The Rules of Silence Page 18

  By the time she had stopped, her voice was quavering with a complex brew of emotions. But the torrent of words had had its effect on Norlin. He seemed to soften a little as he looked at her.

  “You have a good point, Mrs. Cain, ”he said carefully. “But let me say, it's only insane if you think of it from the point of view of your life before Cayetano Luquín. After Luquín, insane takes on another meaning altogether. But, ”he added quickly, “you're right. You've been asked to take a lot on faith. Those of us in this line of work, we don't appreciate that enough.”

  He gave some thought to what he was about to say.

  He leaned against the kitchen counter and folded his arms across his chest. His old suit, already sagging at all of its stress points, bunched up across his shoulders as if it had done this a thousand times before and knew the routine.

  “On a personal level, ”he said, looking at Rita, “and I've told Titus this, I trust this man implicitly. But the thing is, the thing that would be hard for you to sort of get a grip on, is that my trust lies within a context of extremes. The things I trust him to do, for instance, are things that would probably shock you.”

  Another pause. “I could talk about him for days. Don't waste your time trying to figure him out. The only person I know who comes even close to having done that is the woman he lives with. Her name's Lucía. I don't know how many years he's been with her. She's a Roma, a Gypsy from Sicily. Photographer. ”He looked at Titus. “Took all—or most—of those pictures you saw in his place. She's as inexplicable as he is, and they're devoted to each other … way past anything I've ever seen between two people. But that's personal stuff, not exactly where we want to go.

  “Look, ”he said, “I'll tell you what. I don't really know how to do this, so I'll just tell you a story. I could tell you scores of them, but I think this one will do for right now. I'll make it short, but I think it'll give you some idea what García Burden's life is like.”

  Chapter 36

  “Several years ago, ”Norlin began, “an Algerian Islamic extremist, guy named Mourad Berkat, showed up in surveillance photos in Mexico City. He was in the company of members of a drug-trafficking cartel that had established Middle Eastern connections.

  “Berkat had been a GIA terrorist in Algiers during the eighties and early nineties, but he had ambitions and had become a freelance assassin working mostly for the capos in the drug underworld in Spain, Sicily, and France. He liked poisons and chemicals, unusual for a hit man. His appearance in Mexico set off alarms.

  “García was called in … for various special reasons. Turned out that Berkat was trying to obtain the bacterium Clostridium botulinum . Uh, it's an organism that produces an exotoxin, a damned lethal exotoxin, one hundred thousand times more powerful than the sarin nerve agent. But this stuff also has medical uses, as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of certain neurological disorders, for example. So it was a dual-use substance that could legitimately be found in some pharmaceutical and medical environments.

  “García sent out a string of alerts to his foreign assets, but a month went by before one of them called him about a woman doctor in Paris who turned up dead in her apartment. She worked for a research clinic that specialized in neurological diseases. Berkat's photo was found in her possessions. A torn-up metro ticket led them to an apartment near Charles de Gaulle Airport, where surveillance photographs picked up a Hamas agent leaving the apartment.

  “Berkat wasn't really on the Mossad's radar screen, but they sure as hell knew the Hamas guy. They quickly located Berkat in Gaza City, and then grabbed photographs of him at a café talking to Hassan al-Abed. Al-Abed had a doctorate in biological sciences from Cairo University. Back in Paris, the French DST confirmed the missing Clostridium botulinum from the research clinic. Now García was sure that Hamas/Berkat were working on a dispersal method for the exotoxin.”

  Norlin shifted on his feet. Gave it some more thought before he went on.

  “Berkat disappeared from Gaza, and his trail went cold. Then three months later one of García's agents picked it up again in Strasbourg. Berkat had spent the night with a woman there who said that he'd used her computer nonstop for a whole day before moving on. García's people sucked the marrow out of the hard drive and found that he'd booked a twoweek vacation cruise from Brest to St. Kitts under a French name, traveling with his wife and two kids. That was Berkat's shtick, using the family man thing as a cover. He seemed to find no end of gullible women to help him without realizing what they were doing.

  “They tracked him to Belize, where he abandoned his ‘family.’Now, under a different French name, he caught a flight to Tampico, where he rented an SUV under the name of a Mexican national and headed north.

  “By now everyone had to assume that his target was somewhere in the States. Even beyond the issue of national security, the people who hired García didn't want it known that a terrorist with a biological weapon had made it within even a hundred miles of our borders. At that time, we were still whistling through the graveyard and hoping the public didn't notice just how damned vulnerable we really were.

  “God knows what kind of political repercussions there might be if people ever rolled their asses off their sofas and woke up to what was really going on. And the politicians didn't want the public to get the idea that Mexico was swarming with terrorists—bad for NAFTA—even though it was, and still is, a very real issue of concern. Another one of those things they hope the public doesn't wake up to.

  “Anyway, Berkat just needed to disappear, and it was best if that happened in Mexico. Without the Mexican government's knowledge, of course.

