The Rules of Silence

by David Lindsey

  As Macias watched, Luquín suddenly straightened up in his chair, his eyes locked on the small screen. Macias stopped hearxing anything that was being said to him over the cell phone. Luquín leaned closer to the screen as his expression hardened.

  “I'll get back to you, ”Macias said. He closed the cell phone and had started around the pool when Luquín suddenly bellowed a curse and jumped to his feet. He snatched up the laptop from the table and flung it into the air. It whiffled into a high arc, still open, the screen lighted with its last message, and then plummeted into the exact center of the pool, where it hit the water with a soft slurp and fluttered slowly to the bottom.

  Macias stopped. Luquín glared across the water at him, his legs apart in a combative posture.

  “Goddamn it, ”Luquín barked, “get me a computer.”

  Macias broke into a sweat as he went into the house and snatched a laptop from the dining room table. As he headed outside with it, his mind ran through all the places they'd anticipated glitches, trying to guess what might have caused Luquín's outburst.

  “I don't believe this guy, ”Luquín said. His voice had returned to a conversational volume. His fury had gone underground. Now you needed to be afraid of him.

  Macias set the laptop on the table, opened it, and hit the power button. Then he went around to the other side of the table so that he could watch Luquín's face. Luquín finessed the keys, his fingers barely making a sound as they whispered over the little gray plastic squares.

  They waited for the secure site to materialize, and then Luquín pulled up the message that had caused his outburst. He turned the laptop around and shoved it at Macias.

  “That pinche cabrón, ”he said, smiling, his voice languid in disdain.

  Macias looked at the screen.

  I have the $10 million ready for Cavatino, but I'm not putting it through until I talk to you again, face-to-face. We have to understand something. I've done nothing to disobey your instructions. If you're going to kill people even when I follow your directions, then I'll keep my money and you can go to hell.

  Macias couldn't believe his eyes. Cain had just kissed off another life or two. Macias could feel Luquín looking at him over the top of the computer screen, waiting for a response.

  “Well, at least you know he hasn't got anyone advising him, ”Macias said. “Nobody in the business would have let him do that.”

  Luquín said nothing. His eyes drifted away from Macias and held in the middle distance, seeing nothing.

  153

  “So what is he doing? ”Luquín asked.

  “Maybe he can't handle the killing. Maybe he's going to freak out.”

  “He doesn't do that. Maybe he hasn't seen enough killing, that's what I think.”

  This was Luquín's big gamble, jugar el todo por el todo, all or nothing, and he had pored over psychological profiles of Cain as if he were a professional psychiatrist. From these documents Luquín had created his own understanding of Cain's psychology that allowed him to anticipate Cain's reaction to every pressure that Luquín applied even before he applied it. This, however, was a kink in the plans.

  But Luquín's impatience with this surprise was only that, impatience. In Luquín's mind, his superiority was firmly established. Cain might make a sudden move that required a sudden reaction, but it was only a momentary diversion.

  “This is an interesting development, ”Luquín said. “Defiance? After knowing he was responsible for his friend's death?”

  “But he thinks the killing was unjustified, ”Macias said. “Maybe he doesn't think he's responsible at all. He thinks you're out of line.”

  Luquín slowly pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the table in front of him, as if a quick move would make him lose his train of thought. He lighted it and stared out into the heat.

  “Maybe, ”Luquín said, thinking. “This guy is a complicated mixture, a pussy with brass balls. ”He laughed. “Yeah, that's a good description. I'm just surprised the balls came into play at this point. After a little more pressure, maybe. But I thought the first killing would knock him off his feet, that it would take him some time to recover. Then, maybe, I'd have a tough time with him. ”He smoked, nodding to himself. “Yeah, this is interesting.”

  Macias watched Luquín. This was interesting for him, too. Normally, having a target show this kind of defiance would already have resulted in an order for a swift, brutal death, but for some reason, this time, Luquín was not so predictable. This time he was willing to exercise a little patience, even if it was capriciously granted. Still, for him to show any at all was extraordinary. Maybe Luquín wanted the money even more than he wanted to make a machismo point with Cain. Luquín's greed was legendary. He wanted those millions.

  But there was more to it than that. Though Macias was not directly involved, and Luquín never spoke to him about it, Macias knew that something bigger was at stake. Luquín was once again doing business with some of his old friends in the Middle East. Business in Mexico.

  Macias wasn't officially in the loop, but he knew more about this than Luquín believed. Not much went on in Mexico that Macias didn't know about. And the strange activities of his old compadre Luquín were no exception.

  Even by Luquín's standards, this Middle Eastern business was insanely dangerous. No wonder Luquín was volatile sometimes and uncharacteristically pliant at others. He was playing a game of snakes and ladders, jugar a la vida.

  “Can that be done? ”Luquín asked, shifting his eyes to Macias. “A safe meeting with this cabrón?”

  “It can be done, Tano. But are you sure you want to do it?”

  Luquín cut his eyes at Macias. “Fear. And flexibility. Huh? This requires a brutal hand … with a delicate touch now and then to give him hope. We have to be flexible, Jorge. We've never done it in just this way before. We have to be … sensitive to the possibilities. The blade here. A blessing there. We do what we have to do … for sixty-four million dollars, huh? You can do this? No problem?”

