The Rules Of Silence (12 page)

Burden stared into Titus’s eyes. “None whatsoever.”

“Then the pangs of conscience you’re talking about, that has to do with what might happen to Luquín?”

“That’s right.”

This time it was Titus who hesitated a moment before he spoke, but when he did, there was no hesitation in his voice.

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about. I’m not going to have any pangs of conscience over that.”

They were looking at each other in silence when Mattie entered the study from the balcony, carrying the phones and Titus’s laptop.

“It’s all ready, ”she said, walking past them and placing everything on the library table.

The two men moved to the table, and Burden picked up one of the cell phones and handed it to Titus.

“Don’t ever let this out of your sight, ”he said.“It’s encrypted. Mattie will give you the dial codes. It connects you to me, and to Mattie and the others. It’s your lifeline.

“The laptop’s ready. Mattie will give you encryption codes for this, too. We’ll use both the phones and the laptop to communicate.

“For the most part, you just do whatever you have to do to comply with Luquín’s demands. Keep in mind, there’s going to be some surveillance. There’s nothing you can do about it without more retaliation from Luquín, but be aware that it’ll be there.”

“How much? What kind?”

“Not a lot. Luquín’s people don’t want to attract any attention. So they’re not going to be swarming. Most of it will be mobile. A van cruising, trying to pick up snippets of cell phone traffic. Maybe some photography. But it’ll be very discreet. He’s not going to be all over you, but he’s going to be watching.

“As of right now, I’m committed to moving as quickly as possible to try to save lives. And that’ll save money, too. Remember this: Just because you’re not hearing from me doesn’t mean I’m not there. There’s a hell of a lot to arrange. I won’t be getting much sleep. Communicate as often as you want. You won’t always get me, but you can always get Mattie. I’ll get back with you as soon as it’s possible for me to do so.

“Okay, Mattie’s going to finish briefing you on communication procedures. I’m going right now to arrange for the pilot. Someone will be here to pick you up within the hour to take you to the airstrip.”

Titus nodded. His mind was already moving so far and so fast ahead that he was almost carrying on two conversations in his head simultaneously. All he could think about was the logistics of getting Rita out of Europe and on her way home.

Chapter 17

AUSTIN

Luquín paced slowly back and forth along the deck that was perched on the edge of the cliff, one hand in his pocket, smoking his cigarette, the smoke a blue breath drifting away from him into the darkness. Now and then he paused and looked out into the night.

There was nothing much to see in the direction he was looking. Far below the sapphire surface of the wide river twisted through the cobalt darkness, and on the other side the long slope of the rising land ascended to black hills with sparsely scattered lights glinting through the dense woods. Occasionally a light would flicker and stretch out and die, the headlights of a car negotiating the narrow, unlighted lanes that rambled through the thickly wooded hills. The house that held his attention was straight in front of him, a mile and a half away as the crow flies.

“We’ll hear from him tomorrow, ”Luquín said. “How many bugs have they taken out?”

“Half a dozen, so far.”

“I told you, ”Luquín sneered, “he is going to be so predictable, arrogant bastard. So fucking confident. Nobody’s going to bug his place and get away with it. I wish I could have seen his face when he realized what he had done. ”He shook his head in amusement. “I would have had to find another excuse to kill Thrush if Cain had left the damn bugs in place.” He snorted. “It’s going to be a pleasure working this asshole.”

He smoked. “But I can’t figure out why we haven’t picked him up on any of the bugs that are still in there. We haven’t even heard him coughing or pissing or anything.”

“We’re picking up the technicians.”

“I know that, Jorge. But we’re not picking up Cain. What’s he doing?”

“You’ve scared the shit out of him, Tano, ”Macias said. “He’s probably not even breathing in there.”

Jorge Macias was Luquín’s Mexican chief of operations. In his mid-thirties, Macias was barrel-chested and handsome in the Latin lover sense of the term. He was self-assured and selfcentered and easy with violence.

