Thief (21 page)

More precious than silver, he thought, more precious than gold. This is my future. I can see it as bright as the sun.

 

27

NEW ORLEANS

BEAU ARSENAULT STOOD IN
the crowd on the corner of Basin Street and Canal, watching the Krewe of Dionysus Parade. Louisa's float was approaching, and he had to admit it was a showstopper.

The mogul's wife rode on a tower at the back of the float with two of her friends in gowns that evoked the Renaissance. Below the women, the Jester stood in his chariot, his leer huge and garish as he snapped a whip over the backs of the seven deadly sins. Envy was a bent-back old witch with an empty purse. A drunken ogre warned of Sloth. And Gluttony was a prehistoric hog.

But it was Lust that held Arsenault's eye the longest.

Louisa had depicted mythical sexual passion not as a faun, but as a striped centaur, part man with goggle eyes and his tongue hanging out of his head, part zebra with a black penis that drooped and came erect every few seconds.

How in God's name had she gotten that by the Krewe? The city?

People all around the mogul were roaring and pointing at the centaur's arousal and decline. Arsenault looked up and saw his wife blowing him a kiss. He caught it, and transformed it into a thumbs-up that he pumped over his head. Louisa had done it again! The thing that people were going to talk about for months was that zebra's dick, which meant that the person people were going to talk about was Louisa.

His wife had a knack for getting herself known, and always in an inventive, sometimes risqué manner. The mogul loved Louisa for it. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He'd tell her so later when he got to the after party.

Arsenault turned and started to weave through the crowd partying along Basin Street, aware of the shabby Iberville housing projects to his left, and what it once was. Before the demolition in the early 1930s, Storyville had been the Big Easy's red-light district, and by all accounts one of the greatest in history, especially for men who liked chocolate.

Louis Armstrong's mother worked in there awhile.

So did hundreds of other colored gals.

Not for the first time in his life, the mogul cursed fate for having him born too late to have ever known such a pleasure palace.
Could you imagine?

Arsenault could, and that fired up the longing in his loins. His new conquest, Lynette Chambers, was waiting for him at her club. If he played his cards right, he could be that centaur on Louisa's float.
Wouldn't that be too perfect?

Digging in his pocket, he came up with a Viagra and swallowed it whole. Imagining himself a stallion, he turned toward the river and the French Quarter.

There were throngs of people in the streets, but the real noise was ahead and behind him when the burn phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He took it out, saw that Saunders was calling him, answered, and said, “Can this wait?”

The security chief said, “I thought you'd want to know where we stand.”

Arsenault said, “Hold on a second.” He got out a cigarette, another habit he hid from his wife, and lit it. He took a deep drag, and then said, “Go ahead.”

“Monarch's definitely in,” Saunders said. “He withdrew a quarter of a million from the account yesterday. He and Santos and her team have been spending it.”

The billionaire took another drag, said, “On?”

“Scientific equipment, supplies, and transport,” Saunders said.

“Specifics?”

“They bought three Zodiac rafts, four outboard motors, three fifty-five-gallon gas tanks,” Saunders said as if reading from notes. “Ten solar battery packs. A water filtration system. Pack frames. It's a big expedition.”

“What about the science equipment?” Arsenault asked as he blew out smoke.

“Three hard-case laptop computers,” Saunders said. “A portable autoclave, an automated portable DNA sequencer with capillary gel and slab-gel platforms, a manual DNA SQ3 sequencer, Gene/Quant RNA/DNA calculator, DNA Centrivap system, Centra-CL2 centrifuge, and a miniature thermo-cycler. You want more?”

“No,” the mogul said.

“They also chartered a small turbo-prop cargo plane. Leaving in the morning.”

“Destination?”

“They haven't filed a flight plan, but I've got men on it, old and not-so-dear friends of Monarch.”

“They didn't get carried away and kill Santos's assistant the other night?”

“They say no,” Saunders said.

“You trust them?”

