The Rules Of Silence (38 page)

The coffee tasted right, but there was no appetite to deal with. As much as anything, it was the nearly unbearable constraint pressed upon them to pretend that nothing had happened that created so much stress for them. If there could have been some kind of ritual aftermath of their harrowing four days, the police, the consolation of friends, the presence of attorneys or doctors … or something, they might have been able to handle it more easily. Or at least they might have begun to heal a little.

But there was no transition. Somewhere during the hours of ten o’clock and midnight nine people had died, one of them by Titus’s own hand, and then immediately after that everyone and every body (literally) disappeared. Burden remained behind on the rocky hilltop while Kal drove Titus and Rita home. That was the last they saw of García Burden. No good-byes. No one seemed to want to do it, and there was a kind of atmosphere of “we’ll tie up loose ends later ”that everyone seemed to prefer. The bodyguards stayed the night, but by noon the next day, the three of them, along with Herrin and Cline, were gone. It was bizarre.

Charlie’s funeral was on a bright, sunny Sunday. They buried him on his ranch, a breeze blowing through the valley as they gathered under a huddle of live oaks on the hill across the stream from the house. After speaking, Titus sat down and didn’t hear another word anyone said. At one point he was shaken out of his preoccupation by the scream of a red-tailed hawk circling high overhead.

Family and friends gathered at the house afterward, and Titus sat for a long time in the shade of the porch and visited with Louise. After a while, at the appropriate time—neither too early nor too late—he and Rita drove away.

Carla’s funeral on the following Monday was wrenching. There was a huge crowd at the late afternoon service in the church where she was a longtime member, the sanctuary filled with CaiText employees. Again, Titus spoke, but he and Rita were sitting with the girls, and when he sat down there was notime for him to indulge in his own reveries while Carla’s daughters needed his attention.

Titus and Rita opened their home for the reception after-ward. The last people didn’t leave until dusk.

In the days that followed, Titus was immediately forced to deal with the total loss of his life savings. His attorneys and financial advisers were still trying to make sense of his Cavatino investments. There would be some sticky moments getting all that sorted out, but it wasn’t an insurmountable problem.

But CaiText was still a strong company with bright prospects, so it wasn’t like starting over from scratch. Still, it was a sobering loss, and he threw himself into CaiText’s business in a way that he hadn’t done in the last several years.

At home, he and Rita continued to talk endlessly about what had happened. It was strange and frustrating to have had this lifetransforming experience in absolute isolation from the rest of the world. It was disconcerting suddenly to have powerful secrets that they would never be able to share with anyone. For a long time it obsessed them both. They hardly thought or spoke about anything else when they were alone. The whole experience was schizophrenic.

Over time, however, they gradually worked the nightmare into the fabric of their lives. They had to, or those four days would have become the only thing that had meaning for them in life. It would have defined them. Luquín and Macias would have stolen more than friends and money from them.

But Titus was restless. One night he went through the complicated process of contacting Gil Norlin again. He told him he wanted to try to arrange a meeting with García Burden. Why? Because he just wanted to talk to him. He wanted the guy to sit still for a few hours and talk to him. Norlin said he would see what he could do. But Titus never heard from either of them.

Epilogue

WASHINGTON, D.C.
NOVEMBER

It was a cold, drizzly evening with a heavy mist fuzzing the city’s lights when Titus got out of the taxi in front of Galileo. He paid the driver and went inside, where one of the booths along the wall was waiting for him as he had requested.

He was in D.C. for business and would be returning to Austin the next day. After a week in the capital with back-toback appointments, he had deliberately left the evening open. He just wanted a slow meal alone and time to read the newspaper.

He got a bottle of good wine and ordered dinner. When it came, he ate slowly and continued to noodle through the newspaper. He was three-quarters through the meal when he was aware of someone approaching his table. He looked up and was stunned to see García Burden standing there.

“Titus, ”Burden said, smiling and holding out his hand, “do you mind if I join you for a few minutes?”

