Bio-Strike

TWENTY-TWO

It was ten P.M. when enrique quiros drove his moon-gray Fiat Coupé 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 café 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 sweetheart.” Glenn patted the steering column with affection. “Bought her secondhand from an officer pal in Camp Pendleton who kept her in cherry condition, and she’s never let me down.”

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:

“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.

Ricci grabbed for the door handle. “Come on, I think we’ve got ourselves a destination,” he said.

“Lucio,” Quiros said.

“Enrique,” Salazar said.

They shook hands.

It was a few minutes shy of eleven o’clock, and they were standing in the darkened parking lot behind the Spanish Village. Salazar’s Caddy on one side of them, Quiros’s Fiat Coupé and Lincoln on the opposite side, their bodyguards grouped loosely near the cars from which they’d emerged.

“So,” Salazar said. “What now?”

Quiros looked at him in silence a moment, the cool night breeze riffling his lightweight sport jacket around his body. “Now we talk,” he said. “See if we can find a way to straighten out our problems.”

Salazar tilted his head toward their guards. “We need to give ourselves some room,” he said. “Take a walk, air things in privacy.”

Quiros nodded. “I propose we each bring one man to follow behind as a precaution,” he said. “Leave the rest here with the cars.”

Salazar had to grin. “Sure, a precaution,” he said. “Got to make sure we don’t kill each other on the garden path.”

Enrique looked at him. “I’m glad you’re smiling, Lucio,” he said.

The balance that Sword’s foot surveillance teams generally had to strike was the same balance struck by cops doing undercover work in every major population center in America or for that matter the developed world. On the one hand, there was an appreciable chance that someone would see them — regardless of their skills at camouflage, concealment, and clandestine movement, and also regardless of how derelict, deserted, or remote their area of operation might be. On the other hand, they understood that being seen and being noticed were two very different things, and that being exposed was yet a third thing altogether.

Here and now in Balboa Park, this meant they faced specific limitations in their use of apparel, weapons, and accessories. They could not, for example, wear form-hugging stealth suits, equipment vests, night-vision goggles, and ballistic helmets in environments where there was even the scant likelihood of a late-night stroller mistaking them for terrorist invaders out to lay siege to his home and neighborhood or, worse, of their targets nailing them for the covert personnel they happened to be.

With regard to arms, they were a bit less hamstrung. Full-sized VVRS rifles with their twenty-inch barrels were of course virtually unconcealable and consequently out. The diminutive upgrades most recently trialed by Ricci’s rapid deployment team were in, but because they were still designated as prototypical, they had been issued only to the complement of A-Team Sword ops who accompanied Ricci from San Jose that afternoon. Nevertheless, a fair range of offensive and defensive gear was available to the entire task force, from incapacitant sprays and grenades and less-than-lethal stingball guns to very lethal revolvers, automatic pistols, and compact submachine guns.

Their tactical guidelines were basically low profile: Street clothes were to be donned over mandatory Zylon bullet-resistant vests, weapons had to be easily stowable, and deadly fire restricted to an option of absolute last resort.

The civvies worn by the three-person foot team in the shadows outside the botanical building were sufficiently camouflaging to make the odds of their drawing a first glance quite slim, and sufficiently inconspicuous to make a second glance even less probable, should anyone’s eye chance upon them. One of the men had on a black rugby shirt, navy chinos, and black canvas loafers. The second wore a slate-gray sweatshirt, baggy crew pants, and black running sneakers. The female member of the team was dressed in a dark green rigger ensemble and matching jogging shoes. Their Sword identification patches were concealed beneath pull-down velcro flaps.

All three had been plainclothes law enforcement agents prior to hiring up with Sword, and were thoroughly versed in the ins and outs of surveillance.

As they passed under lushly crowned trees and wound through flourishing gardens, they strode casually side by side, one sipping bottled spring water, one unwrapping a stick of chewing gum, another pausing briefly to tie a shoelace. While attempting to remain quiet and keep out of direct light, they avoided letting it become an elaborate production. They did not walk on their tiptoes, dart between lampposts, peek around corners, or freeze in place like window mannequins whenever a head turned in their direction. The idea was to do their damnedest to stay out of view but act as natural as possible if they were sighted.

