The Thieves of Darkness (5 page)

Barabas himself took aim at the figure before him, fifty yards ahead. He steadied his gun hand while guiding the jeep and began rapid-firing.

F
EAR TORE THROUGH
Michael; he had not expected to be the bull’s-eye target of all of the guards, the fifteen-strong contingent rapid-firing at him. The bullets hit the ground behind him as he raced for the cliff. The edge was up ahead, falling off into total darkness. Michael ran harder than he had ever run before, knowing that the effort and pain would prove worthless if he didn’t make it.

But the bullets were erupting closer, shattering the ground around him. It would be only seconds before one of the shooters got lucky.

Without breaking stride, Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out the small remote. He thumbed back the cover, hit the red switch…

And the night was torn apart. An enormous fireball rose from behind the prison, lighting up the world around it. The fuel tanks, in concert with the C-4, rained destruction upon the generating plant. Even at a distance, Michael could feel the heat of the blast searing the air. The barrage of gunfire fell to silence as the guards instinctively dove for cover.

T
HIRTY YARDS BACK
, Barabas was not deterred. He never even looked in the direction of the fireball. His attention was like that of a hawk on its meal, fixed without distraction upon Michael. He rapid-fired his pistol until it clicked out of bullets. There was no time to
reload. He pinned the gas pedal to the floor. He was out of ammo, but that didn’t deter him. Ten yards. It would only be seconds before he ran the man down, the man who had destroyed his prison, freed his captives, and ruined his life.

M
ICHAEL HEARD THE
roar of the engine behind him, its pitch climbing as it approached with unabated acceleration. He could hear the crunching of the ground, the pinging of the pebbles as they hit the undercarriage of the jeep. Michael refused to look back; he refused to look at death. The jumping headlights grew brighter as they played off the cliff’s edge only feet away…

Michael leaped out into the night. The wind once again poured over his body. Without a pilot chute, he would have to pray that the reserve was packed properly and the deployment was quick. He held tight to the rip cord as he free-fell into darkness.

B
ARABAS SAW THE
abyss too late; his focus had been only on the runner. He slammed on the brakes with both feet, ramming the pedal into the floorboard. The jeep skidded left to right, its inertia determined to sail him out over the edge. He threw the wheel hard left, hoping to avoid the inevitable, but it was too late. His speed was too great for the brakes to overcome; the jeep skidded sideways, finally slipping over the cliff into oblivion.

M
ICHAEL HEARD THE
jeep behind him scrape over the edge. He craned his neck and watched as its headlights fell through the air, tumbling end over end. He turned his body and waited before pulling his chute, afraid of being pulled right into the descent of the two-thousand-pound vehicle that was still behind him, tumbling his way.

Michael turned his body, expanded it as much as he could to create the most drag, slowing his descent. It was only moments before he would be killed by either the falling jeep or an abrupt impact with the ground.

The jeep, as if in slow motion, crept alongside him. Michael briefly saw the driver’s fear, saw him clutching the wheel as if it would somehow deliver him from death. And Michael yanked the rip cord.

The chute skittered out of the pack, dragged up into the night by the wind, and the canopy deployed, yanking Michael’s body to an almost sudden halt. Michael watched as the lights of the jeep fell away to pinpoints and then a sudden fiery explosion glowed at the foot of the cliff, its orange tendrils reaching up for him. The deep, resonating sound echoed up seconds later.

Michael turned and guided the chute through the plume of rising smoke out into the desert on a northerly heading. He caught his breath as he began drifting. Suddenly, headlights flicked on, illuminating a section of level ground. Michael glided in, coming to an easy landing. KC and Simon were leaning up against a Land Rover.

A tall man, six-four, walked up to Michael, his blond hair a tangle in the night’s summer breeze.

“You’re always late,” Paul Busch said as wrapped his bearlike arms around Michael, hugging him tight.

