Guardian of Lies (26 page)

“Where is that?”

The name sent a chill up Daniela’s spine. “It’s one of the main rivers in Nariño 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.

Liquida watched as a couple of cars turned down the ramp. They passed the box truck without difficulty and drove onto the freeway where they quickly backed up in traffic. He was beginning to get nervous. If the truck remained stalled on the ramp much longer, some pain-in-the-ass commuter would call it in to the highway patrol. It was the one thing he feared. If they were forced to start the fireworks early, the bus driver would see it. Then, instead of turning right onto the on-ramp he would take the bridge straight ahead, over the top of the freeway. The bus would be gone before his men could move.

This nightmare was still rattling around in Liquida’s brain when a fuzzy green image crept across the round edge on the lens of the field glasses. He adjusted the focus and watched as the sheriff’s bus pulled into the left-hand turn pocket on Magnolia. It nosed to a stop at the traffic light on Prospect.

Liquida grabbed the walkie-talkie from his pocket, pushed the button, and spoke into it. “
Está aquí. Aquí
. It’s here.”

Before the words were even out of his mouth, the man in the gully was moving at a run, lugging the heavy duffel bag up the steep slope toward the upper end of the on-ramp. When he reached the top, he lay flat on his stomach against the incline and waited.

“What’s the matter?” said Katia.

“Hmm. Oh, nothing,” said Daniela.

“You look worried all of a sudden.”

“No, it’s nothing. I was just wishing the driver would pick up his speed so we could get to the courthouse a little sooner and get off the bus.”

“You don’t like it,” said Katia. “Neither do I, it’s too closed in. You can’t see nothing. They should put in windows.”

Daniela had a different reason for wanting to get off the bus. The minute she was separated from Katia she would fly to a phone and call Thorpe at the bureau headquarters in Washington. She would tell him to gather every resource he could lay his hands on, civilian and military, and throw a wide net over the jungle surrounding the Tapaje River in Colombia. She was praying that it wasn’t too late, that Nitikin and the bomb were still there.

Liquida watched as the bus made the left turn across four lanes of traffic and slipped into the right lane on Prospect. The lumbering bus moved like a snail. Cars were backed up behind it, trying to make their way toward the ramp, but the bus had them blocked.

“Now comes the tricky part,” said Liquida under his breath, “traffic control.”

As the bus took the tight turn onto the ramp, it nearly came to a complete stop. It eased down the ramp at fifteen miles an hour, and the man with the duffel bag sprang from the grass at the edge of the ramp. With his hand up, he stepped behind the bus as it passed and stopped the line of traffic behind it. Before the driver of the first car realized what was happening, the man with the duffel bag had flung a small satchel. The nylon bag, covered with graphite dust, slid like a hockey puck over the pavement and under the front end of the car. The man with the bag turned and ran in the other direction, down the ramp, toward the bus.

“What the hell?” As the driver started to lift his foot off the brake pedal, the fiery explosion buckled the center of his car and flipped it into the air. The blast ignited the gas in the fuel tank. A half second later the fiery wreck landed on top of the car behind it. A mushroom-shaped bloom of flame leaped thirty feet into the air and engulfed both vehicles.

“Now that’s the way to stop traffic,” said Liquida.

He shifted the field glasses to look down the ramp toward the bus. Sure enough, human nature had done its part. With the blast, the bus driver had looked in his big side-view mirror. He’d seen the flames and the flying car and instinct took over. He hit the brakes. It was only a few seconds, but it was enough. He was barely rolling, still looking in the mirror, when the box truck pulled out in front of him and blocked the ramp.

“Look out,” said the guard.

By the time the driver looked back to the front and realized what was happening, it was too late, the ramp was blocked and he had no momentum to punch his way through.

Five of the button boys came out of the back of the truck, the other two exited from the cab. All of them were wearing dark glasses, their faces covered with scarves. They carried their assault rifles slung from their shoulders and aimed from the hip as they moved swiftly toward the front of the bus.

The guard unlocked the shotgun from its rack as the driver tried to put the bus in reverse. The explosives man with the duffel bag, running down the ramp behind them, slid another satchel charge under the rear of the bus and flung himself facedown on the ground.

The blast lifted the rear wheels of the bus three feet off the pavement. It shredded all eight rear tires on the double dual axles and blew out the transmission. By the time the rear end landed back on the ground, the bus was a stationary death trap.

Several of the women up front on the bus were screaming.

The explosion lifted both Katia and Daniela off the bench seat. It would have sent them to the ceiling except that the ankle chain and the falling weight of the bus jerked them back down, hard, on the thin seat cushion, jamming their backs.

Katia was dazed. She held her head with her hands, looking up first at the ceiling and then turning her head from side to side to make sure her neck wasn’t hurt. “A-a-a-ah…What happened?”

“I don’t know.” As she said it Daniela heard the hollow ping of metal as the first rounds ripped into the bus, followed half a beat later by the distinctive clatter of Kalashnikovs on full automatic somewhere outside.

