Guardian of Lies

FORTY-ONE

The uranium projectile suddenly toppled from the muzzle of the gun. Instinctively Tomas reached out with his gloved right hand and caught it in midflight. But at arm’s length, reaching across the table, he couldn’t hold the weight.

The projectile’s leverage and the momentum of its fall forced his hand down until his fingers were suddenly pinched between the heavy, falling uranium slug and its fissile target.

Tomas pulled the projectile back toward his chest as the air in the room ignited in a brilliant violet light. It rippled in waves and hues of blue that Tomas had never before seen. The heat was intense. It burned his fingers right through the gloves, but Tomas was so dazzled by the radiance that he didn’t notice. As the glow from the agitated molecules of air evaporated, the heat sapped the energy from his body.

He looked down and realized he was holding the enriched uranium against his chest. He carefully laid the projectile on the table, as far from the target as he could. Then he turned and walked out the door to where Nitikin and the other man were standing.

When Yakov turned and saw him, Tomas had already lifted the protective hood from his head. His face was running with a river of sweat. Other than that, he looked fine. He was animated, smiling and laughing, like a soccer goalie who has just blocked a free kick.

He assured Nitikin that the projectile had not struck the uranium target. He had saved it, but his fingers had been pinched in the process.

Tomas did not seem to comprehend the flash of blue light and the intense heat that was still sending rising vapors of smoke off of his suit. He told Yakov that everything was all right, then lifted his right arm to pull off his glove.

Tomas stopped in midstride and looked at his hand. There was nothing left of the first three fingers but charred stumps.

Yakov reached him the instant before he collapsed. He laid him on the ground and helped him take off his suit. He hollered at Alim’s man, the one holding the ramrod, to help him. But the man just stood there shaking his head.

Alim and the rest of his cadre remained off in the trees, at least a hundred meters away. Yakov told the man with the ramrod to put on Tomas’s suit, that he would need his assistance. When the man didn’t understand, Nitikin gestured with his hands, sign language, to put it on.

The man looked at him and slowly shook his head as he backed away. Yakov yelled into the trees and a couple of seconds later he heard Alim’s commanding voice speaking in Farsi. The man looked to the trees, then back at Nitikin with a kind of trapped expression on his face. Reluctantly he stepped forward and began to put on the suit.

Nitikin hollered assurances to the translator off in the jungle, asking him to tell the man that there was no longer anything to fear. With the proper tools, Nitikin could now complete the assembly quickly and safely. They would be finished in a matter of minutes. The translation came back and the man nodded. What the Russian didn’t tell them was that Alim’s man, who was now donning the suit, was already dead. The lifetime body burden of radiation was far exceeded by his naked exposure to the wicked tail of the dragon.

Together they entered the hut. The radiation had elevated the temperature inside the room to the point that they could not remain more than two or three minutes.

Yakov had the man steady the barrel of the cannon, his bare fingers projecting through the holes burned into the right-hand glove. Nitikin retrieved the projectile with the tongs. In less than a minute, using the ramrod, Yakov seated the uranium bullet securely down the barrel of the gun.

It took another thirty seconds to insert the safety disk of uranium-238, the neutron deflector, into the slot between the end of the gun barrel and the target. Once in place, the disk of uranium-238 began doing its job. It bounced the wandering neutrons from the two elements of highly enriched uranium, the projectile and the target, back to their respective sources, instantly reducing the gain in radiation. Nitikin heard the rapid clicking from the Geiger counter on the table suddenly fall off sharply.

The safety disk of U-238 was attached to a rigid piece of steel wire. The wire protruded through a tiny hole in the side of the bomb case. A quarter-twist of the wire in a clockwise direction locked the safety disk in place. Anyone trying to remove the disk without first twisting the wire in a counterclockwise direction would snap the brittle connection between the safety disk and the wire, rendering the bomb useless. The gun would fire. The cordite explosion would destroy the barrel and bomb housing, but there would be no nuclear chain reaction. Even radioactive fallout would be minimal and generally contained to any structure the device was in.

