The Nightmare Thief (6 page)

And that was all the time Haugen needed.

He finally glanced at Von. “Do you think there’s the slightest chance I’ll risk shooting Autumn Reiniger here, at a public park?”

Von stared at the beach. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

Haugen smiled thinly. “Is that wit? A bon mot?” Intellectual gymnastics from the man—Von had just earned back a point or two. “You’re right. I was using a rhetorical device. We will not, I repeat,
not
risk damaging our investment by injuring Ms. Reiniger.”

“I think I got it now, boss.” Von looked at the beach. “Just one question.”

“Yes?”

“Six people in her party, right?”

“Correct.”

“So why are there seven of them there on the sand?”

J
o paused at the crest of the ridge. The sun was a gold needle in a deep blue sky. She leaned back against a boulder spackled red with lichen. A moment later, Gabe joined her.

She swept back curls that had escaped her ponytail. “Thirty seconds. Gotta catch my breath.”

Gabe shrugged off his backpack and got out a canteen. He took a swig and handed it to her.

“Thanks.” She drank and wiped her lips. “You have an altimeter?”

He shook his head. But the rise and fall of his chest told her they were at significant altitude.

Her truck was parked two miles back and probably a thousand feet below them on a narrow logging road. She and Gabe had been hiking for ninety minutes. According to her Stanislaus National Forest trail guide and the map Evan Delaney had given her, they were still a mile from the abandoned gold mine where Phelps Wylie had been found dead.

Gabe scanned the crown of the forest. All around, covering the mountainside, were lodgepole pine, white fir, and dogwoods turning crimson. He pointed at a soaring conifer whose dusty green boughs spread above them.

“That’s Jeffrey pine. It only grows above six thousand feet.” He smiled at her, a challenge. “Still way too low to worry about supplemental oxygen.”

“Yeah, sure—you could have HALO jumped and beaten me here. No need to brag.”

“Nah. The government gets annoyed when a PJ uses Air National Guard resources to meet his girlfriend for a date.”

He set his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head. He looked like he was in fighting trim, and he was talking like it too, as a deflective mechanism. But he couldn’t keep Jo from surreptitiously doing a visual sweep of his vital signs.

His skin tone was good: bronze, with a ruddy glow from the hike. Respirations were rapid, but that could be expected because of the altitude. His pulse was strong. She could see it beating in his neck, where it met the line of his jaw. His eyes were clear, dark, and focused. On her.

She slid her arms around him and kissed that beating pulse point. Wordlessly he pulled her tight against him and held her. She felt him breathing. He kissed the top of her head and then she tilted her face up and he kissed her right, on the lips. Twice.

Then he smiled, patted her backside, and picked up his pack again. “Wasting daylight, campers.”

Jo saluted.
Don’t make a big deal out of it.

But she couldn’t stop herself from keeping an eye on him.
Tough cookie
didn’t begin to describe Gabe, even on his worst day. And today was far from his worst.

He was strong and young and resilient. But he hadn’t fully recuperated from being shot in the chest with a 9 mm bullet.

He had only recently returned to work with the California Air National Guard, and to grad school at the University of San Francisco. He had not yet received medical clearance to return to active military duty. He hadn’t put back on all the weight he’d lost in the hospital or recovered his stamina. A patch of sweat darkened his USF T-shirt between the shoulder blades. He still had a considerable amount of pain, which he refused to dampen with medication.

That, Jo knew, stemmed from pride and machismo and the determination to provide a clean and sober example to Sophie. And it stemmed from being a PJ, a pararescueman, with the Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. Gabe worked search and rescue on land, sea, and air. And when on active duty, he performed CSAR, combat search and rescue, sometimes leaping into firefights from thirty thousand feet, using HALO parachute jumps—high altitude, low opening—designed to maximize stealth and speed and a PJ’s chances of reaching the scene of the rescue alive.

Jo followed him along the crest of the ridge, through slices of sunlight in the cool air. The terrain was dry and spare and wild, beautiful and incredibly quiet. Looking up, past the green tops of the pines, she saw only polished blue. Her footfalls landed softly on dirt and pine needles. Beyond them she heard the rustle of the breeze through the boughs of the trees. The only signs of human encroachment were power lines strung from metal pylons that towered atop nearby ridges in the mountain range. The lines skimmed high above gorges and rivers, and for a moment Jo wished she could simply hang a zip line from one and slide directly toward the mine.

