Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

  I know what he is doing. He is peering through the side windows with his flashlight, checking the car’s interior, making sure there is no one inside. If I could only get him to move a few blocks away and try it again, he might be greeted by the flash of nine-millimeter muzzles and the FBI. Something tells me there is a connection here if I could only figure it out.

  He rolls forward a few inches. A second later the sound of the music diminishes as the window closes. If he keeps going forward and looks in his mirror, or drives to the corner and turns around, I am dead. He would see me silhouetted under the car, backlit by the overhead lights down the street.

  As this thought enters my brain, he guns the engine. His rear wheels squeal. My nostrils fill with the acrid odor of burnt rubber as his car chatters sideways for half a beat before it shoots back down the street in reverse. He throws the rear end into the opening at Katia’s street and in a single fluid motion makes a three-point turn and speeds off in the other direction. I watch as his brake lights flare at the next intersection. He slows for a few seconds and looks in both directions, down to the right toward the Sportsmens Lodge, and up to the left toward the hospital.

  The brake lights dim and he shoots straight ahead, down the hill. The road curves to the right and he disappears around the bend.

  I crawl out from under the car. I don’t stop to brush off my clothes. Instead I begin to run faster and faster into the darkness under the trees near the fence at the zoo. My heart is pounding. I turn and fall against the chain link, leaning with all of my weight as I catch my breath. Then I make my way slowly in the dark along the twisting lane. I can’t run, though I want to. In the pitch-black under the shadows of the trees, I would break my neck.

  I am passing the first intersection when suddenly I see the lights of a vehicle winding its way along the lane, coming toward me. I look for somewhere to hide. There are some scrub bushes along the fence near the gnarled trunk of a eucalyptus tree. I make my way to the tree and position myself between the trunk and the fence and watch the headlights, trying to keep the tree between myself and the twin beams of light as the car approaches.

  It isn’t until the flare of the bright light is past me that I can see the windows of the taxi and Herman in the backseat with the window down and looking out the other side.

  “Herman! Here.” I step out into the street.

  “Alto. Aquí,” says Herman.

  The taxi driver throws on the brakes.

  I run up along the right side of the car and get in the front seat. “Go,” I tell him. A second later we are moving.

  “I waited for ya at the top of the stairs,” says Herman. “I saw the guy come outside. Then when he went in I saw you run across the street. But I wasn’t sure how to get to you. I figured the best way was to get a cab. Is he still at the house?”

  “No.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A visitation from the angel of death,” I tell him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw him up close for only an instant. He was behind a car window. But it was a face I won’t forget. It was pockmarked, one side of it, not the usual adolescent acne. It was something more sinister. Maybe smallpox or fire scarred, I couldn’t tell.”

  “Funny you should say that. When I was at the gate working on the lock, I had a real edgy feeling, like somebody or something was lookin’ at me, and not just lookin’, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” I don’t tell Herman, but the reason I couldn’t look more closely at his face was because my focus was drawn to something in the eyes. It is hard to explain, something you have to see to understand, a kind of reflection of evil.

  I have seen that look before. As a young prosecutor in Capitol City, I had sent someone with those same haunted eyes to prison. He was a man who had killed many times, and according to the doctors, he liked to do it, and given the chance would do it again. I remember some years later I stood on the riser and looked through the blinds, through the plate-glass window of a green metal room. I watched as the demons were drawn and exorcised from the eyes of Brian Danley, in the fog of the San Quentin gas chamber.

  FORTY-ONE

  The uranium projectile suddenly toppled from the muzzle of the gun. Instinctively Tomas reached out with his gloved right hand and caught it in midflight. But at arm’s length, reaching across the table, he couldn’t hold the weight.

  The projectile’s leverage and the momentum of its fall forced his hand down until his fingers were suddenly pinched between the heavy, falling uranium slug and its fissile target.

  Tomas pulled the projectile back toward his chest as the air in the room ignited in a brilliant violet light. It rippled in waves and hues of blue that Tomas had never before seen. The heat was intense. It burned his fingers right through the gloves, but Tomas was so dazzled by the radiance that he didn’t notice. As the glow from the agitated molecules of air evaporated, the heat sapped the energy from his body.

  He looked down and realized he was holding the enriched uranium against his chest. He carefully laid the projectile on the table, as far from the target as he could. Then he turned and walked out the door to where Nitikin and the other man were standing.

  When Yakov turned and saw him, Tomas had already lifted the protective hood from his head. His face was running with a river of sweat. Other than that, he looked fine. He was animated, smiling and laughing, like a soccer goalie who has just blocked a free kick.

  He assured Nitikin that the projectile had not struck the uranium target. He had saved it, but his fingers had been pinched in the process.

  Tomas did not seem to comprehend the flash of blue light and the intense heat that was still sending rising vapors of smoke off of his suit. He told Yakov that everything was all right, then lifted his right arm to pull off his glove.

  Tomas stopped in midstride and looked at his hand. There was nothing left of the first three fingers but charred stumps.

  Yakov reached him the instant before he collapsed. He laid him on the ground and helped him take off his suit. He hollered at Alim’s man, the one holding the ramrod, to help him. But the man just stood there shaking his head.

