Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  “Could have left me and gotten the suitcase,” I tell him.

  “Thought about it,” he says. “But then who’s gonna pay my bill?” He winks at me. “If we help you up, do you think you can stand?” he asks her.

  “I will try.”

  He hands her purse to her. We each get under one arm and help her to her feet. The blare of a siren suddenly fills the air. The bright red of the first fire truck turns the corner at the other end of the block, followed by two more cops riding Suzuki dirt bikes.

  The cops quickly busy themselves directing traffic. The crowd around us suddenly disperses as their attention is drawn to the truck. With their backs to us, they watch the firemen as they come off and start hauling hoses.

  Katia’s mother takes a few steps and says something to the lady who offered to allow us to use her house.

  “What did she say?” Herman didn’t hear it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

  Within seconds the three of us are hobbling down the street in the other direction, away from the crowd. As we reach the stairs at the end of the block, Herman takes the lead, helping Katia’s mother down the steps.

  I stand above them on one of the steps, my eyes just at street level for a few seconds, making sure that no one is following us.

  Looking back I see a cop in a dark blue uniform talking to some of the people who had gathered around us on the sidewalk. He is taking notes. A woman who is talking to him gestures toward the sidewalk behind her without bothering to turn to look.

  He says something to her.

  She turns and starts to point at the curb where I had been sitting, and then suddenly stops. She looks around as if she is confused. She knows we were there. She turns back to the officer and they continue to talk. Just as the cop begins to lift his eyes from his notebook to glance down the block in my direction, I drop down one more step and disappear below the level of the street.

  FORTY-SIX

  Nitikin went to bed at his usual time, eight o’clock, but he didn’t sleep. He tossed and turned for hours, troubled by the thought that what he had been told was wrong. Ten days earlier, he had been shown a copy of a fax by one of his friends in the FARC. It was a bill of lading from a Panamanian shipping company. It had arrived at the FARC communications hut earlier that day.

  The bill of lading was a contract for the shipment of a single cargo container by sea from the Port of Tumaco on the Pacific coast of Colombia to the container terminal at Balboa, Panama, at the western approach to the Panama Canal.

  As Nitikin lay tossing on his bed he was troubled by the fact that according to the bill of lading, the shipment was scheduled for the following morning, with the deadline for loading containers set for two A.M., sailing by four.

  The distance between the FARC encampment in the Tapaje River valley and the Port of Tumaco was more than sixty miles as the crow flies, an hour by car on a fast highway. But there was no highway, only dirt roads that wound through the deep river gorges and over the mountains. Because one had to dodge Colombian military patrols, the trip could take more than a day; that is, if none of the bridges over the rivers was washed out.

  By early afternoon, when no truck had arrived to transport the con tainer with the device, Nitikin was forced to conclude that the information he had seen on the fax was wrong; either that or Alim was playing games with him.

  Yakov had set everything up premised on the one assumption that thirty-six hours after departing the harbor at Tumaco, he and the device would be in Panama. Whether this was their final destination he had no way of knowing. But through some FARC friends he had managed to obtain a cell phone with a Panamanian GSM chip. It was useless in the jungles of Colombia, but at the Port of Balboa, near Panama City, he would be able to get a cellular signal. The chip contained just enough minutes for a brief long distance call to his daughter’s cell phone in Costa Rica. Nitikin was desperate to be sure that she was safe, and to tell her one last time that he loved her.

  It was a three-story concrete building just two blocks south of the Sportsmens Lodge. But it took us the better part of an hour to get there hauling our luggage and helping Katia’s mother, Maricela Solaz, along the way. She introduced herself as we walked. I filled her in as much as I could concerning Katia, the fact that she was charged with serious crimes and in the hospital following an attempt on her life.

