Guardian of Lies

SIXTEEN

Ten en after seven in the morning and Zeb Thorpe was already sweating. “Make it fast. I’ve got a full day, starting with the director, in twenty minutes. That means you got ten.”

In his sixties, craggy faced, a retired marine colonel, this morning Thorpe was pumping enough adrenaline he could have gone toe-to-toe with George Patton and chewed the stars off his helmet.

As the FBI’s executive assistant director for the National Security Branch, he headed up four separate divisions: Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, the Directorate of Intelligence, and the WMD Directorate. All of these had either been created or drastically reorganized as a result of the move toward homeland security.

Today he had a complete dance card, first a full-dress briefing with his boss, the latest and momentary head of the FBI. Then the two of them would spend their afternoon dodging bullets and bricks from the political drive-by mob on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most of the members of the panel had one thing on their minds-making the bureau and, in particular, the new acting director, look like crap. It was the second day of Senate confirmation hearings on his boss’s nomination and Thorpe already knew the man wasn’t going to survive.

Yesterday, before the midafternoon break, the committee had knocked most of the snot, blood, and brains out of him. And these were people from the president’s own party. They kneed him in the groin before asking him why he wasn’t back in his office phoning the ACLU for rec ommendations on how to fight crime and end terrorism. Today they would try to get him on his back on top of the green-felt-covered witness table where they could properly gut him before calling the White House to send over the next victim.

Why not, they had done it twice in the last six months with other candidates and nobody lifted a finger. It was politics as blood sport. The job of director was becoming a revolving door and it was spinning like a tumbler in a washing machine.

As far as Thorpe was concerned, the political parties that occupied the House and the Senate reminded him of two retarded Siamese gorillas sharing the same brain. Together with their feeders and handlers on Wall Street, they’d spent a decade toying with the national economy, trying to get everybody in the country into houses they couldn’t afford. When this set fire to the national economy, crashing markets, destroying whole industries, and generally torching the entire circus, they tripled the national debt in order to smother the flames with money.

Having solved that problem, the beasts had spent the last seven months lowering the chain on Homeland Security to see what would happen next.

Thorpe’s own staff had an office pool going, taking bets on how long it would be before some group dropped sarin gas in a crowded subway, or lit up an American city with a mushroom cloud and gamma rays. In his more sanguine moments, Thorpe was beginning to wonder why there wasn’t a hunting season on members of Congress.

This morning he was in a particularly foul mood, jowls down to his drawers. Part of the reason was this meeting dropped into his schedule at the last minute by his assistant, Raymond Zink. They were in the small conference room off Thorpe’s office, Zink, the heads of two of the four divisions, and Thorpe.

“We think we may have a problem,” said Zink. “It’s information that came from one of our photo analysts in the lab.”

“What are we talking, surveillance shots?”

“No, sir. A contact outside government sent our analyst some pictures, digital images.”

Thorpe opened the file in front of him on the table.

“What we have are two enlargements received by our man. All the names are in the file. He says that, according to his source, there are six photos in all. The original pictures were sent to a private laboratory for processing by a gentleman in California. An employee at the private lab sent the two enlargements to our man, asking if he could access information from secure bureau databanks, confidential information on personal backgrounds and whatever else he could find.”

“Stop! You’re not gonna tell me the man in our lab did this?” Thorpe couldn’t even conjure up the sea of blood on the floor if Senate Judiciary got a handle on this.

“No,” said Zink.

Thorpe took a deep breath. “Thank God for little favors.”

“Our employee was actually quite discreet. But he was curious,” said Zink, “he took a shot and went on the Internet. He didn’t think he’d find anything because he assumed that the fellow who sent him the stuff, the other lab technician, had probably already checked. But when he pumped in the name of the gentleman from California, the fellow who sent the pictures to the private lab, his computer screen lit up like a pinball machine. The man’s name was Emerson Pike.”

“Was?” said Thorpe.

Zink nodded. “The Internet printouts are in the folder. Why the technician at the private lab didn’t Google the name, we don’t know, but apparently he didn’t, or if he did, he omitted to mention that Emerson Pike was murdered in his home in California, apparently just a few days after he sent the photographs in for processing and analysis.”

