Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel Read online

  Guardian of Lies

  Steve Martini

  In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  To the drug lords of the Tijuana cartel, the man

  Two

  The upstairs study was a large room with a vaulted

  Three

  Once over the fence, “Muerte Liquida” moved swiftly across the

  Four

  At this moment Katia had but a single thought as

  Five

  He was halfway up the stairs when the steady sound

  Six

  Once in the garage, Katia quietly opened the driver’s side

  Seven

  Sometimes it’s how you back into things in life that

  Eight

  This morning Katia does not look nearly as young or

  Nine

  Alim Afundi longed for the arid Zagros Mountains of his

  Ten

  The fact that Katia told us about the note first,

  Eleven

  The request for services came from across the country, about

  Twelve

  Liquida picked up one of the gold coins, what collectors

  Thirteen

  You say that Pike’s first meeting with you was no

  Fourteen

  For three days after finding the binder and identifying the

  Fifteen

  Unless I am wrong, the killer tied the knot.

  Sixteen

  Ten en after seven in the morning and Zeb Thorpe

  Seventeen

  Alim waited in the trees at the edge of the

  Eighteen

  Harry and I are wearing a rut in the road,

  Nineteen

  We have to assume that as long as the man

  Twenty

  Larry Templeton’s facial features have always reminded me of those

  Twenty-One

  Anyone familiar with such things might have been skeptical, but

  Twenty-Two

  If the study of crime is a science, its first

  Twenty-Three

  As Harry and I enter the courtroom this afternoon, Templeton

  Twenty-Four

  Yesterday afternoon after she hung up the receiver in the

  Twenty-Five

  Harry and I had to wonder why, if the Foreign

  Twenty-Six

  If he ever got drunk and unruly in a bar,

  Twenty-Seven

  Kim Howard entered the room, followed by Zeb Thorpe, head

  Twenty-Eight

  Liquida was tired. He had spent nearly a week on

  Twenty-Nine

  Liquida watched as the bus made the left turn across

  Thirty

  I don’t want excuses,” said Liquida. He and the explosives

  Thirty-One

  Gil Howser was the lead homicide detective in the Solaz

  Thirty-Two

  Much of the inside of the bus was charred. Most

  Thirty-Three

  By the time Harry and I arrive at the University

  Thirty-Four

  At least the news from California was good. Alim read

  Thirty-Five

  Harry and I hoof it toward the parking lot at

  Thirty-Six

  It is a sinking feeling leaving Katia like this, alone

  Thirty-Seven

  The black SUV was parked at the curb around the

  Thirty-Eight

  Judgment day had finally arrived. Yakov Nitikin had made his

  Thirty-Nine

  Just before seven in the evening, Herman and I meet

  Forty

  As Herman works the lock, I stand at the corner.

  Forty-One

  The uranium projectile suddenly toppled from the muzzle of the

  Forty-Two

  I had just finished shaving when I stepped from the

  Forty-Three

  So what do I tell them?” Thorpe was already on

  Forty-Four

  Two minutes, seńor, to get my men into position at

  Forty-Five

  They had it all wrong. Colombian coffee was all right,

  Forty-Six

  Nitikin went to bed at his usual time, eight o’clock,

  Forty-Seven

  Liquida read the brief account of the fire in the

  Forty-Eight

  Within minutes, three of Alim’s men were overcome by motion

  Forty-Nine

  Alim felt the steel sides of the cargo container shudder

  Fifty

  This morning as Herman and I step out of the

  Fifty-One

  Liquida spent almost forty minutes trolling the San José neighborhood

  Fifty-Two

  Yakov woke to the sound of a train, the diesel

  Fifty-Three

  He stepped away for a moment.” The interpreter looked at

  Fifty-Four

  As he marched toward his car, Liquida knew the Arab

  Fifty-Five

  As Realtors will tell you, location is everything. For us,

  Fifty-Six

  Unfortunately the Gulfstream had everything on board but an in-flight

  Fifty-Seven

  It was edging up toward ten o’clock at night by

  Fifty-Eight

  Listen, thank him for us. How many units are they

  Fifty-Nine

  So they have no idea where the truck is headed?”

  Sixty

  In the late nineties, politicians eager to pocket million-dollar speaking

  Sixty-One

  After spending millions of dollars of his government’s money, Alim

  Sixty-Two

  From the middle of the bench seat in the U-Haul

  Sixty-Three

  After separating from the cargo carrier, the rental truck continued

  Sixty-Four

  I look at Herman as the truck begins to slow.

  Sixty-Five

  Alim opened the passenger-side door to the truck and climbed

  Sixty-Six

  I am sliding sideways under the truck so I can

  Sixty-Seven

  Herman finally realizes that what he needs is leverage. He

  Sixty-Eight

  It took a few days for the dust to settle.

