surveillance can stay on Quiros before he gets keen?”
Glenn thought a moment.
“It depends,” he said. “Give us some added manpower, and we’ll be okay for a while. Use two- and three-car teams. Leapfrog whenever we know his route.”
“The team that flew in with me enough support?”
“How many men in it? Ten or so?”
“An even dozen.”
“That should be plenty.”
“They’re yours,” Ricci said. He pulled his burger plate closer without enthusiasm. “For all it’ll be worth. Even if Quiros doesn’t make his tails, he’ll still figure we’re tracking his movements. And he’ll be careful about them.”
Glenn looked at him.
“Is Enrique your only lead to whoever did whatever nobody’s talking about to Gordian?”
“Yeah.”
“Meaning we need to get information out of him fast.”
“Yeah.”
Glenn picked up his burger.
“It’s a predicament. We go too easy on the son of a bitch, he’ll keep his mouth shut. We lean on him too hard, he could go underground. I doubt for good, but it’s sounding to me like we can’t afford to lose any time.”
Ricci nodded.
“Between us, Glenn, I figure we’ve got maybe twenty-four hours before it’s too late,” he said. “And other than making ourselves feel like we’re doing something, I don’t know what we’ve accomplished.”
“You have any sort of plan?”
Ricci stared down at his glass a while in silence. Then he looked at Glenn.
“You want to be friends?” he said.
Their eyes had met.
“Sure,” he said. “Just make good on your promise to pay the tab.”
Ricci was still looking straight into Glenn’s eyes.
“There’s leaning hard, and there’s leaning hard,” he said. “Nothing opens up for us by tomorrow morning, I’m on my own with Quiros. And he’s going to talk. It might cost me my job. Maybe more than that. A whole lot more. But he’ll talk. And he won’t have a chance to go anywhere.”
Glenn sat with his beer mug suspended below his chin, his fingers clenching the handle. He took in and released a long, tidal breath.
“If it’s got to be that way, there’s no other choice, I can give you a hand.”
“No,” Ricci said, his voice firm. “Nobody else involved. I—”
Ricci’s cellular bleeped in his jacket pocket. He raised a finger in a hold-on-a-minute gesture, reached for it, and answered.
Glenn waited. He saw Ricci ease upright in his chair, listening without comment, taking in whatever was being said to him with acute interest.
When Ricci returned the phone to his pocket, there was something very close to relief on his features.
“That was Pete Nimec in San Jose,” he said. “I think we might’ve been saved by the bell.”
TWENTY-TWO
It was ten P.M. when enrique quiros drove his moon-gray Fiat Coupe from the grounds of his Rancho Santa Fe mansion through an electric gate in its eight-foot-high wrought-iron perimeter fence, accompanied by two Lincoln Town Cars that flanked him front and rear.
Much of the short trip from the rarefied North County community to Balboa Park in San Diego proper would be on Interstate 5, alternately known as the San Diego Freeway. Their route to the southbound entry ramp went along a loose braid of quiet, palm-lined streets and county roads and then skirted the cluster of specialty shops and gourmet restaurants in and around the small downtown.
As they passed one of the busier eateries, a dark green Saab 9–5 wagon drew away from the curb a few yards farther up the street, easing in front of Quiros’s lead car.
At the same instant, a young man and woman chatting beside a Cherokee parked near the restaurant’s outdoor cafe suspended their conversation and climbed into the SUV, looking to all eyes like an attractive couple who had gone to dine out on this pleasantly cool November night. The man at the wheel and his companion next to him in the passenger’s seat took their place following Quiros’s small procession, hanging back a little to remain inconspicuous.
Just before they reached the first of several signs guiding traffic to the freeway entrance, a Toyota Prius gasoline /electric emerged into the intersection from a cross street where it had idled in the shadow of a tall, spray-leafed royal palm and then swung between the Cherokee and the Lincoln immediately behind Quiros.
The Cherokee’s driver glanced at the woman to his right. “What’s up with the electric razor?” he said.
“Could be its pilot wants to prove you can be fuel-efficient and an asshole.”
“Or could be that he’s trying to queer our tail.”
The woman frowned. “We’d better play it safe and inform Glenn,” she said.
A moment after the Prius cut in behind the Lincoln, its driver tilted his head unnoticeably upward to speak into the hands-free, trunked-band radio mounted on its roof.
“Very good, we are in position,” he said in Castilian Spanish.
On a sleepy residential block southwest of Balboa Park, a customized Town and Country minivan sat in a parking space where it apparently had been left for the night. Its extended cargo area was partitioned from the front section. The bar lock on the steering wheel and blinking burglar alarm light on the dash were meant to convince anyone who might take a close-up look through the glazed front windows that it was unoccupied. Carefully fitted black shades over the rear windows ensured that the radiance of the computer monitors and LED equipment readouts aboard would be hidden from the street.
Should a roaming car thief have chanced upon this particular vehicle and failed to be deterred by the visible security devices, it would have been a supremely luckless blunder. And his last ever.
In the minivan’s rear, the little man seated at his control station acknowledged the message from the Prius’s driver, told him he would await his further report, and then switched frequencies on his transmitter to notify his marksmen in the park of their target’s progress.
“What the hell kind of car is this, anyway?” Ricci said.
“An ’88 Buick LeSabre T-type,” Glenn said. “Why?”
“Can’t belong to the company pool.”
“Is that some kind of put-down?”
“No.”
“Complaint?”
“No.”
“Because you might want to remember that she’s gotten you everywhere you’ve been going all day,” Glenn said. “And that not every rolling stakeout’s in the chichi North County. You have to blend in with the scenery. Stay unobtrusive.”
Ricci looked at him from the passenger seat. “In other words, it’s your personal vehicle.”
“My personal
