The Nightmare Thief (11 page)

She tried to turn over and banged her head on the roof—the floor—of the Hummer. Dust stung her eyes.

Behind her, the moan turned to hacking. Autumn was hanging from her seat belt, like a skydiver tangled in her harness. With the Hummer smashed, her knees scraped the roof below her. She was conscious, eyes wide. She hit the buckle release.

“Get out. Come on.” Jo could barely keep from screaming.

She saw the other kids splayed around her. Lark had already unhooked her seat belt and was crawling toward Jo. Peyton was facedown across the vehicle, crying. Her lungs seemed to be working powerfully well. Her blond hair was streaked bloody red.

The air felt electrically charged. It prickled her skin like a million needles. Not from the dirt that had piled through the broken windows or the gray talcumlike dust from the airbag or the tiny motes of glass spinning through the vehicle, but from pure hellish energy. Jo turned onto her belly and looked for the door. It was four feet away, crushed shut. The sound that bled from her mouth was a whimper.

She began to shake. She heard a humming in her head. The light seemed yellow and cold. It smelled like cement dust, like the creaking of tons of roadway, pressing down on top of her father’s car. The view spun, seemed to darken, to splinter.

She had to get out.

Get out before the top deck of the Cypress Viaduct collapsed completely and crushed her and her dad and brother and baby sister inside their old family car.

The view clouded, as if tons of pressure had obscured the sun. Gray, brown, dark. Smoke. The stench of gasoline and burning tires gagged her. She kicked and crawled and didn’t care about the broken glass—she had to reach the door, before there was an aftershock and the whole double-decker section of freeway came down with them inside.

“We gotta move. Hurry.”

“Jo, no.”

“Now.
Move
.”

A hand grabbed her shoulder. She yelped and shoved it away and scrambled for the darkened door. The hand swept over her shoulder and stopped her, pulled her tight.

“Jo. Hang on.” Gabe held her hard. “Wait.”

She was half a moment from hyperventilating. She buried her face against his chest and held her breath.

Jesus.

Her vision returned. She wasn’t in her dad’s car. She wasn’t trapped on the Cypress Viaduct. The Loma Prieta quake had happened ages back, not now.

“Sorry.” She held on to him. “God.”

Her claustrophobia had jumped on her, rung her bell, chased her into a near-panic. Tears stung her eyes. “You all right?”

“Gonna be hellaciously sore tomorrow. But I can move.”

His T-shirt was sharp with bits of glass. She didn’t care. He was okay. “Sorry. I freaked. But we need to get out of the Hummer.”

He held her back. “Not that door.”

Jo wiped dust from her eyes. The crushed door in front of her would never move. The glass in the window had fallen out in a single, cracked sheet. It had landed outside, on top of Friedrich.

During the crash the driver’s door had been flung open, and Friedrich had been thrown out. His body lay right outside. His face was crushed, his head deformed. In the blood and the mud, something else was trickling beneath him.

Gasoline. “The fuel line ruptured.”

She couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice. She would have been in more trouble if she’d climbed out and not just because she would have ended up face-to-face with the corpse.

Von.
She whipped around to look at the topsy-turvy driver’s compartment.

Empty. The passenger door was twisted open.

“Where’s Von?” she said.

A voice from the back of the Hummer said, “Gone.”

Kyle Ritter, the Edge Adventures employee, had propped himself up and was looking out the big stretch-limo-size side window.

“When we left the road he jumped ship,” Kyle said.

Relief coursed through her. Both gunmen were gone. Then she understood what Kyle had just said. Von had jumped.

“So he may be coming down the slope after us,” she said.

Gabe glanced around the Hummer. “Let’s get these kids out of here.”

Kyle moved. “Before he comes back. And brings his partners.”

D
ane Haugen stared at the screen of his iPhone, downloading the latest market data. Outside, the road ran straight and gradually uphill. They had finally reached the eastern edge of the San Joaquin Valley and were beginning to climb into the foothills of the Sierras. By his calculation, their Volvo SUV was two hours behind the Hummer.

