Guardian of Lies (50 page)

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me. “I cannot believe my father would do something like that.”

“Perhaps, as you say, he has no choice. If that’s the case, we’re going to have to do what we can to help him get free.”

She looks at me, then nods. “Then I will help you,” she says.

“Good.”

Three hours later we land in Mexico City to off-load the first passengers. I tell the pilot that my cell phone is on the fritz and ask him if there is any way he can send a message over the plane’s VHF radio to a friend in San Diego. I can’t very well tell him about the bomb without raising eyebrows and being arrested.

Instead the man lets me use his cell phone. I take it to the back of the plane for privacy.

It is after hours. The office will be closed, so I call in the open to Harry’s unguarded cell line. I don’t have Rhytag’s phone number or I would make the call myself.

Harry doesn’t answer. I can’t be sure if he is even carrying his regular cell phone any longer. Harry hates cops. With the federal government now listening in, he has probably flushed the phone down the toilet.

Nonetheless I leave the message to have Harry call Rhytag and tell him about the bomb. I give him the name of the ship,
Amora
, and its estimated time of arrival in Ensenada. I am hoping that the feds are listening in.

Then I call Harry’s house. Again he doesn’t answer, so I leave the same message on his home phone. For the moment, at least, it’s all I can do.

Liquida got bounced like a Ping-Pong ball all over the hemisphere trying to get back to northern Mexico. From San José he shuttled to Houston and from there caught a connecting flight to San Diego. He didn’t even try to fly south from there. Instead he rented a car and stopped for coffee at one of his haunts, a twenty-four-hour Internet java shop just outside National City.

Inside he ordered a latte and sat down at a computer to check his e-mail. He was anxious to snag the Arab’s message and read his lies. Liquida knew that between the coffee and the raghead’s brazen deceit, it should be enough to get his blood going again, to keep him awake at least until he could get across the border.

He was feeling pretty good. He had spent several hours snoozing on the planes, dreaming of ways to entertain his employer. He wondered if the man had family, and if so whether they had any money, and how much an ear or part of a nose might go for among relatives in the Middle East. He could give them a discount and sell him by the pound, a piece at a time. Liquida dreamed that maybe he could take the Arab alive, and get him alone somewhere, in which case the one thing he could promise the man was that he wouldn’t die fast.

At least Liquida could now relax. According to the note he took from the dead cartoon critic at the apartment in San José, he had plenty of time to meet the boat at Ensenada. It wasn’t due in until sometime around noon tomorrow.

He punched up the screen on the computer and waited a second to enter the floating ether of his endless e-mail domains. Then he slipped down through the junk mail and found what he wanted.

Liquida opened the message and sure enough there was text on the screen, so he knew that the Arab was lying again. The e-mail was filled with irritating false praise for the fine job he had done. Because of this, his employer wished to reward him with valuable commodities—gold and fully marketable narcotics and hints that they might even throw in the moon and the stars. But Liquida would have to stop by to pick it all up personally since FedEx was balking at delivering the heroin and the springs on their van couldn’t seem to take the weight from the mountain of gold they had for him. They apologized for the inconvenience and said they hoped he’d understand.

Liquida was angry with today’s e-mail provider. If their bullshit checker had been working properly, every word in the message should have been underlined, flashing and depositing little drips of brown down the screen by now.

The Arab translator even gave him an address in Tijuana where Liquida could hook up his trailer to haul this treasure trove home, and told him tomorrow, four o’clock sharp, not to be late. The Arab’s other assassins must charge overtime, thought Liquida.

He wrote down the address, signed off on the computer, finished his coffee, then looked at his watch. He wondered if it was too late to drop by one of his suppliers and pick up some stuff, or whether the guy would still be awake. Then he dismissed the thought; after all, that’s what doorbells were for.

And if he didn’t answer, there was always the fire alarm.

