Titus stood on the veranda as if he had just walked out of the house and had forgotten what he'd come to do. He stared at the silent fountain in the courtyard and listened to the cars starting in the drive at the front of the house. He heard car doors slamming and heard the cars driving away, their engines fading as they wound their way down the hill and into the night.
He turned and looked at the dogs. Jesus. He had to think. He had to be clearheaded. He had to think things through all the way to their logical conclusions.
After walking over to the first dog, he knelt and worked his hands underneath. He was warm and limp and bloodsoaked. Titus avoided looking at his head. When he picked him up he felt that odd density of death, a strange thing he had known before with animals, how they seemed so much heavier after they had died.
He carried the dog through the courtyard, into the allee of mountain laurels and out into the darkness, where a broad, sloping path led down to the orchard. At the back of the orchard, where the only light was the reflected glow of the city lights haloed over the ridge of hills, he put the dog down on a flat plot of thick Bermuda grass. Then he returned for the second dog.
With a pickax and shovel he got from the reservoir work site a hundred yards away, he began digging in the loam. It took him the better part of an hour to get the hole deep enough to discourage the coyotes and feral cats from digging them up, and then he laid the two dogs one on top of the other and filled in the hole.
When he was finished he was soaked in sweat, his clothes ruined, smeared with dirt and dog's blood that combined into a sad crust. He returned the pickax and shovel to the reservoir site and then walked back up to the house, where he got a hose and washed the pools of blackening blood from the veranda.
He crossed the courtyard and went through to the walled enclosure surrounding the pool. Behind the poolhouse there were showers and dressing rooms and a large storage room where they kept the tables and chairs and other accessories they needed for entertaining.
Outside the dressing rooms, he removed his clothes and mud-caked loafers and threw them into the trash cans. Naked, he went to the ice machine in the cabana beside the pool and filled a plastic bucket there with ice and threw the ice into the pool. He did this repeatedly until the ice machine was empty. And then he dove in. He swam four laps slowly, back and forth through the cold pockets of floating ice, trying to clear his head.
Once out of the pool, he made his way to a deck chair and sat down. He started trying to work it out. For a moment his thoughts just wouldn't gel. He couldn't come up with anything at all. He just wanted to call Rita, hear her voice. But that was out of the question. He didn't trust himself to hide his emotions, and to make her suspicious-maybe even frighten her- without having some kind of plan in place was simply irresponsible.
If he was going to believe this guy's threats, then there was nowhere to go. No options. But Titus found that inconceivable. There were always options, weren't there?
How would this guy know if he contacted someone? Obviously he had some kind of tactical team. How thorough were they? There were bound to be bugs in the house. The phones were probably tapped. And it didn't take geniuses to pick up cell phone transmissions. Would he be followed, too?
Still, doing nothing was out of the question. Alvaro had said: Even if you do contact law enforcement people and are able to hide it from me temporarily… So maybe his surveillance wasn't as infallible as he would like Titus to think. Sure, he'd want Titus to believe that he, Alvaro, was all over him, that Titus couldn't even have a change in his pulse rate without Alvaro knowing about it; but what if that wasn't true? Was Titus just going to roll over and believe that? It's a gamble, Alvaro had said.
Titus sat up in his chair at the memory of that remark. A gamble. Well, where there's a gamble, there's also a chance, isn't there?
He stood up, his mind racing. No police. No FBI. No law enforcement agencies. But Titus remembered a guy. Four years ago, one of Titus's female employees was abducted from the CaiText parking garage. It developed into a hostage standoff situation (it turned out to be a bad marriage turned worse) that lasted a couple of days. Among the various law enforcement-type consultants brought in during the ordeal was a guy named Gil Norlin. It was never clear to Titus who brought him into the situation or whom he answered to, but he was always sort of hanging around on the edges of it. Never fully engaged, never having any authority for anything. Yet Titus noticed that people did consult him, even the FBI agents, but always quietly, to the side.
Titus heard later that he was a former CIA officer, retired now. A consultant. He had left Titus his card, avoiding his eyes, Titus remembered. Titus headed for the house.
Wearing his robe, he rummaged around in his office for twenty minutes before he found the old card in an outdated Rolodex at the back of a drawer.
He looked at his watch. At this hour the winding roads of the wooded hills were sparsely traveled, and even Titus would be able to see someone following. On the other hand, it really didn't matter. Even with all the advanced technology available today, a call from a spontaneously chosen pay phone was still a safe call. Even if Alvaro's people had a surveillance tag on the Rover and knew he was making the call, they wouldn't know whom he was calling or what the call was about.
Alvaro had specified no law enforcement. But he knew that Titus would have to make arrangements with a variety of people in order to raise the money Alvaro was demanding. For all he knew, Titus could be calling his banker, his broker, his accountant, his lawyer. Surely those conversations could be private and not considered a violation of Alvaro's bans on communication? Was Titus to have understood from Alvaro's instructions that he could never have another private conversation? That just didn't seem realistic. It was worth the risk of pushing the envelope a little to find out just how tight a grip this guy had on him.
He grabbed the card from his Rolodex, threw on some clothes, locked the house-feeling stupid, considering what had just happened-and went out and got into the Range Rover.
It took him only ten minutes to get down the winding narrow roads below his house to the lone all-night convenience store at an isolated intersection in the woods. He hadn't seen anyone following him so far, although he knew that his countersurveillance skills had to be less than great.
There were no other cars there. He placed the call from the pay phone outside. That number had been changed. He dialed the new number. He got a recording that gave him yet another number, where he received a cell phone number, where he got a recording to leave a pay phone number and state if he had an emergency. He did both.
Agitated, he sat in the Range Rover with his window down so he could hear the phone ring and stared at the bright interior of the store. Nobody was in there except the night clerk. No other cars were parked outside except his. The two of them, the middle-aged woman suspended in fluorescent isolation as she stared into space from her stool behind the cash register and Titus staring at her from his solitary, lightless cubicle, were polar opposites, bound together by their dissimilarities. Black-and-white metaphors for the bewildered.
When the phone rang he was out of the Rover in an instant and picked up the receiver on the third ring.
“Yes?”
“Yeah, this is Titus Cain. I met you about four years ago. There was this abduction-”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“What's the situation?”
“Extortion. Death threats if I call law enforcement. This phone call's a big risk.”
“How were the threats made? Letter?”
“Three armed gunmen showed up at my house about an hour ago. Shot my dogs right there in front of me and gave me ultimatums.”
“Give me the address where you are right now.”
“I imagine I'm being followed. My car's probably-” “As long as you're not tagged personally, we'll be okay.” Titus gave him the address.
He left the Rover at the convenience store and rode with Gilbert Norlin through the winding, wooded roads of the hills while Norlin made the necessary maneuvers to make sure they weren't being tailed. Titus surprised himself by not being able to speak. Norlin didn't press him, and they rode in silence for a while. Titus's tongue-tied confusion embarrassed him, but there literally wasn't anything he could do about it. Finally he could control his voice, and he began to tell Norlin everything, chronologically, in as much detail as he could remember.
By the time he had finished, they had arrived at the deserted building site of one of the many new homes under construction in the hills. They got out of Norlin's car and walked to the house slab where the framing was just
