“No.”
“Doesn't matter.”
“What do you want me to do, just fly down there?”
“No. I'll get instructions to you. And Mr. Cain, you need to understand right now that nothing is ‘just’ anything anymore. From now on you are an extraordinary exception to the general rules of just about everything.”
David Lindsey
The Rules of Silence
WEDNESDAY
The Second Day
Chapter 9
Any significant sleep had been impossible during the night. Titus had lain in bed watching the black hills against the cobalt dark sky and was still watching as the sun rounded the curve of the earth, scattering the night before it.
At nine-fifteen the next morning, a van and a pickup with no markings pulled into Titus's driveway. They stopped within a large enclosure of high hedges that screened the parking area from the city.
Mark Herrin was a quiet young man with a ponytail and a gentle smile. He was a full head taller than Cline, his partner, who had a fraternity-neat haircut and a tendril of a black tattoo creeping out of the white collar of his shirt along his left jugular vein.
They introduced themselves, and Herrin said, “Garcia said to assume everything in the house is hot.”
“I'm not positive about it, ”Titus said. “I do know the security system's been bypassed.”
“We'll give it all a good cleaning, ”Herrin said with a kind of lazy indifference. “Actually debugging a place like this takes a lot of equipment. We're going to have to haul some things inside. Big stuff. ”He looked around at the hedge enclosure. “This is a big break, having this protection. I don't like working under the opposition's constant supervision, you know, ”he said, throwing a look across the valley toward the river.
“Then you think the house is being watched? ”Titus asked.
“If you're a target, you're a target, ”Herrin said simply. “If this guy's serious, there's no such thing as half- assed in this business.”
They stood there between the driveway and the veranda while Herrin had Titus corroborate the information Burden had passed on to him, and then he asked him a lot of additional questions.
“Okay, ”Herrin said after a while. “We need to go inside and look around. Now, when we start locating these bugs and jerking them out of there, they're going to know about it. So after we pop the first one, the cat's out of the bag. But there's no need to give them a heads-up, either. So when we get in there let's don't talk about what we're going to be doing, okay?”
Titus led them inside and showed them through the house. Once they had a feel for the layout of the place, Titus left them alone to wander through the house and survey the size of their job.
Remembering what Herrin had said about the house being watched, Titus walked down the allee to the site where the stone workers were facing the reservoir. They came in every morning just after sunrise to get an early start on the heat, using the code to the front gates on the property. Titus had been using these men for years to do work around the property, but now he wasn't comfortable with someone having access to that kind of freedom to the grounds.
Standing in the shade of an oak, he talked with Benito, the foreman, and told him that he was going to have some other men on the property working on some electrical problems, and he didn't want that many crews and trucks there at the same time. He said he'd give Benito's crew two weeks’ paid vacation-beginning right now. When they came back, they could pick up where they'd left off.
Benito was surprised, but two weeks’ paid vacation smoothed over a lot of puzzlement, and Titus shook his hand and headed back to the house. He could hear the crew loading their tools into the truck behind him.
Titus returned to the kitchen and looked at his watch. He had about forty minutes before he had to leave. He picked up his cell phone and walked outside to call Carla Elster, his assistant at CaiText.
“Carla, listen, I don't really have any must-do meetings during the next few days, do I?”
“Nothing on your calendar but the weekly touch-base reviews with the department heads, ”Carla said. “But, uh, Matt Rohan did call late yesterday and wanted to see you for about half an hour when you had time today. He didn't say what about. As usual. And Donice McCafferty called for an appointment. I'm guessing she wants to ask if CaiText will sponsor their charity drive again this fall. And I was supposed to remind you that there's a retirement party on Friday for Alison Daly in accounting.”
There was no wasted motion and no wasted moments in Carla's life. She was disciplined, focused, organized, and faithful to her routines. She had to be, because without it her life and Titus's life would fall apart. At least she was convinced they would.
Carla had been his assistant since the day he'd signed the corporation documents to start CaiText. Until he'd met Rita, Carla had been the one person he'd depended on to give him a grounded second opinion and an honest, compass-correcting perspective on whatever was preoccupying him at the time. She was like a sister to him.
“Okay, well, if you could just put all of that on hold for right now, I'd appreciate it.”
“On hold? For how long?”
“A few days, maybe. I'm going to be out of pocket a couple of days.”
Pause. “Okay. ”Pause. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure. ”He stopped. Jesus. He was tempted, enormously tempted, to say something to her, to relieve some of the pressure he felt, but he kept remembering Alvaro's words: I don't want anyone suspicious… That's the important thing. I really can't emphasize that enough.
“Titus, ”she said, “what's going on?”
At forty-six, Carla was a single mother of twin daughters who were soon to enter their freshman year at Vanderbilt University. Her husband had left her six years earlier when the girls were in the sixth grade, and Carla had immediately galvanized her mind and turned her life into a regimen. She was determined to do it all without him, and she did. She'd be damned if she would let her life fall apart in his absence. A man who would leave his wife and young daughters to fend for themselves couldn't have been all that valuable in the first place, she decided. She wouldn't let him be.
Titus had helped her throughout the whole ordeal. Whenever she needed to take off from work for the girls’school events, she never even had to ask. He boosted her salary to compensate for the loss of half her income, and he made sure the girls had summer jobs at CaiText so Carla didn't have to worry about them during the day.
Her husband had maddeningly given her the house in West Lake Hills without a whimper. The fact that he didn't think it worth fighting for infuriated her. And he didn't even fuss that much about the level of alimony she had demanded. He was in such a hurry to set up housekeeping with his new girlfriend that he practically ran from everything they had built together over fourteen years of marriage.
And then there was Darlene, his new woman. Darlene was half Carla's age. She was a blonde; Carla was a brunet. She was tall; Carla was not so tall. She was health-nut thin and tight; Carla was practical medium and not so tight. Darlene didn't work; Carla had worked for CaiText their entire marriage and was as loyal to Titus and the company he was building as if she owned half of it. The striking differences in the two women were an additional humiliation. Darlene was everything that Carla wasn't.
But that had been six years ago. She had created a new life and a new self. She had made a stable home for her daughters while she had nurtured them through the storms and stresses of adolescence. They were good girls, and she was proud of them.
Now, though, with the girls away from home for the first time at summer jobs in Denver that Titus had gotten for them, and soon to be off to their first year at the university, Carla found herself with a spare moment once in a while, for the first time in eighteen years. She was dating a man, Nathan Jordan, who was considerate
