The Rules Of Silence (13 page)

“Okay, ”he said. “Now you bring me up to speed.”

“We’re making good progress, ”Herrin said. “This stuff’s pretty slick. I like it. But it’s a slow go. I’m keeping a floor plan of the house on the island in the kitchen. I’m marking the rooms that’ve been swept so you’ll know where you can talk and where you can’t. ”He swigged from the chrome mug. “García told me he wanted to leave a couple of places hot.”

“Fine. Why?”

“Yeah. He said there might be some things we’re going to want these guys to overhear, so we’re going to overlook some bugs. We want it to look like we’re good at this, but not quite good enough. They’re expecting to lose most of them anyway. But the places we keep hot have got to be in rooms where it’s logical that you’d think you’re safe.”

“You mean the bathroom. The bedroom.”

“Yeah. In fact, I’ve already found the ones in your bedroom. They’re more sophisticated than the others, much harder for us to find. They wanted these girls to stay put. So I left them in place. I suspected García would want to leave some.”

Through the windows at the end of the room, Titus saw a scarlet tanager on the courtyard wall, an incredible brilliance for an instant, then it vanished.

“Okay, ”Titus said. “I understand that. Then go ahead and leave them.”

“You’ll have to be on your toes in there, ”Herrin reminded him.

Titus nodded. Yeah, there was going to be a lot of that.

Suddenly Titus’s encrypted cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and opened it.

“This is García. You have a minute?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve been up all night arranging a couple of mobile teams to work with us in Austin, ”Burden said. “About three people in each team. One team’s already there, one will be there in a couple of hours. Herrin’s going to be coordinating some things with them, too, and he’s going to need to set up some additional equipment. Is he going to have room in that guest house for several more monitors?”

“Yeah, there’s plenty of room.”

“Great. I’m about an hour out of Austin. We need to get together pretty soon and go over some things. Right now, though, I need you to get back to Luquín. Have you heard any more from him?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. Use the laptop and follow Luquín’s communication instructions. All of this is about the money, so let’s talk money with him. Here’s how I think you should handle it.”

Burden’s instructions were precise, and he laid them out with a simple, straightforward explanation of his reasoning. Titus was surprised at the boldness of what Burden wanted him to do, in light of what had happened with Charlie.

Though he was still in near shock at the fatal consequences of his own decisions made the day before, he knew that Burden’s aggressive approach was necessary. He knew, too, that this couldn’t be done without his own full commitment. This was no time to lose his nerve, though he had to admit that he had never before had so much riding on nerves that had been so badly frayed. But, by God, he wasn’t about to fold now. For all that had been lost, there was so much more to save. Despite how grieved he was over Charlie’s death, he knew in his gut that it was Luquín who had killed him. Deep down it made him furious that Luquín was trying to pin the responsibility for that great sadness on him.

“Yeah, good. I’ll do it, ”he said when Burden finished.

“Okay. Then we’re set. I’m going to call Herrin again and go through some things. I’ll let you know when I get into town.”

“One thing, ”Titus said. “In two hours Rita and Louise Thrush will be landing here in Austin. I want to get Rita out of here. I want her somewhere safe. Somewhere away from this business.”

There was a silence at the other end.

“What’s the matter? ”he asked. “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, ”Burden said.

“Jesus, why wouldn’t it be?”

“Keep reminding yourself: Luquín wants the money. The money. His methods are crude in some ways, but the bottom line is that he’s trying to play you psychologically. He’s hoping that the killings will gain your cooperation, that those deaths will guarantee you’ll cough up the money. But he’s smart enough to know that going after Rita could have just the opposite effect. It could send you over the edge. He’s not going to risk that. She’s safe. Just as safe as you are. He wants the money. This is about the money.”

“You’re telling me she’s not at risk?”

“That’s right. Right now I don’t think she’s at risk. What’s more, if you do that, you could trigger another death. He doesn’t want you thinking for yourself like that. He doesn’t want you independent. He wants to dictate what you do and don’t do. ”Pause. “I think it would be a huge mistake, Titus.”

