The Rules of Silence Page 2

The older man sighed in disgust and dropped the rest of his hamburger into the sack. Fucking hamburger. He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. It would sit like a stone in his stomach. He tossed the sack onto the floor. Fucking stupid American hamburgers.

  “And the other two? ”he asked.

  “The same.”

  “The same what? ”he snapped.

  “They're ready. Their techniques are well planned. They are waiting to hear from you.”

  Outside, the countryside was lighted by the waxing moon that raced along beside them. Hills rose up the size of pyramids, mounded and disguised by time, mile after mile of them. Occasionally they would fall away and a valley would open up, and sometimes fields, and sometimes meadows, rolled out under the moonlight. Now and then, in the distance, the windows of a solitary ranch house burned like isolated embers.

  “Planning something like this, on this side, ”he said to no one in particular, looking out the window, “we can't be too careful. This time there's no such thing as too much planning.”

  The men listened. They were already nervous, all of them. The stakes this time were higher than they had ever been, and everyone knew that the older man behind them had a short and deadly fuse when the stakes were high. They had been planning this a long time, and now with the arrival of the cattle truck, there was no turning back.

  The Navigator turned west again.

  The older man liked the sounds of the radio transmissions. It meant his men were tending to business. There was always something to double-check. There was always a tiny, bothersome oversight to eliminate. He settled into the corner of his seat.

  “This guy's going to think the devil's got him by the huevos, ” he said. “He's going to wish his mother had choked him to death the minute he was born, right there between her legs.”

  TUESDAY

  The First Day

  Chapter 3

  Titus Cain and Charlie Thrush were at the far half of the onemile course when they decided to stop jogging and walk the rest of the way back. They'd done three and a half miles, and the temperature was a hundred and two. It was six-fifteen in the afternoon.

  They loped to a walk, sweat streaming from them, their athletic gray T-shirts and shorts stained dark with it. They strode through the misters flanking either side of the cinder track at fifty-yard intervals, head-high sprayers that formed a wet cloud of ten or twelve feet in diameter that Titus had installed for a distance of several hundred yards on the back half of the track.

  Charlie, a tall, lanky man in his early sixties, turned and went back to the mister and stood in the cloud of spray.

  “Damn, this's saving my life, ”he gasped, bending over and putting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath, the fine spray beading on his silver hair.

  Titus, breathing heavily, too, paced back and forth through the cloud.

  “We should've gone to the pool. This's brutal.”

  There were nearly two hundred employees at CaiText now, and Titus had deliberately fostered a health-conscious environment by making it convenient for them to jog or swim or play handball without having to leave CaiText's twenty-six-acre campus. The roughly oval cinder track, situated at the back of the company's complex west of downtown, wound through an airy stretch of Hill Country woods dominated by oaks and elms and mountain laurels. It was a choice site, sitting on the crest of a hill and commanding an expansive view of the valleys that fell away to more hills to the west.

  “We're gettin’old, ”Charlie said, straightening up and grinning.

  “We?”

  Titus had known Charlie since his early years at Stanford, when CaiText was just a dream in Titus's mind. At the time, Charlie was an electrical engineer and software designer doing research in microengineering. He was in the process of pioneering some of the early uses of computer-guided laser surgery, which he later patented. In the years since, the patents had made him enormously wealthy.

  Over the years their friendship remained strong, and Charlie and his wife, Louise, regularly visited Titus and his wife, Rita, in Austin. Though nearly twenty years separated the two women, Louise's impulsive and exuberantly curious nature had kept her young and was a complement to Rita's commonsense practicality. They had become good friends from the moment they met.

  During their visits to Austin, Charlie and Louise had fallen in love with the Texas Hill Country and eventually bought a four-hundred-acre ranch south of Fredericksburg about an hour's drive away. They built a retirement home there, and the two couples saw each other frequently. In fact, Rita and Louise were now on a three-week trip together in Italy.

  Titus heard a lone jogger behind him and turned to see a chunky guy with thick black hair and a beet red face just shutting down from a jog to a fast walk. He was trying vainly to dry his glasses on the tail of his sweatshirt.

  “Hey, Robert, ”Titus said as the guy approached. “You gonna make it?”

  The guy shook his head. “Heat index's gotta be a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty.”

  “It's the humidity, ”Titus said. “Don't push it too hard.” He slapped the guy on the back as he passed by. When he was through the mist he put on his glasses again, but he didn't pick up the jog. He just kept walking. Titus watched him.

  “You ever meet Brister? ”he asked Charlie, nodding at the young man.

  “Yeah, sure. In the R and D labs.”

  Often when Charlie was in town, he would hang out at CaiText for a few hours, spending time in Research and Development exercising his curiosity. He was something of a celebrity with the researchers there, and they got a kick out of talking to him. His “no boundaries ”thinking was just as radical now as it had been when he was a young man, and everyone in the division had great affection for this eccentric and brilliant man.

  The two men moved out of the spray and started back to the clubhouse, keeping to the shady side of the track.

  “Poor guy's life's a horror story right now, ”Titus said. “His wife has brain cancer. The slow kind that takes your life away by moments and millimeters, leaving you breathing, but haunted.”

