Thief (10 page)

“But where am I getting that money?”

“From this last mission,” Monarch said.

“And what did you do to earn the money?”

He lied, said, “It's classified, but I will say that the man at the center of the mission deserved everything he got.”

Sister Rachel sat there several moments, her chin quivering before she hugged him and kissed him on the cheek, said, “You are a very good person, Robin Monarch.”

Monarch bowed his head slightly, felt embarrassed, but hugged her back, and said, “I had an excellent teacher.”

“Sister!” a boy called.

Monarch and the missionary doctor parted to see Juan running up the easier path.

“What's happened?” Sister Rachel called.

He stopped, hands on his thighs, breathing hard, said, “Someone smashed the windows and broke into the offices at the Refuge last night. They need you to come quick. The police are on the way.”

 

13

CHICAGO

FIVE DAYS LATER …

BEAU ARSENAULT TIGHTENED HIS
tie and gazed in the mirror at Cassie Knox, who lay on her side, back turned under the sheets in the Ritz-Carlton suite.

The color of her skin still amazed him, like nutmeg, cocoa, and a hint of cayenne. But ever since their brief “discussion” two days before Christmas, there'd been little to no enthusiasm for the mogul's chocolate fetish. Indeed, just now she'd lain there like a fallen soufflé while he pumped away, and grew angrier with her with each thrust.

This was the way he liked things, actually. In Arsenault's perfect world, the “protégée” came to him for mentoring and financial support, and he feasted on her dark flesh. When the protégée stopped knowing her place, the relationship in all its aspects ended. The billionaire very much enjoyed the cycle of finding a young woman of color in need of a rung up, providing it, and then pulling it away when he was bored. He'd been doing it for years, and it never failed to satisfy.

Cassie Knox, he thought, was about to feel the long drop.

“Good-bye,” he said, and started toward the door.

“I'm on tour next week,” Knox called after him.

“I'd heard that,” he replied. “I'll let you know.”

Arsenault did not wait for her response, left the suite, and strode toward the elevator with a renewed sense of anticipation. In the coming weeks, he'd witness the collapse of the once-promising young singer, and then grow excited as he cruised far and wide, looking for his next chocolate treat.

In the elevator, the billionaire checked his watch. It was just past five. He had time for a glass of bourbon before meeting Sophia, her dick of a husband, and Little Beau at the airport for a long weekend trip to the Telluride chalet. Though he looked forward to seeing his grandson, the thought of his son-in-law's prattling on the flight set Arsenault on edge.

The elevator opened. He stepped out, headed toward the bar.

“Beau?”

The mogul looked to his right and saw a tanned Billy Saunders hurrying across the lobby toward him, a big smile on his face.

“I hope good came of nearly three weeks in sunny Argentina,” Arsenault said.

“A whole lot of good,” Saunders replied.

The billionaire looked over at the entrance to the bar, and rejected it out of hand.

“Tell me on the drive to the airport,” the billionaire said, and together they left the hotel, waited out front for the limousine to come around.

When they were rolling and the window between them and the chauffer had been raised, the security chief filled Arsenault in on everything he'd managed to discover.

“As you suspected,” Saunders said, “there was a connection between Monarch's mysterious past and the orphans. Her name is Sister Rachel Diego del Mar. She's a missionary and doctor in the slums down there. She evidently saved his life when he was a gangbanger, turned him around.”

The security chief explained about the clinic, and the orphanage in the foothills, both of which had become much larger in the past three years. He also described documents found in the orphanage office that detailed large anonymous gifts Sister Rachel had received in those same three years.

“You're saying Monarch paid for it all by ripping off guys like me?” Arsenault asked, already fuming at the idea.

“Or saving the secretary of state,” Saunders said.

“Where is he?”

Handing the mogul an iPad, the security chief said, “At the orphanage recuperating from the bullet Louisa put in him. We got several pictures of him.”

“We?”

“Let's just say Monarch has enemies.”

