The Rules of Silence

by David Lindsey

  “Decent people, ”Luquín mused, nodding. “Yes. Well, Mr. Cain, it has been my experience that there is just a hair—a very thin hair—between decent people and animals. I have learned that what works with animals, works with decent people, too.”

  “Fear.”

  “Yes, of course. Fear.”

  Titus listened to the faint hiss of the lantern in the following silence. Even though the windows of the shack were open, the heat was oppressive, and the acrid smoke of Luquín's cigarette mingled with the decaying odors of the old shack. Titus was sweating under his uniform, and he saw that Luquín was sweating now, too, almost suddenly.

  “You are a stupid man, Mr. Cain, ”Luquín said.

  “Within forty-eight hours you can have thirty-one million dollars in your accounts, via Cavatino, ”Titus said. “But if another person dies, I'll go straight to the FBI with everything. I'll have them hunt your ass all the way to Patagonia. And if they don't find you … I will.”

  Luquín flinched, and his right arm shot up as he thrust his upper body forward in his deck chair and pointed the first and second fingers at Titus, the cigarette smoldering between them. The swaggering affability was gone, and Titus saw rage. He saw Luquín's beast, a thing that had hungers that could be satisfied only if someone grieved.

  Like a silent image in a wax museum, Luquín remained frozen in midgesture, his arm outstretched, his eyes fixed in midheat. His words, whatever they might have been, remained in his throat. Only the cigarette, trembling slightly, smoke waffling up from its ember, betrayed his reality.

  “Do not, ”he managed to say in a voice made hoarse by his extraordinary effort at self-restraint, “presume anything with me, Mr. Cain. ”His breath was squeezed to a whisper. “You do not threaten me.”

  Luquín's eyes flicked to the side, and in an instant Titus remembered that Roque was still standing just a step back. The butt of Roque's gun caught him at the edge of his eye in the right temple. He heard the sound of flesh splitting between metal and bone and felt his head fling back before he went out.

  Unfortunately he was out only seconds, stunned, really. He could've gotten up sooner, but the lantern kept trying to go out, and for reasons he didn't understand he seemed to have gained several hundred pounds and had to get his legs in just the right position to be able to lift himself.

  He heard Luquín barking angrily in Spanish, and then Roque was on him again, and Titus covered up his head to ward off another blow. Suddenly he was horrified that he would be beaten to death. But there was no second blow.

  “La capucha, ” Roque said, standing over him, and Titus felt the black hood hit him in the head.

  Chapter 29

  There was a driver and a camera operator with a thermal infrared videocamera in each of the four surveillance cars, all local talent. The local talent was a necessity. So much of chase surveillance was about anticipating moves, and anticipation required an intimate knowledge of the geography and the traffic ways. Burden was in the fifth vehicle, a van, where he sat in the back with two technicians monitoring three types of mapping computer screens and four live television screens picking up the cameras from each of the cars.

  Burden never even met the chase people he was working with, but the driver and the two technicians in his own van were regulars that he used on these kinds of operations, flying them in from different locations.

  From the moment Titus was picked up outside the gates of his property, Burden watched LorGuide monitors that registered the feedback from the moles Titus was carrying for distribution. Green dot signals registered the moles put on people, the yellow dots registered moles left on vehicles.

  Using a complicated tag relay technique, the chase team was able to keep visual contact with the vehicle carrying Titus, even when he was taken into the thousand-acre greenbelt of City Park, nestled into a large U-shaped bend of Lake Austin. It was on the isolated City Park Road that Burden watched his monitors as Titus was switched to another vehicle, which then left the park's only paved road and headed out into the dense cedar brakes.

  But it was also on City Park Road that the chase cars had the good luck to spot Macias's own surveillance van. They dropped off a marksman in the woods when the van entered a loop that would bring it out the same way it went in. From his blind, the marksman shot the van's right rear wheel with a paint ball filled with a black dye that popped up on the LorGuides as a bright raspberry dot.

