The Rules Of Silence (22 page)

“But what if I can’t deliver on that?”

“All you’re saying is that you’re going to speed up the original schedule he’d given you. ”Burden checked his watch. “That conversation needs to happen within the hour. One last thing, ”he said, looking at Titus. “In your meeting with Luquín last night, you gave him a pretty hard time. That took guts. But in any other circumstances, that would’ve gotten you killed. And that confrontational stance has a pretty stiff downside to it.

“It’s my fault, ”he added quickly. “I should’ve covered this with you, but it got past me. The fact is, pissing him off wasn’t what we wanted to do. The upshot of the meeting should’ve been that you were intimidated by your confrontation with him. He needed to have walked away from there thinking that he had you completely under his control. But in light of the effect you had on him, I think we ought to bring in some bodyguards to stay here with Rita. You may have to leave again. She may need company.”

Neither Titus nor Rita said anything for a moment. They were both having the same thought, but Rita came out with it first.

“But … isn’t that … wouldn’t that be the same thing as Titus removing the surveillance? When they see bodyguards coming in here … won’t that give Luquín another excuse to kill someone else?”

She was looking at Burden, but it was Titus who spoke up.

“Do it, ”he said to Burden. “And do it fast.”

Chapter 34

He unzipped his pants, moved over a few steps, and pissed at an angle against the rock retaining wall so that it didn’t make any sound. A bright green anole lizard scuttled away up the set-back rows of stones to get away from the urine.

As he relieved himself, he took stock of his situation. Bluejays complained incessantly somewhere in the peach trees. Cicadas hymned loudly in every direction, praising the rising heat. Nothing unusual. He glanced back over his left shoulder toward the guest house. The two guys who had come out half an hour earlier were still sitting on the veranda. The Cains were still inside the guest house. Whatever the hell that was all about.

He shook himself off and zipped his trousers again. Turning back to the camera, he leaned his full body against the stones of the retaining wall. They were set back row upon row from his feet to his chin, so that all he had to do was lean forward against them in an upright reclining position, as if it had been designed for him to spy from. He lowered his head to the camera, scanning the telephoto lens back and forth. No. Just the two guys.

That morning he had watched as the woman came outside, early, in her gown. She had gone out to the fountain and looked in, then she had walked over to the wall that separated the courtyard from the pool and looked at some flowers there. It was there, as she’d turned to go back to the veranda, that the sun had fallen on her across the top of the stone wall, and in an instant the gown went clear, as if it had turned to a thin sheet of transparent water. Oh, shit.

It was good for six or eight strides of her long legs, and then the thing went opaque again as the poolhouse blocked the sun. But he had gotten off two snaps, and when nothing was happening he went back to them on the camera’s screen. He was going to save those.

Having thought of it, he double-checked the laptop, which was balanced on the retaining wall’s top row of stones. The thing was powered up, ready to send his next series of pictures.

Suddenly the guest house door opened, and the two guys on the veranda stood, looking toward it. The problem with his position—and there was nothing he could do about it, no matter how much he moved up and down the retaining wall—was that he couldn’t get a clear shot of the door itself. The allée of trees obscured it so that all he could see was the bottom half of the people who came and went, until they got to the veranda.

But now he saw three sets of legs. The woman, her husband, and another. He needed a shot of the third person. He didn’t know there had been another person in there. The guy had to have arrived after dark.

Sweat trickled out through the hair at his temples and slid down the side of his face. His hands were sticky with it, and the case of the camera grew slick. Straining through the viewfinder, he concentrated on the legs of the people as they moved to the front of the allée, toward the veranda. He blinked away the sweat gathering in his eyebrows. Damn it.

Just before the three of them emerged onto the veranda, the unidentified man stopped. They talked some more, and then the guy left the Cains and headed down the allée alone.

He had to make a quick decision since the allée descended in his direction and came to within twelve meters of where he was standing. He shoved the computer into the grass—no time to put it away—grabbed the camera, and fell back into the orchard, disappearing into a stand of wild grass. Turning immediately, he faced the allée with a view through a row of peach trees.

