"No. "t.i.tus cringed. Was that another offense? Was he expected to live with Alvaro listening to every word spoken in his own home? He couldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. "He didn't say specifically not to do it."

"Then you've got a choice to make. Get used to it, or be ready to live with the consequences, if there are any."

"I can't live like that."

"Fine. Do you know people who can do that for you?"

"I own a software company. We work with electronic security constantly."

"You're going to need some highly specialized people, Mr. Cain. You've got a very specific kind of problem there. It's not the same. Surely you can see that."

s.h.i.t. t.i.tus felt stupidly naive. He was going to have to start thinking differently.

"Mr. Cain, this is my profession. This is what I do. Let me send someone to you. They know about the latest technology. They know this game. Okay?"

"Yeah, "t.i.tus said. "Okay."

"They'll be there tomorrow, "Burden said. "Now, you're coming down here tomorrow so we can talk?"

"Yeah-"

"Do you speak Spanish?"

"No."

"Doesn't matter."

"What do you want me to do, just fly down there?"

"No. I'll get instructions to you. And Mr. Cain, you need to understand right now that nothing is 'just' anything anymore. From now on you are an extraordinary exception to the general rules of just about everything."

WEDNESDAY.

The Second Day

Chapter 9.

Any significant sleep had been impossible during the night. t.i.tus had lain in bed watching the black hills against the cobalt dark sky and was still watching as the sun rounded the curve of the earth, scattering the night before it.

At nine-fifteen the next morning, a van and a pickup with no markings pulled into t.i.tus's driveway. They stopped within a large enclosure of high hedges that screened the parking area from the city.

Mark Herrin was a quiet young man with a ponytail and a gentle smile. He was a full head taller than Cline, his partner, who had a fraternity-neat haircut and a tendril of a black tattoo creeping out of the white collar of his shirt along his left jugular vein.

They introduced themselves, and Herrin said, "Garcia said to a.s.sume everything in the house is hot."

"I'm not positive about it, "t.i.tus said. "I do know the security system's been bypa.s.sed."

"We'll give it all a good cleaning, "Herrin said with a kind of lazy indifference. "Actually debugging a place like this takes a lot of equipment. We're going to have to haul some things inside. Big stuff. "He looked around at the hedge enclosure. "This is a big break, having this protection. I don't like working under the opposition's constant supervision, you know, "he said, throwing a look across the valley toward the river.

"Then you think the house is being watched? "t.i.tus asked.

"If you're a target, you're a target, "Herrin said simply. "If this guy's serious, there's no such thing as half-a.s.sed in this business."

They stood there between the driveway and the veranda while Herrin had t.i.tus corroborate the information Burden had pa.s.sed on to him, and then he asked him a lot of additional questions.

"Okay, "Herrin said after a while. "We need to go inside and look around. Now, when we start locating these bugs and jerking them out of there, they're going to know about it. So after we pop the first one, the cat's out of the bag. But there's no need to give them a heads-up, either. So when we get in there let's don't talk about what we're going to be doing, okay?"

t.i.tus led them inside and showed them through the house. Once they had a feel for the layout of the place, t.i.tus left them alone to wander through the house and survey the size of their job.

Remembering what Herrin had said about the house being watched, t.i.tus walked down the allee to the site where the stone workers were facing the reservoir. They came in every morning just after sunrise to get an early start on the heat, using the code to the front gates on the property. t.i.tus had been using these men for years to do work around the property, but now he wasn't comfortable with someone having access to that kind of freedom to the grounds.

Standing in the shade of an oak, he talked with Benito, the foreman, and told him that he was going to have some other men on the property working on some electrical problems, and he didn't want that many crews and trucks there at the same time. He said he'd give Benito's crew two weeks' paid vacation-beginning right now. When they came back, they could pick up where they'd left off.

Benito was surprised, but two weeks' paid vacation smoothed over a lot of puzzlement, and t.i.tus shook his hand and headed back to the house. He could hear the crew loading their tools into the truck behind him.

t.i.tus returned to the kitchen and looked at his watch. He had about forty minutes before he had to leave. He picked up his cell phone and walked outside to call Carla Elster, his a.s.sistant at CaiText.

"Carla, listen, I don't really have any must-do meetings during the next few days, do I?"