  For the two hours that Titus was in the hands of Macias's people, Burden's teams never stopped moving, dropping off cars and picking up others to avoid any vehicle being seen more than once by the Macias surveillance. It was a complex operation, and by the time Titus was dropped off at an apartment complex overlooking Loop 360, Burden's people had a good idea of the size of Macias's tactical team. Many of the vehicles and people had been tagged by Titus, and their positions could be monitored constantly.

  It was two-forty in the morning as Titus guided the Rover up his private drive, past the place where the Rover had been taken away from him, and went on to the wrought-iron gate. He punched the remote under his dash, the gates swung open, and he drove through.

  Suddenly a man stepped out in front of his headlights, at the far edge of their reach, and stood in the middle of the drive. Titus's heart slammed so hard, he lost his breath. No, he didn't want any more of this. And then: Had something happened? Had they gotten in somehow? The figure grew brighter and brighter until he realized it was García Burden.

  Titus stopped, and Burden came around and opened the passenger door and climbed in.

  “Shit! ”he said when he saw Titus's face in the dash lights. “What happened?”

  “I pissed off Luquín and his man banged me with the butt of his gun. I've been bleeding like a pig, but I'm okay except for a hell of a headache.”

  Burden was already past it. “After you clean up I need to talk with you. I need to hear the details.”

  Rita conquered her every instinct to explode and instead helped him clean up the cut. Though she quickly realized that it wasn't a really serious wound, she stubbornly insisted that he needed stitches. But when Titus flatly refused to go to the emergency room, she cobbled together a butterfly stitch of her own manufacture that she said would do the job but would leave a scar as big as a third eyebrow. After he put on clean clothes, they called Burden, who had gone to the guest house to talk to Herrin and his mobile crews over the radios and secure phones.

  They sat at the island in the kitchen, Titus, Rita, and Burden, with papers and radios and telephones scattered out in front of them on the black granite counter. Rita had made a pot of strong French roast coffee to help them stay alert.

  Rita, Titus discovered, had actually listened to the whole thing in the guest house with Herrin, an experience that she said she had found fascinating and horrifying, but ultimately reassuring. The subdued control with which Burden and his teams had handled the hectic two hours was a lesson in a new kind of reality for her. Somehow—irrationally, she admitted— it had made her feel as though there might be some way to get through this after all.

  Burden was focused on the debriefing and repeatedly took Titus through his trip from the moment he was taken from the Rover to the moment he was returned to it. He asked Titus about the things he heard, of movements he heard, of what he sensed. What about accents? What about personalities? He asked how many people Titus could count, and then he took him over what they had seen on their monitors. He asked Titus for his guesses about this and that, and then he told Titus his own perspective of the same guesses.

  They went over Titus's conversation with Luquín, and Burden asked about Luquín's manner, the way he sounded when he said certain things, the expression on his face, the set of his eyes. How did he choose his words?

  Finally there was a pause in the debriefing. Burden checked his messages on his phone, looking at the readout without saying anything. Titus glanced at Rita, trying and failing to mask his anxiety. Rita caught his expression and frowned
.

  Burden cleared his screen, looked up, and paused.

  “Okay, ”he said, “let's talk about it. Whatever it is. There's no time for being subtle. I don't have time to decipher signals. Bring it out in the open.”

  Titus shifted in his chair.

  “The whole thing tonight, ”he said, rubbing his face with his hands, flinching when he touched the cut that he'd forgotten about. “He's running a pretty damned tight operation, isn't he.”

  “He always does. You can't afford many mistakes with this guy.”

  “I'll be honest, ”Titus said. “It doesn't look to me like you've got what it's going to take to do this.”

  Burden kept his eyes on Titus, but his expression was unreadable.

  “It looks to me like the disadvantages that you outlined for us earlier add up to a damned big handicap. Too big for you to overcome.”