When Luquín had business in Mexico or Texas, it was Macias who saw that it ran the way it was supposed to. His teams laid the groundwork. His teams ran the intelligence. His teams provided the brutality when brutality was required. (It was Macias’s people who had smuggled Luquín across the border in the top of Benny Chalmers’s truck.) And from years of experience, he had become deft at passing down the bad news to the lower ranks. If they made blunders, he gave them one chance to rectify their mistakes. Another failure, and they disappeared. Others took their place with the full knowledge of what had happened to the men before them. Predecessors’mistakes were never repeated. There were no exceptions.

“What about the guys sweeping the house? ”Luquín asked.

“Just technicians. Our guy on the ground hasn’t picked up any guns. Cain has a very high quality security system at CaiText, and he probably knew these guys through those connections. He runs a very tight operation. It looks like routine sweeping, just what we anticipated. Nothing more than that.”

“And you think these are the guys he called from the pay phone.”

“Probably. He couldn’t stand it. Wanted to do something about it as fast as he could.”

Luquín planted his feet firmly apart, drew slowly on his cigarette, and stared across the night river. A boat moved steadily over the water, going away from the city. Its lights reflected off the sapphire, and the sound of its engine grumbled off the sides of the cliffs.

“I’m trying to imagine, ”he said, as much to himself as to Macias, “what he must be thinking. The man is careful. He doesn’t make big mistakes. He weighs the pros and cons, follows the rules, and makes safe, reasonable decisions. He is predictable, as we have seen. Now, how does he react to the realization that he is responsible for his friend’s death?

“He’s going to go over and over in his head how this happened, ”Luquín went on, answering his own question. “He’s going to reconfirm in his mind that I didn’t specifically say: Don’t sweep the house. So then he’s going to think, My God, I’ve got to try to feel my way through this. That son of a bitch Luquín is unpredictable. I’ve got to read his mind. How in the hell am I going to do that!”

Luquín smoked, resting his elbows on the deck railing as he peered into the night, as if the tiny lights of the houses in the distance were a fortune-teller’s cards and he could see there the answers to all of his concerns.

“And then, ”Luquín said, “he is going to begin to get crazy. A careful man finds it very stressful to deal with unpredictability. He sees no fucking way to figure it out. And that begins to wear on him. It begins to eat at him. And that’s good.”

Jorge Macias listened to Luquín talk. The man had no equal at what he did, and working for him was always an education in perversity. Over the years, Luquín had evolved from being just another assassin in the drug wars, a culture that bred assassins like maggots and treated them with just about as much respect, to being a kind of philosopher of the business of death. The amount of time Luquín put into knowing the psychological biography of the person he focused his attention on was extraordinary in this business. That was why he was so greatly feared by those who knew enough to fear him. And that was why he was so effective.

Macias would become a wealthy man from this one job alone. But there was a price for it. When you worked with Luquín there was always a price. The man didn’t feel he was getting his money’s worth out of you if you didn’t pay a price, and that usually meant some kind of suffering. Before this was over, Luquín was going to require him to do something that would be anguishing, either physically or emotionally, and that was why Macias had already sworn to himself that this would be the last time he would work with this madman.

Macias’s cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and turned away from the deck railing. With his head down, listening, he began walking idly around the lighted pool. Luquín turned and watched him. He liked telephone calls during an operation like this. It meant action. Things were happening near and far to his advantage. The wheels turned; the plan moved forward.

He flicked the butt of his cigarette, and it made a high, expert arc and landed in the near edge of the pool, floating on the aqua light. He watched Macias, who was on the other side of the pool now, the half of his body facing Luquín shimmering with turquoise light reflected from the surface of the water. By the time he got around to Luquín again, he was ending his conversation. He snapped the phone closed and joined Luquín at the railing again.

“That was Mateos in Venice. His informant in Mrs. Cain’s hotel just reported that she received a telephone call a couple of hours ago. Unfortunately that’s all he knows. The informant wasn’t in a position to monitor the call. ”Macias looked at his watch. “That would have been about two-thirty in Venice. An unusual hour to receive a call.”

Luquín dug another cigarette out of the pocket of his guayabera and lighted it. “So that means that Mrs. Thrush and Mrs. Cain will be on their way home sometime tomorrow morning. ”Luquín smiled slowly, and then it grew into a soft, delighted laugh. “Goddamn, I love this guy Cain. Doing that woman long-distance would have been so inconvenient.”