“They're pros getting a two-for-one here,” he said. “I believe them.”

“How mobile are they?”

“They've got a jet on standby. It will get wherever they're going well ahead of a cargo plane.”

“Remind them they're not there to disrupt the research,” Arsenault said.

“They understand the assignment.”

“Good. Keep me posted.”

The mogul hung up, finished the cigarette, and crushed it. He popped a breath mint, and set off again. Before he turned into the madness of Bourbon Street, he tore the SIMM card out of the burn phone and broke it. Then he twisted the phone until it snapped at the hinge. He tossed the pieces in overflowing trashcans as he passed.

Arsenault hated being in crowds like this, with lesser, sweating people pressing up against him. But this was where Lynette Chambers sang for her living. He felt his lips going a little numb, the Viagra kicking in.

What an incredible drug
.
Think of all the lives it's changed.

That caused him to look closer at the crowd flowing all around him, and then to think about that paper Santos and her colleagues had written. They'd failed peer review, but mounting a return expedition of this size indicated they were determined to come back with the needed proof. He wondered what it would mean if it were real, if it could be isolated, and then mass-produced?

When it came to sales this could be Viagra on steroids!

In the next second, his enthusiasm tempered considerably because he felt some unformed thought, a warning somewhere deep in his subconscious. Try as he might, he could not bring the thought whole.

It wasn't until he was on his way into the club where Lynette Chambers was singing that Arsenault was finally able to shrug off that sense of foreboding and imagine himself the stallion once more.

 

28

LAKE ZUG, SWITZERLAND

5:45
A.M.

IT WAS BITTERLY COLD,
even for mid-February, and light snow had begun to fall in the first light of dawn. Shivering, Gloria Barnett pulled the hood of her white down coat up over the white wool knit hat she wore over her red hair, and pushed back into the branches of a pine tree.

She had become used to the spa life and tropical weather since joining up with Monarch. If someone had told her even a week ago she would volunteer to get up at three in the morning for the third morning in a row to take a surveillance shift outdoors on a Swiss mountainside during the winter, she would have called him a fool, insane even.

But because Sister Rachel's life was at stake, there Barnett was, huddled under a tree on a steep face three hundred feet above and six hundred yards back from the lakeside estate of Tristan Hormel, the partner of the London banker who'd put the squeeze play on Monarch. Whatever it took they were going to get her back safe and sound.

She stamped her felt-lined Pac boots, and shivered again, but then unzipped her coat with white wool mittens, and pulled out a pair of Leica 15 by 56 binoculars. Screwing them into the metal pan head of a carbon-fiber tripod, Barnett settled in behind the glasses.

Even though snow was falling the optics were so sharp and clear she was able to peer across the railroad tracks and the frontage road. The compound boasted four structures: a boat house, a six-bay carriage house, a three-thousand-square-foot guest “cottage,” and a twelve-thousand-square-foot chalet that faced west-southwest. A high wall surrounded the place. Access from the frontage road was through a massive wrought-iron gate. Because of her position, Barnett was able to see diagonally down and through the gate bars, spotting two guards carrying semiautomatic weapons.

Barnett moved her attention back around the compound, scanning the openings in a loose scattering of fir trees around the cottage. She almost shifted her attention to the mansion, but then caught movement in those trees.

A large red and black German shepherd trotted through an opening and disappeared. A few moments later, she spotted a black shepherd to the east of the first one. It took another five minutes before she found the third, also a shepherd, with a black head and tan body.

At three minutes to six a man exited a caretaker's cottage and walked over by the stable before blowing a dog whistle. The dogs came in on three different fast vectors, bounding through the snow to the stable and then sitting before their master. He bowed over the dogs, rubbed their heads, and gave them treats and praise.

Then he gave a heel command and the dogs trailed him into the stable where she assumed there was a heated kennel waiting for them. Only then did Barnett turn her full attention to Hormel's home.

