Kal reached into his pocket and showed Titus a black plastic disk, the cap of a film canister.
“Thing's new, ”he said. “I think you've had a visitor.”
He looked up and squinted into the bright western light slanting in at the far end of the allee. “Come on, ”he said to Titus, and they started up the allee.
They got to the entrance of the orchard just as Ryan was heading into the rows of peach trees from the back side. Kal stopped where the front corner of the orchard met the allee. A retaining wall faced with stone blocks stood shoulder high where the orchard began, following a slow, outward-swinging arch as it circled around behind the house and the pool and then sloped to natural grade on the far side of the orchard.
Kal stood with his back to the orchard and looked at the house, trying to see what the man could have seen if he was looking at the house from this vantage point. It made Titus queasy to realize again just how vulnerable to Luquin's surveillance he and Rita had been during these past few days. Luquin literally could have put his hands on them any time he wanted.
Without saying a word, Kal went through the two stone pillars where an old gate used to be, and he and Titus started walking, following the low retaining wall's outward arc. They could hear Ryan coming up through the orchard, and soon they saw him approaching, walking slowly through the trees, scanning back and forth in a very deliberate manner.
Suddenly Kal stopped. He stared at the ground. The wild grass that grew there was flattened out and the ground had been churned about, the crescent shapes of a heel print partially visible here and there in the powdery surface dirt.
He didn't have to explain anything to Titus. Both of them started looking around as Ryan walked up.
“He was here, ”Kal said, and the two guards started walking back and forth along the base of the wall.
Titus didn't know exactly what they were looking for, but their subdued urgency reminded him of his dogs when they'd picked up a fresh scent with the constant sweeping of their noses to the ground. They were methodical, but more than a little juiced.
Suddenly Kal stopped and dropped to his knees, his legs straddling the churned-up ground. He stared at the retaining wall right in his face. The stones were a standard quarrying size of sixteen inches wide by eight inches high by twelve inches deep. Solid limestone blocks.
He stared at them closely, his eyes sweeping along the rows as they traveled upward. Gradually he got up off his knees to a crouch, then eventually he was standing upright again. At waist high he reached out and grabbed one of the stones. It was heavy and Titus helped him, as the two of them slipped a loose stone out and let it drop to the ground.
There was a cavity behind the stone, and Kal reached in up to his elbows and grabbed something. When his hands came out he was holding a dark charcoal laptop and a wadded clear plastic bag that looked as though it had been used to protect the laptop.
“Looks like he left in a hurry, ”he said.
Chapter 41
“I'm working on it now, ”Herrin said, “but the encryption's pretty damned good. I can't make any promises about how long it'll take.”
They were in the guest house, and Burden was coming in on the speakerphone. They didn't know where he was, and he didn't say. But in the momentary hesitations of conversation, there was the distant sound of boat traffic.
“Listen, Titus, ”Burden said, “this's my screwup entirely. I got sloppy. The worry here is that this guy got a shot of me. We won't know whether he did or not until Mark breaks the encryption. If he did, Luquin'll evaporate, abort this thing. He may already be gone. We may be spinning our wheels here and don't even know it. But if he did ID me… if Luquin knows I'm here, it'll get rough. There'll be a steep price to pay for this, Titus.”
The afternoon heat had driven them inside. The sun was now at forty-five degrees in a clear sky, nothing to block the heat until the horizon swallowed the light. Macias had yet to open the e-mail from Elias Loza. With an attachment. Something made him cautious, made him not tell Luquin what he had. He glanced at Luquin, who was pacing back and forth in front of the windows looking out onto the deck.
Macias opened the file. No message, which was odd. He opened the first attached picture file. The familiar allee of trees, the legs of people under the canopy of the trees standing in front of the guest cottage. Two men and a woman. He guessed the Cains and one of the technicians. The second picture file: a longer shot showing the two technicians on the veranda and the three people still at the front door of the cottage. There was another person in play now in addition to the technicians they already knew about. Third picture file: Loza's camera concentrating on the unidentified man, who had left the Cains and started down the allee alone. Fourth and fifth picture files: taken from another position, not the retaining wall. The unidentified man at the edge of the woods, his left arm holding a cell phone. But the angle was bad, mostly from the back. The last shot showed the man glancing back as he entered the woods, just his eyes showing over the top of his hand, which was holding the cell phone.
Macias had been sitting with his elbow resting on the dining room table as he stroked his mustache with his index finger, thumb under his chin. His finger stopped. Everything that had been swirling around in his mind, so many of the details to be balanced in his scheme that he had been preparing for a full month, came to a sudden halt. All sensory perception evaporated except his sight, and his sight registered nothing but the eyes… and something vaguely familiar about them. Where had he seen these eyes before?
Chinga-! What in the fuck was this? He looked up, glancing at Luquin, who was absently picking at a scab on the back of his hand and gazing out across the pool to the valley below and the hills beyond toward Cain's house. He shot a glance at Roque, who was sitting to one side of the room, reading-well, looking at the pictures in-a copy of People magazine.
Macias went back to the photograph, just to confirm his sensation of something familiar. Shit, yes. But he didn't know who this was. He didn't know.
But it wasn't necessary that he know who this was. The fact that he was there, the fact that he was leaving Cain's property in secrecy, was a clear indication that something was going on behind the scenes. Something was cooking. They were not, after all, seeing everything that Cain had going on.
Unable to control it, Macias could feel the slow arrival of a dark, hairy fear. How had his people missed this? What was Luquin going to do when he heard about this? If they could believe what their bug had picked up, in twenty-four hours Tano would have his money. How was he going to react to this latearriving revelation that threw everything into question?
Could they believe the bug? Something was going on here. And how long had this unidentified man been working for Cain? Who was he talking to on the cell phone? What had he been doing in the guest cottage? Macias knew they had set up an electronic control room in there to deal with communications countermeasures, if nothing else. But what if there was something else? What if Macias was only hours away from an implosion here?
His mind was racing, hurtling ahead in an effort to anticipate what his situation might be, what his options might be. Was he too late? Just in time? Ahead of Cain's game? What was Cain's game? How good was his game?
Just then Macias's incoming e-mail pinged again, startling him. From Loza. Another picture file. Only one. Macias opened it. It was a photograph of two men crossing the courtyard behind Cain's veranda. Both men were carrying automatic weapons slung over their shoulders.
Macias sat very still, not wanting to attract attention to himself until he figured out what he was going to do. Why hadn't Loza sent a message with the picture files? Had he been in a hurry? Had he been caught before he could send a message! Did Cain know that Loza had sent these? And to whom?
Did Cain really intend to pay up the money the next day in order to save lives? Or was this just a ploy to keep Luquin hanging around until they could move against him? Was Cain setting a trap?
Did Macias have time to turn things around, to salvage the situation?
The questions flew at him so fast, he felt he was experiencing the emotional equivalent of data overload. But in this case it was fear overload, and the threatening result was not a system crash, but uncontrollable panic.
He could save Luquin's life by evacuating him right now. Just walk over to him and tell him, put him in the