"Nothing on your calendar but the weekly touch-base reviews with the department heads, "Carla said. "But, uh, Matt Rohan did call late yesterday and wanted to see you for about half an hour when you had time today. He didn't say what about. As usual. And Donice McCafferty called for an appointment. I'm guessing she wants to ask if CaiText will sponsor their charity drive again this fall. And I was supposed to remind you that there's a retirement party on Friday for Alison Daly in accounting."

There was no wasted motion and no wasted moments in Carla's life. She was disciplined, focused, organized, and faithful to her routines. She had to be, because without it her life and t.i.tus's life would fall apart. At least she was convinced they would.

Carla had been his a.s.sistant since the day he'd signed the corporation doc.u.ments to start CaiText. Until he'd met Rita, Carla had been the one person he'd depended on to give him a grounded second opinion and an honest, compa.s.s-correcting perspective on whatever was preoccupying him at the time. She was like a sister to him.

"Okay, well, if you could just put all of that on hold for right now, I'd appreciate it."

"On hold? For how long?"

"A few days, maybe. I'm going to be out of pocket a couple of days."

Pause. "Okay. "Pause. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah, sure. "He stopped. Jesus. He was tempted, enormously tempted, to say something to her, to relieve some of the pressure he felt, but he kept remembering Alvaro's words: I don't want anyone suspicious... . That's the important thing. I really can't emphasize that enough. I don't want anyone suspicious... . That's the important thing. I really can't emphasize that enough.

"t.i.tus, "she said, "what's going on?"

At forty-six, Carla was a single mother of twin daughters who were soon to enter their freshman year at Vanderbilt University. Her husband had left her six years earlier when the girls were in the sixth grade, and Carla had immediately galvanized her mind and turned her life into a regimen. She was determined to do it all without him, and she did. She'd be d.a.m.ned if she would let her life fall apart in his absence. A man who would leave his wife and young daughters to fend for themselves couldn't have been all that valuable in the first place, she decided. She wouldn't let him be.

t.i.tus had helped her throughout the whole ordeal. Whenever she needed to take off from work for the girls'school events, she never even had to ask. He boosted her salary to compensate for the loss of half her income, and he made sure the girls had summer jobs at CaiText so Carla didn't have to worry about them during the day.

Her husband had maddeningly given her the house in West Lake Hills without a whimper. The fact that he didn't think it worth fighting for infuriated her. And he didn't even fuss that much about the level of alimony she had demanded. He was in such a hurry to set up housekeeping with his new girlfriend that he practically ran from everything they had built together over fourteen years of marriage.

And then there was Darlene, his new woman. Darlene was half Carla's age. She was a blonde; Carla was a brunet. She was tall; Carla was not so tall. She was health-nut thin and tight; Carla was practical medium and not so tight. Darlene didn't work; Carla had worked for CaiText their entire marriage and was as loyal to t.i.tus and the company he was building as if she owned half of it. The striking differences in the two women were an additional humiliation. Darlene was everything that Carla wasn't.

But that had been six years ago. She had created a new life and a new self. She had made a stable home for her daughters while she had nurtured them through the storms and stresses of adolescence. They were good girls, and she was proud of them.

Now, though, with the girls away from home for the first time at summer jobs in Denver that t.i.tus had gotten for them, and soon to be off to their first year at the university, Carla found herself with a spare moment once in a while, for the first time in eighteen years. She was dating a man, Nathan Jordan, who was considerate and sensible and comfortable with the girls, who liked him very much. She was entering a new season in life, and it looked as if it were going to be a good one.

"Everything okay with Rita? "she asked.

"Yeah, everything's fine. I talked with her last night."

Pause. He could feel her listening to his voice, reading between the lines of the way he sounded. She was all over this.

"Come on t.i.tus. What's going on?"

"I'm under a little pressure here, "he said. "It's nothing to do with Rita. It's ... financial. And it's personal, company's not involved. But Rita doesn't know about it yet. It doesn't seem right to go into it with you before I've had a chance to tell her."

"Well ... is it ... disastrous? I mean, h.e.l.l, t.i.tus, give me something to put this in perspective."

"Several months back I made some ... risky investments. I've just learned that they've gone bad. I've lost a h.e.l.l of a lot of money. I'm working out how to deal with it. I can tell you more in a few days. But right now, Carla, you're the only person who knows about this. Understand?"

"Yeah, t.i.tus, I understand, "she said, and he could hear the sympathy and the actual hurt in her voice. "Listen, I'm sorry to hear this. If I can do anything ... I'll do anything I can."