He was dressed handsomely, even elegantly, Titus thought, and seemed as comfortable in his expensive, double-breasted suit as he had been in his jeans and baggy linen shirt. He sat down, and the waiter brought another glass. They waited while he poured wine for Burden and took away Titus’s plate.

“This is no accident, ”Titus said.

Burden smiled. “I’m here on business, too, but Gil Norlin called me when he learned we were in the city at the same time. So I tracked you down.”

Titus could only imagine. And how in the hell did it happen that Norlin knew that Titus was in Washington?

“I understand you’d wanted to talk to me, ”Burden said. “Sorry it couldn’t happen sooner.”

Titus nodded, studying him. The clothes might have changed, but he had the same sorrowful cast of the eyes that Titus remembered and the same air about him that suggested he had seen or done things that separated him from most other men.

“I was feeling … pretty desperate back then, when I called Norlin, ”Titus said. “Time has helped that a little bit. Rita and I have worked through some things, come to terms with some things, since then.”

Burden nodded.

Titus sipped his wine. They stared at each other.

“One thing, though. The man who … at Luquín’s that night. That was Artemio Ospina, wasn’t it? The girl’s father.”

Burden nodded again.

“Why’d you lie to me about him being dead? I don’t see the point of it.”

“Didn’t lie to you. I said the guy had destroyed himself. That’s what was so awful about it. He would’ve been better off dead. He became a professional killer, but that was just a sideline. His real reason for living was to track down the five guys who showed up at his house that night. He hunted them down one by one over the years. Luquín was the fifth one. After that, Artemio just ended it.”

“He quit killing?”

Burden told him how Artemio had died.

“Jesus! ”Titus was astonished, surprised that he could still be surprised by anything connected with those astounding four days in July. He studied Burden. The high-strung intensity that had been so much a part of him during that short ordeal was tempered now to an interesting subtlety. He was thoughtful, relaxed. He was in no hurry to end the conversation.

Burden glanced around the room, a flick of his eyes, an involuntary reflex that signaled a change in the conversation. He leaned forward a little more, his forearms on the table, his long fingers touching the stem of his wineglass, moving it slightly toward the candle on the table. He tilted it, letting the light pass through the ruby liquid.

“That laptop Macias was so desperate to get? ”Burden said.

Titus nodded.

“It contained the entire operational details of their scheme against you. Names. Names. Names. It expanded our criminal intelligence database about Mexico and its relationship to international crime by thirty percent. That’s massive. It was a gold mine for us.

“Gil told me later that he’d told you and Rita about Mourad Berkat. Well, Tano Luquín was a key figure behind the Berkat episode. He was the one who had the Hamas connection, oddly enough. He dropped off our radar screens after that. When you came down to San Miguel and identified his picture in my files, I couldn’t believe it.

“Macias is a different story. He knew about Luquín’s connections to radical factions in the Middle East, and he’d started building secret files on Luquin’s contacts. A man like Macias is addicted to information. Collects it like a junk dealer collects junk. You never know when you might be able to make a buck off some bit of information. Macias knew that eventually information about Luquín’s Middle Eastern contacts would be valuable. He also knew that Luquín’s dealings with these people could eventually be Luquín’s downfall. So Macias began hedging his bets big time, hoarding every grain of information he could dig out of the cracks about Luquín and the terrorists. That laptop was full of dots, and Macias was already well on his way to connecting them.”

He stopped and looked at Titus, slowly righting his glass so that the ruby smear on the tablecloth moved like a red ghost back into the glass.

“Tano Luquín was running a very dangerous game, Titus. After you left San Miguel, I followed a hunch and had a team sweep a house Luquín owned in Rio de Janeiro. They found, among other things, a telephone number that rang in a house in the Polanco district in Mexico City. When I had another team go to the house in Polanco, they found it empty. Hastily empty. The man who had been leasing the place for the past two months was named Adnan Abdul-Haq. More phone numbers. One of these numbers rang at a house in Beirut, a house that belongs to Hezbollah.

“Further checking revealed that Luquín had been in Beirut twice in the past six months. Also, remember the accounts through which Cavatino was going to scatter your ten million?”

“One was in Beirut.”

