"I don't like the high-speed drill and gas idea, "Cope said. "This has to be b.l.o.o.d.y quick, and with the windows open we can't guarantee we'll get b.l.o.o.d.y quick."

"Then it's got to be the CS grenade, "t.i.to said. "We drive by and I'll toss it in, bam. They won't be able to get another breath for about thirty seconds. It's like getting slapped in the face with a board. But then it wears off quick, so we have to get in quick and do our thing."

"What kind of noise does it make? "Cope asked.

"None."

"Flash?"

"None."

Cope thought a moment. "We can't risk them getting a shot off, not even one."

"Their throats and lungs are locked up, man, "t.i.to a.s.sured him. "They can't even draw a breath ... for thirty seconds. After that, they're going to start coming around."

Silence. Cope looked at his watch. "Okay, then I'll just pull up and you toss the bomb. I'll jam on the brakes, and we bail out. The second you know it's okay, jump in and get behind the wheel, and I'll go into the back."

That was it.

Cope pulled away from the curb and slow-rolled to the intersection. He eased out, looking right. Two blocks ahead they could see the Pathfinder up the slight rise in the street, looking like a sitting duck. He turned into the street and started up the hill.

Suddenly the taillights of the Pathfinder came on.

"s.h.i.t. "t.i.to leaned forward over the dash, but then the taillights went out again. "Guy's just shifting in his seat."

Cope was watching his rearview mirror for approaching traffic, but they were so far off Bull Creek Road that there was no through traffic, and at this hour the neighborhood was quiet.

He noodled along, not wanting to change pace when they pulled past the Pathfinder. Then they were there.

He looked to his right just as they were even with the Pathfinder driver, and t.i.to lobbed the CS grenade as if he were tossing back a wadded piece of paper into a trash can. The little canister sailed right past the surprised face of the driver.

Cope slammed on his brakes, stopping just past the front left fender of the Pathfinder so that t.i.to could fling open his door. Cope scrambled around the back of the car to find the Pathfinder's opened windows swirling with gas.

"Wait, "t.i.to barked. They stood there three beats, and then: "Go!"

As t.i.to was opening the door, he reached in and shot the driver in the face twice with his suppressed USP, then shoved the dying man from under the steering wheel as he crawled in. At the same instant, Cope plunged into the backseat and shot the gagging guard in the mouth twice, crawled over his body, and shot the pa.s.senger-side guard three quick bursts in the left ear as he pushed him down into the floorboard out of sight. Then he was out and back into the idling car.

In less than fifteen seconds it was over. Inside the Pathfinder, three men were in various stages of dying as t.i.to slowly pulled the SUV away from the curb and eased out into the street. Cope followed him at a distance.

The man had crouched in the pocket of deep shade among the cedars and settled in to endure the stifling heat of the afternoon. The sun beat down on the thick canopy of the woods above him, sucking all the air out of the underbrush. Forty meters away, the lake water lapped against the rocks. Cicadas throbbed in the hot trees, and their drone blended with the occasional drone of ski and pleasure boats plying the long, narrow lake. Peering through a break in the brush, he had found a spot across the lake halfway up the sloping hillside, a terracotta tile roof, and he concentrated on it, using it as his gateway out of time.

Everything else that happened for the next four and a half hours happened in his parallax view and in his head. He was fully aware of the changing light, but not in the gradual way that an observant person might be aware of it. For long periods of time his eyes took in nothing-that is, nothing of which he was aware. He was gone, traveling in his mind.

Then, as if playing catch-up, his eyes registered the changing light of the past hour or so all in the s.p.a.ce of just a few moments, like a timelapse film. The clouds skimmed northward across the valley, and the sunlight flickered rapidly as the clouds flitted past, and then underlying it all was the changing light resulting from the angle of the falling sun.

And then again everything held still while he pa.s.sed through terra-cotta into other worlds.

He got up once to remove his clothes, jamming them into the small canvas duffel bag. He turned aside and urinated into the gra.s.s, then squatted on his haunches and returned to the tile roof.

Another hour or so pa.s.sed and the mosquitoes had gotten so bad that he turned to the duffel bag again and took out two round, plastic containers holding charcoal and olive body paint. Methodically, without any attention to time at all, he began to smear his body with the camouflage paint. He didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, as if it didn't matter much how it was done. But he was thorough, head to toe, inside his ears and nostrils, between the crevice of his b.u.t.tocks, and even his genitals.

Dusk.

Now he squatted among the weeds, invisible. With the dying light, the swarms of mosquitoes grew exponentially. Frustrated by the repellent in the paint, they formed a cloud around him. He heard them, a high-pitched whining sound enveloping him in its harmonics, exactly like the dusk in Espiritu Santo when he was waiting to kill the man from Andradina and was astonished to hear the sound of time pa.s.sing. It was an aural sensation precisely the same as the cloud of mosquitoes. It was so odd to discover that.

Time pa.s.sed. A long time ... in a darkness blacker than old blood.

When the telephone vibrated in his hand-he had held it throughout, laying it down only to put on the body paint, and even then carefully resting his toes on it so that he would feel the vibrating if it should happen-he answered it by saying only, "Yes."