  “Sure, we can do it. But we have to control the logistics. And we need to make him think that we need time for you to fly in for the meeting. We don't want him to know you're close by.”

  Luquín thought a moment. Then he reached out and turned the laptop around and started typing.

  Okay. One meeting. Wait for instructions. You would do well to meet your deadline for payment tomorrow.

  Luquín turned the laptop around again and showed his message to Macias.

  “I'll contact my people and start setting it up.”

  “Send it, ”Luquín said.

  Macias tapped the key, and Luquín shoved back his chair and stood. He wanted to see the laptop in the water. He walked over to the pool and stopped, the toes of his loafers almost over the edge. He looked in and there it was, sitting at the bottom like a single eye in a man's forehead. He smoked, and the smoke was whipped away in the breeze that blew along the cliffs above the lake.

  His eyes picked up the movement of an oak leaf that had fallen into the water. It was floating about crazily, the variable breezes slinging it this way and that, first in manic pursuit, then in unstrung flight across the aqua sea.

  That's the way he wanted Titus Cain, he thought, just on the edge of hysteria, his heart racing, his mind not quite able to stop long enough to gain the traction of reason, but having enough control of his faculties to know that the faster he unloaded the money, the sooner the deaths would stop. That was the kind of pressure that Luquín had to reestablish in his meeting with Cain. Cain had to be buffeted constantly, given no time to drift. He had to be driven.

  Chapter 24

  On the way back from the orchard, Titus stopped off at the guest cottage while Rita continued on to the house. The living room of the cottage was now crammed with computers and a variety of electronic equipment that he hadn't even bothered to try to understand.

  Herrin gave Titus a quick overview of how it would all work and was bringing him up-to-date on the results from the Beechc
raft when Titus's cell phone rang. It was Burden. “Have you seen Luquín's response?” “No.”

  “He's going to do it. He's going to meet with you.” Titus was stunned. He didn't know what he'd expected, but he was definitely taken aback at the prospect of meeting face-to-face with Luquín again. “What'd he say?”

  “He'll send you his instructions, so stay close.” “Did he say why he was agreeing to meet with me?”

  “No, but he's not as sure of himself as he wants you to believe. I think he wants to look at you, reassure himself. This is good. We'll see his instructions, so just do what he says. We'll take care of our end of it.”

  “Which is?”

  “I want to go over that with you in detail, ”Burden said. “I'm going to get to your place early tonight, and I'll put it all together for you, tell you where we stand. What do you have to do to make the first payment go through?”

  “A phone call.”

  “Good. I want you to do that right there in front of him. And what about the next payment?”

  “I'm working on it.”

  Burden paused, and Titus heard something in the background, people talking, radio transmissions.

  “Look, ”Burden said, “I want you to be prepared … Thrush isn't going to be the only one. I just don't want you to start thinking … that anything's magically changed here.”

  Titus was aware of the acrid odor of electronics, of warm plastics and rubber-coated wiring. Familiar smells. But what he was feeling at the back of his brain, the hum that oscillated deep behind his chest muscles as if his heart were about to fibrillate, was not only unfamiliar, but also frightening. Waiting for another death was harrowing. He wondered if this was what a man felt when he lost control of his reason, if these sensations were the beginnings of what would later be called blind rage.

  “No, ”Titus said, “I understand that hasn't changed.”

  After ending the call, Titus stepped outside and stood in the shade at the front of the guest cottage. The shadow would grow as the sun fell farther behind the orchard, heading toward the hillside where the men had been working on the reservoir. He looked down through the splintered light of the allée of laurels and slipped into one of those moments when all that was familiar and commonplace swiftly bled away from his awareness, until he found himself estranged from his own experience, caught in a queer and alien moment.

  Then, just as quickly, he snapped out of it and took the cell phone out of his pocket and called Carla at the office. He asked her if she could bring her laptop and come to the house for a few hours’work. It wasn't an uncommon request. Titus liked working from the house whenever he could, even in the early years.

  He walked across the courtyard, past the fountain, and into the broad atrium hallway. He found Rita in their bedroom, unpacking. She heard him, but she didn't turn around from the bed where she had opened her suitcases. She was snatching things out of the bags, still agitated.

  “Listen, ”he said, “let's don't leave it like this.”

  When she spun around to say something that he knew had been building up inside her, he gestured with a vertical forefinger and then pointed to his ear, reminding her of the bug.

  Caught off guard, she just stared at him, holding her breath. Then she snapped, “Not now, Titus, for God's sake.” And she turned around again and went on with her unpacking.

  “Carla's coming over, ”he said to her back. “I've got to get some things done.”

  “Then do it, ”she said without stopping, covering the bed with slips and skirts and underwear and shoes.

  Titus turned and walked out of the room.

  When Carla stepped into his office nearly an hour later, he was at the long worktable reading Luquín's message on his laptop screen for the tenth time. When he looked up and saw her face, he knew that she knew that something was going on. She put her laptop on the table across from him and flipped it on before she'd even slipped off her shoulder bag.

