The Rules Of Silence (6 page)

“But he may say something else, ”Titus said. “And if he does, I go with that. I believe him on that, too.”

“That’s right.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I’m getting ready to find out.”

“You have a lot of faith in him? ”It was a question, and an observation, and a concern.

“I worked with him at the CIA. He’s been contract for a long time now. He’s solid, like I told you. Does his best work out of the box.”

“Out of the box. I need a little more on that.”

“He’s several points removed from any official equation. If he screws up, there’s no blowback. He’s one of a very few who know going into a situation that he’s on his own. Guy like that, nobody owns his ass. And nobody helps him out of a bind, either. He’s alone. He’s given the edgiest operations, and when he succeeds, the intelligence community wins big. And silently, which is really the only way to win. But when guys like him go down, they go down alone. They just disappear. Forever.”

“Why do they do it?”

“Big, big money. And because they can’t help themselves. They’re addicted to the adrenaline. Or they have private demons that can only be satisfied by putting everything on the line every time. ”He shrugged. “Or for reasons that maybe only God understands.”

“But that’s CIA work. Intelligence stuff. Why would he be interested in this?”

Norlin shrugged. “Big, big money. Or maybe he’ll have other reasons.”

Titus considered this. “And you think this is the way to go, then, with this guy who’s … good at working outside the box?”

“Look, Mr. Cain, I may not have the goods to advise you on what’s happening here, but I can promise you this: This Alvaro doesn’t even know there is a fucking box. Believe me, if I can find him, you’re going to need this guy.”

Without saying any more, Norlin turned and walked away, past his car, onto the dirt track that led away from the construction site to the road below. Titus could hear him murmuring out in the dark.

Titus stood and twisted his shoulders to relieve the tension. He stared out over the valley. No city view here, but he could see a coil of Lake Austin, the surface of the water glazed in reflected light. He felt desolate. Isolated. Completely at a loss. The woods around the construction site were dense, and when he looked up toward the lighted sky, he could see the black circle of the trees surrounding him out of his peripheral vision. He stood that way a long time, long enough to lose track of time. Long enough to be startled by Norlin’s voice.

“You’re in luck, ”Norlin said, coming up out of the darkness.

Titus was surprised to see Norlin step up and stretch out his arm, handing the cell phone to him.

“He just happens to be close by, ”Norlin explained. “He’s in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. His name’s García Burden.”

Titus took the heavy phone and put it to his ear in time to hear one ring and then:

“Titus Cain?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“García Burden. Gil’s told me the basic story. If this is what it seems to be, it’s extraordinary.”

His voice was soft, a surprise, though Titus hadn’t had any preconceptions. He had a bit of an accent, but Titus had no idea what it was. García. No, it wasn’t Hispanic, the accent, not like Alvaro’s, anyway. It was something altogether different.

“‘If’? ”Titus asked. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Who knows? ”Burden said cryptically. “But your visitor’s not who he says he is. His scheme is complex and would require a lot of experience in this sort of thing. So I’m fairly sure he’s using a bogus name, which means he’s on all the international border watch lists. He must’ve entered the States illegally. That’s significant and supports the ransom story.”

“How does it do that?”

“He’s too cautious to have come in under a fake passport. Too much risk with the new technology now. This kind of man wouldn’t enter the States under the sorts of conditions illegal entry would require for anything routine. This has probably been in the works for a long time. He’s come in for the kill … so to speak.”

Burden seemed to be all over this.

“How long before he gets back to you?”

“He didn’t say.”

“It’ll be very soon. But he gave you no instructions?”

“No.”

“So there are no ‘rules’for you to offend yet.”

“I’m not supposed to contact any law enforcement agency.”

“Well, he would consider me in that category, so if he knew about this, you would’ve already offended him. This conversation would justify the first hit.”

The word
hit
struck Titus like a board to the side of the head. Jesus. It was stunning to hear that word in the context of reality, of his reality. But then, did he really believe Alvaro was going to start killing people if Titus didn’t—what—follow instructions?

Burden responded to Titus’s shocked silence.

