Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

  About a mile away on the other side, I can see the international cargo terminal. It lies along a jetty that forms the breakwater between the harbor and the Pacific Ocean. My best guess is that we are now roughly eighty miles south of San Diego.

  There is a large container ship the size of a small city tied up to the dock across the harbor and being off-loaded. It is riding high in the water and appears to be almost empty. Four enormous container cranes silhouetted against the open sky stand like steel giraffes. One of them is digging deep into the hold of the ship. It lifts out two containers at a time and stacks them on the dock. Smaller portable gantries roll up and down the wharf lifting cargo onto trucks that are lined up waiting to carry materials to the factories up north.

  “What time do you have?” My watch has stopped.

  “Ten forty,” says Herman.

  By now Harry should have gotten my messages, and Rhytag should be mustering his forces, contacting the Mexican Federal Judicial Police and making arrangements to send agents south from the border.

  “If the fax is accurate and the ship’s on time,” says Herman, “that gives us less than ninety minutes. Any ideas how you want to do this?”

  “Do you have your binoculars?”

  “In my bag,” he says.

  “Can I borrow them?”

  “Sure.” Herman fishes through the bag, finds the small Zeiss four-power glasses, and hands them to me.

  From where I am standing, even with the field glasses I can barely make out the name on the bow of the container ship. Just enough to know that it’s not the Amora.

  “One thing’s for sure, we need to find a place where we can see better. Why don’t we pack up and leave the bags by the door? Then let’s get Maricela and take a walk.”

  We go two blocks away from the water, then head along a main drag until we come to a bridge that crosses the canal. We turn right and follow the path along the canal out to where the cruise ships dock. By the time we get there, the container ship is buttoned up and two tugs have moved in to ease it away from the dock across the harbor.

  We find a bench and the three of us sit like bumps on a log to wait.

  Maricela watches through the field glasses as the tugs, with meticulous care, nudge the huge ship out into the center of the channel. They assist the empty cargo container as she turns in her own length. Ten minutes later the ship gets her bow pointed out to the open sea, and the massive screws begin to churn the water under her stern. In less than five minutes she is out beyond the jetty with the two tugs trailing alongside.

  I am wondering if I should try and call Harry again, though I’m not sure how.

  The two tugs have peeled away from the larger ship, but they aren’t coming back to port. Instead they are sitting there. They appear to be dead in the water, maybe a couple of miles out. If I strain my eyes I can see what appears to be a dot just this side of the horizon.

  “Somethin’ out there,” says Herman.

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “Can I see the glasses?”

  Maricela hands them to Herman.

  He peers through the binoculars for ten seconds, maybe longer, trying to fine-tune the focus. “It’s a cargo ship. Looks like it might be empty, but I can’t tell.”

  “Why wasn’t I informed?” said Rhytag. He was standing at his desk barking into the phone. “So I was in a meeting. So you should have interrupted me.

  “I don’t care if the agents thought it was a hoax.

  “I know. I know. I’m aware that Madriani and his partner know we’ve been monitoring them. So what if they’re playing games. I still want to know. Has anyone checked out the information?

  “What I’m saying”—his voice went up a whole octave—“is do we know if there’s a ship named the Amora scheduled to dock at Ensenada?

  “Well, then find out! And call me back,” Rhytag shouted into the phone. He didn’t even bother to hang up. He just pushed the button for the other line and dialed a new number. He waited a few seconds and the instant the phone on the other end was picked up he said, “Zeb. Jim here, have you heard? Last night a phone call came in on the wiretap at Madriani’s partner’s house. There was no answer, so the caller left a message. He identified himself as Paul. The agents say the voice sounded like Madriani. He told his partner to call me and tell me that the bomb was on board a ship. According to the message, the ship is named the Amora and it’s scheduled to dock at Ensenada, Mexico, sometime today. They didn’t bother to report it because it’s clear that Madriani and his partner know the offices are bugged and the phones are tapped. The agents are certain it was a hoax.

  “Why? Because yesterday afternoon there was another phone call. Presumably it came in over the lawyer’s encrypted cell phone, so the agents couldn’t hear the actual conversation. But according to what they heard over the bug in the office, the partner appeared to be using our wire to jerk the agents around. He was taking them right to the cusp of something important, apparently pretending to repeat information he was getting over the phone and then pretending the phone went dead…Zeb, Zeb, are you there? I thought I lost you,” said Rhytag.

  “What’s that?”

  Rhytag listened to the long explanation about triangulation and jamming as the blood seemed to drain from his head. He was getting the details when his secretary came through the door with a handwritten note and handed it to him.

  He read the note as he was listening to the litany of excuses from Thorpe: “Confirmed. Panamanian-registered ship Amora, currently docked container port Ensenada, Mex. Agent M. Trufold.”

  “Zeb, never mind that. Shut up and listen…”

  We sit quietly on the bench and watch as the Amora clears the jetty and heads into the channel. She’s much smaller than the other container ship that left port almost an hour earlier, and she’s riding high in the water. As she swings her stern to clear the breakwater, I see a single cargo container resting on the deck, near the stern.