  “I just saw Rita in the kitchen, ”she said, giving him a significant look as she shrugged off the bag. “What happened to the trip? She was upset.”

  “Sit down, ”Titus said, and as she did he started telling her about Charlie Thrush's accident. Astounded, she asked questions—she always asked questions—and then commiserated. It didn't take her long to realize, either, that this terrible news was falling on top of the stress Titus was already under from the huge financial loss he'd told her about yesterday.

  They talked a little while about notifying certain people at CaiText, and Carla made a list of those whom Titus thought should be told immediately. They, in turn, could tell others.

  “God, this is just one thing on top of another, ”she said. She hesitated and then went right into it. “What about … the financial thing you mentioned? Is that what you want to deal with now?”

  “Mostly.”

  “And does Rita … ?”

  “She knows everything.”

  “How's she … ?”

  “We're working on it.”

  Carla nodded. After an awkward silence Titus said, “I'm going to have to sell off a piece of the company, a small piece, about eight percent.”

  Carla's mouth dropped open.

  Titus instantly flushed. This was humiliating.

  “I've got Lack Paley working on it, and it ought to be done in a couple of days.”

  “A couple of days?! ”She was floored.

  Angry and embarrassed, Titus swallowed, and then he knew she had seen it. He'd never felt exactly like this in his life. All the good common sense, the sound judgment, the caution and steady stewardship he'd used to build CaiText, and which was a trademark of the way he conducted business, were being destroyed by the actions Luquín was forcing him to make. It would have been bad enough if this disparagement had been justified, but to have to deliberately bring such wrong assumptions upon himself was nearly more than he could stand.

  “You needed to know this, ”he went on, his face burning, “in case something about it leaked out and you started to get inquiries.”

  If he felt this way telling Carla, who knew him so well, with whom he had shared so much of his life, and who knew more about him than anybody besides Rita, how was he going to feel when this perceived irresponsibility became public? What would people think when the business press seized on this? What would happen to his reputation when his colleagues and managers and employees believed he had behaved so recklessly? How was he going to deal with that?

  “If … if I do get questions, what … what do you want me to say? ”she asked.

  “Just tell them you don't know anything about it. Tell them it's legal stuff. It's out of your bailiwick.”

  She nodded, still looking at him, but the expression on her face had moved from shock to suspicion, as if she were beginning to see that there was far more to this than Titus was telling her.

  “That's a big hit, ”she said, pretending to believe him and knowing that he could tell she was pretending, “that bad investment.”

  He nodded. Carla was a faithful jogger, and the same inner discipline that drove her regimen of physical training shaped her sense of integrity. It wasn't his withholding that was eating at her here. Titus didn't tell her everything about the business, of course, and she never expected him to. But she knew that something else was going on here, something was wrong.

  They sat in silence.

  “Look, ”she said, leaning toward him, her short, brindled hair framing her face and raised eyebrows in a kind of tousled discipline, “when I came into the house a minute ago, I saw some kind of technician coming out of the guest house wearing headphones. I walked into the kitchen and there was Rita standing at the sink, staring out the window. When I hugged her she didn't even react to my surprise at seeing her home early.”

  She kept her eyes on him.

  “And just now, when I walked through the house to come in here, I saw another technician wearing headphones. ”She paused for emphasis. “It looked to me like he was listen
ing to a little bookcase.”

  She shrugged. Who was she to find that odd? Her forearms were resting on the table, and when she paused her hands opened and her fingers spread out as if she were trying to convey a feeling of sincerity. Her fingernails were carefully manicured to an oval-edged practicality. She never wore polish.

  “I'll go along with the bad investment story, ”she went on. “That's fine. ”She nodded. “Okay? But listen, Titus, something's terribly not right here, I think. Are you sure … you know, that you don't want to go into it just a little bit?”

  He stared at her. He was tempted. The room had been swept. Who could possibly know if he said anything to her? He didn't have any doubt about her being able to keep a secret, but he felt that telling her would be like splashing her with a radioactive chemical. It could only be dangerous for her to know.

  “Give me a week, ”he said, swallowing again. “We'll talk about it then.”

  “You and Rita, ”Carla said, “everything's okay there?”

  “A lot of tension, ”he said honestly. “But we're okay.”

  She nodded solemnly. “Good, ”she said. “Then you can handle anything else, can't you.”

  “Yeah. I can handle anything else.”

  His right hand was resting by his laptop, and she reached over and touched the back of it with the back of her hand.

  “Okay, ”she said. “Then I guess we'd better get some work done.”

  Titus worked several hours with Carla, and by the time she left it was late in the afternoon. He checked for messages and found that Luquín's instructions for the meeting had arrived. They were terse: At exactly twelve-thirty A.M. he was supposed to drive through the gates of his property and make his way by a specific route to an isolated intersection in the hills, where he would receive further instructions. He sat down and stared at the screen. Burden would have this by now, too. Surely Titus would hear from him soon.

  He found Rita in the kitchen, making pasta for dinner. She was still agitated, and he didn't really have anything to add to what he'd said before. Her temper was on a hair-trigger setting, and he knew that there would be little to gain from an argument with her.