Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel

by Steve Martini

  Rhytag tells him about Templeton’s disability. “Seems bright, a decent enough guy. Given the fact that we’ve told him next to nothing, I suppose we’re lucky that he’s cooperating with us at all.”

  “You may change your mind after you read this,” said Howard.

  The telephone on the side table behind Howard rings.

  “Here, take a look.” She hands Rhytag some pages of the surveillance transcript as she swivels in her chair to get the phone.

  He reads for a few seconds. “Son of a bitch!”

  “What is it?” said Thorpe.

  “That little sucker, that moral pygmy, sold us out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s angry because we won’t talk to him. It was Templeton who invited the defense to file the motion to get the photographs. He told them to do it now. Guess he figures that’s going to smoke us out and give him some information. That little prick! He forced us into court before we could get the surveillance up and running. Damn it to hell,” said Rhytag.

  “Maybe we should tell him everything we’ve got,” said Thorpe. “Stink up his case and let the state court dismiss it.”

  “Serve him right,” said Rhytag. “If it wasn’t such an abuse of justice, I’d call him on the phone right now and read him the transcript and record the telephone conversation.”

  Howard hung up the phone and turned back to the table. “She’s here. I told them to send her in.”

  “Good,” said Rhytag.

  A couple of seconds later one of the secretaries opened the door to the conference room. In walked a young woman in running shoes, shorts, and a T-shirt. Her hair was disheveled, and she looked somewhat sweaty.

  “Please excuse my appearance,” said Daniela Perez. “I thought it might look suspicious if I changed my routine at the jail to shower and clean up this early in the day.”

  Thorpe made the introductions since he was the one who’d made the assignment.

  Daniela’s true name was Carla Mederios. She was born in Panama in the old Canal Zone to a Colombian mother and an American father. Her dad was an officer in the Army Corp of Engineers. He was killed before her eyes when Carla was fifteen years old. They had been shopping in Panama City when her father was taken by rampaging Panamanian thugs, one of the so-called dignity brigades. He was hacked to pieces by machetes, and his body dragged through the streets. It was a month before the U.S. invasion of Panama and the capture of Manuel Noriega.

  Carla moved with her mother to Colombia and remained there until she returned to the United States for college.

  It was no surprise that she spoke fluent Spanish. She was also an honors graduate of Pepperdine University, in Los Angeles. After college she spent four years as a lieutenant in a U.S. Army Ranger battalion, two of them in combat in Afghanistan. It was there that she gained the artwork on her body and learned how to deal with unruly people in showers.

  She returned from the military and studied law at the University of Virginia, where she graduated second in her class.

  Mederios turned down four six-figure job offers from major law firms in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and instead went to Quantico, Virginia, where she trained to become an FBI agent. For the last three years she’d worked undercover, both in the United States and abroad. She was now considered one of the foremost female agents in the bureau, the reason she’d been picked for this assignment.

  “Agent Mederios, have a seat, please.” Rhytag offered her the chair next to him.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said.

  “Where does she think you are right now?” said Thorpe.

  “I told her I had a meeting with my lawyer. After all, I didn’t want to lie to her,” said Mederios. “She thinks I’m at the jail, in one of the conference rooms. Tomorrow we’re going to court together. I’d take her shopping and out to lunch, but we don’t have enough time.” Even Rhytag laughs at this. “She thinks I have a court appearance. I figured I’d put myself on the bus with her and we could talk.”

  “Have you gotten anything out of her so far?” said Rhytag.

  “I’ve built up some goodwill,” said Carla. “I let her beat me at gin rummy three days running. If you saw us together you’d swear I was her Doberman, on a leash, growling at the gangbangers. But she’s reluctant to talk about her case. Her lawyer has filled her head with anxieties about trusting people in jail.”

  “She told you this?” said Thorpe.

  “Right out of her lawyer’s handbook,” said Carla. “He told her not to discuss it with anyone, and she listens to him. To hear her tell it, the man walks on water.”

