The Rules Of Silence Part 6

"That's inconceivable, "said t.i.tus, who was also leaning forward on the sofa now. "That doesn't make any sense."

Burden looked at him as if he were trying to see something in t.i.tus that hadn't yet been made apparent to him. It was almost as if he were trying to determine whether t.i.tus himself could be trusted.

"It would be a mistake, t.i.tus, for you to believe that this is only about you and Luquin. Right now the lens is focused on you, but only because Luquin has focused on you. There's more to this picture than you can see from your vantage point. You are only one detail among many, but for now you've become a very important detail."

Burden stopped and sat back in his armchair. But he didn't resume his formerly languid posture.

"In the next hour or two we'll have to decide many things, "he said. "I believe you're a good and honest man, t.i.tus. I believe you'll be honest with me."

Burden waited, sobriety returning to his eyes, deepening the lines that gathered there.

"I should tell you, "he said, "the end of the story of the little girl. "He paused, his gaze distracted toward some invisible place across the room. "I finally tracked her down, a few years later. Her grave, that is. It was ... only ... three weeks old. Just three weeks. I had"-he turned his eyes on t.i.tus again- "I had her exhumed. I wanted to see her ... with my own eyes. I had to know ... beyond any doubt, that her h.e.l.l was over for her."

He swallowed. He was still looking at t.i.tus, but he wasn't seeing him. He swallowed again.

"But she had suffered so ... and that changes a person physically. Still, I'm almost ... certain ... that it was her."

Chapter 13.

Charlie Thrush's land was a dozen miles southwest of Fredercksburg. His home, made of native stone, sat near the center of a small valley laced with spring-fed streams and was heavily wooded with chinquapin and live oak. A thread of sycamores crowded the banks of the largest creek that ran the length of the valley.

Even though Charlie was not a rancher, he'd always liked the idea of it, and after he and Louise had lived in their new home for several years, he'd quickly settled into the life of a gentleman rancher.

This afternoon Charlie had a fairly simple problem to deal with. For the last four years an old dead sycamore had stood solitary and forlorn near the back corner of Charlie's office, a three-room building nestled in a sycamore stand seventy-five yards from the main house. Charlie had been meaning to cut it down every year after it died, and now its skeletal presence had become symbolic, a kind of nagging reminder of his procrastination. Finally he put it on his "to do "list for this month, and today was the day he had set aside in his mind to finally get the job done.

He had meant to get started early while the day was still cool, but he had gotten sidetracked in the peach orchard, and by the time he thought of the tree again it was late morning and he realized he wouldn't get to it until after lunch.

It was a hot postnoontime, with the sun standing still in the meridian, when Charlie headed for the tool shed with a couple of Mexican laborers who had come through a few days earlier looking for work. They'd heard that Charlie was clearing the underbrush around an oak mot spring several hundred yards from the house. Charlie had put the men to work and was letting them live in a shack not far from the spring. But the truth was, they'd turned out not to be very good workers, and he'd decided he was going to let them go. But yesterday he'd told them he wanted them to help him cut down the old sycamore. He'd let them go tomorrow.

With the men carrying the sixteen-foot ladder and Charlie lugging his twenty-inch Stihl chain saw, they headed for the tree. The Mexicans raised the ladder as high as it would go and leaned it against the sycamore in the fork of one of its largest bare branches. They steadied it while Charlie serviced the chain saw and then clipped the saw to the harness he'd made for carrying the saw up into trees when he worked alone.

Working a chain saw from a ladder could be exhausting, so he had rigged the harness so that he could turn off the saw and let it hang from the strap, freeing his hands to reposition himself and steady his footing when he started on another part of the tree. For a man his age, it was slow work.

He climbed up the ladder, steadied himself, and started the saw. He revved the throttle trigger a few times until the saw idled easily, and then he started cutting, reaching up to cut the higher limbs while his energy and muscles were still fresh.

