The Rules of Silence

by David Lindsey

When he was finished he was soaked in sweat, his clothes ruined, smeared with dirt and dog's blood that combined into a sad crust. He returned the pickax and shovel to the reservoir site and then walked back up to the house, where he got a hose and washed the pools of blackening blood from the veranda.

  He crossed the courtyard and went through to the walled enclosure surrounding the pool. Behind the poolhouse there were showers and dressing rooms and a large storage room where they kept the tables and chairs and other accessories they needed for entertaining.

  Outside the dressing rooms, he removed his clothes and mud-caked loafers and threw them into the trash cans. Naked, he went to the ice machine in the cabana beside the pool and filled a plastic bucket there with ice and threw the ice into the pool. He did this repeatedly until the ice machine was empty. And then he dove in. He swam four laps slowly, back and forth through the cold pockets of floating ice, trying to clear his head.

  Once out of the pool, he made his way to a deck chair and sat down. He started trying to work it out. For a moment his thoughts just wouldn't gel. He couldn't come up with anything at all. He just wanted to call Rita, hear her voice. But that was out of the question. He didn't trust himself to hide his emotions, and to make her suspicious—maybe even frighten her— without having some kind of plan in place was simply irresponsible.

  If he was going to believe this guy's threats, then there was nowhere to go. No options. But Titus found that inconceivable. There were always options, weren't there?

  How would this guy know if he contacted someone? Obviously he had some kind of tactical team. How thorough were they? There were bound to be bugs in the house. The phones were probably tapped. And it didn't take geniuses to pick up cell phone transmissions. Would he be followed, too?

  Still, doing nothing was out of the question. Alvaro had said: Even if you do contact law enforcement people and are able to hide it from me temporarily … So maybe his surveillance wasn't as infallible as he would like Titus to think. Sure, he'd want Titus to believe that he, Alvaro, was all over him, that Titus couldn't even have a change in his pulse rate without Alvaro knowing about it; but what if that wasn't true? Was Titus just going to roll over and believe that? It's a gamble, Alvaro had said.

  Titus sat up in his chair at the memory of that remark. A gamble. Well, where there's a gamble, there's also a chance, isn't there?

  He stood up, his mind racing. No police. No FBI. No law enforcement agencies. But Titus remembered a guy. Four years ago, one of Titus's female employees was abducted from the CaiText parking garage. It developed into a hostage standoff situation (it turned out to be a bad marriage turned worse) that lasted a couple of days. Among the various law enforcement-type consultants brought in during the ordeal was a guy named Gil Norlin. It was never clear to Titus who brought him into the situation or whom he answered to, but he was always sort of hanging around on the edges of it. Never fully engaged, never having any authority for anything. Yet Titus noticed that people did consult him, even the FBI agents, but always quietly, to the side.

  Titus heard later that he was a former CIA officer, retired now. A consultant. He had left Titus his card, avoiding his eyes, Titus remembered. Titus headed for the house.

  Wearing his robe, he rummaged around in his office for twenty minutes before he found the old card in an outdated Rolodex at the back of a drawer.

  He looked at his watch. At this hour the winding roads of the wooded hills were sparsely traveled, and even Titus would be able to see someone following. On the other hand, it really didn't matter. Even with all the advanced technology available today, a call from a spontaneously chosen pay phone was still a safe call. Even if Alvaro's people had a surveillance tag on the Rover and knew he was making the call, they wouldn't know whom he was calling or what the call was about.

  Alvaro had specified no law enforcement. But he knew that Titus would have to make arrangements with a variety of people in order to raise the money Alvaro was demanding. For all he knew, Titus could be calling his banker, his broker, his accountant, his lawyer. Surely those conversations could be private and not considered a violation of Alvaro's bans on communication? Was Titus to have understood from Alvaro's instructions that he could never have another private conversation? That just didn't seem realistic. It was worth the risk of pushing the envelope a little to find out just how tight a grip this guy had on him.

  He grabbed the card from his Rolodex, threw on some clothes, locked the house—feeling stupid, considering what had just happened—and went out and got into the Range Rover.

  It took him only ten minutes to get down the winding narrow roads below his house to the lone all-night convenience store at an isolated intersection in the woods. He hadn't seen anyone following him so far, although he knew that his countersurveillance skills had to be less than great.

  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 d
ivision 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.”