On tonight’s job, their experience yielded valuable dividends. The four Quiros soldiers they had been hastily assigned to follow had exited the breakaway Lincoln behind the Marston House at the far western end of El Prado, advanced across the gardens and meadows to the thoroughfare’s north, and then finally taken positions of hiding on either side of a thickly hedged walkway without displaying the slightest awareness that they were being tailed.

Although they couldn’t have known they were watching a trap being set for Lucio Salazar, the Sword ops did realize they had stumbled onto something important and quickly radioed Ricci and Glenn with word of their observations and position.

What would soon throw their situation into confusion, however, was the fact that they weren’t the only ones doing the watching.

In the Town and Country, the small man at the monitoring station saw Quiros’s men slip into the hedges through his optical relay with the shooter on the museum’s rooftop, who had noticed their movement while surveying the area through his long-range scope… a stroke of good fortune for Lucio Salazar.

Had it not been for that observation, he might well be walking to his death.

Little was said between Quiros and Salazar as they left the parking area, walking south past the Spanish Village toward the green dominated by the Moreton Bay fig tree, their bodyguards following like unspeaking golems, near enough for their presence to be felt, far enough away for it to be unobtrusive. The few words they did exchange were inconsequential: Beautiful night, air’s nice and fresh, been too long, don’t see each other much these days, business, you know. Even without the duplicitous secrets they concealed, their planned or contemplated treacheries, they would have been disinclined to hurry their conversation toward matters of substance. There was a timing, a restraint, an almost formalized ritual of overtures and preambles to which they were both accustomed and that for men such as themselves was essential to the politics of survival. Talk too soon, and one could look weak or anxious. Too late, and deception or indecision was assumed.

Timing.

At the eastern border of the green, Quiros paused a beat, glanced around as if to gain his bearings, then started briskly onto a path that would take them past the side of the Natural History Museum and into the Plaza de Balboa at the east end of El Prado.

Salazar touched his shoulder, noting his quickened pace.

“Lawn’s shorter,” he said and waved a hand to indicate the area behind the museum between the big Aussie tree and the village. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to cut across it instead.”

Quiros appraised him quietly. He’d heard the mistrust in his tone, seen his reluctance to take the path. “Why not?” he said, inserting a note of hesitancy into his own voice as he moved off the path. “I picked the spot, you pick the route.”

Salazar gave him a thin smile. “I hadn’t looked at it that way, but it sounds good to me,” he said and turned right toward the green.

That was exactly where Quiros had meant to steer him all along, knowing his men were in position at its western side, hidden there in the shrubs that bordered on the walkway leading toward the reflecting pond, lying in wait, ready to spring their ambush.

The squawks came almost back to back, one from the surveillance team that had stayed on Quiros and his walking pal since they’d appeared from behind the Spanish Village, a second from the spotters who’d watched Quiros’s soldiers move into hiding in the garden near the reflecting pond. Ricci and Glenn were jogging briskly toward the latter from the park entrance over by the Marston House at Balboa’s western extremity, not far from where Quiros’s breakaway car had been left.

“What’s your take on those sluggers that crawled into the bushes?” Glenn said.

“Same as yours,” Ricci said. “Looks like Quiros has something rotten cooking for whoever met him here…. What’s his name again?”

“Salazar,” Glenn said. “Lucio Salazar. At least that’s who my people think it is. He and his brothers in Mexico are old-time, all-purpose smugglers and racketeers. Got into dealing dope, hit the mother lode. He’s Quiros’s chief local competition.”

“Maybe not for much longer,” Ricci said.

Glenn nodded and ran on in silence a moment.

“At this pace, it’ll be a quick shot to that garden.”

“You positive we have a vehicle at every car exit?” Ricci said.

“Yeah.”

Ricci grunted, hustling along. “Be good to make the action,” he said. “Main thing for us, though, is that Quiros doesn’t slip away. Because that E-mail we got is looking righter and righter. And I’ve got a feeling that if we lose him now, we’re done.”

As soon as they got halfway across the green, Salazar slowed to halt and stood gazing at the Moreton Bay fig. “All those twists and turns, one grows out of the other, you never know which way they’re gonna go,” he said and indicated the outspread branches and root system intricately silhouetted in the partial moonlight. “I figure it’s what life’s about.”