  Titus paused. “I'll tell you, Charlie, it makes you count your blessings. I just can't imagine what I'd do… .”

  “Yeah, I know, ”Charlie said, running a hand over his sweaty face. “I've thought about it, too. Not exactly like that, maybe, but just from the point of view of us having done okay doing the kind of work we like to do. Not everybody's got that.”

  “Not everybody's got someone like Louise, Charlie. Or someone like Rita. We're lucky about those two women, that's what I'm talking about.”

  Charlie suddenly laughed, shaking his head.

  “I got an e-mail from Louise yesterday, ”he said. “She said she was shipping something home, and if it got here before she got back, I wasn't supposed to uncrate it under any circumstances. Uncrate it!? What the hell's she done?”

  They were both laughing as they walked through the long arcade of arbors into the palmy courtyard outside the club. CaiText employees were sitting around small tables in their swimsuits and jogging clothes in the shade of the oaks that covered much of the campus. The setting had a westward view of the hills.

  Afternoon, Mr. Cain. Hot enough for you, Mr. Cain? The women smiled. Titus stopped and chatted with them a few moments before he and Charlie moved on, going through the club, past the swimming pool with its echoing voices, and on to the men's dressing rooms.

  Titus Cain was an egalitarian. He shared everything with his employees. There were no special facilities for him or any of the CaiText executives. His locker was just one of the hundreds of lockers in the same locker rooms with everyone else. He swam with everyone else, jogged with everyone else, and worked as hard as everyone else.

  But, like being the most beautiful girl in school, just being who he was naturally set him apart. After you get so far up on the food chain, egalitarianism is largely a symbolic sort of thing anyway. You're really never going to be buds with the men and women at the bottom. And
in Titus's case that really didn't matter to them. But it did matter to them that he cared enough about them not to set himself apart in the day-to-day scale of things where they had to live out their lives.

  Titus Cain might have a lot more money than they did— multimillions more—and most would probably admit that he was smarter than they were—in a certain wide-angle sense that the world seemed to reward—but the important thing was, he never acted as if he believed he was a better human being because of those things. And they liked him and respected him for that.

  The two men went to their lockers, took off their sweaty clothes, showered, and dressed. A few minutes later, they were in CaiText's underground parking garage at their SUVs.

  “You sure you don't want to stay over tonight and drive back tomorrow afternoon? ”Titus asked.

  “Naw, I'd better get back, ”Charlie said, opening the back of his Pathfinder and throwing in his dirty jogging clothes. “I've got to do some stuff around the house tonight, and tomorrow I've got to cut down an old dead tree by the office. I've been putting it off. ”He slammed the back door. “But thanks for the invitation. Maybe I'll take you up on it near the end of the week. I've got to come back in and do some legal stuff downtown.”

  “Give me a call, ”Titus said. “Careful driving back.”

  He opened his Range Rover and climbed in. He started the engine to get the air conditioner going and flipped open his cell phone.

  As he pulled out of the garage and circled up to the front gates of the complex, he waited for the only sound in the world that he really wanted to hear.

  Chapter 4

  “Hello, Titus, ”she said. “Tell me about your day.”

  “You first. You've got to be having more fun than I am.” He heard her yawn. It was two o'clock in the morning in Venice, but he didn't care, and she never complained. Rita didn't sweat the small stuff.

  “Well, in the morning we went to Burano, where Louise way overspent on Venetian lace, and then we went to Murano, where I spent a very sensible amount for some gorgeous glass. Snoozed in the afternoon. Dinner—a wildly delicious dinner— at La Caravella.”

  “Sounds hectic, ”he said. He steered the Rover past the security booths and then pulled into the overlook just outside the gates. In the near distance below, he could see Austin between the shoulders of the hills. It sparkled promisingly at the end of the groove of the valley. When he looked the other way, the Hill Country was turning purple beneath the last tangerine light of sunset.

  “And your day? ”she asked.

  “Business. Uneventful. Charlie was in town. We had lunch, jogged this afternoon, and then he headed back. I'm on the way home right now.”

  “I saw on the Internet that the temperatures have skyrocketed in the past week.”

  “Blistering. Hundred one, hundred two, every day. No rain in sight. Things beginning to burn.”

  “Summer.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Well, we're both having a great time. Louise is a dear and fun to be with, as always. Yesterday she spent all day photographing the colors of the walls. I had a good time just watching her. She's just endlessly curious, finds something beautiful to appreciate every time she turns around, and sometimes, literally, right under her feet.”

  “You just tagged along.”

  “I never just tag along. I carried her camera stuff for her, kept track of the rolls of film, dating and numbering them.”

  “You kept track of the time and already had the place picked out where you'd eat your next meal.”

  “Yep, you bet I did.”

  Titus laughed.

  “Well, you know Louise, ”Rita said. “She just follows her nose around all day, and when it occurs to her that she ought to eat she just wanders into any old place close by. Listen, ever since we both got sick that time in Barcelona I quit doing that with her. I've always got something checked out.”

