Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

He punched up the magnification on one of the images. The old man’s skinny body and spindly legs, the wiry cords in his neck, and the texture of his leathered face consumed the screen. Honeycutt adjusted the contrast, softening the stark lines between sunlight and shadow. The old guy was wearing camo-cargo pants cut off at the knees and left to fray. He looked ragged and unkempt. Except for the intense expression in his eyes, you might judge him to be forlorn. There was several days’ worth of beard growth on his face and he was wearing a pair of scuffed black leather boots, the kind you might find in an army surplus store. There were no socks showing above the leather tops. His feet were probably bare inside the boots and the shoes looked too large and clunky for such frail and skinny legs.

Wherever the pictures were taken, it must have been chilly. The old man was zipped up almost to his chin in a faded weather-worn military fatigue jacket. One of the others was tarped in a blanket, Indian style, that hung around his shoulders. They all had on sweaters or jackets. Looking at the terrain, Honeycutt suspected that the temperature might be the result of altitude.

He was wondering why anyone would be willing to spend so much money processing what appeared to be ordinary photographs of six men in ragged clothes somewhere in the wilderness. Enhancing their resolution and enlarging them to near poster size with the clarity requested in Emerson Pike’s e-mail would cost him several thousand dollars. He was just about to log off and return the images to the server when something caught his eye. It was only a few letters in the dappled sunlight, faded print over the breast pocket on the old man’s jacket in one of the pictures, but the letters were Cyrillic.

Honeycutt sat back in the chair for a moment. He studied the complexion of the old man’s face. It was weathered, like tanned leather, but underneath you could tell he was fair skinned. The lack of excess flesh on his face, its sharp angles, gave him almost a Nordic look. What hair was left appeared to have been blond at one time, and might be again if he washed it. Now that he noticed, the old man was different from the other figures in the photographs, all of whom appeared dark complected, perhaps Latin, southern European, or Middle Eastern, he couldn’t be sure.

Honeycutt leaned forward, took the mouse, and drew a flickering box around the area of the lettering on the old man’s chest. He punched up the program, blowing the boxed image to nearly full-screen size. The resolution dipped to a fuzzy haze. The light was not good, but the letters he could see were definitely Cyrillic.

He punched out and reduced back to the original image as he danced the computer’s cursor over the figure, searching for another target. He didn’t find one. He selected one of the other photos and pulled it onto the larger screen. This time the old man was farther away, maybe twenty feet from the camera lens, his body was turned sideways, and his left arm was raised in a gesture, as if making a point.

Honeycutt found what he wanted. He enlarged the view of a shoulder patch. Its colors were muted for combat; frayed at the edges and faded by the sun, it showed an oval wreath of leaves surrounding a central circle. In the center was a round shield. A perpendicular sword behind it pointed upward, with two crossed arrows bisecting the center. A smaller patch below it bore the numeral 79.

He hit the keyboard and printed the item, then swung around in his chair and scanned the bookcase behind him looking for an old blue denim three-ring binder. Honeycutt was hoping that he hadn’t tossed it in the trash during one of his exuberant getting-ready-to-retire office cleanup parties.

Liquida picked up one of the gold coins, what collectors called a cob, an irregular hand-stamped Spanish escudo. He flipped it over and noticed the numbers and letters stamped on the other side. From a small book he had taken from Pike’s house the night of the murder, he knew that the coin had been poured and stamped in Lima, Peru, probably three hundred years ago.

He dropped it into the bubbling crucible knowing that he had just dissolved several thousand dollars of its value. The risk of fencing the coins was too great. The authorities would be looking for them in every pawnshop in the country. For this reason he had decided that he could save only one of them, a single coin worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, so rare and valuable that he could not bring himself to destroy it. He set it aside on the table as he continued to work.

Liquida was huddled all alone inside a dingy auto-body shop a few miles north of the Tijuana border station at San Ysidro. It was a front for a “chop shop” owned by an acquaintance, a place where they cut up and sold parts of stolen cars, or changed out VIN numbers if it was a high-end boost destined for some rich mogul in Asia.

For a few dollars, the owner gave Liquida the keys and let him use the chop shop at night when the place was closed.

Liquida stood next to the steel table of a forge, holding the torch in one hand as he fired the bottom of the small crucible with oxygen. He used only an occasional spurt of acetylene to speed things up. He wanted to avoid cutting up the crucible in the process.

Every couple of minutes he dropped a few more coins into the brew. Six shiny small ingots lay steaming in their little molds, cooling on a table a few feet away.

He looked at them admiringly, as if they were freshly baked pies on a windowsill. At the same time he was beginning to understand the saying that being rich doesn’t mean you’re happy.

He goosed the acetylene one more time and tried to digest the latest veiled e-mail from his masters down south. He’d decoded it on the small computer earlier that day. They were beginning to drive him crazy. The latest was another frantic message, this time with another job, more pressing than the last. Of course there would be more money. They gave him a name and an address and again instructions on things to look for after the wet work was done. They had found something on Pike’s laptop, the one Liquida had grabbed that night and sent south in a box filled with plastic packing peanuts, along with the photo from the desk and the woman’s camera.

Liquida informed them that he had not yet had time to cut the head off the serpent. He wished they would make up their minds. They told him the serpent could wait and sent him scurrying to Travelocity for an airplane ticket.

As if this wasn’t enough, Liquida was discovering that killing the woman now locked away inside the female section of the county jail was like dealing with affirmative action, ladies only. If you were a man trying to do the deed, you had to go to the back of the line and wait.

If she were in the men’s side of the jail, she would have been dead four times by now. A single phone call to a number in Tijuana by nine in the morning and she would have been suicided all alone in her cell before noon.

But the women’s jail was something else. This would require him to make his own arrangements directly with some angel of suicides at the jail, and Liquida drew the line at this. It was one thing to kill people for a living; it was another to talk directly with some idiot inside a jail about having it done, especially a woman.

If she was facing serious time, she might give Liquida up just to get a little slack on her term. And if she tried to choke the snake and screwed it up, she would roll over on him in a Mexican minute. Liquida would go down for something that he didn’t even dirty his own hands on. This was against his religion.

No, it would have to be done outside the jail, between there and the courthouse.

Fortunately, there was only one jail that took women in San Diego County and it was located almost twenty miles from the courthouse. She could die of old age just getting there on the sheriff’s bus, unless the bus was hit by a train or a spaceship on the way.