Thief (38 page)

“She's an innocent person,” he muttered as he fell into sleep. “She does more good than fifty people I know put together. You've got to get her through this. You've got to help me get her through this.”

 

51

BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING
,
Sister Rachel knew she'd contracted some kind of intestinal parasite. She was lying on her side. Her stomach was cramping, and she was drained from repeated bouts of diarrhea. Given the squalid nature of her captivity, she was hoping it was giardia and not dysentery or cholera, which were both capable of killing her sooner than later.

To make matters worse, she had no idea whether the water from the pump was clean or not. And then there were the sores on her body. Several were definitely infected, and she was trying to keep a sharp eye out for signs of abscess or redness traveling away from the wounds.

One of the best ways to deal with difficult situations beyond your control was to establish a routine however threadbare that routine might be. To that end, despite her circumstances, the missionary was trying to keep to her old habits of praying and thanking God for another day of life upon awaking, and then cleaning herself as best she could.

When she was done, she passed the time until Vargas brought her food by keeping her mind engaged in her work. She made incessant mental lists of everything that had to be done at the clinic and the orphanage. She dissected the needs of every child under her care, contemplating how best to lovingly handle them when she returned home.

She imagined conversations with the other missionaries who worked with her. She daydreamed about expanding her work to other cities in Argentina and the rest of South America. And she thought often of Robin Monarch.

Vargas had said he was the reason she was being held captive. At first, she'd been angry at Robin. But now he'd become a source of hope for her. She believed in her heart that he was doing everything in his power to get her released. That's just the way he was. That's just the way he'd always been.

He'll come. He will
.

But how much longer could she last as sick as she was? And how many more of Vargas's cruel whims could she endure before her nervous system fried and gave out? There had to be a limit to what a body could take, and she wondered whether she was fast approaching it when the keys slid into the lock.

Wracked by abdominal cramps, she tried to be stoic when Vargas came in with the duct tape, the GoPro camera, and his little toy.

“Fucking stinks in here,” Vargas said.

“I'm sick,” the missionary said. “I need medication.”

“Oh, right,” he sneered. “I'm going to just take you out to see a doctor.”

“I am a doctor, you idiot,” she said. “I can tell you what to get.”

Vargas flicked the toy in his hand. “You calling me an idiot?”

For a second she thought she'd blown it, and that he was about to inflict his cruel revenge on her with twice the ardor.

But she stopped him, saying, “Go ahead, idiot. Do what you want, idiot. But either I get those meds, or you'll find me dead in here one morning, and you'll no longer have leverage over Robin Monarch.”

Vargas glared with laser intensity at her, but then relaxed and rubbed the tape against his chin.

“I'll get your meds,” he said. “But you have to help me and the people I work for, bitch.”

“How?”

He gestured up at the GoPro camera on his head. “They want you to record a little message to your buddy. You can do that, right? Scratch our back if we can scratch yours?”

“And if I do, you'll get me medicine, better food, and clean clothes?”

Vargas ran his tongue along his upper lip before saying, “You'll get the medicine, but you'll have to do a damned good job to get the food and clean clothes.”

“Agreed,” she said.

“Get up then,” he said. “Can't film you in a shithole like this.”

*   *   *

The thief awoke before dawn, hearing the jungle come alive. He ate a handful of Getok's leaves and drank half the water in the gourd. The second he had enough light to see the compass, he took off on a trail he recognized. He jogged until the heat turned unbearable, and then slowed to drink half the water that remained in the gourd and to roll another plug of leaves into his mouth.

He took off his shirt, rung it out, and tied it around his head. The bugs swarmed him as he skirted a swamp. They bit everywhere and he felt like he was being tortured. He stopped then, and lay in mud on both sides of his body, then smeared it to protect his skin, and moved on.

Monarch crossed through an area he recognized with downed trees and thorny vines. By four that afternoon, he reached the pool of water that they'd filtered on the way in.

