Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

Liquida never used cell phones. They were far too dangerous. Even dynastic drug lords thought to be immortal were visited by death from the sky, found charred and frozen, their ears gone, but with one of the tiny plastic phones melted to the side of their head.

Instead Liquida maintained no less than twenty different e-mail addresses, each under a separate alias and all of them free-Hotmail, Yahoo, and a dozen more. The best, the most protected, were operated by overseas providers, in places where the reach of the U.S. government was limited or, better yet, nonexistent. He would contact employers on a regular basis and they would reply.

He used each address only once, and discarded each daily, like underwear. He alternated among providers to make it difficult for the government to set him up, to track his movements, or to read his mail.

To mask the messages he used encryption, not the stuff for e-mail that came loaded on your home computer, but custom made. In Liquida’s world, paranoia was an acquired discipline. This meant that the keys to almost all commercial encryption software were already in the possession of the American government.

He hired a gentleman in Guadalajara who fashioned the encoding software from complex algorithms. After that the man destroyed the master key to prevent anyone else from getting at it. Liquida knew this because he’d watched him do it, thirty seconds before he killed the man, cutting his throat and torching every inch of his office with gasoline.

After Pike’s murder and the disappearance of the woman, there was relative silence for a time. This changed abruptly with the news of the woman’s arrest. According to Liquida’s contact, the go-between who had acted on behalf of higher-ups to commission the job, the inefficiency with which it was done was now threatening ominous results.

While Liquida was not told why this was a problem, he was told that people would soon be asking questions about Pike and his background. He knew very little about the old man.

Pike’s documents were still unaccounted for. The one he produced was on its way to them by DHL along with the old man’s computer.

But the most ominous problem, the one that caused him to stay up nights wondering if they might soon be issuing another commission, this time on his own life, was their unbridled anger over the woman’s arrest. Either she was important or she wasn’t. If she was critical to their plan, they should have told him this, in which case he would have arranged it so that she could not escape.

The answer came in an encrypted e-mail message five minutes later. He took the message from one of the computers inside the café and downloaded the encoded machine language onto a tiny thumb drive plugged into the computer’s USB port. Then he erased the message from the in-box, removing it from the most obvious location inside the computer. He knew there would be copies of it in other places, both inside the computer and with the various providers along the ether chain. But this could not be helped and all of the copies were scrambled. And even if someone could read it, unless they knew what they were looking for, they might not understand it.

He removed the thumb drive and retreated to the table outside and his coffee.

From his backpack he removed a small antiquated notebook computer. It was the size of a thin hardcover novel. Somewhat beaten up and worn, it had never once been connected to the Internet or any other computer network. It contained no data of any kind, only the basic operating system and a single user program.

Liquida booted up the computer and punched up the program. He slipped the thumb drive into the single USB port on the back of the machine and pulled up the message. After several clicks on the keyboard the words appeared, not encrypted, but in plain Spanish. As usual, it was brief and, except to the most discerning reader, it would have been completely obscure.

The following is a riddle. See if you can find the solution:

You have released the serpent of coiled and twisting justice. The head is female but with scaled eyes. She does not see, and therefore cannot strike. But beware the thrashing tail. It may turn over rocks not comprehending what is there and snag vines not knowing to what they are attached. It may crawl into places it should not go. Solution: how do you dispatch a serpent?

It was not what Liquida expected. They were not worried because the woman had information she might reveal. She knew nothing. Her eyes were scaled.

He studied the message, and from the lines of the riddle he quickly deduced the problem.

He had driven the woman to the one place he should not have, into the glare of a trial in an American courtroom. It was not what she might say, but what they might discover as a consequence that worried his employers. The serpent’s thrashing tail was the probing investigators and inquisitive American lawyers who would attach themselves to the woman before and during her trial.

Unlike other places it was a process that could not be sedated, put to sleep with bribes. Kill the judge here and it was instant national news. Shoot one of the lawyers and another would take his place before they could remove the body. If you became too obvious, the hammer of the American federal government, with all of the dark forces at its command, would fall on you. Liquida knew that his own employers would kill him long before they allowed that to happen.

He took a deep breath. He had no idea what they were up to, but whatever it was, they now believed it to be in jeopardy because of what he had done. The serpent “may crawl into places it should not go” in the words of the riddle. He had set in motion something neither he nor they could control.

It was by far the largest contract he had ever received. People didn’t pay that kind of money unless what they were doing was substantial and with a high degree of risk. What revelations might be uncovered he had no idea; what’s more, he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know. It was not his business.

What was his business, and the only thing that occupied his mind at the moment, was how to achieve the ultimate message of the e-mail, the answer to the riddle. The way you kill a serpent is by cutting off its head.

The fact that Katia told us about the note first, about writing it and leaving it on Pike’s desk, but never mentioned the dagger is, according to Harry, part of the deeper equation of truth.

“Think about it,” he says.

This morning Harry, I, and Herman Diggs, the investigator we have used for some years now, are inside the yellow police tape that surrounds Emerson Pike’s house on the hill above Del Mar. Herman is inside the house with one of the homicide detectives going over details of the crime scene.

The other homicide detective and a small cadre of uniformed cops stand huddled out near the front gate. Harry has the public defender’s file, including copies of the police and investigative reports from that night and for several days afterward as they processed the scene. Everything has now been transferred to us.

“If she plunged that dagger into Pike’s chest, then I’m a sword swallower and I’ll eat it whole,” says Harry. He is talking softly, under his breath, even though the officers are too far away to hear anything.

“You saw the look on her face. She didn’t know a thing about it. Nothing clicked until I mentioned her fingerprints and then only because she realized she moved the damned thing when she put it on top of the note.”

Harry is preaching to the choir. The entire chain of events leading up to and surrounding the murders reeks of contrivance. I had decided to take the case long before that point. Katia reminded me of my daughter. I could see Sarah caught up in circumstances in a foreign country, and I wondered if anyone would put out a helping hand. Katia had felt trapped and I knew it, though Harry did not.