Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

“Here, hold her on her side,” he tells me. “Don’t want her breathing fluid into her lungs.”

I hold her while he heads across the street. I watch as he kicks the flaming front door away from the iron gate, then uses the bottom of his shirt to grab the metal gate and opens it. He disappears into the house.

The woman takes a couple of deep breaths. Finally, she turns her head, looks at me, and says, “Who are you?” in perfect English.

“You are Katia’s mother?” I say.

“Yes. Who are you?”

“We are friends of Katia from the United States. She is in a great deal of trouble. We need your help.”

She is breathing heavily now, making up for the deficit of oxygen. “What kind of trouble?”

“We must find a place where we can talk,” I tell her. “Not here.”

When I look back, Herman is out of the house, coming this way.

Katia’s mother has now boosted herself up so that she is sitting on the sidewalk. She is talking to one of the other women in Spanish, then turns to me. “She is a friend. She lives down the street. We can go to her house.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Herman overhears the conversation as he approaches. He gestures with his head to the left, up the street.

When I turn and look, I see people in white hospital smocks. Apparently they have wandered down from the hospital up the hill. Next to one of them is a motorcycle cop. He has parked his bike and is propping his helmet on the seat. Then we hear the sound of sirens in the distance.

“We need to talk somewhere else,” I tell her. “Do you have any friends outside the neighborhood?”

She thinks for a moment. “Yes. There is someone else.”

“How are you feeling?” says Herman.

“My head hurts,” she says.

“That’s the fumes from the gas,” he tells her. “You’re going to have a headache.”

“What about you?” He looks at me.

“I’m fine.”

He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief. “Here.”

“What’s that for?”

“Your head’s bleeding.”

I reach up and sure enough there is blood on the side of my face, dripping onto the shoulder of my shirt. I remember hitting the countertop just before I blacked out in the kitchen.

I press the handkerchief to my head and hold it there.

“Why did you go back in the house?”

“Wanted to see if I could grab her luggage,” says Herman. “But it’s flamed. I snagged her purse on the way out, but that was all because I had my hands full with the two of you.”

“Could have left me and gotten the suitcase,” I tell him.

“Thought about it,” he says. “But then who’s gonna pay my bill?” He winks at me. “If we help you up, do you think you can stand?” he asks her.

“I will try.”

He hands her purse to her. We each get under one arm and help her to her feet. The blare of a siren suddenly fills the air. The bright red of the first fire truck turns the corner at the other end of the block, followed by two more cops riding Suzuki dirt bikes.

The cops quickly busy themselves directing traffic. The crowd around us suddenly disperses as their attention is drawn to the truck. With their backs to us, they watch the firemen as they come off and start hauling hoses.

Katia’s mother takes a few steps and says something to the lady who offered to allow us to use her house.

“What did she say?” Herman didn’t hear it.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

Within seconds the three of us are hobbling down the street in the other direction, away from the crowd. As we reach the stairs at the end of the block, Herman takes the lead, helping Katia’s mother down the steps.

I stand above them on one of the steps, my eyes just at street level for a few seconds, making sure that no one is following us.

Looking back I see a cop in a dark blue uniform talking to some of the people who had gathered around us on the sidewalk. He is taking notes. A woman who is talking to him gestures toward the sidewalk behind her without bothering to turn to look.

He says something to her.

She turns and starts to point at the curb where I had been sitting, and then suddenly stops. She looks around as if she is confused. She knows we were there. She turns back to the officer and they continue to talk. Just as the cop begins to lift his eyes from his notebook to glance down the block in my direction, I drop down one more step and disappear below the level of the street.

Nitikin went to bed at his usual time, eight o’clock, but he didn’t sleep. He tossed and turned for hours, troubled by the thought that what he had been told was wrong. Ten days earlier, he had been shown a copy of a fax by one of his friends in the FARC. It was a bill of lading from a Panamanian shipping company. It had arrived at the FARC communications hut earlier that day.

The bill of lading was a contract for the shipment of a single cargo container by sea from the Port of Tumaco on the Pacific coast of Colombia to the container terminal at Balboa, Panama, at the western approach to the Panama Canal.

As Nitikin lay tossing on his bed he was troubled by the fact that according to the bill of lading, the shipment was scheduled for the following morning, with the deadline for loading containers set for two A.M., sailing by four.

The distance between the FARC encampment in the Tapaje River valley and the Port of Tumaco was more than sixty miles as the crow flies, an hour by car on a fast highway. But there was no highway, only dirt roads that wound through the deep river gorges and over the mountains. Because one had to dodge Colombian military patrols, the trip could take more than a day; that is, if none of the bridges over the rivers was washed out.

By early afternoon, when no truck had arrived to transport the con tainer with the device, Nitikin was forced to conclude that the information he had seen on the fax was wrong; either that or Alim was playing games with him.

Yakov had set everything up premised on the one assumption that thirty-six hours after departing the harbor at Tumaco, he and the device would be in Panama. Whether this was their final destination he had no way of knowing. But through some FARC friends he had managed to obtain a cell phone with a Panamanian GSM chip. It was useless in the jungles of Colombia, but at the Port of Balboa, near Panama City, he would be able to get a cellular signal. The chip contained just enough minutes for a brief long distance call to his daughter’s cell phone in Costa Rica. Nitikin was desperate to be sure that she was safe, and to tell her one last time that he loved her.

It was a three-story concrete building just two blocks south of the Sportsmens Lodge. But it took us the better part of an hour to get there hauling our luggage and helping Katia’s mother, Maricela Solaz, along the way. She introduced herself as we walked. I filled her in as much as I could concerning Katia, the fact that she was charged with serious crimes and in the hospital following an attempt on her life.

She said she had never heard the name Emerson Pike, but after what had happened she was not surprised that an attempt had been made on Katia’s life. It was the photographs she had taken in Colombia. Though her father had told her almost nothing, she was certain that the people she had accidentally caught in the pictures were dangerous. “Whoever tried to kill my daughter also tried to kill me.”

“Did you see him? Could you identify him?” I ask.

“No. But I can identify the man in Colombia,” she says. “And I am certain that he is the one who ordered it.”

“What man?”

“I will tell you when we get there.”