He ignored it, not daring to take a drink, and pushed on, driven by the idea he could get to the riverbank before dark, find the provisions and eat and drink before rigging one of the motors to the raft. Could he do that alone?

If he couldn't, he didn't care. There were oars and he'd be heading downstream. He'd be at the mouth of the river in three days' time, maybe to Tefé in four if he could catch a ride in another motorized boat.

But then around five, Monarch got turned around taking the trail he'd followed from the river to intercept Santos and the expedition on the way in. It took him almost an hour to get back on track, and darkness quickly overtook him.

It began to rain. He opened the top of the gourd and let it fill. For the second night in a row, he slept fitfully at the base of a giant tree. When dawn came, the thief found the gourd almost full and he drank the rainwater greedily before wolfing down more leaves and setting off once more.

An hour later, he found a muddy trail that still showed the boot prints from the expedition passing the week before. He followed it. He smelled the river before he heard it, and quickened his pace, head down, watching the tracks, and then suddenly emerging onto a slip of land devoid of brush and trees.

He'd told Santos explicitly to hide the rafts and engines and the other gear. But there it all was, pulled almost completely out of the water. They'd fucked up, but after everything he'd been through in the last few days, he was glad of it.

Monarch went and found a chest, opened it and found four warm Cokes. He cracked one, drank it down, belched, and then opened another. That was about as good as anything had ever tasted. He burped again, and began rummaging in a carry box that held freeze-dried foods, when over the sound of the river he thought he heard something behind him.

Monarch turned and found three men aiming automatic weapons at him. They were gaunt, bearded, swollen from insect bites, and beyond filthy. But the thief instantly recognized the one in the middle, the one with the crazed leer on his face, the one who said, “You didn't think we'd give up so easily, now did you?”

“Hello to you, too, Jason,” Monarch said, extending his hand. “Long time no see. What brings you to this little neck of nowhere?”

Dokken sneered at Monarch's extended hand, stayed locked down on the rifle stock, said, “You must think I'm a moron.”

“Not at all,” Monarch said, acting offended.

“Get down on your knees or I put a round through one,” Dokken snapped.

Monarch could tell he wasn't bluffing, and went to his knees.

“Face down now, hands laced behind your head,” Dokken said. “Zip him, Timbo. Panic, help him.”

Monarch did as he was told, aware of the one they called Timbo looping around him, and then pressing a rifle muzzle to his head, and stepping on his back between his shoulder blades before Panic cinched his wrists with a zip tie. They hauled him back up onto his knees.

“Robin Monarch suppliant before me,” Dokken gloated. “Do you know how many years I've been waiting on this day?”

“I won't suck your cock if that's what you're asking,” Monarch said. “I heard after ten years in the stir you get a taste for that kind of thing.”

Dokken's kick came instantly, driven right into the thief's stomach, and blowing all the air from him. “I should cut your liver out, piece by piece, you piece of shit,” he seethed, and then just as Monarch got his breath back, kicked him again, this time targeting the kidneys.

The pain was excruciating, and the thief puked up the Coke, inhaled some, and choked and coughed until his eyes filmed over with tears and he lay there panting.

“Okay now,” Dokken said, walking around him. “That's a start. We can work with that. Yes, sir. That's some punishment, right there. Some revenge, right there.”

“You come all the way to the Amazon to kill me?” Monarch said. “You a masochist now, too?”

Dokken smiled again. “Hell no. Boy, what you're seeing here is a goddamned two-fer for yours truly. I make a fortune three months out of Leavenworth, and I get to kill you in the process. Ain't it grand?”

Timbo and Panic started snickering.

“What do you want from me?” Monarch demanded.

“The fountain of youth,” Dokken said, sobering.

“Don't know what you're talking about,” Monarch replied.

“Sure you do. Those scientists wrote a paper saying the Indians in there are living to one hundred and thirty. That's why they went back. To figure out for sure and why.”

“Yeah?” Monarch asked. “Who told you that?”

