After Burden left them in front of the guest house, t.i.tus and Rita headed straight to their bedroom, where they dutifully had the conversation Burden had wanted, and then went on to t.i.tus's study. For the next hour they sat at the long table under the sunny cupola, contacting Carla's friends and enlisting help in calling scattered relatives. t.i.tus made sure the news of Carla's death was handled properly at CaiText and that Carla's responsibilities were temporarily covered.

But no matter how many phone calls t.i.tus made, no matter how many shocked people he talked to or how many urgent items he found crowding in upon him demanding to be dealt with immediately, his mind was divided. He had been staring out the window, lost in thought, when he realized that Rita was finishing a conversation and hanging up the phone. She had been talking to Louise.

"How'd she sound? "he asked.

"Okay. I think she's in that just-get-through-the-funeral mode. Nel and Derek are lifesavers. And a lot of friends from Fredericksburg are coming out."

"She'll have a lot of support, "t.i.tus said. "She'll need it."

"She wants you to speak at the service, "Rita said.

"When?"

"Day after tomorrow."

"Jesus. What'd you tell her?"

"Of course you would."

Before he had time to process how impossible that seemed to him, his encrypted phone rang.

"This is Garcia. Listen, Gil Norlin's bringing in the bodyguards-"

"Norlin? "t.i.tus was surprised, though as soon as he was he didn't know why he should've been.

"He pulled together the local chase car drivers I needed last night, t.i.tus. I use him when I need him, just like everybody else."

For some reason that last sentence stuck in t.i.tus's mind like a neon sign.

The bodyguards were two men and a woman. They arrived in a Blazer following Gil Norlin's Volvo without any special effort to conceal the fact that they were coming in. t.i.tus guessed they had talked that over with Burden.

First names only. Janet was tall and athletic, with makeup that looked as if it had been applied by numbers. She had an easygoing manner. At first the sound-suppressed MP5 (she told them what it was) slung across her shoulder looked incongruous, until you watched her move around with it. She wore it as comfortably as her pleated trousers.

Ryan was the shorter of the two men at six two, t.i.tus guessed. Lifted weights. Military haircut. All-American. Looked exactly like what he was.

The tall one, Kal, was maybe six five. Not a small man, but not bulked up like Ryan. He seemed a little preoccupied, as if the team were his responsibility.

As soon as they finished introductions and a few words, Rita and t.i.tus took them on a tour of the house. Decisions were immediately made to lock all but the most frequently used doors and to put breach limpets on all the doors and windows. It got very serious very quickly.

After the bodyguards had been briefed and took off in separate directions, Norlin paused in the kitchen with t.i.tus and Rita.

"Do what they say, "he said. "There's no hocus-pocus here. Just a lot of experience-based common sense."

"These are your people? "t.i.tus asked.

"I've worked with them before, "he said. He was standing with his fist on his hip, his jacket pushed back a little. t.i.tus saw Rita glance at the gun at his waist.

"And you've worked with Garcia Burden before, too?" Rita asked. "Is that right?"

"Yeah. A few years back."

She looked at him. "Why don't you just give me some idea of what this man's like?"

Norlin flicked an uneasy glance at t.i.tus and then looked down, collecting his thoughts.

"That's kind of touchy, "he said.

"What do you mean? "she asked. Her voice had a barb to it, as if his reluctance were somehow unworthy.

"Well, you're working with him-"

"Look, "she interrupted, and then she hesitated nervously-or was it angrily? "People are dying here, "she said, "and any scruples you might feel of a professional nature just don't seem significant to me right now."

Norlin was looking at her. He didn't seem particularly taken aback, nor was he intimidated, but Rita had definitely cut through a lot of c.r.a.p that he was used to falling back on when he was put on the spot.

"Well, he's had a full life, "Norlin said with intended irony. "What did you have in mind?"

