Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

“You’re probably right,” said Daniela. “It must be a woman. Did you ever have a chance to meet him? Your grandfather, I mean?”

“My mother told me once that I did, but I don’t remember. I was too small.”

“And so you don’t know if he’s alive or dead?” said Daniela. “That could be a problem.”

“Why?”

“Well, because the people my lawyer is working with are going to want to know one way or the other. I mean, most people know whether their grandparents are alive or dead.”

There was a long pause as Daniela allowed the anxiety to work its magic on Katia.

“I suppose it’s possible he’s alive,” said Katia. “Let me ask you a question. Just between us.”

“Of course.”

“Let’s say he’s alive and I am wrong. Let’s suppose it’s not another woman but something else that has kept him away from his family all these years.”

“Yes?” said Daniela.

“Let’s say I make a guess at where he might be; will they go after him or would they give the information to some other government so they could go after him?”

“Of course not,” said Daniela. “The information is only for background, to see if you’re telling the truth about your family. It has nothing to do with your grandfather. They probably already know who he is. They would have information on computers.”

“I see.” Katia had carried the theory of another woman through her entire childhood, only to have it shaken by Emerson Pike and his obsession with the photographs from Colombia. Katia had suspected for some time, even before she met Emerson, that the old man in the photographs might be her grandfather. If she was right, and that was the reason Pike was interested in the pictures, it wasn’t because her grandfather had had an affair with another woman. Deep in her soul, though she didn’t want to admit it, Katia suspected that her grandfather was hiding something more serious. It was the reason she’d said nothing to her lawyers. If her mother was still with him, and Katia told them where they were, her mother could be in trouble.

“So you think you know where he is?” said Daniela.

Katia looked at her, wondering if she should say anything more. “It’s only a guess. It’s probably wrong.”

“So tell me your best guess,” said Daniela.

“If you’re sure they won’t go after him.”

“I’ll talk to my lawyer. I’ll make sure they won’t, and unless he’s absolutely certain, I will tell him to forget that part of the information and not give it to anyone else.”

“Okay,” said Katia. “You see, for a long time now, several years, my mother has been traveling from Costa Rica to your country.”

“To the United States?” said Daniela.

“No.” Katia looked at her with a puzzled expression. “No. I mean Colombia.”

“Ah, Colombia,” said Daniela. “Of course.”

“That is where you come from, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s just that I’ve been in the States so much the last few years, it starts to feel as if I live here. You know the feeling?”

“Oh, I know. I hate that,” said Katia. “I wish I could go home too. Maybe soon we can both go. Maybe I could visit you in Colombia.”

“That would be fun,” said Daniela. “So your mother travels to Colombia regularly?”

“Sometimes twice a year. She stays there for a long time. She was gone when I left to come to the United States.”

“She was in Colombia at the time?”

“Yes.”

“So what does she do down there?”

“She says she visits family.”

“You have relatives in Colombia?”

“That’s the problem, not that I know of,” said Katia. “I have never met them.”

“I see,” said Daniela.

“My mother tells me that one of her relatives in Colombia is very old and she must go down to provide care.”

“Your grandfather?”

“She has never said this, but who else can it be?”

Yakov Nitikin is in Colombia, thought Daniela. “So when she goes down to Colombia, where does she go?” In for a dime, in for a dollar.

“She flies to Medellin.”

“Ah, a beautiful city,” said Daniela.

“But dangerous,” said Katia. “A lot of drugs.”

“Not so much anymore,” said Daniela. “I’ve been there recently. The city has changed. I take it you have never been there?”

“No. I would like to go sometime.”

“We’ll have to do it. And you must tell your mother to take you so you can visit your grandfather.”

“If that’s who she goes down to see, he doesn’t live in Medellín,” said Katia.

“But you said that’s where she goes?”

“Yes. She flies to Medellín, but she takes a bus from there. I have asked her many times, but she refuses to tell me where she goes. But…” Katia stopped and bit her lower lip a little as she hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Last year I found a bus ticket in her purse for a place called El Chocó. I looked on the Internet, and it is located in the south of Colombia, in a place called Narnio Province.”

“You mean Narińo Province,” said Daniela.

“Yes, that’s it. Do you know it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been there?”

“No,” Daniela lied.

“That, plus little things my mother has said over the years. I know she stays in a small village near a river. She has talked about the Indians going up and down the river in dugout canoes. So it must be very rural.”

“The Rio Tapaje?” said Daniela.

“Where is that?”

The name sent a chill up Daniela’s spine. “It’s one of the main rivers in Narińo Province.” Daniela had been on the Rio Tapaje five months earlier. The river flowed into the Pacific Ocean in a remote corner of southwest Colombia. The first few miles were controlled by the Colombian army, but only through the use of high-speed boats with.50-caliber machine guns mounted on the front.

The fleet of boats, called Piranhas, was supplied by the U.S. government in an effort to eradicate the coca trade that thrived in the river basin beyond the village of El Chocó. Beyond that point even the Colombian army was reluctant to venture. This was the land of the FARC. And, if Katia was right, it was the place where her grandfather was holed up with a weapon powerful enough to erase half of Manhattan or Washington, D.C.

This morning the bus was late. Liquida steadied his elbows on the edge of the roof as he struggled to focus the big ten-by-fifty-power field glasses. He scanned the surface streets on the other side of the freeway. Liquida was on top of an abandoned commercial building along the side of Highway 67, less than two miles from the women’s jail in Santee.

The freeway traffic was bumper-to-bumper during the morning rush hour.

Across the way he could see the Prospect Avenue on-ramp. The big box truck, the one the explosives man had rented, was already in place, parked right at the edge of the on-ramp, halfway down the sharp decline to the freeway. On each side of the paved roadway the ramp fell off steeply, on one side into a shallow ravine, and on the other toward the freeway. A man on foot could cross either slope easily, but a heavy vehicle, a bus or a truck, trying to traverse the steep slope would roll.

A hundred feet beyond the on-ramp, on the other side, across the ravine, Liquida had parked the getaway van. He had rented it the previous morning by using a stolen credit card and stolen driver’s license. The van was parked along the side of the road, on North Magnolia Avenue. Liquida had cut a hole in the chain-link fence separating Magnolia from the freeway so the men could quickly pass through in their escape.

A lone figure with a sizable duffel bag at his feet was huddled in the shadows under one of the trees down in the gully of the no-man’s-land between the elevated on-ramp and Magnolia.