The Rules of Silence Read online

  “It's Tano Luquín, ”Burden said. “I've found him.” The man quit breathing. The movement in his sternum just stopped. Slowly he turned to wax, and his eyes became glass. Though he had been perspiring before, now he began to glisten profusely, as if overwhelming emotion had sucked away his breath and condensed it within him into an oleaginous concentrate that now oozed from every pore.

  Then something caught Burden's eye. On the man's shoulder the fly had crept to the cusp of the relief of trapezius. It had stopped, its black head only just emerging from the verge of the shallow. And there it waited.

  Chapter 40

  “I don't know what to think, ”Rita said. Norlin had left soon after finishing his story of Mourad Berkat, and she had gone straight to the sink to run a glass of water while Titus had walked out to Norlin's car with him. Now he was gone, and Titus had just come in through the kitchen door. Rita was standing with the back of her hips against the sink, the glass of water in one hand, her hand on her hip.

  Titus looked at her and shook his head, then went straight to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He popped the top off with a bottle opener and took a long drink. Feeling weary, he sat on one of the stools at the island, put the bottle down, and rubbed his face and eyes with both hands.

  “I'll tell you something, ”he said. “That was a pretty damned surprising story. But you know, it shouldn't have been. García told us himself—in so many words—what he does. Face it, Rita, we're pretty naive about these things. We're just … naive.”

  “I don't think Mr. Norlin picked that anecdote randomly, as he claimed, ”Rita said. “It's tied to what's happening now. Something else is going on with Luquín.”

  “Yeah, I'm sure there is. We'd be not only naive, but stupid to think there wasn't. Hell, García told us that. We're just a piece of this story. As grim as it is for us, it gets worse the more you know.”

  He stared out at the veranda. For the first time in a couple of days, he thought about the dogs. Shit. How many years ago had that been?

  “That woman, ”Rita said, “and those children …”

  He knew what was coming.

  “That make you think of us? ”she asked.

  “Yeah, ”he said honestly, “it did.”

  “What if he wants Luquín as desperately as he wanted that Algerian man?”

  “You want me to be honest with you, ”he said, pulling his eyes away from the veranda to her, “he probably does.”

  She stared at him. Rita could deal with shock. She would pull herself together and deal with it.

  “I think that's part of what Norlin was telling us, ”Titus said, “leaving it up to us to read between the lines. Maybe he didn't know what or how much García had told us, but I think he was trying to get us to understand the scope of our situation. That it's not just about us.

  “But that's not all there is to it, ”he went on. “This isn't the same kind of situation. Just imagine … the names on that list. Those men … every circumstance is different. They're scattered all over the world, live in all kinds of situations, in caves, in mansions. Some educated and intellectual, some ignorant. It's got to be unbelievably complex. I think we'd be making a terrible mistake to think that every one of these situations is the same, that we can predict the way one plays out based upon the way that another one played out.

  “I'll tell you something, ”he said, turning toward her. “It probably would've been easier on us in some ways if we'd known this much truth—I won't say the whole truth, but this much, at least—going into this. But he couldn't tell us. And if we hadn't been on the verge of blowing this thing apart, he wouldn't have told us when he did. Jesus, think of what's going on here.”

  He took another long drink of the beer. It was cold. It was good. And it reminded him of before all this, when evil was something in books or movies, when life was simple, and he didn't even know it.

  He went on. “But I've got to say, as scared as I am, knowing what we know now has put a different twist on this thing. If this is what García and Norlin say it is … we've got to hang in here. We've even got … I don't know … an obligation, to work with these guys.”

  “An obligation to help them assassinate someone? ”Rita was incredulous.

  Titus focused on her.

  “Think about it, Rita. If they're telling us the truth, do you feel good about working against them?”

  “Well, I don't feel good about helping them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you keep saying ‘if’they're telling us the truth.”

  “Look, Rita. There's nothing … nothing … we can do about being in a hell of a situation here. We've just got to do the best we can. I know that sounds lame, but what in the hell other answers do you have?”

  Through the kitchen window he saw Kal making his way through the wrought-iron gate in the stone wall that led to the pool and come across the courtyard to the veranda.

  It was midafternoon. It seemed an eternity until dark, yet at the same time, it all seemed to be hurtling along so fast that everything could easily fly out of control.

  The door from the veranda opened and Kal stepped in.

  “Excuse me, ”he said. “Ryan and I are going to take a look around. Janet's on her way in here from the other side of the house.”

  “Okay, thanks, ”Titus said. He walked to the door and watched the two men through the window, striding quickly down the allée of laurels, their MP5s strapped over their shoulders in plain sight.

  “Routine stuff, ”Janet said, walking into the kitchen as Titus was looking out. “It always takes a while before you feel entirely comfortable in a new situation, ”she added by way of a casual explanation. All three of the bodyguards belonged to the “never show concern because it scares the client ”school.

  Titus watched them until they disappeared around the knoll.

  “It's a big place, ”he said. “There's a lot to get comfortable with.”

  “They're used to it, ”Janet said. “And they like it, which is even more important. ”She turned her head, tilting it slightly toward her earpiece, and then looked at Titus.