Everything else was bang on schedule.

The iPhone was valuable for gathering quick and dirty information online, but he had needed a solid hour on his secure laptop back in San Francisco. His laptop had heavy-duty encryption and connected through an anonymizer, so nobody could trace him online. The phone was nowhere so secure.

Everything was in place. In Dubai and Singapore and the intermediate accounts he had set up around the world. His prize today was going to be massive. And it would come home to him, where it belonged, where it should have been all along. But it would arrive only after taking a traipse around the globe, hopping from bank to bank, country to country, account to account.

At the wheel of the Volvo, Pat Stringer frowned at the highway. He looked like a songbird, so slight and flighty, but Haugen knew he could rely on the man to do what it took.

“Ease down. Save your mental energy for the hours ahead,” Haugen said.

Stringer nodded curtly.

“We’re on the winning side here,” Haugen said. “These kids are cream puffs. They’re Twinkies. This is not the yard at Lompoc.”

The U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc, California, was a medium-security facility, hardly Leavenworth or Marion. But it was a real prison, and Stringer had done real time there, for a real financial crime. Bank robbery.

Stringer was a real criminal and didn’t apologize for it. He had gone after what he wanted, taken the risk for the chance at the reward. It hadn’t worked out, and he had done his time. The problem, as Haugen saw it, was that Stringer wasn’t cut out for management. He couldn’t plan for contingencies and had failed to keep a back door open so that, when his plans went balls up, he had an escape route. So that when his getaway car got clamped while he was in the bank, he had a better way to elude the LAPD than running down Wilshire Boulevard.

But Stringer didn’t complain. Not once. And Haugen had enlightened him, when he recruited him for this venture, as to what had gone wrong with his heist. Stringer had walked up to a teller in the middle of the day, with a note in his hand. That was a classic move, but not one that gave the best returns. No, to steal real money, you needed to get an investment banker to hand a piece of paper to a hedge fund manager or derivatives trader. Do it with a smile and a stiletto in your voice. Do it big. Do it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Walk all over them. Do it that way, and you were one of the masters of the universe.

Like Haugen should have been.

Stringer kept his eyes on the road and said nothing. Outside, farmland was giving way to open countryside. Golden grass was cooked from a dry summer. Live oaks dotted the hills. In the distance, where the road rose, on and on, ponderosa pine began to take over. The sun was beating down, but the wind was stiff and banks of clouds piled up against the hills ahead.

Haugen glanced into the backseat, at Sabine. “We haven’t heard from Von and Friedrich.”

“Cell towers are scarce up there.”

Haugen turned all the way around, slowly, and glared at her.

She sat up straighter, and dropped the languid pose. She had removed not only her ski mask but the blond wig, and her boyishly short red hair stood as straight on her head as a field of sorghum.

Haugen kept his voice low and flat. “Put the wig back on.”

“The windows are tinted.”

“We don’t break cover. Do it.”

Indolently, as though it were her own idea, she stretched and reached for the wig. She fit it on her head, smoothed it down with her fingertips slowly, and slid her gaze over him.

“That’s more like it,” he said. She looked like a woman now. The mannish power was subdued.

She wanted to seduce him, right then. They all did, women. They latched on to him, would do anything for him. Sabine was no different.

Except she was. She had a Wharton MBA, and years working for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and an eighteen-month stint working as a bond trader for one of the big financial players in the City of London. She was a magician. A cruel, vicious, greedy magician, with a lack of scruples he found completely fascinating. But she was loyal. Fanatically loyal to the idea of the money they were going to make. But her lust for him—and her desire not only to get inside his mind, but to burrow under his emotional skin and make
him
want
her
—were what truly kept her loyal to him. She might want to take the money for herself, but not yet. Not while she was in thrall to the idea that he could love her.

“I know cell towers are far between,” he said. “And reception’s spotty in the mountains. They should have found a landline and phoned ten minutes ago. They need to know I won’t accept sloppy work. Phone them.”