  She said she had never heard the name Emerson Pike, but after what had happened she was not surprised that an attempt had been made on Katia’s life. It was the photographs she had taken in Colombia. Though her father had told her almost nothing, she was certain that the people she had accidentally caught in the pictures were dangerous. “Whoever tried to kill my daughter also tried to kill me.”

  “Did you see him? Could you identify him?” I ask.

  “No. But I can identify the man in Colombia,” she says. “And I am certain that he is the one who ordered it.”

  “What man?”

  “I will tell you when we get there.”

  We took a wide berth around the lodge, walking several blocks out of our way, up the hill and around the hospital to avoid the police and any FBI who might be lingering around our hotel.

  She pointed out the apartment building as we approached. It looked as if it dated to the thirties. The gray concrete structure curved with the street and incorporated elements of Art Deco, concrete columns with molded threads in the form of a winepress set into the facade.

  “The yellow house across the street behind the fence is the Casa Amarilla, it is the ministerio of exterior relations. How do you say?”

  “The foreign ministry?”

  “Yes. That’s it. My friend lives on the second floor in the apartments across the street.” She leads the way. When we arrive in front of the curving iron gate at the door, she takes hold of the bars with one hand and rattles it, then steps back a few feet to the curb and hollers up to the window overhead, “Lorenzo. It’s Maricela. Open the door.”

  For a few seconds there is nothing. She rattles the gate again. Then a voice overhead. “Who is it?”

  “Es Maricela y sus amigos. Let us in.”

  The man who sticks his head out the window a couple of seconds later looks no more Costa Rican than I do. “Where have you been? I have been trying to reach you for the last six weeks,” he says. “Katia is in trouble.”

  “I know,” she tells him. “Lemme in, please.”

  “Give me a minute to find my key.” He disappears from the window.

  “Your friend is an American,” I say.

  “Yes. His name is Larry Goudaz. He calls himself Lorenzo. He is from California. The Silicon Valley,” she says.

  “I see.” I remember the name Lorenzo Goudaz from one of our meetings with Katia at the jail. “I think Katia mentioned him as a friend.”

  “Yes, I’m sure she would have told you about him.”

  Lorenzo Goudaz was on Harry’s short list of people in San José as possible contacts, names given to him by Katia, who might be able to reach her mother. According to Katia she had introduced Goudaz to Emerson Pike before she and Pike left for California. Goudaz didn’t particularly like Pike. If Katia had listened to him and stayed home, none of this would have happened.

  As I listen to her, Maricela describes a man who is a professional networker. He has situated himself between the local Costa Ricans and the Americans, some who live here and some who trek to the city periodically from up north, and has made himself useful to all.

  “Lorenzo has been here twenty years at least,” says Maricela. “He has been a friend and from time to time has helped people in the neighborhood. All the norteamericanos, what you call expatriates…”

  “Yes.”

  “They all know him. When they come to town they visit him. They call him the mayor of Gringo Gulch. Katia calls him ‘the MOGG.’” She explains that this is short for mayor of Gringo Gulch. “But don’t say it in front of him. Katia jokes
, but I don’t think he likes it.” She looks at me and smiles, the same intriguing smile as her daughter’s.

  We hear him coming down the stairs.

  “Why do they call him the mayor?” says Herman.

  “Because he has been here so long and knows so many people. If you are in trouble, you go see Lorenzo and he will fix it, or knows somebody who can.”

  A second later the front door opens. We are greeted with a broad grin under a shiny bald head. His stocky, round white body is naked to the waist, and there are only a few wisps of gray hair on the chest.

  The second he looks at Maricela he loses the smile. “You look as if you’re sick. What’s happened?”

  “There’s been a fire at my house. Please let us in.”

  “Of course.” He fumbles with a large brass ring of keys trying to find the one that works the gate.

  “How did it happen?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get inside.”

  He struggles with the ring, then drops it on the ground. “Fucking keys,” he says as he bends over to pick them up. When he stands up he’s staring straight at Maricela. “Excuse my French,” he says. He gives Herman and me a cockeyed, impish grin through the bars.