Quiros made a meaningless sound and waited, concealing his impatience.

Salazar kept staring at the tree. “We should talk about Felix,” he said.

Quiros looked at him. This was not how it was supposed to happen. He wanted to get to the damned garden walkway.

“Let’s hold off,” he said. “The pond is a better place. We can sit there and—”

Salazar raised a hand abortively and faced him. “Now, Enrique,” he said. “I want to talk about him right now.”

Quiros studied his expression. It left no room for argument. So be it.

“You had a problem with my nephew, you should have come to me,” he said after a minute.

“For what? The problem, like you said… it was never him. He wouldn’t have done that job at the tunnel if you didn’t authorize it.”

Quiros shook his head. “He was on his own.”

“No.” Salazar’s voice was at once weary and bitter. “We came all the way here, might as well be straight.”

Quiros inhaled, exhaled. “That’s what’s been wrong from the start, Lucio. You answering your own questions. Making up your mind before you know the facts. I told you the truth, and you can believe it or not. It doesn’t make a difference to me. It isn’t even the real issue between us anymore. If you’d given me a chance, I’d have put Felix on the rack, made amends. But you chose otherwise. You took things into your own hands. What you did, how could you think it would resolve anything?”

“What I did—?”

“Killing my nephew. My sister’s only son. What were you thinking?”

Salazar glared with anger. “Even here, between us, you’re trying to pass off that bullshit—”

He never got to finish his sentence.

There were four simultaneous flashes from four different points above the green, four rifle cracks that merged into one loud, echoing sound that split the night like a thunderclap. Salazar jerked with surprise and confusion as Quiros’s head snapped sideways, blood misting up around it and spurting from a hole in his chest, and then his mouth dropped open and blood was pouring from it, too, streaming over his lips and chin. Quiros went down, folded almost neatly, and lay still there in front of him on the grass.

Salazar spun around and saw that Quiros’s guard was also on the ground, his own man standing over the sprawled body.

He looked up at the roof of the museum, at the great fig tree, at the tops of the Spanish Village cottages and saw no sign of the snipers, nothing at all except shadows and pale silver moonlight.

His eyes widened with confusion. He hadn’t given the order. What the hell had happened here? He hadn’t given the goddamned order.

Ricci and Glenn were within fifteen yards of the hedges when they heard the discharge of the sniper guns smack the air up ahead.

Both had slowed to a trot to keep from scaring Quiros’s men out of the bushes. Now they came to a frozen standstill and looked at each other.

“Those were rifle shots.” Ricci removed his radio’s earpiece so he could hear more clearly. “Plural, I’m pretty sure.”

Glenn nodded. “I’ve heard synchronous fire before. You don’t forget the sound.”

Ricci reached under his sport jacket and pulled his Five-Seven out of its holster. Glenn drew his own piece, a Beretta 9mm.

“Where you think the shooting came from?” Ricci said.

Glenn started to answer, then abruptly tapped his radio earpiece to indicate he’d been squawked, and listened.

His features were stunned as he ten-foured into the unit’s neck mike.

“Let’s have it,” Ricci said.

Glenn looked at him.

“Quiros is down,” he said. He pointed eastward beyond the walkway and hedges. “The green, back of the museum.”

“Fuck.” Ricci’s breath escaped him in a sick rush. “What about Salazar and his bodyguard?”

“They’re on the go.”

“Tell our people to stay on his tail, but I don’t want anybody trying to take him, not under any circumstances. Those shooters that tapped Quiros have the overhead positions and are going to cover his retreat.”

Glenn nodded and conveyed the message.

Ricci was forcing himself to think. “We have to get over to Quir—”

There was a loud stirring of vegetation to his right.

They might have started out of the bushes a second or two earlier, Ricci wasn’t positive. In his momentary crushing distraction, his effort to pull his wits together, he could have missed hearing them right off. But he’d heard them now.

He wheeled toward the sound of tossing branches, spotted Quiros’s men spotting Glenn and him, remembered a couple of them from the Golden Triangle office. One was the bulky door-opener, Jorge.