Properly turned and pulled, the wire would slide the disk from its slot, leaving the pathway clear for the projectile to be fired into the uranium target.

The only procedure more delicate than removing the safety disk was replacing it if the need ever arose. With the bomb housing closed, it would be impossible to see the disk or the slot into which it should slide. With only the rigid wire to manipulate the disk, replacing it in the slot was a matter of trial and error. It required the deft fingers and touch of a surgeon. Even Nitikin was not sure if he could do this any longer, though in his youth, in training, he had accomplished it twice on dummy mock-ups of the warhead.

Having locked the safety disk in place, it took less than a minute to seal the lead-lined bomb case and render the device safe.

As the two men stepped from the building, Alim’s man lifted the hood from his head and smiled with a toothy grin as the expression of relief flooded his sweaty face.

Nitikin had no way of measuring the dose of radiation emitted by the ionizing blue flare. But he knew that Tomas and the smiling lad he was now looking at were both dead.

The old Russian hovered over Tomas’s bed for four days and five nights. During this entire period, neither Yakov nor the FARC physicians could do much to comfort the young Colombian.

An ocean of water could not satisfy his thirst, even if he could keep it down. He was wretched with nausea, vomited constantly, and passed bloody diarrhea as the radiation began to kill his body from within.

After three days, Tomas’s fingernails turned black. His thick, dark hair fell from his head in patches so that a nurse had to brush it from his pillow every few hours, into a box that was to be buried somewhere in a deep hole. Open sores developed around his mouth and eyes. When the doctor lifted the sheet, he realized that these bloody sores covered Tomas’s entire body.

Nitikin could not even touch him for fear of further infecting his wounds, though the Russian knew there was no hope. The end was near. A high fever set in on the fourth day as infection began to take its toll. Tomas struggled for every breath as his airway swelled and his lungs filled with fluid. Just after midnight on the fifth day, Tomas suddenly went into convulsions. He arched his back as if a steel spring had snapped in his body. He shook the entire bed for almost a minute and then went limp.

Yakov noticed that in his stillness, Tomas was no longer struggling for breath. He didn’t have to wait for the doctor to check his pulse or put the stethoscope to Tomas’s ulcerated chest to know he was dead. He stood and slowly covered Tomas’s face with the bedsheet.

Tomas may not have understood entirely what he was doing, but Nitikin knew that his quick reactions and nimble fingers had averted a nuclear disaster that could have lit up the jungle and killed them all.

“Excuse me, but Mr. Hinds is on the phone with a client. If you’ll wait a moment-”

“Officer, if she gets in the way again, arrest her.”

Harry was on the phone, but he recognized the voice outside his office door. A second later it opened.

“Listen, I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Harry.

Before Harry could hang up the phone, Templeton was standing on the other side of his desk, backed up by a hefty sheriff’s deputy, muscle in a uniform, and one of the homicide detectives in Katia’s case. The detective had his arm in the air, holding a sheaf of folded papers as if it was a cocked pistol and the Dwarf was about to level the muzzle on Harry.

“We’re going to have to continue this later. I’ll call you. Yeah, yeah…call you this afternoon.” Harry hung up the phone.

The detective slapped the papers on the desk in front of him. “Consider yourself served.”

“What’s this about?”

“Search warrant,” said Templeton. “Bring some of those boxes in here!” he hollered to whoever was outside the door. Harry’s secretary, standing in the doorway, nearly got run over by the hand truck being pushed by one of the deputies, followed by another cop. The dolly was loaded with flattened cardboard boxes. They began unfolding and assembling the boxes on the floor, using packing tape and a tape gun to bind the bottoms.

“Why don’t you tell me what this is about?” By now Harry was standing behind the desk fumbling with the papers.

“Read the warrant,” said Templeton. “Sergeant, anything with the name Solaz on it, box it and seal it for review. If you have questions about anything, ask me. You!” He pointed to one of the other deputies. “Get some of those boxes and follow me.” Templeton headed out of the office.

Harry, who was still trying to read the documents, followed him out of the office and joined the parade headed down the hall. There were three more deputies outside in the reception area already boxing up files from the filing cabinets.

