Thief (26 page)

The thief opened his eyes in the dim hold. The image of Sister Rachel opening her arms to hug him the day he set off for America was so clear that he choked at the thought of her being held against her will.

Since Pynchon, the scumbag banker, had showed up at his hotel to show him the video of Sister Rachel being taken, Monarch had not once considered the consequences of failure. They were unfathomable, and yet his mind tried to conjure them. In two, maybe three seconds he saw all sorts of ways Sister Rachel might suffer at the hands of Hector Vargas, and at the hands of whoever was behind him.

Monarch sickened physically and mentally before feeling the ferry engines thrown in reverse, and the ship's momentum shift to port. They were docking at Tefé.

Taking several deep breaths, the thief willed all thoughts of failure and its consequences aside. When the ferry sidled into the dock, he bowed his head and vowed not to think about the future, or the past anymore. He would live for the moment, and he would use every moment to rescue her.

Monarch waited until Rousseau and Carson came to oversee the unloading of the gear, and went against the flow of a stampede on deck as passengers fought to get off, heading forward where he found Santos and the graduate assistants preparing to move the research equipment, their personal items, and the food.

The scientist took one look at the knot below the thief's eye, and said stiffly, “Did you get that in the knife fight?”

“Lucky elbow,” Monarch said.

“Why didn't you wake me?” Santos demanded.

“I didn't see the need. The danger had been averted. And someone had to get a good night's sleep. It might as well have been you and your colleagues.”

“I know you gave us the money, and I know you're protecting us, but this is my project, my expedition.”

“You've got no argument from me there.”

“Then I need to know what you know, when you know it. Am I clear?”

“As a bell,” Monarch said. “How long are we staying here?”

“As long as it takes to inflate the rafts, and pack the gear,” the scientist replied. “I want to be well upriver before darkness falls.”

“How much farther?” he asked.

“We've still got a ways to go,” she replied vaguely. “How fast we get there depends on the rains upstream.”

Sensing he wasn't going to get much more out of her, Monarch said, “Let's start hauling stuff out of here then.”

A helicopter came roaring upriver and passed overhead. Monarch saw a logo on the side that read SJB Mining Company before the bird disappeared.

He stacked several large plastic bins holding food, picked them up and carried them toward the exit. Most of the passengers had fled the ship, and were moving en masse toward shore and Tefé, a town of seventy thousand people. Many of them looked more indigenous than African or European.

The hold was opened. A small deck crane lifted out the pallets that held the Zodiac rafts and outboard engines, and set them on the wharf, where Rousseau and Carson oversaw a crew of locals transferring the gear into the bed of an old pickup truck.

Monarch scanned the scene, looking up and down the wharf and the two piers beyond, looking for Dokken, but not finding him. This was a much smaller place than Manaus, and a crew of big guys would stand out.

It took several back-and-forth trips to get everything off the ferry, and into the bed of the pickup, before he noticed there were several loose bands of boys working the wharf, hustling people.

“Can you do some translating for me?” Monarch asked Santos.

“Sure,” she said, and followed him as he walked to three kids eyeing him warily.

“Ask them if they saw a group of big guys get off the ferry that came earlier this morning,” Monarch said.

Santos said, “What big guys?”

“The ones who got off that private jet back in Manaus,” Monarch said. “I thought I saw them on the other ferry. So could you please ask?”

She chewed the inside of her cheek, and did. The boys nodded, replied. Santos said, “They think there were six of them.”

“Big, big black guy with them?”

The boys nodded.

“Where'd they go?”

One of them gestured east across the river and spoke. Santos said, “They left here about an hour ago in fishing rafts. Peacock bass is a big business here.”

“They had rods and gear?”

The boys nodded.

“Whose rafts were they?”

Two of the boys shrugged, but the smallest of them replied.

Santos said, “They belong to a father of a friend of his.”

“Ask him if he knows where I can find his friend's father.”

“He wants money to tell you.”

