority looked like anymore.

  “In this case, you can forget everything you’ve read,” said Llewellyn. “And I don’t say that lightly. It’s a special case.”

  “In what way?”

  “The Soviet Seventy-ninth Brigade, according to the accounts in the Russian documents, possessed a highly skilled field-level maintenance unit. The FKRs were designed to be completely field maintained.

  “More to the point, each transport van contained multiple replacements for every critical part. We’re talking about a gun type here, simplicity itself, exceedingly reliable and easy to maintain. The entire device could fit into a fair-size steamer trunk. The gun barrel would be no more than perhaps three feet long and between three and four inches in diameter, with a smooth bore. According to the information in the documents, the man we’re looking for was one of the brigade’s top armorers. He was trained and experienced in maintenance on the system in question. He would know how to store it, how to keep it alive, and if necessary, how to bring it back to life.”

  “That’s possible? He could do that?”

  “With an ample supply of replacement parts, yes.”

  “What about the Russians? Can they help us at all?” said Thorpe.

  “State Department has been in contact with them. Relations, as you know, are not good. On the international front, to deflect heat, in the event that something happens, they’re taking the position that it’s an old-empire problem, a holdover from the Soviets for which they are not responsible. Unofficially, they’re trying to obtain design details, drawings if they can find them. But it’s an old system. It’s been obsolete for decades, not even remotely close to anything in their current arsenal. Their thermonuclear stockpile, fifty megatons or more, enough to take out twenty square miles, would be implosion-type bombs, a core of plutonium surrounded by conventional explosives and triggered by highly complex detonation systems. What we’re hearing is that a lot of the documentation on the older-type weapons, the stuff we’re dealing with here, was trashed after the collapse of the Soviets. So finding information may be next to impossible.”

  “So correct me if I’m wrong. You’re telling me our cause for concern turns on two contingencies: that the man is still alive and that he has the necessary spare parts to keep the weapon alive.”

  “Correct.”

  “We may know more about the man in a day or so. For now, let’s talk about the parts,” said Thorpe.

  Thorpe and Llewellyn were about as different as two people could be. Llewellyn was an intellectual from MIT, a scientist who headed up an office of nerds all packing scientific calculators that could perform three hundred functions and carry out equations to a dozen decimal points. For this reason it seemed strange that the two men always gravitated toward each other whenever there was a crisis, as if each compensated for some deficiency in the other.

  “Let’s assume for the moment that he doesn’t have the parts. Could he fabricate them?”

  “It’s possible, but it becomes much more problematic. The tolerances required for fabricated parts would be critical. He would require access to tools and dies that would be difficult to obtain. Even with the proper equipment, it’s questionable. Without skilled help I would say his chances of success drop dramatically. The man’s an armorer, not a machinist.”

  “Good,” said Thorpe. “Now how do we know he has the spare parts?”

  “The KGB reports,” said Llewellyn. “We know that the Russian, Nitikin, arrived on Castro’s doorstep at Punto Uno the afternoon of October twenty-eighth.”

  “Excuse me. What’s Punto Uno?” said Thorpe.

  “It was central command, military headqu
arters for the Cuban government during the missile crisis. Castro always hung out there whenever there was a national calamity.”

  “So Castro was involved personally?”

  “We don’t know, but we have to assume so. According to the KGB reports that were compiled from Soviet military accounts, Castro was present at Punto Uno when the Russian arrived. Apparently the Russian was invited inside the compound. He was there for a little over an hour. What happened inside, who he met, who he may have talked to, the Soviets couldn’t be certain.”

  “Castro would have wanted to cover his ass,” said Thorpe. “He wouldn’t want to get crosswise with the Soviets.”

  “Nor they with him,” said Llewellyn.

  “So we have no idea whether the Cubans might be involved now?”

  “No,” said Llewellyn.

  “Go on, let’s get back to the parts.”

  “The Russian was seen again later that night, October twenty-eighth, this time at the port at Mariel. Both times, at Punto Uno in the after noon and at Mariel that night, he was driving a large Soviet transport van. According to the Soviet military and the later KGB reports when he arrived at Mariel, he was under the protection of a good-size contingent of Cuban troops. They estimated more than two hundred armed soldiers and at least two armored vehicles. It’s clear he wouldn’t have gotten off the island without the Cubans.”

  “So what you’re saying is that to get it back, the Russians would have had to engage in a shooting war with their allies,” said Thorpe.

  “Correct. And according to all the reports,” said Llewellyn, “Moscow wasn’t willing to do it. At that moment they had a full plate trying to stare us down.”

  “The van the Russian was driving,” said Thorpe, “I assume this is the key piece of evidence?”

  “Correct. It was a fully equipped Soviet mobile-weapons van. According to the KGB it had the weapon and a full complement of replacement parts.”