Free Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini Page B

folding canvas bag that he’d brought for this purpose. By the time the bag was full, between the gold, the laptop, its cord with the power box, the thumb drive, and the woman’s small camera, he was afraid the bottom would fall out of the canvas bag. He could barely lift it.
    The gold was an added perk, the freedom to take whatever he wanted from the collection of coins as long as he disposed of them in a manner that could never be traced. There would be no way for the police to know how many coins the woman took or who broke into the drawers. Now, instead of a random burglary, they would solve the crime quickly and in the process take care of the woman for him.
    Down in the kitchen he washed up the chef’s knife one more time and left it on the sink. As a finishing touch, he added just a tiny trace of blood from the maid. This he picked off her body with the point of his own knife and carefully transferred to a crevice near the handle. He knew that the evidence technicians would find this and that police would conclude that the maid was killed last. He transferred smears of blood from Pike onto the maid’s clothing, this to further reinforce the order of death. A little blood smeared on the front door near the handle, with the door left partially open, and Liquida made his escape. He went out the way he had come in, out the back door, locking it behind him.
    Eighteen hours later police in Arizona picked up the woman. One enterprising reporter for an Arizona paper got wind of some of the coins taken by the female suspect and interviewed the pawnshop owner where she’d peddled them. Everything was working perfectly, or so he thought.
    Liquida had never been in this much trouble before on any job. The people who hired him were not happy. It is the problem when you are hired to kill people but you are not told why, which is often the case.
    He had been led to believe that the woman was not critical to the job. They had told him that if she was away from the house at the time Pike was killed, that that would be acceptable. In which case he was to use his best efforts to find and retrieve the documents, the photographs if he could, and to forget about the woman. He was told that killing Pike was critical in order to separate the old man from the documents. If he could find the photographs, he was to get a bonus.
    The problem was that the man and the woman seemed inseparable. One never left the house without the other. It was for this reason he concluded that he would have to take them both.
    But according to his employers, allowing her to escape death was one thing, setting her up for murder was another. His plan to have her arrested had blown up in his face.
    In Liquida’s business, clients were never interested in excuses, or in how difficult a job was. You commanded a high fee because you could do the work. Once you failed on a major contract, word got out. If your failure jeopardized people in high places, you could lose more than just your career.
    This morning as he sat drinking his coffee he was waiting for a message. All of the machines inside the Internet café were busy. He would have to wait.
    Liquida never used cell phones. They were far too dangerous. Even dynastic drug lords thought to be immortal were visited by death from the sky, found charred and frozen, their ears gone, but with one of the tiny plastic phones melted to the side of their head.
    Instead Liquida maintained no less than twenty different e-mail addresses, each under a separate alias and all of them free—Hotmail, Yahoo, and a dozen more. The best, the most protected, were operated by overseas providers, in places where the reach of the U.S. government was limited or, better yet, nonexistent. He would contact employers on a regular basis and they would reply.
    He used each address only once, and discarded each daily, like underwear. He alternated among providers to make it difficult for the government to set him up, to track his movements, or