The real target, whose face Liquida’s men had all memorized, was to be killed by accident in an apparent cross fire using a gun from one of the dead guards on the bus. While the shooters were doing this, the explosives man was to place three charges connected by det cord along the dash in the front of the bus, from the steering wheel to the passenger door. This would take out the front of the bus and with it the security video recorder, destroying any tape that might have recorded the sequence of events on board.
If all went as planned, they would be off the bus in less than two minutes and on their way to the safe house where they would hide. Once things cooled down, the men could cross the border back into Mexico.
“When do you think we can go?” Katia was talking about the honor farm.
“Maybe as early as next week, maybe sooner,” said Daniela.
Today the bus was more than half empty, not enough for a full load, but too many for the smaller vans. The driver and the guard were still shackling two of the women up front to the foot bar that kept them from moving around inside the bus. There were no windows except for small oblong strips of glass up high, near the ceiling, for light.
Katia, who suffered from claustrophobia, didn’t like it. She sat next to Daniela on the inside of the bench seat, against the wall where the window should have been. They were two rows from the rear of the bus.
Katia didn’t know what she would do if she lost her friend. Before Daniela showed up at the jail, Katia had lived each day in constant fear. Now she faced the prospect of having to deal with it again. Only this time she knew it would be much worse.
This morning she and Daniela were chained together at the waist, each with one ankle also manacled to the metal bar that was welded near the floor to the back of the empty bench seat in front of them.
“You look like this is your first time on the bus,” said Daniela.
Katia nodded. “When they brought me out from the courthouse when I was first arrested and saw the judge downtown, they took me to the jail in the back of a sheriff’s car.”
“We’re lucky,” said Daniela.
“Why do you say that?”
“Male prisoners normally have their hands cuffed and fastened to the waist chain. Sometimes the women too.” Daniela knew this was standard operating procedure. “These two guards are pretty nice. It looks like they’re not going to cuff our hands until we get to the courthouse.”
“We can talk later today, when we get back,” said Katia. “I need to write down everything you need. Maybe you can help me. I’m not good at writing in English. I don’t want you to leave the jail for this other place without me.”
“I won’t.” Daniela could see that Katia was both excited and scared.
“I think I can give you everything you need. My mother, my cousin; my father is dead, so he doesn’t count, is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Daniela, “just surviving relatives. But you have to go back as far as your grandparents.”
“No problem. And I don’t think my lawyers would mind. I’m sure that if they knew you the way I do, they would tell me to go ahead.”
“Yes, but I told you, you can’t discuss it with them,” said Daniela. “You understand?”
“I won’t,” said Katia. “I promise you. I would never do anything to get you in trouble. It is our secret, just you and me.”
“I know. I’m just a little nervous.”
“Are you sure your lawyer can do this? Get us to this honor place, I mean?”
“The honor farm.” Daniela nearly cringed as she said it.
“Yes, that’s what I meant, the honor farm. You think he can do it?”
“I do.” It troubled Daniela to give her such promises. She knew that if Rhytag or Thorpe had Katia alone in a room for ten minutes, they would come to the same realization Daniela had, that Katia Solaz knew nothing about a loose nuke. If you were a terrorist planning an attack you would have to be on drugs to bring her into the loop. Still, it was possible that if her grandfather was alive, Katia might know where he was. “So have you always lived in Costa Rica?” she asked.
“Yes. I was born there.”
The driver settled into his seat as the guard closed and locked the steel-and-wire mesh gate that sealed off the prisoners’ compartment from the driver’s section. The driver pushed a button on the dash and the door up front closed with a hydraulic whoosh. The guard pulled a lever and the four case-hardened steel locking bolts slid into place, securing the heavy steel door.
“And your mother, was she born in Costa Rica as well?”
“Yes.”
There was a deep vibration under the seat as the diesel engine stirred and then started. A second later the bus began to roll.
“Well, it should be very easy,” said Daniela. “It sounds like your whole family is from Costa Rica.” She put out the bait to see if Katia would bite. She didn’t. “And your mother’s parents, were they born in Costa Rica too?”
“No,” said Katia. “Mi abuela, how do you say? My grandmother, she was born in Cuba. Mi abuelo, my grandfather?”
“That’s correct.”
“He was born in Russia.”
“Really?” Daniela turned toward her and smiled. “That’s interesting. Where did they meet?”
“In Cuba.”
“Very international,” said Daniela. “And romantic.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“Are they still alive, your mother’s parents?”
“No. Well, actually I’m not sure.”
“I don’t understand,” said Daniela.
“My grandmother is dead. She died many years ago. My grandfather, I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“It’s a long story,” said Katia.
“We have time. It’s a long bus ride.”
“Well, my grandfather is, how do you say when someone is separated from you for a long time?”
“Estranged.”