  “Kal wants you to come down to the orchard.”

  Titus looked out and saw him coming back around the knoll at the far end of the allée. He went outside and headed down to meet him.

  “You been taking pictures down here lately? ”Kal asked, putting his foot up on a boulder at the edge of the trees as he retied his shoelaces.

  “Pictures?”

  “Yeah, down here. ”He lifted the other foot and retied that shoelace as well. Titus saw his earpiece and the tiny mike hugging his cheek and curving around toward his mouth.

  “No.”

  Kal reached into his pocket and showed Titus a black plastic disk, the cap of a film canister.

  “Thing's new, ”he said. “I think you've had a visitor.”

  He looked up and squinted into the bright western light slanting in at the far end of the allée. “Come on, ”he said to Titus, and they started up the allée.

  They got to the entrance of the orchard just as Ryan was heading into the rows of peach trees from the back side. Kal stopped where the front corner of the orchard met the allée. A retaining wall faced with stone blocks stood shoulder high where the orchard began, following a slow, outward-swinging arch as it circled around behind the house and the pool and then sloped to natural grade on the far side of the orchard.

  Kal stood with his back to the orchard and looked at the house, trying to see what the man could have seen if he was looking at the house from this vantage point. It made Titus queasy to realize again just how vulnerable to Luquín's surveillance he and Rita had been during these past few days. Luquín literally could have put his hands on them any time he wanted.

  Without saying a word, Kal went through the two stone pillars where an old gate used to be, and he and Titus started walking, following the low retaining wall's outward arc. They could hear Ryan coming up through the orchard, and soon
they saw him approaching, walking slowly through the trees, scanning back and forth in a very deliberate manner.

  Suddenly Kal stopped. He stared at the ground. The wild grass that grew there was flattened out and the ground had been churned about, the crescent shapes of a heel print partially visible here and there in the powdery surface dirt.

  He didn't have to explain anything to Titus. Both of them started looking around as Ryan walked up.

  “He was here, ”Kal said, and the two guards started walking back and forth along the base of the wall.

  Titus didn't know exactly what they were looking for, but their subdued urgency reminded him of his dogs when they'd picked up a fresh scent with the constant sweeping of their noses to the ground. They were methodical, but more than a little juiced.

  Suddenly Kal stopped and dropped to his knees, his legs straddling the churned-up ground. He stared at the retaining wall right in his face. The stones were a standard quarrying size of sixteen inches wide by eight inches high by twelve inches deep. Solid limestone blocks.

  He stared at them closely, his eyes sweeping along the rows as they traveled upward. Gradually he got up off his knees to a crouch, then eventually he was standing upright again. At waist high he reached out and grabbed one of the stones. It was heavy and Titus helped him, as the two of them slipped a loose stone out and let it drop to the ground.

  There was a cavity behind the stone, and Kal reached in up to his elbows and grabbed something. When his hands came out he was holding a dark charcoal laptop and a wadded clear plastic bag that looked as though it had been used to protect the laptop.

  “Looks like he left in a hurry, ”he said.

  Chapter 41

  “I'm working on it now, ”Herrin said, “but the encryption's pretty damned good. I can't make any promises about how long it'll take.”

  They were in the guest house, and Burden was coming in on the speakerphone. They didn't know where he was, and he didn't say. But in the momentary hesitations of conversation, there was the distant sound of boat traffic.

  “Listen, Titus, ”Burden said, “this's my screwup entirely. I got sloppy. The worry here is that this guy got a shot of me. We won't know whether he did or not until Mark breaks the encryption. If he did, Luquín'll evaporate, abort this thing. He may already be gone. We may be spinning our wheels here and don't even know it. But if he did ID me … if Luquín knows I'm here, it'll get rough. There'll be a steep price to pay for this, Titus.”

  The afternoon heat had driven them inside. The sun was now at forty-five degrees in a clear sky, nothing to block the heat until the horizon swallowed the light. Macias had yet to open the e-mail from Elías Loza. With an attachment. Something made him cautious, made him not tell Luquín what he had. He glanced at Luquín, who was pacing back and forth in front of the windows looking out onto the deck.

  Macias opened the file. No message, which was odd. He opened the first attached picture file. The familiar allée of trees, the legs of people under the canopy of the trees standing in front of the guest cottage. Two men and a woman. He guessed the Cains and one of the technicians. The second picture file: a longer shot showing the two technicians on the veranda and the three people still at the front door of the cottage. There was another person in play now in addition to the technicians they already knew about. Third picture file: Loza's camera concentrating on the unidentified man, who had left the Cains and started down the allée alone. Fourth and fifth picture files: taken from another position, not the retaining wall. The unidentified man at the edge of the woods, his left arm holding a cell phone. But the angle was bad, mostly from the back. The last shot showed the man glancing back as he entered the woods, just his eyes showing over the top of his hand, which was holding the cell phone.

  Macias had been sitting with his elbow resting on the dining room table as he stroked his mustache with his index finger, thumb under his chin. His finger stopped. Everything that had been swirling around in his mind, so many of the details to be balanced in his scheme that he had been preparing for a full month, came to a sudden halt. All sensory perception evaporated except his sight, and his sight registered nothing but the eyes … and something vaguely familiar about them. Where had he seen these eyes before?

