Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

  “You checked every room?”

  “I looked. She’s not here.”

  We check again, this time carefully, opening every closet, looking under the bed. We even check the refrigerator, a thing macabre movies make you do. Nothing.

  We close the door, lock up, and head back down.

  “What time did she leave to go to the phone company?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I think it was probably a little after nine,” says Herman.

  “She can’t still be there.”

  Without a phone to reach her, there is no way of knowing.

  “What do we do now?” he says. “We can’t stay here.”

  “No. We need to pack up. But first we have to make sure we have everything out downstairs.”

  “You think we oughta wipe the place down?” says Herman.

  “You mean the body?”

  “No. I mean our prints, anything we mighta’ touched.”

  I think about this for a second. “No. If we do and the killer left any trace evidence, we’re likely to destroy it. Besides, two days in a confined area like the apartment and trace evidence of our presence would be everywhere. We’d never get it all.”

  “Sure.” Still, Herman takes the knife out of my hand, wipes the handle and the blade with the tail of his shirt as I use the key to open Goudaz’s apartment door.

  As I do, I hear the phone in the study ring. Herman and I look at each other, then I break and run toward the sound. I can’t tell how long it’s been ringing. Before I get there the automatic answering device picks up the call.

  I wait and listen, hoping at least that I might hear the message. Instead there is a long beep as the fax machine on the desk kicks in. I wait a few seconds. The machine spits out a single sheet and then quits.

  “Who was it?” Herman has put the knives back in the drawer and is now standing behind me.

  “I don’t know, it’s a fax.” I grab the page and start to read, but it’s in Spanish. Herman studies it over my shoulder.

  “Son of a bitch!” he says. “That answers your question, how Goudaz knew where the container was comin’ from. Look,” he says. Herman points with his finger. “The name of the ship, and it ain’t the Mariah. Vessel’s called the Amora. Its ETA, where it’s headed, even the container number. And the name at the bottom, ‘A. Afundi.’ First name Alim,” says Herman.

  “But why? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s a copy of a fax sent to a cargo broker. They wanted Goudaz to follow up on it. From what I’m readin’ he gave ’em the lead on the broker. Like you said, he was selling information.”

  “So that’s how they knew about Pike and the fact that he had the pictures. It still doesn’t make any sense. If they needed his help, why did they kill him?”

  “Who knows,” says Herman. “At least we know where we’re going.”

  I look at my watch. “What’s the time difference between here and Ensenada?”

  “Same as at home,” says Herman. “It’s one hour later here, I believe.”

  I hear the gate clatter downstairs and a shrill voice. “Lorenzo! Lemme in.” It’s Maricela. I run to the little French windows leading to the tiny balcony, step out, and stick my head over the railing. “Stay there, we’ll be down in a minute.”

  “Lorenzo was right. They couldn’t gimme my old phone number. So I don’t know what we do now,” she says.

  “Just wait there.”

  I don’t even bother to close the window. “Let’s grab our bags.” I see a phone book on a shelf in the kitchen. “Hold on a second. How do you say ‘charter air’ in Spanish?”

  Herman thinks for a moment.

  “Never mind.” I grab the book and take it. “Make sure Maricela’s got her purse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her passport is in it.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  As he marched toward his car, Liquida knew the Arab would be sending him an e-mail any minute telling him he wanted to meet him to pay him. Liquida would meet him all right, on his own timetable and perhaps at a place of his own choosing.

  He no longer cared about killing the woman. As far as he was concerned, at least for the moment, he was working for himself, and there were only two people on his current hit parade: the man called Afundi who owed him a bundle, and the lawyer who had interfered for the last time.

  In his present state of agitation, Liquida was a good fit for the Tico traffic of San José. He whipped out of the parking space without bothering to look in his mirror, cutting off a woman who hit her brakes and laid on the horn.

  Liquida gave her the finger out his open window as he laid rubber on the rainbow road, streaking for the airport. He was already calculating in his mind which terminal in northern Mexico to parachute into that would put him closest to the port of Ensenada.

  They say that with enough money you can buy anything. At the moment Herman and I are testing the concept. Sitting in the backseat of one of the little red taxi sedans, we are rumbling down Highway 1 just beyond the broad avenue known as Paseo Colón. The shocks are gone on the car’s rear end, so we feel every bump and groove in the road as it vibrates from the tailbone up the spine.

  Herman and I are silently counting the currency from our money belts as Maricela sits, watching us from over the front-passenger seat. We have not told her that Lorenzo is dead, only that we have information regarding her father, where we think he will be, that there is no time to talk, and that we will fill her in later.

  “I don’t think it’s enough,” says Herman. “You gotta figure it’s at least twenty-five hundred miles, maybe more.”

  Herman and I left the States with a total of nineteen thousand dollars between us in the two money belts. Less the fifty-three hundred we paid for the two passports leaves us thirteen thousand seven hundred. Even if I wanted to use it, the feds have probably put a stop on my credit card. Herman could use his, but it has a twenty-five-hundred-dollar limit and there’s no question they would trace it.

