Thief (39 page)

A moment later, Chavez eased down beside him. Claudio glanced at her face, found it hard and distant. He could tell rural Argentina was not where she wanted to be.

“How's Regina doing?”

Chavez looked in her lap, said, “She'd had almost two good weeks, you know? Numbers were looking great. Everyone was thinking…”

“What happened?”

Chavez shrugged. “Denny said she had a really tough day and night after the latest chemo round. She was too weak to talk to me.”

“You said cancers ebb and flow toward remission,” he said.

“I know. It's just that…”

“Do you want to go back to Texas?”

“No,” she said. “It's not that. It's…”

“What?”

Tears began to pool and spill from Chavez's eyes. She turned her head to him with a piteous expression. “Denny thinks she may be starting to give up. She's been fighting so long, it's just taken its…”

She couldn't go on, broke into soft sobs, and buried her face in his chest. The Brotherhood of Thieves had taught Claudio to rarely show his emotions, but as he wrapped his arms around her, it was like Chavez was part of him, so connected that he suffered as she suffered, feared as she feared, and grieved as she grieved. Soul mates. Wasn't that what they called this?

Claudio had the urge to ask her right there, up in the woods, hoping that he could replace the pain with the joy he felt whenever he thought about having her as his wife.

She said, “I don't know what I'll do if she dies, how I'll ever be happy again.”

That almost broke Claudio's heart.

“I know it's not exactly the place for it,” he began. “But…”

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement down on the flat. The two field-workers were moving back toward the ranch house.

“Something's happening,” he said.

“K,” Chavez said, pulling free of his grasp.

Claudio fought off the urge to hold her again, and looked into the parallel eighty-power scopes. The field-workers had stopped in the garden rows closest to the adobe wall, and left their tools in the lane. They were crouched now, and working together to pick— Was that a giant head of lettuce? He fiddled with the power and the focus knobs, got a better look. His heart beat faster.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe we do have something here.”

“What?”

“Those guys are picking cabbages,” he said. “Huge cabbages.”

“Let me see,” Chavez said, and he let her get behind the scopes.

“Bonnie-Mega?” he asked.

Chavez looked, said nothing for several beats, and then pulled away from the glasses, saying, “It's some kind of O-S cross, that's for sure.”

She took the radio from him, said, “They're picking mega cabbages over here.”

There was silence for several moments before Barnett came back. “I don't know if that's enough.”

“It's more than we had ten seconds ago,” Chavez snapped.

“And I appreciate it,” Barnett said. “But—”

“Hold on,” Claudio said. “We've got someone new pulling up to the gate.”

The artist got back in behind the spotting scopes, ignoring the friction in the banter between Chavez and Barnett. He swung the scopes off the farmworkers, who were looking toward the road, and found the gray Toyota pickup.

Through the tinted-glass windows, Claudio couldn't make out the driver, or whoever was in the backseat, but the front passenger window was down. The woman had dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and was turned from him. Her head pivoted slightly into quarter profile as the driver, a big, broad-shouldered guy, got out and went to the gate. Then she looked off toward the fields and the guys harvesting giant cabbages.

“Hello, Galena Real Montez,” he said.

Chavez stopped arguing with Barnett, said, “Really?”

“Right there, with the hubby,” Claudio said, watching as the truck carrying Hector Vargas's half sister entered the old ranch yard.

Chavez moved over beside him, looked through a pair of binoculars.

Feeling vindicated, Claudio's mind ripped back through all that had gotten them to this little piece of nowhere, hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires. When they left the Boom-Boom Club, he'd been convinced that Tito Gonzalez had let slip enough of the truth to help them. He'd probably lied about seeing Vargas. He'd probably lied about not knowing Galena's surname. He probably even lied about having the fake funeral south of the Village of Misery, the location anyway. But he would have no need to lie about it taking place in a chapel on cemetery grounds. It only made sense.