  Chinga——! What in the fuck was this? He looked up, glancing at Luquín, who was absently picking at a scab on the back of his hand and gazing out across the pool to the valley below and the hills beyond toward Cain's house. He shot a glance at Roque, who was sitting to one side of the room, reading—well, looking at the pictures in—a copy of People magazine.

  Macias went back to the photograph, just to confirm his sensation of something familiar. Shit, yes. But he didn't know who this was. He didn't know.

  But it wasn't necessary that he know who this was. The fact that he was there, the fact that he was leaving Cain's property in secrecy, was a clear indication that something was going on behind the scenes. Something was cooking. They were not, after all, seeing everything that Cain had going on.

  Unable to control it, Macias could feel the slow arrival of a dark, hairy fear. How had his people missed this? What was Luquín going to do when he heard about this? If they could believe what their bug had picked up, in twenty-four hours Tano would have his money. How was he going to react to this latearriving revelation that threw everything into question?

  Could they believe the bug? Something was going on here. And how long had this unidentified man been working for Cain? Who was he talking to on the cell phone? What had he been doing in the guest cottage? Macias knew they had set up an electronic control room in there to deal with communications countermeasures, if nothing else. But what if there was something else? What if Macias was only hours away from an implosion here?

  His mind was racing, hurtling ahead in an effort to anticipate what his situation might be, what his options might be. Was he too late? Just in time? Ahead of Cain's game? What was Cain's game? How good was his game?

  Just then Macias's incoming e-mail pinged again, startling him. From Loza. Another picture file. Only one. Macias opened it. It was a photograph of two men crossing the courtyard behind Cain's veranda. Both men were carrying automatic weapons slung over their shoulders.

  Macias sat very still, not wanting to attract attention to himself until he figured out what he was going to do. Why hadn't Loza sent a message with the picture files? Had he been in a hurry? Had he been caught before he could send a message! Did Cain know that Loza had sent these? And to whom?

  Did Cain really intend to pay up the money the next day in order to save lives? Or was this just a ploy to keep Luquín hanging around until they could move against him? Was Cain setting a trap?

  Did Macias have time to turn things around, to salvage the situation?

  The questions flew at him so fast, he felt he was experiencing the emotional equivalent of data overload. But in this case it was fear overload, and the threatening result was not a system crash, but uncontrollable panic.

  He could save Luquín's life by evacuating him right now. Just walk over to him and tell him, put him in the Navigator, and take him to the airstrip. He would be safe in Mexico in time to watch the evening news.

  But did this unidentified man's presence mean that it was all over? If Macias followed his own rules, yes. Any sign of a countering effort meant quitting the scheme. This was the fucking U.S., after all.

  On the other hand, they were only hours away from collecting a damned fortune.

  Macias immediately closed the Loza e-mails and erased them. He tried to clear his thoughts. Think. That guy could've been anybody. Just because he was there didn't mean he was competent or accomplished at whatever it was he was doing. Didn't mean he was a professional. Maybe Cain was trying to play Spy Man.

  But what if this was a serious move? What if this was the endgame and Macias's greed was clouding his reasoning? Both Macias and Luquín had agreed that the reward was worth the risk, but if it failed, well, then they had differing points of
view. Luquín took every failure as a personal insult. As irrational as that was, it didn't change the fact that he believed it.

  And now, the arrival of bodyguards meant that Luquín's order to kill Rita Cain was impossible in the short term.

  The pressure for Macias was sudden and excruciating. Cayetano Luquín would have him killed for this one. If not immediately, then later, when Macias was least expecting it. Tano would see the failure of this operation—the loss of so much money—as an unforgivable betrayal.

  Suddenly, getting Luquín out safely seemed less of a priority. In fact, it actually seemed like a stupid move.

  This wasn't a time for half measures. Everything had to be put on the table for consideration.

  Chapter 42

  The two fishermen had been maneuvering the bass boat along the northern bank of Lake Austin for half an hour, every so often putting in next to the cliffside woods, tying up temporarily to an overhanging tree and then casting their lures into the shade along the bank. The boat was covered with a canvas canopy to keep the searing afternoon sun off them as they dabbled along, heading in the direction of the looming steel arches of the Loop 360 bridge.

  They were having lousy luck. The ski boats were active on this particular afternoon, roaring up and down the center of the long lake, throwing an endless series of swelling wakes toward the wooded shores. The fishermen stubbornly worked their way in the direction of the bridge, stoically tolerating the rolling action of their boat, casting uselessly into the thin margin of shadows thrown onto the water by the woods that crowded against the limestone cliffs.

  Finally they tried one last spot. After tying up close to the bank, they pulled the boat under a thick shelter of oaks. From across the lake the boat was almost hidden, but no one noticed. The bass boat had been piddling along for three-quarters of an hour now, and all of the attention on the water was attracted to the skiers who blazed up and down in their lanes in the lake's center. Summer afternoons on this part of the lake were given over to water sports that were louder and faster than fishing.