this guy from some of the old fossils at CIA, musta been what, thirty years ago now, the legend of Yakov Nitikin. He’s a bag of smoke. Soviets floated the name after the Cuban missile mess so we’d chase ghosts. I can’t remember, what it was that they called him?”
“The Guardian of Lies,” said Llewellyn.
“That’s it.” Thorpe snapped his fingers and pointed at Llewellyn. “Always count on Herb for a good memory.”
“It was a takeoff on Churchill’s famous quote,” said Llewellyn, “that in time of war the truth is so precious that it must always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
“That’s what we thought at the time,” said Britain. “But it appears we may have been wrong. The old Soviet intelligence documents behind the summary, those were obtained from KGB files after the Soviet Union collapsed. According to those, Nitikin was real, and so was his secret.”
“So what you’re telling me is, this guy Nitikin is the one wearing the jacket in the two enhanced photos?” said Thorpe.
“It would seem to fit with the two first letters of the last name over the pocket,” said Britain.
“Okay, let’s assume I buy into this. It’s all very interesting, but it’s ancient history. We’re talking 1962, almost fifty years. I mean, I guess it’s possible that the man could still be alive, maybe. But the item sure as hell isn’t. There’s no way.”
Thorpe looked at Herb Llewellyn, seated across the table from him. “Tell me I’m right, Herb!”
“I’d like to. In any other circumstance I wouldn’t hesitate, but in this case I’m afraid I can’t.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
Thorpe looked at his watch. He didn’t have time for a physics lesson. “Ray, do me a favor, go out and tell my secretary to call the director’s office and tell him I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. I’m running a little late.”
Zink headed out of the conference room with the message.
“Herb, for the moment I’ll assume there’s some basis in fact for your belief in perpetual shelf life, and we can talk about that. But I suspect that if this guy’s even alive, and he has anything at all, he’s probably in a wheelchair somewhere sitting on a pile of corroded metal.”
“I don’t think so,” said Llewellyn.
“We’ll talk about it when I have more time,” said Thorpe. “For the moment I think we’re chasing rainbows here. The stuff in the old Soviet files could be disinformation for all we know. Back during the Cold War, both sides were big on that. Put a fairy tale in your file and let the other side find it. In the meantime you’re spending a billion dollars looking for Goldilocks.”
“What about Pike’s murder and the missing photo analyst?” said Britain.
Zink came back into the room and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a sheet of paper in his hand.
“I don’t know,” said Thorpe. “The whole thing just doesn’t smell right. The only thing we have linking the Russian’s name with Pike’s murder is a lot of hearsay from a photo analyst who’s missing. And even that’s tenuous. We’re reaching into fifty-year-old Soviet documents to make the connection.”
“Not exactly,” said Zink. “Not anymore. Take a look at this.” He handed the sheet of paper to Thorpe.
“What’s this?”
“It’s the booking sheet on the suspect in Pike’s murder. I had my secretary pull up what she could find off the law enforcement database on the state’s case while we were meeting. That was on my desk.
“The suspect is a foreign national by the name of Katia Solaz. She’s in the country on a Costa Rican passport. According to my secretary’s note, the woman was living with Pike at the time he was killed. But check out the alias; one of the names she used was Katia Solaz-Nitikin.”
Thorpe took a deep breath as he looked at the name on the sheet. “You’re sure about this?”
“I have to assume that if the police picked it up on the booking sheet, they must have gotten it from somewhere, either a passport or a driver’s license.”
“Get a couple of agents out of the San Diego field office to go over to the courthouse and comb the police file on this thing. And don’t wait. Do it today. Tell them anything with the name Nitikin on it, we want to take a look. Also see if they can get additional background on the suspect, particularly as regards family, also where she’s from in Costa Rica.”
Both Zink and Britain were scrawling notes on legal pads as Thorpe spit out instructions.
“Tell the agents to look through everything, all documents and physical evidence, whatever the police have. Also anything they seized at the time of this woman’s arrest and anything they found at the scene, or anywhere else, that belonged to her. Oh, and see if the police found any computers at Pike’s house.”
“Good point,” said Britain. “Why didn’t we think of that one earlier? Maybe we can find the digital images Pike sent to the lab. Who knows what else?”
“Tell the agents to keep their eyes peeled for pictures, and be sure and tell them what they’re looking for, an older man in an olive drab fatigue jacket,” said Thorpe. “If they find photos fitting that description, tell them to sit on them and to call here immediately. I don’t want those pictures disappearing again unless we’re the ones doing the vanishing act.”
Thorpe looked at his watch. “Damn it, I got to run, go prop up the human punching bag so he can get the crap kicked out of him again.” Thorpe was packing up his notes, grabbing the file. “Ray, check my calendar, let’s meet again, first opportunity, as soon as we find out what’s in the crime file. And, Herb, you and I still have to talk about the gadget.”
SEVENTEEN
Alim waited in the trees at the edge of the forest for one of his men to return with the information that he wanted. The man in question had been assigned a simple task, to watch Nitikin’s daughter whenever she wandered free in the camp. The man had failed. Because of this, the woman’s photographs of her father, along with Alim and his men, had found their way into the American’s laptop computer and from there to a laboratory for processing in the United States.
Afundi’s first thought was that Nitikin’s daughter was working with the Americans. Together with the interpreter he cornered the Russian and braced him with questions.
Nitikin assured him that his daughter knew nothing, and he wanted it to stay that way. The Russian knew only too well the perils of knowledge. He told Afundi that all she knew was that her father had deserted from the Soviet army many years before. She believed that to be the reason he was in hiding.
To Afundi this made no sense. If desertion from the Soviets was his only reason for hiding, why had Nitikin not gone back to his family in Costa Rica when the Soviet Union ceased to exist? Surely she must have asked her father that same question many times.
By then Afundi realized he himself had asked one too many questions. He could read in Nitikin’s eyes his fear for his daughter. Alim dismissed it all as a misunderstanding. He slapped the old man on the back and told him not to worry, that everything was now fine. But it wasn’t.
Alim and his small troop of escapees from Guantanamo had been selected for the job not because they were trained fighters or because they had any special skills for completing the operation. They were picked because it was Alim who’d delivered the information to his country’s Cuban consul, and from there directly to Alim’s
