Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

Before I can move, somebody taps me on the shoulder. I turn to a uniformed officer packing a semiautomatic sidearm with a well-worn handle.

“ Seńor , please get your bags and come this way.

Excuse me?

This way. He points toward a door a few feet away. “With your bags, por favor. ”

I gather my large roll-on and the briefcase and follow him.

Once inside, they close the door behind me and tell me to place the bags on the table in the middle of the room. One of them proceeds to go through my luggage as the other takes my jacket and checks the pockets. Then he has me empty the pockets in my pants and tells me to place everything on the table. I drop a few coins, keys, my billfold, and a money clip.

One of the cops feels around my waist and notices the money belt under my shirt. He tells me to unstrap it and lay it on the table. I lay it down and the other one goes through each pocket on the belt removing the U.S. currency and counting it, nine thousand five hundred dollars exactly.

“ Mucho dinero ,” he says.

“Vacation money,” I tell him. It is under the ten-thousand-dollar limit requiring disclosure of cash brought into the country. He folds the currency and carefully places every bill back into the pockets of the belt and leaves it on the table.

By now the two of them are looking at each other with quizzical glances. What they’re looking for isn’t here.

“ Seńor , you have a cell phone perhaps?

No, I don't think so. Is it illegal to have a cell phone in Costa Rica?”

He doesn't answer me.

Un momento . One of them disappears outside. The other one waits with me. A minute or so later the other cop comes back. “ Seńor , you may put your things back in your bags,” he says. “You are free to go.”

Gracias . I pack it all up, strap the money belt around my waist under my shirt and tuck it in, don my jacket, and head out the door. As I leave I glance toward the mirrored wall behind me knowing that Rhytag’s men are back there wondering what happened to the cell phone.

Outside in front of the airport, taxi drivers descend on me like a pack, trying to hustle me to the dispatch ticket booth and from there to their taxi. I have to fight several of them off just to maintain a hold on my bags.

In my best pidgin Spanish I try to tell them that I’m waiting for a friend. Then I see the hulking presence of Herman standing next to a taxi forty feet away.

I make it through the crowd and throw my bags into the open trunk of the taxi. We hop in, Herman up front, me in the back. The driver slips behind the wheel and we pull away.

“Any problems?” says Herman.

“They tried to snag the phone.”

He reaches into his bag to make sure it’s still there. “You want it back?”

“Hang on to it. We’ll find a place to hide it when we get to the hotel.”

The romp down the highway is a wild ride, the driver swinging in and out of traffic, past lines of slower-moving trucks and buses, weaving between cars. The right shoulder, it seems, is reserved for underpowered motorbikes.

We pass through an industrial area, new factories with signs and foreign names, European, American, and Asian. All the while, Herman is looking over his shoulder to see if we’re being tailed. He shakes his head. “Can’t see ’em if they’re there.”

A half hour later we’re jammed up in downtown traffic heading for the center of San José. I notice there are no street signs or address numbers on the buildings. The streets are crowded with pedestrians, and vendors hocking their wares. The taxi takes a sweeping right turn, then a quick left, and we find ourselves on a broad one-way street, five or six lanes, though none of the vehicles seems to stay within them, all jockeying for position as they move uptown. We pass a children’s hospital and a large white cathedral on the right. A half mile farther on, we drive past a large plaza on the left. It is flanked by a beautiful colonial building under the patina of a coppered roof. Herman asks the driver and is told that the building is the Teatro Nacional, the national theater.

A few blocks farther on he makes a left and we cut through traffic on a narrow street, stop and go for several lights, then under an old concrete overpass and around another plaza.

Some of the buildings on the side streets are old metal corrugated structures with design features that date them to the end of the nineteenth century when fruit, sugar, and tobacco ruled the region. There are old mansions mixed in, some of them in disrepair, others restored. The driver gestures toward a large yellow colonial house. It is situated behind a high wrought-iron fence. He tells us this is the Casa Amarilla, the yellow house, the offices of the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry.

It takes the driver a few more minutes navigating one-way streets before he makes a turn and pulls to a stop in front of a low-slung building fronted by a low yellow masonry wall and gated entrance covered by a large green awning.

“Your hotel, seńor . Sportsmens Lodge,” he says.

Herman and I have no idea what the rooms are like. Harry and I selected the lodge from a listing of downtown hotels because of its location. Using the directions on the slip of paper from Katia, a map of downtown San José, and satellite images from Google Earth, we determined that from the Sportsmens Lodge, it is less than two blocks to the house where Katia lived with her mother. It is here that we hope to find the camera with the Colombian photographs, assuming they are still there, and if we’re lucky, Katia’s mother.

A little research informed us that the Sportsmens Lodge is owned by an American and is a hangout for weekenders flying in from the States. Here, Herman and I can mingle with the other guests and blend in until we can lose the FBI and disappear on the next leg of our journey.

We grab our bags out of the back of the taxi, pay the driver, and head into the hotel, down a long corridor, tiled floor flanked by doors leading to some of the rooms. Farther on, the hallway opens onto a large central patio covered by an expansive fiberglass roof that forms a kind of open-air entertainment area. It is part of a sports bar with overhead flat-screen televisions, each one showing a different event, baseball and golf from the States, soccer from Europe and Latin America.

The reception counter is a small kiosk with a pretty girl working inside. She takes our names, finds our reservations, signs us in, and gives us keys to our rooms. I ask her about the exercise area that is supposed to be downstairs. She points toward the bar at the rear of the building and tells me where the stairs are. She has the bellman take our bags, except for the one Herman was carrying with the phone tucked inside.

“How ’bout a beer?” says Herman. He has spied the bar at the other end of the patio.

“Sure.”

The guests seem to be mostly Americans in casual dress, shorts and cutoffs, jeans and T-shirts, with a few locals mixed in, Ticos and Ticas, sitting at the tables in the patio. There is a louder crowd inside in the more formal bar area, watching one of the games and downing drinks.

I tip the bellman and ask him to take our bags to my room as Herman and I grab two stools on the patio side of the bar.

The phone rang on Harry’s desk. He picked it up.

“Mr. Hinds, a Mr. Rhytag for you on line two,” said the receptionist.

“Thanks.” Harry punched the button for line two. “Mr. Rhytag, what can I do for you?”

“One of our people is in your neighborhood. He has some information you might be interested in.”

“Why don’t you just tell me over the phone?” Harry smiled to himself as he asked the question.