"Just give me some sense of what he's like, "she said. "Something that ... orients him in my head, gives me some perspective. Look, we're working with this man because you recommended him. Now you think about it: We don't really know you, either. You think it's just ... the way it ought to be that just because we're scared to death here, we should start trusting people who-let's face it-are leading pretty d.a.m.n murky lives? I don't know what you do. t.i.tus has told me how he first met you, but then ... what's that? You seem to be who you say you are, but then, how the h.e.l.l are we to know, really? We haven't seen any credentials. Right? No one that we know we can trust has called us and vouched for you, have they? You know, Mr. Norlin"-she put a little extra on the "Mr. Norlin"-"we don't just intuit your integrity, or your legitimacy, for that matter. The fact that we're even working with him, Burden, or you ... or any of these other people"-she gestured broadly toward the bodyguards, toward Herrin in the guest house-"strikes me as ... just ... insane when I think about it."

By the time she had stopped, her voice was quavering with a complex brew of emotions. But the torrent of words had had its effect on Norlin. He seemed to soften a little as he looked at her.

"You have a good point, Mrs. Cain, "he said carefully. "But let me say, it's only insane if you think of it from the point of view of your life before Cayetano Luquin. After Luquin, insane takes on another meaning altogether. But, "he added quickly, "you're right. You've been asked to take a lot on faith. Those of us in this line of work, we don't appreciate that enough."

He gave some thought to what he was about to say.

He leaned against the kitchen counter and folded his arms across his chest. His old suit, already sagging at all of its stress points, bunched up across his shoulders as if it had done this a thousand times before and knew the routine.

"On a personal level, "he said, looking at Rita, "and I've told t.i.tus this, I trust this man implicitly. But the thing is, the thing that would be hard for you to sort of get a grip on, is that my trust lies within a context of extremes. The things I trust him to do, for instance, are things that would probably shock you."

Another pause. "I could talk about him for days. Don't waste your time trying to figure him out. The only person I know who comes even close to having done that is the woman he lives with. Her name's Lucia. I don't know how many years he's been with her. She's a Roma, a Gypsy from Sicily. Photographer. "He looked at t.i.tus. "Took all-or most-of those pictures you saw in his place. She's as inexplicable as he is, and they're devoted to each other ... way past anything I've ever seen between two people. But that's personal stuff, not exactly where we want to go.

"Look, "he said, "I'll tell you what. I don't really know how to do this, so I'll just tell you a story. I could tell you scores of them, but I think this one will do for right now. I'll make it short, but I think it'll give you some idea what Garcia Burden's life is like."

Chapter 36.

"Several years ago, "Norlin began, "an Algerian Islamic extremist, guy named Mourad Berkat, showed up in surveillance photos in Mexico City. He was in the company of members of a drug-trafficking cartel that had established Middle Eastern connections.

"Berkat had been a GIA terrorist in Algiers during the eighties and early nineties, but he had ambitions and had become a freelance a.s.sa.s.sin working mostly for the capos in the drug underworld in Spain, Sicily, and France. He liked poisons and chemicals, unusual for a hit man. His appearance in Mexico set off alarms.

"Garcia was called in ... for various special reasons. Turned out that Berkat was trying to obtain the bacterium Clostridium botulinum Clostridium botulinum . Uh, it's an organism that produces an exotoxin, a d.a.m.ned lethal exotoxin, one hundred thousand times more powerful than the sarin nerve agent. But this stuff also has medical uses, as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of certain neurological disorders, for example. So it was a dual-use substance that could legitimately be found in some pharmaceutical and medical environments. . Uh, it's an organism that produces an exotoxin, a d.a.m.ned lethal exotoxin, one hundred thousand times more powerful than the sarin nerve agent. But this stuff also has medical uses, as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of certain neurological disorders, for example. So it was a dual-use substance that could legitimately be found in some pharmaceutical and medical environments.

"Garcia sent out a string of alerts to his foreign a.s.sets, but a month went by before one of them called him about a woman doctor in Paris who turned up dead in her apartment. She worked for a research clinic that specialized in neurological diseases. Berkat's photo was found in her possessions. A torn-up metro ticket led them to an apartment near Charles de Gaulle Airport, where surveillance photographs picked up a Hamas agent leaving the apartment.