“Get down,” she told Katia. Daniela reached for the small Walther under her arm. It was wedged into the tight elastic at the side of her sports bra. “Get down on the floor.”

“How?” said Katia. She was looking at the chain that joined them around their waists. “Where did you get that?” Katia saw the gun in Daniela’s hand.

“Never mind, just get down, as low as you can behind the seat.” Chained at the waist, they had to move together if they were going to find cover. With their ankles locked to the metal bar, they were stuck where they were. Their only protection was the thin pad of upholstery on the back of the seat in front of them and the light-gauge sheet-metal backing that supported it.

The first burst of rounds went high, punching two holes at the top of the windshield and perforating the metal above it. The driver and the guard seemed stunned when they realized that the bulletproof windshield had failed to stop the rounds. The guard punched the button on his shoulder mike and began to call it in.

“Need backup. Shots fired, explosive devices…”

“What’s your location?”

The second burst by all seven button boys instantly transformed the entire windshield, from left to right, into what looked like a lacy pattern of frosted glass, a frozen fog of fractured crystals. The glass stayed in place, it didn’t shatter, but it was no longer transparent. Every one of the fifty or so armor-piercing rounds passed cleanly through and into the interior of the bus.

One of the assault team with his rifle at the ready cautiously stepped to the passenger side of the bus and glanced through the thick glass in the door. The bloody bundle that had been the guard lay crumpled up against the door, on the stairway inside. The back of the driver’s seat looked like Swiss cheese, with tiny strips of foam padding protruding from the back out of each bullet hole. The driver, wet with various shades of crimson, leaned toward the door like a rag doll, his upper body perpendicular to the floor, his arms dangling, as his lower body was held in place by the seat belt.

The button boy slung his weapon over his shoulder and gave the rest of them the all-clear sign. Two of them quickly swapped out clips. They replaced the armor-piercing rounds, to avoid shooting their comrades through the walls of the bus, slapping new clips with hollow points into their rifles. For them, shooting accuracy was no longer an issue. From here on out, everything would be point-blank.

Two of the others quickly took up positions behind the bus, making sure no one came down the ramp behind them. Two others positioned themselves on the freeway side of the bus to watch for any law enforcement that might approach from the highway, while one of them watched Magnolia Avenue from the other side to ensure that their getaway path was clear.

The explosives man took out the shaped charge from his bag. It was a roll of synthetic material that looked and felt like children’s Play-Doh. He had worked it into the shape of a rope about an inch thick and twelve feet long. He started at the foot of the bus door and pressed it against the metal. In less than a minute he’d outlined the entire perimeter of the armored door. He pressed a single detonator cap into the soft plastic and pulled the fuse. As it started to smoke, the men on that side of the bus scattered and took cover. A few seconds later there was a loud explosion and the heavy metal door fell from its frame, the strong inside hinges and all four of the locking bolts severed.

The entry team, the two men with rifles loaded with hollow points, whisked some of the smoke away with a sweep of their hands as they swung the muzzles of their rifles into play once more. One of them grabbed the guard in the stairway and rolled his body out onto the pavement. He reached down to retrieve the officer’s sidearm.

The explosives man asked him for the key to the wire-mesh cage inside.

The kid with the pistol pulled the guard’s keys off his belt. There must have been twenty of them on the ring.

“Forget it,” said the explosives man. He reached into his bag and pulled out another small charge and climbed into the bus. He walked toward the steel-and-wire mesh cage and pressed the malleable explosive charge directly over the round steel disk housing the lock for the gate.

He noticed that the mesh of the cage was severed and mangled, with jagged pieces of wire sticking out in several places directly behind the driver’s seat, where bullets had passed through the cage. The two women in the first seat inside the cage on that side were already dead, their heads thrown back, their eyes and mouths open as blood ran off the seat and covered the rubber floor mat that ran down the aisle. He looked closely through the wire mesh, but neither woman appeared to be either the one in the picture or the other target whose photograph they had memorized.

He worked to flatten the charge against the lock.

There was a lot of crying and whimpering back in the cage. One woman pleaded with him from behind the wire, her hands pressed together in prayer as she begged him not to hurt her.

He finished shaping, pressed a detonator into the charge, and in a fluid motion pulled the fuse.

He stepped off the bus pushing the two button boys ahead of him until they were a few feet away. The sharp crack of the explosion was followed by more screams inside the bus.

The explosives man gestured toward the bus with a wag of his head as he started to close up his bag while smoke billowed from the bus door. “
Rápido
, huh!”

The two killers waved away the smoke and climbed the bus steps to finish the job. At first they couldn’t see. A gray white mist filled the front of the bus along with the acrid smell of burnt nitrate. As the smoke began to settle, they could see a large hole in the wire mesh on the gate where the lock had been.

They moved quickly, threw the gate open, and started down the aisle.

The women cowered, some of them down on the floor between the seats, crying.

One of the button boys held the photograph while the other grabbed the women by the hair, one at a time, pulling their heads up so the two men could see their faces. They worked from side to side, first checking seats on the right, then the left, moving toward the rear of the bus.