  “I've already told you our odds aren't good, ”Burden said. “So that shouldn't be a surprise. And if you're judging the battle by what you see on the battlefield, you're making a mistake.”

  “What I see, ”Titus said, “is a guy who's got a well-oiled machine operated by disciplined and brutal men. What I see is that he came prepared to win, and he brought men who'll do anything to make sure that he does.”

  “That's what you've seen, ”Burden said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, in this business what you see isn't a good gauge of the reality. The whole plan of engagement—on both sides—is designed to be unseen. It's what you don't see that you need to worry about.”

  “That sounds good, García, but I can't make my decisions based on what I don't see.”

  “Keep this in mind, ”Burden said. “Those people who handled you tonight have been here a month or more, and during that time you saw nothing, knew nothing. They came into your house, many times, planting bugs, familiarizing themselves with your security system, sniffing you out, and you didn't have the slightest idea about it. Until Luquín himself told you what he'd done.

  “And don't forget this: What you saw of Luquín's operation tonight you saw only because of what we did, my people and you. We drew him out, and he didn't even know what was happening. As powerful as he is, we were able to do that. Right now we're processing that information in our computers, and after I add in what I learned from you during the last hour or so, we'll have a pretty good picture of the number of people we're up against.”

  Burden took a sip of his coffee and glanced at Rita before he spoke again.

  “You haven't done the wrong thing, Titus. Don't start second-guessing yourself now. We sure as hell don't need Ruby Ridge or Waco tactics here. We've come a long way in a short time in understanding how to deal with the Luquíns of the future. What you're seeing are the rough edges. The slicker stuff you won't see at all. We don't want spectacle. We want invisibility … and silence.”

  He paused. “One other thing: Remember our conversation in San Miguel? Once we've committed to this thing, there's no turning back. I'm holding you to that. We're sleeping with the serpent now, Titus. The only way we're going to live through the night is to be very still and very quiet until it's dead. If we wake it, it'll kill us.”

  FRIDAY

  The Fourth Day

  Chapter 30

  An hour after Titus collapsed into bed and instantly fell asleep, despite the adrenaline high of his ordeal, his assistant, Carla Elster, rolled over in her bed several valleys north and looked out the window at the pale dawn. The radio alarm had just come on, and she listened to Bob Edwards on NPR intone something about a congressional hearing. She let herself stay in bed until the end of the story, which couldn't have been more than three minutes long, and then threw back the covers.

  She reached for her cotton robe on the chair beside the bed, slipped it on, and tied the sash in a slipknot. She padded into the bathroom, where she washed her face, brushed her hair, and then brushed her teeth with her left hand on her hip as she examined her face in the mirror and assessed the impact of the years.

  Telling herself to hell with that, she turned and went out into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen, where the coffee would just be finishing. She poured herself a cup, added half-and-half from the refrigerator, and carried the mug with her out the front door to get the paper.

  Back inside, she sat at the kitchen table and read the headlines of The New York Times . She couldn't concentrate on the articles because her mind kept going back to Titus, as it had throughout the night. She couldn't stop worrying about him. Something was seriously wrong. She didn't believe the bad investment story, of course. But the most remarkable thing about it was that whatever was happening, Titus thought it was necessary to ruin his own reputation to cover it up. That must have killed him, and it pained her deeply that he felt he had to do that.

  And those guys with the headphones, were they checking for electronic bugs? That's what it looked like, and Titus had completely ignored her pointed questions about it. Even more curious was his immediate insistence that his financial worries were personal. That made her suspect they weren't.

  She changed into jogging clothes, still thinking of Titus and Rita. Although Rita's disturbed behavior was understandable, given the death of Charlie Thrush and the news about Titus's financial troubles, she seemed more agitated and abrupt than distraught.

  At the bottom of the stairs she stopped by the secretary's desk in the front hallway to pick up her epinephrine injector, which she kept in a small sack and wore on a string around her neck when she jogged. She checked her watch as she headed down the front sidewalk and then hit the street, taking off at a slow lope.