  “You think that’s it?” says Herman.

  “It’s gotta be, unless there are more containers belowdecks,” I say.

  I scan with the glasses back in the other direction hoping to see a train of police vehicles streaming into the port. Instead all I see are trucks hauling cargo containers in the other direction, up the coast highway toward Tijuana and the border.

  “Can I see?” said Maricela. Apparently she sees something on the ship she wants to look at.

  I hand her the field glasses.

  She puts them to her eyes and adjusts the focus, looks for a moment, and then says, “That’s him!”

  “Your father?” I ask.

  “No. Alim,” she says. “On the stairs.” She hands the glasses back to me. “Up at the top.”

  I adjust them and look. A slender man with dark hair, wearing white coveralls, is standing on the wing of the bridge and just starting to make his way down the steps. I get a good look at him as he climbs to the main deck and disappears through a door in the tower section of the ship.

  “Are you sure it’s him?” I ask.

  “Yes. I would know that face anywhere. But where’s my father?” She wants the glasses back.

  I hand them to her.

  I turn to Herman. “If that’s the container on the deck, it’s not going to take them long to off-load. If they get it on the back of a truck and clear customs, they’ll be out along the jetty and up on the highway before we can move. Do you see a road coming in here anywhere?”

  Herman turns, scans the parking area behind us. “It’s all fenced off. But back along the path by the canal, there was a street that came in.”

  “Listen, see if you can get out on the road and flag down a taxi. Take it to the street by the canal and wait for us. I’ll stay here with Maricela, see if we can catch a glimpse of her father and keep an eye on the container. Just wait for us out there.”

  Herman heads out on the run.

  By the time I look back, the tugs have the Amora pressed up against the cargo dock across
the way. It appears as if they aren’t even waiting to tie her up. One of the huge cargo cranes is lining up to lift the container from the aft deck.

  Maricela is frantically scanning the deck from bow to stern looking for any sign of her father.

  In no time at all the container is in the air and lifted free of the vessel. The mammoth arm of the crane swivels as the container swings over the side and disappears from sight down onto the dock on the other side of the ship.

  “We’re gonna have to go,” I tell her.

  “But where is my father?” she says.

  “He could be on the other side of the ship, behind the superstructure, or in one of the cabins. Or possibly he’s already down on the dock.”

  She looks at me with a certain anxiety in her eyes. Or he could be dead, she must be thinking. But she doesn’t say it.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” I tell her. “We need to get to the taxi, grab our stuff at the room, and get out there.” I point to the end of the road that runs along the top of the breakwater where it merges with the coast highway heading north. “If we lose them now, we’ll never find them again.”

  We head off running as fast as we can along the path toward the canal.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Listen, thank him for us. How many units are they sending?” Thorpe listened as he penciled notes on a pad on the table.

  Rhytag looked on. They were closeted in the operations center in the bowels of the FBI building with communications at their fingertips and a small army of agents and technicians working computers and handling phones.

  “Any idea how long it’ll be before they get there?” Thorpe flashed all five fingers of one hand at Rhytag twice in quick succession. Ten minutes.

  “Did you offer them the NEST team?”

  NEST was the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, a group of scientists, technicians, and engineers operating under the U.S. Department of Energy. The teams were trained and prepared to respond to nuclear accidents or incidents anywhere in the world.

  Thorpe shook his head slowly and made a face. It was apparent that the Mexican government, at least for the moment, had declined the assistance of the specialists. “So they understand they may be getting in over their heads?”

  “Okay, keep me posted.” He hung up the phone.

  “They’ve got thirty police units going in. The Mexican government is also bringing in some military forces to cordon off the area around the port. The problem is, the container may have already left the facility. They won’t know for at least fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Until then there’s nothing we can do but wait.”

  “No. You’re wrong,” said Rhytag. “Contact the director at Homeland Security. Tell him what we’ve got and that our recommendation is that they close the border immediately. Every crossing from San Ysidro east to the Arizona border. Tell them to shut ’em down now. Nothing gets through. No cars, no trucks until we can figure out where this thing is and how to stop it. And tell them to be sure and warn our people at the border as to what they’re dealing with.”

  “The second we shut the border the media’s gonna know. It’ll be all over the news. If the device is still at the port and the Mexicans stop it, the White House will hand you your head when the public finds out how close they came to another nine-eleven or worse,” said Thorpe.

  He was right. Too many law enforcement officials would have to be told what they were looking for to keep it under wraps.

  “Then the White House spinmeisters can make up a story to feed the media. We can’t stick our head in the sand any longer. I’ll take full responsibility. Besides, what if the Mexicans don’t stop it?”

  Thorpe didn’t have an answer.

  By the time we get to the canal, Herman has a taxi waiting. Maricela and I bundle into the backseat as Herman gives directions to the driver in Spanish.

  From the backseat of the taxi I am straining my eyes through the binoculars to see if I can pick up any sight of the container. From here it is a long distance across the water, and the Amora is in the way. But I can see part of the road leading out of the port, and there is a train of trucks on it, heading for the highway.

