Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  As he approaches and then passes my seat, he gives me a good once-over, checking my computer, which is still open on the tray table in front of me. As I look up, he’s checking things out, looking back over his shoulder at me. I give him a few seconds to get down the aisle, then turn and look as he disappears into one of the vacant restrooms at the rear of the plane.

  I waste no time, turn off my computer, release my seat belt, and grab my briefcase from the overhead compartment.

  Herman stirs and then wakes to the motion. “Where are we?” he yawns.

  “About an hour out,” I tell him. I pack my computer back into the briefcase and take out the encrypted cell phone. I slip back into my seat, fasten the seat belt, drop the tray table, and put the phone right in the center of it. It is a little larger than your normal clamshell phone, though it might not catch your attention unless you were looking for it.

  By the time the agent makes his way up the aisle, I am dozing again with only half an eye on the phone in front of me. I sense his motion as he stops behind me in the aisle. I stir in my chair and he moves on. A few seconds later he raps on the flight-deck door. It opens and he disappears inside.

  I nudge Herman.

  “Saw him,” he says. Herman can see with his eyes closed.

  I hand him the phone. “Make it scarce.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Put it in the bottom of your bag.”

  The phone disappears into Herman’s carry-on, under the seat in front of him.

  “When we get off the plane, we split up, you grab your bags and get through customs and on through immigration. If they ask you, the rea son for the trip is tourism. We’ll meet up out in front of the airport. If you get there ahead of me, grab a taxi and wait. And keep an eye out for me.”

  “You think they’re gonna try and stop you here?”

  “I doubt it. I just want to be on the safe side.”

  Fifty minutes later, Herman is jarred awake as the wheels touch down at Juan Santamaria International Airport in San José, Costa Rica. The instant the plane stops at the Jetway and the pilot turns off the seat belt sign, I’m up out of my seat to allow Herman to get into the aisle ahead of me. As the plane starts to empty, I take my time getting my luggage from the overhead compartment as several passengers get between Herman and me.

  As we pass the open flight-deck door, there is no sign of the two deadheading airline employees. I continue to hang back so that by the time we get to customs, Herman and I are no longer together. We clear immigration and then spend almost ten minutes standing on opposite sides of the luggage carousel before the bags finally roll in. Herman grabs his and follows the crowd toward the conveyor belt and the two large X-ray machines near the exit.

  I let my bag go around three more times as I wait.

  I watch the line at the X-ray machine. None of the bags is being opened, and the speed with which they rocket through the machine makes me wonder if the woman operating it is watching cartoons on the screen.

  By now, Herman is long gone, out through the door leading outside.

  I let my bag go around one more time before I grab it and head toward the machine. I lug both the bag and the briefcase onto the conveyor belt and watch as they roll up the ramp into the machine.

  Before I can move, somebody taps me on the shoulder. I turn to a uniformed officer packing a semiautomatic sidearm with a well-worn handle.

  “Seńor, please get your bags and come this way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This way.” He points toward a door a few feet away. “With your bags, por favor.”

  I gather my large roll-on and the briefcase and follow him.

  Once inside, they close the door behind me and tell me to place the bags on the table in the middle of the room. One of them proceeds to go through my luggage as the other takes my jacket and checks the pockets. Then he has me empty the pockets in my pants and tells me to place everything on the table. I drop a few coins, keys, my billfold, and a money clip.

  One of the cops feels around my waist and notices the money belt under my shirt. He tells me to unstrap it and lay it on the table. I lay it down and the other one goes through each pocket on the belt removing the U.S. currency and counting it, nine thousand five hundred dollars exactly.

  “Mucho dinero,” he says.

  “Vacation money,” I tell him. It is under the ten-thousand-dollar limit requiring disclosure of cash brought into the country. He folds the currency and carefully places every bill back into the pockets of the belt and leaves it on the table.

  By now the two of them are looking at each other with quizzical glances. What they’re looking for isn’t here.

  “Seńor, you have a cell phone perhaps?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Is it illegal to have a cell phone in Costa Rica?”

  He doesn’t answer me.

  “Un momento.” One of them disappears outside. The other one waits with me. A minute or so later the other cop comes back. “Seńor, you may put your things back in your bags,” he says. “You are free to go.”

  “Gracias.” I pack it all up, strap the money belt around my waist under my shirt and tuck it in, don my jacket, and head out the door. As I leave I glance toward the mirrored wall behind me knowing that Rhytag’s men are back there wondering what happened to the cell phone.

  Outside in front of the airport, taxi drivers descend on me like a pack, trying to hustle me to the dispatch ticket booth and from there to their taxi. I have to fight several of them off just to maintain a hold on my bags.

  In my best pidgin Spanish I try to tell them that I’m waiting for a friend. Then I see the hulking presence of Herman standing next to a taxi forty feet away.

  I make it through the crowd and throw my bags into the open trunk of the taxi. We hop in, Herman up front, me in the back. The driver slips behind the wheel and we pull away.

  “Any problems?” says Herman.

  “They tried to snag the phone.”

  He reaches into his bag to make sure it’s still there. “You want it back?”

  “Hang on to it. We’ll find a place to hide it when we get to the hotel.”