"I've got to go, "he said.

Chapter 10.

Herrin's a.s.sistant with the jugular tattoo drove out of t.i.tus's place in his pickup, his windows rolled down in the late morning heat, obviously alone, as anyone could see. In a hidden compartment under the bed of the pickup, t.i.tus lay in the dark, guessing the truck's route by following the right and left turns as they made their way down the winding roads to Westlake Drive and headed toward town.

The ride downtown hardly registered on t.i.tus. He carried no additional clothes, only his laptop, as Burden had instructed. He felt webby headed, his reflexes sluggish from the lack of sleep, his mind only slightly distracted by the rattling of equipment in the pickup's toolboxes and by the smell of plastics and electrical wiring.

Cline let him out in the first level of the Four Seasons underground parking garage, and t.i.tus took the elevator down to the second level, where he met two men waiting beside a rental car. No introductions.

While one of the guys went over t.i.tus with a debugging instrument, the other one opened his laptop and put it through a series of checks as well. Satisfied, they told him to lie down in the backseat of the car, and they drove out of the garage. A few minutes later they told him he could sit up, and he stared out the window into the bright summer light while they headed east out of downtown to Austin-Bergstrom International.

They bypa.s.sed the main terminal entrance and circled around behind to the charter flight hangars. The car drove straight onto the tarmac to a waiting King Air 350, and in twelve minutes t.i.tus was in the air.

Alone in the cabin, he watched as the earth fell away outside the window, and when they began pa.s.sing through the white, c.u.mulous clouds, he reclined his seat as far as it would go. Still trying to understand how this could be happening to him, he fell asleep.

Awakened by the quickly sinking Beechcraft, he sat up just as they were touching down. Zipping past the window was a narrow valley, the gra.s.s lush with the summer rains and scattered with up-reaching fingers of garambullo garambullo cactus and huisache trees with gracefully outspread canopies. As the pilot turned the aircraft and cut back on the engines, t.i.tus saw a black Suburban waiting at the edge of the isolated airstrip. cactus and huisache trees with gracefully outspread canopies. As the pilot turned the aircraft and cut back on the engines, t.i.tus saw a black Suburban waiting at the edge of the isolated airstrip.

The driver was a hefty Mexican behind sungla.s.ses and a mustache, polite but taciturn, and soon they were sailing along the valley's dirt road. Beyond the nearer rolling hills, the Sierra de Morenos stretched out in the blue distance as far as t.i.tus could see. Finally they reached a two-lane paved road and turned south.

San Miguel de Allende was a small hillside town in central Mexico, a couple of hours north of Mexico City. Rich in colonial history, it was crowded with handsome churches and elegant homes cl.u.s.tered along narrow, and sometimes steep, cobblestone streets. It was famously beautiful and long had been a favorite retreat for wandering American writers and artists and eccentric expatriates with dubious pasts. For several decades now it had become a popular second-home destination for well-to-do Americans and a cosmopolitan international crowd.

After rambling into the heart of town, past the Jardin, and then up into the higher neighborhoods, the driver eventually squeezed the Suburban into a cobbled lane of simple, sunwashed walls. He stopped the groaning vehicle on a steep incline and said something in Spanish, gesturing at a ma.s.sive, dark wooden door set in a fading cornflower blue wall. A jacaranda, lavish with blossoms like broken pieces of the sky, sheltered the doorway. To one side, a brilliant bougainvillea splashed over the top of a rock wall as if the stones were holding back a sea of magenta.

t.i.tus got out with his laptop and waited for his driver to pull away up the hill before he crossed the lane. He stepped down from the steeply rising sidewalk to the level threshold of the cathedral-size door, banged the bra.s.s door knocker in the shape of a woman's hand, and waited as the sound echoed and died between the high walls of the lane.

Very quickly a normal-size door inset into the larger one was opened by a grandmotherly Indian, who smiled at him with bright teeth generously framed in gold. Her abundant black-and-gray-striated hair was parted in the middle and worn in two braids that reached down past her thick waist.

Greeting him in Spanish, she stepped back to invite him inside, a brown hand pressed gracefully to the front of her white blouse, which was embroidered with broad, alternating bands of russet and gold. Her skirt, a dazzling thing of cobalt and black stripes, stopped just an inch above her bare, stubby toes.

