Guardian of Lies

NINE

Alim Afundi longed for the arid Zagros Mountains of his homeland and for the village of his father. He wondered if he would ever see his home again. He knew he would never see his parents. Both had been killed two years earlier in an errant attack by American warplanes while visiting relatives near the border with Iraq. The mighty Satan called the accident “collateral damage” and dismissed it as part of the unfortunate cost of peacekeeping.

And for now Afundi and his comrades remained on another continent half a world away.

It was nearly a year since their escape from America ’s fenced fortress at Guantanamo Bay. This word, “ Guantanamo,” was one they had never heard or known of until they achieved their freedom. In the months that he and his men had been held, there had been no visits from international groups or others representing the prisoners. Afundi’s American captors had seeded rumors within the prison that they were on the American mainland in a place called Florida, surrounded by swamps and shark-infested seas, and from which there was no way home.

There had been a few attempts at escape, but as far as Afundi knew, he and his comrades, six of them, were the only freedom fighters thus far to succeed. They cut through wire, tunneled under fences, and waded through swamps until, exhausted and lost, they stumbled into a group of armed military men.

Despondent, believing they had been recaptured, Afundi tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist with a small blade from a razor. But he was saved by two of the men in green fatigues. It wasn’t until later, when Afundi’s own counsel general visited him in the hospital, that he realized that the men who saved him were Cuban soldiers, and that the American prison fortress was itself an island in the middle of a Cuban sea. Had his freedom fighters known it, Afundi believed they would have stormed the fences in the American compound even in the face of machine-gun fire.

For weeks Afundi and his men remained as guests of the Cuban government, feted and entertained, waiting for the propaganda coup of their escape to be unveiled to the world. But this never came. The Americans, it seemed, were too embarrassed to admit their own incompetence, and therefore disclosed nothing regarding the escape to their own press. Afundi was then certain that the Cubans would disclose it in concert with his own government. But strangely they did not.

Instead, six weeks after their escape from Guantanamo, Afundi and his men, along with an interpreter, boarded a Cuban military plane and flew west, away from the island and farther from their homeland, toward a rendezvous with armed allies in the mountains of Colombia. They carried twenty million dollars in cash from their own government and were told that they would receive their orders for their next mission as well as the training necessary to carry it out from the people in Colombia. The small area of that country, tucked up against the Pacific Ocean on the western approach to the Isthmus of Panama, had been controlled since the 1960s by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC.

Alim had learned much from his FARC hosts in the months he and his men had been with them. The organization operated within Colombia as a kind of government in exile. The FARC possessed an informal alliance with his own country as well as other nations. They participated in a complex web of international connections and subnational associations. These included people’s governments on nearly every continent, freedom fighters such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels that, along with kidnapping for ransom, the FARC used to derive most of its funding.

The relationships were complicated, but for Alim and his men it reduced down to a single common goal shared by all: the desire to annihilate the Great Satan, to eliminate the power of the American regime so as to shake its grip once and for all on the rest of the world.

To Alim, that the devil should die because of its warfare and interference in the affairs of others should come as no surprise. The irony was in the fact that after launching successive wars over oil in the Middle East, it should meet its fate because of a war on drugs launched in its own backyard, a war that most had already forgotten about.

In the 1980s and early ’90s the Americans had linked arms with the Colombian government in a decade-long war to drive drug traffickers from Colombian soil. The Americans succeeded, only to have the cartels reappear in an equally violent form in Mexico, directly across its own border in places with names that Afundi could barely pronounce, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

The proximity of these forces to the huge amounts of money and armies of violence at their command had now caused Satan to try to wall himself in.

The Americans had planted new listening posts abroad in an effort to revive their human intelligence networks. They used technology to listen in on telephones and to read e-mail. But with all of this they were now more vulnerable than ever before. They had done nothing to alleviate the anger of millions, which carried on its wings the threat that soon Satan would face something he could not even begin to comprehend.

Elements of the plan were already under way. Money had been delivered to the cartel to begin work. They were not told the precise nature of the cargo to be delivered. They were told that the product of their labors would be theirs to use as they wished once it was completed and the delivery was made. The Mexican cartel was now a critical element in the plan.