At forty-seven stories, Wake Financial was the tallest building in Amsterdam. Built in 2007, it soared above the Amstel River and had an unobstructed view west to the North Sea. It sat just south of the historic district of the Dutch capital with its meandering canals that gave the city its nickname, Venice of the North. The three uppermost floors of the glass structure were occupied by the PV Group. Floor forty-five traded stock and precious metals, floor forty-six bought and sold real estate, and floor forty-seven dealt in the more illicit trades.

The organization was owned and presided over by Philippe Venue. The sixty-two-year-old sat behind an enormous black onyx desk, his thick, gnarled hands stroking a large paperweight, his eyes locked on a dark oil painting that hung upon the near wall. Over two hundred years old, it depicted a sick child in its mother’s arms amidst a host of warring gods fighting among the sunlit clouds.

Venue’s office was vast, over one thousand square feet. The furnishings were thick and heavy; leather and suede. There were several seating areas, a long cherrywood conference table that sat sixteen, and an enormous fireplace that lay dormant for the summer months but was constantly aflame during the cold Dutch winters. There were bookcases adorned with antiquities, with a heavy representation of Byzantine sculpture and carving; the walls were covered with a host of Renaissance
and Expressionist paintings, while Classical Greek and Roman statuary rested upon squat, fluted pedestals. Though some of the art had been procured through auction houses, some had been obtained in a less legitimate fashion. It was similar to the way he collected companies: some through aboveboard monetary transactions, others through more physical confrontations. But whatever the acquisition might be, he orchestrated its obtainment and concluded it here in his palatial office suite, the inner sanctum of a man whose reputation had grown to mythic proportions.

Venue stood six-foot-three and carried the weight of a wrestler. His hair had receded almost to nothingness, and what little he possessed had been gray since he was thirty. His face was thick and gnarled from several broken noses and small scars achieved on the streets of his childhood, the streets that had afforded him an education that could never have been achieved at Yale, Harvard, or Cambridge. He had been handsome in his youth in a rough-and-tumble way, the broken, slightly off-kilter nose giving him character as opposed to hideousness.

He wore a black pinstripe Armani suit, a blue Hermès tie, and black Gucci cap-toe shoes. It was his battle uniform of choice for negotiations, hirings, and firings. He was a man of singular purpose and that purpose was himself. He had amassed a fortune of more than three billion dollars over twenty-five years and had done it with no one standing at his side. There was no room in his life for the foolish demands of family or love, only the drive to gain wealth and power.

At the age of thirty-eight Venue started an investment firm from scratch, basing himself in Amsterdam. It had always been his favorite city, in a beautiful world where laws were lenient and morals lax. He loved the canals and the architecture of old; the brick and stone town houses that lined the picturesque waterways; the four hundred quaint bridges that crossed them. As Amsterdam was one of the few European cities spared bombing during World War II, the old section of the city was able to resist the encroachment of the modern world.

Venue hired experts in stock trading, real estate, and finance, and went about investing judiciously, buying companies for their synergistic
capabilities. He installed fifteen security monitors upon the wall near his desk, hooked up to over fifty cameras on the two floors below so as to monitor the productivity of every employee as their images cycled by. Venue would sometimes stare at them for hours, watching the hustle and bustle, the frantic deal-making, all for his sole benefit—a hive of men and woman serving to enrich their keeper.

The companies Venue purchased were varied: energy, textiles, pharmaceuticals, entertainment. Once he set his sights on his quarry, he wouldn’t relent until he had taken it down, dragging it into his conglomerate. He had a unique style of negotiation, one that could bend the will of even the most difficult seller. While organized crime looked to control drugs and prostitution, he used similar tactics to acquire and control legitimate enterprise, bending people to his will through fear, intimidation, and sometimes even death.

Accusations were only whispered, and bringing charges was never even considered. He had filled officials’ pockets with money, graft, and trepidation. He was as feared as the devil and no one thought he could be stopped. But as in all things in life, even the devil has his day.

The markets had turned; vast profits became stunning losses. Real estate prices became depressed, wiping out his highly leveraged equity positions.