  “This would be Mr. Madriani?” says Howard.

  “I don’t know his last name. There are two of them. She calls them Paul and Harry.”

  “When you say he walks on water, does it look like the normal lawyer-client relationship or do you think there might be something going on on the side?” said Howard.

  “You mean a threesome with her lawyers? Now that would be kinky,” said Carla.

  “I’m talking about Madriani. That would be the Paul half of the partnership. Do you think she and the lawyer might have been having an affair?”

  “There hasn’t been any heavy breathing that I’ve heard.”

  “Keep your ear to the ground,” said Rhytag.

  “One thing is certain, she’s scared. I don’t think she’s ever been in jail before. She’s a little naive. If I were doing an evil deed, she’s not someone I’d pick to do covert work.”

  “That may not be how it went down,” said Thorpe. “She may have been enticed up here by the victim without knowing the reason.”

  “You mean Pike.”

  “Correct,” said Thorpe. “When she realized what was happening with the photographs, she knew enough about Nitikin to know she was in trouble. So she had to get the photographs back.”

  “And to do that she ended up having to kill Pike, is that it?”

  “It’s possible,” said Thorpe.

  “The prosecutor seems to think she had some help,” said Howard.

  “We know she drugged Pike,” said Thorpe. “One of our agents got a glance at a toxicology report. So she’s not as innocent as she looks. Keep one eye open when you sleep.”

  “I’ll try to get her to talk about the case, but—”

  “Forget the case,” said Thorpe. “Get her to talk about her life down in Costa Rica, her family. About her parents, particularly her mother. Share some intimate details with her about your own family. Nothing real. Make it up. Get her reminiscing about life on the outside.”

  “We know now that it was her mother who took the photographs,” said Howard. “We need to know where the pictures were taken and where her maternal grandfather is.”

  “Yakov Nitikin. I read the file,” said Carla. “If she’s involved in the way you think she is, she’s not going to tell me anything about Nitikin.”

  “She may give you a clue. It depends on who she thinks you are,” said Thorpe. “If she gets in trouble again and she has nobody to lean on but you, and she trusts you, she may.”

  “Just an idea,” said Rhytag. “I take it that after the fight in the shower there are hard feelings on the part of some of the other women.”

  “That’s an understatement.” Carla laughed. “It’s why I needed the weapon. I wasn’t excited about the idea of fending off eight or ten of them if they got me cornered somewhere out of sight of the guards. But if I have to pull the Walther, I’m going to be out of there. It’ll blow my cover. It’s one thing to have a zip gun. It’s another to have a three-eighty with a full magazine.”

  “Given your attire I’m curious as to where it is right now,” said Thorpe.

  “You don’t want to know,” said Carla.

  “The sheriff wasn’t keen on a loaded handgun in his jail. I was advised that it’s against state law,” said Thorpe. “He told me that if you got caught with it, my ass was grass, because neither he nor any of his people knew anything about it, including the guard who slipped it into the towels for you. So if I lose my pension, you owe me.”

  “Semper fi,’” said Carla. “I knew you’d bee
n in the marines too long to let one of your troops go tits up in a county jail.”

  Howard looked at her, wide eyed.

  “Excuse my language,” said Carla. “I’ve been undercover too long.”

  Thorpe laughed.

  “So here’s the deal.” Rhytag was ignoring them. “Solaz is bottled up in jail on a murder charge with gangbangers who, after the brawl in the shower, would stick a shiv in her in a heartbeat. So if you aren’t around to protect her, she’s got problems, right?”

  “I hope you’ve thought about that,” said Carla.

  “We have,” said Rhytag. “She’s not in any danger. We’re keeping a close eye on her. Father Protector, the guard who slipped you the gun, has her on a special assignment in the jail dispensary while you’re here. We’re not going to let anything happen to her.