“Wait, wait wait. What are they doing?” said Harry. “They can’t reach in and take the files out of the cabinets.”

“You want us to roll the cabinets out and put them on the truck, that’s fine by me,” said Templeton, still walking.

“I’m going to have to ask you to have your staff leave the office until we’re done collecting everything. Then they can come back,” said Templeton.

“Why don’t you stop for a second so we can talk about this?” said Harry.

“Time for talk is over.” Templeton breezed through the open door of Paul’s office, reached up on the wall, and flipped the light switch. “You can start with the desk,” he told one of the cops. “No. No. On second thought I think I’d rather have Detective Howser do that. Gil, get every drawer. Clean it out. You guys can work on the file cabinets, here and the ones outside by the secretaries. And don’t forget the bookshelves. Those binders all contain documents. Box ’em up,” said Templeton. “Take ’em all.”

By now, Harry had devoured the few pages accompanying the search warrant. It had been signed by another judge, not Quinn.

“Wait a minute.” Harry saw one of the cops starting to grab binders off the shelves. “Those files have nothing to do with the Solaz case. The warrant is limited to Solaz.”

“In that event you’ll get ’em back,” said Templeton. “Procedure’s been set up for a review by a non-taint team and it’s been approved by the judge.”

“What the hell’s a non-taint team?” said Harry.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve never had my office ransacked before.”

“Get those up there. The high ones.” Templeton had ignored him and had instead started directing one of the taller deputies, pointing to the top shelf, up near the ceiling, as if he was having the man sweep for cobwebs.

“A non-taint team involves another prosecutor from my office and a detective from homicide, not Detective Howser here, somebody else. They will make up the non-taint team. Neither of them is involved in any way in the Solaz case. They’ll look at everything we take and decide whether it’s within the scope of the warrant. If it’s not, you’ll get it back. I can’t say exactly when you’ll get it back.” Templeton quickly looked at Harry over his shoulder and winked at him.

“Those files contain privileged information, lawyer-client,” said Harry. “And the clients have nothing to do with Solaz.”

“The other prosecutor will decide if any privilege attaches to any of it, lawyer-client or otherwise. If it does, you’ll get that back too.”

“When, after your office copies it all?” said Harry.

“We represent law enforcement,” said Templeton. “I’m shocked.”

“Yeah, well you’re going to be spreading your shocked little body pretty thin when I drag you in front of half the judges downtown, demanding continuances and dismissals because you’re sitting on our files and peeking at our work product in their cases. And while you’re at it, you might wanna call the attorney general and tell him to expect an appeal on any case out of our office ending in a conviction in the next four or five years. If he’s lucky, there’ll simply be a blanket order of reversal on all of them. Save him time,” said Harry.

“Guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. Officer, get…yeah, that’s it, grab that one up there.” Templeton continued to ignore him.

“So that’s your procedure? That’s it?” said Harry.

“You don’t like it, you can always go to court,” said Templeton.

“You bet I will.”

“But I’d have to warn you, the judge seemed very satisfied with the process.”

“I’m sure he was. After all, he used to work for the DA’s office,” said Harry. “Back then he could only dream about such things.”

“I didn’t know that.” Templeton smiled. “Anyway, the team will look at it and decide what is evidence and what is not.”

“Evidence of what?” There was a tone of hesitance as Harry said it.

“That’s right, I forgot. You don’t know. I’m sorry.” For the first time since entering the room, Templeton turned to look at him. “You might want to get on the phone and check with your partner to see if he wants to get outside counsel or whether maybe he wants you to represent him. I wouldn’t want to give you any advice on that. But if he wants you to represent him, we can save time and serve you with the other papers right now.”

Harry was almost afraid to ask. “What other papers?”

“Let’s see, there are warrants for arrest on two counts of first-degree murder, aiding and abetting, breaking and entering, grand larceny, and conspiracy to commit all of the above. Let me think. I don’t want to forget anything. We’re still weighing the issue of witness tampering, seeing as he was sitting on top of his codefendant and telling her what to say and what not to say.”

“He is her lawyer,” said Harry.