Bill Britain, head of the bureau’s Directorate of Intelligence, handed Thorpe a short half page with printed information. “Take a look. It’s a summary of Emerson Pike’s background. We printed out only the headings and high points, but it gives you the picture.”

Thorpe devoured the words on the half-page sheet, then looked up. “All right.”

“It gets more curious,” said Zink. “Our lab man tried to contact his friend at the private lab to give him the news that Pike was dead. When he did he was told that his buddy hadn’t shown up at work for two days and hadn’t called in. What was more disturbing was that his car was in the parking lot, but nobody knew where he was. They told our guy that if the employee didn’t show up by the end of the day or phone in, they were going to call the police and have them check into it. Our man didn’t wait. He turned over what he had to one of our agents.”

“So yesterday,” said Zink, “the agent went over to the private lab, a place called Herrington’s-”

“I’m familiar with it,” said Thorpe. “It’s across the river, in Virgina. We did contract work there years ago.”

“Right,” said Zink. “The missing lab analyst still hadn’t shown up for work. The police came by and got information on contacts and next of kin, getting ready to do a missing person’s, I guess. Our agent asked if they could take a look at the photo images sent in by Emerson Pike. They had to finagle a bit, but finally they got one of the supervisors to let them take a peek. The only problem was, the photos were gone.”

“What?”

“The supervisor looked, checked their system up one side and down the other, and couldn’t find them. After an hour and some disc diving by their IT people, they concluded that somebody had removed them from the system. They did find references to Pike and the photos on their website e-mail system, but the system was set up to strip attached images from incoming client mail in order to save space on the company’s servers. As a consequence, there are no copies of Pike’s digital images in their system.”

Thorpe turned his attention to the file in front of him. “Aren’t these the pictures?”

“No,” said Zink. “That’s what was sent to our man. Those are only two enlargements of what he was told is a single digital frame. There were additional photos, according to his source, either six or seven, he couldn’t remember.”

“And unfortunately, the two enlargements don’t show facial features or any clue as to location,” said Britain. “The first one is a shoulder patch from a field tunic for a Russian missile brigade. We received background on it from military intelligence at the Pentagon. It’s old.”

“The picture?”

“No. The tunic,” said Britain. “Our man in the lab says his source, who is also a photo analyst with experience and skill, assured him that the digital images were shot about four months ago. He’s not sure if he was given a specific date. If he was, he couldn’t remember.”

“Go on.”

“The Russian missile unit dates to the early sixties and ceased to exist sometime around 1965, after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“The next enlargement,” said Britain, “the name patch over the pocket, is from the same jacket, according to the source. The only portion of it we can read are the first two letters of the soldier’s name. They’re Russian Cyrillic. The English translation is NI.

“Next is a series of documents,” said Britain. “The first set, marked ‘Top Secret-Classified,’ are from the executive committee of the National Security Council, most of them dating to the late fall, early winter of 1963. The last one, I believe, is dated just sixteen days before President Kennedy was assassinated. Behind those are a series of translations from Soviet military and intelligence files obtained by the CIA in the early nineties, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The original documents date back to the period between October and the end of December 1962. To save time we’ve summarized the critical items on a single page, yeah, I think you have it there.”

Thorpe read the summary through once, very quickly. “Wait…wait…wait,” he said. “I remember hearing about this guy from some of the old fossils at CIA, musta been what, thirty years ago now, the legend of Yakov Nitikin. He’s a bag of smoke. Soviets floated the name after the Cuban missile mess so we’d chase ghosts. I can’t remember, what it was that they called him?”

“The Guardian of Lies,” said Llewellyn.

“That’s it.” Thorpe snapped his fingers and pointed at Llewellyn. “Always count on Herb for a good memory.”

“It was a takeoff on Churchill’s famous quote,” said Llewellyn, “that in time of war the truth is so precious that it must always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

“That’s what we thought at the time,” said Britain. “But it appears we may have been wrong. The old Soviet intelligence documents behind the summary, those were obtained from KGB files after the Soviet Union collapsed. According to those, Nitikin was real, and so was his secret.”