Gabe followed her gaze. “No way.”

She laughed. Ahead, the trail switchbacked to the bottom of a ravine before crossing a rocky stream and climbing up the other side. But upstream, where the slope steepened and began its climb to the timberline and snowcapped crags of the high Sierra, power pylons stood on opposite ridges of the ravine, linked by an aluminum catwalk.

“It would cut three miles off our trip. Save us a couple of hours and hundreds of feet of climbing,” she said.

Gabe leaned toward her.
“Bzz.”

“Okay, there’s high voltage, and the danger that the bridge would collapse.”

“If it’s thrills you want, let’s get out of here and get a room. So come on and examine this mine, pronto.”

“Right.”

They had a reservation for the night at the Lodge at the Falls in Yosemite. That meant a couple of hours driving still to come, after the hike out. The wind sent a shiver through the trees. It sent a shiver through her as well.

Phelps Wylie would never have chosen this as an afternoon’s recreation.

Maybe he had taken a joyride in his warm, luxurious Mercedes, listening to
Madama Butterfly
on his German stereo system. But he never would have driven two hundred miles from home into a mountain range where, not much more than a century earlier, the Donner Party had become trapped for the winter and ended up eating each other.

Wylie’s death was no accident.

“Wylie had a map. Or he had a guide. He had some reason for being up here.”

Gabe glanced over his shoulder. “Not a good one.”

“Got that right, Sergeant.” A gust lifted her hair from her collar. “Okay, let’s pick it up. This wind is only going to get stronger. And we’re going to lose the sun.”

Gabe nodded. “Weather’s coming.”

She felt a cold thread skim past her, like a hundred pinhead snakes.
Bad vibe
about covered it. “Let’s move.”

H
augen eased off the throttle. As the speedboat settled lower in the water he counted the people on the shore ahead, running toward the beach.

Three women, four men. What was an extra man doing there?

“Maybe it’s a random picnicker,” Von said.

Haugen’s jaw tightened. “Who runs
toward
a boat driven by men in ski masks?”

Von didn’t reply.

The boat crept forward. The wind raised spray on the water. Haugen tented a hand over his forehead to cut the glare, then adjusted his sunglasses to get a clearer view of the extra man on the beach. With a start, he was reminded that these weren’t his prescription pair. He had purchased these sunglasses this morning with cash, just as he had purchased his black work boots and gloves and pants with cash, all at separate stores, and had bought his black tactical gear online through a corporate account that couldn’t be linked to him. Should anybody report his description to the police, nothing he wore could tie Viking, the kidnapper, to Dane Haugen.

But as a consequence, he couldn’t get a crisp view of the people on the sand. He grimaced and covered. “We’ll find out who it is in sixty seconds. We play it by the book, until we have to play it by ear. Follow my lead.”

“No shooting,” Von said. The black mask, stretched across his basketball of a head, rendered his expression unreadable. But complaint was in his voice.

Haugen turned his head toward the man. Haugen’s dead-eyed glare was hidden, but Von still cringed, intimidated.
Good.

Haugen got the walkie-talkie. “Ran, come in.”

Sabine came back, staticky. “We’re on site. Ready to egress. But our numbers are—”

“Extra man in the picture. Repeat, extra man in the picture. Possibly a bystander.”

She paused. “Possibly not?”

“Don’t know,” Haugen said.

Another pause. “Understood.”

He shoved the throttles to full power. The engine snarled. The stern of the boat dug into the bay, the bow rose, and they bounded across the whitecaps toward the beach. Haugen put the walkie-talkie to his lips again.

“Going in. Follow my lead.”

 

 

Autumn ran behind Dustin toward the beach. The speedboat, white and sleek, knifed through the glinting water straight at them. Ahead, Lark and Noah jogged to a stop at the water’s edge. Peyton was walking behind Grier, raspberry velour hips swaying, champagne bottle swinging in her hand. Up the sand in the distance, the tai chi practitioner stopped to watch.