And for the moment the cartel had saved both Afundi and his mission. For how long he couldn’t be sure. The problem arose because Alim had allowed the woman to come here into FARC territory in the first place. Because the old man was sick, he needed her. FARC had provided doctors, but the old man wanted his daughter. Alim was desperate. He would do anything to keep him alive.

The difficulty arose because the man he had assigned to watch her had not done his job, that and the fact that she should never have been allowed to leave. That was the blunder.

It had all started with an argument. When the old man told them how long it might take, Afundi knew they couldn’t wait that long. The doctors had already given him their estimate that the old man might have six months left, eight at the outside. That was four months ago. If he died, it was over. They all knew it. Afundi’s government had sent over technicians to look at the problem. They determined that the Russian possessed both information and techniques without which the entire project was hopeless. Safety devices incorporated in the original assembly could not be overcome except by those with specific knowledge of its design.

In the quarrel that followed, Alim and his men, including the one who was supposed to be watching the woman, became so bound up with the interpreter in arguments with the Russian, insisting that they could do much of the work for him if only he showed them how, that no one even noticed the woman and her camera.

Alim had no idea there was even a problem until months later. Fortunately, the FARC had sources in Costa Rica. An American tourist had started asking questions, and even brought up the name Nitikin. Some judicious probing and the fact that the tourist had somehow found photographs, and Alim jumped on it immediately.

The cartel in Mexico possessed what Afundi did not: access across the border by way of travel documents for daily business and people with the skills to solve the problem.

True, the man was a mercenary being paid, but he acted swiftly and, for the moment at least, the project was still alive. But he had left a loose end and now it was threatening to come unraveled. It was a sensitive issue, one that Afundi was anxious should not be allowed to disturb the old man or, for that matter, his daughter. She was in permanent residence now, though as far as Afundi knew, she had not yet come to realize this. There would be no more phone calls home or trips to Medellín. At this point the opportunity for harmful information to flow in either direction was far too great.

The cartel’s man would have to deal with the loose end. This morning Afundi was busy with the interpreter, writing riddles to make sure that this happened and that it happened quickly.

Liquida sat at a table at an outdoor café on Orange Avenue in Coronado, two blocks from the lawyer’s office. He considered his options as he sipped a cappuccino and dipped the pointed end of a biscotti into the frothy brew.

The lawyer’s name, Paul Madriani, and his firm, Madriani and Hinds, had popped up in the news the day before. This morning Liquida was scanning more details as he sipped his coffee. According to the news accounts, it was now confirmed, they were representing the woman.

The local papers and the San Diego television stations were full of it. The double murder in a high-end neighborhood up in Del Mar, the gory scene and the arrest of the young woman, was hot news. So far it was confined to the local press. If he was lucky and if he worked quickly, it would stay that way, a San Diego story with a sad ending and no more questions.

So far the press and media reports were limited to a few details about how authorities had caught up with her in Arizona, trying to flee; some veiled conjecture as to her live-in relationship with the old man; and speculation that she might have been in the country illegally.

The press pounded the illegal-alien angle with relentless sidebars to the murder story, another violent criminal from over the border and more innocent victimized gringos. Of course, they failed to note that one of the victims, the maid, was herself Mexican, and for all Liquida knew, she might have been undocumented as well. This morning’s paper said the female suspect was believed to be from either Mexico or Colombia. Sooner or later they would get it right and start nosing around in Costa Rica. Liquida’s employers made it clear; they were counting on him to deal with the problem before that happened.

He read on. Halfway down the page, the maid’s brother was interviewed. He told reporters that his sister was not supposed to work that night but that she had been called in at the last moment. The brother had dropped her off at the murder house at nine thirty. Liquida must have just missed them. It bothered him, but not enough to stop nibbling on his biscotti.

He hadn’t arrived outside the fence at Pike’s house until a quarter to ten. Had he been there earlier and seen the maid and her brother drive up, he would have postponed the entire event.

According to the reports in the press, the maid’s brother returned to pick her up just before midnight, when she didn’t call home and efforts to reach her on her cell phone failed. He rang the bell at the front gate, but nobody answered. What he did after that wasn’t clear. The police had instructed him to say nothing more.