“So what you’re telling me is, this guy Nitikin is the one wearing the jacket in the two enhanced photos?” said Thorpe.

“It would seem to fit with the two first letters of the last name over the pocket,” said Britain.

“Okay, let’s assume I buy into this. It’s all very interesting, but it’s ancient history. We’re talking 1962, almost fifty years. I mean, I guess it’s possible that the man could still be alive, maybe. But the item sure as hell isn’t. There’s no way.”

Thorpe looked at Herb Llewellyn, seated across the table from him. “Tell me I’m right, Herb!”

“I’d like to. In any other circumstance I wouldn’t hesitate, but in this case I’m afraid I can’t.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

Thorpe looked at his watch. He didn’t have time for a physics lesson. “Ray, do me a favor, go out and tell my secretary to call the director’s office and tell him I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. I’m running a little late.”

Zink headed out of the conference room with the message.

“Herb, for the moment I’ll assume there’s some basis in fact for your belief in perpetual shelf life, and we can talk about that. But I suspect that if this guy’s even alive, and he has anything at all, he’s probably in a wheelchair somewhere sitting on a pile of corroded metal.”

“I don’t think so,” said Llewellyn.

“We’ll talk about it when I have more time,” said Thorpe. “For the moment I think we’re chasing rainbows here. The stuff in the old Soviet files could be disinformation for all we know. Back during the Cold War, both sides were big on that. Put a fairy tale in your file and let the other side find it. In the meantime you’re spending a billion dollars looking for Goldilocks.”

“What about Pike’s murder and the missing photo analyst?” said Britain.

Zink came back into the room and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a sheet of paper in his hand.

“I don’t know,” said Thorpe. “The whole thing just doesn’t smell right. The only thing we have linking the Russian’s name with Pike’s murder is a lot of hearsay from a photo analyst who’s missing. And even that’s tenuous. We’re reaching into fifty-year-old Soviet documents to make the connection.”

“Not exactly,” said Zink. “Not anymore. Take a look at this.” He handed the sheet of paper to Thorpe.

“What’s this?”

“It’s the booking sheet on the suspect in Pike’s murder. I had my secretary pull up what she could find off the law enforcement database on the state’s case while we were meeting. That was on my desk.

“The suspect is a foreign national by the name of Katia Solaz. She’s in the country on a Costa Rican passport. According to my secretary’s note, the woman was living with Pike at the time he was killed. But check out the alias; one of the names she used was Katia Solaz-Nitikin.”

Thorpe took a deep breath as he looked at the name on the sheet. “You’re sure about this?”

“I have to assume that if the police picked it up on the booking sheet, they must have gotten it from somewhere, either a passport or a driver’s license.”

“Get a couple of agents out of the San Diego field office to go over to the courthouse and comb the police file on this thing. And don’t wait. Do it today. Tell them anything with the name Nitikin on it, we want to take a look. Also see if they can get additional background on the suspect, particularly as regards family, also where she’s from in Costa Rica.”

Both Zink and Britain were scrawling notes on legal pads as Thorpe spit out instructions.

“Tell the agents to look through everything, all documents and physical evidence, whatever the police have. Also anything they seized at the time of this woman’s arrest and anything they found at the scene, or anywhere else, that belonged to her. Oh, and see if the police found any computers at Pike’s house.”

“Good point,” said Britain. “Why didn’t we think of that one earlier? Maybe we can find the digital images Pike sent to the lab. Who knows what else?”

“Tell the agents to keep their eyes peeled for pictures, and be sure and tell them what they’re looking for, an older man in an olive drab fatigue jacket,” said Thorpe. “If they find photos fitting that description, tell them to sit on them and to call here immediately. I don’t want those pictures disappearing again unless we’re the ones doing the vanishing act.”

Thorpe looked at his watch. “Damn it, I got to run, go prop up the human punching bag so he can get the crap kicked out of him again.” Thorpe was packing up his notes, grabbing the file. “Ray, check my calendar, let’s meet again, first opportunity, as soon as we find out what’s in the crime file. And, Herb, you and I still have to talk about the gadget.”