  “Please hurry,” she says. “I need to use your bathroom.”

  He finds the right key, turns it in the lock, and opens the gate.

  Maricela shoots through the door and up the cement spiral staircase ahead of us.

  “What can I say? Any friend of Maricela’s is a friend of mine.” He smiles a little, as if to acknowledge that this is a mantra in which Maricela’s name is interchangeable with the name of every other person he knows. “Excuse my appearance. It’s laundry day and I’ve run out of shirts. So you get to see the washboard abs and the rugged me.”

  Herman and I laugh. Goudaz has the natural charm of a glad-hander. He does it easily and with a certain grace, even naked from the waist up.

  “Sorry to barge in on you like this. My name’s Paul, this is Herman.”

  “That’s what I like, people on a first-name basis.” He shakes our hands while he’s looking at our duffel bags.

  “I hope it doesn’t look like we’re planning on staying,” says Herman.

  “Don’t worry about it. Come on in. I’m sure Maricela has told you about me. I’m the local curiosity.” He locks the gate behind us and closes the door.

  “Everything except how you got the name Lorenzo,” I say.

  “It’s because Ms. Blind Costa Rica loves to toy with this single hair on my chest, so she calls me Lorenzo the Magnificent. If you have any other questions, just ask, ’cause I’ve got lots of lies,” he says.

  Herman and I laugh as we trudge up the stairs hauling our luggage.

  “So tell me what happened.”

  Shortly after midnight the demons stopped dancing in his head and Yakov fell asleep. It was deep and restful, though he couldn’t be sure how long it lasted.

  He wakened suddenly to a sound overhead unlike anything he had ever heard before. A deep whomping percussion that became louder and shook the entire hut as it drew near. It was a helicopter. The Colombian military had found the base.

  Nitikin rolled over and was suddenly blinded by a flashlight beam directed into his eyes. “Get up. We are leaving.”

  Yakov held up a hand to shade his eyes. It was Alim’s interpreter. The man lowered the flashlight. “Put on your clothes. Leave everything else. Take nothing. Everything you need will be provided. Come. Hurry.” The man stepped just outside the door of the hut and waited. “Quickly!”

  Yakov began to put on his pants as the deafening sound of the helicopter moved overhead. He glanced at his watch and realized it was just after three in the morning.

  Nitikin put on his shirt and buttoned it. He looked for his watch and couldn’t find it.

  “Hurry up!”

  He grabbed his boots and his field jacket, then reached under the bed into a bag he had already packed. He felt around inside the bag for the shape of the small clamshell cell phone. He disconnected the wire that had been charging it, and then slipped the phone into his pants pocket. He reached for the charger, plugged into the wall on the other side of the bed.

  “Hurry! What are you doing?” The interpreter came back into the hut.

  “I am looking for some socks.”

  “You don’t need socks. We don’t have time. Put your boots on now. Let’s go.”

  The man stood there and watched him as Nitikin laced up his boots over his naked feet. Yakov hadn’t worn socks in years. But he needed time to get the charger for the cell phone. Now he would have to leave it and pray that he had enough battery power to make the call to Maricela.

  He followed the interpreter out the door and through the maze of huts. By now several of the FARC commandos had taken up their Kalashnikov rifles and were headed in the same direction. Helicopters overhead always charged the entire camp with fear. They were employed against the FARC both for attacks as well as subterfuge. Recently they had been used to trick the FARC into releasing hostages the rebels believed were merely being transported from one camp to another.

  By now the bird was on the ground. Yakov could hear the gentle woofing of the blades as they idled quietly, whipping the air in the clearing beyond the huts. As he came around the corner of the last building, he suddenly realized why Alim had waited so long to transport the container.