Some of the details, including what little the news reporters picked up regarding the crime scene, were at variance with the facts as Liquida knew them. As usual, the authorities withheld all of the critical forensics, any trace evidence, the trail of blood inside the house, the wounds, and how and where they were inflicted. The only specifics about the weapons came by way of the vague information that the victims died of stab wounds and the disclosure that one of the victims was found upstairs and the other on the first floor.

Having taken down the old man, Liquida had figured that he was home free. How hard could it be to rouse the woman and draw her into the study? After dispatching Pike he made some noise, stomped on the floor a few times, and waited.

When that didn’t work, he pushed over a small display case in the study. This smashed the glass in the case and dumped various cups, other awards, and mementos across the hardwood.

When the woman didn’t come running, he began to wonder if she was deaf. He started a search of the rooms on the second floor, but he couldn’t find her. Liquida came as close to panic in that moment as he could ever recall.

His first thought was that she had seen him and fled, perhaps from the top of the landing when he first saw her. If so, the police could be arriving at any minute. Liquida began to sweat. He moved frantically from room to room, searching every place he could think of. He went down the stairs into the garage and found a car door open. He checked inside for the ignition key. It wasn’t there. He thought maybe she had tried to take the car and couldn’t.

Then he noticed that the side door leading from the garage into the yard was open. She must have gone out that way, but he didn’t follow her. If she had reached a phone, the police would be on their way.

He raced back upstairs. If he couldn’t get the woman, he would make a quick effort to find the documents and beat a hasty retreat. He started looking for the documents in the most likely place, the study.

It was then that he found it, the note the woman had left for Pike. It was toward the front of the desk, under the pen and the ornate letter opener. He read it without picking it up. His pulse dropped forty beats. She hadn’t seen him. She was on the run from the old man, and she had taken some coins. Liquida dropped into the chair behind the desk to catch his breath.

He couldn’t be certain how long she’d been gone. He estimated that at least ten minutes had passed since he’d seen her up on the landing from down below. He pieced it together in his head. The noise of the running water had to be the old man taking a bath or a shower.

He guessed that when she heard this, the woman made her move. She hadn’t lingered for long or he would have caught up with her.

Things were not going well. First the maid and now this. He was trying to figure out how he could track her down and wondering when the next flight to Costa Rica was. He was staring across the desk at her note on the other side when it occurred to him that the problem of the missing woman and the abrupt way in which she’d left might actually present its own solution.

Once the two bodies were discovered and the police were called in, it wouldn’t take them long to start counting heads and realize she was gone. Neighbors probably knew she was living in the house with Pike. The cook certainly knew it. Pike’s friends knew it. Process of elimination: two dead bodies and she is gone; either whoever killed the others took her hostage, or she did the deed herself. When they caught up with her, and they would, the fact that she was running free, they would arrest her in a heartbeat.

He considered his options. There weren’t any. The only thing serving to confirm her denials would be the note, and the police would probably claim she wrote that just to cover her tracks. The authorities would arrive at the obvious conclusion: either there was an argument and a violent struggle or she simply wanted money. Either way, she killed Pike, and ran into the maid on her way out; that’s what the evidence would show.

He got out of the chair and went around the desk. He was reaching for the note when something instinctual stopped him. It was Pike’s letter opener, the oversize dagger on top of the paper.

Even now, sitting here on the street drinking coffee and watching as the traffic coursed down the broad avenue, past the lawyer’s office, Liquida had to smile.

He realized immediately that she had to finger the dagger to put it on top of the note. He looked at the blade. It was very sharp, both edges. A woman, dainty hands, would not pick such a thing up by the blade. She would take it by the smooth bronze handle.

It was so simple, made to order. He picked it up by the blade between gloved fingers and used a heavy hardbound book to pound the end of the handle. He drove the dagger between the old man’s ribs in the upper chest area. Two good strokes and the blade was embedded almost to the hilt. He grabbed the note off the desk, flinging the light plastic pen onto the floor where it hit his foot and went under the desk. He didn’t care. He had what he wanted. He folded the note and slipped it into his pocket.

