Guardian of Lies (53 page)

He held the gun close as he continued to watch the conference down below.

The lone wolf wandering near the rear of the rental truck apparently saw something out of place. He approached the lift gate and played with the heavy latch for a moment. Apparently it wasn’t closed. He lifted the gate a little, and then seemed to stand there for a moment as if he were frozen in place.

Afundi said something and one of the others hollered out in perfect Spanish, telling the man at the rear of the rental truck to leave it alone and come out where they could see him. The one who spoke Spanish separated himself from the others and walked toward the rear of the rental vehicle.

Before he could get there, the other man lowered the lift gate and quickly moved around the truck where he rapidly closed the distance between the two of them with his hands out, turning the other, fatter man around. “It was nothing. A piece of wood caught under the door. I took care of it. It’s fine.”

The other man stood there for a second looking at him, and then pushed past him, walked to the back of the truck, and checked it out. The other, taller man was close behind him.

Liquida heard the metal of the hooked lever lock on the back of the truck as the fat man tested it to make sure that the catch was working and the door was sealed.

While the two of them were still standing at the back of the truck, the leader stopped talking, stepped away from the others, and started walking over to join them. By then the fat man was satisfied that everything was fine. He headed back the other way, said something to his leader, and the two of them joined their comrades in discussion once again.

Liquida thought about popping Afundi as he stood there talking, but that would be too easy. Besides, he’d probably end up in a gunfight with the others, and taking rounds through the bottom of the catwalk was not something he wanted to think about. Liquida would wait them out. He’d whittle them down with the silencer a shot at a time, so they wouldn’t know where it was coming from.

The conversation went on for a couple more minutes, until Afundi handed two of the men a piece of paper and began talking to them. He pointed to the sheet as if he was giving them directions of some kind.

They nodded, one of them took the sheet of paper, and the two men headed toward the car. But they didn’t get in, instead they grabbed two assault rifles out of the backseat.

Afundi said something to one of them and pointed toward the back wall of the building. As he watched the man walk in that direction, suddenly the diesel engine on the container truck started up. Liquida turned to look back at the trucks as another of the men climbed up into the container truck. He closed the truck’s doors and waited with the engine running. The other three men, including the tall one who didn’t seem to fit, got into the rental truck and started its engine.

Liquida wondered where they were going. No one had opened the large overhead door. The fumes were beginning to build up. Suddenly an overhead door on the other side of the building opened up. It was being opened by a heavy electrical motor. Liquida looked at it and realized that the door was surrounded not by metal, but heavy concrete. The opening was cut into a retaining wall where the building backed up to an incline in the earth outside.

Once the door was fully up, Liquida could see that the concrete floor beyond the opening dropped off in a steep decline. It was ramped down. Within seconds the two trucks drove through the opening and down the ramp, disappearing in a blue haze of exhaust as the noise of their engines slowly receded into the distance.

After spending millions of dollars of his government’s money, Alim was gratified by the results. It had taken seven months for the cartel to acquire the two buildings, one on each side of the border, to engineer and dig the tunnel, and to shore it up with concrete and steel rebar.

It had been a seamless operation. The cartel knew that the U.S. border patrol and customs watched the Mexican side of the border for unusual traffic volume and patterns. So the cartel purchased the trucks from the original
maquiladora
operator just as the manufacturer folded. They used the trucks to remove the earth from the excavation of the tunnel as well as to deliver the building materials. To anyone watching, the volume of truck traffic coming and going from the building never changed, as if the manufacturing concern was just humming along. The cartel greased some palms in the city government and no one ever looked.

The joint venture between Afundi and the cartel meant that a good portion of the cash Alim received from his government went to finance the tunnel’s construction. The cartel oversaw construction and built the tunnel. Alim then had an option for its exclusive use for thirty days, after which time the entire project would revert to the cartel, which could then continue to use it as a narco highway for as long as they could maintain the secret.

The tunnel was only a few hundred meters east of the Tijuana airport and less than three hundred yards long. The building on the Mexican side was less than a hundred feet from the border fence. The tunnel, sixty feet underground where thermal imaging and motion and vibration detectors sealed off by the heavy concrete walls would never be able to detect a thing from the surface, spanned the distance between the two buildings. Alim smiled at the thought that the cartel had employed a retired engineer from the California Department of Transportation to design the whole thing, though the man never had a clue as to where it would be located or what it would be used for.

In a little more than a minute the trucks were on the surface once more, inside the building on the U.S. side of the border. They wasted no time opening the doors and exiting from the building to merge with the surrounding California traffic.

Alim looked at his watch. Amazingly, they were still on schedule. It was just after three in the afternoon. According to the news reports, festivities were not scheduled to get under way until just before five.

Though Nitikin didn’t know it, Afundi had already installed the cordite and set the timer for five o’clock, maximum effect. The Russian had been in the jungle for so long that he didn’t know about the high-tech gadgets the world had invented in his absence. This included the tiny pencil-lens camera Alim had installed inside the wooden crate, through which he watched as Yakov pulled the safety device, arming the bomb. Alim now no longer needed him. He could have killed the Russian at any time, but he was saving that pleasure for later.

The haze of the exhaust hadn’t even settled inside the building before Liquida centered the red dot on the first of the two men left behind in the building. As he squeezed the trigger, a crimson halo exploded around the first man’s head as the mercury-tipped bullet did its job.

The second man never saw or heard a thing. With his back turned, he was smiling. He pointed toward the open tunnel and turned to share the wonder of the thing with his friend just as the next round transited the top of his head. The exploding bullet blew out a sizable hunk of skull bone, now bouncing off the concrete floor behind him.

