Thief (30 page)

“You need help pushing off?” Brooks said.

Hormel shook his head. “I'm good. See you in an hour or so?”

“Sounds right. Cell phone with you, sir?”

The banker patted his chest before tugging on the helmet, leaving the visor up. Hormel left the house through a back door, and, not wanting to sweat up, walked slowly toward the boathouse. Hormel lived for mornings like these, and he quickly shoved aside all the worries and anxieties that had plagued him the past few months.

Even through the helmet he could hear the clanking of the ropes and hardware against the mast of the A-class Skeeter and it made him grin. The Skeeter looked like a cherry-red water bug, with a long, narrow, aerodynamic body that whittled down to a sharp nose. A four-foot titanium strut ran straight out from beneath the nose to a shock absorber and a skate bladelike stainless-steel “runner” about eighteen inches long. The rear of the hull sat on a perpendicular ten-foot strut called the plank, with shock absorbers and runners at either end.

The banker hurried the nose into the wind so he could raise the sail without flipping the boat. When he'd done so, he unclasped the chains from the cinder blocks, let the sail luff, and then pushed the Skeeter out from behind the boathouse. There was enough light now for him to dig in with his cleats and get the iceboat gliding before he climbed into the cockpit.

He buckled himself into a safety harness that connected him with an inner protective cage, and then settled his hands on the wheel that controlled the forward runner. He tightened up on the sail, and turned the craft north-northwest toward the point of land at Risch on the opposite shore, some two miles away.

The sail caught the wind. The iceboat accelerated.

Within seconds, Hormel was moving twice the speed of the wind, and then three times, clipping along at better than sixty miles an hour in a single, long rattling slice across the lake ice that thrilled him to his core.

“I got a need for speed.”

The banker smiled as he altered course ever so slightly until the wind lifted the rear right runner completely off the ice, heeling a good six feet in the air.

He was pushing seventy now, the boat precariously balanced on the nose and left rear runners, using the opposite strut as a counterbalance and wind foil, cutting across the smooth ice, and loving every magnificent second of it.

After he'd passed the point, Hormel gave the sail some slack, turned the wheel, and prepared to come about into the wind. When he did, he noticed about a mile away another iceboat coming from the direction of Zug. The banker could tell at a glance that it was an older and larger boat than his Skeeter, a so-called stern-steerer with a single, maneuverable runner in the back, two runners amidship, and a main and foresail. He could also tell that the pilot knew what he was doing. Though stern-steerers were capable of higher top-end speeds than an A-Skeeter, Hormel's craft was nimbler, and far easier to control. And yet, the other pilot had his boat heeled and running hard and true across the ice.

As he came fully about, Hormel strained to see if he recognized the other boat and its pilot, but at that distance he couldn't make out the color of the hull. The pilot and a single crewman were mere dots.

Losing sight of them as he sped off, the banker wondered if this was a new boat or a new pilot on the lake. It would be nice to have stronger competition, he thought as he ripped by his estate, seeing lights blazing in the windows. Karen was getting the children ready for school. He raised a hand as he shot past in case they were watching, and then tacked south-southeast heading for a narrowing in the lake between the steep western shore and a large, forested thumb of land.

The wind was stronger in the gap and Hormel blew through it, traveling as fast as he'd ever gone in the Skeeter. Pushing eighty miles per hour, he thought, his skills taken right to their limits.

The banker screamed with joy as he gave the sail slack and prepared to come about again for another run through that gap. If he was lucky, he'd get two or three passes before he had to call it a day.

Hormel made two quick tacks to bring the iceboat closer to the western shore, and then set out north-northeast again, cutting diagonally through the gap, navigating toward the far shore of that thumb of timber. He knew the wind would be perfect for that course, and once again the Skeeter accelerated up near eighty miles an hour.

The banker was no more than two hundred and fifty yards off the northeast corner of the thumb, when he spotted the stern-steerer coming hard on nearly the exact opposite bearing. Hormel figured they'd pass within twenty-five or thirty yards of each other.