Then he searched for the documents. He found what he thought might be one of them, but he wasn’t sure. It was the right size, a glossy print. It appeared to be hidden under a magazine on the desk. But it didn’t conform to what he remembered from the description of the photos he had been given. All the same, he unzipped the front of his suit and stuffed the single photograph into a quart-size ziplock bag. He placed the bag back against his chest and zipped up the suit. He would let them decide if it was part of the deal.

He searched the desk drawers and two antique wooden filing cabinets that stood against the wall behind it. He went through every file. There was no sign of any of the other documents. He looked around the study. All of the coin drawers would have been too small to contain the photos, eight by ten inches from what he had been told.

He spent several minutes looking in the master bedroom, the only other place he could think of where the old man might have kept them. But he had no luck. He looked in the bedroom where the woman kept her clothes, some in the closet and others folded in the bureau drawers. He combed through them. He didn’t find the documents, but he did find her camera. This was on the short list of items they wanted. It was in a case with one additional storage chip and an extra battery. He took the whole thing.

He gave up the search for the documents and went back to the study. The only other item he was specifically instructed to look for was Pike’s laptop computer and any storage devices that might be hooked up to it. The laptop was on the desk with a single thumb drive plugged into it. He bagged the computer and the thumb drive. Then he went to work with his survival knife, the one strapped to his leg. He jimmied more than twenty locked drawers in the study and swept everything that looked like gold from each drawer into a large folding canvas bag that he’d brought for this purpose. By the time the bag was full, between the gold, the laptop, its cord with the power box, the thumb drive, and the woman’s small camera, he was afraid the bottom would fall out of the canvas bag. He could barely lift it.

The gold was an added perk, the freedom to take whatever he wanted from the collection of coins as long as he disposed of them in a manner that could never be traced. There would be no way for the police to know how many coins the woman took or who broke into the drawers. Now, instead of a random burglary, they would solve the crime quickly and in the process take care of the woman for him.

Down in the kitchen he washed up the chef’s knife one more time and left it on the sink. As a finishing touch, he added just a tiny trace of blood from the maid. This he picked off her body with the point of his own knife and carefully transferred to a crevice near the handle. He knew that the evidence technicians would find this and that police would conclude that the maid was killed last. He transferred smears of blood from Pike onto the maid’s clothing, this to further reinforce the order of death. A little blood smeared on the front door near the handle, with the door left partially open, and Liquida made his escape. He went out the way he had come in, out the back door, locking it behind him.

Eighteen hours later police in Arizona picked up the woman. One enterprising reporter for an Arizona paper got wind of some of the coins taken by the female suspect and interviewed the pawnshop owner where she’d peddled them. Everything was working perfectly, or so he thought.

Liquida had never been in this much trouble before on any job. The people who hired him were not happy. It is the problem when you are hired to kill people but you are not told why, which is often the case.

He had been led to believe that the woman was not critical to the job. They had told him that if she was away from the house at the time Pike was killed, that that would be acceptable. In which case he was to use his best efforts to find and retrieve the documents, the photographs if he could, and to forget about the woman. He was told that killing Pike was critical in order to separate the old man from the documents. If he could find the photographs, he was to get a bonus.

The problem was that the man and the woman seemed inseparable. One never left the house without the other. It was for this reason he concluded that he would have to take them both.

But according to his employers, allowing her to escape death was one thing, setting her up for murder was another. His plan to have her arrested had blown up in his face.

In Liquida’s business, clients were never interested in excuses, or in how difficult a job was. You commanded a high fee because you could do the work. Once you failed on a major contract, word got out. If your failure jeopardized people in high places, you could lose more than just your career.

This morning as he sat drinking his coffee he was waiting for a message. All of the machines inside the Internet café were busy. He would have to wait.

Liquida never used cell phones. They were far too dangerous. Even dynastic drug lords thought to be immortal were visited by death from the sky, found charred and frozen, their ears gone, but with one of the tiny plastic phones melted to the side of their head.

Instead Liquida maintained no less than twenty different e-mail addresses, each under a separate alias and all of them free-Hotmail, Yahoo, and a dozen more. The best, the most protected, were operated by overseas providers, in places where the reach of the U.S. government was limited or, better yet, nonexistent. He would contact employers on a regular basis and they would reply.