Just doing his job, Ricci thought.

And all within a heartbeat he saw the recognition in Jorge’s eyes, saw Jorge notice the Five-Seven in his hand…

And then Ricci saw Jorge start to point his own gun at him.

Glenn reacted to the disturbance in the shrubbery in near unison with Ricci, pivoting on his heel, whipping his Beretta toward the hitters as they appeared from cover.

“Team One, move in!” he called into his throat mike.

They were already moving.

By the time he saw the gun coming up in front of him, Ricci was on automatic pilot: his position, movement, and firing seamlessly integrated, the large figure outlined against the bushes objectified to his trained eye, a target with specific aiming points.

The Five-Seven in a firm, two-handed grip, his arms extended, feet apart, he dropped into the slight crouch of a police shooter’s stance and fired three rounds into the darkness, catching Jorge dead on with every one of them.

Clouted off his feet, Jorge collapsed backward, a yawning hole briefly visible in his chest before he crashed heavily down into a clump of shrubbery.

Ricci didn’t pause to think. You didn’t pause at these moments, didn’t think; at these moments you were the tip of an arrow.

Leading with his Five-Seven, he swiveled to the right, where another slugger had advanced from the bushes, his pistol a blur as he brought it up toward Glenn. Ricci took a quick breath, sighted, pulled the trigger on his exhalation. Glenn’s Beretta spurted flame at the same instant. The slugger did a grotesque shimmy on his feet, then pitched over sideways.

Ricci sought more movement, listened for more rattling in the hedges. There, over to the left, a third man raised his gun. A fourth beside him.

And then from farther back in the darkness, a female voice called out, “Don’t try it! Toss your weapons, hands up in the air. Now!”

Ricci focused on the spot from which the command had been shouted and saw a woman in a rigger’s outfit with a semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. The luminescent Sword ID on her breast identified her as one of his own.

A moment ticked by.

Two more figures had rushed out of the night to either side of the woman and formed up in a semicircle around the hedges. Men in dark civvies, firearms held out, glow-in-the-dark Sword insignias seeming to float over their chests.

Ricci kept his Five-Seven on the sluggers, saw Glenn doing the same with his Beretta from the corner of his eye.

Both men waited to see if the sluggers would pick smart or dead, their choice here, no lifelines, no polling the audience.

They dropped their pieces, raised their hands.

Smart.

Ricci sprang out of his crouch toward Glenn, leaving the frisk-and-cuff to their foot team.

“The green,” he said. His hand on Glenn’s arm. “Take me over there.”

Ricci had known Quiros was down but had hoped to a God he’d never been sure existed that Quiros wasn’t out. What he found on the lawn would not make a religious man out of him.

One brief glance at the body on the grass was all it took to establish there wasn’t a spark of life remaining in it. Whatever part of the head hadn’t gotten scattered aross the lawn was a gaping, bloody mess. Ricci guessed it should have seemed odd to him that Quiros’s glasses had stayed on his face, that they weren’t even askew, but he’d been around violent death enough to know it often had a sardonic touch.

He knelt over the body, searched through its pockets, and found nothing of use. Then he just knelt there feeling numb.

Far across the lawn, he could see Glenn looking up at the tops of the buildings around them, standing with his gun loosely at rest against his leg. The roofs looked empty. The monster tree looked empty. Not much risk to being here, the snipers were probably gone by now. If they were still in place, they weren’t a threat. Their work showed they’d been top-tier pros, and the job they’d been hired to perform was finished.

Glenn raised a hand to catch Ricci’s eye and signaled that he wanted to do a walkaround, pointing toward the front of the museum. Ricci waved for him to go ahead and watched him turn the building’s corner, leaving him alone with the body.

Ricci knelt over it, looked down at it, the night feeling very deep around him, its chill penetrating his clothes.

“You got away from me,” he said to Quiros’s un-hearing ears, his voice flat and husky. “Got away, you son of a bitch. And I don’t know what to do.”

He never heard anyone slipping up on him. Never heard a sound. Despite his natural alertness, his finely keyed senses, not a sound until the voice spoke out of the darkness mere inches behind his back.

“Shazam,” it said.