Though it took two days, a lot of phone calls, and a visit to the director of the municipal cemetery in Zarate, a small town sixty miles northwest of Buenos Aires. The director, after a little money had passed under the table, had agreed to check his records. The ashes of Hector Vargas had indeed been placed in a crypt there six years before. Galena Real of Zarate paid for the simple service and the crypt space.

It had not taken them long after that to find that Galena Real had subsequently married Luis Montez, a farmer who lived southwest of Córdoba. When Barnett had checked property records in Córdoba, she'd discovered that Montez owned two pieces of property: the one where he lived, and another the truck farm Claudio was watching.

Galena Montez stepped from the car wearing jeans, a canvas coat, and boots. If she seemed nervous, she wasn't showing it. Neither was her husband, who was starting in the direction of the garden.

“C'mon,” Claudio said. “Show us he's there. Show us where he's got her.”

Then the back door of the truck opened.

“Son of a bitch,” Claudio said, and pulled off the scopes to reach for the radio.

Chavez had beaten him to it. She triggered the mike, said, “Gloria, you need to call in some favors, pronto. We need a drone and backup over here.”

 

53

MONARCH HEARD A CHUGGING
noise that was becoming louder. His jaw hurt deep in the joint, and one of his molars felt loose. The pulsing came louder now and he opened his eyes to see two helicopters coming upriver. One was a large open bay Northrup construction chopper bearing the SJB Mining logo. The other was a much smaller Cicaré that was unmarked.

They arced overhead, and landed, the Northrup and then the lighter bird, forcing the thief to duck his face to his chest until the rotors stopped turning and the engines died.

When he looked up, Dokken was speaking with three armed men who'd come out of the bigger bird. The Cicaré's passenger door opened and a great big slab of a man with bandages on his face and a cast on his left hand got out. He glared at Monarch, but went to Dokken, argued with him a minute, and then handed him a digital tablet. The thief recognized him as the man he'd thrown off the ferry, and been aboard the SJB copter that crashed downriver the week before.

Dokken and the big guy came over to Monarch.

“He wants to kill you right now,” Dokken said. “His jaw's broken. Wrist was spiral fractured. And one of his best men died in that crash.”

“Kill him,” the thief said, pointing at Dokken. “He shot you down.”

Dokken kicked Monarch, and then crouched down, holding the tablet.

“We went to the crash site, found him,” Dokken said. “Explained what you'd done. He appreciated our help in calling for help. And it's like that old saying: the enemy of my enemy is now my friend?”

The thief said nothing.

“Turns out, for their own reasons they want to find that lost tribe, too,” Dokken went on. “So when I called them, and told them I had you, and that you knew how to get us in there, they offered us a ride. Wasn't that nice?”

“Can't help you,” Monarch said. “We're talking dense, dense jungle. No place to land. You want in, you walk, but without me.”

Dokken shook his head. “You didn't read Santos's paper closely, did you? If you did, you'd have seen reference to several clearings in the forest where the tribe lives.”

“Just the same,” Monarch said. “I'm not guiding you.”

“No?” Dokken said, smiling. “Maybe this'll help persuade you.”

He thumbed the tablet, and turned it to face the thief.

In the video clip Sister Rachel looked worse than Monarch ever expected. They had her bound to a wooden chair with wide nylon straps across her chest and others around her wrists and ankles. Her eyes were drawn down in their sockets, her skin gray, and she was hollow through her cheeks. You could see the terrible strain of the experience everywhere about her.

It all hit the thief like a sledgehammer, but he told himself to stay strong, keep the Ayafal and Santos out of it, figure out a way to escape and get downstream.

Then the missionary began to speak, and destroyed his resolve.

“They want me to talk to you, Robin,” she began in a weak and trembling voice. “They have said that I will be released if you do what they say.”

Sister Rachel closed her eyes a moment, seemed to gather strength before she looked right into the camera, and said, “Whatever you do, act for the greater good, not mine, Robin. If what they are asking you to do involves a greater wrong, you must sacrifice me. You must…”

Sheer horror crossed her face as she looked off camera. “No. No, please!”