  “I booked a charter flight out of Mexico a few years ago for a client and it cost us twelve grand back then. And we didn’t go nearly that far,” he says.

  “We won’t know unless we try,” I tell him.

  “Seńor, we are coming up to the turnoff, I need to know if you want me to take it or keep going.”

  “Give us a minute,” says Herman.

  “This time of the day the only commercial flights north are gonna take us to the States. Maricela can’t get in without a visa even to transfer flights. And then there’s the question, do you really want to try and run the U.S. border on these things?” I tap the phony Canadian passport next to me on the seat.

  “Take the turnoff,” says Herman.

  The driver cuts across three lanes of traffic, setting off horns all across the city. He hangs a quick right on the short off-ramp, rolls through the stop sign, and starts winding through the back streets. I ask Herman for the cell phone and call Harry. I have tried to reach him repeatedly over the last several days. I am wondering if perhaps the carrier simply doesn’t have good coverage in this area.

  I am holding the fax from Goudaz’s apartment in my hand as Harry answers.

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for two days,” he says.

  I tell him to get a piece of paper and write down what I’m about to tell him. With what we now know from the fax, Herman and I have decided that we can no longer withhold the information from the federal authorities.

  “Wait till I get outside,” says Harry.

  “You’re in the office?”

  “Where the hell else would I be?” he says.

  “Then stay there, you won’t need a pencil. Just repeat everything as I give it to you out loud. As I say it.”

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, we’re talking to the world,” I tell him. “I want you to contact Rhytag and give him the following information. Go ahead. Say it out loud.”

  “You want me to contact Rhytag and give him the following information.”

  “The weapon is in transit on board a ship.”

  �
�What weapon?” says Harry.

  “Never mind, just say it.”

  He repeats it out loud.

  “The name of the ship is .” Before I can say the word Amora, the line goes dead. “Hello. Hello. Damn it!”

  Just as I push the button to dial again, the driver starts goosing the taxi, bumping aross the deep swales at blind intersections as if this were the national sport. Herman and I bounce all over the backseat.

  The phone rang on his desk and Thorpe picked it up.

  “Hello.”

  “Director Thorpe, Bob Mendez.”

  “Yes, Bob, have you got something for me?”

  “We think so. We’ve zeroed in on the cell phone signal. It’s clear as a bell. At a place called Pavas.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s a suburb just a few miles north of San José. It seems that Madriani and the other man are on the move. We were having trouble honing in on the signal downtown. We were getting interference from someplace. Then we realized the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry had an antenna array on top of their building. We were picking up their transmission signals and jamming them by mistake.”

  “The ministry?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Thorpe winced.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t put it in any reports,” said Mendez. “The good news is, the cell phone is now in the clear. He keeps powering down, so we lose the signal every once in a while. He was moving, but he appears to be stationary now. We’re triangulating the position. We have agents closing in on the area, along with the Costa Rican police. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Excellent. Are you in communication with your agents?”

  “I am.”

  “Good. Then tell them the following. There is a chance that a woman is traveling with Madriani and the other man.” Thorpe pawed through some papers on the top of his desk until he found the one he wanted. “Her name is Maricela Nitikin-Osa de Solaz.” Agents in Costa Rica had found the name in official records after they realized Maricela had survived the blast at her house and has been seen with Madriani and Herman.

  “Tell your agents that it is absolutely essential that the Costa Rican authorities hold her for questioning. Also tell them to make sure she’s given adequate security. We think there’s already been one attempt made on her life. And tell the agents that Justice and State are working on some kind of documentation to get permission from the Costa Ricans so that we can question her. It’s going to be dicey. She’s a Costa Rican national. Tell your agents that if the local authorities let her go, I want a tail put on her twenty-four-seven. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if she tries to leave the country, stay with her.”

  “Hold on a second,” said Mendez, “something’s coming in now.” He went off the line for a second. Thorpe could hear voices in the background. Then Mendez was back. “They’re less than a mile from the signal, do you want to hold?”

  “Yeah, I’ll stay on the line.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  As Realtors will tell you, location is everything. For us, the good news is that Costa Rica sits dead center, right on the spine of the Americas.

  The airport in Pavas is smaller than San José International, known as Juan Santamaría. The Pavas airport caters to domestic flights and eco tours to the coasts. It offers occasional international charters, from small prop jobs to jets, the occasional Citation, and even a Gulfstream or two as we learn today.

  Ordinarily you couldn’t touch a charter flight from San José to northern Mexico for anything close to thirteen grand. But the bad economy and the good location have conspired to make things possible. These days, flights coming from the south are often snagged in the air by radio if the passengers are willing to allow a few more on board in return for a good discount.

  Today we get lucky. A Gulfstream is already on the ground, sitting on the runway. It is headed from Panama City to Los Angeles and will stop in Mexico City for the couple who are now getting ready to board.

  A phone call from the charter desk out to the plane, followed by a quick vote by the other two people already on board, and for a little over eleven thousand dollars all three of us have a ride north.

  “Do we get any hors d’oeuvres on board?” asks Herman.

  I give him a look to kill.