It was edging up toward ten o’clock at night by the time the sleek Gulfstream dropped us at the airport just a few miles south of the port at Ensenada. In less than ten minutes we had our luggage, and had cleared customs as well as immigration. A single sleepy-eyed officer took one look at our bags, then searched for a blank page on our passports, hit them with the stamp, and welcomed us to Mexico.

We took a taxi and laid up overnight in a small hotel on the waterfront near the pleasure-boat docks on the harbor. We booked a separate room for Maricela, while Herman and I bunked together to save cash. We were now down to a little under seven hundred dollars. As a last resort I could always try my ATM card, though by now I am certain that Templeton will have it blocked.

The following morning we get up early and grab breakfast at a small restaurant on the waterfront. Most of the stores and shops aren’t open yet. We find an outdoor market that has what we need.

I open our piggy bank and we use a little over a hundred dollars of the cash we have left to buy a beach bag, some items of clothing for Maricela, and a few snacks. Since the fire, except for a few sundries and necessities she purchased yesterday morning on her way to the phone company in San José, Maricela has nothing.

Back in our room I stand at the window and look out at the small boats in the slips that line the floating docks in front of the hotel. Off to the left is the cruise terminal with its long concrete dock that, at the moment, is empty.

About a mile away on the other side, I can see the international cargo terminal. It lies along a jetty that forms the breakwater between the harbor and the Pacific Ocean. My best guess is that we are now roughly eighty miles south of San Diego.

There is a large container ship the size of a small city tied up to the dock across the harbor and being off-loaded. It is riding high in the water and appears to be almost empty. Four enormous container cranes silhouetted against the open sky stand like steel giraffes. One of them is digging deep into the hold of the ship. It lifts out two containers at a time and stacks them on the dock. Smaller portable gantries roll up and down the wharf lifting cargo onto trucks that are lined up waiting to carry materials to the factories up north.

“What time do you have?” My watch has stopped.

“Ten forty,” says Herman.

By now Harry should have gotten my messages, and Rhytag should be mustering his forces, contacting the Mexican Federal Judicial Police and making arrangements to send agents south from the border.

“If the fax is accurate and the ship’s on time,” says Herman, “that gives us less than ninety minutes. Any ideas how you want to do this?”

“Do you have your binoculars?”

“In my bag,” he says.

“Can I borrow them?”

“Sure.” Herman fishes through the bag, finds the small Zeiss four-power glasses, and hands them to me.

From where I am standing, even with the field glasses I can barely make out the name on the bow of the container ship. Just enough to know that it’s not the
Amora
.

“One thing’s for sure, we need to find a place where we can see better. Why don’t we pack up and leave the bags by the door? Then let’s get Maricela and take a walk.”

We go two blocks away from the water, then head along a main drag until we come to a bridge that crosses the canal. We turn right and follow the path along the canal out to where the cruise ships dock. By the time we get there, the container ship is buttoned up and two tugs have moved in to ease it away from the dock across the harbor.

We find a bench and the three of us sit like bumps on a log to wait.

Maricela watches through the field glasses as the tugs, with meticulous care, nudge the huge ship out into the center of the channel. They assist the empty cargo container as she turns in her own length. Ten minutes later the ship gets her bow pointed out to the open sea, and the massive screws begin to churn the water under her stern. In less than five minutes she is out beyond the jetty with the two tugs trailing alongside.

I am wondering if I should try and call Harry again, though I’m not sure how.

The two tugs have peeled away from the larger ship, but they aren’t coming back to port. Instead they are sitting there. They appear to be dead in the water, maybe a couple of miles out. If I strain my eyes I can see what appears to be a dot just this side of the horizon.

“Somethin’ out there,” says Herman.

“Yeah, I see it.”

“Can I see the glasses?”

Maricela hands them to Herman.

He peers through the binoculars for ten seconds, maybe longer, trying to fine-tune the focus. “It’s a cargo ship. Looks like it might be empty, but I can’t tell.”

“Why wasn’t I informed?” said Rhytag. He was standing at his desk barking into the phone. “So I was in a meeting. So you should have interrupted me.

“I don’t care if the agents thought it was a hoax.