Monarch smiled. “Of course he does.”

 

35

AFTER NEGOTIATING A PRICE
and giving the kid half up front, Monarch and Santos followed him off the dock and toward the center of the small town.

“He says it's not far,” Santos said, her face hardening. “Who do you think those guys are?”

“They may be just a bunch of adventure tourists for all I know,” Monarch said. “But one of them looked like a guy I used to know.”

“A dangerous guy?”

The thief glanced at her, saw her concern, said, “That too.”

The kid took a left into a bar, and gestured at a short, squat man in his early thirties, who was happily three sheets to the wind at eight in the morning.

The intoxicated fisherman saw the kid, smiled, saw Santos, and smiled even more.

“Ask him—” Monarch began.

“I'll handle this,” the scientist said, and walked up and sat on a stool next to the fisherman, who openly leered at her chest.

Santos crooked her finger, put it under his chin, and lifted it before smiling and talking to him in a low, but animated voice. He glanced over at Monarch once, but kept talking and taking sidelong looks at her chest.

She leaned over after about five minutes, kissed him on the cheek, and laughed when he playfully spanked at her bottom as she moved toward Monarch.

“He got a call last night from a friend in Manaus,” she said. “His friend said a group of fishermen from the States wanted to rent his rafts to explore and fish. He told them they had to hire guides, too, until they offered him twenty times the going rate for two weeks' use of the rafts. They handed him the money, loaded their gear, and left. They seemed to know where they were going.”

“He see fishing rods?”

“And tackle boxes,” she replied. “Satisfied?”

“For the moment,” Monarch said. He still wasn't convinced.

He gave the kid the rest of the money, and he and Santos headed back toward the waterfront through the bustling town.

“So this is the last big outpost?” Monarch asked. “Tefé?”

“There are a few villages ahead, but this is the last of civilization,” she said. “Beyond here, the real jungle begins. Beyond here, you better be prepared for anything.”

“The people look different here,” he said. “More Indian influence?”

“Very observant of you,” she said. “It's why I started looking in Tefé first. This is the kind of place where indigenous people really do walk in from the jungle.”

“Is this where your great-grandmother came out?”

“That's miles upstream yet, but this is where I began my original search.”

Santos explained that after college, she was accepted into a dual doctorate program at Stanford in anthropology and biogenetics. Because of her great-grandmother, she wanted to study longevity, and began to do fieldwork in the so-called blue zones where there are high concentrations of centenarians, people who live more than one hundred years.

Santos was trying to find out what, exactly, made them live so long. Her early findings pointed to things that had been suggested in other studies, including diet, exercise, friendship, a positive outlook, and, most important, a purpose, a reason for being. Some of the century-plus crowd said they drank antitoxin teas from certain plants, and ate diets rich in omega-3s, fish, avocado, and olive oil. Some were vegetarians. Some were out-and-out carnivores. A few were abstinent and chaste their entire lives. Others drank alcohol every day and enjoyed an active sex life well into their nineties.

But none of these links and contradictions, and none of these examples explained the people Vovo described, the ones she said lived to one hundred and thirty or more.

“I knew finding someone that age was like chasing a fantasy,” Santos said. “But I figured that maybe the longevity had somehow spread out from Vovo's people. I decided to come here first, to Tefé, trying to determine if it qualified as a blue zone.”

“Did it?”

“One of the bluest,” she replied. “There are seventy thousand people in and around Tefé, and by my original count—four years ago—there were three hundred and fifty-six people who had lived a century or more within ten or twelve miles of where we are walking right now.”

“That seems high.”

“Astronomically high,” Santos said. “In the rest of Brazil there are roughly twelve centenarians for every ten thousand people. By those numbers, Tefé should have roughly eighty-two centenarians in total.

“Instead, there are more than fifty centenarians per ten thousand here,” she went on. “That eclipses the rate in Japan, which is thirty-four per ten thousand. In the United States, seventeen people per ten thousand live past the age of one hundred.”

