Guardian of Lies

by Steve Martini

“What’s wrong with you?” Herman is giving her a piece of his mind. “You want to get us all killed? To say nothing of a few thousand bystanders. Think, woman!”

  Maricela looks as if she’s about to cry.

  “She’ll be all right. Calm down. She got excited, that’s all. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead. When she saw him,” I shrug a shoulder, “she snapped. Cut her some slack,” I tell him.

  Herman shakes his head slowly and takes a deep breath. He apologizes and removes his huge hands from her shoulders.

  As we’re talking I hear the engine start behind us. Before I can even turn to look, the taxi driver pulls a U-turn from his parking position and heads the other way down the dusty street.

  “Great!” says Herman. “That cuts it. What do we do now?”

  There is no time to think or talk. “Stay here and keep an eye on her.” I step out of the bushes and walk as fast as I can along the side of the road toward the gas station at the end of the block. If we lose the truck now, we’ll never find it again. We could get ourselves killed, but what choice do we have? I’ve never done anything like this before, but then I’ve never been in a situation like this. Sometimes we surprise ourselves—what adrenaline can do.

  When I reach the corner, only one of the men is outside, keeping an eye on the trucks as the pump continues to fill the empty tank on the U-Haul. The guy is moving around over by the container. He is checking it out, making sure it’s fastened down tight on the rails that form the bed on the back of the cargo carrier.

  The others are still inside the mini-mart. When I look back, the guy at the container truck has moved to the other side.

  I notice that the back of the U-Haul is not locked. I swing the handle on the catch out of the way and gently lift the roll-up gate just enough to crawl inside. Once in, I lift the gate a little farther so Herman, down the street, can see me. Holding the gate in one hand, I’m motioning with the other for them to join me, and to make it fast.

  Before they can move very far, I hear voices coming out of the mini-mart. A foreign tongue that isn’t Spanish. I put my hand out and Herman steps off the road and into the bushes with Maricela once more.

  As I quietly lower the gate, I see a small piece of wood on the bed of the truck, just inside the door. I slip it under the edge at the bottom of the door just enough to keep the outside hand lever from sliding into the lock and sealing me in.

  A few seconds later the voices get louder as they approach. I hear someone pull the fuel nozzle from the tank and hook it back to the pump, and a few seconds later the doors as they open and slam closed. Off in the distance I hear the diesel engine on the container truck as it turns over and starts, and a second later the U-Haul ignition as it kicks in, then the deep rumble of the engine.

  I stand and lift the gate high over my head and look for Herman. He sees me from the bushes. I point with my thumb, like a hitchhiker, to the other side of the street.

  Quickly Herman grabs Maricela by the hand and the two of them scoot across the street and end up behind an old pickup truck off its wheels on blocks at the side of the road.

  It’s a gamble, but I’m assuming these guys have pulled off the highway for gas, which means they may be heading back to the highway. I hear the container truck as it swings in front of the U-Haul to make the turn back down the dusty street to the freeway. The U-Haul starts to make the turn to fall in behind it. I am holding on to the gate to steady myself, hanging on to it over my head as the truck rocks back and forth leaving the pavement and going onto the dirt.

  The driver misses a shift and grinds the gears just as Herman steps out from behind the parked pickup. He is carrying Maricela on his shoulders and before the truck can get up to ten miles an hour he tosses her up to me. All I can do is break her fall with one hand and part of my body as I hold the gate for Herman. A second later he is on board.

  I look down at Maricela. She’s smiling back at me. She’s fine. Herman and I carefully lower the gate and I stick the piece of wood underneath it again.

  We can barely see each other in the dark, but there is no chance they’re going to hear us up front, not with the rumble of the engine and the road noise.

  “May as well make ourselves comfortable,” says Herman. He grabs a heavy packing blanket off the top of a wooden crate up front, brings it back, and spreads it in a double thickness on the floor, for us to sit on.

  I catch my breath, but still can’t believe we’ve just done this. That we are so close to risking it all.

  FIFTY-NINE

  So they have no idea where the truck is headed?” said Rhytag.

  Thorpe shook his head. “According to our agents the Mexican police are pushing them pretty hard. They got the captain and two of the others down belowdecks right now teaching them about the inquisition.” Thorpe was talking about the ship’s crew, the captain and the others brought on board the Amora to replace the original crew members, who have all disappeared except for two who signed on in Colombia.

  “All we know right now is that the current crew members appear to be connected to the Tijuana cartel. Most of them are seamen or have some sea experience. They were contacted by people they knew in the cartel to bring in the ship. They’re telling the Mexican authorities that’s all they know. When they were shown the photos taken by Nitikin’s daughter, they IDed Nitikin as being on board as well as at least three and possibly four other individuals in the photographs. According to the cartel crew members, they have no idea what Nitikin was doing or what was in the container. We did get a good description of the container, color and size. It’s a twenty-footer, lime green, and one of the crew members gave us a partial plate number off the truck. It was a Mexican commercial plate. Mexican government is checking it now as to the owner and possible destination. Also, there was another vehicle, a box truck. One of the crew members said he thought it was a rental truck of some kind but he couldn’t remember the name of the company or the license number. There was one thing that was curious though.”