Sabine didn’t sigh or pout. He gave her points for that. She took her sleek little phone and punched Friedrich’s number with her French-manicured nail.

She put the phone to her ear and pinned her eyes on Haugen. She was wearing blue contacts, another part of her light disguise. With the blond wig, the startling aqua jumped out at him.
Ran.
Yes, with the disguise, she looked fully the Norse goddess. She could steal just about anything.

She could stand to lose fifteen pounds, but after this weekend, he would send her to a spa. Then she should be just about right.

After a moment she said, “Out of range.”

The car bounced and took a turn hard. Stringer was pushing it.

“Stay under the speed limit,” Haugen said. To Sabine: “Try again.”

Sabine handed him the phone. “Hear for yourself.”

As she stretched, her top gapped open and showed the tattoo.

Haugen felt the skin around his temples shrink. “Cover that up.”

She continued to lean forward, phone extended. He could hear Von’s number ring. She didn’t shift or make the slightest move to cover the tattoo. As she inhaled, her breast swelled and so did the snake, a sea serpent, the World Serpent of Norse mythology, blue like the veins of her breast, flowing beneath the pale white skin, so rich and fearsome. The serpent’s forked tongue protruded, flicking toward her unseen nipple. The sight repelled him.

He grabbed the phone from her. “Button your shirt or put on a jacket. Don’t breach security, even in the vehicle.”

She leaned back, taking her time, and glanced out the windows at the endless plains and empty farm fields and scrub pine. Then she smiled, as if she were humoring him, and buttoned her top.

Haugen put the phone to his ear. Von’s number was ringing. But he wasn’t picking up.

Sabine put her foot up on the center console. “We need to be within two miles to use the walkie-talkies.”

“I know.”

Why didn’t Von pick up? Haugen slammed the phone shut. He nodded out the windshield and said to Stringer, “Step on it.”

I
n the sloppy rock and grit on the side of the gorge, the cell phone rang. Von could hear it clearly. But he couldn’t find it.

It was Haugen, he knew. Haugen, calling because he had missed his check-in. Each ring sounded angrier than the last.

Huffing, he said to the mountain air, “I’m here, asshole.”

He was stuck halfway down the side of the steep gorge, midway between the gravel logging road and the riverbed below. The Hummer had catapulted him free when it flipped. That had saved him. He couldn’t believe he was alive, but he would take the luck.

Below him, dirt and vegetation were scraped away as though a crazed bulldozer had charged downhill at an angle. He hurt all over. He was covered with dust and scratched to bits and thought his arm might be busted. Maybe his eye socket too—things looked kind of crooked—and his head was screaming.

He glanced up. The hillside, this evil gorge, looked nearly vertical. He grabbed hold of a root that had been half pulled from the hillside by some protruding edge of the limo, and he leaned forward to look down.

He saw the Hummer.

It was—oh, man—it was probably four hundred feet below him, upside down on top of rocks at the edge of the river, tires pointed at the sky like a fat dead turtle.

He saw Friedrich.

Or the smashed shell that was left of Friedrich.

Royally screwed
. No kidding. Friedrich, Friedrich—“Why’d you swerve?”

All he’d done was kick Friedrich accidentally, and the idiot lost control of the Hummer. That’s what he’d tell Haugen. It was Friedrich’s fault.

He heard voices. He heard a girl crying. So—they weren’t all dead.

He wiped his nose. He had to salvage this. He couldn’t let the kids get away.

His phone stopped ringing.

“Crap.”

He needed the phone to ring so he could find it.

And he needed his gun to ring so he could find
it.

He pulled himself to his knees. His head pounded like a frying pan was hitting it. He looked downhill. He should go down there. The weapons were down there. Friedrich wasn’t using them. Nobody was guarding the hostages.

Then he took another look at the gorge. No way could he possibly climb down. The hillside was too steep and slick.

But he could climb up. He could scramble back to the logging road. And on the way, he could find his phone and his gun. And Haugen would be coming along. Haugen, and nobody else—this road was virtually deserted three hundred sixty days a year.