Guardian of Lies

SIXTY

In the late nineties, politicians eager to pocket million-dollar speaking fees from foreign trade groups embraced the concept of a global economy. They teamed up with Chinese businessmen and Mexican manufacturers and carved out a zone along the U.S. southern border where trade restrictions were virtually eliminated.

American politicians sold the country on the concept of our being an information economy, that we no longer needed manufacturing or heavy industry, as if you could drive words and eat sentences. They shipped entire job sectors abroad and then railed at the demise of the middle class.

Places like Ensenada with its sleepy port suddenly boomed. In less than two years, vast amounts of commercial cargo moved off docks in Los Angeles and San Diego and landed instead in northern Mexico. China began shipping oceans of cheap component parts to ports along the Mexican coast, most of which were delivered to factories known as maquiladoras on the northern border. There the parts were assembled into finished products that flowed into the American market on trucks owned and operated by Mexican trucking companies.

It was a win-win situation if you were looking to buy a cheap television, or a politician collecting on IOUs from foreign constituents. But for those who once worked in the shuttered factories or drove trucks for a living, it was the end of the road.

For more than a decade, the maquiladoras flourished, until they fell on hard times, in a way a victim of their own success. It’s difficult to sell televisions, even if they’re cheap, to millions of Americans who are out of work.

Liquida smiled at the thought as he wandered through the empty building, wondering why the raghead would want to meet him here. He got in by picking a small lock on a door at the rear of the building. The place was huge, cavernous, all under a single roof with overhead doors large enough to accommodate Noah’s ark.

Like all of the maquiladora facilities, it was situated in the trade zone nestled right up against the U.S. border. While the Americans controlled their side with vast areas of vacant land and highly trained dogs, the Mexicans punched right up against the fence in many places. Both sides of the border were arid desert with rugged ravines and hills. The American side was only sparsely developed, mostly commercial warehouses and trucking facilities with a vast array of border checkpoints. With the downturn in the economy, some of the warehouses on both sides were now empty, chained-up facilities waiting for better days.

Liquida was sweating because of the long coat he was wearing. It was necessary to conceal the heavy item underneath. He checked his watch. He was two hours early. He had parked his car several blocks away and walked so that his early visit would come as a surprise to his employer.

He had gone to the port at Ensenada earlier that day. From the overview on the knoll above the highway, overlooking the harbor, Liquida could see police crawling all over the ship, so many uniforms he was afraid it would sink.

He had watched with heavy-duty binoculars for some time and was pretty sure that Afundi had gotten away. Because of all the ongoing interrogations the police were still looking for someone or something. There were enough squad cars parked along the dock with hoods up and batteries missing that the chief in Tijuana would have to call Delco to get them all home.

He was musing over the events at the harbor when suddenly he heard a noise from outside the warehouse. It was the sound of a heavy truck coming from the direction of the large fenced-in parking area.

Liquida sprinted over to the door and peeked through a crack. A man was unlocking the gate out on the street. There was a large container truck and another smaller box truck that looked like a rental vehicle behind it.

Liquida watched for a few seconds as the man unlocked the chain and pulled the double gates open. The two trucks started to roll through the gate, toward the warehouse.

Liquida retreated to a ladder in the far corner of the building and climbed to an overhead loft area, a kind of industrial catwalk where he could perch and take in the show without being seen. He made himself comfortable, took off his long coat, and set it and the object strapped under it on the catwalk next to him.

A couple of minutes later the large overhead garage door was lifted by someone outside. For the first time Liquida realized it hadn’t been locked. The mammoth door was so delicately balanced that the man was able to hoist it with one arm and send it sailing along the track until it settled almost against the roof of the building.

Liquida wondered if anyone had been inside watching him. He was fairly confident there were no cameras. Those he had looked for. But the unlocked overhead door surprised him.

A minute later both trucks were inside the building. Liquida could smell the odor of diesel exhaust as it wafted up to the balcony where he lay. The engines shut off and four men climbed down from the two trucks. Three from the rental vehicle and the driver of the cargo-container truck. The fifth waited by the huge open door with one hand on the rope, as if he were going to pull it and close the overhead door. But he didn’t. He waited for several minutes, looking out the open door as if expecting someone else, while three of the other men talked. Liquida couldn’t understand a thing they said. They were speaking in a foreign tongue of some kind. The other man, the fifth one, stood not far from the rental truck and seemed to be off somewhere in his own world. He didn’t look like the others either. He was older, fair haired, and though Liquida couldn’t get a good look at him from up high, he appeared to be taller as well.

