Guardian of Lies (31 page)

“In the meantime, I’ll be dodging pygmy darts from Templeton’s blowgun,” says Harry. “And I won’t even be able to complain to you because you’ll be in another hemisphere without a phone.”

“Not necessarily. I may have a solution for that.”

“What, tin cans and a string?” says Harry.

“Something Herman told me about. It’s the errand I mentioned on the phone.”

It is a sinking feeling leaving Katia like this, alone and in trouble, thousands of miles from her home and family. But there seems to be no other choice. That the federal government now believes Katia to have been the target on the bus and the reason for the assault confirms what Harry and I already suspected. Whatever is playing in the background, the unanswered questions surrounding the Colombian photographs are central to Emerson Pike’s murder. Until we know what that is, it is impossible to adequately defend Katia on multiple charges of first-degree murder.

Before leaving San Diego I placed a call to my daughter, Sarah, who is away at college, to tell her I would be gone but without mentioning where, that I might be unreachable for several days, and to stay in touch with Harry. She was filled with questions, but I couldn’t answer many of them over the phone. She reminds me so much of Katia, the compelling reason for my involvement in the case. I make a mental note to visit with Sarah when I get back.

Herman snoozes in the seat next to me to the sound of the jet engines as we wing our way south. We are somewhere over the Gulf, two hours south of Houston, where we spent last night in a hotel before catching the early bird flight to Costa Rica.

If there was a hold on my passport, there was no sign of it either from TSA or the airline at the gate prior to boarding. Herman and I waited for the usual announcement to line up and show passports before they opened the Jetway. Two airline clerks checked the names on our passports against the names on the boarding passes and initialed each boarding pass with a colored felt marker. Herman and I boarded without incident.

We both saw what we believe to be two FBI agents just after getting on at Houston. The flight was full, not a seat to spare. They were closing the door when, at the last minute, two airline employees dressed in civilian clothes and packing scuffed-up black leather flight bags used their credentials to deadhead up front with the flight crew.

Herman nudged me with his elbow as one of them asked the flight attendant for the passenger list. The man took a gander at the list, and then glanced down the aisle. He made eye contact with me just for an instant before he looked away and then handed the passenger list back to the attendant. The two agents waited for the airplane door to be closed and locked before they entered the compartment up front and sealed themselves in with the pilots.

By now their colleagues back at the FBI’s San Diego field office should be going crazy. It was the errand we had to run before we left town, the one I mentioned to Herman on the phone. No doubt they followed us, Harry, Herman, and me, to the small electronics shop downtown, a place that Herman had originally told me about.

Inside the shop, Harry and I purchased two new cell phones. These particular phones have a long name. They are called encrypted, unlocked, quad-band GSM cell phones. Along with the phones, I had one of our secretaries purchase two AT&T GSM chips, each programmed for international call coverage. We had the chips installed at the shop.

The phones use encryption algorithms and code keys that are randomly generated. The keys are longer than the human genome and change with each phone call, making them impossible to decode even with the most massive supercomputers. There is no proprietary source key for the government to obtain and no back door that would allow a third party to unscramble a message. We are told that even the National Security Agency has been unable to decode them. It is for this reason that these particular phones are used by the Israeli military.

You do have to wonder what the world is coming to when your own government can’t stick a pipe in your brain to suck out your thoughts.

Harry has his phone tied to a shoelace hung around his neck. He says that if he has to, he will shower with it to keep it out of their hands.

For the time being, mine is in my briefcase.

Three hours into the flight, I am just beginning to doze when I notice the door to the flight deck open. A couple of seconds later, both of the deadheading airline employees step out to use the lavatory and close the flight-deck door behind them. One of them uses the restroom up in first class. The other takes the long walk down the aisle.

As he approaches and then passes my seat, he gives me a good once-over, checking my computer, which is still open on the tray table in front of me. As I look up, he’s checking things out, looking back over his shoulder at me. I give him a few seconds to get down the aisle, then turn and look as he disappears into one of the vacant restrooms at the rear of the plane.

I waste no time, turn off my computer, release my seat belt, and grab my briefcase from the overhead compartment.

Herman stirs and then wakes to the motion. “Where are we?” he yawns.

“About an hour out,” I tell him. I pack my computer back into the briefcase and take out the encrypted cell phone. I slip back into my seat, fasten the seat belt, drop the tray table, and put the phone right in the center of it. It is a little larger than your normal clamshell phone, though it might not catch your attention unless you were looking for it.

By the time the agent makes his way up the aisle, I am dozing again with only half an eye on the phone in front of me. I sense his motion as he stops behind me in the aisle. I stir in my chair and he moves on. A few seconds later he raps on the flight-deck door. It opens and he disappears inside.

I nudge Herman.

“Saw him,” he says. Herman can see with his eyes closed.

I hand him the phone. “Make it scarce.”

“Hmm?”

“Put it in the bottom of your bag.”

The phone disappears into Herman’s carry-on, under the seat in front of him.

“When we get off the plane, we split up, you grab your bags and get through customs and on through immigration. If they ask you, the reason for the trip is tourism. We’ll meet up out in front of the airport. If you get there ahead of me, grab a taxi and wait. And keep an eye out for me.”

“You think they’re gonna try and stop you here?”

“I doubt it. I just want to be on the safe side.”

Fifty minutes later, Herman is jarred awake as the wheels touch down at Juan Santamaria International Airport in San José, Costa Rica. The instant the plane stops at the Jetway and the pilot turns off the seat belt sign, I’m up out of my seat to allow Herman to get into the aisle ahead of me. As the plane starts to empty, I take my time getting my luggage from the overhead compartment as several passengers get between Herman and me.

As we pass the open flight-deck door, there is no sign of the two deadheading airline employees. I continue to hang back so that by the time we get to customs, Herman and I are no longer together. We clear immigration and then spend almost ten minutes standing on opposite sides of the luggage carousel before the bags finally roll in. Herman grabs his and follows the crowd toward the conveyor belt and the two large X-ray machines near the exit.

I let my bag go around three more times as I wait.

I watch the line at the X-ray machine. None of the bags is being opened, and the speed with which they rocket through the machine makes me wonder if the woman operating it is watching cartoons on the screen.

By now, Herman is long gone, out through the door leading outside.

I let my bag go around one more time before I grab it and head toward the machine. I lug both the bag and the briefcase onto the conveyor belt and watch as they roll up the ramp into the machine.

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.

“
Señor
, 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.

“
Señor
, 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. “
Señor
, 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,
señor
. 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.