Monarch looked around as they approached the public boat launch, and had to admit he was seeing an inordinate number of spry old people about. When they reached the others, they found the Zodiacs already inflated, though the big outboards had yet to be mounted on the sterns. Most of the dry bags were aboard, and the food was being loaded and lashed down.

“Nice of you to join us,” Carson said, wiping sweat from his brow.

“Just checking a few things regarding your security, Dr. Carson,” Monarch said. “Now what can I do to help?”

Rousseau gestured at a big black dry bag with a padlock lying on the ground, said, “You can tell us what's in there. It's the heaviest single bag here.”

“Cooking utensils,” Monarch said.

“They're guns,” Carson said.

“Like I said, cooking utensils,” Monarch replied.

“You said nothing about guns,” Santos said. “Where did you get them?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“You mean they're illegal?” she hissed.

“No, just unregistered.”

“That is illegal in Brazil.”

He shrugged. “One way or another, they're coming. I like to have the odds stacked in my favor, especially when I'm far from legal authority. The guns will stay in the bag until they're needed. If they're not needed, they stay in the bag.”

Santos looked at odds, but finally said, “Okay.”

“Stella,” Carson protested.

“Todd, are you an expert on security?” she asked.

“I don't like having the guns along,” Carson repeated.

“I don't either,” Santos replied, and left it at that.

Monarch picked up the gun sack and stowed it forward, tight to the gunnels alongside a smaller dry bag containing his satellite phone. Then he helped move and lash the fifty-five-gallon gas tanks into position aboard the follow raft, and led the effort to mount the outboard engines.

“You've done this before,” Edouard Les Cailles said. “When we did this last time, it took us an hour.”

“I've had practice,” Monarch agreed. “It's a matter of knowing protocols.”

“Well,” Santos said, glancing at her watch. “That helps us a lot. We might make it all the way to the mouth.”

“The mouth?” Monarch asked.

“Where we leave the last big channel,” the scientist said.

“We running GPS?” Monarch asked.

The look that Santos shot him could have cut steel. “No GPS,” she said. “Under any condition. No GPS coordinates are to be taken.”

“Why?”

“Because the coordinates would get out, and then it would be over,” she said hotly. “And that will not happen, not on my watch.”

“Okay, so how do we find this place?”

“The same way we did the first time,” Santos replied cryptically. “Are you okay with that, Mr. Monarch? Or do you wish to remain here until our return?”

“Last time I looked, you're going upriver on my dime, Dr. Santos.”

“Be that as it may, those are my terms. Do you have a GPS?”

“He has a satellite phone,” said Graciella. “I saw it.”

“No GPS on it,” he replied.

“Someone could get a fix off the satellite records,” Rousseau said.

“The sat phone's nonnegotiable,” Monarch growled. “I've got a sick mother down in Argentina. I need to and will talk to my sister every other day to check on her. And those are
my
terms. Accept them, or go off defenseless.”

There was a long moment of tension between Monarch and Santos, but then she softened, and said, “I'm sorry about your mother. What's she sick with?”

“A cancer that came back to life last week,” he said. “They're doing tests.”

A flicker of skepticism flashed at the corners of Santos's eyes.

Monarch caught it, said, “You want to call my sister? Her name's Gloria. She can fill you in on the sad details if you feel you have to hear them.”

There was another moment of indecision before the scientist said, “I have your word that you will not use the phone to figure out our exact location?”

“I promise,” Monarch said. “I'll even give you the chip after we're done. You can do with it what you want.”

“Okay, then,” she replied. “We're off.”

 

36

HOURS LATER, MONARCH STRADDLED
the rubber gunnel of the lead Zodiac and watched for logs and debris in the river. Carson was at the tiller, with Santos sitting at the center of the raft. They were traveling at a fair clip, but the breeze did little to cut the heat and humidity, which was beyond oppressive.