As the limbs tumbled down, the Mexicans gathered them on the ground and dragged them over to one side. It went fast since the limbs were bare of foliage, and he was soon ready to s.h.i.+ft the ladder to another position. But then something went wrong.

Just as he was about to cut off the saw, the throttle trigger snapped and the saw revved up to a whining full-throttle scream. Bracing himself against his thighs on the ladder, he reached over with his other hand to the kill switch. But it didn't work. It slipped back and forth freely without cutting off the engine.

With the engine screaming, he moved the chain brake forward with his forearm, but the chain kept churning; the brake bolts were too loose to engage it.

Then Charlie felt his ladder move.

He looked down and saw that the two Mexicans had attached a rope to one of the legs of the ladder and were standing back out of the way. One of them was slowly pulling the ladder out from under him. It was like seeing a bird fly backward or a coyote climbing the sky. It didn't relate to anything logical at all. It just looked ridiculous.

He yelled at them: What the h.e.l.l are you doing?! What the h.e.l.l?? Hey!!

In an instant, with the heavy chain saw screaming in his hand, the horror of possibilities flew at him: If he dropped the saw to hang on to the tree limb with both arms, the saw would swing from the harness and the torque of the whining engine would pull the chain into him, spinning crazily, cutting his legs off... .

If he hung on to the limb with one arm and the chain saw with the other, eventually his strength would give out and he'd fall, and from this height he'd surely tumble onto the churning chain... .

If he could step up another step and rest the saw on the limb before the ladder was pulled out from under him, he could unclip the saw from the harness and let it fall free... .

He stepped up one step even as he felt the ladder going sideways out from under him, and for an instant the screaming saw teetered on the limb and then slipped over on the other side as the ladder was jerked away.

It all happened in one smooth, fluid stream of action, not in discrete moments, but in one continuous flow of time. It is said that at the moment of death the sense of hearing is the last to go. He couldn't really say. The sensation of the shrilly whining chain ripping wildly into him was startlingly painless. It eviscerated him, thras.h.i.+ng about inside him, the torque of the engine whipping it about like a frenzied, live thing, reaming him out as if he were a gutted deer hanging in a tree.

He smelled the hot engine spewing oil and gasoline.

Numbness came quickly, and he wasn't sure how or when he let go of the limb with his arms. He was aware of his body whirling around and around, entangled with the pitching saw. He was aware of being whipped about. He actually heard the liquidy sound of himself being flung and splashed.

He thought an arm went with a swipe of the chain.

He saw sunlight and earth and the Mexicans looking up and watching, their expressions curious but not surprised. He saw the trees and the woods and sunlight and even dark spatters flying through the air.

Somewhere in his midsection something separated and pulled loose and fell away.

The whining was vicious and deafening. His lungs flew out of his mouth. His sight failed. It wasn't so bad; and the screaming faded away, too, and though he felt nothing, he was aware of the sensation of swinging.

Chapter 14.

The roan-haired woman from Burden's archives room brought over two thick ring binders containing Cayetano Luquin's dossier. Burden cleared a s.p.a.ce on the round library table and left t.i.tus with the two volumes while he returned with the woman.

The dossier was a straightforward biography with photographs interspersed throughout. There was a detailed index with cross-references to other volumes in Burden's archives and to various U.S. and foreign law enforcement and intelligence agency archives. t.i.tus was surprised at the amount of personal minutiae in the file (clothing sizes, dining habits, video rental preferences, medical records) and that considerable s.p.a.ce was given to Luquin's psychological profile.

At one point, while following up a footnote, t.i.tus came across a reference to a paper by Garcia Prieto Burden, lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland.

The reports of the four Rio de Janeiro abductions were given in more detail than Burden had related to t.i.tus, but there were also cross-references to even longer accounts. Any word that was cross-referenced and had expanded data in another file was printed in a distinctive typeface. Even though the dossier seemed thorough and packed with information, there were also ample signs of copious deletions, information t.i.tus was not allowed to see.