Good, he thought. Gives me a solid look at these guys.

He could tell the hull of the older boat was dark green now, but still little about the pilot or crewman other than the fact that they were wearing white helmets. Hormel took his eyes off them to true his course and trim his sail. When he looked right again, they were virtually upon him, less than sixty yards away and closing. He almost panicked when he realized the boats would pass at under twenty yards. Too close!

He nudged the wheel to port a degree, and glanced up again only to see that the crewman was aiming a gun at him! The banker didn't hear a shot as they blew past him, but he felt a sharp stick of pain in his chest, looked down and saw a stubby, steel hypodermic needle with dart fins sticking out of his parka. He took his left hand off the wheel to yank it, and then realized that he was already passing out. He let out the sail, and turned with the wind.

Hormel knew in an instant that he'd overcorrected. The boat heeled wildly, and just before he passed out he saw trees and the thumb's frozen shore coming right at him.

Even with the sail swinging impotently, the Skeeter was still traveling at better than forty miles an hour when the front-runner hit a low shelf of rock. The iceboat flipped forward and smashed into several large trees.

*   *   *

“Fuck, we've killed him,” moaned Gloria Barnett, who began to run along the shoreline about three hundred yards south of the crash site.

“No way,” groaned John Tatupu through the bud she had in her ear.

“There were pieces of the boat flying all over the place.”

“Coming about,” Abbott Fowler said.

Shit, Barnett thought as she ran. He was supposed to crash, but nothing like that.

As Monarch taught them, they'd looked for patterns in the behavior of Hormel and his family. After identifying the patterns, they'd looked for choke points, places where the banker was vulnerable. At first the banker's security team seemed to have covered all the bases. He went nowhere outside the house or his office without a bodyguard, and he had dogs, and armed men roaming the estate.

Unless they made a risky attack on the compound, there appeared to be no way to get at Hormel until Tatupu mentioned that if they could find a vice, like a mistress, or booze, or gambling, they could exploit it.

The banker's sole weak spot had come to Barnett almost instantly. The lake and his passion for sailing was where he was vulnerable.

Assuming that Hormel would go out in his custom boat as soon as the conditions were good, they'd come up with the strategy of renting an iceboat, and then getting close to the banker as he sailed through the narrow, darting him, and then letting him run aground. The plan didn't involve the banker's boat basically disintegrating.

When she reached the crash site, there was debris up in the trees, on the bank, and out on the ice. To her surprise the roll cage was intact, and the banker was still strapped inside it.

She got her finger on his neck. Slow heart rate, but that was the sedative, right?

“Tats?” she called. “I need you here, pronto. He's alive.”

The stern-steerer came gliding to a stop, thirty yards offshore. Tatupu wrenched himself up out of the cockpit, and hurried to her looking monolithic in the insulated gear and helmet.

“I'm out of here then,” Fowler said. “See you in an hour, maybe two.”

Barnett did not reply. She was watching the big Samoan cut Hormel free of the harness and then pull him from the cage.

“What if his neck's broken?” Barnett said.

“He dies,” Tatupu said. “But I think he's good.”

With that, he hoisted the man up over one shoulder, and said, “How far?”

“Quarter of a mile at the most.”

 

41

THREE DAYS AFTER CATCHING
up with Santos and the other scientists, Monarch was limping under the weight of the dry bag lashed to a pack frame. He shrugged and drove himself deeper into that dispassionate place where he dwelled in times of hardship, disassociating himself from the pain of having walked nearly fifty miles beyond the boundary of the forbidden zone while suffering from piranha bites.

When he'd rendezvoused with Santos, he'd immediately cleaned the bites and applied antibiotic cream and bandages from the primary first-aid kit. He'd done the same twice since then, but the bites remained open and oozing.

There was something about the heat and high humidity that wouldn't let the wounds close. He'd heard about this happening in the tropics, and had tried to be careful and keep the wounds clean.