The guy walked the length of the allée, and he could hear him talking, using his cell phone. Still he couldn’t get a clear shot with the camera. At the end of the allée the guy turned and went down behind the orchard toward the woods. Where the hell was he going?

Risking discovery, he left the grass and ran, bent over in a crouch along the end of the rows of peach trees, past a toolshed. Breathing heavily and thankful that the guy was on the phone, which would distract his hearing, he came to the end of the last row of trees and dropped to his knees behind a cedarpost woodpile. He turned to the end of the allée where he expected the guy to have emerged and raised his camera. But he was nowhere in sight. Loza frantically scanned the edge of the dense woods that led down the hillside to Cielo Canyon Road below the property.

At the last possible moment he saw the guy entering the woods. He squeezed off a few shots, not sure what he was getting.

Shit. This was suspicious. Not good. Macias wasn’t going to like this.

Chapter 35

After Burden left them in front of the guest house, Titus and Rita headed straight to their bedroom, where they dutifully had the conversation Burden had wanted, and then went on to Titus’s study. For the next hour they sat at the long table under the sunny cupola, contacting Carla’s friends and enlisting help in calling scattered relatives. Titus made sure the news of Carla’s death was handled properly at CaiText and that Carla’s responsibilities were temporarily covered.

But no matter how many phone calls Titus made, no matter how many shocked people he talked to or how many urgent items he found crowding in upon him demanding to be dealt with immediately, his mind was divided. He had been staring out the window, lost in thought, when he realized that Rita was finishing a conversation and hanging up the phone. She had been talking to Louise.

“How’d she sound? ”he asked.

“Okay. I think she’s in that just-get-through-the-funeral mode. Nel and Derek are lifesavers. And a lot of friends from Fredericksburg are coming out.”

“She’ll have a lot of support, ”Titus said. “She’ll need it.”

“She wants you to speak at the service, ”Rita said.

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Jesus. What’d you tell her?”

“Of course you would.”

Before he had time to process how impossible that seemed to him, his encrypted phone rang.

“This is García. Listen, Gil Norlin’s bringing in the bodyguards—”

“Norlin? ”Titus was surprised, though as soon as he was he didn’t know why he should’ve been.

“He pulled together the local chase car drivers I needed last night, Titus. I use him when I need him, just like everybody else.”

For some reason that last sentence stuck in Titus’s mind like a neon sign.

The bodyguards were two men and a woman. They arrived in a Blazer following Gil Norlin’s Volvo without any special effort to conceal the fact that they were coming in. Titus guessed they had talked that over with Burden.

First names only. Janet was tall and athletic, with makeup that looked as if it had been applied by numbers. She had an easygoing manner. At first the sound-suppressed MP5 (she told them what it was) slung across her shoulder looked incongruous, until you watched her move around with it. She wore it as comfortably as her pleated trousers.

Ryan was the shorter of the two men at six two, Titus guessed. Lifted weights. Military haircut. All-American. Looked exactly like what he was.

The tall one, Kal, was maybe six five. Not a small man, but not bulked up like Ryan. He seemed a little preoccupied, as if the team were his responsibility.

As soon as they finished introductions and a few words, Rita and Titus took them on a tour of the house. Decisions were immediately made to lock all but the most frequently used doors and to put breach limpets on all the doors and windows. It got very serious very quickly.

After the bodyguards had been briefed and took off in separate directions, Norlin paused in the kitchen with Titus and Rita.

“Do what they say, ”he said. “There’s no hocus-pocus here. Just a lot of experience-based common sense.”

“These are your people? ”Titus asked.

“I’ve worked with them before, ”he said. He was standing with his fist on his hip, his jacket pushed back a little. Titus saw Rita glance at the gun at his waist.

“And you’ve worked with García Burden before, too?” Rita asked. “Is that right?”

“Yeah. A few years back.”

She looked at him. “Why don’t you just give me some idea of what this man’s like?”

Norlin flicked an uneasy glance at Titus and then looked down, collecting his thoughts.

“That’s kind of touchy, ”he said.

“What do you mean? ”she asked. Her voice had a barb to it, as if his reluctance were somehow unworthy.