  “There would be no loss of intelligence if Berkat just evaporated without anyone even talking to him. We already knew Hamas was financing his run. The delivery system that he was carrying was known by its designer/creator, the good Dr. alAbed back in Gaza. The Mossad would deal with debriefing him. Berkat was just a snake that had to be killed. His poison would die with him.

  “García's choice of weapon was a particularly incendiary bomb design, just to make sure the exotoxin didn't survive or was somehow inadvertently distributed by the explosion. The bomb was loaded on a helicopter and flown ahead in the general direction of Berkat's anticipated route, the choices being narrowed down as he advanced north. Finally it was clear that he was headed for one of the border's smallest crossings, the toll bridge at Los Ebanos, Texas.”

  Norlin paused again. He glanced out the kitchen window and cast his thoughts to far-off places. He slowly shook his head and brought his eyes back to Rita.

  “You've got to understand, ”he said, “that every operation is a moving target. You start out with an objective and a plan, but you know damn well that most of the plan is bound to change because you'll inevitably be blindsided by some damned surprise. It's one of the hardest things about the job. And it's one of the things that García excels at. He's cool with blindsides.

  “Incidentally, his other most desirable talent is his ingenuity in making things happen without raising any eyebrows. He achieves his objective in silence. Or if that can't happen, the event is disguised to make it appear to be something other than what it actually is.

  “Anyway, at a dusty village called Cerralvo, Berkat left the main highway and headed north through the backcountry desert. That was even better for García's plans. The helicopter moved ahead, landed at an isolated spot of the highway, dealt with installing the explosives, and took off again. Five miles from the bomb, Berkat pulled off the side of the road at a little food stand. And, whoa, big surprise. The surveillance team was stunned to see a woman, two little boys, and a little girl bail out of the SUV with him to get snacks. Berkat had himself another family.

  “Surveillance team frantically radioed García. The helicopter had dropped him off on the other side of the bomb, and he was headed toward it from the opposite direction, watching Berkat's dot on his tracking monitor as they both converged on the site.”

  Norlin looked out the window o
ver the kitchen sink again. Titus followed his eyes and saw one of the bodyguards prowling around the poolhouse. Norlin, his forearm on the cabinet, rubbed his forehead with his other hand. He seemed reluctant to continue.

  “One night a little more than a year after this happened, I sat with García in his study in San Miguel. We'd been drinking. Too much. But I remember how the crickets were raising hell in the darkness outside the opened windows as he told me in a flat, dead voice what happened next.

  “García and his driver raced toward the bomb's location. About a quarter of a mile from the bomb they turned off on a dirt track and drove out into the brush and turned around to watch.

  “García got out of the car and vomited in the grease brush. And then, suddenly, he lost control of his bowels. After cleaning himself up, he scrambled onto the top of the car and watched the highway through his binoculars. He could see Berkat's SUV with the woman and children heading for the border and the bomb. There would be no mistake about the bomb, a computer would make sure the timing was accurate. Everybody involved in the operation who had a radio or phone or computer was using it to message García about the woman and kids. His driver was inside the car, confirming, confirming, confirming.

  “García stood alone on top of the car in the grease brush and watched through binoculars as the SUV sped along the highway.

  “Then, instantly, it went up in a geyserlike explosion. It threw up a mushroom plume high into the desert's purple evening sky. García remembered the color of the sky and the color of the plume with its internal fireball. He saw it, then heard it, then felt it.

  “The bomb had been designed to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the Mexican federal police couldn't even tell how many people had been in the vehicle. They and the newspapers assumed the blast had been the work of drug traffickers’assassins, and those who suspected otherwise kept their suspicions to themselves. Whatever it was, it had been a serious thing. Mexicans learned long ago to make peace with inexplicable events.”

  Norlin shook his head and stared at nothing for a moment.

  “Later, as Berkat's operation was dissected, and the leads gathered in those last frantic days were played out, it was learned that he had been headed for the Texas Medical Center in Houston. The effectiveness of the dispersal method designed by al-Abed for the exotoxin was a controversial question. It was an aerosol device intended for the air-conditioning system in one of the center's largest hospitals. Some argued that only twenty or thirty people would have died, but others strongly disagreed. They used words like ‘catastrophic’ and ‘unimaginable.’

  “But the speculation about body count didn't have any effect on García. There were always only four in his nightmares. He said it bothered him a lot that he never saw body parts in his dreams, only bits of charred clothing drifting down through the darkly glittering mushroom, a bright red little tennis shoe, a toddler's green-and-blue-striped T-shirt, a woman's white bra, a small dress with sashes fluttering. The colors and the kinds of clothing changed from dream to dream, but the dream never changed, and the count never changed, either. Four completely innocent people went up in a plume of fire and desert sand, over and over and over.

  “Because García Burden had decided that they should.”