“A little birdie in a tree, who offered millions to me,” Dokken said.

“To find the fountain of youth?”

“Whatever it is makes them live so long. The scientist with the amazing tits and ass, she's figuring it out, right?”

“There's nothing to figure out,” Monarch said. “The Indians were full of it. They aren't that old.”

Dokken squinted at him. “How's that?”

“Her carbon-14 and DNA tests didn't jibe with their age claims,” Monarch said. “She's still in there testing people, but I've seen the data. It's a hopeless case, a loser. No evidence to back the claim up. That's why that paper of hers was never published. Her peers sensed that she didn't have the goods, and won't. I figured that out, and split. I've got better things to do, and so do you.”

The other two men appeared uncertain, and looked to Dokken, whose face revealed nothing for several seconds. Then he grinned, and laughed at Monarch before saying, “Boys he's lying through his teeth. I'll bet she not only proved the little jungle bunnies live that long, she knows why, and so does he.”

The thief shook his head wearily. “This is a lost cause. You want to kill me, get to it. But men have been looking for the fountain of youth since time began, and guess what? They'll need to keep on looking, because it isn't back there.”

“Sure it is,” Dokken said. “You know I learned the hard way that you always have an angle, Monarch, and that angle is usually a hundred and eighty degrees off what you're talking. It's that traitorous mind-set of yours that put me in a prison for more than ten years.”

“You got ten years for shooting women and children,” Monarch said, seeing the reaction among Dokken's men almost immediately. “Oh, he didn't tell you that?”

Before they could answer, and before Monarch could tell them what really happened to get them both thrown in Leavenworth, Dokken swung his rifle by the barrel in an uppercut. The butt stock struck the thief under the chin, and turned his lights out.

 

52

SOUTH OF CÓRDOBA, ARGENTINA …

CLAUDIO FORTUNATO PERCHED IN
the shadows on a secluded ledge near the top of a wooded hillside high above an early autumn landscape of farms, vineyards, and orchards.

Wearing faded camouflage and a floppy green hat Claudio had his eyes pressed to two Leica spotting scopes mounted side by side on a bracket attached to a tripod. He peered down through the powerful glasses, monitoring a farm roughly eight hundred vertical feet below and six hundred yards to the west.

Beside him on the ledge and resting on a bipod was a U.S. Repeating Arms Model 70 in .338 Win-Mag. Equipped with a Swarovski tactical scope, it was one of Chanel Chavez's guns. She was up the hill behind him, talking by sat phone to her brother-in-law.

Since they had moved into position shortly before dawn, they'd seen little to say they were justified being there. The road that passed the farm was fairly busy with traffic going to, and from, Córdoba. But the hundred-and-forty-acre farm, while cultivated, appeared uninhabited. There were no livestock or animals on the property. And so far the only humans they'd seen set foot on the land were two
campesinos
who arrived in the back of a battered pickup truck driven by a man in a straw gaucho hat.

The workers entered the farm through a gate in an adobe wall that surrounded the boarded-up ranch house and yard. They went to a barn of sorts, came out with hoes, shovels, and wheelbarrows, which they pushed through a second gate to a lush vegetable garden that covered several acres on the near side of the compound. The two men had been at it for nearly three hours without a break, and were still going hard, weeding, pruning, and moving irrigation lines and sprinkler heads.

Claudio pulled his head off the glasses, picked up a walkie-talkie with a seven-mile radius, and said, “Anything?”

After a pause, John Tatupu came back. “Negative. Quite a bit of activity at this end of town, but we haven't seen either of them yet.”

“Ditto,” Abbott Fowler said.

“Patience,” Gloria Barnett said. “If we're right, this is a target-rich environment.”

Claudio had his doubts. Were they right? Or was this a goose chase?

Before he could dwell on the facts, he heard Chavez behind him, and up the hill.

“Okay,” she was saying, pressure and anxiety threaded through her voice. “Tell her I love her, and call if there's any change. Thanks, Denny.”