Titus was livid. Was he supposed to believe that he couldn’t even protect Rita? That he was supposed to just leave her sitting here, vulnerable, until Luquín decided he wanted to kill her? He held his tongue. He was boiling inside, but he held his tongue.

“We’ll talk about it again later, ”he said tersely. “I’m going to have to think about this.”

Chapter 19

Half an hour before Titus sat down at his computer to contact Luquín for the first time, a King Air 350 similar to the one Titus had flown in to San Miguel and back took off from the airstrip in the resort of Lago Vista on Lake Travis and headed for Austin, twenty-five air miles to the southeast.

Aboard the ten-passenger Beechcraft were six real estate developers who wanted a closer look at greater Austin. It was a common occurrence in a city that had attracted a lot of development in the past decade. And despite the fact that the economy had slowed all over the country, the roving eyes of developers were never still. Always hoping that the next upturn in the market was just around the corner, they were ever vigilant, thinking that if they timed it right, they could fall right into the money pot again with a well-placed housing development or a shopping mall or an office complex.

With the aircraft approaching Austin-Bergstrom International’s tracking range, the pilot radioed the control tower, explained what his passengers wanted to do, and requested permission to circle the city at a specific altitude of twenty-two thousand feet. After a few exchanges of information, the Beechcraft received its permission from the Austin-Bergstrom tower and fell into a series of patterned loops over the city, most of their turns concentrating on Austin’s southwest quadrant, where much of the development had been in recent years. It covered both sides of Lake Austin from Emmet Shelton Bridge to the Austin Country Club, a swath of real estate that included some of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.

As the aircraft began its first series of turns, the passengers swiveled their chairs to the cabin walls and opened concealed computer consoles that folded down out of the mainframe. Antennae telescoped out from the belly of the plane, and the technicians put on headphones and powered up their computers.

Each technician wore two earpieces so he could monitor two different radio-frequency transmissions simultaneously. Each was responsible for monitoring a selected range of frequencies in the cell phone bandwidth. Whenever they picked up an encrypted transmission, their computers immediately nailed the radio frequency and time, recorded the plane’s position and the angle of reception of the signal. When the coordinates were locked in, they began recording the transmissions and then moved on to the next channel and continued scanning.

The object of this first collection flight was to scoop up as many encrypted transmissions as possible in their two hours aloft. The recordings were transmitted to the team that Burden had told Titus was already in place, a large panel van carrying encryption crunchers who quickly went to work on the content coming down from the Beechcraft. The first order of business was to determine which transmissions were in Spanish. Once the Spanish transmissions were identified, they were sent to Herrin and Cline, who started mapping and analyzing the sources of the transmissions.

Mark Herrin sat at his computer in Titus’s guest house and watched the data scroll down the screen.

“Jesus. Good stuff! ”he said into his headset mike. “What kind of technology do they have in that thing?”

“Expensive, ”Burden said from some undisclosed location. When the scrolling slammed to a stop, Herrin saved the information to a new directory.

“Whoa! One hundred and twelve separate encrypted conversations in the southwest quadrant in two hours?!”

“Not a surprise, ”Burden said. “Encryption’s gotten to be something of a status symbol these days.”

“But, damn, this many?”

“Well, a lot of people think they have a lot of status, ”Burden said dryly. “We’ll get another look when they go back up in a little while. If we’re lucky, we’ll find something for them to take a second look at. Now we’ll wait for the guys in the other van to tell us which of these things are in Spanish.”

Chapter 20

Through the screen door and the opened windows of the old motel room, he looked out at the dappled shade of the afternoon on the circular gravel drive around which the dozen paint-flecked cottages sat in mute dishevelment. Trashy hackberry and chinaberry trees shielded the entire compound in a murky gloom that contrasted sharply with the bright sunwashed street a short distance away at the motel’s entrance. In the center of the circular drive was a weedy miniature playground, a weather-splintered seesaw, a swing set with two broken swings, a rusted merry-go-round. No child had touched them in decades, and they were haunted by silence and by the absence of little bottoms and little hands.