"Berkat wasn't really on the Mossad's radar screen, but they sure as h.e.l.l knew the Hamas guy. They quickly located Berkat in Gaza City, and then grabbed photographs of him at a cafe talking to Ha.s.san al-Abed. Al-Abed had a doctorate in biological sciences from Cairo University. Back in Paris, the French DST confirmed the missing Clostridium botulinum Clostridium botulinum from the research clinic. Now Garcia was sure that Hamas/Berkat were working on a dispersal method for the exotoxin." from the research clinic. Now Garcia was sure that Hamas/Berkat were working on a dispersal method for the exotoxin."

Norlin shifted on his feet. Gave it some more thought before he went on.

"Berkat disappeared from Gaza, and his trail went cold. Then three months later one of Garcia's agents picked it up again in Strasbourg. Berkat had spent the night with a woman there who said that he'd used her computer nonstop for a whole day before moving on. Garcia's people sucked the marrow out of the hard drive and found that he'd booked a twoweek vacation cruise from Brest to St. Kitts under a French name, traveling with his wife and two kids. That was Berkat's shtick, using the family man thing as a cover. He seemed to find no end of gullible women to help him without realizing what they were doing.

"They tracked him to Belize, where he abandoned his 'family.'Now, under a different French name, he caught a flight to Tampico, where he rented an SUV under the name of a Mexican national and headed north.

"By now everyone had to a.s.sume that his target was somewhere in the States. Even beyond the issue of national security, the people who hired Garcia didn't want it known that a terrorist with a biological weapon had made it within even a hundred miles of our borders. At that time, we were still whistling through the graveyard and hoping the public didn't notice just how d.a.m.ned vulnerable we really were.

"G.o.d knows what kind of political repercussions there might be if people ever rolled their a.s.ses off their sofas and woke up to what was really going on. And the politicians didn't want the public to get the idea that Mexico was swarming with terrorists-bad for NAFTA-even though it was, and still is, a very real issue of concern. Another one of those things they hope the public doesn't wake up to.

"Anyway, Berkat just needed to disappear, and it was best if that happened in Mexico. Without the Mexican government's knowledge, of course.

"There would be no loss of intelligence if Berkat just evaporated without anyone even talking to him. We already knew Hamas was financing his run. The delivery system that he was carrying was known by its designer/creator, the good Dr. alAbed back in Gaza. The Mossad would deal with debriefing him. Berkat was just a snake that had to be killed. His poison would die with him.

"Garcia's choice of weapon was a particularly incendiary bomb design, just to make sure the exotoxin didn't survive or was somehow inadvertently distributed by the explosion. The bomb was loaded on a helicopter and flown ahead in the general direction of Berkat's antic.i.p.ated route, the choices being narrowed down as he advanced north. Finally it was clear that he was headed for one of the border's smallest crossings, the toll bridge at Los Ebanos, Texas."

Norlin paused again. He glanced out the kitchen window and cast his thoughts to far-off places. He slowly shook his head and brought his eyes back to Rita.

"You've got to understand, "he said, "that every operation is a moving target. You start out with an objective and a plan, but you know d.a.m.n well that most of the plan is bound to change because you'll inevitably be blindsided by some d.a.m.ned surprise. It's one of the hardest things about the job. And it's one of the things that Garcia excels at. He's cool with blindsides.

"Incidentally, his other most desirable talent is his ingenuity in making things happen without raising any eyebrows. He achieves his objective in silence. Or if that can't happen, the event is disguised to make it appear to be something other than what it actually is.

"Anyway, at a dusty village called Cerralvo, Berkat left the main highway and headed north through the backcountry desert. That was even better for Garcia's plans. The helicopter moved ahead, landed at an isolated spot of the highway, dealt with installing the explosives, and took off again. Five miles from the bomb, Berkat pulled off the side of the road at a little food stand. And, whoa, big surprise. The surveillance team was stunned to see a woman, two little boys, and a little girl bail out of the SUV with him to get snacks. Berkat had himself another family.