  “What’s that?” said Rhytag.

  “Some of the crew members said it looked as if the Russian was being held captive. According to them he was being guarded pretty heavily and was locked in a cabin on the ship most of the time.”

  “You think he’s acting under duress?” said Rhytag.

  “Who knows?”

  “What about the others, the people with him?”

  “All foreigners. One of them spoke Spanish and some other language. He seemed to be doing all the interpreting. The crew members said they didn’t know what the other language was, and they claim they didn’t overhear any of the translated conversations. The Mexican authorities don’t believe them. According to them somebody had to overhear something. It’s why they’ve got the captain and the others belowdecks having discussions.”

  Rhytag took a deep breath and thought for a moment. When he spoke again his voice was a near whisper so that none of the others in the room working the computers or the telephones could hear. “For the record, I didn’t ask this question,” he said, “but have the Mexicans taken them surfing?”

  “Surfing” was a euphemism for waterboarding. ACLU types condemned it as torture, but experience had proved that when time was of the essence, it was the one sure way to extract information and to do it quickly. Oftentimes less than two minutes.

  “That may be a touch too subtle for the Mexicans,” said Thorpe. “According to our agent on the scene, they got the captain hooked up to a car battery with a coil and alligator clips, charging up his nipples and various other body parts every minute or so. They let him rest just long enough to stop glowing. If he knows anything, he’s not talking. Seems the Mexicans are willing to keep at it all night. If they have to, they’ll bring the crew down in shifts and get some more batteries.”

  “The problem is that if the crew doesn’t know where the truck is headed, all that pain is likely to extract is false information. Which means we could find ourselves sent on some wild-goose chase,” sai
d Rhytag. “What do we have by way of assets up along the border?”

  “You mean besides the world’s biggest traffic jam?” said Thorpe. “At last count we had two hundred highway patrol men, another hundred on the way. The NEST team is already deployed to San Ysidro. We’re assuming that’s the nearest border crossing, so that’s likely to be where they try to come in. We’ve pulled in border patrol from as far east as Yuma. We have two FBI SWAT teams, and Delta Force is sending us two of their crackerjack sniper teams, but we’re told that’s not for public consumption. We’re also bringing in one of our own hostage-rescue teams.”

  “Why hostage rescue?” said Rhytag.

  “It was a suggestion from one of our tactical commanders. He says that hostage rescue has expertise and training in vehicle breeches, mostly buses. It’s the same team that went in to try and extract Agent Mederios and the others from the bus. If we can locate the cargo truck, we’ll use the HR team as the spear to gain access to the container, followed closely by the NEST team, to try and defuse the thing.

  “So all we need now is to find it,” said Rhytag. He asked what kind of equipment was set up along the border in terms of detection.

  “That’s the problem,” said Thorpe. “None of our detection equipment does us any good if nothing’s moving. According to the people on the NEST team, it probably wouldn’t do any good anyway. I talked with Llewellyn, he agrees. He says the fissionable material in the bomb is highly enriched uranium, and since it’s probably shielded, the equipment we have is next to useless. It could read plutonium fairly easily. But with uranium we’d have to be right up against the carrier, no more than three or four feet away, to read anything. And we’d probably have to be there for an extended period of time before we got a sufficient reading.”

  “In other words, Nitikin and his friends are in a position to sit us out and wait,” said Rhytag.

  “We could use thermal imaging,” said Thorpe. “We’d be looking for high-density anomalies, lead in the shield, for example. We could reduce the number of vehicles to be searched. The problem is, the bomb, from everything we know, is on the other side of the border. The Mexican government is not willing to allow us to use imaging.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re afraid if we find it, Nitikin and his cohorts will detonate the damn thing and turn Tijuana into a crater.”

  “That would get rid of the cartel for them,” said Rhytag.

  “No, that would get rid of the cartel for us. They don’t seem to mind. Especially now. With oil down that’s the only growth sector in their economy. Half of those factories on the other side of the border are shut down. What did they call those things?” said Thorpe.

  “Maquiladoras,” said Rhytag.

  SIXTY

  In the late nineties, politicians eager to pocket million-dollar speaking fees from foreign trade groups embraced the concept of a global economy. They teamed up with Chinese businessmen and Mexican manufacturers and carved out a zone along the U.S. southern border where trade restrictions were virtually eliminated.

  American politicians sold the country on the concept of our being an information economy, that we no longer needed manufacturing or heavy industry, as if you could drive words and eat sentences. They shipped entire job sectors abroad and then railed at the demise of the middle class.

  Places like Ensenada with its sleepy port suddenly boomed. In less than two years, vast amounts of commercial cargo moved off docks in Los Angeles and San Diego and landed instead in northern Mexico. China began shipping oceans of cheap component parts to ports along the Mexican coast, most of which were delivered to factories known as maquiladoras on the northern border. There the parts were assembled into finished products that flowed into the American market on trucks owned and operated by Mexican trucking companies.