“Yes, that’s it. He is estranged from his family for many years now. When I was little I always thought of my grandfather as the black sheep.”
Daniela laughed. “Why is that?”
“Because my mother never talked about him. When I was little I would ask her, and she would always find something else to talk about. Or she would tell me to go do something. I knew he must have done something bad a long time ago.”
“You mean something against the law?” said Daniela.
“No, no, I don’t mean that.” Katia looked at her anxiously. “I mean, this wouldn’t keep me from going to the honor farm right?”
“No, of course not,” said Daniela. “As long as you disclose all the details, that’s all they care about. They’re not going to blame you for what your parents or grandparents did.”
“Okay. I mean, sure, it’s possible he may have broken the law, but I don’t think so. I think it’s something else.”
“What?”
“I think maybe another woman,” said Katia.
“Another woman?” said Daniela.
“Yes, maybe, and maybe more serious than that. My grandfather may have had a child by this woman.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I know it sounds stupid, except that I know my mother. If all he did was break the law, she would have forgiven him long ago.”
Daniela had to laugh.
Katia smiled. “You laugh, but I asked her once if he had trouble with the law and that’s the reason she wouldn’t talk about him and we never saw him. And you know what she said?”
“No, what did she say?”
“She said that for her father, the law was an angry Russian mother, a mistress who had taken his life.”
“I see. So you figure the jealous mistress was another woman,” said Daniela.
“Of course. What else could it be?”
To Katia this meant a lover. But to Daniela, who seemed to know more about Katia’s grandfather than Katia herself, it was obvious. Katia, w
ho was probably a young child at the time, had gotten the words reversed in the translation. The angry mistress who had stolen her grandfather’s life was not a Russian mother, but Mother Russia. Nitikin had squandered his life on the run, hiding from the Soviets who wanted to kill him and retrieve the nuclear device, and from the western powers that wanted to capture him because of what he knew.
“You’re probably right,” said Daniela. “It must be a woman. Did you ever have a chance to meet him? Your grandfather, I mean?”
“My mother told me once that I did, but I don’t remember. I was too small.”
“And so you don’t know if he’s alive or dead?” said Daniela. “That could be a problem.”
“Why?”
“Well, because the people my lawyer is working with are going to want to know one way or the other. I mean, most people know whether their grandparents are alive or dead.”
There was a long pause as Daniela allowed the anxiety to work its magic on Katia.
“I suppose it’s possible he’s alive,” said Katia. “Let me ask you a question. Just between us.”
“Of course.”
“Let’s say he’s alive and I am wrong. Let’s suppose it’s not another woman but something else that has kept him away from his family all these years.”
“Yes?” said Daniela.
“Let’s say I make a guess at where he might be; will they go after him or would they give the information to some other government so they could go after him?”
“Of course not,” said Daniela. “The information is only for background, to see if you’re telling the truth about your family. It has nothing to do with your grandfather. They probably already know who he is. They would have information on computers.”
“I see.” Katia had carried the theory of another woman through her entire childhood, only to have it shaken by Emerson Pike and his obsession with the photographs from Colombia. Katia had suspected for some time, even before she met Emerson, that the old man in the photographs might be her grandfather. If she was right, and that was the reason Pike was interested in the pictures, it wasn’t because her grandfather had had an affair with another woman. Deep in her soul, though she didn’t want to admit it, Katia suspected that her grandfather was hiding something more serious. It was the reason she’d said nothing to her lawyers. If her mother was still with him, and Katia told them where they were, her mother could be in trouble.
“So you think you know where he is?” said Daniela.
Katia looked at her, wondering if she should say anything more. “It’s only a guess. It’s probably wrong.”
“So tell me your best guess,” said Daniela.
“If you’re sure they won’t go after him.”
“I’ll talk to my lawyer. I’ll make sure they won’t, and unless he’s absolutely certain, I will tell him to forget that part of the information and not give it to anyone else.”
“Okay,” said Katia. “You see, for a long time now, several years, my mother has been traveling from Costa Rica to your country.”
“To the United States?” said Daniela.
“No.” Katia looked at her with a puzzled expression. “No. I mean Colombia.”
“Ah, Colombia,” said Daniela. “Of course.”
“That is where you come from, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s just that I’ve been in the States so much the last few years, it starts to feel as if I live here. You know the feeling?”
“Oh, I know. I hate that,” said Katia. “I wish I could go home too. Maybe soon we can both go. Maybe I could visit you in Colombia.”
“That would be fun,” said Daniela. “So your mother travels to Colombia regularly?”
“Sometimes twice a year. She stays there for a long time. She was gone when I left to come to the United States.”
“She was in Colombia at the time?”
“Yes.”
“So what does she do down there?”
“She says she visits family.”
“You have relatives in Colombia?”
“That’s the problem, not that I know of,” said Katia. “I have never met them.”
