David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

Rita, Titus discovered, had actually listened to the whole thing in the guest house with Herrin, an experience that she said she had found fascinating and horrifying, but ultimately reassuring. The subdued control with which Burden and his teams had handled the hectic two hours was a lesson in a new kind of reality for her. Somehow-irrationally, she admitted- it had made her feel as though there might be some way to get through this after all.

Burden was focused on the debriefing and repeatedly took Titus through his trip from the moment he was taken from the Rover to the moment he was returned to it. He asked Titus about the things he heard, of movements he heard, of what he sensed. What about accents? What about personalities? He asked how many people Titus could count, and then he took him over what they had seen on their monitors. He asked Titus for his guesses about this and that, and then he told Titus his own perspective of the same guesses.

They went over Titus's conversation with Luquin, and Burden asked about Luquin's manner, the way he sounded when he said certain things, the expression on his face, the set of his eyes. How did he choose his words?

Finally there was a pause in the debriefing. Burden checked his messages on his phone, looking at the readout without saying anything. Titus glanced at Rita, trying and failing to mask his anxiety. Rita caught his expression and frowned.

Burden cleared his screen, looked up, and paused.

“Okay, ”he said, “let's talk about it. Whatever it is. There's no time for being subtle. I don't have time to decipher signals. Bring it out in the open.”

Titus shifted in his chair.

“The whole thing tonight, ”he said, rubbing his face with his hands, flinching when he touched the cut that he'd forgotten about. “He's running a pretty damned tight operation, isn't he.”

“He always does. You can't afford many mistakes with this guy.”

“I'll be honest, ”Titus said. “It doesn't look to me like you've got what it's going to take to do this.”

Burden kept his eyes on Titus, but his expression was unreadable.

“It looks to me like the disadvantages that you outlined for us earlier add up to a damned big handicap. Too big for you to overcome.”

“I've already told you our odds aren't good, ”Burden said. “So that shouldn't be a surprise. And if you're judging the battle by what you see on the battlefield, you're making a mistake.”

“What I see, ”Titus said, “is a guy who's got a well-oiled machine operated by disciplined and brutal men. What I see is that he came prepared to win, and he brought men who'll do anything to make sure that he does.”

“That's what you've seen, ”Burden said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, in this business what you see isn't a good gauge of the reality. The whole plan of engagement-on both sides-is designed to be unseen. It's what you don't see that you need to worry about.”

“That sounds good, Garcia, but I can't make my decisions based on what I don't see.”

“Keep this in mind, ”Burden said. “Those people who handled you tonight have been here a month or more, and during that time you saw nothing, knew nothing. They came into your house, many times, planting bugs, familiarizing themselves with your security system, sniffing you out, and you didn't have the slightest idea about it. Until Luquin himself told you what he'd done.

“And don't forget this: What you saw of Luquin's operation tonight you saw only because of what we did, my people and you. We drew him out, and he didn't even know what was happening. As powerful as he is, we were able to do that. Right now we're processing that information in our computers, and after I add in what I learned from you during the last hour or so, we'll have a pretty good picture of the number of people we're up against.”

Burden took a sip of his coffee and glanced at Rita before he spoke again.

“You haven't done the wrong thing, Titus. Don't start second-guessing yourself now. We sure as hell don't need Ruby Ridge or Waco tactics here. We've come a long way in a short time in understanding how to deal with the Luquins of the future. What you're seeing are the rough edges. The slicker stuff you won't see at all. We don't want spectacle. We want invisibility… and silence.”

He paused. “One other thing: Remember our conversation in San Miguel? Once we've committed to this thing, there's no turning back. I'm holding you to that. We're sleeping with the serpent now, Titus. The only way we're going to live through the night is to be very still and very quiet until it's dead. If we wake it, it'll kill us.”

David Lindsey

The Rules of Silence

An hour after Titus collapsed into bed and instantly fell asleep, despite the adrenaline high of his ordeal, his assistant, Carla Elster, rolled over in her bed several valleys north and looked out the window at the pale dawn. The radio alarm had just come on, and she listened to Bob Edwards on NPR intone something about a congressional hearing. She let herself stay in bed until the end of the story, which couldn't have been more than three minutes long, and then threw back the covers.

She reached for her cotton robe on the chair beside the bed, slipped it on, and tied the sash in a slipknot. She padded into the bathroom, where she washed her face, brushed her hair, and then brushed her teeth with her left hand on her hip as she examined her face in the mirror and assessed the impact of the years.

Telling herself to hell with that, she turned and went out into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen, where the coffee would just be finishing. She poured herself a cup, added half-and-half from the refrigerator, and carried the mug with her out the front door to get the paper.

Back inside, she sat at the kitchen table and read the headlines of The New York Times. She couldn't concentrate on the articles because her mind kept going back to Titus, as it had throughout the night. She couldn't stop worrying about him. Something was seriously wrong. She didn't believe the bad investment story, of course. But the most remarkable thing about it was that whatever was happening, Titus thought it was necessary to ruin his own reputation to cover it up. That must have killed him, and it pained her deeply that he felt he had to do that.

And those guys with the headphones, were they checking for electronic bugs? That's what it looked like, and Titus had completely ignored her pointed questions about it. Even more curious was his immediate insistence that his financial worries were personal. That made her suspect they weren't.

She changed into jogging clothes, still thinking of Titus and Rita. Although Rita's disturbed behavior was understandable, given the death of Charlie Thrush and the news about Titus's financial troubles, she seemed more agitated and abrupt than distraught.

At the bottom of the stairs she stopped by the secretary's desk in the front hallway to pick up her epinephrine injector, which she kept in a small sack and wore on a string around her neck when she jogged. She checked her watch as she headed down the front sidewalk and then hit the street, taking off at a slow lope.

There were sections of West Lake Hills, an incorporated town on Austin's southwest side, that felt almost rural, their narrow, winding lanes climbing the heavily wooded hills and then twisting down into the valleys. The homes themselves were often hidden from the lanes, and it wasn't unusual to jog for many blocks without seeing any of the homes at all.

Carla's route was a secluded course, and she looked forward to her peaceful early morning regimen. She liked the time alone, because once she got to CaiText it was nonstop until she returned home exhausted in the evening.