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.