  Alim and the rest of his cadre remained off in the trees, at least a hundred meters away. Yakov told the man with the ramrod to put on Tomas’s suit, that he would need his assistance. When the man didn’t understand, Nitikin gestured with his hands, sign language, to put it on.

  The man looked at him and slowly shook his head as he backed away. Yakov yelled into the trees and a couple of seconds later he heard Alim’s commanding voice speaking in Farsi. The man looked to the trees, then back at Nitikin with a kind of trapped expression on his face. Reluctantly he stepped forward and began to put on the suit.

  Nitikin hollered assurances to the translator off in the jungle, asking him to tell the man that there was no longer anything to fear. With the proper tools, Nitikin could now complete the assembly quickly and safely. They would be finished in a matter of minutes. The translation came back and the man nodded. What the Russian didn’t tell them was that Alim’s man, who was now donning the suit, was already dead. The lifetime body burden of radiation was far exceeded by his naked exposure to the wicked tail of the dragon.

  Together they entered the hut. The radiation had elevated the temperature inside the room to the point that they could not remain more than two or three minutes.

  Yakov had the man steady the barrel of the cannon, his bare fingers projecting through the holes burned into the right-hand glove. Nitikin retrieved the projectile with the tongs. In less than a minute, using the ramrod, Yakov seated the uranium bullet securely down the barrel of the gun.

  It took another thirty seconds to insert the safety disk of uranium-238, the neutron deflector, into the slot between the end of the gun barrel and the target. Once in place, the disk of uranium-238 began doing its job. It bounced the wandering neutrons from the two elements of highly enriched uranium,
the projectile and the target, back to their respective sources, instantly reducing the gain in radiation. Nitikin heard the rapid clicking from the Geiger counter on the table suddenly fall off sharply.

  The safety disk of U-238 was attached to a rigid piece of steel wire. The wire protruded through a tiny hole in the side of the bomb case. A quarter-twist of the wire in a clockwise direction locked the safety disk in place. Anyone trying to remove the disk without first twisting the wire in a counterclockwise direction would snap the brittle connection between the safety disk and the wire, rendering the bomb useless. The gun would fire. The cordite explosion would destroy the barrel and bomb housing, but there would be no nuclear chain reaction. Even radioactive fallout would be minimal and generally contained to any structure the device was in.

  Properly turned and pulled, the wire would slide the disk from its slot, leaving the pathway clear for the projectile to be fired into the uranium target.

  The only procedure more delicate than removing the safety disk was replacing it if the need ever arose. With the bomb housing closed, it would be impossible to see the disk or the slot into which it should slide. With only the rigid wire to manipulate the disk, replacing it in the slot was a matter of trial and error. It required the deft fingers and touch of a surgeon. Even Nitikin was not sure if he could do this any longer, though in his youth, in training, he had accomplished it twice on dummy mock-ups of the warhead.

  Having locked the safety disk in place, it took less than a minute to seal the lead-lined bomb case and render the device safe.

  As the two men stepped from the building, Alim’s man lifted the hood from his head and smiled with a toothy grin as the expression of relief flooded his sweaty face.

  Nitikin had no way of measuring the dose of radiation emitted by the ionizing blue flare. But he knew that Tomas and the smiling lad he was now looking at were both dead.

  The old Russian hovered over Tomas’s bed for four days and five nights. During this entire period, neither Yakov nor the FARC physicians could do much to comfort the young Colombian.

  An ocean of water could not satisfy his thirst, even if he could keep it down. He was wretched with nausea, vomited constantly, and passed bloody diarrhea as the radiation began to kill his body from within.

  After three days, Tomas’s fingernails turned black. His thick, dark hair fell from his head in patches so that a nurse had to brush it from his pillow every few hours, into a box that was to be buried somewhere in a deep hole. Open sores developed around his mouth and eyes. When the doctor lifted the sheet, he realized that these bloody sores covered Tomas’s entire body.

  Nitikin could not even touch him for fear of further infecting his wounds, though the Russian knew there was no hope. The end was near. A high fever set in on the fourth day as infection began to take its toll. Tomas struggled for every breath as his airway swelled and his lungs filled with fluid. Just after midnight on the fifth day, Tomas suddenly went into convulsions. He arched his back as if a steel spring had snapped in his body. He shook the entire bed for almost a minute and then went limp.

  Yakov noticed that in his stillness, Tomas was no longer struggling for breath. He didn’t have to wait for the doctor to check his pulse or put the stethoscope to Tomas’s ulcerated chest to know he was dead. He stood and slowly covered Tomas’s face with the bedsheet.

  Tomas may not have understood entirely what he was doing, but Nitikin knew that his quick reactions and nimble fingers had averted a nuclear disaster that could have lit up the jungle and killed them all.

  “Excuse me, but Mr. Hinds is on the phone with a client. If you’ll wait a moment—”

  “Officer, if she gets in the way again, arrest her.”

  Harry was on the phone, but he recognized the voice outside his office door. A second later it opened.

