David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

“I never said that.”

“You told me he was shady.”

“He just wasn't working up front like the rest of them, ”he said. “That's all I meant by that.”

Again they glared at each other. This was killing him. He watched her eyes reddening again.

“Titus, ”she said, and her voice had a break in it that surprised even her, he saw it in her face, “are we going to regret this? ”She was actually trembling. Titus had never seen Rita tremble-ever.

“I'm making the decisions I have to make, ”he said, “and I'm making them the best way I know how. You've got to understand, there are no guidelines for this, Rita. This is like waking up from a nightmare and discovering that being awake didn't stop the dream. I'm just having to work through it the best way I can.”

He hesitated. “I need your help, Rita. I can't do this without you.”

Her expression shifted. She wasn't sure she wanted the conversation to go in the direction his tone of voice was suggesting. At this point her emotions weren't attuned to conciliation.

“I need you to cooperate with me here, ”he said. “I'm going to have Burden find you a place to stay where I know you'll be safe-”

“Titus! ”Rita stopped him, her eyes holding him, her face rigid with anger and frustration.

He knew what she was thinking: He doesn't understand… doesn't even have a clue what he's asking. But he did. The fact was, she was the one who didn't have a clue. Her loyalty scared the hell out of him because it put her at risk, and he could hardly live with the idea of the possibilities that presented themselves.

They stared at each other.

“I've got to unpack, ”she snapped, and spun around and headed up to the house along the allee.

He didn't try to stop her. He knew better. She was tired. She was emotionally worn out. She was scared. This was the way Rita reacted to those stresses. When she was afraid she got angry, because she could feel the edges of control slipping away from her and that was the most frightening thing of all. She needed time. God help them, they all needed some time, but he didn't think they were likely to get what they needed. Luquin was going to steal as much time as he could along with the money. He was going to keep the pressure on.

As he watched Rita's back flickering through the shadows of the laurels in the allee, the droning of the cicadas grew louder, as if someone had turned up the volume. The heat seemed to have gone up a notch, too, extruding the fragrances of summer, of superheated vegetation, the undercurrents of peaches, the good odors of earth. It all seemed so much more appealing to him now, so much more desirable, than it had a few days before when he had taken it for granted. He relished it, understanding now as he'd never understood before that it was finite, that it wouldn't last forever because it couldn't. It had always been only a temporary thing, but he'd just never thought of it that way before.

The coordinates from the Spanish-language transmissions dribbled in slowly, sent immediately from the first mobile team as soon as the coordinates had been identified. When the first few pinged on Herrin's screen, and Burden's, too, as he waited in the second mobile unit, Burden was immediately speaking into Herrin's earpiece.

“What are the stats on your new program? ”he asked.

“It'll pull us into a target area of about a one-hundredmeter radius, ”Herrin said, focused on the screen.

“Good. Let's just see if we can eliminate anything outright. Maybe a retail site, a law firm, law enforcement. Something that might have a legitimate need for encryption. We're going to be interested in residential. Leased property, most likely.”

Herrin stayed at the computer for nearly two hours before all the transmissions had been scanned by Burden's mobile unit. When the Spanish-language transmissions had been pulled out of the list of 112 encrypted calls, the list had shrunk to only 14. He had called Burden back.

“Okay, ”Burden said. “The Beechcraft will be in position again in fifteen minutes. So what have we got?”

Herrin brought up the summary on both screens.

“Of the fourteen encrypted Spanishlanguage transmissions, ”Herrin said, “two originated in a country club, one in a real estate office, three in lawyers’offices, and two were APD Chicano squad transmissions.”

He rubbed his face and then leaned on his elbows and stared at the screen. He was sitting in the path of one of the airconditioning vents in the guest house, and the chilled air was welcome.

“That leaves only six transmissions to look at, ”Herrin continued. “Three originated on this side of the lake, three on the other side. The ones on the other side are known addresses. The ones on this side were mobile. But we still don't have any content.”

“They said the encryption's tricky, ”Burden said. “It didn't take much to find out if they were English or Spanish, but the actual translations themselves are another thing.”

“Any guesses?”

“No. But I'm hoping the mobile ones go back to one of the houses on the other side, ”Burden said. “If they do, then I'm hoping we'd have their base and their surveillance unit.”

Herrin stared at the screen and unwrapped the clear cellophane from a cube of taffy candy and popped it into his mouth.

“We've got just this one more shot, ”Burden said. “That plane's scheduled for a job in Maracaibo beginning tomorrow. ”Herrin was sucking nervously on the taffy, sucking on the taffy, thinking, thinking, and then he bit into it and chewed it up in a couple of bites.

“I'm going to call the plane, ”Burden said. “I'm going to tell them to stay with those six channels, and go ahead and scan as many of the new ones as they can during the two-hour flight.”

Herrin waited, eyes fixed on his screen, one leg bouncing on the ball of his foot as if he were a manic adolescent. Running live operations made him forget to be laid-back.

“Damn, ”Burden said into Herrin's earpiece, “this isn't much. If they just happen not to be transmitting during these four hours… ”Pause. Silence. Then he said, “But I have a hunch that their timing's good. On the first flight the Beechcraft was in position and operating within only a couple of minutes of Cain's e-mail to Luquin. If Luquin was going to react quickly, and he always does, he should've been making encrypted calls within the time frame of that first flight. He just has to be in one of those three houses.”

Jorge Macias stood at the deck railing that overlooked the lake, a cell phone pressed to his ear as he watched a girl in a banana yellow bikini lying on the bow of a rumbling ski boat resting in the water a hundred meters below. He wore black linen trousers and a dove gray silk shirt unbuttoned to midchest, the dark hair of which peeked through the plackets of his shirtfront. He was talking to his mobile surveillance crew, who had picked up and reported the arrival of Rita Cain.

As he listened he watched another girl, wearing a black thong and holding a drink in her hand, as she leaned over the side of the boat and talked to a man in the water getting his skis ready. A second man stood at the steering wheel telling him what to do.

“Ah, very good, ”Macias said, “exactly, exactly. I needed some good news. Still no sign of bodyguards, anything like that?… Bueno, bueno. Great.”

The girls preened in the sun. Girls like that, que chichis. And then the girl on the bow stood and got into the boat. The driver, looking back, gunned the engine. The prop dug into the water and the boat took off. Suddenly the guy in the water was skipping along the surface of the lake on his skis, heading into the glittering ripples of the water.