  It was a win-win situation if you were looking to buy a cheap television, or a politician collecting on IOUs from foreign constituents. But for those who once worked in the shuttered factories or drove trucks for a living, it was the end of the road.

  For more than a decade, the maquiladoras flourished, until they fell on hard times, in a way a victim of their own success. It’s difficult to sell televisions, even if they’re cheap, to millions of Americans who are out of work.

  Liquida smiled at the thought as he wandered through the empty building, wondering why the raghead would want to meet him here. He got in by picking a small lock on a door at the rear of the building. The place was huge, cavernous, all under a single roof with overhead doors large enough to accommodate Noah’s ark.

  Like all of the maquiladora facilities, it was situated in the trade zone nestled right up against the U.S. border. While the Americans controlled their side with vast areas of vacant land and highly trained dogs, the Mexicans punched right up against the fence in many places. Both sides of the border were arid desert with rugged ravines and hills. The American side was only sparsely developed, mostly commercial warehouses and trucking facilities with a vast array of border checkpoints. With the downturn in the economy, some of the warehouses on both sides were now empty, chained-up facilities waiting for better days.

  Liquida was sweating because of the long coat he was wearing. It was necessary to conceal the heavy item underneath. He checked his watch. He was two hours early. He had parked his car several blocks away and walked so that his early visit would come as a surprise to his employer.

  He had gone to the port at Ensenada earlier that day. From the overview on the knoll above the highway, overlooking the harbor, Liquida could see police crawling all over the ship, so many uniforms he was afraid it would sink.

  He had watched with heavy-duty binoculars for some time and was pretty sure that Afundi had gotten away. Because of all the ongoing interrogations the police were still looking for someone or something. There were enough squad cars parked along the dock with hoods up and batteries missing that the chief in Tijuana would have to call Delco to get them all home.

  He was musing over the events at the harbor when suddenly he heard a noise from outside the warehouse. It was the sound of a heavy truck coming from the direction of the large fenced-in parking area.

  Liquida sprinted over to the door and peeked through a crack. A man was unlocking the gate out on the street. There was a large container truck and another smaller box truck that looked like a rental vehicle behind it.

  Liquida watched for a few seconds as the man unlocked the chain and pulled the double gates open. The two trucks started to roll through the gate, toward the warehouse.

  Liquida retreated to a ladder in the far corner of the building and climbed to an overhead loft area, a kind of industrial catwalk where he could perch and take in the show without being seen. He made himself comfortable, took off his long coat, and set it and the object strapped under it on the catwalk next to him.

  A couple of minutes later the large overhead garage door was lifted by someone outside. For the first time Liquida realized it hadn’t been locked. The mammoth door was so delicately balanced that the man was able to hoist it with one arm and send it sailing along the track until it settled almost against the roof of the building.

  Liquida wondered if anyone had been inside watching him. He was fairly confident there were no cameras. Those he had looked for. But the unlocked overhead door surprised him.

  A minute later both trucks were inside the building. Liquida could smell the odor of diesel exhaust as it wafted up to the balcony where he lay. The engines shut off and four men climbed down from the two trucks. Three from the rental vehicle and the driver of the cargo-container truck. The fifth waited by the huge open door with one hand on the rope, as if he were going to pull it and close the overhead door. But he didn’t. He waited for several minutes, looking out the open door as if expecting someone else, while three of the other men talked. Liquida couldn’t understand a thing they said. They were speaking in a foreign tongue of some kind. The other man, the fifth one, stood not far from the rental truck and se
emed to be off somewhere in his own world. He didn’t look like the others either. He was older, fair haired, and though Liquida couldn’t get a good look at him from up high, he appeared to be taller as well.

  A few minutes later another vehicle, this one a small, dark sedan, came rocketing through the open door and hit its brakes inside the building.

  The man pulled the rope and the large door came screeching down along the track until it hit the concrete floor with a bang. This time the man pushed the locking bolt into the slot, sealing it tight from the inside.

  Two more men got out of the car, and the six of them, the three who were originally talking, the man by the door, and the two from the car huddled together some distance away from the sixth man, who was now wandering all alone near the rear of the rental truck.

  Liquida watched as the five cohorts stood in a small circle near the container truck. One of them who seemed to be the leader was doing most of the talking while the others listened. The language was not something Liquida had ever heard before. He knew it must be Arabic and that the man talking had to be the boss man from Colombia. Language barrier or not, Liquida could clearly see that he was barking the orders and the others were listening. He got a good look at the man.

  Liquida reached over on the platform next to where he was lying, opened the coat, and pulled apart the two snaps inside. Having freed it from the inside of the coat, he picked up the weapon. It looked like something from a space movie, with a silencer the size of an exhaust pipe on the muzzle end, and a box clip for the 5.56-millimeter rounds at the other end where it slipped into the receiver up inside the shoulder stock under the shooter’s armpit. The weapon had a strange-looking device mounted underneath the barrel and a small scope on top.

  The modified bull pup had the advantage of a full-length rifle barrel in a gun that, without the silencer, was little more than twenty inches long.

  He held the gun close as he continued to watch the conference down below.