  The romp down the highway is a wild ride, the driver swinging in and out of traffic, past lines of slower-moving trucks and buses, weaving between cars. The right shoulder, it seems, is reserved for underpowered motorbikes.

  We pass through an industrial area, new factories with signs and foreign names, European, American, and Asian. All the while, Herman is looking over his shoulder to see if we’re being tailed. He shakes his head. “Can’t see ’em if they’re there.”

  A half hour later we’re jammed up in downtown traffic heading for the center of San José. I notice there are no street signs or address numbers on the buildings. The streets are crowded with pedestrians, and vendors hocking their wares. The taxi takes a sweeping right turn, then a quick left, and we find ourselves on a broad one-way street, five or six lanes, though none of the vehicles seems to stay within them, all jockeying for position as they move uptown. We pass a children’s hospital and a large white cathedral on the right. A half mile farther on, we drive past a large plaza on the left. It is flanked by a beautiful colonial building under the patina of a coppered roof. Herman asks the driver and is told that the building is the Teatro Nacional, the national theater.

  A few blocks farther on he makes a left and we cut through traffic on a narrow street, stop and go for several lights, then under an old concrete overpass and around another plaza.

  Some of the buildings on the side streets are old metal corrugated structures with design features that date them to the end of the nineteenth century when fruit, sugar, and tobacco ruled the region. There are old mansions mixed in, some of them in disrepair, others restored. The driver gestures toward a large yellow colonial house. It is situated behind a high wrought-iron fence. He tells us this is the Casa Amarilla, the yellow house, the offices of the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry.

  It takes the driver a f
ew more minutes navigating one-way streets before he makes a turn and pulls to a stop in front of a low-slung building fronted by a low yellow masonry wall and gated entrance covered by a large green awning.

  “Your hotel, seńor. Sportsmens Lodge,” he says.

  Herman and I have no idea what the rooms are like. Harry and I selected the lodge from a listing of downtown hotels because of its location. Using the directions on the slip of paper from Katia, a map of downtown San José, and satellite images from Google Earth, we determined that from the Sportsmens Lodge, it is less than two blocks to the house where Katia lived with her mother. It is here that we hope to find the camera with the Colombian photographs, assuming they are still there, and if we’re lucky, Katia’s mother.

  A little research informed us that the Sportsmens Lodge is owned by an American and is a hangout for weekenders flying in from the States. Here, Herman and I can mingle with the other guests and blend in until we can lose the FBI and disappear on the next leg of our journey.

  We grab our bags out of the back of the taxi, pay the driver, and head into the hotel, down a long corridor, tiled floor flanked by doors leading to some of the rooms. Farther on, the hallway opens onto a large central patio covered by an expansive fiberglass roof that forms a kind of open-air entertainment area. It is part of a sports bar with overhead flat-screen televisions, each one showing a different event, baseball and golf from the States, soccer from Europe and Latin America.

  The reception counter is a small kiosk with a pretty girl working inside. She takes our names, finds our reservations, signs us in, and gives us keys to our rooms. I ask her about the exercise area that is supposed to be downstairs. She points toward the bar at the rear of the building and tells me where the stairs are. She has the bellman take our bags, except for the one Herman was carrying with the phone tucked inside.

  “How ’bout a beer?” says Herman. He has spied the bar at the other end of the patio.

  “Sure.”

  The guests seem to be mostly Americans in casual dress, shorts and cutoffs, jeans and T-shirts, with a few locals mixed in, Ticos and Ticas, sitting at the tables in the patio. There is a louder crowd inside in the more formal bar area, watching one of the games and downing drinks.

  I tip the bellman and ask him to take our bags to my room as Herman and I grab two stools on the patio side of the bar.

  The phone rang on Harry’s desk. He picked it up.

  “Mr. Hinds, a Mr. Rhytag for you on line two,” said the receptionist.

  “Thanks.” Harry punched the button for line two. “Mr. Rhytag, what can I do for you?”

  “One of our people is in your neighborhood. He has some information you might be interested in.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me over the phone?” Harry smiled to himself as he asked the question.

  “Not something I want to discuss over the phone,” said Rhytag.

  “I see.”

  “The man’s in the Brigantine right now, the restaurant out in front of your office. He’s African American, he’ll be wearing a dark blue suit and a maroon-striped club tie. His name is Agent Sanders. If you go now you can catch him.” Before Harry could say another word, the line went dead.

  Harry got out from behind his desk and headed out of the office, through the plaza and into the side door of the Brigantine. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so the restaurant was mostly empty. He saw the FBI agent seated at a table by himself out near the front windows. He had his hands folded on top of a large manila envelope resting on the table in front of him.

  Harry walked up and introduced himself then sat down.

  “You wanted information on one John Waters,” said the agent.

  “You found something?” said Harry.

  “We found six bank accounts in that name all in the greater San Diego area. But only one of them was newly opened under a fresh taxpayer ID number and shows activity in the amount that you described—a near six-figure deposit just after the time Emerson Pike was murdered. Of course, there is no way to know if this is your man, but there was one other thing.”

  “What’s that?” said Harry.

