Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

“The old man’s on the lam,” says Harry.

“Uh-huh. Pike sees the photographs of the mother’s last trip, gets all excited, and immediately hustles Katia off to the States where he has her calling home every day-asking where Mama is and when’s she coming back.”

“So Pike was looking for Mr. Nitikin, assuming Grandpa’s still alive,” says Harry. “And you think Pike was killed because of that?”

“Two murders made to look like a badly botched larceny, gold coins and pawn tickets on Katia when they catch her, but none of the rest of the missing coins. The computer, the one the cops didn’t find at Pike’s house, it was a laptop,” I tell Harry. “Katia saw it. He had it with him in Costa Rica. He used it to download the Colombian photographs from her camera without her knowledge. Katia saw it on his desk the night she left, and unless she killed him, and I don’t think she did, she was right as rain to run, because she got out of that house half a beat ahead of whoever did.”

“Hand me that binder,” says Harry.

He wants the document binder from the shelf, the one I had just opened. I hand it to him and Harry riffles through it. He finds what he wants.

“Six photographic prints, eight by ten,’” Harry is reading this to me. “It’s the property inventory sheet from when they took her into custody in Arizona,” he says. “The prints she took back from Pike that night. They were in her bag when they arrested her.”

“We need to get copies of those photographs yesterday,” I tell him.

Ten en after seven in the morning and Zeb Thorpe was already sweating. “Make it fast. I’ve got a full day, starting with the director, in twenty minutes. That means you got ten.”

In his sixties, craggy faced, a retired marine colonel, this morning Thorpe was pumping enough adrenaline he could have gone toe-to-toe with George Patton and chewed the stars off his helmet.

As the FBI’s executive assistant director for the National Security Branch, he headed up four separate divisions: Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, the Directorate of Intelligence, and the WMD Directorate. All of these had either been created or drastically reorganized as a result of the move toward homeland security.

Today he had a complete dance card, first a full-dress briefing with his boss, the latest and momentary head of the FBI. Then the two of them would spend their afternoon dodging bullets and bricks from the political drive-by mob on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most of the members of the panel had one thing on their minds-making the bureau and, in particular, the new acting director, look like crap. It was the second day of Senate confirmation hearings on his boss’s nomination and Thorpe already knew the man wasn’t going to survive.

Yesterday, before the midafternoon break, the committee had knocked most of the snot, blood, and brains out of him. And these were people from the president’s own party. They kneed him in the groin before asking him why he wasn’t back in his office phoning the ACLU for rec ommendations on how to fight crime and end terrorism. Today they would try to get him on his back on top of the green-felt-covered witness table where they could properly gut him before calling the White House to send over the next victim.

Why not, they had done it twice in the last six months with other candidates and nobody lifted a finger. It was politics as blood sport. The job of director was becoming a revolving door and it was spinning like a tumbler in a washing machine.

As far as Thorpe was concerned, the political parties that occupied the House and the Senate reminded him of two retarded Siamese gorillas sharing the same brain. Together with their feeders and handlers on Wall Street, they’d spent a decade toying with the national economy, trying to get everybody in the country into houses they couldn’t afford. When this set fire to the national economy, crashing markets, destroying whole industries, and generally torching the entire circus, they tripled the national debt in order to smother the flames with money.

Having solved that problem, the beasts had spent the last seven months lowering the chain on Homeland Security to see what would happen next.

Thorpe’s own staff had an office pool going, taking bets on how long it would be before some group dropped sarin gas in a crowded subway, or lit up an American city with a mushroom cloud and gamma rays. In his more sanguine moments, Thorpe was beginning to wonder why there wasn’t a hunting season on members of Congress.

This morning he was in a particularly foul mood, jowls down to his drawers. Part of the reason was this meeting dropped into his schedule at the last minute by his assistant, Raymond Zink. They were in the small conference room off Thorpe’s office, Zink, the heads of two of the four divisions, and Thorpe.

“We think we may have a problem,” said Zink. “It’s information that came from one of our photo analysts in the lab.”

“What are we talking, surveillance shots?”

“No, sir. A contact outside government sent our analyst some pictures, digital images.”

Thorpe opened the file in front of him on the table.

“What we have are two enlargements received by our man. All the names are in the file. He says that, according to his source, there are six photos in all. The original pictures were sent to a private laboratory for processing by a gentleman in California. An employee at the private lab sent the two enlargements to our man, asking if he could access information from secure bureau databanks, confidential information on personal backgrounds and whatever else he could find.”

“Stop! You’re not gonna tell me the man in our lab did this?” Thorpe couldn’t even conjure up the sea of blood on the floor if Senate Judiciary got a handle on this.

“No,” said Zink.

Thorpe took a deep breath. “Thank God for little favors.”

“Our employee was actually quite discreet. But he was curious,” said Zink, “he took a shot and went on the Internet. He didn’t think he’d find anything because he assumed that the fellow who sent him the stuff, the other lab technician, had probably already checked. But when he pumped in the name of the gentleman from California, the fellow who sent the pictures to the private lab, his computer screen lit up like a pinball machine. The man’s name was Emerson Pike.”

“Was?” said Thorpe.

Zink nodded. “The Internet printouts are in the folder. Why the technician at the private lab didn’t Google the name, we don’t know, but apparently he didn’t, or if he did, he omitted to mention that Emerson Pike was murdered in his home in California, apparently just a few days after he sent the photographs in for processing and analysis.”

Bill Britain, head of the bureau’s Directorate of Intelligence, handed Thorpe a short half page with printed information. “Take a look. It’s a summary of Emerson Pike’s background. We printed out only the headings and high points, but it gives you the picture.”

Thorpe devoured the words on the half-page sheet, then looked up. “All right.”

“It gets more curious,” said Zink. “Our lab man tried to contact his friend at the private lab to give him the news that Pike was dead. When he did he was told that his buddy hadn’t shown up at work for two days and hadn’t called in. What was more disturbing was that his car was in the parking lot, but nobody knew where he was. They told our guy that if the employee didn’t show up by the end of the day or phone in, they were going to call the police and have them check into it. Our man didn’t wait. He turned over what he had to one of our agents.”

“So yesterday,” said Zink, “the agent went over to the private lab, a place called Herrington’s-”