  “Listen, I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Harry.

  Before Harry could hang up the phone, Templeton was standing on the other side of his desk, backed up by a hefty sheriff’s deputy, muscle in a uniform, and one of the homicide detectives in Katia’s case. The detective had his arm in the air, holding a sheaf of folded papers as if it was a cocked pistol and the Dwarf was about to level the muzzle on Harry.

  “We’re going to have to continue this later. I’ll call you. Yeah, yeah call you this afternoon.” Harry hung up the phone.

  The detective slapped the papers on the desk in front of him. “Consider yourself served.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Search warrant,” said Templeton. “Bring some of those boxes in here!” he hollered to whoever was outside the door. Harry’s secretary, standing in the doorway, nearly got run over by the hand truck being pushed by one of the deputies, followed by another cop. The dolly was loaded with flattened cardboard boxes. They began unfolding and assembling the boxes on the floor, using packing tape and a tape gun to bind the bottoms.

  “Why don’t you tell me what this is about?” By now Harry was standing behind the desk fumbling with the papers.

  “Read the warrant,” said Templeton. “Sergeant, anything with the name Solaz on it, box it and seal it for review. If you have questions about anything, ask me. You!” He pointed to one of the other deputies. “Get some of those boxes and follow me.” Templeton headed out of the office.

  Harry, who was still trying to read the documents, followed him out of the office and joined the parade headed down the hall. There were three more deputies outside in the reception area already boxing up files from the filing cabinets.

  “Wait, wait wait. What are they doing?” said Harry. “They can’t reach in and take the files out of the cabinets.”

  “You want us to roll the cabinets out and put them on the truck, that’s fine by me,” said Templeton, still walking.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to have your staff leave the office until we’re done collecting everything. Then they can come back,” said Templeton.

  “Why don’t you stop for a second so we can talk about this?” said Harry.

  “Time for talk is over.” Templeton breezed through the open door of Paul’s office, reached up on the wall, and flipped the light switch. “You can start with the desk,” he told one of the cops. “No. No. On second thought I think I’d rather have Detective Howser do that. Gil, get every drawer. Clean it out. You guys can work on the file cabinets, here and the ones outside by the secretaries. And don’t forget the bookshelves. Those binders all contain documents. Box ’em up,” said Templeton. “Take ’em all.”

  By now, Harry had devoured the few pages accompanying the search warrant. It had been signed by another judge, not Quinn.

  “Wait a minute.” Harry saw one of the cops starting to grab binders off the shelves. “Those files have nothing to do with the Solaz case. The warrant is limited to Solaz.”

  “In that event you’ll get ’em back,” said Templeton. “Procedure’s been set up for a review by a non-taint team and it’s been approved by the judge.”

  “What the hell’s a non-taint team?” said Harry.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve never had my office ransacked before.”

  “Get those up there. The high ones.” Templeton had ignored him and had instead started directing one of the taller deputies, pointing to the top shelf, up near the ceiling, as if he was having the man sweep for cobwebs.

  “A non-taint team involves another prosecutor from my office and a detective from homicide, not Detective Howser here, somebody else. They will make up the non-taint team. Neither of them is involved in any way in the Solaz case. They’ll look at everything we take and decide whether it’s within the scope of the warrant. If it’s not, you’ll get it back. I can’t say exactly when you’ll get it back.” Templeton quickly looked at Harry over his shoulder and winked at him.

  “Those files contain privileged information, lawyer-client,” said Harry. “And the clients have nothing to do with Solaz.”

  “The other prosecutor will decide if any privilege attaches to any of it, lawyer-client or otherwise. If it does, you’ll get
that back too.”

  “When, after your office copies it all?” said Harry.

  “We represent law enforcement,” said Templeton. “I’m shocked.”

  “Yeah, well you’re going to be spreading your shocked little body pretty thin when I drag you in front of half the judges downtown, demanding continuances and dismissals because you’re sitting on our files and peeking at our work product in their cases. And while you’re at it, you might wanna call the attorney general and tell him to expect an appeal on any case out of our office ending in a conviction in the next four or five years. If he’s lucky, there’ll simply be a blanket order of reversal on all of them. Save him time,” said Harry.

  “Guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. Officer, get yeah, that’s it, grab that one up there.” Templeton continued to ignore him.

  “So that’s your procedure? That’s it?” said Harry.

  “You don’t like it, you can always go to court,” said Templeton.

  “You bet I will.”

  “But I’d have to warn you, the judge seemed very satisfied with the process.”

  “I’m sure he was. After all, he used to work for the DA’s office,” said Harry. “Back then he could only dream about such things.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Templeton smiled. “Anyway, the team will look at it and decide what is evidence and what is not.”

  “Evidence of what?” There was a tone of hesitance as Harry said it.

  “That’s right, I forgot. You don’t know. I’m sorry.” For the first time since entering the room, Templeton turned to look at him. “You might want to get on the phone and check with your partner to see if he wants to get outside counsel or whether maybe he wants you to represent him. I wouldn’t want to give you any advice on that. But if he wants you to represent him, we can save time and serve you with the other papers right now.”