"Surveillance team frantically radioed Garcia. The helicopter had dropped him off on the other side of the bomb, and he was headed toward it from the opposite direction, watching Berkat's dot on his tracking monitor as they both converged on the site."

Norlin looked out the window over the kitchen sink again. t.i.tus followed his eyes and saw one of the bodyguards prowling around the poolhouse. Norlin, his forearm on the cabinet, rubbed his forehead with his other hand. He seemed reluctant to continue.

"One night a little more than a year after this happened, I sat with Garcia in his study in San Miguel. We'd been drinking. Too much. But I remember how the crickets were raising h.e.l.l in the darkness outside the opened windows as he told me in a flat, dead voice what happened next.

"Garcia and his driver raced toward the bomb's location. About a quarter of a mile from the bomb they turned off on a dirt track and drove out into the brush and turned around to watch.

"Garcia got out of the car and vomited in the grease brush. And then, suddenly, he lost control of his bowels. After cleaning himself up, he scrambled onto the top of the car and watched the highway through his binoculars. He could see Berkat's SUV with the woman and children heading for the border and the bomb. There would be no mistake about the bomb, a computer would make sure the timing was accurate. Everybody involved in the operation who had a radio or phone or computer was using it to message Garcia about the woman and kids. His driver was inside the car, confirming, confirming, confirming.

"Garcia stood alone on top of the car in the grease brush and watched through binoculars as the SUV sped along the highway.

"Then, instantly, it went up in a geyserlike explosion. It threw up a mushroom plume high into the desert's purple evening sky. Garcia remembered the color of the sky and the color of the plume with its internal fireball. He saw it, then heard it, then felt it.

"The bomb had been designed to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the Mexican federal police couldn't even tell how many people had been in the vehicle. They and the newspapers a.s.sumed the blast had been the work of drug traffickers'a.s.sa.s.sins, and those who suspected otherwise kept their suspicions to themselves. Whatever it was, it had been a serious thing. Mexicans learned long ago to make peace with inexplicable events."

Norlin shook his head and stared at nothing for a moment.

"Later, as Berkat's operation was dissected, and the leads gathered in those last frantic days were played out, it was learned that he had been headed for the Texas Medical Center in Houston. The effectiveness of the dispersal method designed by al-Abed for the exotoxin was a controversial question. It was an aerosol device intended for the air-conditioning system in one of the center's largest hospitals. Some argued that only twenty or thirty people would have died, but others strongly disagreed. They used words like 'catastrophic' and 'unimaginable.'

"But the speculation about body count didn't have any effect on Garcia. There were always only four in his nightmares. He said it bothered him a lot that he never saw body parts in his dreams, only bits of charred clothing drifting down through the darkly glittering mushroom, a bright red little tennis shoe, a toddler's green-and-blue-striped T-shirt, a woman's white bra, a small dress with sashes fluttering. The colors and the kinds of clothing changed from dream to dream, but the dream never changed, and the count never changed, either. Four completely innocent people went up in a plume of fire and desert sand, over and over and over.

"Because Garcia Burden had decided that they should."

Chapter 37.

Luquin and Jorge Macias sat beneath the oak that shaded one end of the pool. They were nursing cafecitas, cafecitas, as Luquin liked to call the demita.s.se cups of strong coffee that he was addicted to. It wasn't espresso, just d.a.m.ned strong coffee. Luquin had slept late, and he'd slept like a tired old cat, deeply and serenely. That was his way. The abominations of the waking man never disturbed the peaceful hours of the sleeping man. And why should they? Waking was not sleeping. They were two entirely different things, he said. as Luquin liked to call the demita.s.se cups of strong coffee that he was addicted to. It wasn't espresso, just d.a.m.ned strong coffee. Luquin had slept late, and he'd slept like a tired old cat, deeply and serenely. That was his way. The abominations of the waking man never disturbed the peaceful hours of the sleeping man. And why should they? Waking was not sleeping. They were two entirely different things, he said.

