The Rules Of Silence (3 page)

“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.

Chapter 5

At that moment a fourth man came through the laurel allée as if he’d been there all along and approached the courtyard from the side. He stepped into the pale light spilling off the veranda.

“Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Titus Cain, ”he said with Spanishaccented English, “you are safe. Perfectly safe. Please, everything is fine.”

He stopped at the edge of the veranda as if awaiting permission to go farther. Of average height and weight, he was perhaps sixty-four, sixty-five, with wavy, gray-streaked hair. A narrow nose, long upper lip. Nice looking. He was wearing a dove gray suit and a white shirt with broad navy stripes, very English, no tie, the collar open, the suit coat buttoned.

“I’ve come to visit with you, Mr. Cain, to have a conversation about concerns of mutual interest.”

Titus clung to fragments of logic. His alarm system was the best. So these people had to be very good. The fountain was on the same circuit. He hoped they hadn’t killed the dogs.

“I would like to sit down with you, ”the man said, holding his hand out to one of the wrought-iron chairs as if asking permission.

Titus couldn’t bring himself to speak or even nod.

The man stepped onto the veranda and approached politely. Watching Titus carefully, as if he were trying to discern his disposition, he pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat down. His suit was silk. Very silk. French cuffs, the glint of a discreet gold bracelet on his right wrist. Gold ring with a cabochon garnet.

Slowly, as if he were demonstrating there were no tricks up his sleeve, he reached into his coat pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to Titus, who just stared at him. The man took one for himself and lighted it, laying the pack on the table with the lighter.

“My name is Alvaro, ”he said. He smoked. “What I am about to tell you will take some lengthy explanation, ”he said, “but from this moment, Mr. Cain, I am afraid that you must consider yourself
secuestrado.
”

Titus gaped at him.

“Yes, kidnapped, ”Alvaro said.

The shadow men stayed in the shadow courtyard. Titus heard the coyotes now, yippingyippingyipping on the far side of the valley, below the amber lights of houses clustered near the crests of the next ridge of hills.

Alvaro smoked, clenching his teeth as though there were something tart but savory in the taste of the cigarette before opening his lips to exhale.

“First of all, ”he said, “I must give you a few moments to control yourself, to comprehend the reality of your situation. For the next half hour or so, I am going to explain to you how your life has changed.
¿Bueno?”

Titus’s ears were ringing. His face was hot, and he felt a little giddy.

“As you must already know, ”Alvaro went on, “this kind of enterprise is much practiced in Latin America. In the past it has been a very crude business, and it still is most of the time. Unnecessarily complicated for everyone. Idiots in the mountains holding hostages in filthy conditions. The idiot K and R people based in London or Paris or Washington negotiating with the idiots in the mountains on behalf of the sweaty corporate lackey worrying about how much his employer’s insurance is going to go up. Wild demands negotiated down to stupidly small sums. Imbecilic police.”

Titus was dumbstruck. This guy just wasn’t for real. It was like going to the theater with Rita, one of those productions in the round where the actors come out into the audience to include them in the drama. He was always uneasy with that.

Alvaro rested his right elbow on the arm of his chair, his forearm vertical, cigarette tucked deep into the crotch of his first and second fingers. His eyes grew lazy.

“Forget all of that, ”he said, flicking his hand dismissively. “As you will see, this is something quite different altogether. First, this is occurring right here in the U.S.—Texas, no less— not in Latin America.

“Second, we are not going to take you away. No. You are free to go on living your life normally, as you please.

“Third, no negotiations. No haggling.

“Fourth, no police, no federal authorities, no intermediaries, no K and R guys. In fact, no one will ever know that this has even happened.”

Titus’s adrenaline high had greatly heightened his perceptions. The sticky smack of phlegm in Alvaro’s throat when he spoke certain words was amplified to the point of distraction. And though the light on the veranda was only a glow, Alvaro sat before him in sharp three-dimensional clarity, outlined very precisely from the darkness behind him, his face glimmering like a hologram.

“I have gone to a great deal of trouble to learn about you,” Alvaro went on. He looked around and lifted his chin. “This house, for example, is as familiar to me as my own home. I could find the light switches in every room in the darkness. I know your company and its history inside out. I know your biography better than my own father’s.”

He spoke with a grounded sureness, without animation, his voice almost devoid of inflection.

Titus hadn’t taken another swallow of his beer. He was entranced. Immobile, he waited for the emerging revelation. It was like seeing the moment of his own death coming down a long road, a small speck, slowly, slowly growing larger as it made its shambling approach. It was a horrible thing to see, and fascinating. He couldn’t pull himself away from the spectacle of it, even to flee.