  “But in the meantime,” said Rhytag, “there’s no reason we can’t put all that fear to work for us. Here’s how we do it. Tell Solaz that your lawyer pulled some strings with somebody he knows at the jail. They’re thinking about transferring you someplace else. Tell her it’s the honor farm. If you’re right about her, and she hasn’t been inside before, she’s not going to know the difference. Tell her it’s a place where they let inmates go when they think they can trust them, and it’s much better than the jail. Tell her you already talked to your lawyer and there’s a chance he might be able to have Solaz transferred with you. The problem is, to do this your lawyer needs a lot of personal and family background information to make sure she qualifies, so that when your lawyer goes to pull all the levers, it’s not going to blow up in his face. He needs to know all the places she’s lived, where her family is from, all the places they’ve lived, go back at least three generations. Take notes. You need to know whether any of her family members going back that far have ever been in any trouble with the law in any of the countries where they lived.”

  “This honor farm has high standards,” said Thorpe.

  “Platinum Diners Club only,” said Rhytag. “You need to have any information her family has ever given her in this regard. Tell her that in most other countries, the government in the United States is able to check records, so she has to be sure to tell you everything she knows. If your lawyer finds something in the records that she hasn’t told you about, he’s going to think she’s hiding something and she’s going to be off the invitation list at the honor farm. In which case, when you leave she’s going to be left behind all alone to entertain the angry women you pissed off in the shower.”

  “What if she wants to discuss it with her lawyer?” said Carla.

  “Tell her she can’t. Because if she does, her lawyer is going to want to talk to the people at the jail. If he does it’s going to result in both you and your lawyer getting in a lot of trouble. You put her in the pit of divided loyalties,” said Rhytag. “You came to her rescue; she’s not going to want to get you in trouble. Besides, all she has to do is give you the family background and you’ll take care of the rest. Otherwise you won’t be able to play cards with each other much longer. If she doesn’t deliver up the family tree immediately, let her look around at all the angry faces for a day or two and then tell her time is running out, you need the information or she may wake up one morning soon and you’ll be gone.”

  “You’re cold,” said Carla.

  “That’s how you survive in an ugly world,” he told her. “Think of it this way. The minute she mentions Grandpa Nitikin’s name as a survivor, you take her by the hand, call the guard, go out to the front of the jail. We’ll have agents from the bureau pick both of you up in a nanosecond and we’ll put her in a private suite in the federal tower downtown so we can talk to her.”

  “Yeah, right, with the lights on day and night and the room temperature moving from the Arctic to the Sahara every half hour,” said Carla.

  “What can I say? The world is a dangerous place,” said Rhytag.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Liquida was tired. He had spent nearly a week on the Mexican side of the border assembling the arms and munitions and observing war games in the desert east of Tijuana. He was still picking sand out of his teeth. While the men practiced, Liquida watched from a distance with a pair of field glasses.

  There were seven trigger men, the oldest twenty-two, plus an expert with explosives who was in his mid-thirties. They were all handpicked and in good shape.

  Only one of them, the demolition guy, knew that Liquida was involved. He and Liquida met each day to discuss how the training and preparations were going. As far as the others knew, it was the explosives man who was hiring them all. In fact, the money for everything, the men, the munitions, and the guns, had come from Liquida’s employer down in Colombia.

  The first day of training went fast. Teaching the seven button boys to use the inexpensive Chinese AK-47 knockoffs took less than half a day. The high-velocity Russian rounds of the AK would pass right through anything without ceramic plates behind it. The two, or possibly three, key targets might be wearing Kevlar vests, but they would not have combat armor.

  Two days were spent on explosives training. This involved the shaping and placement of small charges, the use of detonators and high-yield detonation cord if it was needed to take off locks or cut through steel hinges. Liquida’s explosives expert would do most of this work, but some familiarity with it by the others was essential in case he was wounded or killed in the early going.