But his confrontation with Cain had put him in a foul temper. n.o.body talked to him the way Cain had talked to him, and what made it worse was that others had heard what had been said because the room had been wired for security reasons. Macias had heard it, and the sharpshooter who had waited outside in the dark, his rifle aimed through the window at Cain in case anything should happen, had heard it through his ear mike.

"No, absolutely nothing, "Macias was saying. "We never saw the same car twice, all the license plates checked out. We saw nothing suspicious, and the surveillance people didn't, either. We photographed every car and put them into the computers. If any of them show up again, we'll know it."

Luquin was wearing dark trousers and a white guayabera guayabera that hung unb.u.t.toned and open, exposing his thick chest. He wore sungla.s.ses. He smoked. And sipped his that hung unb.u.t.toned and open, exposing his thick chest. He wore sungla.s.ses. He smoked. And sipped his cafecita. cafecita.

This was a dangerous enterprise under any circ.u.mstances, but doing this sort of thing inside the United States was next to insanity. Yet it was precisely there, next to insanity, that a great deal of money was to be made. High stakes inevitably required great risks.

"And the house?"

"They finally got them all. Except one. "Macias was dressed, as always, in cool, limp linen. "It's in the bedroom. We put our best stuff in there. It's got boosters, little things the size of a b.u.t.ton on either side of the room. Good reception. Filters so the sweepers can't pick them up."

Luquin looked away, across the river and the valley toward the roof of t.i.tus's house. He was chasing thoughts, and at the moment he was replaying one of t.i.tus's remarks that had particularly stung with insolence.

"Hunt my a.s.s all the way to Patagonia! "Luquin snorted, mocking t.i.tus's voice. "Patagonia, s.h.i.t. What does he think? How does he feel this morning, huh? He's going to think he woke up in f.u.c.king Colombia!"

He stopped suddenly and looked at Macias. "And those two, they're gone? You got them out of here?"

"As soon as they were sure the woman was dead, they called us, and my boys picked them up and drove them to the airstrip. They'll cross the border in another hour, near Lajitas. The two guys who did Thrush are already in Oaxaca."

Luquin nodded his approval. A killing well done. He looked at his watch. "In another half hour I should hear from Cavatino."

"We saw a county sheriff's car going into Cain's place, so he probably knows about the woman by now."

"Welcome to Colombia."

Macias would be glad when it was over. When Luquin had come to him with this job and had spent two days explaining it to him, Macias had agreed to do it provided a reconnoitering trip to Austin satisfied him that his people could handle the logistics of such an operation.

After ten days in Austin, he had called Luquin and agreed to do it. But he'd wanted the complete authority to pull the plug on the operation if he thought it was about to be compromised. Luquin had balked at Macias having the last word, but he couldn't do it without Macias's U.S. and Mexican connections. Ultimately he had agreed. The deal was on.

Macias had leased the house on Las Ramitas. He had a team of three cars and six men, as well as a surveillance van with three technicians. The surveillance team was from Juarez, men out of the drug trade. The four teams were strictly compartmentalized. They never a.s.sociated and never communicated except by secure radio and cell phones.

Macias knew that there were two things that had given him the edge in this enterprise. First, the fact that there was no precedent for it. What has not been done before is difficult to antic.i.p.ate. That was one of the great lessons of the World Trade Center event. Innovation was difficult for the American intelligence community. The old ways of doing things were hard to change in the sprawling bureaucracy of a powerful government.

The second thing that had given him an edge was getting everyone in place in absolute secrecy. He believed he had done that successfully.

But he was nervous. There was an adverse correlative to what the crime world had learned from the September disaster in New York: The U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had undergone, and were still undergoing, severe internal a.n.a.lysis. They were beginning to make changes. It was only reasonable for someone in Macias's position to a.s.sume that many of those changes would remain unknown, until they proved deadly to people like Luquin and Macias.

Nevertheless, this particular operation had an added incentive. If the extortion scheme worked, Macias also got a percentage of the take, not just a fee. For this kind of money he would sweat a little more than he would normally, maybe even a little more than seemed to make good sense. The size of the payoff actually encouraged risk taking.