Guardian of Lies

THIRTY-SEVEN

The black SUV was parked at the curb around the corner, twenty feet up the side street from the Sportsmens Lodge in San José. One of the deadheading airline employees sat behind the wheel with a pair of binoculars as he watched the two men disappear with their luggage through the gate into the entrance of the hotel. Less than a minute later, two other figures emerged from the shadows between some bushes at the opposite corner of the hotel grounds. They walked quickly toward the car. One of them was carrying a small duffel bag.

A few seconds later, the second FBI agent opened the passenger door and got in. His Costa Rican compatriot climbed into the backseat and closed the door.

“Did you get it done?” asked the driver.

“Both rooms, wired snug as a bug, and the phone’s tapped,” said the passenger.

“Now if we could only have gotten the cell phone,” said the driver.

“If customs didn’t find it, where is it?”

“He handed it off to his friend,” said the driver. “That’s why they split up. Sucker knows we’re onto him.”

“If he leaves it in the room, we can get it tomorrow. In two seconds I can fry some of the circuitry and he’ll think it just quit.”

“And what if they take it with them?”

“Perhaps it will be stolen,” said the man in the backseat. “Tourists are always being held up at gunpoint and robbed in San José.”

“We’ll have to talk about that one,” said the driver. “ Washington may draw the line at shooting a lawyer, even in Costa Rica.”

“Turn on the receiver,” said the other agent. “Let’s see what we get.”

“Give it a minute. They haven’t had time to get to the rooms yet,” said the driver.

Herman and I finish our beers, pay up, and leave the empty bottles on the bar. As we were drinking, I noticed one of the employees carrying a full case of beer up a set of stairs in the bar area on the other side. I know this isn’t the way to the exercise area. From what the girl told me at the front desk, those stairs are farther back in the building, through the glass door in the residence area on the way to our rooms.

After making sure the bartender and the waitress are busy with customers, I gesture for Herman to follow me and quickly head from the patio into the formal bar area.

But instead of going through the bar toward the glass door leading to the guest rooms at the back of the building, we quickly veer to the right and slip down the steps into the basement.

They lead to a service and storage area under the bar upstairs. But at the foot of the steps is a solid wooden door with a heavy metal latch. I turn the latch and open the door. It leads to a small lane, a dogleg in the road that runs behind the lodge. Across the street is a chain-link fence covered in heavy foliage and bounded by old eucalyptus trees. On the other side of the fence is dense jungle undergrowth, where if the images on Google Earth were accurate, a steep incline leads down to the old San José zoo in the canyon below.

For the moment I am more interested in the paved lane and where it leads. If the maps and satellite photographs were accurate, Herman and I should be able to follow the lane past the next intersection. A few hundred feet farther on, we would come to another small street on the right. On the left-hand side of that street, less than two hundred yards from the intersection, is the house that Katia lived in with her mother, and if we are blessed by the gods, the camera with the photographs from Colombia.

“Tonight when it gets dark, we check out the house,” I tell Herman. “If her mother’s still gone, the place should be dark. Bring your lock picks.”

He nods and I close the door. We head back up, and hold it at the top of the steps until the barmaid turns her back to wait on a customer. Herman and I quickly step up and wander casually through the bar toward the glass door and our rooms.

The lodge is a labyrinth of connected buildings and stairways. The front section where the entrance is located is part of an old mansion. It contains twenty-odd rooms on two levels plus a two-room penthouse on a third level.

On the other side in the back is an enclosed ramp that leads to another three-story mansion on the back street, across from the zoo, and a small condominium complex. According to the online literature, this section was added recently.

Herman and I find our rooms in the new section. I open the door and we both step into mine so Herman can grab his bags. The room is spacious, high ceilinged and ornate, with king-size beds and exotic hardwood furnishings.

“I hope you didn’t get the only good room,” says Herman.

“You wanna trade?”

“Not yet. I haven’t seen mine.”

As we’re talking, Herman zips open one of his bags and takes out a small device the size and shape of a folded pocketknife. On one end is a small lens. He holds it up to his eye and peers through it, scanning the room, each wall, all the hanging pictures, the television and bedside clock and phone. He checks the bathroom as well as we discuss the weather and talk about the lack of humidity in San José.

Herman’s device is called a SpyFinder Personal. The battery-powered lens will detect any microcamera planted in a room, lighting up the camera’s lens with a red dot even if the camera is powered off at the time. It works off the same principle as the camera, using refracted light, only instead of using it to capture an image, it shoots beams of concentrated light that are refracted by the camera’s lens to reveal its position.

“What time do you want to have breakfast in the morning?” I ask him.

“I don’t know. I’m pretty tired,” says Herman. “Why don’t we sleep in?”

Herman shakes his head regarding any cameras, drops the device back in his bag, and removes the other half of his act, the small elec tronic bug detector. This is the size of an old transistor radio and has a short telescoping antenna. The entire device would fit inside the breast pocket of your shirt. It has a backup scanner to detect cameras that are transmitting and runs the entire frequency range of electronic bugs. Herman has already turned off the detector’s alarm so that it merely vibrates in his hand as the LEDs light up. The room is wired. He points to the phone and nods. Herman is assuming that the phone is tapped as well.

None of this surprises me. We used the firm’s credit card to book the hotel rooms, so Rhytag had plenty of time to plan ahead. We will use credit cards as long as we’re being observed and go to cash the moment we lose the FBI. Herman is carrying another ninety-five hundred in cash in a belt around his waist.

“Tell you what. Whoever wakes up first in the morning calls the other,” I tell him.

“But not before nine,” says Herman.

“We can do dinner downstairs. I’m too tired to go out tonight.”

“Sounds good to me,” says Herman.

I pen a note to him on a pad from the nightstand near the bed. “Sweep the hall and your room for cameras. We meet outside my room tonight at ten-very quietly!” I underline the last two words.

“Give me a call when you want to go to dinner.” He holds up the cell phone and mouths the words “I’ll take care of it.”

I nod. “Catch you later.”

Herman leaves and closes the door behind him.

I turn on the television, unpack my bags, and take a shower. I am drying myself with a towel as I call the front desk and leave a wake-up call for seven that evening. Then I slip between the covers, lower the television volume a bit, and take a nap to the muted sounds of a soap opera in Spanish playing in the background.