  “The way Louise pokes around in the back streets, I can't imagine you finding guidebook recommendations everywhere you go.”

  “Nope, but I give the place a good look-over with my old nursing eye. If it doesn't pass muster, I make a good excuse and steer her to someplace that seems a little less threatening gastro-wise.”

  “She doesn't mind.”

  “No. She knows what I'm doing. We rather enjoy each other's eccentricities. As it happens, I like where she wanders, and she likes where I eat.”

  They visited for a while, and as much as he wanted to keep her on the line, he really did feel guilty about waking her at this hour. After a few more minutes, he hung up. But he didn't drive away immediately. For a while he looked at the city.

  A dozen years earlier, Titus Cain had been a far-from-home Texan, part of a team working for CERN, the Geneva-based physics laboratory, when researcher Tim Berners-Lee developed hypertext markup language, which had led to the conception of the World Wide Web.

  Though he'd been just on the periphery of that new development, Titus saw the profound implications of what was happening as quickly as anyone else. He came back home and founded a tiny company that created software for specialized computers in biomedical engineering research. He marketed his company over the newly developing Internet, and while the World Wide Web was still in the early stages of its academic origins, Titus Cain was communicating with research laboratories on every continent, literally years ahead of other software developers. CaiText became the standard software provider for laser applications medical researchers all over the globe.

  Growing his company held more attraction for Titus than creating the software itself, and he quickly moved out of the science of it and into the business. Soon he was living the familiar cliché of the successful young entrepreneur: His work became his social life, his play, and his family all rolled into one. Then one day he woke up and discovered that because of his work, he actually had none of the others.

  He forced himself to take a two-month vacation, and then three months later he set off on another two-month trip. The time away from the grind was a revelation. He followed his curiosities all over the world, but he was uneasy and restless and didn't even know it.

  All of that changed one sweltering September afternoon when his rafting party rounded a bend in a deep gorge of the Boquillas canyon of the Rio Grande and came upon another rafting group. There had been a serious accident. The guide was unconscious with a broken collarbone, and two members of the party were lying on a sandbar with injuries that hadn't yet been dealt with. Most of the members of the tour group seemed bewildered and at a loss, but the few who could still pull their rattled nerves together were taking orders from one person, a tall, calm, mud-spattered blonde who was ignoring the hand-wringing and tending to the injured.

  It was his first glimpse of Margarita Street, a registered nurse from Houston who turned out to be the archetypal independent Texas girl.

  That moment changed his life. Thank God.

  It took him only fifteen minutes to get home, ten acres of woods and hillside on the eastern slope of the hills west of the river. The wrought-iron gates swung open for him, and he wound his way up to the house, twelve thousand square feet of native limestone and Italian tile. His home was big and comfortable, with sprawling porches and courtyards and half a dozen varieties of tall Texas oaks to shade it. Titus had spent more than he would ever admit to anyone to make sure that the house didn't appear ostentatious and to guarantee that the place would never be described as grand. It looked like a sturdy Texas ranch house, and that was that.

  He parked the Rover under the pecan trees at the back of the house and was greeted by his two laid-back redbone hounds, who were pleased to see him but not frantic about it. He petted them both, gave them good, solid slaps on their shoulders, and then walked through the broad breezeways to the back lawn.

  Looking forward to the smell of peaches, he headed down through a long allée of mountain laurels to the small orchard below the house, the two hounds sauntering along behind him, swinging their tails. It
was the end of the peach season, and he picked a fat Harvester freestone. He started eating it as he continued on the path to a work site just over the shoulder of the hill, where stonemasons were building a reservoir to retain rainwater runoff from the buildings for irrigation.

  It was nearly dark when he got back to the house. While he was feeding the two redbones, the security lights came on around the grounds and lighted his way back to the veranda.

  He went into the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator, and glanced out the kitchen window to the lights in the allée through which he had just walked. He saw a glimpse of something at the edge of the lights, almost something. Coyotes, probably. Shit. The damn things were getting braver and braver all the time, every year closer into town. But why weren't the hounds bawling?

  He stepped outside to the deep veranda that stretched across the back of the house and turned the lights down to a mere glow. He sat at one of the wrought-iron tables and looked out to the courtyard that began at the edge of the veranda, and beyond that to the star jasmine hedges that dropped down toward the orchard.

  He had taken another couple of sips when he noticed something missing. The fountain in the courtyard was silent. He could've sworn it was splashing when he'd walked past it earlier on his way down to the orchard with the dogs.

  And where were the dogs? They ought to be here now, scratching, sniffing at his shoes, wanting to check out the beer he was holding. Had they taken off after the coyotes after all? If so, why didn't he hear them bellowing?

  He was holding a mouthful of beer when he became aware of dimensions in the darkness of the courtyard, the shadows taking on the shape and bulk of substance as three figures emerged slowly from separate corners. He couldn't swallow. His heart rolled hugely and lost its rhythm.

  The men moved a little closer without appearing to move their legs, magically, their positions staggered so that they were not aligned. He saw their weapons now, and just before he thought he was going to pass out, his heart kicked in again, and he swallowed the beer.