“I know. I know. I’m aware that Madriani and his partner know we’ve been monitoring them. So what if they’re playing games. I still want to know. Has anyone checked out the information?

“What I’m saying”—his voice went up a whole octave—“is do we know if there’s a ship named the
Amora
scheduled to dock at Ensenada?

“Well, then find out! And call me back,” Rhytag shouted into the phone. He didn’t even bother to hang up. He just pushed the button for the other line and dialed a new number. He waited a few seconds and the instant the phone on the other end was picked up he said, “Zeb. Jim here, have you heard? Last night a phone call came in on the wiretap at Madriani’s partner’s house. There was no answer, so the caller left a message. He identified himself as Paul. The agents say the voice sounded like Madriani. He told his partner to call me and tell me that the bomb was on board a ship. According to the message, the ship is named the
Amora
and it’s scheduled to dock at Ensenada, Mexico, sometime today. They didn’t bother to report it because it’s clear that Madriani and his partner know the offices are bugged and the phones are tapped. The agents are certain it was a hoax.

“Why? Because yesterday afternoon there was another phone call. Presumably it came in over the lawyer’s encrypted cell phone, so the agents couldn’t hear the actual conversation. But according to what they heard over the bug in the office, the partner appeared to be using our wire to jerk the agents around. He was taking them right to the cusp of something important, apparently pretending to repeat information he was getting over the phone and then pretending the phone went dead…Zeb, Zeb, are you there? I thought I lost you,” said Rhytag.

“What’s that?”

Rhytag listened to the long explanation about triangulation and jamming as the blood seemed to drain from his head. He was getting the details when his secretary came through the door with a handwritten note and handed it to him.

He read the note as he was listening to the litany of excuses from Thorpe: “Confirmed. Panamanian-registered ship
Amora
, currently docked container port Ensenada, Mex. Agent M. Trufold.”

“Zeb, never mind that. Shut up and listen…”

We sit quietly on the bench and watch as the
Amora
clears the jetty and heads into the channel. She’s much smaller than the other container ship that left port almost an hour earlier, and she’s riding high in the water. As she swings her stern to clear the breakwater, I see a single cargo container resting on the deck, near the stern.

“You think that’s it?” says Herman.

“It’s gotta be, unless there are more containers belowdecks,” I say.

I scan with the glasses back in the other direction hoping to see a train of police vehicles streaming into the port. Instead all I see are trucks hauling cargo containers in the other direction, up the coast highway toward Tijuana and the border.

“Can I see?” said Maricela. Apparently she sees something on the ship she wants to look at.

I hand her the field glasses.

She puts them to her eyes and adjusts the focus, looks for a moment, and then says, “That’s him!”

“Your father?” I ask.

“No. Alim,” she says. “On the stairs.” She hands the glasses back to me. “Up at the top.”

I adjust them and look. A slender man with dark hair, wearing white coveralls, is standing on the wing of the bridge and just starting to make his way down the steps. I get a good look at him as he climbs to the main deck and disappears through a door in the tower section of the ship.

“Are you sure it’s him?” I ask.

“Yes. I would know that face anywhere. But where’s my father?” She wants the glasses back.

I hand them to her.

I turn to Herman. “If that’s the container on the deck, it’s not going to take them long to off-load. If they get it on the back of a truck and clear customs, they’ll be out along the jetty and up on the highway before we can move. Do you see a road coming in here anywhere?”

Herman turns, scans the parking area behind us. “It’s all fenced off. But back along the path by the canal, there was a street that came in.”

“Listen, see if you can get out on the road and flag down a taxi. Take it to the street by the canal and wait for us. I’ll stay here with Maricela, see if we can catch a glimpse of her father and keep an eye on the container. Just wait for us out there.”

Herman heads out on the run.

By the time I look back, the tugs have the
Amora
pressed up against the cargo dock across the way. It appears as if they aren’t even waiting to tie her up. One of the huge cargo cranes is lining up to lift the container from the aft deck.