The Rules Of Silence (25 page)

“Only one more, ”the man said without speaking the name.

“Do you worry about not finishing? ”Burden asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“There’s no rush.”

“You don’t want to get it over with?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. To finish it.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly.”

“Just to have it done.”

“Closure?”

That word sounded strange coming from a man like him. Burden wouldn’t have believed he even knew the word.

“I guess.”

“No. There is no closure.”

That was why there was no future. It wasn’t going anywhere. And the man wasn’t going anywhere. Like Zeno’s arrow, he was only where he was, in the instant. His existence was within a continuum that was neither past nor future, neither leaving nor arriving. It was all of a piece. And yet, like the arrow, he miraculously advanced all the same, between instants, where there was neither time nor memory, neither hope nor disappointment.

The man wasn’t ordinary. Maybe he had been before it happened, but not anymore. Some men rise above the ordinary because of who their fathers were, or because of the amount of money they have made, or because of something they have done, or because of the women they have bedded or lived with or married. But this man rose above the ordinary because of what had happened to him, of what he had seen and lived with … and because of what he had become as a result.

A fly appeared and lighted on the man’s bare right shoulder. In the sunlight it threw a shadow twice its length across the collarbone. The man looked at it to see what he’d felt, then ignored it. The fly was thinking, and so was its host. Moving in advancing jerks, the fly went down into the concave shallow near the man’s neck, the relief of trapezius, it was called. The fly stayed there, out of sight.

That, Burden thought, was an odd thing.

Burden watched the relief of trapezius, waiting for the fly to emerge. The shallow wasn’t that large. The fly must be sitting in just the perfect square centimeter deep enough to conceal it. What were the odds of a fly positioning itself like that, to become lost in a man’s anatomy?

The man raised his right arm from where it rested on the arm of the chair and wiped at the sweat trickling out from under his other arm. Burden watched for the fly to shoot off into the room somewhere. It didn’t. Now both the man’s arms were resting on the arms of the chair again. He coughed softly, a kind of grunt. Burden cut his eyes to the relief of trapezius. Nothing. It was as if the fly had crawled into a tiny hidden orifice and entered the man’s body. Gone.

“It’s going to be tonight, ”Burden said.

The man didn’t react. Burden felt sorry for him. It wasn’t much of a life, at least the way Burden measured it. Only a few things kept this man alive. And after all five of them were done, he would find solace in suicide. It was as predictable as night. Burden could hear it in his voice.

But Burden knew that was unfair. One man measuring another man’s life was always unfair, or unbalanced, or a misunderstanding. In reality you never knew what another man’s life was like, and even if you thought you knew, you wouldn’t get it right. You never knew, because the only thing you had to measure by was your own life, and that was such a limited thing. You had to live a long time in your imagination to approach another man’s life with any sympathy or genuine understanding at all.

Burden thought of Lucía; he didn’t know why. He thought of her looking through the viewfinder of her Hasselblad, the world upside down, but even so she understood it and recorded it through a lens of kindness that in itself was misunderstood. He was curious that the man had asked about her. He was curious about it, and he wasn’t. Men who lived on the cusp of hell sometimes tended to be sensitive to kindness. It was a little-known fact about great sinners. It was often misunderstood, mostly by people who mistakenly believed they had little in common with those who were lost.

“It’s Tano Luquín, ”Burden said. “I’ve found him.” The man quit breathing. The movement in his sternum just stopped. Slowly he turned to wax, and his eyes became glass. Though he had been perspiring before, now he began to glisten profusely, as if overwhelming emotion had sucked away his breath and condensed it within him into an oleaginous concentrate that now oozed from every pore.

Then something caught Burden’s eye. On the man’s shoulder the fly had crept to the cusp of the relief of trapezius. It had stopped, its black head only just emerging from the verge of the shallow. And there it waited.

Chapter 40

“I don’t know what to think, ”Rita said. Norlin had left soon after finishing his story of Mourad Berkat, and she had gone straight to the sink to run a glass of water while Titus had walked out to Norlin’s car with him. Now he was gone, and Titus had just come in through the kitchen door. Rita was standing with the back of her hips against the sink, the glass of water in one hand, her hand on her hip.

