Thief (2 page)

The Bentley drove on through. A burly guard carrying a clipboard came to the window.

“Your name, sir?”

“Johanson,” Monarch said, showing him a forged Christmas party invitation featuring an embossed golden tree. “Asa Johanson.”

The guard glanced down his list, nodded, said, “Just you, Mr. Johanson?”

“My blind date stood me up. Can you believe the nerve of some guys?”

The guard coughed, said, “Pull up front. A valet will take your car.”

“Where will it be parked?” Monarch asked.

He gestured back across the street. “By the stables. A valet will bring it when you're ready to leave.”

“Perfect,” Monarch said, and drove on through the gates.

 

3

THIS WAS THE KIND
of job Robin Monarch loved. The stakes were admittedly high, but if he succeeded, the mark, in this case the tycoon, would be in no position to complain to anyone official.

The thief felt confident as he pulled the Rover up to the valet. He'd done his research. He knew his target, its location, and his method of entry. But he reminded himself that in this sort of setting, with several hundred people mingling inside a grand home, things would be fluid. He was going to have to adapt.

Climbing from the Rover, Monarch removed the Chesterfield coat and put it on a hanger in the back. He didn't want to stop at any coat check leaving the party. Tossing the valet the keys with his gloved hands, he strode easily up the heated walkway, heading toward massive carved oak doors that depicted a bull goring a fleeing bear.

The air was spiced and he spotted a pot of it brewing on a burner set discretely in some bushes to the left of the doors. From beyond the doors came Christmas music, a beautiful woman's voice was singing a soft jazzy rendition of “I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In).”

Before Monarch could knock, the door opened and caught him in a blaze of yuletide light and good cheer. The doorman stood aside, and the thief stepped inside a foyer that looked like a movie set, including an elevator with a burled walnut door, and a grand spiral staircase with a rail wrapped in fresh cedar ropes, flowing red bows, and pinpoint white lights that glinted like ice crystals falling on a bitter cold morning.

There were fifteen or so people in the foyer, all in evening wear and fine jewels, most of them moving toward a hallway and the ballroom, as Monarch remembered from the blueprints.

“Can I get your name tag?” asked a woman in a light Irish accent.

Two young, pretty women, the Irish redhead and the other an Asian with frosted hair tips, were throwing him winning smiles from where they sat behind a table covered in badges adorned with sprigs of mistletoe.

Monarch tapped the hearing aide, gave her a quick glance at the forged invitation, and said, “Asa Johanson.”

That surprised her and she extended her hand, studying him. “I'm Grace Lawlor, Mrs. Arsenault's P.A. You're the late add then?”

“Is that a bad thing?” Monarch said, affecting chagrin. “The late add?”

“Not at all,” Grace Lawlor said, playing with a string of pearls at her neck and smiling. “You are most welcome, Mr. Johanson. By the way, how do you know Mr. Arsenault? I didn't have time to ask.”

“Oh,” he said, taking the badge from her. “Beau and I go way back. We used to ski together at Stowe. We ran into each other at a gallery I run in SoHo and he insisted on having me out.”

“Brilliant,” she said. “He'll be thrilled to see you.”

“Not as thrilled as I'll be to see him,” Monarch replied, winked, and then moved aside as a new batch of the uber-rich arrived wearing enough mink, sable, and chinchilla to cause an emotional meltdown at PETA.

The ballroom ceiling was at least twenty-five feet high and made of embossed copper that picked up the soft light of several hundred electric candles and gas lamps that made the vast space glow as warmly as if the Ghost of Christmas Present was right there. Indeed, there was a strong Dickensian theme to the party. The ballroom had been decorated to resemble a snowy London Street, complete with trompe l'oeil paintings of storefronts including Old Fezziwig's and Scrooge & Marley's counting house. And the servers moving food and drink among the guests were dressed for the nineteenth century with top hats and hook skirts.