He used each address only once, and discarded each daily, like underwear. He alternated among providers to make it difficult for the government to set him up, to track his movements, or to read his mail.

To mask the messages he used encryption, not the stuff for e-mail that came loaded on your home computer, but custom made. In Liquida’s world, paranoia was an acquired discipline. This meant that the keys to almost all commercial encryption software were already in the possession of the American government.

He hired a gentleman in Guadalajara who fashioned the encoding software from complex algorithms. After that the man destroyed the master key to prevent anyone else from getting at it. Liquida knew this because he’d watched him do it, thirty seconds before he killed the man, cutting his throat and torching every inch of his office with gasoline.

After Pike’s murder and the disappearance of the woman, there was relative silence for a time. This changed abruptly with the news of the woman’s arrest. According to Liquida’s contact, the go-between who had acted on behalf of higher-ups to commission the job, the inefficiency with which it was done was now threatening ominous results.

While Liquida was not told why this was a problem, he was told that people would soon be asking questions about Pike and his background. He knew very little about the old man.

Pike’s documents were still unaccounted for. The one he produced was on its way to them by DHL along with the old man’s computer.

But the most ominous problem, the one that caused him to stay up nights wondering if they might soon be issuing another commission, this time on his own life, was their unbridled anger over the woman’s arrest. Either she was important or she wasn’t. If she was critical to their plan, they should have told him this, in which case he would have arranged it so that she could not escape.

The answer came in an encrypted e-mail message five minutes later. He took the message from one of the computers inside the café and downloaded the encoded machine language onto a tiny thumb drive plugged into the computer’s USB port. Then he erased the message from the in-box, removing it from the most obvious location inside the computer. He knew there would be copies of it in other places, both inside the computer and with the various providers along the ether chain. But this could not be helped and all of the copies were scrambled. And even if someone could read it, unless they knew what they were looking for, they might not understand it.

He removed the thumb drive and retreated to the table outside and his coffee.

From his backpack he removed a small antiquated notebook computer. It was the size of a thin hardcover novel. Somewhat beaten up and worn, it had never once been connected to the Internet or any other computer network. It contained no data of any kind, only the basic operating system and a single user program.

Liquida booted up the computer and punched up the program. He slipped the thumb drive into the single USB port on the back of the machine and pulled up the message. After several clicks on the keyboard the words appeared, not encrypted, but in plain Spanish. As usual, it was brief and, except to the most discerning reader, it would have been completely obscure.

The following is a riddle. See if you can find the solution:

You have released the serpent of coiled and twisting justice. The head is female but with scaled eyes. She does not see, and therefore cannot strike. But beware the thrashing tail. It may turn over rocks not comprehending what is there and snag vines not knowing to what they are attached. It may crawl into places it should not go. Solution: how do you dispatch a serpent?

It was not what Liquida expected. They were not worried because the woman had information she might reveal. She knew nothing. Her eyes were scaled.

He studied the message, and from the lines of the riddle he quickly deduced the problem.

He had driven the woman to the one place he should not have, into the glare of a trial in an American courtroom. It was not what she might say, but what they might discover as a consequence that worried his employers. The serpent’s thrashing tail was the probing investigators and inquisitive American lawyers who would attach themselves to the woman before and during her trial.

Unlike other places it was a process that could not be sedated, put to sleep with bribes. Kill the judge here and it was instant national news. Shoot one of the lawyers and another would take his place before they could remove the body. If you became too obvious, the hammer of the American federal government, with all of the dark forces at its command, would fall on you. Liquida knew that his own employers would kill him long before they allowed that to happen.

He took a deep breath. He had no idea what they were up to, but whatever it was, they now believed it to be in jeopardy because of what he had done. The serpent “may crawl into places it should not go” in the words of the riddle. He had set in motion something neither he nor they could control.

It was by far the largest contract he had ever received. People didn’t pay that kind of money unless what they were doing was substantial and with a high degree of risk. What revelations might be uncovered he had no idea; what’s more, he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know. It was not his business.

What was his business, and the only thing that occupied his mind at the moment, was how to achieve the ultimate message of the e-mail, the answer to the riddle. The way you kill a serpent is by cutting off its head.