From the sagging bed where he sat, he could see the bungalow directly across from him. An older couple was sitting in front of it in clunky rusted lawn chairs, smoking. They wore outsized shorts over their inflated stomachs and pale, spindly legs. From behind their sunglasses they stared straight ahead without animation, like the listening blind.

The Bungalows Motel was built in 1942, and it had not changed except for the necessary piecemeal repairs that the decades regularly forced upon it. It used to be out on the edge of town, but the years and the city had swallowed it. Now it occupied a section of South Congress Avenue that was invisible, except to people who were also invisible and who no longer had anything to do with the world in which they lived.

Shirtless and perspiring, he wiped his damp hands on his trousers. He was conscious of the odors of dank and aging surroundings, of puggy linens and mildewed upholstery and wood furnishing soured by decades of cursory cleaning with cheap, sweet cleansers. All this forced a weight of melancholy on him that was unexpected and uncomfortable.

He didn’t like this motel, and even though he had been here only a few hours, there was something about the place that gnawed at him in a way he couldn’t explain. It was the dank odor of mildew. He had figured it out, finally, but that didn’t make it stop. There was no mildew where he’d come from. The odors of cheap hotels and apartments were quite different there. They didn’t give him this oppressive feeling that chewed at his thoughts.

He didn’t usually give a damn where he was. He was summoned. He went. He did his work. He waited. If no one called, he just stayed where he was, living however life was lived there. The world was interesting. Or it wasn’t. It was different everywhere. Or it was the same everywhere. Sometimes it was both in the same day. It depended on what it was. There was an infinite variety of things to be different or to be the same. In the end, though, it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He just observed that it was … or that it wasn’t.

He had never smelled anything like this before in his life, and it was driving him crazy. It didn’t make any sense at all. Why would this smell get on his nerves so much? The humidity. The slimy feel of the sweat under his arms. He imagined the hair under his arms mildewing and turning rancid. Rotting. Tufts of it falling out and sticking to the sweat against his body. Itching.

Sometimes he went to cities he’d been to before. It happened often. But it seldom seemed as though he’d been there before. It was just new all over again. As alien as the inside of a casket.

The old couple across the way were beginning to get on his nerves, too. They sat there like two corpses, their bodies distended by the heat. He imagined he could smell them, as well. He imagined that when their bodies began to crack open and ooze, they would begin to tilt over a little. As they tilted, their sunglasses would kick up on one side, maybe slip a bit down their noses. The ooze would begin to cake on them, and their limbs would swell and discolor and stiffen with gases, making them tilt even more.

No need to think like that. He’d change the subject. He’d already forgotten the name he was supposed to be. It didn’t matter. He had his ID. He’d check it if he needed to know.

Sometimes it was a good thing not to remember who you were.

Chapter 21

When the charter jet pulled up at the hangar in the blazing afternoon sun, Titus was waiting on the tarmac with Derek and Nel, the Thrushes’son and daughter, who had flown in from Denver. He had already had a lengthy conversation with them and had heard the shocking details of Charlie’s death from the son. Derek had talked about his father’s death too readily and in startlingly clinical detail. It was the kind of obsession you sometimes saw in people who were still trying to deal with something horrible, still trying to absorb it and make it real in their own minds. Titus could hardly bear it.

The meeting with Louise was anguishing. They stood in the sun and everyone cried. Louise was already assuming the role of sturdy survivor. After all, she’d had a long flight to think about it, and it was clear that she and Rita had talked it through at great length.

After they moved into the shade of the hangar and visited a little while longer, Titus and Rita said good-bye to them, and Louise headed back to Fredericksburg with her children.

Titus and Rita went to the Range Rover and started back across town. Rita sat with her head against the window, tired and emotionally drained. She was wearing black Capri pants, sandals, and a white blouse, her blond hair kept out of her face by her sunglasses pushed back on her head. She looked exhausted.