  “The depositor, this Mr. Waters, also rented a safe-deposit box at the same bank on the date that he opened the account.”

  “What’s in the box?” said Harry.

  “We have no idea.”

  “What do you mean? Now that you know it’s there, you can move on the account, freeze it, and get an order to open the safe-deposit box.”

  “We have no legal basis,” said the agent. “You asked us for information, we got it for you.” He slid the envelope across the table to Harry. “The account number, everything you need is in there. Of course, it could be just a coincidence, a perfectly innocent deposit with nothing in the box but a home deed or an insurance policy.”

  “Great,” says Harry.

  “Let me make a suggestion,” said the agent. “And if you tell anyone where this came from, we’ll deny it. You could put together a declaration claiming the account constitutes the proceeds from the sale of the coin in question, and the box contains physical evidence from the crime scene.”

  “Based on what?” says Harry. “My good looks?”

  “Think about it. Who’s going to complain? You issue a subpoena based on the declaration seeking to tie up the account and obtain a court order to freeze the assets in the box, pending a hearing before the court. Why would the prosecution complain? They don’t own the box or the account. The only interested party is the deposit holder.”

  “Your boss Rhytag is insidious,” said Harry.

  “That’s how he became the boss,” said the agent. “When the depositor receives notice through the bank that the assets are frozen, he can come forward and object at the time of the hearing. If he does you can be sure he’s not involved in Pike’s death.”

  “What if he doesn’t show up? What if he just sends counsel to object?” says Harry.

  “Then the court may want to know who the client is and what’s in the box. And if he doesn’t show up at all, well…”

  Rhytag was using the criminal defense team to smoke out John Waters while the feds hid in the shadows and bugged the lawyers’ offices. Harry hated it. If the whole thing blew up and Mr. Waters filed a civil claim for damages because his funds were cut off, the FBI and Rhytag would be nowhere in sight. Still, it was the only avenue available, and it might work.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The black SUV was parked at the curb around the corner, twenty feet up the side street from the Sportsmens Lodge in San José. One of the deadheading airline employees sat behind the wheel with a pair of binoculars as he watched the two men disappear with their luggage through the gate into the entrance of the hotel. Less than a minute later, two other figures emerged from the shadows between some bushes at the opposite corner of the hotel grounds. They walked quickly toward the car. One of them was carrying a small duffel bag.

  A few seconds later, the second FBI agent opened the passenger door and got in. His Costa Rican compatriot climbed into the backseat and closed the door.

  “Did you get it done?” asked the driver.

  “Both rooms, wired snug as a bug, and the phone’s tapped,” said the passenger.

  “Now if we could only have gotten the cell phone,” said the driver.

  “If customs didn’t find it, where is it?”

  “He handed it off to his friend,” said the driver. “That’s why they split up. Sucker knows we’re onto him.”

  “If he leaves it in the room, we can get it tomorrow. In two seconds I can fry some of the circuitry and he’ll think it just quit.”

  “And what if they take it with them?”

  “Perhaps it will be stolen,” said the man in the backseat. “Tourists are always being held up at gunpoint and robbed in San José.”

  “We’ll have to talk about that one,” said the driver. “Washington may draw the line at shooting a lawyer, even in Costa Rica.”

&n
bsp; “Turn on the receiver,” said the other agent. “Let’s see what we get.”

  “Give it a minute. They haven’t had time to get to the rooms yet,” said the driver.

  Herman and I finish our beers, pay up, and leave the empty bottles on the bar. As we were drinking, I noticed one of the employees carrying a full case of beer up a set of stairs in the bar area on the other side. I know this isn’t the way to the exercise area. From what the girl told me at the front desk, those stairs are farther back in the building, through the glass door in the residence area on the way to our rooms.

  After making sure the bartender and the waitress are busy with customers, I gesture for Herman to follow me and quickly head from the patio into the formal bar area.

  But instead of going through the bar toward the glass door leading to the guest rooms at the back of the building, we quickly veer to the right and slip down the steps into the basement.

  They lead to a service and storage area under the bar upstairs. But at the foot of the steps is a solid wooden door with a heavy metal latch. I turn the latch and open the door. It leads to a small lane, a dogleg in the road that runs behind the lodge. Across the street is a chain-link fence covered in heavy foliage and bounded by old eucalyptus trees. On the other side of the fence is dense jungle undergrowth, where if the images on Google Earth were accurate, a steep incline leads down to the old San José zoo in the canyon below.

  For the moment I am more interested in the paved lane and where it leads. If the maps and satellite photographs were accurate, Herman and I should be able to follow the lane past the next intersection. A few hundred feet farther on, we would come to another small street on the right. On the left-hand side of that street, less than two hundred yards from the intersection, is the house that Katia lived in with her mother, and if we are blessed by the gods, the camera with the photographs from Colombia.

  “Tonight when it gets dark, we check out the house,” I tell Herman. “If her mother’s still gone, the place should be dark. Bring your lock picks.”

  He nods and I close the door. We head back up, and hold it at the top of the steps until the barmaid turns her back to wait on a customer. Herman and I quickly step up and wander casually through the bar toward the glass door and our rooms.