Autumn caught up with her friends. The limo driver, Kyle, ran up behind her.

“All right, you all. Time to separate.” He pointed at the boat. “They’re coming to pick up Ms. Reiniger and her muscle.” He nudged Lark, Dustin, and Grier toward her. Then he pointed at Peyton and Noah. “You two federal agents—you best get lost, if you don’t want to get taken down in a firefight.”

The boat drew nearer.

“Or captured and interrogated,” Kyle said.

Grier adjusted his straw hat. “Listen to the man—he knows the score. If you can’t deny the charges or buy ’em off, you’d better split.”

Peyton worried the charm bracelet on her wrist. Grier took off his smiling skull ring and handed it to her. “My marker, Marshal. You want to change teams, you call me.”

Autumn rubbed her palms against her jeans. “The boat—they’re picking me up after my prison break?”

“That’s right. We are now on the clock.”

Kyle reached beneath his Edge Adventures windbreaker and pulled out a handgun that looked like something Colonel Quaritch would fire at aliens in
Avatar
. Matte silver, with a huge telescopic sight atop the barrel.

He smiled, a cool leer. “And I, Ms. Reiniger, am your nemesis. U.S. Marshal Kyle Ritter, tasked with apprehending you and preventing your crime spree. If I was you, I’d run before I got brought down like a deer.”

Autumn blinked. Then she turned and sprinted toward the water.

 

 

Twenty meters from shore Haugen slewed the boat sideways and brought it to a halt. Von leapt over the side, gun out, and splashed through the shallow water toward the beach.

The Reiniger girl was running toward him.
Excellent.
Her friends seemed confused. In the distance, sprinting over the park’s low hills, came the first members of Sabine’s team.

Up the beach, a man in drawstring pants was doing tai chi. Haugen catalogued him.
Bystander.
Along the path, toward the fishing pier, an elderly couple ambled out from behind the trees. The woman was rotund. She was pushing a baby stroller that held a white poodle. Every few seconds she leaned over to pet and coo at it.

Bystanders.
Their presence was not a problem. Haugen had planned on having to take Autumn Reiniger’s group with people watching. That was the whole point of the way he had designed the operation.

They had waited to ambush the Edge Adventures crew until
after
the boss, Coates, had phoned the SFPD. So the cops now knew a scenario was running at Candlestick Point. They didn’t have to like it. They just had to believe that, whatever happened from this point on,
it was all a game.

Sabine sprinted into sight. A ski mask covered her face. A very real SIG Sauer was gripped in her right hand. She pulled herself to a stop. Walkie-talkie to her mouth.

“Seventh person in Autumn’s group has a gun. Do we back off?”

Haugen raised his walkie-talkie and hesitated. Who was the man in the baseball cap, waving a toy science fiction cannon at Autumn Reiniger?

A
utumn saw the alien-killer gun in Ritter’s hand, heard the “
let’s play
” snicker in his voice, and ran. The non-smile lingered on Kyle’s face. The speedboat bobbed in the cove, engine rumbling. A man in a ski mask was at the controls. Another was over the side and splashing through the water toward her. He was short and stout, with a huge round head covered by the mask. He too had some kind of gun in his hand, not as flashy as Kyle’s, and was holding it high so as not to get it wet.

He waved. “Autumn. This way. I’ll cover you.”

She dashed for the water, her heart racing. She realized she was smiling. Grinning. She yelled, joyful.

The stout gunman pointed at Dustin. “You too.” He reached shore and swung into a stance: arms straight, gun pointed at the other people on the sand.

Autumn heard Peyton shout. Noah cried, “Come on.”

She looked over her shoulder. Three more masked people, swathed in black, had appeared behind them, armed, charging toward the beach.

The stout gunman beckoned to her. “Hurry.”

She hesitated. Her boots were brand-new Stuart Weitzman black leather, buckled, gleaming, top-bitch riding boots. “I can’t get these wet.”

Peyton squealed. Autumn saw a masked attacker descend on her roomie, grab her around the waist, and sweep her off her feet. One of her little bow-covered ballet slippers flew off. Peyton threw her head back, squealing like a piglet.