Lights glowed in many of the chalet's windows as the banker and his family began their day. Hormel was married to Karen, a British national, and they had two children. As far as Barnett could tell, the Hormels led a life of luxury even by Swiss standards. The children, eleven-year-old Ingrid and nine-year-old Klaus, attended an expensive bilingual school in Zurich, which was roughly a forty-minute drive. Karen oversaw an extensive social life for the banker, as well as the estate and two other properties—a lavish ski condo at Gstaad, and a town house in Geneva that was undergoing renovation.

Hormel grew up in Zurich, graduated from the University of Geneva, and got his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. He'd worked for a series of publicly held banks in England and Switzerland until joining forces with Pynchon eight years before in their private venture.

As Monarch had requested, she'd gotten Zullo involved, but so far the computer hacker had not yet been able to break into the bank's information system to look at its list of clients. Meanwhile, Barnett had done quite a bit of digging on the Internet. She'd found Hormel quoted from time to time in the Swiss business press, and mentioned along with his wife in the society columns. But little else had been written about the banker, except for the fact that he adored sailing and raced competitively all around Europe.

An article described Hormel as a “gifted captain and tactician,” and quoted him as saying that while his wife and children enjoyed skiing, his passions were wind and water, and wind and ice. The article also mentioned that he'd invented a protective cage for his custom iceboat similar to those used in race cars.

“I have a family to think of, so I don't take as many risks as I used to,” Hormel said. “But as soon as the ice goes out I'm on the water every morning before work. And in the winter, if we are not in Gstaad for the skiing, I live for sailing my iceboat when the conditions are right. Those days I go to work a little late.”

In the past three days, evidently, the conditions had not been right because like clockwork, a minute after the dogs disappeared, a black, bulletproof Mercedes-Benz exited one of the carriage house bays, and pulled up by a side door. It opened and another armed guard exited, looked over the scene, and then opened the rear car door.

Barnett barely caught a glimpse of Hormel as he stepped out wearing a dark green homburg, a green double-caped overcoat, and scarf. His ducked his head against the snow, and then he was inside. The guard climbed in after him.

The Mercedes pulled out, drove to the gate, waited for it to open, and then headed north toward Zurich, where the bank had its primary Swiss offices.

Barnett pulled a two-way radio from her coat pocket, and clicked it twice. She heard two clicks come back, and pocketed the radio. A mile or so to the north, near the village of Räbmatt, Abbott Fowler would be getting ready to slide in behind the Mercedes and trail it.

The snow lessened, but the breeze picked up and the wind chill forced her to turn her face from it. She thought about her bed in the suite at the Four Seasons, imagined herself submerged up to her chin in hot water, and hung in there, waiting out the forty minutes until a second car, a gray Audi Q6, came out of the car barn and parked at the same side door.

This time, Hormel's wife and children emerged. Though they had a driver, there was no armed guard as far as Barnett could tell. The Audi left the estate and headed north as well. Big John Tatupu would trail that car to the private school the children attended, and then stay on Hormel's wife during her day.

I think I'm good, Barnett thought, making one last look through the binoculars at the house, the grounds, and the gate. The only person moving was the dog trainer leaving the stable.

She was about to pack it in, head back to the car she'd parked on a forest road a little over a mile to the south, but she caught a flicker of movement downhill two hundred yards to her right. She pressed her eyes to the binoculars again.

For a few seconds Barnett saw nothing but the snow falling on leafless hardwood trees above the frontage road. Then she spotted a tree limb that became the barrel of a gun and a figure in snow camouflage holding it. He had his right shoulder ironed into a tree trunk, and was aiming uphill at her through a telescopic sight.

She threw herself to the ground an instant before a bullet sheared off one of the tripod legs and smacked the pine tree behind her. Knowing a second shot was likely, she snatched the fallen tripod and the binoculars, and started crawling fast through the snow. She hoped her white outfit and low profile would keep her out of his sights until she could reach denser cover.