The irony of a guy like Arsenault using
A Christmas Carol,
the story of a skinflint redeemed, was not lost on Monarch. Worth northward of fourteen billion dollars, Arsenault was utterly ruthless, a polished, and yet callous man who had never sported a callus in his entire life. Though his wealthy parents had regularly engaged in philanthropy, the mogul rarely gave money to charity, braying often and publicly that fortitude and an enterprising spirit was all that anyone required to better their lot in life. No one, in Arsenault's opinion, required a handout or a hand up. The theme of the party suggested that the tycoon was spitting at the idea that someone like him could find his way to charity.

So much the better, Monarch thought when he spotted Arsenault across the room. Wearing a green and red cummerbund and a long-tail tux, the fifty-three-year-old was a six-foot-six, boyish-faced man with an egoist's posture and bearing. The mogul was sipping bourbon neat from a cut-glass tumbler and standing with a group of his cronies watching a stunning African American woman in an equally stunning evening dress sing a bluesy “Merry Christmas Baby” next to a black Steinway grand.

Monarch knew her.

Cassie Knox was the hottest female singer on the charts at the moment, a soul and blues singer with six Grammy nominations, and two top-ten singles in the past year. It had to have cost Arsenault a small fortune to get her to appear. Then again, everything about the party suggested that he'd spent several small fortunes on the evening.

Looking as if her face had recently been stretched, nipped, and tucked, Louisa Arsenault, the tycoon's wife, took the end of the song to rush up and embrace Knox. Then Louisa took the microphone and purred at the audience in a sweet Southern drawl, “Isn't she fantastic? Isn't she the best money can buy?”

Despite the singer's awkward reaction to that there were cheers all around.

“Beau?” Louisa said. “Would you like to come up and greet our guests?”

A hush fell over the room as her husband set down his bourbon glass on the lip of a marble planter and made his way up onto the raised platform, grabbing a flute of champagne from a passing waiter along the way. The mogul bowed to Cassie Knox, who looked embarrassed, and then kissed his wife and turned to the crowd, raising his glass and shouting, “A Merry Christmas and a profitable New Year to one and all!”

Monarch, who was already making a beeline for that empty bourbon glass, knew the tycoon was going to say that, word for word. As a matter of fact, he knew a whole lot about Beau Arsenault and his legendary Christmas party.

The mogul had come up on the thief's radar eleven months before, in the aftermath of the kidnapping of U.S. Secretary of State Agnes Lawton by the Sons of Prophecy terrorists. It turned out that the
Niamey,
the oil tanker the terrorists seized, had belonged to one of Arsenault's many far-flung companies.

Arsenault had also been a college classmate and client of Secretary Lawton's late husband, Bill, who was implicated in the kidnapping, and who took his own life before he could be arrested. According to reports Monarch had seen, the FBI looked at Arsenault but they'd found no connection to the Sons of Prophecy.

And to his credit, the mogul had supported Secretary Lawton in the wake of it all, even speaking at her husband's funeral when the rest of Washington had treated Bill Lawton as a pariah. Other than owning the tanker and knowing Bill Lawton, Arsenault looked like a stand-up guy.

Still, there had been something about the billionaire that bothered the thief. He'd gotten an old friend and colleague, Gloria Barnett, to look into the fat cat's background.

Barnett was brilliant at what she did—a hybridization of high-speed research, technical support, and crisis ops—and she was soon funneling Monarch everything that she could find on the mogul and his wife.

Arsenault was one of those guys born on third base. His father had been a successful oil wildcatter from Louisiana, and his mother came from an old-money Connecticut family. Their combined wealth had topped thirty million dollars, which meant their son had spent his childhood moving between a plantation outside New Orleans, the estate in Greenwich, and beachfront cottages on Galveston Island and Nantucket. Beau had been educated at Phillips Exeter, Yale, and Tulane Law School.

When Arsenault was twenty-four, his parents died in a plane his father, an expert aviator, was flying. The FAA believed he'd had a heart attack despite the fact he'd had an electrocardiogram the week before and passed with ease.

Arsenault had left Tulane Law to take control of the family fortune, and in twenty-nine years had expanded it exponentially to include companies and investments in everything from oil exploration and shipping to steel, pharmaceuticals, and government contracting. Along the way, he'd become a behind-the-scenes player in politics, spending lavishly in support of candidates who supported his causes in Washington.