  Chapter 8

  Titus turned and sat on the slab again, a few feet away from Norlin. He felt a little light-headed, his thoughts alternating in velocity between a stunned, sluggish incredulity and the frenetic, revved-up hyperjitter of panic. He wanted to stand up again. He wanted to pace. He wanted to be able to think methodically. He wanted more air. He wanted to wake up.

  “I'm going to give you some advice, ”Norlin said. “Your situation, there are going to be pressures put on you, deliberately, to make fast decisions. And you're going to have to do it. You won't have any choice. But it's going to be tough because sometimes—and it's just the odds, you can't fight it—sometimes you're going to make the wrong decisions. The consequences are going to be painful.”

  “What's that mean, exactly? ”Titus wanted it spelled out, bad news in black and white.

  “It means that after it's done, it's done. If you're going to second-guess yourself, you'll go crazy before this is over.”

  “Odds are, people are going to die, you mean.”

  “Think of it like this: This man is bringing you a sick situation. He created it. You didn't. He's going to force you to make choices where nobody wins. When that happens, remember who started it. You're just playing the hand that this guy's dealt you.”

  Titus let this sober insight sink in. Norlin didn't rush him. Titus could smell the freshly cut brush around them, the stuff that had been carved out of the hillside for the construction site. He could smell the earth, an odor, a fragrance, really, that made him think of his dogs and of the weight of them as he'd put them into the hole he'd dug at the back of the orchard.

  “Okay, ”Titus said, “I understand. ”And he did, but he didn't want to believe it. He wanted to believe that he could avoid the grim scenario that Norlin was predicting. He wanted to believe that in most cases that might be true, but he'd be able to avoid it. He'd figure out a way not to have to live through that kind of dark dilemma.

  “I'm going to put you in touch with someone, ”Norlin said, standing. In the dim ambient light from the city in the distance, Titus watched him step off the concrete slab and go over to his car. He reached in and took out an oversize cell phone— encrypted, Titus assumed—and came back over to the slab.

  “I've got to repeat this, ”Norlin said. “This is not the way the FBI would want it done. They'd say it was irresponsible. And normally I'd agree with them. But … ”He hesitated only slightly. “The truth is, if I were standing where you're standing right now, I'd want this guy to hear my story. And I'd want to know what he thinks about it. He may say, Go to the FBI. Then you should go, and you won't have to worry about whether you're doing the right thing or not. You can believe what he says.”

  “But he may say something else, ”Titus said. “And if he does, I go with that. I believe him on that, too.”

  “That's right.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don't know. I'm getting ready to find out.”

  “You have a lot of faith in him? ”It was a question, and an observation, and a concern.

  “I worked with him at the CIA. He's been contract for a long time now. He's solid, like I told you. Does his best work out of the box.”

  “Out of the box. I need a little more on that.”

  “He's several points removed from any official equation. If he screw
s up, there's no blowback. He's one of a very few who know going into a situation that he's on his own. Guy like that, nobody owns his ass. And nobody helps him out of a bind, either. He's alone. He's given the edgiest operations, and when he succeeds, the intelligence community wins big. And silently, which is really the only way to win. But when guys like him go down, they go down alone. They just disappear. Forever.”

  “Why do they do it?”

  “Big, big money. And because they can't help themselves. They're addicted to the adrenaline. Or they have private demons that can only be satisfied by putting everything on the line every time. ”He shrugged. “Or for reasons that maybe only God understands.”

  “But that's CIA work. Intelligence stuff. Why would he be interested in this?”

  Norlin shrugged. “Big, big money. Or maybe he'll have other reasons.”

  Titus considered this. “And you think this is the way to go, then, with this guy who's … good at working outside the box?”

  “Look, Mr. Cain, I may not have the goods to advise you on what's happening here, but I can promise you this: This Alvaro doesn't even know there is a fucking box. Believe me, if I can find him, you're going to need this guy.”

  Without saying any more, Norlin turned and walked away, past his car, onto the dirt track that led away from the construction site to the road below. Titus could hear him murmuring out in the dark.

  Titus stood and twisted his shoulders to relieve the tension. He stared out over the valley. No city view here, but he could see a coil of Lake Austin, the surface of the water glazed in reflected light. He felt desolate. Isolated. Completely at a loss. The woods around the construction site were dense, and when he looked up toward the lighted sky, he could see the black circle of the trees surrounding him out of his peripheral vision. He stood that way a long time, long enough to lose track of time. Long enough to be startled by Norlin's voice.

  “You're in luck, ”Norlin said, coming up out of the darkness.

  Titus was surprised to see Norlin step up and stretch out his arm, handing the cell phone to him.