Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

“Tell the agents to look through everything, all documents and physical evidence, whatever the police have. Also anything they seized at the time of this woman’s arrest and anything they found at the scene, or anywhere else, that belonged to her. Oh, and see if the police found any computers at Pike’s house.”

“Good point,” said Britain. “Why didn’t we think of that one earlier? Maybe we can find the digital images Pike sent to the lab. Who knows what else?”

“Tell the agents to keep their eyes peeled for pictures, and be sure and tell them what they’re looking for, an older man in an olive drab fatigue jacket,” said Thorpe. “If they find photos fitting that description, tell them to sit on them and to call here immediately. I don’t want those pictures disappearing again unless we’re the ones doing the vanishing act.”

Thorpe looked at his watch. “Damn it, I got to run, go prop up the human punching bag so he can get the crap kicked out of him again.” Thorpe was packing up his notes, grabbing the file. “Ray, check my calendar, let’s meet again, first opportunity, as soon as we find out what’s in the crime file. And, Herb, you and I still have to talk about the gadget.”

Alim waited in the trees at the edge of the forest for one of his men to return with the information that he wanted. The man in question had been assigned a simple task, to watch Nitikin’s daughter whenever she wandered free in the camp. The man had failed. Because of this, the woman’s photographs of her father, along with Alim and his men, had found their way into the American’s laptop computer and from there to a laboratory for processing in the United States.

Afundi’s first thought was that Nitikin’s daughter was working with the Americans. Together with the interpreter he cornered the Russian and braced him with questions.

Nitikin assured him that his daughter knew nothing, and he wanted it to stay that way. The Russian knew only too well the perils of knowledge. He told Afundi that all she knew was that her father had deserted from the Soviet army many years before. She believed that to be the reason he was in hiding.

To Afundi this made no sense. If desertion from the Soviets was his only reason for hiding, why had Nitikin not gone back to his family in Costa Rica when the Soviet Union ceased to exist? Surely she must have asked her father that same question many times.

By then Afundi realized he himself had asked one too many questions. He could read in Nitikin’s eyes his fear for his daughter. Alim dismissed it all as a misunderstanding. He slapped the old man on the back and told him not to worry, that everything was now fine. But it wasn’t.

Alim and his small troop of escapees from Guantanamo had been selected for the job not because they were trained fighters or because they had any special skills for completing the operation. They were picked because it was Alim who’d delivered the information to his country’s Cuban consul, and from there directly to Alim’s government.

The message that came back was verbal and remained unwritten, but it was clear. Secrecy was vital not only for completion of the operation. It was critical to the republic’s continued existence once the mission was over. The information was to be confined to those who already knew and no one else; this meant Alim and his colleagues with whom he had already shared it. All further contact with Alim’s own government was, under any circumstance, forbidden.

Alim first learned the secret from another old man who was still fighting another war. He was Cuban, and like the old Russian, he was also dying.

Fidel Castro had been curious about the man who’d led the escape from the American compound at Guantanamo. And when Fidel was curious about something he always got answers, or rather others got them for him. As one of the great charismatic leaders of his time, Castro knew that the key to human conduct was motivation, and he wanted to know what motivated Alim Afundi.

He learned that Afundi’s parents, his father a farmer and his mother a peasant, had perished under American bombs. The U.S. government claimed it was an accident. Ordnance dropped from planes flown off the decks of an American aircraft carrier sailing in the Persian Gulf had somehow found its way beyond the Iraqi border, a few hundred yards and onto buildings mistakenly identified as an Al-Qaeda outpost.

Fidel learned that it was this single act of unrequited violence that had transformed the otherwise quiet son of a cattle herder into a fire-breathing freedom fighter, and a mortal enemy of the Great Satan.

He invited Alim to dinner in his private quarters a few days later. The Cuban government had treated Afundi and his men as heroes. Now Alim was told that Castro wanted to honor him personally.

Fidel was no longer the head of the Cuban government. He had long since stepped down because of illness. His graying beard looked thin and a bit withered but his eyes burned with a zeal that Alim had seen only in the fiery gaze of ardent mullahs.

Over food, cigars, and Cuban rum, the last two of which Alim respectfully declined because of his religion, Castro spent the evening regaling his guest with recollections of the revolution, all of this through an interpreter.

Afundi was not wealthy, and in terms of world history he was not well educated. He knew almost nothing of the Cuban revolution. To Castro, who had stood before legions of captive audiences, people ordered to bake in the hot Cuban sun for hours and who had heard it all before, the young, eager face at his dinner table was a clean slate upon which to write.

Castro started where it all began, with the failed assault on the Moncada barracks in his youth, before he knew what it was to be a revolutionary. He told Alim about his capture along with his brother Rául and their imprisonment and of their later journey to Mexico to train for the coming revolution. He talked about the return to the island with a force of fewer than a hundred men and the ambush by Batista’s militia that had nearly wiped them out.

“It is why you never leave an adversary breathing and aboveground when you fight a war. They had two opportunities to kill me, one in prison, which they passed up, and the second in the ambush, when they missed,” Castro told him.

To Alim, the man may have been old and in ill health, but you would not have known it from the stamina he exhibited that night. The gathering lasted nearly twelve hours. It did not end until long after a rooster sounded in the yard outside and sun streamed through the windows of the dining room where they sat.

Castro conversed all night in what was largely a one-way monologue. Alim sat nodding politely, grinning appropriately when he needed to and listening as the interpreter conveyed in Farsi Fidel’s recollections and, to the degree possible, his passion for the subject. He talked of Che and the capture of the government munitions train at Santa Clara that sealed Batista’s fate, and of how he, Fidel, had swept into Havana at the head of an army. He spoke of going to New York to speak to the United Nations, of plucking chickens in the presidential suite of the hotel, of the U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the many failed attempts by the Americans to assassinate him over the years.

He talked about the American CIA on whose direction his friend Che had been executed in Bolivia. He talked about American efforts to crush the revolution and to impoverish the Cuban people through forty years of economic embargoes, actions that Fidel said were similar to those America had imposed on Alim’s own homeland.

As the night went on, Alim realized that even with the rum Fidel had consumed, he was going to outdistance his guest. By three in the morning, Afundi was dying. He had experienced sleep deprivation as torture, but Castro’s form was more potent because of Alim’s need to show continued respect toward his host. By six he could no longer make even the pretense. Alim fell asleep.