David Lindsey - The Rules of Silence

There were no other cars there. He placed the call from the pay phone outside. That number had been changed. He dialed the new number. He got a recording that gave him yet another number, where he received a cell phone number, where he got a recording to leave a pay phone number and state if he had an emergency. He did both.

Agitated, he sat in the Range Rover with his window down so he could hear the phone ring and stared at the bright interior of the store. Nobody was in there except the night clerk. No other cars were parked outside except his. The two of them, the middle-aged woman suspended in fluorescent isolation as she stared into space from her stool behind the cash register and Titus staring at her from his solitary, lightless cubicle, were polar opposites, bound together by their dissimilarities. Black-and-white metaphors for the bewildered.

When the phone rang he was out of the Rover in an instant and picked up the receiver on the third ring.

“Yes?”

“Yeah, this is Titus Cain. I met you about four years ago. There was this abduction-”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“What's the situation?”

“Extortion. Death threats if I call law enforcement. This phone call's a big risk.”

“How were the threats made? Letter?”

“Three armed gunmen showed up at my house about an hour ago. Shot my dogs right there in front of me and gave me ultimatums.”

“Give me the address where you are right now.”

“I imagine I'm being followed. My car's probably-” “As long as you're not tagged personally, we'll be okay.” Titus gave him the address.

He left the Rover at the convenience store and rode with Gilbert Norlin through the winding, wooded roads of the hills while Norlin made the necessary maneuvers to make sure they weren't being tailed. Titus surprised himself by not being able to speak. Norlin didn't press him, and they rode in silence for a while. Titus's tongue-tied confusion embarrassed him, but there literally wasn't anything he could do about it. Finally he could control his voice, and he began to tell Norlin everything, chronologically, in as much detail as he could remember.

By the time he had finished, they had arrived at the deserted building site of one of the many new homes under construction in the hills. They got out of Norlin's car and walked to the house slab where the framing was just beginning. They sat on the slab, surrounded by the smells of lumber and concrete and freshly moved earth.

Now it was Norlin who remained silent. Titus waited, his heart loping along as if it were trying to outrun what he was sure would be Norlin's grim appraisal of his dilemma.

Finally Norlin asked, “How difficult is it going to be to do what he wants, to move the money?”

“Depends on how much he asks for first. I've got, I don't know, a good chunk in markets I can dump immediately. I'll take a loss, but I can do it. Beyond that I'll have to sell pieces of the company. It's just going to look bizarre to… hell, to everybody. I've built CaiText on cautious, conservative business practices, for God's sake. I've got a reputation for that.

“Just six months ago, after years of planning, I let all the division heads buy into the company. That's worked great all these years with one other guy who's been with me from the beginning. But on top of that, six months ago, we borrowed heavily for our expansion program-a program all the division heads planned and proposed to me. Everyone's excited about it, and we think it's going to have a huge payoff.

“Now, can you imagine how this is going to look if I start shifting assets so I can start laying out millions of dollars on foreign investments? This isn't going to work.”

“But you don't have any specific instructions yet, ”Norlin said. “You don't know the immediate requirements.”

“No.”

Norlin wasn't saying much, and that was making Titus nervous, filling him with the worst kind of dread.

In the reflected glow of the city lights across the river, Titus could see enough of Norlin to remember him from four years ago. Of middle height, he had thinning hair, a face with no jawline. His shoulders were rounded, tending to a slight hunch.

Norlin shook his head. “I don't blame you for not going to the FBI. I wouldn't have, either. But that's not what they'd want me to say to you. The conventional wisdom is that the sooner they're involved, the better.”

Norlin sat with his arms locked straight, his hands palms down on the edge of the slab, looking at Titus.

“But this doesn't look too damned conventional to me, ”he said. “You know what the percentages are for catching kidnappers in the U.S.? Ninety-five percent. That's mostly because things like this don't usually happen here in the States. The people who get into it here are loners, emotional basket cases to start with. Crazies who think they're going to magically solve the sad problems of their empty lives by stealing another living human being.”

He paused.

“But if something like this, if this was what kidnapping was like in the States, that ninety-five percent would be shattered. Why? Because this is business, and these people aren't crazies. Not in the sense I'm talking about, anyway. That thing with the dogs, that was a promise, not a threat. You can expect these people to do exactly what they say they're going to do.”

“This is it, then? ”Titus was incredulous. “This is it? I just get ready to cough up sixty-four million?”

“No, I didn't say that.”

“Then what in the hell do I do?”

Norlin didn't say anything. He was thinking, and the fact that he wasn't just firing off action points, wasn't rolling out a game plan, wasn't giving Titus go-to names, scared the shit out of him. Norlin was Titus's cop show equivalent of his one phone call, and he wasn't coming through.

Titus wiped the sweat off the side of his face. This wasn't what he'd wanted. He'd wanted Norlin to be reassuring, to have answers. He felt his chest tightening; he felt time running out; he felt desperate.

“I'm no good to you, ”Norlin said.

Jesus.

“I'm not. Wherever this guy's coming from-Colombia, Mexico, Brazil-he's from another world. Believe me, these guys do not breathe the same air we do. Listen, last year in Colombia alone, nearly a billion dollars were paid out in kidnapping ransoms. Big business. And it just doesn't get any more serious than this.”

Norlin shook his head, thinking.

“What I'm seeing here, this is some kind of hybrid operation. I don't know. I've never heard of this kind of thing happening in the States. I've never heard of this much money being demanded. I've never heard of them wanting to keep the money transfer ‘legal.'”

His voice was flat. He wasn't getting excited about it, he was just laying out the facts.

“Killing friends, family, for negotiating leverage, that's routine in Latin America, India, Philippines, Russia, those places, yeah. But here in the States? Shit. I don't know what they're thinking. It's just way, way out of whack. It's hard to believe.”

Titus thought he heard a glimmer of hope.

“You think this could just be a huge poker hand, then? He's calling my bluff? If I cough up some money, he hits it lucky? If I don't, he'll just disappear? He took a shot at it, and it didn't really cost him anything to try.”

“No. ”Norlin was quick to come back. “That's not what I'm saying. You've got to believe this guy. ”He shook his head. “Everything's accelerated in the last two years. There's a harder edge to everything, terrorism, international crime. Law enforcement's pressing harder, intelligence community has gotten back into the trenches. Everything's more extreme. Looking down the road, we knew we were going to be seeing things we'd never dreamed of seeing before. This is the kind of thing we were afraid of. And the worst part of it is, we're just not geared up yet to deal with something so damned brutal.”