  Sixty-Nine

  Tonight Liquida was back at the auto-body shop where he

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Steve Martini

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  To the drug lords of the Tijuana cartel, the man was an urban myth—and the cops were singing off the same page. According to the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, the assassin referred to in scattered press reports as the “Mexecutioner” did not exist.

  To hear them tell it, the killer was a figment of the “button boys’” imaginations, the teenage hoodlums who fueled the violence in the rampaging narco zone near the border, where rumors of his five-figure contracts were threatening to raise the city’s minimum wage for death.

  It is true, these kids were illiterate and violent. They came from the barren Baja and the meager villages of Sinaloa, out of the mountains of Chihuahua, all looking for the same things: opportunity if they could get it, survival if they could not. They lived in banged-up sea containers and the tar paper barrios that dotted the hillsides around the city, and eked out an existence by offering their lethal services to the narco trade.

  Get crosswise with this commerce and for a few thousand pesos an
d your car’s license number for identification, these kids would find you. They’d speed through the city on motorbikes with the silenced muzzle of a Mac-10 poking them in the ass down the back of their pants. They would twist the bike’s throttle with one hand and use the other to blow your brains all over the inside of your nice new Lexus.

  To these concrete cowboys, the Mexecutioner was not only real, they knew him by a different name for the soundless way he took his victims, and always at night. He was like the mountain of water rising from the darkness, washing his victim from a tranquil beach, a kind of unexpected, rough wave—muerte líquida, “liquid death.”

  The fact was, he liked it. It was a name that appealed to his dark sense of humor, so much so that at times he even used it on hotel registries—“M. Liquida,” though always with discretion. He played variations on the theme when abroad. For travel in the U.S. he possessed a credit card in the name of J. Waters.

  The house was located on a tree-lined lane in a neighborhood of large, expensive homes. Many of these could only properly be called estates. The one in question was the black swan of the area, run-down and in need of repair. Or so it looked. It sat back from the road, perhaps sixty yards, behind a wrought-iron gate. The house overlooked the Pacific Coast Highway and the town of Del Mar, California. It had an unobstructed view of the ocean in the distance, and in daylight you could see the beach, perhaps a mile away.

  A seven-foot fence, made up of hundreds of black anodized metal stakes, each topped by a sharp spearlike finial, surrounded the entire property. This seemed out of place. It was too much fence and far too expensive for the dilapidated structure that sat behind it.

  The only opening in the fence was the main gate out to the street. It was remotely controlled. He had seen the owner’s car come and go. The gate automatically opened and closed behind him each time. There were no guards and no dogs and very few visitors. In fact, during all the hours he had watched the house, he had not seen one, only a few Federal Express and UPS delivery vans.

  The fence itself was not electrified. There were none of the small yellow signs showing black bolts of electricity that warned people not to touch it. Only in America would you spend thousands of dollars installing an expensive electrical security system and then warn intruders not to harm themselves.

  Liquida scurried along the ground just outside the fence, moving through the darkness, a vaporous, fleeting image that seemed not to leave a shadow.

  A broken wooden balustrade across the back deck of the house leaned out, as if it was about to topple into the garden below. A shutter on one of the tall side windows hung askew. It seemed to dangle from a single hinge. Some of the wooden shingles were missing from the roof, and the exterior was in need of fresh paint.

  He smiled at the ingenuity of it. Anyone cruising the neighborhood looking for a place to rob would certainly not pick this one. But the people who hired him had sent photographs, interior and exterior, close-ups, along with a diagram of the floor plan inside. Where they had gotten these he did not know, nor did he care, as long as they were accurate.

  He slipped seamlessly through the line of bushes outside the fence, careful not to make contact with any of the iron bars.

  He checked the fence one last time for signs of contact sensors. He looked for the small gray plastic conduit that might contain wires. These could carry signals to the house and an alarm system. This was the third time he had checked the fence and the ground under it. By now he was certain there were no wires and no conduit to carry them.

  The security system for the grounds relied entirely on the motion sensors deployed in the yard, nearer the house. He had discovered the location of two of these on his first visit ten days earlier. In the middle of the night, he threw several large clods of compacted dirt over the fence. Each time he waited to see what would happen. Finally, after several tosses, lights went on in the house. Ten minutes later a small sedan with a security company logo on the door showed up. They checked the yard but found nothing. The motion sensors had been adjusted to levels of low tolerance. A small bird landing near one of the sensors in the yard might not set it off. A crow flapping its wings and bouncing around on the ground probably would.

  Over the next week he set about taking down the motion sensors. For this he used more than a dozen cats, strays he collected during the day from streets and alleys downtown. He transported them in cardboard boxes in the back of his car at night. He baited the cats with nip and then threw small weighted bags of catnip as far as he could toward the house. Then he released a cat through the fence.

