truck.) And from years of experience, he had become deft at passing down the bad news to the lower ranks. If they made blunders, he gave them one chance to rectify their mistakes. Another failure, and they disappeared. Others took their place with the full knowledge of what had happened to the men before them. Predecessors’mistakes were never repeated. There were no exceptions.
“What about the guys sweeping the house? ”Luquin asked.
“Just technicians. Our guy on the ground hasn't picked up any guns. Cain has a very high quality security system at CaiText, and he probably knew these guys through those connections. He runs a very tight operation. It looks like routine sweeping, just what we anticipated. Nothing more than that.”
“And you think these are the guys he called from the pay phone.”
“Probably. He couldn't stand it. Wanted to do something about it as fast as he could.”
Luquin planted his feet firmly apart, drew slowly on his cigarette, and stared across the night river. A boat moved steadily over the water, going away from the city. Its lights reflected off the sapphire, and the sound of its engine grumbled off the sides of the cliffs.
“I'm trying to imagine, ”he said, as much to himself as to Macias, “what he must be thinking. The man is careful. He doesn't make big mistakes. He weighs the pros and cons, follows the rules, and makes safe, reasonable decisions. He is predictable, as we have seen. Now, how does he react to the realization that he is responsible for his friend's death?
“He's going to go over and over in his head how this happened, ”Luquin went on, answering his own question. “He's going to reconfirm in his mind that I didn't specifically say: Don't sweep the house. So then he's going to think, My God, I've got to try to feel my way through this. That son of a bitch Luquin is unpredictable. I've got to read his mind. How in the hell am I going to do that!”
Luquin smoked, resting his elbows on the deck railing as he peered into the night, as if the tiny lights of the houses in the distance were a fortune-teller's cards and he could see there the answers to all of his concerns.
“And then, ”Luquin said, “he is going to begin to get crazy. A careful man finds it very stressful to deal with unpredictability. He sees no fucking way to figure it out. And that begins to wear on him. It begins to eat at him. And that's good.”
Jorge Macias listened to Luquin talk. The man had no equal at what he did, and working for him was always an education in perversity. Over the years, Luquin had evolved from being just another assassin in the drug wars, a culture that bred assassins like maggots and treated them with just about as much respect, to being a kind of philosopher of the business of death. The amount of time Luquin put into knowing the psychological biography of the person he focused his attention on was extraordinary in this business. That was why he was so greatly feared by those who knew enough to fear him. And that was why he was so effective.
Macias would become a wealthy man from this one job alone. But there was a price for it. When you worked with Luquin there was always a price. The man didn't feel he was getting his money's worth out of you if you didn't pay a price, and that usually meant some kind of suffering. Before this was over, Luquin was going to require him to do something that would be anguishing, either physically or emotionally, and that was why Macias had already sworn to himself that this would be the last time he would work with this madman.
Macias's cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and turned away from the deck railing. With his head down, listening, he began walking idly around the lighted pool. Luquin turned and watched him. He liked telephone calls during an operation like this. It meant action. Things were happening near and far to his advantage. The wheels turned; the plan moved forward.
He flicked the butt of his cigarette, and it made a high, expert arc and landed in the near edge of the pool, floating on the aqua light. He watched Macias, who was on the other side of the pool now, the half of his body facing Luquin shimmering with turquoise light reflected from the surface of the water. By the time he got around to Luquin again, he was ending his conversation. He snapped the phone closed and joined Luquin at the railing again.
“That was Mateos in Venice. His informant in Mrs. Cain's hotel just reported that she received a telephone call a couple of hours ago. Unfortunately that's all he knows. The informant wasn't in a position to monitor the call. ”Macias looked at his watch. “That would have been about two-thirty in Venice. An unusual hour to receive a call.”
Luquin dug another cigarette out of the pocket of his guayabera and lighted it. “So that means that Mrs. Thrush and Mrs. Cain will be on their way home sometime tomorrow morning. ”Luquin smiled slowly, and then it grew into a soft, delighted laugh. “Goddamn, I love this guy Cain. Doing that woman long-distance would have been so inconvenient.”
Luquin turned again to the dark valley and to his own thoughts, bending slightly, his elbows resting on the railing. Macias stepped away and took out his cell again. He glanced upstairs, where his two men were at their posts watching the street at the front of the house. He glanced at the shadows next to the house, where he could barely make out the black-onblack image of Roque, Luquin's personal bodyguard, sitting spookily in the shadows. It was Roque who had climbed up into the top of the dark cattle truck with his boss. He was never far away, like a sick memory you couldn't get away from.
Macias looked back at Luquin. His back was palely lighted as he stared into the night. A puff of smoke from his cigarette left his head and wandered away in a long blue stream. It looked as though his hair were on fire.
The night flight from San Miguel seemed interminable. But while the King Air was eating up air miles over the Sierra Madre Oriental and the north Mexican desert, Titus was busy arranging the flight back to Austin for Rita and Louise. He called an international charter service in Houston that had planes on the ground in Milan's Malpensa Airport. He and Rita had agreed that once she talked to Louise, it was highly unlikely there would be any more sleep for them, so he arranged for the charter service to pick them up at Marco Polo International outside Venice as soon as the service could get a crew together.
With that done, he called Lack Paley at his home in Austin. Paley was Titus's chief legal counsel, and Titus told him that he wanted him to initiate the process to do three things:
1. Get with Terry Odell, Titus's stockbroker, and borrow $10 million against his personal investments portfolio and immediately invest the entire amount in a certain way in the entities he would name. Use Marcello Cavatino Inversiones, S.A., in Buenos Aires to facilitate the transactions. These transactions had to be completed by three o'clock the next day.
2. Get with Lee Silber and borrow $21 million, using interest in CaiText as the collateral.
3. Prepare documents to sell off even more of CaiText in the way Titus would describe.
Then he outlined the timetable.
After Paley got over the shock of his instructions, they spent the next forty minutes working out the general idea of how all this would work. Titus told him to keep the plans strictly guarded, though he didn't explain why.
After landing in Austin, Titus took a shuttle to the airport Hilton. Burden was assuming that Luquin would have Titus's home surveilled, as he had done during his other operations in Rio de Janeiro, and he didn't want Luquin to know that Titus had left his house. Cline would pick him up in the morning, and Titus would go home the same way he'd left, in the hidden compartment in the bed of Cline's pickup.
Titus flipped on the television the moment he walked into the hotel room. The flight home had been filled with obsessive preoccupations as he had replayed again and again the what ifs, the shouldn't haves, the whys. Then he'd reviewed his conversations with Burden and tried to put into perspective what he had agreed that Burden should do. He could only hope that in the morning the things he had agreed to wouldn't look dramatically darker.
He didn't want to think anymore. He took off his clothes and fell into bed, staring over his feet at CNN. He hoped to God it would keep him from thinking.
THURSDAY
The Third Day
Chapter 18
