Guardian of Lies

SEVENTEEN

Alim waited in the trees at the edge of the forest for one of his men to return with the information that he wanted. The man in question had been assigned a simple task, to watch Nitikin’s daughter whenever she wandered free in the camp. The man had failed. Because of this, the woman’s photographs of her father, along with Alim and his men, had found their way into the American’s laptop computer and from there to a laboratory for processing in the United States.

Afundi’s first thought was that Nitikin’s daughter was working with the Americans. Together with the interpreter he cornered the Russian and braced him with questions.

Nitikin assured him that his daughter knew nothing, and he wanted it to stay that way. The Russian knew only too well the perils of knowledge. He told Afundi that all she knew was that her father had deserted from the Soviet army many years before. She believed that to be the reason he was in hiding.

To Afundi this made no sense. If desertion from the Soviets was his only reason for hiding, why had Nitikin not gone back to his family in Costa Rica when the Soviet Union ceased to exist? Surely she must have asked her father that same question many times.

By then Afundi realized he himself had asked one too many questions. He could read in Nitikin’s eyes his fear for his daughter. Alim dismissed it all as a misunderstanding. He slapped the old man on the back and told him not to worry, that everything was now fine. But it wasn’t.

Alim and his small troop of escapees from Guantanamo had been selected for the job not because they were trained fighters or because they had any special skills for completing the operation. They were picked because it was Alim who’d delivered the information to his country’s Cuban consul, and from there directly to Alim’s government.

The message that came back was verbal and remained unwritten, but it was clear. Secrecy was vital not only for completion of the operation. It was critical to the republic’s continued existence once the mission was over. The information was to be confined to those who already knew and no one else; this meant Alim and his colleagues with whom he had already shared it. All further contact with Alim’s own government was, under any circumstance, forbidden.

Alim first learned the secret from another old man who was still fighting another war. He was Cuban, and like the old Russian, he was also dying.

Fidel Castro had been curious about the man who’d led the escape from the American compound at Guantanamo. And when Fidel was curious about something he always got answers, or rather others got them for him. As one of the great charismatic leaders of his time, Castro knew that the key to human conduct was motivation, and he wanted to know what motivated Alim Afundi.

He learned that Afundi’s parents, his father a farmer and his mother a peasant, had perished under American bombs. The U.S. government claimed it was an accident. Ordnance dropped from planes flown off the decks of an American aircraft carrier sailing in the Persian Gulf had somehow found its way beyond the Iraqi border, a few hundred yards and onto buildings mistakenly identified as an Al-Qaeda outpost.

Fidel learned that it was this single act of unrequited violence that had transformed the otherwise quiet son of a cattle herder into a fire-breathing freedom fighter, and a mortal enemy of the Great Satan.

He invited Alim to dinner in his private quarters a few days later. The Cuban government had treated Afundi and his men as heroes. Now Alim was told that Castro wanted to honor him personally.

Fidel was no longer the head of the Cuban government. He had long since stepped down because of illness. His graying beard looked thin and a bit withered but his eyes burned with a zeal that Alim had seen only in the fiery gaze of ardent mullahs.

Over food, cigars, and Cuban rum, the last two of which Alim respectfully declined because of his religion, Castro spent the evening regaling his guest with recollections of the revolution, all of this through an interpreter.

Afundi was not wealthy, and in terms of world history he was not well educated. He knew almost nothing of the Cuban revolution. To Castro, who had stood before legions of captive audiences, people ordered to bake in the hot Cuban sun for hours and who had heard it all before, the young, eager face at his dinner table was a clean slate upon which to write.

Castro started where it all began, with the failed assault on the Moncada barracks in his youth, before he knew what it was to be a revolutionary. He told Alim about his capture along with his brother Rául and their imprisonment and of their later journey to Mexico to train for the coming revolution. He talked about the return to the island with a force of fewer than a hundred men and the ambush by Batista’s militia that had nearly wiped them out.

“It is why you never leave an adversary breathing and aboveground when you fight a war. They had two opportunities to kill me, one in prison, which they passed up, and the second in the ambush, when they missed,” Castro told him.

To Alim, the man may have been old and in ill health, but you would not have known it from the stamina he exhibited that night. The gathering lasted nearly twelve hours. It did not end until long after a rooster sounded in the yard outside and sun streamed through the windows of the dining room where they sat.

Castro conversed all night in what was largely a one-way monologue. Alim sat nodding politely, grinning appropriately when he needed to and listening as the interpreter conveyed in Farsi Fidel’s recollections and, to the degree possible, his passion for the subject. He talked of Che and the capture of the government munitions train at Santa Clara that sealed Batista’s fate, and of how he, Fidel, had swept into Havana at the head of an army. He spoke of going to New York to speak to the United Nations, of plucking chickens in the presidential suite of the hotel, of the U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the many failed attempts by the Americans to assassinate him over the years.

He talked about the American CIA on whose direction his friend Che had been executed in Bolivia. He talked about American efforts to crush the revolution and to impoverish the Cuban people through forty years of economic embargoes, actions that Fidel said were similar to those America had imposed on Alim’s own homeland.

As the night went on, Alim realized that even with the rum Fidel had consumed, he was going to outdistance his guest. By three in the morning, Afundi was dying. He had experienced sleep deprivation as torture, but Castro’s form was more potent because of Alim’s need to show continued respect toward his host. By six he could no longer make even the pretense. Alim fell asleep.

