them alive and well. But two bodies were never enough for Luquin. He wanted two bodies before he could even take a shit. This wouldn't be the first time Luquin had put undue pressure on an operation simply because he wanted someone else to die. And things were going so well. Machismo. It was going to get the son of a bitch killed one of these days.
Macias was about to say that he would begin putting it together when his computer pinged, and he turned to see an incoming message from Elias Loza. He glanced at Luquin and decided to wait until later to open the file.
Chapter 38
By the time Burden got down the hill to Cielo Canyon Road, he was soaking in sweat. His shoes were full of rocks and twigs, and cedar needles had gotten into his shirt and had worked their way into his skin in a dozen itchy places. He beeped his van crew and waited a couple of minutes in the woods that crowded up to the edge of the road. When they pulled up, he was inside in seconds.
Gil Norlin had gotten a rental house not half a mile from where Titus lived, a small frame bungalow built in the fifties and tucked into the woods. There weren't many of these kinds of houses left in this high-dollar part of the city, where seclusion was a large part of the real estate appeal. Probably the absentee owners of the property were asking an exorbitant price for what they had and were willing to sit on it until somebody coughed it up. Which they would, sooner or later. But the place was a dump. The small rooms were bare, empty, smelling of insecticide, and crawling with roaches.
The three-member van crew had already eaten lunch and left him a few slices of pizza in the kitchen. He took one of the delivery boxes with the last of two cold wedges of pizza littered with jelled cheese, leathery pepperoni, and flaccid olives and opened an RC. Tired, he sat on the floor in the kitchen, his back against the wall. He'd eaten only a few bites of the cold pizza and washed it down with the RC when he heard the front door open.
He heard Calo's curt bark, “Garcia? ”as he addressed the room of technicians, then heard one of them respond, “Kitchen.”
Calo, an Italian whom Burden had first met in Buenos Aires, headed up a team that comprised only three people besides himself. Sometimes one or two of them were women, but mostly they were men, and there were never more than four altogether. Calo himself wasn't a big man, middle weight, dark complexion with dark hair, not muscular, not distinctive in any particular way. His face was unremarkable, and he didn't look physically imposing enough to do the things that he was in such demand to do. Close work was often misunderstood. In general his team was always a variation of himself, common in appearance, quiet, observant.
Calo walked into the kitchen and went straight to Burden as if he knew where he would be sitting. Burden was already getting up, and the two men embraced, Calo's usual abrazo that for him served as the sealing bond for any given operation. He turned to his three team members, all of them dressed in street clothes.
“Baas, ”he said, indicating a man with wide-set eyes and a soft smile, his dark hair as tightly coiled as an African's.
“Tito… ”He pointed to a very thin young man with a little series of symbols tattooed on one cheek and a pretty mouth.
“Cope… ”The only blond in the bunch, the oldest of them in appearance, maybe in his mid thirties. He didn't look directly at anyone.
“Good, ”Burden said. He'd seen Tito before, but the other two he didn't know. “The stuff's out here, ”he said, walking out of the kitchen and into a long screened porch that looked out onto the dense cedar woods. The porch was scattered with knapsacks and various other bags that belonged to the van crew that had spent the night there. Burden grabbed a cardboard box next to the wall, swung it into the middle of the room, and sat on the floor. The others followed suit, forming a loose semicircle in front of him.
Burden began handing out photos of the clifftop house on Las Ramitas along with several maps: the street plan, the house plan, an area plan. The four men passed the photos and maps around in silence while Burden went over the little intelligence that they had so far, acknowledging its weaknesses, knowing that every unanswered question created a risk for them.
For the next hour he went over the details of the operation, outlining the logistics of dealing with the various teams Macias had put together, emphasizing again and again the importance of absolute silence and of leaving no trace of their presence.
“No evidence at all. If you touch it, it walks away with you. No abandoned cars, no discarded weapons or casings, no bodies, no blood. Nada.”
“Can't be done, ”Calo said. “Not with this many targets.” He was looking at the list of vehicles and bodyguards that Burden's surveillance crew had compiled from the previous night's operation. “Not enough intelligence. Too little time to plan. Too many targets.”
“I understand that, ”Burden said. “But I'm not looking for a total take here. I'm just saying what you do take has got to be clean. We've got something going for us on this. You saw in the file that Jorge Macias put this operation together. In the past he's followed pretty conventional tactical discipline and procedure. Everything mobile. Everything compartmentalized. Most important: At the first sign of operational breach, everybody disappears. No discussion. Gone. ”He looked around at each of them. “I want you to take out as many as you can. But if the risk of discovery is too high, if you can't do it silently, cut them loose.”
“And Luquin?”
“Isolating him in that house is your main objective. I'll be responsible for him after that.”
There was a pause of surprise. Calo pretended to be looking at the maps on the floor in front of him. But no one was going to ask Burden to elaborate.
After a few moments, Calo rose and went to the kitchen sink. He put his cigarette under the faucet, then tossed the soggy butt into one of the empty pizza boxes on the cabinet. He came back to the porch and leaned against the door frame. Everyone was sweating. The dense cedar brakes cut off any chance of a breeze reaching them through the screened porch. It was still, oppressive. Cicadas keened in the midday heat.
“Isolating him, ”Calo said. “That's a problem.”
“Yeah, ”Burden said. “I know.”
Calo bent and picked up his copy of the notes that had been prepared for them. He looked at them.
“Macias is staying in the same house, ”he said. “With his bodyguard and driver. And then there's Luquin's bodyguard and driver. That's six people. How isolated do you want him?”
“Alone, if possible.”
“And if it's not possible?”
“We've got to get Macias out of there, at least. And his two people.”
“Any head-on confrontation is going to cause a stink,” Calo confirmed.
Burden nodded. “Can't do that.”
Calo looked at his intelligence report. “We don't know their routines, their schedules, nothing.”
“We just barely had time to find out how many there were, ”Burden said.
It was quiet on the porch for a moment, each person taking counsel of his own thoughts. Burden knew the routine and waited, letting them do what they had to do. All of the men had read the file on Luquin, so they knew the kind of man they were stalking.
Calo's teams all operated under the same rule of egalitarianism. He pulled together the best people he could find and then trusted them. Because his teams were small, any individual could pull the plug on any operation. Everybody had to be in 100 percent or it wouldn't work. A small team was like a fine mechanical watch-all the parts were essential, none expendable.
Calo's teams were assembled according to a kind of Zenlike intuitiveness. It mattered, somehow, who the target was, and the individuals he chose for each particular assignment seemed to have attitudes about the kinds of people they were going after. It made a difference, Calo said, in the synergy of violence that was a potential in each mission. He was vague about it, but Burden knew that it was important to Calo and to the team's success. It didn't matter that it didn't seem logical. He had learned a long time ago that logic was only a part of this business, sometimes a surprisingly small part of it.
