Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini

and left to fray. He looked ragged and unkempt. Except for the intense expression in his eyes, you might judge him to be forlorn. There was several days’ worth of beard growth on his face and he was wearing a pair of scuffed black leather boots, the kind you might find in an army surplus store. There were no socks showing above the leather tops. His feet were probably bare inside the boots and the shoes looked too large and clunky for such frail and skinny legs.
    Wherever the pictures were taken, it must have been chilly. The old man was zipped up almost to his chin in a faded weather-worn military fatigue jacket. One of the others was tarped in a blanket, Indian style, that hung around his shoulders. They all had on sweaters or jackets. Looking at the terrain, Honeycutt suspected that the temperature might be the result of altitude.
    He was wondering why anyone would be willing to spend so much money processing what appeared to be ordinary photographs of six men in ragged clothes somewhere in the wilderness. Enhancing their resolution and enlarging them to near poster size with the clarity requested in Emerson Pike’s e-mail would cost him several thousand dollars. He was just about to log off and return the images to the server when something caught his eye. It was only a few letters in the dappled sunlight, faded print over the breast pocket on the old man’s jacket in one of the pictures, but the letters were Cyrillic.
    Honeycutt sat back in the chair for a moment. He studied the complexion of the old man’s face. It was weathered, like tanned leather, but underneath you could tell he was fair skinned. The lack of excess flesh on his face, its sharp angles, gave him almost a Nordic look. What hair was left appeared to have been blond at one time, and might be again if he washed it. Now that he noticed, the old man was different from the other figures in the photographs, all of whom appeared dark complected, perhaps Latin, southern European, or Middle Eastern, he couldn’t be sure.
    Honeycutt leaned forward, took the mouse, and drew a flickering box around the area of the lettering on the old man’s chest. He punched up the program, blowing the boxed image to nearly full-screen size. The resolution dipped to a fuzzy haze. The light was not good, but the letters he could see were definitely Cyrillic.
    He punched out and reduced back to the original image as he danced the computer’s cursor over the figure, searching for another target. He didn’t find one. He selected one of the other photos and pulled it onto the larger screen. This time the old man was farther away, maybe twenty feet from the camera lens, his body was turned sideways, and his left arm was raised in a gesture, as if making a point.
    Honeycutt found what he wanted. He enlarged the view of a shoulder patch. Its colors were muted for combat; frayed at the edges and faded by the sun, it showed an oval wreath of leaves surrounding a central circle. In the center was a round shield. A perpendicular sword behind it pointed upward, with two crossed arrows bisecting the center. A smaller patch below it bore the numeral 79.
    He hit the keyboard and printed the item, then swung around in his chair and scanned the bookcase behind him looking for an old blue denim three-ring binder. Honeycutt was hoping that he hadn’t tossed it in the trash during one of his exuberant getting-ready-to-retire office cleanup parties.
     
     
     

TWELVE
     
     
    Liquida picked up one of the gold coins, what collectors called a cob, an irregular hand-stamped Spanish escudo. He flipped it over and noticed the numbers and letters stamped on the other side. From a small book he had taken from Pike’s house the night of the murder, he knew that the coin had been poured and stamped in Lima, Peru, probably three hundred years ago.
    He dropped it into the bubbling crucible knowing that he had just dissolved several thousand dollars of its value. The risk of fencing the coins was too