Titus looked at her and shook his head, then went straight to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He popped the top off with a bottle opener and took a long drink. Feeling weary, he sat on one of the stools at the island, put the bottle down, and rubbed his face and eyes with both hands.

“I’ll tell you something, ”he said. “That was a pretty damned surprising story. But you know, it shouldn’t have been. García told us himself—in so many words—what he does. Face it, Rita, we’re pretty naive about these things. We’re just … naive.”

“I don’t think Mr. Norlin picked that anecdote randomly, as he claimed, ”Rita said. “It’s tied to what’s happening now. Something else is going on with Luquín.”

“Yeah, I’m sure there is. We’d be not only naive, but stupid to think there wasn’t. Hell, García told us that. We’re just a piece of this story. As grim as it is for us, it gets worse the more you know.”

He stared out at the veranda. For the first time in a couple of days, he thought about the dogs. Shit. How many years ago had that been?

“That woman, ”Rita said, “and those children …”

He knew what was coming.

“That make you think of us? ”she asked.

“Yeah, ”he said honestly, “it did.”

“What if he wants Luquín as desperately as he wanted that Algerian man?”

“You want me to be honest with you, ”he said, pulling his eyes away from the veranda to her, “he probably does.”

She stared at him. Rita could deal with shock. She would pull herself together and deal with it.

“I think that’s part of what Norlin was telling us, ”Titus said, “leaving it up to us to read between the lines. Maybe he didn’t know what or how much García had told us, but I think he was trying to get us to understand the scope of our situation. That it’s not just about us.

“But that’s not all there is to it, ”he went on. “This isn’t the same kind of situation. Just imagine … the names on that list. Those men … every circumstance is different. They’re scattered all over the world, live in all kinds of situations, in caves, in mansions. Some educated and intellectual, some ignorant. It’s got to be unbelievably complex. I think we’d be making a terrible mistake to think that every one of these situations is the same, that we can predict the way one plays out based upon the way that another one played out.

“I’ll tell you something, ”he said, turning toward her. “It probably would’ve been easier on us in some ways if we’d known this much truth—I won’t say the whole truth, but this much, at least—going into this. But he couldn’t tell us. And if we hadn’t been on the verge of blowing this thing apart, he wouldn’t have told us when he did. Jesus, think of what’s going on here.”

He took another long drink of the beer. It was cold. It was good. And it reminded him of before all this, when evil was something in books or movies, when life was simple, and he didn’t even know it.

He went on. “But I’ve got to say, as scared as I am, knowing what we know now has put a different twist on this thing. If this is what García and Norlin say it is … we’ve got to hang in here. We’ve even got … I don’t know … an obligation, to work with these guys.”

“An obligation to help them assassinate someone? ”Rita was incredulous.

Titus focused on her.

“Think about it, Rita. If they’re telling us the truth, do you feel good about working against them?”

“Well, I don’t feel good about helping them.”

“Exactly.”

“And you keep saying ‘if’they’re telling us the truth.”

“Look, Rita. There’s nothing … nothing … we can do about being in a hell of a situation here. We’ve just got to do the best we can. I know that sounds lame, but what in the hell other answers do you have?”

Through the kitchen window he saw Kal making his way through the wrought-iron gate in the stone wall that led to the pool and come across the courtyard to the veranda.

It was midafternoon. It seemed an eternity until dark, yet at the same time, it all seemed to be hurtling along so fast that everything could easily fly out of control.

The door from the veranda opened and Kal stepped in.

“Excuse me, ”he said. “Ryan and I are going to take a look around. Janet’s on her way in here from the other side of the house.”

“Okay, thanks, ”Titus said. He walked to the door and watched the two men through the window, striding quickly down the allée of laurels, their MP5s strapped over their shoulders in plain sight.

“Routine stuff, ”Janet said, walking into the kitchen as Titus was looking out. “It always takes a while before you feel entirely comfortable in a new situation, ”she added by way of a casual explanation. All three of the bodyguards belonged to the “never show concern because it scares the client ”school.