  Each time the lights in the house went on, followed a few minutes later by the arrival of the small white security sedan. When the guard saw the cat he laughed, turned, and headed back to the gate and his car. A minute or two later the lights in the house went out.

  He did this for five nights running, each time in the wee hours, until finally one night the lights in the house did not go on. And security never showed up. The motion sensors had been turned off, at least until they could be adjusted for bigger game. It was a funny thing about human nature; it almost always operated to the detriment of the flawed creatures possessing it.

  Three nights earlier, working from the back side of the fence and using gloved hands, he propped a large leaf from a magnolia tree in front of the lens of the single security camera that covered this side of the house. He carefully wedged the leaf into the hinged camera mounting so that it looked as if gravity or the wind might have stuck it there.

  After three days, the fact that no one had removed it told him what he needed to know. There was no active monitoring of the cameras. The system was probably a continuous feed, analog or digital, it didn’t matter. It would be reviewed only if there was an incident, at which time all they would see was a close-up of a leaf.

  TWO

  The upstairs study was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and heavy beams, two stories high. An antique iron spiral staircase led to the catwalk on the second level. Dark wood paneling and custom wood cabinets with little drawers lined the walls on both levels. Each drawer was locked and labeled with a neat printed card slipped into a brass holder and listing the contents. There were hundreds of them. It was from this room that Emerson Pike ran his business, Pike’s Peak, investments in rare coins and precious metals. He had turned a small fortune in the last several years, especially as the stock market fell and wealthy people looked for tangible ways to invest their money.

  Tonight he sat behind his desk with a certain look of exasperation on his face.

  “Katia, please. You can’t wind yourself into the drapes. Sit down and relax or do something else.”

  “Do what?” She shot an annoyed glance at him and refused to budge from the alcove in the window twenty feet away.

  Katia was bored. Lately the only thing she wanted to talk about was going home, back to Costa Rica. This was the one subject he tried to avoid at all costs. He had hoped that with the meal tonight, and her joy in cooking a typical Costa Rican meal for a few friends, her mind would have been off the subject at least for a few hours. Unfortunately, this was not to be.

  All the guests had left and Katia now toyed with the five-thousand-dollar cashmere curtains, pulling and wrapping them around her body, like a sumptuous evening gown, over the dress she was wearing. She seemed in full Latin pout.

  To anyone keeping tabs, Katia Solaz was Emerson Pike’s latest flame. And she was gorgeous, five foot two, with a body to stop a clock, shimmering black hair, and a smile topped by smoldering eyes that could cause a man’s knees to buckle. She was also twenty-six, young enough to be his granddaughter.

  This invariably invited glares of disapproval in restaurants whenever he and Katia dined out. Emerson enjoyed sticking his thumb in the eye of convention. So eating out with Katia became the high point of his day.

  He would sit in the restaurant next to her with a brazen smile, swallowing up, like a galactic black hole, all the censuring furtive glances. Occasionally, he would set off
a social panic, striking up a conversation with some lady’s husband and sending a nuclear shot of adrenaline through her heart by introducing him to Katia.

  But as they say, for every silver lining there is a black cloud, and for Katia it was her moods. Mercurial did not begin to cover them.

  Emerson had seen this often enough during the last five weeks that by now he thought he knew and understood her motivations well. In fact, he had no clue. Emerson thought that in Katia’s perfect universe, the woman always had both hands in the guy’s pockets, frog-marching him down the street like a human debit card toward the nearest ATM.

  In fact, Katia had little or no interest in his money as long as she had enough to survive. Katia had never known her father. There had never been an older male figure in her life. For this reason she enjoyed being with Emerson and caring for him. But she had come to California with a different agenda—education. Katia was interested in the colleges and universities in the area, if not for undergraduate studies then in hopes of one day pursuing a graduate degree in the States. And if Emerson was willing to help her financially, Katia would not say no.

  Emerson had his own reasons for bringing her here to his house, and none of them had to do with sex or some latter-day search for the fountain of youth. Katia had become the cheese in the trap. It was as simple as that.

  Perhaps “simple” was not the right term. Because lately she was asking a lot more questions, most of them arriving at the same point—when would they be going back to Costa Rica?

  He kept putting her off, trying to distract her with various forms of entertainment. As long as she was smiling and having fun, he thought, she wouldn’t ask to leave. To Emerson it was a test of his skills. If he was compelled to resort to force, it would be a clear indication that he was slipping, a warning that he had lost his mastery of the dark arts, the darkest of which was always deception.

  “What are you working on?” She twisted herself into the drapes and leaned so that her weight, petite as she was, hung from the rod overhead.

  Emerson was certain she would rip the curtain from under the valance. “Those are very expensive,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “The drapes.”

  “So? I am worth it, no?”

  He glanced at her, not exactly angry, but with paternal charm.

  Katia gave him one of those mischievous, dimpled smiles. She was playing it to the hilt tonight.