Burden nodded. “Yeah, it’s a popular money-laundering destination. But in this case none of the money went there. Not initially, though eventually that’s where it all ended up.”

“Jesus. So what was going on?”

Burden stared at Titus and then sat back. “We may never know.”

“If you could’ve questioned— ”Titus stopped. That was Burden’s point, wasn’t it?

Burden smiled a little and shrugged.

“And Abdul-Haq? ”he said. “We don’t have a clue who that guy is. His name hasn’t turned up in any intelligence database that we have access to. The man will most likely remain a mystery to us. At what cost? We may never know that, either. Or we may find out the hard way: too late.”

Burden finished the wine in his glass and looked around. His eyes seemed to flicker at something of interest over Titus’s shoulder, and then it was gone. The man didn’t allow himself much room to live life as it came to him. He was always watchful of his own behavior, afraid, it seemed, of an involuntary betrayal of something within him.

“I can understand the … necessity for the list, ”Titus said, lowering his voice, leaning in toward Burden, “but I don’t understand why, with so much to learn from Luquín, he wouldn’t be more valuable to you alive than dead. Or any of the names on the list, for that matter.”

“Intelligence is … unstable, ”Burden said. “It has a halflife that’s measured in instants. It has value only if the subject of the intelligence doesn’t know we have it. The moment he knows, or his connections know, that you have it, its value dissipates like smoke. It becomes worthless.”

“Because everything changes, ”Titus said.

“That’s right. If we picked up Luquín, everyone who ever had anything to do with him would burn their bridges. Anything that used to be connected to him—contacts, procedures, routes, systems, processes, safe houses … everything—would be compromised and immediately changed. Everyone would start conducting their business differently, and we’d have to start from scratch trying to find out who, when, where, how, why.

“But if he dies, ”Burden went on, “odds are that the information we have is still good. His death doesn’t taint the security of their connections, everyone keeps using the same methods and procedures, though maybe with a little extra care, since they can’t be sure who it was who got to him.”

“But removing him causes a void, ”Titus went on, beginning to see the logic, filling in the information to his own question. “It breaks up whatever operations he was driving, maybe kills them for good, and takes a major player out of the mix.”

Burden nodded. “It’s one way of doing things. Right now, for us, it works. We’re still playing catch-up as we revamp our intelligence programs. We need some breathing room. Checking names off that list buys us time.”

The waiter came and asked if they wanted another bottle of wine. Titus looked at Burden, who shook his head. The waiter retreated.

“How are you doing with it, then? ”Burden asked after a few moments of silence. “In terms of the sum of your life.”

Titus found it a curious question and was surprised that Burden would even want to know.

“To tell you the truth, ”he said, “there’s no getting over it. No getting away from it, either.”

Burden nodded as if he knew what Titus was talking about, but he said nothing.

“It’s having to keep quiet about it, ”Titus added, “pretending it never happened. Somehow that makes it harder to live with. Almost unbearable sometimes.”

“Keeping silent and pretending it never happened are two different things, ”Burden said. “You can’t pretend it didn’t happen. That’ll drive you crazy. This thing is part of who you are now, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Listen, what happened to you came out of nowhere, unbidden and unwanted, like disease or heartbreak … like all misfortune. Nobody on this earth would’ve traded places with you.”

He regarded Titus across the dim light of the table.

“As for the silence, I’m not going to lie to you. It’s going to change your life. Doesn’t mean it’s got to change it for the worse, it’s just going to be different. You’ll learn how to live with it.”

“Then that’s the end of it? ”Titus asked. He just wanted the damn thing to have an ending, a place where it stopped. He wanted to hear Burden say, finally, officially: It’s over.

Burden studied him before answering. “Why was Luquín putting money
into
a Hezbollah account? ”he asked. “If he was doing some service for them, helping them establish a base in Mexico within striking distance of the U.S.—which is something we’re definitely watching for—then why wasn’t it the other way around? Why weren’t they paying him? Or were they doing a service for him? And what in the hell could that have been? And, whatever it might have been, did it end with Luquín’s death? Or was he only one of many elements in a larger scheme, just as you were?”