As if he were prescient, Burden walked into his study just as t.i.tus was finis.h.i.+ng the last pages. He stopped a little way from the library table where t.i.tus sat. The deep cas.e.m.e.nt of the doorway leading out to the second courtyard behind him framed him in its light, the shadow of the room too dark for t.i.tus to make out the language of his features.

"What do you think? "Burden asked him.

t.i.tus was nearly dizzy with information that was so outrageous that he sometimes felt as if he had been reading a work of fiction. The dossier, together with Burden's own accounts of Luquin's rampages, filled t.i.tus with fear. The man was like a virulent disease that, by some strange biological perversity, had become a specific threat at this time to t.i.tus's friends and family.

But t.i.tus had tried to read between the lines, and it seemed to him that the curious deletions in Luquin's files were pointing to Luquin being a threat on a scale that far exceeded highdollar extortion and kidnappings, even if the ransom was in the tens of millions of dollars. t.i.tus was getting the impression that Luquin's lethal reach embraced continents. Burden had already alluded to this, but the deletions in Luquin's files clearly indicated that allusions were all that t.i.tus could expect to get from Burden.

"This is scary as h.e.l.l, "t.i.tus said. "That's what I think." He swallowed, looking at Burden's silhouette against the light. "But ... help me understand this ... if Luquin started killing people ... I mean, he's threatening me with a kind of slaughter here. He might get by with that in Colombia, but not in the States. How could he?"

Burden looked at him, saying nothing. He just stood there in silence, waiting, waiting until t.i.tus remembered. Of course it could happen in Austin. G.o.d, if we'd learned nothing else from the recent past, we'd learned that anything could happen anywhere. Death, even outrageous death, gave no special dispensation to accidents of geography or nationality.

Chastened by Burden's silence and by the sound of his own naivete echoing in his ears, t.i.tus ducked his head and then looked up again.

"Okay, that was stupid, "he conceded, "but still, help me understand how he's going to carry out his threats and maintain the silence he's promising, and demanding, at the same time. I mean, what are the logistics of what he's talking about? Mayhem and silence just aren't compatible."

Burden's silhouette, his hands in his pockets, one shoulder angled a little lower than the other, moved out of the doorway and drifted into the shadows gathered at the edges of the bookcases. The ambient light was too little, and t.i.tus couldn't see him well. Outside, the day was turning soft, descending toward late afternoon.

"Look at what's going on here, "Burden said from a corner. "He's not going to do in Austin what he does in Colombia or Brazil. This is not a stupid man.

"Go back to the Rio cases. With each case Tano learned something to do, and not to do, in each subsequent abduction. First case: He learned the K and R people only made matters less lucrative and less efficient for him.

"Second case: He eliminates them by contacting the family instead of the corporation. But he still has to put pressure on the family to put pressure on the corporation to pay up. Working with two separate ent.i.ties is still inefficient.

"Third case: This time he makes sure that the victim and his family are major stockholders in the company. They'll have more leverage in making the company pay than a mere employee would. Still, the demands are on the family, not the corporation. When there's a glitch, he has to kidnap a relative of the original victim before the family presses for payment and Luquin gets his money.

"Fourth case: This time he made sure he chose a victim who was a major stockholder in the company. But it was publicly held, and some of the board members insisted on this supersecret SWAT team's intervention. Caused Tano a lot of trouble. Still he had to threaten to kill additional employees to force their hand."

Burden moved along the wall of books until he stopped at the feet of the reclining nude woman with the monkey.

"Fifth case: You. What's he learned? To whittle down his irritants. No K and R people. No police. No corporate interests versus family interests. No publicly held company with a board to answer to. And even more ingenious, no crime. You'll be buying foreign companies. No noise. Everything done silently-and with seeming legitimacy."

Burden stopped. He took a few steps toward t.i.tus.