Arsenault got irritated. He believed in situations like this the fewer people involved the better. On the other hand, a man's enemy was by nature his ally.

The mogul took the tablet, looked at some long-range shots of a big man climbing a steep hillside, with an older woman in tow. He swiped the screen with a finger, moving the pictures ahead, until there was a close-up of Monarch leaving the front gate of the orphanage with four or five kids, a soccer ball, and a broad smile on his face.

“That's him,” the billionaire said. “That's the guy who darted us.”

They were pulling into a private jet facility at Midway International on Chicago's south side. His grandson was standing outside, waving wildly. Arsenault's heart melted. God, he loved that boy.

“What do you want us to do?” Saunders asked. “From the looks of it, another couple of weeks or so and Monarch could be fully recovered. There's a strong argument to be made of taking him out right there, while he's in a weakened condition.”

Little Beau was coming up to the car now.

The mogul said, “The bonds?”

Saunders's face fell. “Still don't know. This Sister Rachel hasn't gotten any of it yet, anyway.”

The door opened and Arsenault's grandson cried, “Big Mama just called, said there's a storm heading for Telluride. There'll be fifteen inches by morning.”

“Powder day!” the billionaire cried, climbing from the limo into a raw January wind and picking up the boy to hug him. “We better get moving then.”

“Dad's not coming,” Little Beau said when his grandfather had set him down. “His knee hurts.”

“That's an awful shame,” Arsenault said, hiding his relief.

After he greeted his daughter and they boarded the Gulfstream, strapped in, and took off, he went to the small cabin office at the rear of the jet while Sophia, Saunders, and Little Beau ate takeout ribs. It had been a long day already, with a meeting with his Treasury futures traders in the bond pits at the Chicago Board of Trade, and another with the executives of a major grain distributor he was thinking of buying. But he opened his laptop and the file that held the investment tips, reports, and proposals that had accumulated over the course of the prior day.

Arsenault's mind wandered briefly to the issue of Robin Monarch and the missing twenty million dollars, but then he summoned up his legendary discipline and forced himself to compartmentalize. Going through the file was not a trivial task. His father had taught him as a young man that it was easier to make money off other people's developed ideas than it was to imagine and refine your own. It had made him a billionaire many, many times over, and he never forgot it.

The mogul brought laserlike intensity to each and every item in the file, gauging the likelihood of potential future profits with only a few minutes of study. Like a nurse performing triage, he was filtering, looking for the most intriguing, the most promising, the most visionary. In the first half hour, he read and discarded a proposal to invest in a hemp gin in Saskatchewan that claimed to turn the fiber of the marijuana stalk into a fabric tougher and softer than cotton.

While some men might have jumped at the idea, Arsenault dismissed it. To the mogul's way of thinking you never wanted to extend the life of a product, not if you wanted to make any real money with it. Real money required products that were consumed, like oil, gas, food, and drugs; or products that had a limited lifetime, guaranteed obsolescence, like cell phones and computers. A shirt that wore like iron was nothing but a money loser in the long run.

The billionaire wanted investments where people's needs were being met, but not so fully as to keep the customer coming back for more and often. Sadly, however, there was nothing like that in the next six proposals he considered and discarded.

At first glance, the eighth concept didn't fit within his parameters either. But as Arsenault read, he found himself intrigued, and then curious.

The mogul checked the source twice. It was reputable enough. And the man who'd sent the tip along had been a moneymaker in the past. Arsenault reread the entire package again, realizing that there were aspects of it that were inconclusive. The raw data seemed intriguing, but the reasons behind the data were unknown. That was a problem in his opinion. Arsenault liked understanding the reason for innovation, whether it was the engineering or the discovery of— A light knock came at the cabin door.

“Grandpa's still working, Little Beau,” the billionaire growled.

“It's Billy.”

Arsenault hated getting interrupted almost as much as he hated multitasking. He'd run his life that way for more than thirty-five years, bringing intense focus to everything in his path, one at a time, making a decision about it, and then moving on.