"Macias has left, "Burden said. "I believe that only a guard, Roque, and Luquin remain. That's the best we can figure it."

"Macias won't return?"

"No."

"I have the rest of the night, then?"

"No. You have to leave by two o'clock, at least. You have the directions to the airstrip."

"Yes. But nothing has changed?"

"No."

Silence. He wasn't sure how long it lasted, but he was aware of it, which meant it might have been a long time. But Burden didn't hang up. He was there.

"You want to know something, Garcia?"

"Yes. What is it?"

"I didn't think this would ever happen. I thought I would die and this would never have happened."

Silence.

"I won't thank you, "the man said. "I will spare you having to have that on your conscience."

Silence.

"But if I could thank you, I would do it. And if I believed in G.o.d, I would thank him for it, too, but he wouldn't want my grat.i.tude, either. Gracias a Dios, Gracias a Dios, but he would stop it from reaching him. Such grat.i.tude." but he would stop it from reaching him. Such grat.i.tude."

Silence.

"Do you hear the insects?"

"Yes, "Burden said.

"I am engulfed by mosquitoes, "he said. "A cloud of them. They are singing time at me."

Silence.

"I don't ever want to see you again, Garcia. You understand that."

"I understand. Yes."

Silence.

"I look like an insect, "the man said.

Again there was silence, and after waiting a moment or two, he turned off the phone.

Chapter 51.

After Burden's phone call, the man's heart began to fibrillate. He was used to that and recognized the onset of his familiar disturbance. Something happened to you when you took off all your clothes and covered your body with the colors of earth and vegetation. You began to slough off your human-ness. And that was good.

Wearing only tennis shoes that he'd also smeared with camouflage paint, he began moving up through the lake-level woods to the hillside. The mosquitoes formed a whirring aura around him, and he felt as though he were suspended in the sound of time but not touched by it. He moved through the darkness in a coc.o.o.n of timelessness.

The move up the cliff was slow, but not especially difficult. This was simply a steep climb, with a couple of spots where the placement of feet and fingers was important but not critical. He was careful not to dislodge any rocks and send them crashing noisily into the brush.

The pool was set solidly into the stone face of the bluff, but the deck that surrounded it was supported by thick, stolid concrete pilings sunk into the rock face below. When he reached the pilings he stopped to rest a moment before climbing the last twenty feet by crawling over the boulders that had been pushed over the bluff when the pool was built. Then he reached a cinder-block room that housed the pool's plumbing underneath the deck. From there stone steps led up to a tall louvered gate that opened onto the deck and pool area.

He crouched at the gate a long time, holding the little duffel bag with his clothes and a few other things. When he heard no one talking, he carefully unlatched the louvered gate, which opened up into a blind corner of the pool area, and moved inside. He laid the duffel bag in the shadows against the house, unzipped it, and took out the small, dull gray automatic pistol that Burden had given him. It was specifically modified to fire subsonic "cat's sneeze "loads. The rounds had soft lead noses that exploded on impact.

The pale light coming through the gla.s.s walls-it looked like television light-threw too much illumination onto the deck and pool. He wouldn't be able to cross to the other side from here. Leaving his duffel bag, he went back out the gate and made his way down the first flight of steps. At the first turn left, he stepped right into the brush that separated the houses along the cliff. To avoid the noisy vegetation as much as possible, he hugged the outside walls of the house.

When he reached the front corner of the house, he snuggled up under a large shrub and waited. He knew Luquin's security. At night, someone always stayed outside in the dark. He waited. The living human being made noises.

He waited. He heard his own blood in his ears. Not too different from the whirr of pa.s.sing time. He waited.

The guard farted. The man adjusted for the distortion of the architecture and vegetation. The front of the house was a U-shaped courtyard. And luckily, there were hedges. He eased down on his side, his bare back against the house, and advanced under the hedges, groveling inch by inch.

The guard yawned with a groan. The man corrected his audio perception. He was closer than he thought. A few more feet, mulch and twigs digging into his skin. The hedge took a left turn at the patio's edge. The man waited, then slowly eased his head from under the hedge. He saw the guard about two and a half meters away in a lawn chair.

When he shot the guard, there was only the m.u.f.fled pop of his skull and a soft splash on the stones. The man was quickly on his feet. He took the AK out of the guard's lap and laid it on the stones. He left him lolling in the chair.

He went to the front door and tried the k.n.o.b. It was unlocked. He opened the door by millimeters and heard the television. Good. He eased his head around the door. A foyer, lucky. Roque would be within twenty feet of Luquin. As he made his way through the foyer, the television threw a pale, flickering light through the opened doorway. There were no other lights on. Lucky again.

He saw through the room's gla.s.s walls to the lighted deck outside where he had just been standing a few minutes before. Making sure there were no lights behind him, he eased forward and saw Luquin lounging on the sofa, facing the television. He was nodding off, hardly awake. Another step forward, but no Roque.