“No, don’t make that mistake, Mr. Cain, ”he said. “This man doesn’t threaten. He probably even told you that himself. He’s eagerly awaiting his first opportunity to show you how quickly he’ll react to your failure to follow instructions.”

“Then you do know him.”

“I don’t know. But I do know the kind of man he is. In that sense, yes, I know him. ”Burden abruptly shifted gears. “I want to work with you on this, Mr. Cain. Are you interested?”

Titus glanced at Norlin, but he couldn’t see anything beyond a dark figure.

“Of course I’m interested, but I’ve got to think this over. I’m not going to decide to do this right now.”

“I’m only asking if you’re interested in talking.”

“Yeah, of course I am.”

“There’s not a lot of time. You should come tomorrow.”

“Down there? San Miguel?”

“Yes. We need to be here when we talk. I have things to show you, to explain. My archives are here. They’re not portable.”

“But what if he tries to get in touch with me while I’m gone?”

“I’ll explain how to handle that.”

“I don’t know if I can make it tomorrow. My security system’s been wrecked, and I’ve got to get someone to start debugging this place.”

“Did he tell you not to call in security people?”

“No. ”Titus cringed. Was that another offense? Was he expected to live with Alvaro listening to every word spoken in his own home? He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. “He didn’t say specifically not to do it.”

“Then you’ve got a choice to make. Get used to it, or be ready to live with the consequences, if there are any.”

“I can’t live like that.”

“Fine. Do you know people who can do that for you?”

“I own a software company. We work with electronic security constantly.”

“You’re going to need some highly specialized people, Mr. Cain. You’ve got a very specific kind of problem there. It’s not the same. Surely you can see that.”

Shit. Titus felt stupidly naive. He was going to have to start thinking differently.

“Mr. Cain, this is my profession. This is what I do. Let me send someone to you. They know about the latest technology. They know this game. Okay?”

“Yeah, ”Titus said. “Okay.”

“They’ll be there tomorrow, ”Burden said. “Now, you’re coming down here tomorrow so we can talk?”

“Yeah—”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What do you want me to do, just fly down there?”

“No. I’ll get instructions to you. And Mr. Cain, you need to understand right now that nothing is ‘just’ anything anymore. From now on you are an extraordinary exception to the general rules of just about everything.”

WEDNESDAY

The Second Day

Chapter 9

Any significant sleep had been impossible during the night. Titus had lain in bed watching the black hills against the cobalt dark sky and was still watching as the sun rounded the curve of the earth, scattering the night before it.

At nine-fifteen the next morning, a van and a pickup with no markings pulled into Titus’s driveway. They stopped within a large enclosure of high hedges that screened the parking area from the city.

Mark Herrin was a quiet young man with a ponytail and a gentle smile. He was a full head taller than Cline, his partner, who had a fraternity-neat haircut and a tendril of a black tattoo creeping out of the white collar of his shirt along his left jugular vein.

They introduced themselves, and Herrin said, “García said to assume everything in the house is hot.”

“I’m not positive about it, ”Titus said. “I do know the security system’s been bypassed.”

“We’ll give it all a good cleaning, ”Herrin said with a kind of lazy indifference. “Actually debugging a place like this takes a lot of equipment. We’re going to have to haul some things inside. Big stuff. ”He looked around at the hedge enclosure. “This is a big break, having this protection. I don’t like working under the opposition’s constant supervision, you know, ”he said, throwing a look across the valley toward the river.

“Then you think the house is being watched? ”Titus asked.

“If you’re a target, you’re a target, ”Herrin said simply. “If this guy’s serious, there’s no such thing as half-assed in this business.”

They stood there between the driveway and the veranda while Herrin had Titus corroborate the information Burden had passed on to him, and then he asked him a lot of additional questions.

“Okay, ”Herrin said after a while. “We need to go inside and look around. Now, when we start locating these bugs and jerking them out of there, they’re going to know about it. So after we pop the first one, the cat’s out of the bag. But there’s no need to give them a heads-up, either. So when we get in there let’s don’t talk about what we’re going to be doing, okay?”

