Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

“Is that where it was the last time you saw it?” I ask. “On the desk?”

“Yes.” But as she says this, a dark expression crosses her face.

“The police found a set of latent fingerprints on the dagger’s handle,” says Harry. “Guess who they belong to?”

“No. No. No-no.” Frantic eyes, Katia looking first at Harry, then back to me. “No.” As if by saying it enough times she can make the dagger and the prints vanish. For several seconds she seems to struggle for breath. One hand to her stomach, as if Harry’s words have squeezed every ounce of air from her lungs, like a bellows.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Please. I can esplain.” She reaches out and touches Harry’s arm. He steps back, away from the chair. “You misunderstand. Listen to me, please.”

In thirty years of practicing law, Harry has heard it all, so why not? “Go ahead.”

“Es true, I picked it up. I would have told you. I forgot.”

“The dagger?” says Harry.

“Yes. But it’s not what you think. I picked it up to put it on top of the note. I told you about it, remember? I wrote to Emerson that night, a short note, telling him I took the coins and not to follow me.”

“Yes.”

“I left the note on Emerson’s desk, in the study. I picked up the dagger. It was on the desk. I put it on top of the note to hold it there. So he would find the note, that’s all.”

“A paperweight.”

“Yes.” She nearly jumps out of her skin, pointing at me as I say the words.

“Essactly,” she says. “I used it to make a paperweight. Do you understand? That’s how my fingerprints got on it. Don’t you see?” She looks at me and then back to Harry with pleading eyes. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

Harry thinks about it for a moment. He fixes her with a long and uncomfortable stare, and then glances over the top of his glasses at me. “What do you think?” He’s asking me.

Before I can answer, Harry does it himself. “A paperweight for a nonexistent note, one you say you left at the scene, but the cops never found.” He gives her one of his sardonic smiles. “Do you have any idea what the police would have done if you told them that the day they arrested you?”

Katia swallows hard. “No.” From her expression, if Harry told her “summary execution” she would believe it.

“They’d still be laughing,” he says. “Do you know what that means?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“That the police sometimes don’t know the truth when they hear it.”

Alim Afundi longed for the arid Zagros Mountains of his homeland and for the village of his father. He wondered if he would ever see his home again. He knew he would never see his parents. Both had been killed two years earlier in an errant attack by American warplanes while visiting relatives near the border with Iraq. The mighty Satan called the accident “collateral damage” and dismissed it as part of the unfortunate cost of peacekeeping.

And for now Afundi and his comrades remained on another continent half a world away.

It was nearly a year since their escape from America ’s fenced fortress at Guantanamo Bay. This word, “ Guantanamo,” was one they had never heard or known of until they achieved their freedom. In the months that he and his men had been held, there had been no visits from international groups or others representing the prisoners. Afundi’s American captors had seeded rumors within the prison that they were on the American mainland in a place called Florida, surrounded by swamps and shark-infested seas, and from which there was no way home.

There had been a few attempts at escape, but as far as Afundi knew, he and his comrades, six of them, were the only freedom fighters thus far to succeed. They cut through wire, tunneled under fences, and waded through swamps until, exhausted and lost, they stumbled into a group of armed military men.

Despondent, believing they had been recaptured, Afundi tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist with a small blade from a razor. But he was saved by two of the men in green fatigues. It wasn’t until later, when Afundi’s own counsel general visited him in the hospital, that he realized that the men who saved him were Cuban soldiers, and that the American prison fortress was itself an island in the middle of a Cuban sea. Had his freedom fighters known it, Afundi believed they would have stormed the fences in the American compound even in the face of machine-gun fire.

For weeks Afundi and his men remained as guests of the Cuban government, feted and entertained, waiting for the propaganda coup of their escape to be unveiled to the world. But this never came. The Americans, it seemed, were too embarrassed to admit their own incompetence, and therefore disclosed nothing regarding the escape to their own press. Afundi was then certain that the Cubans would disclose it in concert with his own government. But strangely they did not.

Instead, six weeks after their escape from Guantanamo, Afundi and his men, along with an interpreter, boarded a Cuban military plane and flew west, away from the island and farther from their homeland, toward a rendezvous with armed allies in the mountains of Colombia. They carried twenty million dollars in cash from their own government and were told that they would receive their orders for their next mission as well as the training necessary to carry it out from the people in Colombia. The small area of that country, tucked up against the Pacific Ocean on the western approach to the Isthmus of Panama, had been controlled since the 1960s by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC.

Alim had learned much from his FARC hosts in the months he and his men had been with them. The organization operated within Colombia as a kind of government in exile. The FARC possessed an informal alliance with his own country as well as other nations. They participated in a complex web of international connections and subnational associations. These included people’s governments on nearly every continent, freedom fighters such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels that, along with kidnapping for ransom, the FARC used to derive most of its funding.

The relationships were complicated, but for Alim and his men it reduced down to a single common goal shared by all: the desire to annihilate the Great Satan, to eliminate the power of the American regime so as to shake its grip once and for all on the rest of the world.

To Alim, that the devil should die because of its warfare and interference in the affairs of others should come as no surprise. The irony was in the fact that after launching successive wars over oil in the Middle East, it should meet its fate because of a war on drugs launched in its own backyard, a war that most had already forgotten about.

In the 1980s and early ’90s the Americans had linked arms with the Colombian government in a decade-long war to drive drug traffickers from Colombian soil. The Americans succeeded, only to have the cartels reappear in an equally violent form in Mexico, directly across its own border in places with names that Afundi could barely pronounce, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

The proximity of these forces to the huge amounts of money and armies of violence at their command had now caused Satan to try to wall himself in.

The Americans had planted new listening posts abroad in an effort to revive their human intelligence networks. They used technology to listen in on telephones and to read e-mail. But with all of this they were now more vulnerable than ever before. They had done nothing to alleviate the anger of millions, which carried on its wings the threat that soon Satan would face something he could not even begin to comprehend.