Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

“Just an idea,” said Rhytag. “I take it that after the fight in the shower there are hard feelings on the part of some of the other women.”

“That’s an understatement.” Carla laughed. “It’s why I needed the weapon. I wasn’t excited about the idea of fending off eight or ten of them if they got me cornered somewhere out of sight of the guards. But if I have to pull the Walther, I’m going to be out of there. It’ll blow my cover. It’s one thing to have a zip gun. It’s another to have a three-eighty with a full magazine.”

“Given your attire I’m curious as to where it is right now,” said Thorpe.

“You don’t want to know,” said Carla.

“The sheriff wasn’t keen on a loaded handgun in his jail. I was advised that it’s against state law,” said Thorpe. “He told me that if you got caught with it, my ass was grass, because neither he nor any of his people knew anything about it, including the guard who slipped it into the towels for you. So if I lose my pension, you owe me.”

“Semper fi,’” said Carla. “I knew you’d been in the marines too long to let one of your troops go tits up in a county jail.”

Howard looked at her, wide eyed.

“Excuse my language,” said Carla. “I’ve been undercover too long.”

Thorpe laughed.

“So here’s the deal.” Rhytag was ignoring them. “Solaz is bottled up in jail on a murder charge with gangbangers who, after the brawl in the shower, would stick a shiv in her in a heartbeat. So if you aren’t around to protect her, she’s got problems, right?”

“I hope you’ve thought about that,” said Carla.

“We have,” said Rhytag. “She’s not in any danger. We’re keeping a close eye on her. Father Protector, the guard who slipped you the gun, has her on a special assignment in the jail dispensary while you’re here. We’re not going to let anything happen to her.

“But in the meantime,” said Rhytag, “there’s no reason we can’t put all that fear to work for us. Here’s how we do it. Tell Solaz that your lawyer pulled some strings with somebody he knows at the jail. They’re thinking about transferring you someplace else. Tell her it’s the honor farm. If you’re right about her, and she hasn’t been inside before, she’s not going to know the difference. Tell her it’s a place where they let inmates go when they think they can trust them, and it’s much better than the jail. Tell her you already talked to your lawyer and there’s a chance he might be able to have Solaz transferred with you. The problem is, to do this your lawyer needs a lot of personal and family background information to make sure she qualifies, so that when your lawyer goes to pull all the levers, it’s not going to blow up in his face. He needs to know all the places she’s lived, where her family is from, all the places they’ve lived, go back at least three generations. Take notes. You need to know whether any of her family members going back that far have ever been in any trouble with the law in any of the countries where they lived.”

“This honor farm has high standards,” said Thorpe.

“Platinum Diners Club only,” said Rhytag. “You need to have any information her family has ever given her in this regard. Tell her that in most other countries, the government in the United States is able to check records, so she has to be sure to tell you everything she knows. If your lawyer finds something in the records that she hasn’t told you about, he’s going to think she’s hiding something and she’s going to be off the invitation list at the honor farm. In which case, when you leave she’s going to be left behind all alone to entertain the angry women you pissed off in the shower.”

“What if she wants to discuss it with her lawyer?” said Carla.

“Tell her she can’t. Because if she does, her lawyer is going to want to talk to the people at the jail. If he does it’s going to result in both you and your lawyer getting in a lot of trouble. You put her in the pit of divided loyalties,” said Rhytag. “You came to her rescue; she’s not going to want to get you in trouble. Besides, all she has to do is give you the family background and you’ll take care of the rest. Otherwise you won’t be able to play cards with each other much longer. If she doesn’t deliver up the family tree immediately, let her look around at all the angry faces for a day or two and then tell her time is running out, you need the information or she may wake up one morning soon and you’ll be gone.”

“You’re cold,” said Carla.

“That’s how you survive in an ugly world,” he told her. “Think of it this way. The minute she mentions Grandpa Nitikin’s name as a survivor, you take her by the hand, call the guard, go out to the front of the jail. We’ll have agents from the bureau pick both of you up in a nanosecond and we’ll put her in a private suite in the federal tower downtown so we can talk to her.”

“Yeah, right, with the lights on day and night and the room temperature moving from the Arctic to the Sahara every half hour,” said Carla.

“What can I say? The world is a dangerous place,” said Rhytag.

Liquida was tired. He had spent nearly a week on the Mexican side of the border assembling the arms and munitions and observing war games in the desert east of Tijuana. He was still picking sand out of his teeth. While the men practiced, Liquida watched from a distance with a pair of field glasses.

There were seven trigger men, the oldest twenty-two, plus an expert with explosives who was in his mid-thirties. They were all handpicked and in good shape.

Only one of them, the demolition guy, knew that Liquida was involved. He and Liquida met each day to discuss how the training and preparations were going. As far as the others knew, it was the explosives man who was hiring them all. In fact, the money for everything, the men, the munitions, and the guns, had come from Liquida’s employer down in Colombia.

The first day of training went fast. Teaching the seven button boys to use the inexpensive Chinese AK-47 knockoffs took less than half a day. The high-velocity Russian rounds of the AK would pass right through anything without ceramic plates behind it. The two, or possibly three, key targets might be wearing Kevlar vests, but they would not have combat armor.

Two days were spent on explosives training. This involved the shaping and placement of small charges, the use of detonators and high-yield detonation cord if it was needed to take off locks or cut through steel hinges. Liquida’s explosives expert would do most of this work, but some familiarity with it by the others was essential in case he was wounded or killed in the early going.

The last day was spent on what high-tech American police called dynamic entry. In the law enforcement world, this type of training took far more time, but Liquida’s small army had a big advantage. Unlike the police, they didn’t have to worry about collateral damage. If they killed a dozen people getting in, it didn’t matter as long as they got the right one before they left.

For training they used an old school bus that Liquida had purchased from a junkyard in Tijuana and had towed out into the desert.

For cover, each man in the assault group was given a photograph. It was a mug shot from the Mexican Judicial Police of one of the female mules who carried drugs across the border for the Tijuana cartel. From all appearances she was small fry, not of sufficient importance or risk to be transported to court in one of the sheriff’s small vans. She was forty-one years old. She had been arrested in San Diego, housed at Las Colinas for seven months, and was now in her second day of a jury trial. For this reason, Liquida knew that she would be on the bus that morning. Whoever got to her first was to eliminate her with two head shots and drop her photograph on the floor by her seat.