"No noise, "he said. "What does that say to us, t.i.tus? Do you think he's going to commit a series of brash, Colombianstyle a.s.sa.s.sinations in Austin? Remember: He said that when this is all over no one will even know that any crime has been committed. Use your imagination."

He came across the room and stood on the other side of the table from t.i.tus. Thinking, he put his fingers on the fountain pen that lay in the gutter of the opened book.

"Imagine this, t.i.tus. Let's say you decide that working with me isn't the way to go. You go to the FBI. Luquin discovers this immediately and disappears. You tell the FBI everything, but the fact is, you don't really have any proof that what you're telling them actually happened. Except the dead dogs. We've already cleaned up the bugs. Their files on Luquin are spa.r.s.e, and he's been off the radar screen for a decade. They find your story interesting, curious, but frankly, a little suspicious, too. But it's all over, and you've averted a huge loss of money. You've saved lives. Close call.

"Six months from now a friend dies unexpectedly. A car wreck. Or a hunting accident. Or a heart attack. Afterwards you get an e-mail: 'h.e.l.lo, t.i.tus. I told you not to go to the FBI. You should have listened to me.'You go to the FBI again and tell them what's happened. They listen. You're a respectable man, so they take you seriously. But, really, there's just nothing they can do about proving that an accident like that was actually a murder caused by a bad guy from Brazil.

"Time pa.s.ses. A friend's wife in San Francisco drowns while swimming laps in her pool. You get an e-mail: 'h.e.l.lo, t.i.tus. It's me again. You should have listened to me.'

"Five months later, the teenage daughter of another friend in Boca Raton, all the way across the continent, overdoses on drugs. Shocking, because the child had absolutely no exposure to such things. You get an e-mail: 'h.e.l.lo, t.i.tus ...'"

Burden slid the fountain pen along the gutter of the page an inch or two.

"Do you see how this could happen? "he asked. "Every time you go to the FBI. But you understand, Luquin won't always go after your closest friends. He'll scatter the deaths across the country and across relations.h.i.+ps. Maybe even extended family members of your employees. Six months apart. A year apart. Can you imagine how many people would die before the FBI could ever establish a connection in a scenario like that? If they ever did?

"Can you imagine how it's going to make you look to keep going back and saying: Please! You've got to believe me. That tractor accident in Iowa was really a murder. It's this guy in Brazil who wanted to extort sixty-four million dollars... . And Luquin's going to make sure you can't capture his e-mails. There'll be no proof. It could go on and on.

"Tano Luquin is no ideologue, "Burden went on. "He knows nothing about ideals or dreams or political causes, and he cares nothing for them. He's a common criminal. Venal. Violent. Egotistic. He's the kind of man who can be found in every generation and in every culture. A predator. You have something he wants, and he's going to take it.

"But the difference is that today clever men like Luquin have so many more powerful resources in the technology at their disposal. To antic.i.p.ate them, you have to be willing to imagine beyond your a.s.sumptions, to be willing to make that leap into the realm of the unbelievable. I can a.s.sure you, they have. Luquin is wealthy. His methods and resources are sophisticated. His imagination and appet.i.tes are unrestrained."

Burden's point was well made, and chilling.

"Okay, "t.i.tus said, "just tell me this: Can you stop him? Can you save lives?"

Burden didn't answer immediately, and with every second he hesitated, t.i.tus's hopes diminished with a grim effect on his spirit.

"I think I can stop him, "Burden said. "I can save lives. But I can't save all of them. I've told you that. That's what I think.

"You have to remember, "he continued, "Tano's ego is tied directly to his stature in his own mind. He's warned you. You go against that warning, and you've insulted him by not respecting his power to dictate to you. He's going to make you pay for it. And he's going to make sure you know you're paying for it."

t.i.tus was feeling trapped.

"I could just cough up the money. Get it over with."