Talking to him all the while, she ushered him through a short corridor into the diffused brightness of a colonnade that enclosed a garden courtyard. The quadrangle of arches drew his eyes upward, where the dappled light fell past the secondfloor colonnade through the canopies of trees.

Continuing her lilting but unintelligible monologue, the woman gestured politely for t.i.tus to wait on a long wooden bench against the ocher walls of the deep ambulatory. And then she disappeared. Wooden birdcages with varicolored finches and canaries hung along the colonnades, and a fountain in the center of the courtyard added its splash to the highpitched chatter of the birds.

Just as t.i.tus took a deep breath, he was startled by an outburst of shouting. A woman's voice shrilled from one of the doorways on the second floor, a staccato, singsong flood of an Asian language delivered in spirited anger.

Then silence.

Slowly the birds, stopped by the verbal eruption, resumed.

Before t.i.tus could even begin to imagine what that might have been about, a voice above him said, "Welcome to my home, Mr. Cain."

t.i.tus recognized the voice and looked up to the left side of the courtyard balcony.

Garcia Burden was leaning his forearms on the stone bal.u.s.trade, looking down at him. He was tallish and lean, and his dark hair hadn't seen a barber in a good while. His unb.u.t.toned black shirt hung open, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. A gold medallion on a chain around his neck dangled over the bal.u.s.trade.

"We're just about ready for you up here, "Burden said. "There are stairs over there. "He gestured toward a stone staircase. "Just come around the balcony, "he said, swinging his arm past the open doorways.

Burden was b.u.t.toning the front of his shirt as t.i.tus approached him, and as they shook hands t.i.tus noted that they were very nearly the same height. But Burden's age was difficult to determine. He might've been near t.i.tus's age as well, but the crow's-feet at the corners of his brown eyes were deeply cut and had the effect of seeming to distort his age. And there was something in the eyes themselves that made t.i.tus take a second look, something that made him think they had seen more than their share of remarkable things, many of them unnerving.

"Based on what you and Gil have told me, "Burden said, his soft voice even softer now that they were near, "I've got it narrowed to three men. I've got photographs."

He turned and led t.i.tus through the open doorway in front of which he'd been standing.

The house was old, with the three-foot-thick walls typical of colonial architecture. The room they entered was huge and probably had been several rooms at one time. Though they were only pa.s.sing through, heading for another opened doorway on the other side, t.i.tus quickly caught glimpses of antique desks and bookcases, a sitting area with sofa and armchairs, a round library table stacked with books, some still open, a fountain pen cradled in the gutter of one. The only light in the room came in through the deep cas.e.m.e.nts of the doors and windows.

As they went out the other door and onto another balcony, t.i.tus realized that the simple blue wall that faced the street concealed a sizable compound. Here they looked down on a second garden courtyard twice as large as the first one and surrounded by several two-story casitas also connected by two levels of colonnades. Towering flamboyan flamboyan trees cast a lacy veil of shade over everything. trees cast a lacy veil of shade over everything.

t.i.tus followed Burden into the first casita and through a time warp into the twenty-first century: a long narrow room chilly with air-conditioning, numerous computers and servers, a movie screen, a huge television screen, and videophones. Three women moved about the room, working at various tasks, ignoring Burden's arrival.

"Let's show him what we have, "he said to no one in particular, and one of the women nearby turned around and sat at the computer. t.i.tus was surprised to see that she was a Mayan Indian, her flattened features distinctive and unmistakable.

While she typed, t.i.tus glanced at the other two women: an attractive Asian woman who appeared to be in her late forties, her hair worn in a precisely cut bob, dressed in a very smart, straight black skirt and dove gray blouse; and a busty woman of middle height and middle age, plain with Scotch-Irish coloring, roan hair, and a sweet, blue-eyed smile.

Burden stood with his arms crossed, staring over at the TV screen. When the first photo flashed up, he looked at t.i.tus. t.i.tus shook his head. Second photo. Burden looked at t.i.tus. Again t.i.tus shook his head.

"Oh? "Burden seemed both surprised and eager. "Really? Well then, here's your man."

Third photo. It was Alvaro in a grainy photograph blown up from a small surveillance negative, crossing a street-t.i.tus thought it looked like Buenos Aires, maybe-a newspaper tucked under his arm as he glanced back in the direction of the photographer, though not at him.