Luquín turned again to the dark valley and to his own thoughts, bending slightly, his elbows resting on the railing. Macias stepped away and took out his cell again. He glanced upstairs, where his two men were at their posts watching the street at the front of the house. He glanced at the shadows next to the house, where he could barely make out the black-onblack image of Roque, Luquín’s personal bodyguard, sitting spookily in the shadows. It was Roque who had climbed up into the top of the dark cattle truck with his boss. He was never far away, like a sick memory you couldn’t get away from.

Macias looked back at Luquín. His back was palely lighted as he stared into the night. A puff of smoke from his cigarette left his head and wandered away in a long blue stream. It looked as though his hair were on fire.

The night flight from San Miguel seemed interminable. But while the King Air was eating up air miles over the Sierra Madre Oriental and the north Mexican desert, Titus was busy arranging the flight back to Austin for Rita and Louise. He called an international charter service in Houston that had planes on the ground in Milan’s Malpensa Airport. He and Rita had agreed that once she talked to Louise, it was highly unlikely there would be any more sleep for them, so he arranged for the charter service to pick them up at Marco Polo International outside Venice as soon as the service could get a crew together.

With that done, he called Lack Paley at his home in Austin. Paley was Titus’s chief legal counsel, and Titus told him that he wanted him to initiate the process to do three things:

1. Get with Terry Odell, Titus’s stockbroker, and borrow $10 million against his personal investments portfolio and immediately invest the entire amount in a certain way in the entities he would name. Use Marcello Cavatino Inversiónes, S.A., in Buenos Aires to facilitate the transactions. These transactions had to be completed by three o’clock the next day.

2. Get with Lee Silber and borrow $21 million, using interest in CaiText as the collateral.

3. Prepare documents to sell off even more of CaiText in the way Titus would describe.

Then he outlined the timetable.

After Paley got over the shock of his instructions, they spent the next forty minutes working out the general idea of how all this would work. Titus told him to keep the plans strictly guarded, though he didn’t explain why.

After landing in Austin, Titus took a shuttle to the airport Hilton. Burden was assuming that Luquín would have Titus’s home surveilled, as he had done during his other operations in Rio de Janeiro, and he didn’t want Luquín to know that Titus had left his house. Cline would pick him up in the morning, and Titus would go home the same way he’d left, in the hidden compartment in the bed of Cline’s pickup.

Titus flipped on the television the moment he walked into the hotel room. The flight home had been filled with obsessive preoccupations as he had replayed again and again the what ifs, the shouldn’t haves, the whys. Then he’d reviewed his conversations with Burden and tried to put into perspective what he had agreed that Burden should do. He could only hope that in the morning the things he had agreed to wouldn’t look dramatically darker.

He didn’t want to think anymore. He took off his clothes and fell into bed, staring over his feet at CNN. He hoped to God it would keep him from thinking.

THURSDAY

The Third Day

Chapter 18

Herrin was waiting for him in the driveway behind the hedges when he swung his legs off the retractable hidden platform under the bed of the pickup. They walked toward the veranda, Titus carrying his now modified laptop in its case. Herrin was drinking coffee from a chrome high-tech mug that looked like the thermal equivalent of a cryonic canister. They stopped and stood in the shade of the morning glories.

“I’ve talked with García, ”Herrin said, “and he’s brought me up to speed.”

Titus nodded. Jesus.

“Can we talk in my office yet? ”he asked, clearing his throat.

“Yeah, we can. As a matter of fact, I swept that first.”

They walked through the courtyard past the fountain to a back door near the rock wall gate that led to the swimming pool. They went into a broad hallway, its atrium flooding the corridor with morning light, and turned into the first double doorway to the right.

Titus’s office was spacious, and he walked across the room and put his laptop on his desk, a brandy-colored rolltop from an old bank in El Paso. He plugged in the laptop and turned it on. In the center of the room a long antique walnut table scattered with his latest projects, some brought from CaiText, some for his own private interests, was washed in diffused light from an octagonal cupola that hovered over the center of the room and burnished the two-hundred-year-old walnut. Titus walked past it to the windows and looked out to the courtyard and to the orchard beyond. To his left he could see into the walled patios that surrounded the pool. He turned around.