Titus watched them until they disappeared around the knoll.

“It’s a big place, ”he said. “There’s a lot to get comfortable with.”

“They’re used to it, ”Janet said. “And they like it, which is even more important. ”She turned her head, tilting it slightly toward her earpiece, and then looked at Titus.

“Kal wants you to come down to the orchard.”

Titus looked out and saw him coming back around the knoll at the far end of the allée. He went outside and headed down to meet him.

“You been taking pictures down here lately? ”Kal asked, putting his foot up on a boulder at the edge of the trees as he retied his shoelaces.

“Pictures?”

“Yeah, down here. ”He lifted the other foot and retied that shoelace as well. Titus saw his earpiece and the tiny mike hugging his cheek and curving around toward his mouth.

“No.”

Kal reached into his pocket and showed Titus a black plastic disk, the cap of a film canister.

“Thing’s new, ”he said. “I think you’ve had a visitor.”

He looked up and squinted into the bright western light slanting in at the far end of the allée. “Come on, ”he said to Titus, and they started up the allée.

They got to the entrance of the orchard just as Ryan was heading into the rows of peach trees from the back side. Kal stopped where the front corner of the orchard met the allée. A retaining wall faced with stone blocks stood shoulder high where the orchard began, following a slow, outward-swinging arch as it circled around behind the house and the pool and then sloped to natural grade on the far side of the orchard.

Kal stood with his back to the orchard and looked at the house, trying to see what the man could have seen if he was looking at the house from this vantage point. It made Titus queasy to realize again just how vulnerable to Luquín’s surveillance he and Rita had been during these past few days. Luquín literally could have put his hands on them any time he wanted.

Without saying a word, Kal went through the two stone pillars where an old gate used to be, and he and Titus started walking, following the low retaining wall’s outward arc. They could hear Ryan coming up through the orchard, and soon they saw him approaching, walking slowly through the trees, scanning back and forth in a very deliberate manner.

Suddenly Kal stopped. He stared at the ground. The wild grass that grew there was flattened out and the ground had been churned about, the crescent shapes of a heel print partially visible here and there in the powdery surface dirt.

He didn’t have to explain anything to Titus. Both of them started looking around as Ryan walked up.

“He was here, ”Kal said, and the two guards started walking back and forth along the base of the wall.

Titus didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but their subdued urgency reminded him of his dogs when they’d picked up a fresh scent with the constant sweeping of their noses to the ground. They were methodical, but more than a little juiced.

Suddenly Kal stopped and dropped to his knees, his legs straddling the churned-up ground. He stared at the retaining wall right in his face. The stones were a standard quarrying size of sixteen inches wide by eight inches high by twelve inches deep. Solid limestone blocks.

He stared at them closely, his eyes sweeping along the rows as they traveled upward. Gradually he got up off his knees to a crouch, then eventually he was standing upright again. At waist high he reached out and grabbed one of the stones. It was heavy and Titus helped him, as the two of them slipped a loose stone out and let it drop to the ground.

There was a cavity behind the stone, and Kal reached in up to his elbows and grabbed something. When his hands came out he was holding a dark charcoal laptop and a wadded clear plastic bag that looked as though it had been used to protect the laptop.

“Looks like he left in a hurry, ”he said.

Chapter 41

“I’m working on it now, ”Herrin said, “but the encryption’s pretty damned good. I can’t make any promises about how long it’ll take.”

They were in the guest house, and Burden was coming in on the speakerphone. They didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t say. But in the momentary hesitations of conversation, there was the distant sound of boat traffic.

“Listen, Titus, ”Burden said, “this’s my screwup entirely. I got sloppy. The worry here is that this guy got a shot of me. We won’t know whether he did or not until Mark breaks the encryption. If he did, Luquín’ll evaporate, abort this thing. He may already be gone. We may be spinning our wheels here and don’t even know it. But if he did ID me … if Luquín knows I’m here, it’ll get rough. There’ll be a steep price to pay for this, Titus.”