But he took his eyes off the screen and said, “Come in.”

Saunders entered, shut the door, and said, “Have you decided what you want done with Monarch?”

The mogul was about to tell him he had not, when an odd thought dawned on him. He glanced at the screen again, feeling the inkling of possibility unfold into a course of profitable action as effortlessly as one of Louisa's beloved honeysuckles budding and blooming on the vine.

“You know, Billy,” Arsenault said, feeling a wickedly pleasant sensation build in his gut and at the back of his head, a good sign if there ever was one. “I just might have found a way to kill a bird with two stones, and make a shitload of money doing it.”

 

14

BUENOS AIRES

TEN NIGHTS LATER …

EL CAZADOR, THE HUNTER
,
slipped from the car two full hours before first light. He padded down a familiar dirt road, and skirted a farmyard so as not to rouse the dogs that lived there. Beyond the farm, he took to the ditch and walked it to a culvert.

The hunter crawled through, and emerged on the other side of a ten-foot fence that surrounded a grove of almonds and olives higher up the hill. He moved steadily in the darkness and the shadows, thankful for the thin light of the waxing moon, and the rain that had fallen earlier, and now deadened his footsteps.

At the top of the rise, El Cazador looked to his right, downhill, and over a mud-brick wall into the compound. He moved diagonally until he found a spot in the roots of an ancient olive tree that suited his purposes. He dropped his knapsack, drank coffee from a thermos, and then settled in to wait for sunrise.

The hunter tried to be patient, tried to be calm. But after so many years, it was almost impossible to control his excitement and desire. He could feel them like energies swirling around him. At long last, he believed he was going to get his revenge.

*   *   *

Monarch woke up long before dawn, and couldn't go back to sleep.

It wasn't the pain in his right side. That all but disappeared a week before, shortly after he'd left Sister Rachel's care for the relative freedom of Claudio's apartment. No, it was the break-in at the offices of the Refuge of Hope that bothered him enough to keep him tossing and turning in Claudio's guest room.

The Buenos Aires police had decided that one of the older orphans had probably done the deed. Monarch remained unconvinced. After the uniformed officers had gone through the scene and left, he'd done the same, but with a criminal's eye for detail.

The window was broken with a piece of tree branch they'd found lying in the glass. Drawers had been opened. Files had been replaced haphazardly. But after the office staff had inspected them there seemed to be nothing amiss. Sister Rachel had checked the orphanage's safe where she kept the operating cash, and found nothing gone.

Monarch could not determine whether the refuge's computer security system had been breached, and again, the office staff said nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary as far as they could see.

So what had the intruder been after?

That question had nagged at him for the past two weeks. There was always a reason for a break-in. At Watergate, political operatives had been after political secrets. In most urban home invasions, drugs and drug addiction were behind the forced entry and theft. One of the older kids might have done it for a thrill, a statement of rebellion against the strict rules Sister Rachel enforced on the orphanage grounds. But this burglary didn't feel like that. Rebellious teens break things, and everything looked intact. Maybe things had been copied?

Knowing he wasn't going to get any rest, Monarch got up, put on clothes, and went out into the hall. He wasn't surprised to see bright lights glowing at the other end. Shielding his eyes, he went into Claudio's painting studio, which occupied the majority of the apartment's living space. His oldest and dearest friend had headphones on, a pair of shorts, and flip-flops.

Naked from the waist up, Claudio faced one canvas painted yellow and another blue. The artist made whipping motions with paintbrushes that stuck out between the fingers of both hands. The paint spattered over the yellow canvas: greens, and purples, oranges, whites, and reds, all of it creating a riot of color that suggested to Monarch the sky and the wildflowers that bloomed in the spring above the Hogar de Espera.

Seeing his genius friend caught up in the creation of his art, and not wanting to destroy it, Monarch backed out, got shoes, and gathered a few items before slipping out. He got Claudio's BMW motorcycle from the garage, and drove out into the night.