The torso and legs of a man in black entered left of frame, moved to her as she struggled, and then stuck a Taser against her neck. The missionary arched against her bonds, and for the briefest of moments looked just as she had in his hallucination back in the Canyon of the Moon: her back bent, her head tilted to the sky, and her hands splayed out in agony.

Then the torturer pulled back the stun gun, and she collapsed unconscious, head lolling before the screen went black.

Dokken said softly, as if in pity: “Next time, it'll be longer, and then longer, until you show us the way in there, Monarch. So what's it gonna be?”

The thief hung his head, said, “Get me on board. Up front by the pilot with a pair of binoculars.”

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, Monarch sat up front beside the pilot in the construction helicopter with Dokken over his right shoulder, pressing a Glock to the back of his head. They rose in a spiral above the river.

“Bearing?” Dokken demanded.

“West-southwest,” the thief replied. “Deviation plus or minus two degrees.”

“That's a lot of slack, Ranger,” Dokken said.

“Got me in and out, didn't it?” Monarch said.

The pilot was called Pearl. He said, “How far we flying?”

“Fifty? Sixty miles?” Monarch said.

“That do it?” Dokken asked the pilot.

Pearl said, “I've got a hundred and thirty air miles beyond a round trip in there, but the Cicaré will need all our spare fuel to make it back to Tefé.”

The leaden clouds began to weep mist that shrouded the jungle canopy below, making it look even more impenetrable. On a clear day, the thief would have used binoculars to search for the ridge. But in the fog, the jungle unfolded like puzzle pieces.

“Coming up on restricted zone,” Pearl said into his microphone.

He listened, and then reached over and turned off a switch, said, “There better be a good lawyer waiting when I get back, Correa.”

Looking out the windshield with the gun against the back of his head, Monarch recalled Sister Rachel telling him to act for the greater good. He knew what she'd say in this situation. If Santos had discovered the key to the Ayafal's longevity, she could affect the future of mankind. The good and the right lay with Santos and the tribe. There was no doubt about it.

And yet, in his mind all he could see was Sister Rachel when the Taser hit her.

It occurred to the thief then that there might be another course of action he could take. With the mist swirling like this, he might be able to lead them around until they ran out of gas and crashed. Correa had lived through one crash. He'd take his chances.

But what good would that do Sister Rachel? Being shipwrecked in the darkest reaches of the Amazon was of zero benefit to her. Every way the thief looked at his predicament some people were going to lose, with him a guaranteed loser in all of them. No matter what course of action he took, he was committing both good and evil.

Rather than wrestle with that, Monarch did what he always did when faced with moral conflict: he looked away, and searched for ways to turn the tide in his direction.

After several moments of reflection, he said, “There are several different theories active among the scientists.”

“Yeah?” Dokken grunted. “Name them.”

“Carson believes it's the water,” Monarch replied. “Rousseau thinks it's the plants they eat and smoke, and to be honest, I'm with him.”

“I don't care what the fuck it is, long as I get it and deliver it,” Dokken said.

“Deliver it to who?” Monarch asked.

“An interested party.”

“The interested party have a name?”

“I'm sure it does, but since a name doesn't matter to me, I don't care just as long as I get paid.”

“Who pays you?” Monarch asked.

“None of your business,” Dokken said. “Why do you think it's the plants?”

Monarch said, “Reach in my right pants pocket. There are some leaves you need to check out.”

Dokken eyed him suspiciously, but then dug in Monarch's pocket and came up with six or seven of the crumpled leaves Getok had given him.

“What is it?”

“I have no idea and neither does Rousseau,” Monarch said. “It's an as-yet-undocumented plant.”

“What's it do?”

“Eat a couple. Or better yet, put some in your cheek like chew.”

Dokken looked at the leaves, said, “You first.”

Monarch held up his bound hands, took three of the leaves, and put them in his mouth, tongued them into the pouch of his cheek, feeling that healing, euphoric sense almost immediately.