David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

He unzipped his pants, moved over a few steps, and pissed at an angle against the rock retaining wall so that it didn't make any sound. A bright green anole lizard scuttled away up the set-back rows of stones to get away from the urine.

As he relieved himself, he took stock of his situation. Bluejays complained incessantly somewhere in the peach trees. Cicadas hymned loudly in every direction, praising the rising heat. Nothing unusual. He glanced back over his left shoulder toward the guest house. The two guys who had come out half an hour earlier were still sitting on the veranda. The Cains were still inside the guest house. Whatever the hell that was all about.

He shook himself off and zipped his trousers again. Turning back to the camera, he leaned his full body against the stones of the retaining wall. They were set back row upon row from his feet to his chin, so that all he had to do was lean forward against them in an upright reclining position, as if it had been designed for him to spy from. He lowered his head to the camera, scanning the telephoto lens back and forth. No. Just the two guys.

That morning he had watched as the woman came outside, early, in her gown. She had gone out to the fountain and looked in, then she had walked over to the wall that separated the courtyard from the pool and looked at some flowers there. It was there, as she'd turned to go back to the veranda, that the sun had fallen on her across the top of the stone wall, and in an instant the gown went clear, as if it had turned to a thin sheet of transparent water. Oh, shit.

It was good for six or eight strides of her long legs, and then the thing went opaque again as the poolhouse blocked the sun. But he had gotten off two snaps, and when nothing was happening he went back to them on the camera's screen. He was going to save those.

Having thought of it, he double-checked the laptop, which was balanced on the retaining wall's top row of stones. The thing was powered up, ready to send his next series of pictures.

Suddenly the guest house door opened, and the two guys on the veranda stood, looking toward it. The problem with his position-and there was nothing he could do about it, no matter how much he moved up and down the retaining wall-was that he couldn't get a clear shot of the door itself. The allee of trees obscured it so that all he could see was the bottom half of the people who came and went, until they got to the veranda.

But now he saw three sets of legs. The woman, her husband, and another. He needed a shot of the third person. He didn't know there had been another person in there. The guy had to have arrived after dark.

Sweat trickled out through the hair at his temples and slid down the side of his face. His hands were sticky with it, and the case of the camera grew slick. Straining through the viewfinder, he concentrated on the legs of the people as they moved to the front of the allee, toward the veranda. He blinked away the sweat gathering in his eyebrows. Damn it.

Just before the three of them emerged onto the veranda, the unidentified man stopped. They talked some more, and then the guy left the Cains and headed down the allee alone.

He had to make a quick decision since the allee descended in his direction and came to within twelve meters of where he was standing. He shoved the computer into the grass-no time to put it away-grabbed the camera, and fell back into the orchard, disappearing into a stand of wild grass. Turning immediately, he faced the allee with a view through a row of peach trees.

The guy walked the length of the allee, and he could hear him talking, using his cell phone. Still he couldn't get a clear shot with the camera. At the end of the allee the guy turned and went down behind the orchard toward the woods. Where the hell was he going?

Risking discovery, he left the grass and ran, bent over in a crouch along the end of the rows of peach trees, past a toolshed. Breathing heavily and thankful that the guy was on the phone, which would distract his hearing, he came to the end of the last row of trees and dropped to his knees behind a cedarpost woodpile. He turned to the end of the allee where he expected the guy to have emerged and raised his camera. But he was nowhere in sight. Loza frantically scanned the edge of the dense woods that led down the hillside to Cielo Canyon Road below the property.

At the last possible moment he saw the guy entering the woods. He squeezed off a few shots, not sure what he was getting.

Shit. This was suspicious. Not good. Macias wasn't going to like this.

After Burden left them in front of the guest house, Titus and Rita headed straight to their bedroom, where they dutifully had the conversation Burden had wanted, and then went on to Titus's study. For the next hour they sat at the long table under the sunny cupola, contacting Carla's friends and enlisting help in calling scattered relatives. Titus made sure the news of Carla's death was handled properly at CaiText and that Carla's responsibilities were temporarily covered.

But no matter how many phone calls Titus made, no matter how many shocked people he talked to or how many urgent items he found crowding in upon him demanding to be dealt with immediately, his mind was divided. He had been staring out the window, lost in thought, when he realized that Rita was finishing a conversation and hanging up the phone. She had been talking to Louise.

“How'd she sound? ”he asked.

“Okay. I think she's in that just-get-through-the-funeral mode. Nel and Derek are lifesavers. And a lot of friends from Fredericksburg are coming out.”

“She'll have a lot of support, ”Titus said. “She'll need it.”

“She wants you to speak at the service, ”Rita said.

“When?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Jesus. What'd you tell her?”

“Of course you would.”

Before he had time to process how impossible that seemed to him, his encrypted phone rang.

“This is Garcia. Listen, Gil Norlin's bringing in the bodyguards-”

“Norlin? ”Titus was surprised, though as soon as he was he didn't know why he should've been.

“He pulled together the local chase car drivers I needed last night, Titus. I use him when I need him, just like everybody else.”

For some reason that last sentence stuck in Titus's mind like a neon sign.

The bodyguards were two men and a woman. They arrived in a Blazer following Gil Norlin's Volvo without any special effort to conceal the fact that they were coming in. Titus guessed they had talked that over with Burden.

First names only. Janet was tall and athletic, with makeup that looked as if it had been applied by numbers. She had an easygoing manner. At first the sound-suppressed MP5 (she told them what it was) slung across her shoulder looked incongruous, until you watched her move around with it. She wore it as comfortably as her pleated trousers.

Ryan was the shorter of the two men at six two, Titus guessed. Lifted weights. Military haircut. All-American. Looked exactly like what he was.

The tall one, Kal, was maybe six five. Not a small man, but not bulked up like Ryan. He seemed a little preoccupied, as if the team were his responsibility.

As soon as they finished introductions and a few words, Rita and Titus took them on a tour of the house. Decisions were immediately made to lock all but the most frequently used doors and to put breach limpets on all the doors and windows. It got very serious very quickly.

After the bodyguards had been briefed and took off in separate directions, Norlin paused in the kitchen with Titus and Rita.

“Do what they say, ”he said. “There's no hocus-pocus here. Just a lot of experience-based common sense.”