Every hour, however, the pain from the sores seemed to be getting worse, though there was no sign of infection. Making matters worse, he'd been unable to use the satellite phone, and had no idea what his teammates had discovered about Sister Rachel. The jungle canopy had blocked his signal every time.

Vines and underbrush snagged at Monarch's bandages as he followed the others deeper into the rain forest. For mile upon mile they'd walked like this, often navigating by dead reckoning, sometimes traveling on the barest of game paths.

Kiki was confident, however, and on the first day led them to a spring and a pool of water Santos and the others remembered from their earlier trip. They camped, filtered the water, and moved on. On the second day they reached a grove of trees the scientists also recognized. The trees soared high above the jungle floor, with no branches until the dense upper canopy, which blocked out all growth and satellite signals below, leaving a shadowed cavernous space that reminded Monarch of the interior of the cathedral in Buenos Aires.

Sister Rachel brought him to that cathedral the day before he left Argentina to return to America. There in the deepest Amazon the thief swore he could hear his eighteen-year-old voice whispering.

*   *   *

“I'll never forget what you've done for me,” Robin told Sister Rachel. “I'll repay you someday. I promise you that.”

The missionary smiled, said, “I can't tell you how much that means to me, but you're not done yet. I want you to go forward and on your knees up there, and I want you to ask God for his forgiveness and to bless your travels.”

“Out loud?”

“However you wish.”

Monarch remembered going down on the cold hard floor and surrendering his defenses and honestly asking God to consider the circumstances of his life, and his right to survive when judging him for the things he'd done as a member of the Brotherhood of Thieves.

Then he went back to Sister Rachel, said, “I don't know if the army is the right thing for me.”

“Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, Robin,” she said.

*   *   *

Trudging through the jungle more than twenty years later, Monarch knew that the missionary had been gone more than nine days now. Based on his own experience, she was probably beginning to despair.

That idea pried Monarch out of that disassociated place in his brain, and he felt the ache in his feet, hips, and knees, and the fire in the bite wounds, followed by an instantaneous fury that wiped all personal pain away, made it inconsequential. He would hike another hundred miles in the dark, covered in leeches if that was what it would take to get Sister Rachel Diego del Mar back safe to the Hogar.

Fueled once again by that conviction, the thief went on until they passed on the third day through a section of the forest that was strewn with massive boulders and chunks of black rock clad in vine, lichen, moss. The big slick rocks were everywhere and navigating through them threatened to snap their ankles.

Beyond the densest concentration of the rocks, the way got easier and they were able to weave in and around of the stones and low-growing trees with riotous purple flowers, and waxy, lime-colored leaves shaped like elephant ears. Then the trees grew taller again and choked with crazy matrixes of vines. They spooked a troop of howler monkeys sleeping high above them in the vines. The monkeys' alarm roars hurt Monarch's eardrums so much he had to stick his fingers in his ears. Two hundred yards beyond the howlers, but still suffering their deafening verbal wrath, the group broke free of the jungle and emerged on the black-sand bank of a clear-flowing stream where a stiff warm breeze was blowing.

The jungle canopy opened up in many places, and it was the first time in nearly a week that Monarch had not felt closed in and claustrophobic. Now the thief could see a mile or more across the lower stage vegetation to a sheer-sided ridge that rose a good four hundred feet above the jungle floor. It ran north to south as far as he could see.

There were trees growing on top of the ridge, but only vines, ferns, and mosses clung to the flanks, which became cliffs, devoid of vegetation all together. The exposed rock was white in some places, and almost coal black in others with variations in between. From a V-like notch at the top of the highest cliff, water gushed and fell in a plume that disappeared into the low jungle, the source of the stream at their feet.

The howler monkeys behind them were still bellowing. Another troop across the river somewhere toward that waterfall joined in until it sounded like continuous, rolling thunder that forced them all to clap their hands across their ears and shout to be heard.

“This is it!” Santos yelled.