  Chapter 37

  Luquín and Jorge Macias sat beneath the oak that shaded one end of the pool. They were nursing cafecítas, as Luquín liked to call the demitasse cups of strong coffee that he was addicted to. It wasn't espresso, just damned strong coffee. Luquín had slept late, and he'd slept like a tired old cat, deeply and serenely. That was his way. The abominations of the waking man never disturbed the peaceful hours of the sleeping man. And why should they? Waking was not sleeping. They were two entirely different things, he said.

  But his confrontation with Cain had put him in a foul temper. Nobody talked to him the way Cain had talked to him, and what made it worse was that others had heard what had been said because the room had been wired for security reasons. Macias had heard it, and the sharpshooter who had waited outside in the dark, his rifle aimed through the window at Cain in case anything should happen, had heard it through his ear mike.

  “No, absolutely nothing, ”Macias was saying. “We never saw the same car twice, all the license plates checked out. We saw nothing suspicious, and the surveillance people didn't, either. We photographed every car and put them into the computers. If any of them show up again, we'll know it.”

  Luquín was wearing dark trousers and a white guayabera that hung unbuttoned and open, exposing his thick chest. He wore sunglasses. He smoked. And sipped his cafecíta.

  This was a dangerous enterprise under any circumstances, but doing this sort of thing inside the United States was next to insanity. Yet it was precisely there, next to insanity, that a great deal of money was to be made. High stakes inevitably required great risks.

  “And the house?”

  “They finally got them all. Except one. ”Macias was dressed, as always, in cool, limp linen. “It's in the bedroom. We put our best stuff in there. It's got boosters, little things the size of a button on either side of the room. Good reception. Filters so the sweepers can't pick them up.”

  Luquín looked away, across the river and the valley toward the roof of Titus's house. He was chasing thoughts, and at the moment he was replaying one of Titus's remarks that had particularly stung with insolence.

  “Hunt my ass all the way to Patagonia! ”Luquín snorted, mocking Titus's voice. “Patagonia, shit. What does he think? How does he feel this morning, huh? He's going to think he woke up in fucking Colombia!”

  He stopped suddenly and looked at Macias. “And those two, they're gone? You got them out of here?”

  “As soon as they were sure the woman was dead, they called us, and my boys picked them up and drove them to the airstrip. They'll cross the border in another hour, near Lajitas. The two guys who did Thrush are already in Oaxaca.”

  Luquín nodded his approval. A killing well done. He looked at his watch. “In another half hour I should hear from Cavatino.”

  “We saw a county sheriff's car going into Cain's place, so he probably knows about the woman by now.”

  “Welcome to Colombia.”

  Macias would be glad when it was over. When Luquín had come to him with this job and had spent two days explaining it to him, Macias had agreed to do it provided a reconnoitering trip to Austin satisfied him that his people could handle the logistics of such an operation.

  After ten days in Austin, he had called Luquín and agreed to do it. But he'd wanted the complete authority to pull the plug on the operation if he thought it was about to be compromised. Luquín had balked at Macias having the last word, but he couldn't do it without Macias's U.S. and Mexican connections. Ultimately he had agreed. The deal was on.

  Macias had leased the house on Las Ramitas. He had a team of three cars and six men, as well as a surveillance van with three technicians. The surveillance team was from Juarez, men out of the drug trade. The four teams were strictly compartmentalized. They never associated and never communicated except by secure radio and cell phones.

  Macias knew that there were two things that had given him the edge in this enterprise. First, the fact that there was no precedent for it. What has not been done before is difficult to anticipate. That was one of the great lessons of the World Trade Center event. Innovation was difficult for the American intelligence community. The old ways of doing things were hard to change in the sprawling bureaucracy of a powerful government.

  The second thing that had given him an edge was getting everyone in place in absolute secrecy. He believed he had done that successfully.

  But he was nervous. There was an adverse correlative to what the crime world had learned from the September disaster in New York: The U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had undergone, and were still undergoing, severe internal analysis. They were beginning to make changes. It was only reasonable for someone in Macias's position to assume th
at many of those changes would remain unknown, until they proved deadly to people like Luquín and Macias.

  Nevertheless, this particular operation had an added incentive. If the extortion scheme worked, Macias also got a percentage of the take, not just a fee. For this kind of money he would sweat a little more than he would normally, maybe even a little more than seemed to make good sense. The size of the payoff actually encouraged risk taking.

  While Macias was running all of this over in his mind, Luquín had been brooding, too. He was still furious about the way Titus had talked to him; it was the sort of effrontery that would corrode his concentration until he did something to correct the indignity.

  Luquín flipped his cigarette away and then leaned forward and had a last sip from his cafecíta, his thick fingers holding the little handle of the white demitasse cup between his forefinger and thumb, his other fingers fanned outward delicately. He smacked his lips at the rich brew as he put down the cup and sat back in his chair. He stared at Macias from behind his sunglasses.

  “I've been thinking, ”he said, and at that moment Macias's phone rang. Luquín lifted his head in permission, and Macias answered it. He listened, then snapped the phone closed.