Now, as he turned his attention to the images on the wall of monitors, there was hardly any activity beyond a handful of traders trying to shore up his company and a bevy of accountants fabricating books, building illusions to keep the authorities away.

But what troubled him more, beyond the loss of his riches and power, was that
they
had found him. It was only a matter of time before he was revealed to the world for what he truly was and what was left of his fragile empire crumbled around him.

A young man sat before him; he was blond, blue-eyed, and had yet to realize he was actually handsome. He had grown up poor and longed to give something back to his parents, who had sacrificed so much for his education, for his life. Jean-Paul Ducete did his undergraduate work at the Sorbonne and his graduate work at the London School of
Economics and was first in his class—both times. Recruited two years earlier for his unnatural intelligence and his insatiable drive to succeed, he worked eighteen-hour days seven days a week for Venue. His apartment, only one block away on Vristed Street, was used solely for sleep. He took all his meals while at work and postponed life and marriage so as to always be on the job. He dedicated himself to Venue and his visions, knowing that this would lead to the beginning of his own fortune, to being able to give back to his family, to being able to create a life of meaning and value.

But fortune is a word with many meanings, and his fortune had changed less than a half hour earlier. The mistake wasn’t his, it was made by an underling. It was a simple error that could not have been detected by regulators, an error that was easily corrected without consequence, but an error nonetheless. And in the eyes of someone like Venue there was no room for error, unless it was committed by himself. Venue delivered a two-hour lecture to Jean-Paul, most of it on his own brilliance, his own honesty and integrity, exhaustively expounding on his own genius and how moronic the rest of the world was.

Venue demanded Jean-Paul’s resignation and typed up the email announcement to the employees that Jean-Paul had left to pursue other interests.

Venue stood and walked around his desk. Leaning against it, staring down at Jean-Paul, he explained he didn’t want to hurt him; he just didn’t have room for a single mistake. He stood over him like a father over a son, silently staring down in disappointment at the seated young man.

Then, with a blinding swiftness not natural to a person of sixty-two, Venue grabbed the paperweight and, in a single motion, swung it around, hitting Jean-Paul square in the side of the head. He raised the paperweight again and smashed it down on Jean-Paul’s nose, driving the bone back into his brain. Again and again he hit him, the gore exploding about the room. Jean-Paul tried to spin away, but it was useless. He tumbled out of the chair and the old man leaped upon him, pummeling his blond head until it was unrecognizable, his blue eyes swollen shut, what was left of his hair matted red with blood.

Venue finally stood, walked to his private bathroom, and showered. He dressed in a pair of linen pants, a green sport coat, and crocodile loafers. He headed back to his desk, being sure to give a wide berth to Jean-Paul’s bloody corpse so as not to stain his clean clothes and shoes. He looked once more at the email announcement of Jean-Paul’s resignation and departure from the firm and hit Send.

The phone upon Venue’s desk rang. He hit the speakerphone and was greeted by a static-filled voice. “Venue?”

“Well?” Venue said as he leaned back in his chair.

“Barabas is dead,” the man said.

“Am I to assume that is not the state of his two latest inmates?”

“They’re gone,” the man said, as if announcing a death in the family.

“That’s what I get for trusting things to corrupt wardens.” Venue tried to contain his anger. “What a waste of money, thank you very much.”

“Hey, Barabas was your guy,” the man shot back. “He did your bidding, not mine.”

“If we’d killed them here or at least let the police handle it like I said in the first place—”

“If they were killed in Amsterdam and the bodies traced back to you … if they were sent through the court system and it was revealed what they had stolen … think about it.”

“Don’t think you are beyond reproach,” Venue said.

“Seems I’m having to clean up more and more of your messes—” the man began.

“And you will continue to do so until I say otherwise,” Venue screamed, pounding his fist on the desk, silencing the man. “And how the fuck did they even know we had the letter? How did they know it was in my office? Of all people to know it was in my office … What the fuck’s going on? The girl and a priest, for Christ’s sake, you know what my feelings are on that.”

The man on the other end of the phone remained silent but for his steady breathing.