“Jesus Christ, what’d your guys think they were doing?” Lucio Salazar barked into his cellular.

Shaken and baffled, still clueless about why his hired triggers had opened fire, he was speeding from the park in his Caddy, unaware he’d just passed the spot where Sword’s roadblock for Enrique Quiros had been lifted moments earlier.

“They fulfilled their assignment,” the little man in the control station replied over their connection. “The proof is that you’re alive right now.”

“Are you out of your mind? I was handling things with Enrique. Talking to him. I never gave you the goddamned word—”

“It would be better if you could give me some respect. Quiros had people in the bushes ahead of you. I saw at least one of them holding a gun.”

Salazar’s brow wrinkled.

“Hold it a second,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“I know my job. Should I have waited until you reached those men? Let them make their move? If I’d done that, you’d be the one laying in your own blood right now.”

Not quite knowing how to respond, Salazar got off the phone and sat quietly as his driver turned toward the highway. In a way, the brief conversation had left him more confused than before. Looking back upon everything that had happened in the past half hour, remembering Quiros’s words to him, he had to admit that Quiros had seemed to genuinely believe it was the Salazar family that off’ed his bastardo nephew. And then there were his comments about making amends, which in hindsight also had sounded like they might have been sincere. On the other hand, Quiros had set a trap for him along the path, assuming the sniper boss had been on the level… and what would he have to gain from bullshitting about that?

The lines on Salazar’s forehead grew deeper. He supposed it didn’t pay to start entertaining second thoughts at this late stage. The best thing for him was probably to be thankful he was still in one piece, and move on. But questions of what Quiros had or hadn’t known — or done — kept gnawing at him. Because if there was even a speck of truth in the words he’d spoken before he was killed, it would cast serious doubt upon the reliability of Lathrop’s information. And then you’d have to start asking how Lathrop could have gotten it so wrong, and wondering about his motivations, his intentions…

The Cadillac was swinging onto the entrance ramp to I-5, heading north to Del Mar, where the timed explosive charge beneath its fuel tank suddenly detonated with a crumping blast, sending a burst of flame through its interior, its force punching out metal, blowing out both windshields and three of its four side windows, instantly killing Lucio Salazar, his driver, and the bodyguards who had been riding inside with them — leaving Salazar’s questions to vaporize in the smoke and superheated air.

But then, in matters of life and death, one could very rarely expect to receive all the answers.

Ricci’s hand went to his Five-Seven, drew the pistol from its holster even as he turned fast at the hip and looked behind him.

The man standing there was dressed entirely in black, regarding him with sharp, intelligent eyes. His hands were straight down at his sides. One was empty. The other held a square, flat object that Ricci would have immediately recognized as a CD gem case had the setting been different. In the context of his present situation, it took him a second or two.

He studied the man’s face. If the gun Ricci was pointing at him gave him any fear, he showed no sign of it.

“Who are you?” Ricci said.

The man tilted his head up a little, his lips parting, seeming for the briefest of moments to gaze past Ricci into the night sky. Then he locked eyes with him. “One Who Knows,” he said. “But I’ll bet you already have that figured out.”

Ricci’s gun was steady in his grip. But it felt suddenly cold. “Tell me what the hell you want.”

The man shook his head. “It’s what you want that’s important, and I’ve got it right in my hand.” He lifted the gem case from his side, held it out toward Ricci. “Take it. Poor Enrique here’s a dead end, so you’d might as well. What’s there to lose? Maybe you’ll feel you owe me one. But that will be up to you.”

Silence.

Ricci did not move for a long moment. Then he slowly reached out to the man and took the case from him, keeping his gun trained on his chest.

The man’s hand dropped back to his side. “I’m going to steal away into the night now,” he said. “Just tell me I don’t have to worry about you putting a slug into me for some odd reason.”

Ricci was still watching his eyes. “You already have that figured,” he said.

The man smiled and dipped his head in a gesture that almost resembled a bow.

“Be careful now,” he said.

Then the man turned and walked into the darkness, heading toward a nearby footpath, disappearing into the shadows beneath the trees rising tall on either side of it, leaving Ricci crouched over the body of Enrique Quiros, alone in the silent green, one hand around his gun, the other holding tightly on to a mystery.