Like a silent image in a wax museum, Luquin remained frozen in midgesture, his arm outstretched, his eyes fixed in midheat. His words, whatever they might have been, remained in his throat. Only the cigarette, trembling slightly, smoke waffling up from its ember, betrayed his reality.
“Do not, ”he managed to say in a voice made hoarse by his extraordinary effort at self-restraint, “presume anything with me, Mr. Cain. ”His breath was squeezed to a whisper. “You do not threaten me.”
Luquin's eyes flicked to the side, and in an instant Titus remembered that Roque was still standing just a step back. The butt of Roque's gun caught him at the edge of his eye in the right temple. He heard the sound of flesh splitting between metal and bone and felt his head fling back before he went out.
Unfortunately he was out only seconds, stunned, really. He could've gotten up sooner, but the lantern kept trying to go out, and for reasons he didn't understand he seemed to have gained several hundred pounds and had to get his legs in just the right position to be able to lift himself.
He heard Luquin barking angrily in Spanish, and then Roque was on him again, and Titus covered up his head to ward off another blow. Suddenly he was horrified that he would be beaten to death. But there was no second blow.
“La capucha, ” Roque said, standing over him, and Titus felt the black hood hit him in the head.
Chapter 29
There was a driver and a camera operator with a thermal infrared videocamera in each of the four surveillance cars, all local talent. The local talent was a necessity. So much of chase surveillance was about anticipating moves, and anticipation required an intimate knowledge of the geography and the traffic ways. Burden was in the fifth vehicle, a van, where he sat in the back with two technicians monitoring three types of mapping computer screens and four live television screens picking up the cameras from each of the cars.
Burden never even met the chase people he was working with, but the driver and the two technicians in his own van were regulars that he used on these kinds of operations, flying them in from different locations.
From the moment Titus was picked up outside the gates of his property, Burden watched LorGuide monitors that registered the feedback from the moles Titus was carrying for distribution. Green dot signals registered the moles put on people, the yellow dots registered moles left on vehicles.
Using a complicated tag relay technique, the chase team was able to keep visual contact with the vehicle carrying Titus, even when he was taken into the thousand-acre greenbelt of City Park, nestled into a large U-shaped bend of Lake Austin. It was on the isolated City Park Road that Burden watched his monitors as Titus was switched to another vehicle, which then left the park's only paved road and headed out into the dense cedar brakes.
But it was also on City Park Road that the chase cars had the good luck to spot Macias's own surveillance van. They dropped off a marksman in the woods when the van entered a loop that would bring it out the same way it went in. From his blind, the marksman shot the van's right rear wheel with a paint ball filled with a black dye that popped up on the LorGuides as a bright raspberry dot.
For the two hours that Titus was in the hands of Macias's people, Burden's teams never stopped moving, dropping off cars and picking up others to avoid any vehicle being seen more than once by the Macias surveillance. It was a complex operation, and by the time Titus was dropped off at an apartment complex overlooking Loop 360, Burden's people had a good idea of the size of Macias's tactical team. Many of the vehicles and people had been tagged by Titus, and their positions could be monitored constantly.
It was two-forty in the morning as Titus guided the Rover up his private drive, past the place where the Rover had been taken away from him, and went on to the wrought-iron gate. He punched the remote under his dash, the gates swung open, and he drove through.
Suddenly a man stepped out in front of his headlights, at the far edge of their reach, and stood in the middle of the drive. Titus's heart slammed so hard, he lost his breath. No, he didn't want any more of this. And then: Had something happened? Had they gotten in somehow? The figure grew brighter and brighter until he realized it was Garcia Burden.
Titus stopped, and Burden came around and opened the passenger door and climbed in.
“Shit! ”he said when he saw Titus's face in the dash lights. “What happened?”
“I pissed off Luquin and his man banged me with the butt of his gun. I've been bleeding like a pig, but I'm okay except for a hell of a headache.”
Burden was already past it. “After you clean up I need to talk with you. I need to hear the details.”
Rita conquered her every instinct to explode and instead helped him clean up the cut. Though she quickly realized that it wasn't a really serious wound, she stubbornly insisted that he needed stitches. But when Titus flatly refused to go to the emergency room, she cobbled together a butterfly stitch of her own manufacture that she said would do the job but would leave a scar as big as a third eyebrow. After he put on clean clothes, they called Burden, who had gone to the guest house to talk to Herrin and his mobile crews over the radios and secure phones.
They sat at the island in the kitchen, Titus, Rita, and Burden, with papers and radios and telephones scattered out in front of them on the black granite counter. Rita had made a pot of strong French roast coffee to help them stay alert.
Rita, Titus discovered, had actually listened to the whole thing in the guest house with Herrin, an experience that she said she had found fascinating and horrifying, but ultimately reassuring. The subdued control with which Burden and his teams had handled the hectic two hours was a lesson in a new kind of reality for her. Somehow- irrationally, she admitted- it had made her feel as though there might be some way to get through this after all.
Burden was focused on the debriefing and repeatedly took Titus through his trip from the moment he was taken from the Rover to the moment he was returned to it. He asked Titus about the things he heard, of movements he heard, of what he sensed. What about accents? What about personalities? He asked how many people Titus could count, and then he took him over what they had seen on their monitors. He asked Titus for his guesses about this and that, and then he told Titus his own perspective of the same guesses.
They went over Titus's conversation with Luquin, and Burden asked about Luquin's manner, the way he sounded when he said certain things, the expression on his face, the set of his eyes. How did he choose his words?
Finally there was a pause in the debriefing. Burden checked his messages on his phone, looking at the readout without saying anything. Titus glanced at Rita, trying and failing to mask his anxiety. Rita caught his expression and frowned.
Burden cleared his screen, looked up, and paused.
“Okay, ”he said, “let's talk about it. Whatever it is. There's no time for being subtle. I don't have time to decipher signals. Bring it out in the open.”
Titus shifted in his chair.
“The whole thing tonight, ”he said, rubbing his face with his hands, flinching when he touched the cut that he'd forgotten about. “He's running a pretty damned tight operation, isn't he.”
“He always does. You can't afford many mistakes with this guy.”
“I'll be honest, ”Titus said. “It doesn't look to me like you've got what it's going to take to do this.”
Burden kept his eyes on Titus, but his expression was unreadable.
“It looks to me like the disadvantages that you outlined for us earlier add up to a damned big handicap. Too big for you to overcome.”
“I've already told you our odds aren't good, ”Burden said. “So that shouldn't be a surprise. And if you're judging the battle by what you see on the battlefield, you're making a mistake.”
“What I see, ”Titus said, “is a guy who's got a well-oiled machine operated by disciplined and brutal men. What I see is that he came prepared to win, and he brought men who'll do anything to make sure that he does.”
“That's what you've seen, ”Burden said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, in this business what you see isn't a good gauge of the reality. The whole plan of engagement-on both