In seconds Liquida was down the ladder. He retrieved the sheet of paper Afundi had left for his men. It was a printed map of San Diego, with a route traced along the freeways. It had a dark pen mark at one location. Liquida didn’t need the map. He knew the location well. He had been there only a few months earlier. But as he looked at the detail at the north end, near the end of the route, he had to wonder what the hell was going on.

He thought about his rental car half a mile away and decided Avis could probably find the vehicle by itself. The man whose wallet, credit card, and driver’s license Liquida had stolen on his flight from Houston would probably get a whopping surprise on his credit card bill. He fished through the dead men’s pockets until he found the keys to the small blue sedan. He jumped in the car and two seconds later disappeared down Alice’s rabbit hole to see where it went.

We have no idea where we are. Herman is flat on his belly on the bed of the truck, trying to release the catch on the lock outside with a pocketknife. He is using the light from the screen on my worthless encrypted cell phone to guide his probing with the blade under the crack of the door.

For the first several minutes the vehicle seems to bounce all over the place, first a steep decline and then back up. For ten minutes a lot of stop and go and then finally the constant hum and steady movement of a highway.

Herman finally gives up with the knife.

“No use,” he says. “Blade’s too short. But the good news is, you were right about your father.” He is looking at Maricela in earnest as he says it. “He’s gotta be acting under duress. The way he closed the gate and protected us, kept his mouth shut. Otherwise, I don’t know about you, but Paul and I would be dead right now.”

Maricela seemed stunned and still in shock after the sudden appearance of her father at the back of the truck. The only one more surprised was Nitikin himself. From the look on his face when he saw her, I thought he would die. One thing is certain, we now have his attention, though none of us has a clue as to where we are or where the truck is headed.

“They picked up a signal from Madriani’s cell phone,” said Thorpe. He came rushing into the command center.

“Where?” said Rhytag.

“San Diego.”

“What?”

“Intelligence picked it up two minutes ago. They’re not sure, but it looks as if the signal’s coming from somewhere along I-5, just south of San Diego.”

“How the hell did he get there?”

“We don’t know.”

“He can’t be with Nitikin,” said Rhytag.

Thorpe shrugged his shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Rhytag thought for a moment. “Pull the tactical squads back from the border,” he said.

“Should we open up the border crossings?”

“No. Just get the SWAT teams, some highway patrol if you can, the NEST team, and the snipers you got from Delta. Alert the hostage-rescue team and tell them we may need them on short notice. Get a precise location on the signal. Give the highway patrol the description of the cargo container and partial plate off the truck and tell them to put out an all-points on it. If they find it, tell them to track it from a distance, but not to stop it. To monitor its location and call it in.”

From the middle of the bench seat in the U-Haul truck, Nitikin kept seeing signs as they passed them, Chula Vista, National City. He had never seen so much traffic. His mind raced with thoughts of how to free Maricela from the back of the truck, and who the two men were who were with her. But he was trapped in the middle, between the translator who was driving and Alim.

His brain was so occupied with these thoughts that he didn’t even notice when the rental truck slipped into the right lane of the freeway. When he looked up he suddenly realized that they were driving at high speed on some kind of long off-ramp paralleling the freeway but separated from it by a low retaining wall. The cargo truck with the container on the back was still out on the highway, going straight ahead.

Yakov nudged the interpreter.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the interpreter.

“You’re going to trust the two men on the truck to arm the bomb?” said Nitikin.

The interpreter said something in Farsi. Alim responded, and the interpreter told Yakov, “The cordite charge is already loaded and the timer is set.”

Nitikin was stunned. “The safety device is still on,” he told them.

“Do yourself a favor and save your lies,” said the interpreter. “We saw you remove it.”

Yakov knew this was not possible. He knew they could not possibly have seen inside the crate tucked away in the dark container when he pulled the wire.

“Where is the truck going? What is the target?” said Nitikin.

The interpreter said something to Alim, who smiled and said nothing.

The off-ramp suddenly veered to the left and passed over the top of the freeway. Yakov looked out the right window and watched as the cargo container, surrounded by traffic, streamed down the freeway. Soon it was out of sight.

Nitikin now knew that Alim no longer needed him. Yakov was running out of time. If Afundi found Maricela in the back of the truck, he would kill her in a heartbeat. Yakov was her only hope. Desperate to free his daughter, he knew he would have to do it before he took his last breath.

By now Thorpe and Rhytag were taking their orders from a higher authority. The director of Homeland Security, now at the command center, watched the screen on the computer as well as the streaming video, on the huge monitor, being fed to them by a military helicopter. The chopper was flying at four thousand feet, high above the cargo container on the freeway below.

The highway patrol had picked up the truck just north of San Diego and tracked it from a distance for more than twenty miles, until the interstate entered the area of Camp Pendleton, the sprawling marine base on the Pacific Coast. There tens of thousands of acres of barren hillsides replaced the endless housing tracts and subdivisions of Southern California.

CHP units had slowed traffic several miles out in front where they could not be seen by Alim’s two men in the container truck. Over the course of several miles, driving a pattern of long, slow S curves, they finally brought the traffic to a halt. Other units cut off traffic in a southerly direction as two Delta Force sniper teams were deployed from helicopters on each side of the highway, three hundred yards out from the truck.

Alim’s men were frustrated by the stalled traffic. Busy talking to each other they never saw a thing before the glass on the truck’s side windows shattered. A separate .308 round nailed each of them in the head at the same instant as their bloodied bodies piled up in the center of the seat.

Most of the motorists around them never noticed a thing, even when the distant muted crack of gunfire reached them a second or so later.