Suddenly he heard a toilet flush down the hall and turned just in time to see Roque coming around the corner at the other end of the hallway, fumbling at the zipper of his pants. He was hardly on his guard and probably had been nodding off in front of the television too before he got up to go to the bathroom. The man straightened his arm out horizontally in the dark hallway, and Roque walked right into its muzzle.

The cat sneezed, and Roque's head flew back as if he'd been hit with a mallet, and his feet shot out from under him. He hit the floor with a sloppy whump, whump, half a second after most of his brain hit the hallway wall. half a second after most of his brain hit the hallway wall.

The man wheeled around and was standing in front of the huge entertainment screen facing Luquin while Luquin was still trying to get to his feet. When he finally righted and steadied himself, the man was holding the remote control on the screen. The sound went off.

They stood facing each other in the silence, the coffee table between them.

"Sientese, " the man said. Luquin's expression was slack, and the pale light from the screen was jumping all over his face, heightening his expression of shock. "Sit down, "the man repeated in English. the man said. Luquin's expression was slack, and the pale light from the screen was jumping all over his face, heightening his expression of shock. "Sit down, "the man repeated in English.

Luquin dumbly complied, collapsing into the exact spot from where he'd struggled so hard to get up a moment before. The man walked to the coffee table. Then he stepped around it, looming over Luquin, his camouflaged genitals dangling an arm's reach away from Luquin's face. The man sat down slowly on top of the coffee table, his knees almost touching Luquin's knees.

"Take off your shirt."

A couple of beats pa.s.sed before Luquin began unb.u.t.toning his guayabera. guayabera. When he had it off, the man reached out and took it from him. Slowly he began wiping his face with it, smearing away the paint, his eyes latched on to Luquin's eyes as firmly as if they had been little hands holding him. Luquin stared, watching as the color of the man's flesh emerged from underneath the paint. His eyes narrowed a couple of times involuntarily as he tried instinctively to recognize the man underneath the paint. When he had it off, the man reached out and took it from him. Slowly he began wiping his face with it, smearing away the paint, his eyes latched on to Luquin's eyes as firmly as if they had been little hands holding him. Luquin stared, watching as the color of the man's flesh emerged from underneath the paint. His eyes narrowed a couple of times involuntarily as he tried instinctively to recognize the man underneath the paint.

Suddenly he realized who it was.

Luquin went limp and sank back on the sofa. The odor of feces filled the room as Luquin's mouth sagged in stupefaction. Some men have a sixth sense about their last moments, something that tells them that this time it will not be a close call. Often such an intuitive certainty is dumbfounding, and that moment of realization sucks everything out of them. That's the way it was for Cayetano Luquin. Now there were only two things left: death, and the fear of death.

The man was surprised by this sudden collapse. He had always antic.i.p.ated that Luquin would fight insanely, like a rabid coyote. This was unantic.i.p.ated. But it meant nothing, one way or the other.

"Get on the floor."

Luquin looked at him blankly, without comprehension.

The man stood. "Get on the floor."

Luquin hesitated, then slid sideways off the sofa and onto the floor. He didn't know what position to take on the floor, so he kind of knelt there, almost on his side, eyes rolled at his adversary.

"On your back, "the man said. Then, standing over Luquin, he bent and unbuckled Luquin's belt and then the waistband of his trousers. Then he flipped off Luquin's expensive alligator loafers. He grabbed the bottom of his silk trousers and pulled them off. He stood back, looking at him.

"Pull off your underwear."

Luquin rolled around on the floor, squirming out of his feces-soaked underwear.

"Stuff them in your mouth."

Luquin did, without hesitation.

Then the man went back to the coffee table and sat down again. He looked at Luquin, studying him. His body was surprisingly well kept for a man his age. Almost athletic.

"What do you think, Tano, "the man asked, "is fear different for different people? Is there only 'fear,'a single thing that is the same for everyone? Or are there fears? "He thought a moment. "A child's fear. Do you think it's different from a man's fear? "He paused as if he were letting Luquin contemplate that. And then he said: "How could it not be?

"And how long can a human being be afraid, Tano? "the man asked in a quiet, conversational tone. He waited for an answer, as though he actually expected Luquin to respond. "A few days? Weeks? Months? "Pause. "To me, it seems that after a time, and that time is probably different for different people, fear turns into something else. For you, a person so experienced in such things, who knows, that period of time might be ... endless."

He pondered this a moment.

"What do you think? "he asked Luquin again. "You're something of a philosopher on the subject."

Luquin lay on the floor transfixed, his fecal-drenched underwear hanging out of his mouth, his forearms raised, wrists c.o.c.ked back in a posture of benumbed disbelief.

"Here's what I think, Tano, "the man continued. "I think that after a lengthy time, if that thing which causes fear continues and does not go away, then fear itself is transformed, almost like a chemical reaction. It turns to horror. And that, I think, is a more intense experience. Horror is miedo profundo." miedo profundo."

The man noted that Luquin's eyes were beginning to acquire the gla.s.sy look of disa.s.sociation. A film covered the eyes in such moments, like a cataract, though not milky in that way, but rather glittery, reflective, so that the film caught the light and obscured the eye behind the reflection.