They rode briefly in silence, moving west on El Cajon Boulevard toward Balboa.
Ricci looked at the dash clock. It was almost a quarter past ten.
“How much longer till we’re at the park?”
“Maybe ten minutes or so. I know a few places nearby where we can haul in the car and wait.”
Ricci looked thoughtful. “Let’s squawk our moving surveillance cars again. See about that Prius.”
The Cherokee was now several car lengths ahead of Enrique Quiros’s trio in the center lane of 1–5. The Saab wagon had dropped back behind them. This tactic of periodically changing lead and follow spots was a textbook example of leapfrog surveillance, calculated to minimize the risk of detection.
The Saab’s driver was wearing an earphone mike/ lapel transmitter assembly that he’d set to voice-activation mode.
“Roger, the Prius is still keeping pace with us,” he said in answer to Ricci’s inquiry. His eyes had flicked to his sideview mirror. “It’s in the right lane, almost directly abreast of my vehicle.”
“You get a look at who’s inside?”
“A single male, thirtyish, clean shaven,” the driver said. “His windows are tinted too dark for me to give you more than that.”
“The way it’s switching lanes, staying out of Quiros’s line of sight, it doesn’t seem like one of his cars,” Ricci said over the VHF communications channel.
The driver nodded to himself. “Yeah,” he replied. “If I didn’t know better, I’d damn well figure it for one of ours.”
The snipers had assumed a four-pointed pattern of deployment around the grassy area between the rear of the Natural History Museum and the Spanish Village Art Center to its north, giving them a wide open field of fire. One of them was prone on the roof of the long, three-story museum, his Walther rifle nosed over its baroque ornamental edging. A second was concealed in the 120-foot spread of the exotic Moreton Bay fig tree that had stood behind the museum for almost a century. Opposite the museum, at the northeast corner of the green, a third sharpshooter was atop one of the low stucco-and-tile art galleries of the village. The fourth was posted at the northwest corner, on the roof of another Old Spanish-style cottage.
Each of their high-magnitude night-vision scopes was equipped with an infrared camera head/optical beam splitter attachment. Designed to bend light at a ninety-degree angle as it struck the eyepiece, it would simultaneously relay the shooter’s sight image to the rifle-mounted scope and to the control van over a wireless video feed.
Inside the Town and Country, the team commander would have a real-time picture of what his firers saw through their scopes from their separate angles of view. Maintaining radio contact via their tactical headsets, he could coordinate their actions from the moment Enrique Quiros made a move on Salazar until the moment Quiros — and whoever he might have positioned in ambush — fell dead to the ground.
Now the little man waited at his monitoring station and remembered how Lucio Salazar had balked at the cost of his team’s services. Their clients often did at first. But quality was never cheap, and Salazar had gotten the best that money could buy, as he was bound to realize with gratitude before tonight’s events ran their ultimate course.
Sitting in his parked Cadillac sedan along with four hand-picked bodyguards, Lucio Salazar shrugged his jacket sleeve back from his wristwatch and read the time.
It was almost half past ten, and he was feeling impatient. Lucio had arrived early to make sure the contract hitters were where they were supposed to be, and once his men had gone out and confirmed their presence, he’d had nothing to do except wait for Quiros to show. Little as he’d wished for this appointment, he was anxious to push the start button and get it under way. He wasn’t truly afraid; in his fifty-eight years of living, Lucio had been in far too many tight situations for that. Nor had he acquired any scruples about killing in his late middle age. But for all his preparation, it was his hovering uncertainty, his not knowing what was to come, that was hardest to abide. If he were only convinced of Quiros’s intentions, things would be clear to him, and he would know beyond a doubt what to do. He was a man who put a high value on forethought. His operation had thrived as a result of deliberation, planning, and a willingness to compromise — even concede losses, within margins — rather than let himself in for more trouble than seemed worthwhile. When circumstances changed, you had to look at them carefully and know when to make accommodations. Yet here he’d been thrust into a situation where everything hung on split-second decisions and hair triggers. And it didn’t feel right to him in the least.
He sighed and glanced out his window, watching for the headlights of Enrique’s car to appear in the parking lot entrance.
Feel right or not, what was about to happen would happen anyway.
He just wanted to be finished with it and get back to business as usual.
As Enrique Quiros approached Balboa from the northwest, the third automobile in his entourage separated from the others and took the turnoff to the Cabrillo Bridge. Remaining on the San Diego Freeway, Quiros and his lead car continued to head toward the Pershing Drive exit that provided the easiest and most direct access to the Spanish Village area.
Inside the tail vehicles that had kept pace with Quiros since he’d left the ranch, the members of each surveillance team noted this unexpected development and promptly advised their respective superiors.
“What do you make of it?” Ricci said.
“The bridge hooks up with Laurel Street, and that’ll take you over to Balboa,” Glenn said. He had pulled the LeSabre into a dark, empty employee lot behind a municipal building on C Street, within view of the park. “It’s kind of a long way around. The scenic route, I guess you’d call it. Runs between these two wooded slopes.”
“I don’t think our guys are interested in admiring the foliage,” Ricci said.
“Not that anybody could in the dark,” Glenn said and sat thinking quietly. After a moment or two, he turned to Ricci. “What’s that E-mail we got again? The exact words?”
Ricci frowned, took his cell phone out of his pocket, and touched a button to illuminate the LCD. Then he pressed a second button on the keypad, retrieved the stored message Nimec had forwarded from San Jose, and opened it. “Here,” he said and handed the phone across the seat to Glenn. “Read the damn thing yourself.”
Glenn did. It said:
QUIROS. ELEVEN P.M. BALBOA PARK. FINAL CLOSEOUT, EVERYTHING UP FOR GRABS. GET WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE HE’S GONE. FROM ONE WHO KNOWS.
“Coded messages. Anonymous tips that don’t mean anything.” Ricci studied the government office building’s flat, concrete backside through the windshield. “I’m sick and tired of being jerked.”
“If you ask me, we’re lucky just to be in the game,” Glenn said, still looking at the LCD.
“I guess.” Ricci glanced at the dash clock and saw that it was exactly 10:30. “Be nice if we could figure some of it out before we need to make our move.”
Silence. Glenn pursed his lips, gave the phone back to Ricci. “You know, Laurel connects with a long strip of the park called El Prado,” he said. “That’s the main pedestrian mall. It has lots of recognizable buildings, a big reflecting pond, other stuff.”
Ricci looked at him. “You guessing it’s where the action might be?”
“I don’t know,” Glenn said, “but there has to be a reason the last car in Enrique’s cavalcade of stars broke away to head in that direction.”
Ricci tugged at the flesh below his chin. “You’re looking to set something up, it’s always a good idea to pick a spot where there are landmarks.”
“Agreed. And tell me this isn’t the definition of a setup.”
“Do we have people sitting on the area?”
“Some,” he said. “And we can shuffle more over.”
Ricci nodded. “How close are we?”
“A hop and a skip,” Glenn said.