"Yeah, you could do that, "Burden agreed. "And maybe that would end it for you. But it would also guarantee that Luquin would go on doing what he does, and with even more resources. You'd guarantee that someone else would be put through the same h.e.l.l that you're going through. And your money would be financing it. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want that on my conscience."

t.i.tus found it a little difficult to get his breath.

He looked toward the windows and the opened doorway. He felt alienated, estranged from his life before last night. Adrift. Outside, the light and the sounds were foreign. The language was foreign. The smells belonged to other people, and the rhythm of life belonged to another culture. It all contributed to a sense of uncertainty.

Uncertainty, however, was only part of it. His anger was still there, too, slowly evolving into a determination to fight back. Somehow. But not at the cost of someone else's life. Not even one. Burden was probably right that Luquin would find out if he went to the FBI. Sooner or later. And then there was Burden's other prediction, that someone was going to die anyway, regardless, just so Luquin could establish his authority.

He looked at Burden, who was studying him just an arm's reach across the round table, his face a narrative of the effects of sustained secret struggles. Whatever his life had been like, it wasn't entirely hidden from anyone who cared enough to try to understand what they were looking at. It was sculpted into his face and had shaped the sorrowful angle of his eyes. Whatever it was this man knew, he'd paid dearly for it. t.i.tus couldn't ignore that.

And then there was Gil Norlin's advice: If you follow this guy's recommendations, you won't have to worry about whether or not you're doing the right thing. You can believe what he says.

t.i.tus took a deep breath, one that reached down into the place that made him what he was, to the place that defined him.

"Okay, "he said to Burden, "let's do whatever it is we have to do. And let's do it as fast as we can."

Chapter 15.

"Guys like Tano have brilliantly taken advantage of the effects that terrorism has had on U.S. domestic security, "said Mattie Selway. She was the roan-haired woman t.i.tus had seen in Burden's war room earlier in the day. She had joined t.i.tus and Burden in the study, bringing with her a black ring binder that she kept in her lap, occasionally flipping the pages back and forth, making notes.

"They foresaw that for the immediate future, at least, the preponderance of the U.S.'s law enforcement, intelligence services, and domestic security would be poured into reacting to this new threat. Addressing a crisis like this creates a kind of tunnel vision in the national psyche. People want the d.a.m.n thing solved, they want it to go away. The government wants to accommodate them. Luquin knew that in the States it was going to be all eyes-and money and commitment-on international terrorism for the foreseeable future. We've seen this in the FBI's rea.s.signments, pulling huge numbers of agents from narcotics operations, others from violent crime units, others from white-collar crime, to work in counterterrorism."

The sun had fallen behind the towering fresno fresno and and eucalipto eucalipto trees outside and was sinking toward the Sierra de Morenos in the west. They sat in an eerie twilight that t.i.tus was beginning to a.s.sociate with Burden himself. trees outside and was sinking toward the Sierra de Morenos in the west. They sat in an eerie twilight that t.i.tus was beginning to a.s.sociate with Burden himself.

"Several things stand out as interesting to us, "she continued. "One: the size of the ransom, of course. That's probably a reflection of his confidence in his plan. Two: the way he wants it paid. Smart. It'll work. After you've made your investments, the money will evaporate like a morning mist. It just won't exist anymore, lost in the vast electronic void. And third: the fact that Luquin himself has crossed the border for this."

"I think this last one's the one that'll give us our opening," Burden said from a dark pocket of the room. He was continuing to roam the parameters of the gloomy s.p.a.ce. "Mattie thinks the unusual financial arrangements are our best bet. In any event, there are some basic preparations. Your computer's ready to go. I talked to Herrin about an hour ago, and he says they're finding phone taps and bugs all over your house. "He stopped and looked across at t.i.tus through the dim light. "And you need to get your wife back here, "he said.

Before t.i.tus could open his mouth to respond, the Mayan woman appeared in the opened doorway where the balconies led to the buildings next door.

"Garcia, "she said, "we've got Luquin coming in on Mr. Cain's laptop."