  This was no ordinary helicopter. Yakov had seen it before, but it was always in the distance, miles away, where you couldn’t gain a true appreciation of its size. The huge Sikorsky Skycrane was used for logging in remote areas, in particular for hauling high-end exotic hardwoods from inaccessible river valleys. Yakov had heard stories of logs hollowed out to carry even more valuable crops, thousands of pounds of cocaine whisked through the air to unknown destinations.

  On the ground close-up, the Skycrane looked like a giant dragonfly. Its seventy-two-foot-diameter rotor blades and giant twin turboshaft engines could lift a fully armed battle tank to nearly ten thousand feet. It could carry it two hundred miles in less than two hours and gently set it back on the ground. Yakov noticed there was something different about this particular Skycrane from the ones he had seen before. There were two large exterior tanks fitted into the normally vacant area under what looked like the rigid backbone of the craft.

  Nitikin saw Alim in the distance, standing next to the chopper, gesturing with his arms and pointing in the direction of the cargo container a hundred meters away just at the edge of the clearing near the trees.

  Two crew members in orange jumpsuits were arranging the lift cables under the helicopter’s belly tanks. The cable lines looked as if they were at least a hundred feet long. From these the container would dangle like a pendulum beneath the belly of the huge chopper.

  “This way.” The interpreter tapped Yakov on the shoulder, directing him away from the helicopter and toward the cargo container where the four surviving members of Afundi’s group were waiting. As they approached, one of them opened the cargo container door, swinging it wide. He gestured for Nitikin to get inside.

  The wooden crate containing the device was already bolted in place, fastened to the floor in the center of the container. The bomb was not heavy. It was a fraction of the weight of the atomic device dubbed Little Boy that had been dropped on Hiroshima in Japan at the end of World War II, though its yield would be equal to or perhaps even more destructive. Both the Soviets and the U.S. had made strides in reducing the size and weight of warheads in the years immediately following the war.

  The real weight of the load was in the lead lining of the cargo container itself, a precaution not so much for safety as against detection. Nitikin had told Alim that this was unnecessary, but Afundi refused to believe him. A warhead using highly enriched uranium, while more primitive and less powerful, was more difficult to detect than an implosion device using plutonium. The gamma rays and neutrons emitted by a shielded uranium device allowed for detection only at very short di
stances, no more than two to four feet. More important was the time required to count a sufficient number of particle emissions from a uranium bomb in order to set off an alarm. This could take anywhere from several minutes to hours. By then, any vehicle carrying the device through a border check or control point would be long gone.

  Yakov just stood in the open doorway looking at the crate. One of Alim’s men tossed three large duffel bags into the container. Then he nudged Yakov toward the door. As Nitikin stepped inside the man gestured for him to sit on the floor. He sat with his back against the container wall and his feet against the wooden crate. When he looked up he saw Alim at the doorway, looking down at him with a simpering smile.

  Afundi had packed a few personal items. He knew he would not be coming back to the camp. In a light day pack he carried the newspaper given to him by Fidel that morning in Havana and Emerson Pike’s small laptop. He figured, why not? He didn’t own a computer and the dead American no longer needed it.

  Within seconds, Alim, his four men, and the interpreter joined Nitikin inside the cargo container. The interpreter handed Yakov two small white pills. “Here, take these.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dramamine, for motion sickness. Trust me, you will need it.”

  Nitikin swallowed the two pills.

  Someone outside closed the door. Yakov heard the screech of metal as the steel bar was dropped into position, sealing them behind the heavy metal door. The interpreter turned on his flashlight as they sat and waited.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Liquida read the brief account of the fire in the local newspaper the next morning. One fatality, a woman, her identity withheld until they could notify the next of kin.

  Later that afternoon, after packing his luggage for the return to Mexico, he took a detour on his way to the airport. He parked the car and took a stroll down the dead-end street. Everything was back to normal, except for the burned-out house two doors from the corner. Someone had swept the glass and debris from the street. The front gate on the house was padlocked, probably to prevent looters from falling into the charred pit that was inside.