“Was,” said Templeton. “And I’m sure he wasn’t going to let that get in his way. And, of course, there is the bus thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Word on the street is, it was your client who was the target. They’re still counting bodies, but if it turns out that your partner was involved, you might want to tell him the stuff on the bus isn’t going to be covered by lawyer-client privilege. He can try to argue attorney work product, but I doubt if the judge will buy it.”

“You’re out of your mind,” said Harry.

“All the same, if we tag him on that one, you can expect a lot more paper. Figure a ticker-tape parade,” said Templeton.

Harry was getting grim looks from the deputies standing around the desk.

“Oh, yeah! And we’ll be adding a fugitive arrest warrant later today, just to add a little international spice.”

Harry stood there looking at him.

“Well, do you want to call him and give him the news?” said Templeton. “He’d probably rather hear it from you than read it in the newspaper. Or maybe he doesn’t read Spanish? You do know where he is?” Templeton looked at him and waited to see if Harry was going to fess up. When he didn’t, the Dwarf said, “You might try Costa Rica. At least according to the airline, that’s where his plane landed. You did know he was down there?”

“So what? There were no warrants outstanding when he left,” said Harry.

“You might remind him of that and see if you can coax him back. By the way, you wouldn’t know how he got out of the country, seeing as the state had placed restrictions on his passport, would you?”

Harry looked at him and just swallowed a little saliva.

“Well?”

“No.”

Templeton knew he was lying. He also knew that the federal government had been pushing buttons and pulling levers. The Dwarf had been given the shaft. It didn’t take a mind meld to know what was up. Let the horse out of the barn and follow him.

By morning Templeton would have the FBI in a legal headlock. If they were tailing Madriani, once a fugitive warrant was issued for the lawyer’s arrest and the FBI received notice, they would be compelled by law to arrest him immediately. The state would then have to arrange extradition. If the FBI failed to take Madriani into custody and he slipped through their fingers, the federal government would have to answer for its conduct in a courtroom and explain to a judge the reason for their actions. In a case of multiple murder, Templeton would be all over them, national security or no national security. The Dwarf would climb on a stump and start pumping out headlines ending in question marks-what was the federal government up to, and why did they allow a multiple murderer to leave the country and then run free?

“Larry.” Howser was trying to catch Templeton’s attention from the other side of the desk.

“Well, are you going to call him or not?” Templeton’s gaze was locked on Harry.

“If I do, I’ll let you know,” said Harry.

“Larry!” Howser was standing there looking down at the open drawer on the other side of the desk.

“What?” Templeton was aggravated by the interruption.

“I think you better look at this.”

He walked around to the other side of the desk. “What is it?”

Howser pointed. “Right there.”

At first Templeton didn’t say anything, at least not with his lips. Instead the Dwarf stood there looking as if he had just found the original gold nugget at Sutter’s Mill.

“Okay. Okay. I want everybody outta here,” he said. “Clear the offices. I want everybody outside now. And call the crime lab, tell them to send a van over here right away. I want two CS technicians, and tell them we’re gonna need photos.”

“What are you talking about?” said Harry.

“Maybe you can tell us how you’re gonna explain that?” said Templeton.

“What?” Harry edged his way around the desk.

“That.” Templeton was pointing toward a lot of clutter, pens and paper clips, some loose change, rubber bands, and a roll of Scotch tape in a center section of the top drawer of Paul’s desk. “Right there.”

The second Harry saw it, all the blood seemed to drain from his head. He began to sway. For a moment he thought he might actually fall.

Templeton grabbed his arm as if he could hold him up. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. I’m fine,” Harry lied.

“I know. I know,” said Templeton.

In that moment Harry and the Dwarf seemed to communicate on a level that transcended language. With the evidence he had and the charges he’d brought, it was clear that even Templeton, deep down, harbored nagging doubts that another lawyer could have done this.

But there in front of them in the drawer was one of the bags of catnip. It looked identical to the bags found by the police and photographed, the catnip used to take down the motion sensors in the side yard, the path used by the killer to enter Emerson Pike’s house.