At some point, he didn’t know how much time had passed, he was startled from his slumber by Castro’s shouting. He lifted his sleepy head just in time to miss the next blow landed by Fidel’s closed fist on the table’s surface. Through the interpreter, Castro’s words came streaming in: “…betrayal by a trusted ally in the face of imperialist aggression.”

Fidel’s voice climbed to a roar and bristled with anger as he chomped on his cigar. Then he turned to look angrily at Alim.

Afundi was mortified. He was certain he had offended his host by falling asleep.

It took him a few seconds and a few discreet questions to the interpreter before he realized he was wrong. Alim came to grips with the snippets of Fidel’s message he had missed while dozing. It was something to do with Castro’s alliance with the Soviets and Russian missiles placed on Cuban soil for defense. Apparently, Castro’s fury had not been quelled by the passage of more than forty years.

“In the end,” said Fidel, “the only Russian who remained true to the revolution has spent his life hiding from his own government in the mountains of Colombia.” Then he turned his blazing eyes on his guest. “In the event that you are wondering, it is the reason I have invited you here this evening.

“By the way, before I forget, I have for you and your men a present. It isn’t much, perhaps just a small taste of home.” Castro reached over to the shelf under a table alongside his chair and pulled out a newspaper. Immediately, Alim saw the stirring banner on the front page, the large cursive letters in Farsi. He recognized the newspaper. It was the provincial sheet published by his own government and circulated in the mountains near his home. Afundi hadn’t seen news from home in nearly two years.

“I had it delivered in one of our diplomatic pouches,” said Fidel. He tossed it to Afundi across the table. “Share it with your men. They need to hear from home.”

Alim took the newspaper and a drink of water in an effort to wake himself, and tried to glance at the newspaper as he listened.

After spending the entire night reliving his life, it took Fidel less than five minutes to come to the point.

There was a stark contrast between the sentimental old man who lived in the past, the one who had talked Alim to sleep, and the operational warlord Afundi had woken up to in the morning. Alim recognized the difference immediately.

Fidel told him about Nitikin, how they’d met and about the secret they shared. It was Fidel’s sense that fate had delivered Alim and his men to him at a critical moment, when all the stars were aligned, while he still had breath to deliver the message, and his old Russian friend still had the strength to act upon it.

As Castro spoke, Afundi held the newspaper on his lap and glanced at it occasionally with one eye. When Fidel turned to grab the decanter of rum once more, Alim quickly flipped the newspaper over to see the back side. There he saw the photograph of a large American warship. The moment he read the caption printed beneath the photograph, his eyes seemed fixed on the four-column photograph.

According to the paper: “The American warship Ronald Reagan plies the waters of the Persian Gulf on its most recent tour. Its warplanes routinely kill innocent women and children in cities and villages throughout the region. It delivers without mercy the infidel’s poisonous bite on other nations where the Great Satan seeks to impose his will on true believers and the faithful throughout the Islamic world.”

By the time Fidel finished pouring his drink, Afundi’s eyes were back on him, though his mind was not.

“I am certain,” said Fidel, “that given enough diplomacy and time, your own government will see the wisdom of my plan. And that you yourself will come to understand its opportunities. Of course, it must be handled with a good deal of care and discretion. But I’m sure you al ready know that. You see,” said Fidel, “it is a grand opportunity delivered to you and to me, by destiny.”

Destiny or not, for the moment Afundi had problems. The old Russian was sick once more. He was resting in the three-room hut with his daughter. One of the doctors had looked in on him that morning. The physician told Alim that it was not serious, just that the old man was tired. They were working him too hard. He needed more rest. If they were lucky he might be down only for the day, perhaps two. But without him they could make no further progress.

If this were not enough, now there was something else, one more problem to worry about.

Alim saw his man rushing back toward him from the hut. The man had exited from a back window. The fact that he had nothing in either hand told Afundi that the search had been unsuccessful.

“You didn’t find it?”

“No.” The man was breathless.

“You went through everything?”

“All of her bags and her clothing. Besides, I haven’t seen her with it. And I have been watching her closely this time. I don’t think she has it.”

“Then where is it?” said Afundi.

“I don’t know. Maybe she took it with her when she went home. If so, it could still be there, in Costa Rica.”

Afundi thought for a moment. It was a delicate subject, and not one that he wanted to raise either directly or indirectly with the Russian or his daughter.

The man from the Mexican cartel had sent three items to them after killing the American at his home in California and trying to kill Nitikin’s granddaughter. He sent the dead man’s laptop, a printed photograph that none of them recognized, and a small digital camera in a pink leather case.

Afundi had directed the killer to look for a camera because Nitikin’s daughter had told them she borrowed her daughter’s camera to use during her last trip to Colombia. It was the camera that had taken the photos of Nitikin, Alim, and his men.

When Alim checked the camera sent to them from California, he found nothing except photographs apparently taken there, in California. Initially Afundi was relieved. He assumed that the original photographs from Colombia had been erased.

But the reprieve was short lived. That morning, through the interpreter, he had gone out of his way to ask Nitikin’s daughter if she could help him with a new camera he had purchased. He showed her the camera from California without its pink case and with none of the photographs of the Russian’s granddaughter still in it. The mother didn’t recognize it. She told him she had never seen one like it. It was much nicer, newer, and smaller than the one she had used. It was all Alim needed to know. The camera and perhaps the Colombian photographs were still out there.

It was possible that no one would find them, at least not before it was too late, but then again, given his luck so far…