  “Just wondering.” He gives me a moping face. “Been a while since we had breakfast.”

  “There is food on board.” The man behind the counter is working the computer, not even looking at us when he says it, so he doesn’t see the broad smile on Herman’s face.

  “See, it pays to ask,” says Herman. “Bet you they got beer too,” he whispers in my ear.

  The man at the counter barely looks at our passports, just long enough to take the names and put them in the computer, then hand them off to the resident immigration officer a few feet away who punches them with an exit stamp and hands them back to us. We allow Maricela to take the lead on this as she speaks impeccable Spanish and makes Herman and I appear almost civil.

  If I’d known, I could have saved us five grand, though I may be happy to be a Canadian citizen on the Mexican end. There are no boarding passes. We just haul our luggage out onto the tarmac. When the three of us climb the steps and get inside, we see the luxury of the deep leather chairs, all of which seem to swivel and recline. The four other passengers are standing next to a center table, munching and clinking their iced glasses.

  They turn with broad smiles and introductions to welcome the rest of the partygoers. Hi, my name’s Paul. I’m an international fugitive. Please excuse the blood on my hands. There simply wasn’t time to wash up.

  Instead I shake hands and use my Canadian name to make new friends. I haven’t figured out what I do for a living yet, but I’m sure they’ll ask. I take the cell phone from Herman, move to the back of the plane, and make one last attempt to reach Harry.

  “We got ’em,” said Mendez.

  “Did you get the woman?” said Thorpe.

  “If she’s with him, they’ll have her in just a few seconds.”

  “What do you mean? Either you have him or you don’t,” said Thorpe.

  “The agents are turning onto the street right now. They’re less than a hundred feet from the signal. They’re right on top of them, could reach out and touch them,” said Mendez.

  “Can you hear what’s going on?” said Thorpe.

  “What do you mean it’s a different tower?” Mendez was talking to someone else. Thorpe could hear more voices, a lot of excitement at the other end. “What?”

  “What’s happening?” said Thorpe.

  “Sir, there’s a little confusion here. We’re getting some signals we don’t understand. There’s got to be a tower malfunction. The signal’s been handed off to three separate towers. What? How fast?”

  “What’s going on?” said Thorpe. “Talk to me.”

  “According to our technicians the signal is moving again. Whoever has the phone is doing about a hundred and forty knots.”

  “What?”

  “That’s about a hundred and sixty miles an hour.”

  “I know what a goddamn knot is,” said Thorpe.

  “He appears to be on an airplane.”

  “Do we have any military assets in the area? WACs, anything that can track it on radar?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, find out. And see if you can get the tower at the airport to call the plane back. Costa Rican police ought to be able to do something. And call me when you know.” Thorpe slammed the receiver down so hard it bounced off the cradle on the phone and onto the floor, where he got up and kicked it.

  Nitikin had spent most of his life shielding the bomb and harboring it for a purpose. In his youth, the device was an instrument of the revolution. That Khrushchev would not use it for that purpose and share the power with their comrades in Cuba had angered Nitikin. The revolution was an ideal, pure and pristine. Yakov had never abandoned his country. On the contrary, its leaders had abandoned the revolution. Despite all the years he spent in hiding, Yakov Nitikin was still a soldier.
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  But now that he was old, he was confused. He longed only to spend time with his daughter, to see her again, to talk to her, to hold her. He wanted to see his granddaughter, Katia, whom he had seen only once as an infant, but whom he talked about endlessly with Maricela, asking questions and looking at photographs. All of these were now lost, left behind in his hut at the encampment. He had cried himself to sleep, bellowing like a baby the night Maricela left the camp. Something had snapped in him. He feared for her and could not wait to call her on the phone.

  He now hovered anxiously on the edge, caught between duty and the desire to escape.

  Nitikin knew that there was no way to bargain with Alim. To attempt it was to invite a quick death. How does one bargain with the devil? The moment Afundi knew that the bomb was armed, he would pull out his pistol and Yakov would be dead. There were times he thought he hated the man enough that he could kill him, but the thought of sabotaging the bomb never entered his mind.

  To fail now was to betray everything he believed in, all that he had worked for all those years. He had traded a life with his family for the mission of the bomb. It was not his child, though there were times when he felt as if it throbbed with life, the embryo of revolution.

  He searched for some way out, some method by which he could satisfy duty and still see his daughter. What he needed was time.

  Yakov was working through an open side panel of the wooden crate, inside the container, presumably checking the device for any damage, as instructed by Alim.

  Nitikin had lied to him. The bomb was entirely safe to transport. The safety device was redundant. After all, the warhead had been designed for delivery in the belly of an unmanned MiG jet, a cruise missile launched from a ramp, not unlike the V-1 rocket. The gravitational and kinetic forces applied to the warhead at launch were probably three or four times greater than those experienced in the most violent vehicle collision or other accident.

  True, the safety device would prevent the bomb from achieving a chain reaction if the gun was fired accidentally, but there was no chance of that unless the cordite charge was loaded under the breech plug, which only a fool would do except immediately prior to deployment.