A few minutes later another vehicle, this one a small, dark sedan, came rocketing through the open door and hit its brakes inside the building.

The man pulled the rope and the large door came screeching down along the track until it hit the concrete floor with a bang. This time the man pushed the locking bolt into the slot, sealing it tight from the inside.

Two more men got out of the car, and the six of them, the three who were originally talking, the man by the door, and the two from the car huddled together some distance away from the sixth man, who was now wandering all alone near the rear of the rental truck.

Liquida watched as the five cohorts stood in a small circle near the container truck. One of them who seemed to be the leader was doing most of the talking while the others listened. The language was not something Liquida had ever heard before. He knew it must be Arabic and that the man talking had to be the boss man from Colombia. Language barrier or not, Liquida could clearly see that he was barking the orders and the others were listening. He got a good look at the man.

Liquida reached over on the platform next to where he was lying, opened the coat, and pulled apart the two snaps inside. Having freed it from the inside of the coat, he picked up the weapon. It looked like something from a space movie, with a silencer the size of an exhaust pipe on the muzzle end, and a box clip for the 5.56-millimeter rounds at the other end where it slipped into the receiver up inside the shoulder stock under the shooter’s armpit. The weapon had a strange-looking device mounted underneath the barrel and a small scope on top.

The modified bull pup had the advantage of a full-length rifle barrel in a gun that, without the silencer, was little more than twenty inches long.

He held the gun close as he continued to watch the conference down below.

The lone wolf wandering near the rear of the rental truck apparently saw something out of place. He approached the lift gate and played with the heavy latch for a moment. Apparently it wasn’t closed. He lifted the gate a little, and then seemed to stand there for a moment as if he were frozen in place.

Afundi said something and one of the others hollered out in perfect Spanish, telling the man at the rear of the rental truck to leave it alone and come out where they could see him. The one who spoke Spanish separated himself from the others and walked toward the rear of the rental vehicle.

Before he could get there, the other man lowered the lift gate and quickly moved around the truck where he rapidly closed the distance between the two of them with his hands out, turning the other, fatter man around. “It was nothing. A piece of wood caught under the door. I took care of it. It’s fine.”

The other man stood there for a second looking at him, and then pushed past him, walked to the back of the truck, and checked it out. The other, taller man was close behind him.

Liquida heard the metal of the hooked lever lock on the back of the truck as the fat man tested it to make sure that the catch was working and the door was sealed.

While the two of them were still standing at the back of the truck, the leader stopped talking, stepped away from the others, and started walking over to join them. By then the fat man was satisfied that everything was fine. He headed back the other way, said something to his leader, and the two of them joined their comrades in discussion once again.

Liquida thought about popping Afundi as he stood there talking, but that would be too easy. Besides, he’d probably end up in a gunfight with the others, and taking rounds through the bottom of the catwalk was not something he wanted to think about. Liquida would wait them out. He’d whittle them down with the silencer a shot at a time, so they wouldn’t know where it was coming from.

The conversation went on for a couple more minutes, until Afundi handed two of the men a piece of paper and began talking to them. He pointed to the sheet as if he was giving them directions of some kind.

They nodded, one of them took the sheet of paper, and the two men headed toward the car. But they didn’t get in, instead they grabbed two assault rifles out of the backseat.

Afundi said something to one of them and pointed toward the back wall of the building. As he watched the man walk in that direction, suddenly the diesel engine on the container truck started up. Liquida turned to look back at the trucks as another of the men climbed up into the container truck. He closed the truck’s doors and waited with the engine running. The other three men, including the tall one who didn’t seem to fit, got into the rental truck and started its engine.

Liquida wondered where they were going. No one had opened the large overhead door. The fumes were beginning to build up. Suddenly an overhead door on the other side of the building opened up. It was being opened by a heavy electrical motor. Liquida looked at it and realized that the door was surrounded not by metal, but heavy concrete. The opening was cut into a retaining wall where the building backed up to an incline in the earth outside.

Once the door was fully up, Liquida could see that the concrete floor beyond the opening dropped off in a steep decline. It was ramped down. Within seconds the two trucks drove through the opening and down the ramp, disappearing in a blue haze of exhaust as the noise of their engines slowly receded into the distance.