  The last day was spent on what high-tech American police called dynamic entry. In the law enforcement world, this type of training took far more time, but Liquida’s small army had a big advantage. Unlike the police, they didn’t have to worry about collateral damage. If they killed a dozen people getting in, it didn’t matter as long as they got the right one before they left.

  For training they used an old school bus that Liquida had purchased from a junkyard in Tijuana and had towed out into the desert.

  For cover, each man in the assault group was given a photograph. It was a mug shot from the Mexican Judicial Police of one of the female mules who carried drugs across the border for the Tijuana cartel. From all appearances she was small fry, not of sufficient importance or risk to be transported to court in one of the sheriff’s small vans. She was forty-one years old. She had been arrested in San Diego, housed at Las Colinas for seven months, and was now in her second day of a jury trial. For this reason, Liquida knew that she would be on the bus that morning. Whoever got to her first was to eliminate her with two head shots and drop her photograph on the floor by her seat.

  The real target, whose face Liquida’s men had all memorized, was to be killed by accident in an apparent cross fire using a gun from one of the dead guards on the bus. While the shooters were doing this, the explosives man was to place three charges connected by det cord along the dash in the front of the bus, from the steering wheel to the passenger door. This would take out the front of the bus and with it the security video recorder, destroying any tape that might have recorded the sequence of events on board.

  If all went as planned, they would be off the bus in less than two minutes and on their way to the safe house where they would hide. Once things cooled down, the men could cross the border back into Mexico.

  “When do you think we can go?” Katia was talking about the honor farm.

  “Maybe as early as next week, maybe sooner,” said Daniela.

  Today the bus was more than half empty, not enough for a full load, but too many for the smaller vans. The driver and the guard were still shackling two of the women up front to the foot bar that kept them from moving around inside the bus. There were no windows except for small oblong strips of glass up high, near the ceiling, for light.

  Katia, who suffered from claustrophobia, didn’t like it. She sat next to Daniela on the inside of the bench seat, against the wall where the window should have been. They were two rows from the rear of the bus.

  Katia didn’t know what she would do if she lost her friend. Before Daniela showed up at the jail, Katia had lived each day in constant fear. Now she faced the prospect of having to deal
with it again. Only this time she knew it would be much worse.

  This morning she and Daniela were chained together at the waist, each with one ankle also manacled to the metal bar that was welded near the floor to the back of the empty bench seat in front of them.

  “You look like this is your first time on the bus,” said Daniela.

  Katia nodded. “When they brought me out from the courthouse when I was first arrested and saw the judge downtown, they took me to the jail in the back of a sheriff’s car.”

  “We’re lucky,” said Daniela.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Male prisoners normally have their hands cuffed and fastened to the waist chain. Sometimes the women too.” Daniela knew this was standard operating procedure. “These two guards are pretty nice. It looks like they’re not going to cuff our hands until we get to the courthouse.”

  “We can talk later today, when we get back,” said Katia. “I need to write down everything you need. Maybe you can help me. I’m not good at writing in English. I don’t want you to leave the jail for this other place without me.”

  “I won’t.” Daniela could see that Katia was both excited and scared.

  “I think I can give you everything you need. My mother, my cousin; my father is dead, so he doesn’t count, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” said Daniela, “just surviving relatives. But you have to go back as far as your grandparents.”

  “No problem. And I don’t think my lawyers would mind. I’m sure that if they knew you the way I do, they would tell me to go ahead.”

  “Yes, but I told you, you can’t discuss it with them,” said Daniela. “You understand?”

  “I won’t,” said Katia. “I promise you. I would never do anything to get you in trouble. It is our secret, just you and me.”

  “I know. I’m just a little nervous.”

  “Are you sure your lawyer can do this? Get us to this honor place, I mean?”

  “The honor farm.” Daniela nearly cringed as she said it.

  “Yes, that’s what I meant, the honor farm. You think he can do it?”