Titus led them inside and showed them through the house. Once they had a feel for the layout of the place, Titus left them alone to wander through the house and survey the size of their job.

Remembering what Herrin had said about the house being watched, Titus walked down the allée to the site where the stone workers were facing the reservoir. They came in every morning just after sunrise to get an early start on the heat, using the code to the front gates on the property. Titus had been using these men for years to do work around the property, but now he wasn’t comfortable with someone having access to that kind of freedom to the grounds.

Standing in the shade of an oak, he talked with Benito, the foreman, and told him that he was going to have some other men on the property working on some electrical problems, and he didn’t want that many crews and trucks there at the same time. He said he’d give Benito’s crew two weeks’ paid vacation—beginning right now. When they came back, they could pick up where they’d left off.

Benito was surprised, but two weeks’ paid vacation smoothed over a lot of puzzlement, and Titus shook his hand and headed back to the house. He could hear the crew loading their tools into the truck behind him.

Titus returned to the kitchen and looked at his watch. He had about forty minutes before he had to leave. He picked up his cell phone and walked outside to call Carla Elster, his assistant at CaiText.

“Carla, listen, I don’t really have any must-do meetings during the next few days, do I?”

“Nothing on your calendar but the weekly touch-base reviews with the department heads, ”Carla said. “But, uh, Matt Rohan did call late yesterday and wanted to see you for about half an hour when you had time today. He didn’t say what about. As usual. And Donice McCafferty called for an appointment. I’m guessing she wants to ask if CaiText will sponsor their charity drive again this fall. And I was supposed to remind you that there’s a retirement party on Friday for Alison Daly in accounting.”

There was no wasted motion and no wasted moments in Carla’s life. She was disciplined, focused, organized, and faithful to her routines. She had to be, because without it her life and Titus’s life would fall apart. At least she was convinced they would.

Carla had been his assistant since the day he’d signed the corporation documents to start CaiText. Until he’d met Rita, Carla had been the one person he’d depended on to give him a grounded second opinion and an honest, compass-correcting perspective on whatever was preoccupying him at the time. She was like a sister to him.

“Okay, well, if you could just put all of that on hold for right now, I’d appreciate it.”

“On hold? For how long?”

“A few days, maybe. I’m going to be out of pocket a couple of days.”

Pause. “Okay. ”Pause. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure. ”He stopped. Jesus. He was tempted, enormously tempted, to say something to her, to relieve some of the pressure he felt, but he kept remembering Alvaro’s words:
I don’t want anyone suspicious… . That’s the important thing. I really can’t emphasize that enough.

“Titus, ”she said, “what’s going on?”

At forty-six, Carla was a single mother of twin daughters who were soon to enter their freshman year at Vanderbilt University. Her husband had left her six years earlier when the girls were in the sixth grade, and Carla had immediately galvanized her mind and turned her life into a regimen. She was determined to do it all without him, and she did. She’d be damned if she would let her life fall apart in his absence. A man who would leave his wife and young daughters to fend for themselves couldn’t have been all that valuable in the first place, she decided. She wouldn’t let him be.

Titus had helped her throughout the whole ordeal. Whenever she needed to take off from work for the girls’school events, she never even had to ask. He boosted her salary to compensate for the loss of half her income, and he made sure the girls had summer jobs at CaiText so Carla didn’t have to worry about them during the day.

Her husband had maddeningly given her the house in West Lake Hills without a whimper. The fact that he didn’t think it worth fighting for infuriated her. And he didn’t even fuss that much about the level of alimony she had demanded. He was in such a hurry to set up housekeeping with his new girlfriend that he practically ran from everything they had built together over fourteen years of marriage.

And then there was Darlene, his new woman. Darlene was half Carla’s age. She was a blonde; Carla was a brunet. She was tall; Carla was not so tall. She was health-nut thin and tight; Carla was practical medium and not so tight. Darlene didn’t work; Carla had worked for CaiText their entire marriage and was as loyal to Titus and the company he was building as if she owned half of it. The striking differences in the two women were an additional humiliation. Darlene was everything that Carla wasn’t.