In his daily life, the tycoon seemed to go out of his way to avoid the spotlight. His wife, however, was a different story. A former debutant from Shreveport, Louisa was a publicity hound. Barnett found articles in
Architectural Digest
that described Louisa's rebuilding of the plantation house, which was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, and her renovation of the massive Georgian mansion in Greenwich. There was also a recent article in
Vanity Fair
that used the Arsenault's annual Christmas party to illustrate Louisa's ever-expanding social presence among the top one percent of the top one percent.

This was all stuff anyone with a bit of curiosity could have gleaned from the public record and the Internet, and hardly reason for someone like Monarch to target the Arsenaults. But Barnett had dug deeper than the public record and the Internet. She'd hired a guy Monarch knew only as Zullo, a computer security genius, to hack the mogul.

Zullo got into several of Arsenault's computers, put a tap on his mobile phone, and made similar inroads into Louisa's electronics. Zullo soon discovered that the mogul had made a ridiculous amount of money—roughly seven billion dollars—in and around the time the secretary of state was kidnapped.

Arsenault had divested and shorted the markets in the months before the incident, and then bought back into the markets shortly after Agnes Lawton's rescue. At the time, there had been speculation at high levels of the intelligence community that the kidnapping might have been less about religious extremism and more about political influence and profit.

But there was nothing Zullo found that said Arsenault's bold moves in the stock market had been anything more than the shrewd acts of a savvy investor. To the contrary, there was documentation—letters, e-mails, and the like—to prove that the mogul had been fearful of a stock market crash going back two years or more, and that he had been gradually reducing his exposure before going short. Arsenault's reasons for buying back into the market after the steep slide caused by the attacks had also been amply documented.

The Securities and Exchange Commission looked into Arsenault's big gains, but came up with nothing to connect the mogul to illegal activities. At least in that case.

Zullo and Barnett
did,
however, find ample evidence that Arsenault regularly engaged in questionable and illegal activities such as kickbacks, money laundering, and tax evasion. Despite his stupefying wealth, the mogul liked to hoard physical cash in various currencies, as well as gold coins, jewelry, and bearer bonds as a way of keeping significant sums of undeclared income close at hand.

That had gotten the thief thinking that the mogul's illicit stash might help Sister Rachel Diego del Mar, a physician and missionary who rescued orphans from the slums of Buenos Aires. Sister Rachel saved Monarch from that wretched life when he was a teenage gangbanger; he'd spent these last few years stealing money from crooks, rescuing people for cash, and giving it all to the missionary's cause.

So where did a mogul like Arsenault hide his loot?

Using construction plans as well as detailed digital blueprints, the thief was able to study the renovated mansion's layout, including an unlabeled space inside heavily reinforced concrete walls in the basement next to the wine cellar. Monarch believed that space held a vault, a likely storage place for Arsenault's stash. This is what had brought him to the Christmas party with a forged invitation, a place on the guest list courtesy of Zullo, and a need to grab that empty bourbon glass the mogul had been using.

“Merry Christmas, Beau and Louisa!” the party crowd roared around the thief, raising their champagne. “And a profitable New Year!”

Monarch snagged the cut-glass tumbler just as a waiter was about to bus it. Cassie Knox and her band broke into “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

Arsenault took Louisa in his arms and they began to dance. Monarch glanced at his watch. It was seven thirty on the dot, exactly when the
Vanity Fair
article had said they would dance. You had to hand it to them: they had the Christmas party thing down to a science.

Monarch stood a moment watching the mogul and his wife work the floor as if they were trying out for
Dancing with the Stars
. He hated to admit it, but they were pretty good.

Then with all eyes on the host and hostess, the thief got down to work.

 

4

REACHING UP BEHIND HIS
left ear, Monarch turned on the hearing aide. Fitting his fingernail beneath the stem of the Patek Phillip, he tugged it out about a sixteenth of an inch until he felt a click. Then he got hold of the pin that held the sprig of holly to his tux lapel and twisted it counterclockwise.