  There were sections of West Lake Hills, an incorporated town on Austin's southwest side, that felt almost rural, their narrow, winding lanes climbing the heavily wooded hills and then twisting down into the valleys. The homes themselves were often hidden from the lanes, and it wasn't unusual to jog for many blocks without seeing any of the homes at all.

  Carla's route was a secluded course, and she looked forward to her peaceful early morning regimen. She liked the time alone, because once she got to CaiText it was nonstop until she returned home exhausted in the evening.

  Twenty minutes into her run, as she rounded a corner at an intersection, a man was warming up at the entrance to his drive that led deeper into the woods. He fell in behind her for half a block back as she turned into a smaller street. Another half block ahead of her a woman emerged from a hedge flanking the front sidewalk of one of the homes and began jogging in front of her, though at a slower pace.

  Just as Carla was about to overtake her, she heard the man coming up fast behind her. She slowed just as she was approaching the woman so that the three of them wouldn't be three abreast on the small lane as the man passed.

  But he didn't pass. The woman whirled around and embraced Carla and spun her around. The man was on her instantly, stuffing a ball of foam into her mouth, and then the two of them literally carried her into the dense woods that crowded up against the lane.

  Stunned, Carla didn't even know how much she struggled, but she was aware of fighting, though she was soon pinned down. The woman pulled down the neck of Carla's sports bra, and the man produced a net bag that emitted a sound that horrified her: a constant, quavering buzz.

  Carefully the man placed the opening of the bag next to her left upper breast, and she went berserk. But she just wasn't strong enough. The hornets stung her repeatedly before the man moved the net down to her bare stomach, where he held it firmly against her as they stung her again.

  That was all.

  Then the man and woman simply held her. The man looked at his watch, and they all waited. The welts on her breast and stomach burned fiercely, as though hot coals had been spilled on her, and because she was already sweaty, they itched wildly.

  They lay there, the three of them, in the tall grass a few yards into the woods, in a weird, mad embrace, waiting. What was happening? Why were they doing this? She could smell the man's a
ftershave, and she could feel the woman's soft breasts against her bare shoulder. The mind-numbing why of it was as stupefying as was the terror of waiting for the allergic reaction to kick in.

  This was incomprehensible.

  She tried to see their faces, but she couldn't. Why wouldn't they let her see their faces? If they were trying to kill her, what would it matter? Kill her?! Was that … could that really be their intent? That's what they were doing, but was that what they meant to do?

  That made no more sense than if one of them were a butterfly.

  Her allergy was acute, so the symptoms struck quickly. She began to feel her throat close up, and then her lungs seemed to collapse, as if they couldn't retain enough oxygen. She felt the quiverings of panic and coughed through the foam ball. Her stomach began to cramp, long, hard contractions of her muscles. She felt light-headed, and her heart revved up to an incredible speed.

  She felt one of them remove the epinephrine injector from around her neck. Were they going to save her after all?

  Suddenly she felt as if time had accelerated at an incredible velocity. She knew she had twenty minutes at most. The couple embraced her like oddly impassioned friends. The idea of how the three of them might look to someone passing by flashed through her mind. Beyond strange. She felt their warm flesh against her own. So intimate. She could hear them breathing. Or was that her?

  As she began to fade in and out, it seemed that they loosened their grip on her. Was that just because she was losing consciousness, or were they actually doing that? Inexplicably she thought of her ex-husband with an angerless regret. She thought of the girls. They would be all right. She had gotten through the tough years with them, and they were leveling out. The rest of it was going to be okay. Nathan. Bless his heart. He would be dumbfounded.

  There was a moment of brilliant, mind-blinding panic, and she fought her abductors. And she fought her departure. Of all the silly things to happen to her … Who would've thought it would be something like this, something so profoundly, utterly mystifying?