“Well, you’re working with him—”

“Look, ”she interrupted, and then she hesitated nervously—or was it angrily? “People are dying here, ”she said, “and any scruples you might feel of a professional nature just don’t seem significant to me right now.”

Norlin was looking at her. He didn’t seem particularly taken aback, nor was he intimidated, but Rita had definitely cut through a lot of crap that he was used to falling back on when he was put on the spot.

“Well, he’s had a full life, ”Norlin said with intended irony. “What did you have in mind?”

“Just give me some sense of what he’s like, ”she said. “Something that … orients him in my head, gives me some perspective. Look, we’re working with this man because you recommended him. Now you think about it: We don’t really know you, either. You think it’s just … the way it ought to be that just because we’re scared to death here, we should start trusting people who—let’s face it—are leading pretty damn murky lives? I don’t know what you do. Titus has told me how he first met you, but then … what’s that? You seem to be who you say you are, but then, how the hell are we to know, really? We haven’t seen any credentials. Right? No one that we know we can trust has called us and vouched for you, have they? You know, Mr. Norlin”—she put a little extra on the “Mr. Norlin”—“we don’t just intuit your integrity, or your legitimacy, for that matter. The fact that we’re even working with him, Burden, or you … or any of these other people”—she gestured broadly toward the bodyguards, toward Herrin in the guest house—“strikes me as … just … insane when I think about it.”

By the time she had stopped, her voice was quavering with a complex brew of emotions. But the torrent of words had had its effect on Norlin. He seemed to soften a little as he looked at her.

“You have a good point, Mrs. Cain, ”he said carefully. “But let me say, it’s only insane if you think of it from the point of view of your life before Cayetano Luquín. After Luquín, insane takes on another meaning altogether. But, ”he added quickly, “you’re right. You’ve been asked to take a lot on faith. Those of us in this line of work, we don’t appreciate that enough.”

He gave some thought to what he was about to say.

He leaned against the kitchen counter and folded his arms across his chest. His old suit, already sagging at all of its stress points, bunched up across his shoulders as if it had done this a thousand times before and knew the routine.

“On a personal level, ”he said, looking at Rita, “and I’ve told Titus this, I trust this man implicitly. But the thing is, the thing that would be hard for you to sort of get a grip on, is that my trust lies within a context of extremes. The things I trust him to do, for instance, are things that would probably shock you.”

Another pause. “I could talk about him for days. Don’t waste your time trying to figure him out. The only person I know who comes even close to having done that is the woman he lives with. Her name’s Lucía. I don’t know how many years he’s been with her. She’s a Roma, a Gypsy from Sicily. Photographer. ”He looked at Titus. “Took all—or most—of those pictures you saw in his place. She’s as inexplicable as he is, and they’re devoted to each other … way past anything I’ve ever seen between two people. But that’s personal stuff, not exactly where we want to go.

“Look, ”he said, “I’ll tell you what. I don’t really know how to do this, so I’ll just tell you a story. I could tell you scores of them, but I think this one will do for right now. I’ll make it short, but I think it’ll give you some idea what García Burden’s life is like.”

Chapter 36

“Several years ago, ”Norlin began, “an Algerian Islamic extremist, guy named Mourad Berkat, showed up in surveillance photos in Mexico City. He was in the company of members of a drug-trafficking cartel that had established Middle Eastern connections.

“Berkat had been a GIA terrorist in Algiers during the eighties and early nineties, but he had ambitions and had become a freelance assassin working mostly for the capos in the drug underworld in Spain, Sicily, and France. He liked poisons and chemicals, unusual for a hit man. His appearance in Mexico set off alarms.

“García was called in … for various special reasons. Turned out that Berkat was trying to obtain the bacterium
Clostridium botulinum
. Uh, it’s an organism that produces an exotoxin, a damned lethal exotoxin, one hundred thousand times more powerful than the sarin nerve agent. But this stuff also has medical uses, as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of certain neurological disorders, for example. So it was a dual-use substance that could legitimately be found in some pharmaceutical and medical environments.