  “It was a strange shade of green,” says Maricela. She is talking about the container. “It had some lettering sprayed on one side.”

  She is right. I see the container on the back of a truck just as the taxi passes a building on the left that cuts off my view.

  “You wanna stop and pick up the bags at the hotel?” says Herman.

  “Leave them. We can’t take the time.” I can once again see the truck with the container, across the harbor. It is only a few hundred feet from the exit gate at the port where a uniformed guard is checking vehicles and paperwork. If we could only get there, we could stop it.

  “Herman, tell him to pick it up, otherwise we’re gonna lose him going through town. If he gets out on that highway and takes a turnoff, we’ll never see him again.”

  Herman says something to the driver, and the man says something back.

  “He says his foot’s on the floor,” says Herman.

  “Great! Let’s hope there are a lot of hills between here and wherever that truck’s going, because we’re never going to catch him at the gate.”

  We make the wide swing to the left around the port, headed for where the port facility joins the highway.

  When I look once more with the field glasses, the truck with the container is gone. It’s already cleared the gate. As the road curves to the right and heads up the hill, I see it chugging up the grade about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. It’s just ahead of a U-Haul truck struggling up the hill, unable to pass it.

  Herman points with his finger and says something to the taxi driver who slides into the right lane and slows down. The highway is first world, two lanes in each direction with a center divider and cross traffic only where the divider is broken.

  There are several vehicles between us and the cargo carrier. The driver wants to know if he should pass them. Herman tells him no, to keep a few of the vehicles between us, but not to lose the container truck.

  As we continue to climb the hill, the few cars ahead of us begin to pull out. Within ten minutes we find ourselves directly behind the U-Haul, trying to stay shielded behind the big box truck and not appear too obvious.

  Herman tells the driver to back off a little and the guy says something back to him. “He wants to know how far we’re going,” says Herman.

  “Tell him we’ll know when we get there.”

  This doesn’t seem to satisfy him. He has a longer conversation with Herman.

  “He says he stops at Rosarita,” says Herman. “He won’t go any farther north than that. He says the traffic up around Tijuana coming back this way in the afternoon is too much. He’ll lose too many fares.”

  “Tell him we’ll pay him for his time.”

  “You’re getting pretty extravagant,” says Herman. “Maybe we should count up our cash again, see what we’ve got left.”

  “We’ve got close to six hundred,” I tell him. “For that he ought to take us to San Francisco.”

  “I can tell you one thing, if they cross the border he won’t go beyond there. He can’t unless he’s got a visa and insurance. Maricela’s gonna have the same problem, and if you try and cross you’ll get your ass arrested.” The minute he says it Herman looks at me and bites his lip.

  We both glance at Maricela. She is looking so intently out the side window, her face pressed up close to the glass, that she didn’t even hear him.

  “If they try to cross the border, at least one of us has to make it to the kiosk to get the border patrol to stop them,” I tell him.

  “That means me, since you can’t run for squat,” he says.

  A half hour past the turnoff to El Descanso the road becomes a freeway and the driver tells us we’re approaching Rosarita. Just as he says it the U-Haul hits its turn signal to make a right on the next off-ramp.

  Herman tells the taxi driver to slow down, an
d as we fall back I nearly panic when I realize the container truck is no longer out in front on the highway. Then I see it on the off-ramp in front of the U-Haul.

  “Derecho. Derecho,” says Herman.

  The taxi driver swings to the right and falls in line behind the U-Haul, nearly plowing into the back of the truck. The driver is angry, saying something in Spanish to Herman, both of his hands off the wheel for a moment as we lumber into the outskirts of Rosarita. We drive off of pavement and onto dirt streets.

  I can’t tell what the driver is saying, only that he is getting short with Herman.

  “You know, I’m getting the sense those two are together.” Herman is ignoring the driver, talking about the cargo carrier and the U-Haul.

  I’m hoping that we’re coming to the end of the trip. Maybe they’ll stop for the night. “Herman, you got the cell phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Check it and see if we have a signal.”

  He pulls it out, powers it up and waits, then shakes his head. “Nothing.”

  We’re hanging back, rolling slowly along the dusty, unpaved street when half a block up the two trucks pull into a Pemex station. The driver of the U-Haul climbs down out of the truck and starts to gas up. The container truck pulls on through and stops in a wide area next to the little mini-mart in the gas station. It looks like a bladder break, all of them suddenly jumping out of the trucks.

  “My father!” says Maricela. “That’s him!” Her face lights up as she points.

  “Where?”

  “There’s my father.” Maricela reaches for the door, and before I can stop her she’s out, running along the edge of the road.

  Herman is out before I can move.

  I try to go and the driver grabs my arm. “Seńor! ĄMi tarifa, por favor!”

  He wants his money.

  By the time I look up, Herman has caught up to Maricela and pulled her into some bushes off the road.

  I pay the driver and tell him in my best pidgin Spanish and sign language to wait. A few seconds later I join Herman and Maricela in the bushes.