David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

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 shift 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 hell are you doing?! What the hell?? 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, thrashing 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.

The roan-haired woman from Burden's archives room brought over two thick ring binders containing Cayetano Luquin's dossier. Burden cleared a space on the round library table and left Titus 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. Titus was surprised at the amount of personal minutiae in the file (clothing sizes, dining habits, video rental preferences, medical records) and that considerable space was given to Luquin's psychological profile.

At one point, while following up a footnote, Titus 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 Titus, 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 Titus was not allowed to see.

As if he were prescient, Burden walked into his study just as Titus was finishing the last pages. He stopped a little way from the library table where Titus sat. The deep casement of the doorway leading out to the second courtyard behind him framed him in its light, the shadow of the room too dark for Titus to make out the language of his features.

“What do you think? ”Burden asked him.

Titus 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 Titus with fear. The man was like a virulent disease that, by some strange biological perversity, had become a specific threat at this time to Titus's friends and family.

But Titus 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. Titus 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 Titus could expect to get from Burden.

“This is scary as hell, ”Titus 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 Titus remembered. Of course it could happen in Austin. God, 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.