“I see,” said Daniela.
“My mother tells me that one of her relatives in Colombia is very old and she must go down to provide care.”
“Your grandfather?”
“She has never said this, but who else can it be?”
Yakov Nitikin is in Colombia, thought Daniela. “So when she goes down to Colombia, where does she go?” In for a dime, in for a dollar.
“She flies to Medellin.”
“Ah, a beautiful city,” said Daniela.
“But dangerous,” said Katia. “A lot of drugs.”
“Not so much anymore,” said Daniela. “I’ve been there recently. The city has changed. I take it you have never been there?”
“No. I would like to go sometime.”
“We’ll have to do it. And you must tell your mother to take you so you can visit your grandfather.”
“If that’s who she goes down to see, he doesn’t live in Medellín,” said Katia.
“But you said that’s where she goes?”
“Yes. She flies to Medellín, but she takes a bus from there. I have asked her many times, but she refuses to tell me where she goes. But…” Katia stopped and bit her lower lip a little as she hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Last year I found a bus ticket in her purse for a place called El Chocó. I looked on the Internet, and it is located in the south of Colombia, in a place called Narnio Province.”
“You mean Narińo Province,” said Daniela.
“Yes, that’s it. Do you know it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been there?”
“No,” Daniela lied.
“That, plus little things my mother has said over the years. I know she stays in a small village near a river. She has talked about the Indians going up and down the river in dugout canoes. So it must be very rural.”
“The Rio Tapaje?” said Daniela.
“Where is that?”
The name sent a chill up Daniela’s spine. “It’s one of the main rivers in Narińo Province.” Daniela had been on the Rio Tapaje five months earlier. The river flowed into the Pacific Ocean in a remote corner of southwest Colombia. The first few miles were controlled by the Colombian army, but only through the use of high-speed boats with .50-caliber machine guns mounted on the front.
The fleet of boats, called Piranhas, was supplied by the U.S. government in an effort to eradicate the coca trade that thrived in the river basin beyond the village of El Chocó. Beyond that point even the Colombian army was reluctant to venture. This was the land of the FARC. And, if Katia was right, it was the place where her grandfather was holed up with a weapon powerful enough to erase half of Manhattan or Washington, D.C.
This morning the bus was late. Liquida steadied his elbows on the edge of the roof as he struggled to focus the big ten-by-fifty-power field glasses. He scanned the surface streets on the other side of the freeway. Liquida was on top of an abandoned commercial building along the side of Highway 67, less than two miles from the women’s jail in Santee.
The freeway traffic was bumper-to-bumper during the morning rush hour.
Across the way he could see the Prospect Avenue on-ramp. The big box truck, the one the explosives man had rented, was already in place, parked right at the edge of the on-ramp, halfway down the sharp decline to the freeway. On each side of the paved roadway the ramp fell off steeply, on one side into a shallow ravine, and on the other toward the freeway. A man on foot could cross either slope easily, but a heavy vehicle, a bus or a truck, trying to traverse the steep slope would roll.
A hundred feet beyond the on-ramp, on the other side, across the ravine, Liquida had parked the getaway van. He had rented it the previous morning by using a stolen credit card and stolen driver’s license. The van was parked along the side of the road, on North Magnolia Avenue. Liquida had cut a h
ole in the chain-link fence separating Magnolia from the freeway so the men could quickly pass through in their escape.
A lone figure with a sizable duffel bag at his feet was huddled in the shadows under one of the trees down in the gully of the no-man’s-land between the elevated on-ramp and Magnolia.
Liquida watched as a couple of cars turned down the ramp. They passed the box truck without difficulty and drove onto the freeway where they quickly backed up in traffic. He was beginning to get nervous. If the truck remained stalled on the ramp much longer, some pain-in-the-ass commuter would call it in to the highway patrol. It was the one thing he feared. If they were forced to start the fireworks early, the bus driver would see it. Then, instead of turning right onto the on-ramp he would take the bridge straight ahead, over the top of the freeway. The bus would be gone before his men could move.
This nightmare was still rattling around in Liquida’s brain when a fuzzy green image crept across the round edge on the lens of the field glasses. He adjusted the focus and watched as the sheriff’s bus pulled into the left-hand turn pocket on Magnolia. It nosed to a stop at the traffic light on Prospect.
Liquida grabbed the walkie-talkie from his pocket, pushed the button, and spoke into it. “Está aquí. Aquí. It’s here.”
Before the words were even out of his mouth, the man in the gully was moving at a run, lugging the heavy duffel bag up the steep slope toward the upper end of the on-ramp. When he reached the top, he lay flat on his stomach against the incline and waited.
“What’s the matter?” said Katia.
“Hmm. Oh, nothing,” said Daniela.
“You look worried all of a sudden.”
Guardian of Lies Page 20