The Rules of Silence Read online

  “Jesus Christ, ”Titus said. Suddenly everything tilted. His perspective shifted, trying to accommodate another dimension. “These men … on the list, they're … all over the world?”

  “That's right. Every speck of intelligence about these men is funneled into the operations office of a … certain task force. And eventually it comes to me, or one of my colleagues. That's the end of it as far as anyone in intelligence is concerned. I'm not, strictly speaking, an intelligence officer. In fact, I'm not anything. Or, more accurately, I'm whatever I need to be to get the job done.”

  “Why”—Rita was shaking her head in disbelief—“can't they just deal with these people in a straightforward way, through the legal system? Or the military? Or …”

  “Consider this, ”Burden said. “Think of the scale of commitment that's been brought to bear on the pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the manpower, military power, intelligence dedication, financial expenditure, legal wrangling, media attention, national preoccupation, time. Multiply that by ten … or more.”

  “But these men haven't done what bin Laden did, ”Rita argued.

  “Neither had bin Laden before he did it. But we did know that he was some kind of threat, on some level, possibly huge. Our problem was that we had a failure of imagination. And it cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and we're not through yet. Believe me, these men have every bit as much potential to assault this country as bin Laden did. Some of them have even more. They wouldn't do it the way he did it. They know we're watching for that. But they'll come up with something different.

  “You need to understand, there's no failure of imagination in their minds. Look at what Luquín has come up with. And what he's doing to you isn't even his objective. It's just something he's doing to get his hands around a huge sum of money on his way to something bigger. He's financing something, and we don't know what the hell it is. But we're worried about it.”

  Burden looked down at the floor, his hands still clasped, forearms on his knees. His face, though impassive, nevertheless conveyed the strain he must have felt as time pressed in upon him.

  “This is … hard to believe, ”Rita said.

  Burden looked up. “Is it as hard to believe as Charlie Thrush's death? Or what that deputy told you just an hour ago?”

  Titus said, “How do we know we can believe this?”

  Then he saw something in Burden's face, an inkling, really, a slight intimation, of a hard passion stripped of the civility and of the world that had been ripped away from Titus three nights before. In the flick of an instant he glimpsed that unmentionable thing that a cultivated society allows to live at its core as long as it doesn't step into the full light, as long as it is silent and protects us from those unspeakable things that live even deeper in the darkness than it does.

  “You want all of your questions answered? ”Burden asked. “Listen to me, I've spent eighteen years in this business, and I've had to make a hell of a lot of morally confusing decisions. But they've never given me all the answers. Ever. Only God gets all the answers.”

  Burden simply looked at them, and Titus could feel him trying to understand how they were taking this. Then Burden said:

  “I'm not going to say we're engaged in a war here. It's not that easy to define, and it oversimplifies what we're facing. But we do have enemies who threaten us, who have to be engaged in a defensive struggle. And that struggle shares in some of war's demons: People die, people make sacrifices, make hard decisions, do hard things. And if we survive, we have to live with what we saw and what we did, and what we allowed others to do on our behalf. It's the price we pay … even if we didn't have any choice in the matter at all.”

  Titus glanced at Rita, and he could clearly see the strain in her face. This had blindsided her, caught her off guard even more than it had Titus.

  “We can't send this struggle away to be dealt with elsewhere by other people, ”Burden went on. “When something like this comes to your doorstep, you have to deal with it on your doorstep. And you have to deal with the moral decisions that killing always involves. Life doesn't give us clarity of foresight. We work with what we've got. It's a human dilemma.”

  Before Titus could speak, Rita stood from where she had been sitting beside him on the arm of his chair. He watched her as if he were seeing her anew, loving her profile, loving the way her thick, buttery hair was gathered hastily behind her neck, always so practical. She put both hands on her hips, wrists up, and looked at both men.

  “All of this is just so ridiculously horrific, isn't it, ”she said. “I can't stop thinking of Louise, and of Carla's poor girls. Going to sleep at night will never be the same again for any of them.”

  Titus didn't know what she was going to say, but he knew in his gut where she was going with it.

  “Can you possibly imagine what those two … deaths must've been like, ”she said, looking at Titus now. “I have to say I've thought of it. In spite of my repulsion at the idea of it, I've been drawn to thinking of it. Can we possibly imagine the … odd … horror of their last moments?” Pause. “What are we to think of that?”

  She put her hands together and pressed her forefingers to her lips as she thought a moment. Then she wiped back a few floating tendrils from her temples.

  “We're not bad people, Titus. If we do this, then we do it, and we don't look back. I know that I've been dragging my feet, and that's made it hard for both of you. But if what he's telling us is the truth … we don't have any choice in this. This really is bigger than us, larger than our own selfinterests, larger than our fears.”

  She turned and focused on Burden. “We don't know what … we're doing here. We're caught in a terrible place. If Titus is willing to trust you on this, then I will, too. ”She paused. “But so help me God, if you turn out not to be who you say you are, as wild as this sounds, I'll see to it that you regret what you're doing to us.”

  Rita and Burden stared at each other in silence. It was a moment that at once cleared the air and then suddenly filled it again with new tensions.

  Titus stood up. “Let's just get the hell on with it, ”he said.

  Burden looked up at him. “Titus, none of this ever happened. This is your own consent to silence.”

  “Understood, ”Titus said. Rita swallowed and nodded.

  Burden hesitated, then decided not to belabor it.

  “Okay, then, ”he said, “that's settled. Now, first thing: It's time you two had a conversation in your bedroom for the benefit of the listening devices we left active in there. Titus, we need for Luquín to believe that he's achieved the effect he was wanting to achieve with you by keeping the pressure on you. This is especially true since you pissed him off last night.

  “You need to tell Rita that after learning of Carla's death, you want to get this ordeal over with as quickly as possible. To prevent any more deaths, you're going to give Luquín all of the money he's asking for. Forget the delayed releases, you say. You're going to start putting through big chunks of his ransom demand to Cavatino as quickly as your attorney can arrange it with your banker and your broker. Tomorrow. Or the next day. As soon as possible.”

  “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 o
ught 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.”