Thief (22 page)

When Barnett was just shy of the deeper woods, she heard a bullet whiz past her head. It sent her into high gear. Lurching to her feet, she lunged toward the thicker woods, making erratic cuts back and forth with every step. Barnett suffered from scoliosis, and moved awkwardly even when she was relaxed. That awkwardness probably saved her, kept the sniper from getting a solid sight picture on her until she'd stumbled into the wood line and out of his line of fire.

Barnett stopped for a few beats, gasping for air, and reassessed. That had to have been one of Hormel's men. They were onto the surveillance and ready to do anything to protect the banker. The gunman had been at least two hundred yards down a steep hill and she had a head start she needed to maintain. She tugged off the hood, held the busted tripod and binoculars across her chest, and started to head out across the steep side hill.

When she realized she was leaving tracks in the snow, she began to run as hard as she could given her awkward gait. Barnett reached an opening in the forest, a hundred-yard-wide rock-strewn avalanche chute that she crossed as quickly as she dared.
Is the rifleman alone? Does he know the area? Was he calling allies to have them circle around to the forest road?

She'd no sooner had that thought than she heard the thud of the rifle going off a third time. It must have been a snap shot from across the opening behind her because she never heard it hit.

Barnett knew that he was going to catch up to her, not far ahead, probably on the narrow bench she had to cross before reaching the road.

What would Monarch do
?

She took off in a last frantic sprint.

What would Monarch do?

He'd go on offense using whatever weapon he had.

But Barnett had no gun, no weapon at all. And she was built like a rail, delicate, with very little power. For a few moments she was panic stricken.

What do I do? There's nothing I can do to—

She reached the near end of that long, narrow bench in the woods. There was a sheer granite cliff to her immediate left and downed trees choking the way forward. In that change in topography and barrier, she saw her weapon and her chance.

Trembling with nervousness, Gloria stepped into her tracks from the morning and walked ten yards. Then she stopped and walked backward five yards, putting her boots right in her tracks. She leaped sideways over the trunk of one tree, and into an almost natural blind formed by the exposed root system of another.

Peering through the roots, keeping an eye on her back trail, Barnett stripped the binoculars off the tripod and let them drop in the snow at her feet.

Then she shakily held the two remaining legs of the tripod like a long baseball bat, set her feet so her left shoulder faced her back trail, and waited. She could hear rocks clack against each other as her pursuer crossed the chute.

The snow picked up. She heard him curse in German. Ever so slowly, Barnett turned her head enough that she could see through the roots. He was right behind her and to her left now, no more than twenty yards away.

He had his rifle cradled in one arm, and was wiping the snow from his eyes with his free hand. Trying to breathe slowly, Barnett waited until the sniper stepped almost parallel to her before twisting and lashing the tripod at him.

He caught her movement, and stutter-stepped back, trying to swing the gun her way. But the metal pan head of the tripod struck him above the eye, stunned him, and opened a gash that gushed blood.

He dropped to one knee.

Barnett swung again, hitting the side of his head with a dull cracking sound. He flopped over in the snow, unmoving.

For a second or two, she was frozen in shock. It had worked!

Then she realized she might have killed the gunman and felt sick. She'd never killed anyone, not even close. She wasn't a field agent. She was a runner, for God's sake.

Stepping back across the log so she could see better, Barnett sighed with relief. He was bleeding from both head wounds, and his breathing was erratic, but he was definitely alive.

Barnett took up his gun, the binoculars, and the broken tripod. Figuring he'd come around at some point in the next hour, she left him there and stalked her way to the road. She waited in the trees off the road until she was sure the car wasn't being watched, and then ran like hell.

Five minutes later, she turned onto the highway away from Hormel's estate, the defroster on high, and the gun in the trunk. Forty minutes after that, she was in the bathroom in the suite at the Four Seasons, lowering herself into fourteen inches of deliciously hot, steamy water.

Barnett lay back, feeling the cold cook out of her, and relived her counterattack in the woods. She smiled, thinking that even Monarch would approve.

Then she went back through everything that had happened before that first rifle shot. The dogs going to kennel at first light. Hormel and his bodyguard leaving a minute or two later. A break and then his wife and children leaving.

Three days in a row, they'd done virtually the same things at the same time. It was a strong pattern.

If the pattern breaks, we can exploit it even if Hormel's men know we're watching the estate.

 

29

ON ROUTE TO MANAUS, BRAZIL

THIRTY-ONE HOURS LATER

MONARCH DOZED IN A
window seat of a Saab 350 turbo prop cargo plane until they hit turbulence. His head jerked slightly. He startled awake, looked around groggily. The seat beside him was empty. Across the aisle, Todd Carson was sleeping next to Philippe Rousseau. In front of them the two graduate students were slumped over in their seats.

Monarch's head jerked slightly again when Estella Santos leaned over his seat from behind.

“Sorry to wake you, but look out the window,” the scientist whispered. “There she is. The mother of us all.”

Monarch came fully awake, turned his head, and saw that the sun was rising. The dawn light gave him his first look at the Amazon. It flowed in ribbons and loose braids through dense misty jungle toward a narrow lake that stretched north. As far as he could see there was only water and rain forest canopies glowing in a golden light that took his breath away. The thief had been born and raised in cities, but he was always moved by primitive places and untouched wilderness.

“What do you think of her? My river?” Estella Santos said, sliding into the seat beside him.

“I think she's beautiful.”

“Upriver, where she is young, that's where you'll see her real beauty,” Santos promised. “Coffee?”

“Perfect.”

With a thermos of coffee, she filled a cup for him. Monarch glanced at his watch, and saw it was nearly five thirty. They'd left Rio at midnight, and landed once to refuel.

“How much longer?” he murmured after taking a sip of the strong coffee.

“To Manaus? Not long.”

The thief drank again, and looked back out the window, seeing flocks of white birds circling above the jungle canopy. The scene unfolding below might have mesmerized him on another day, but he was on a mission to save Sister Rachel. That was all that really mattered.

The soldier in him started taking a mental inventory of the gear they'd amassed on short notice. Santos had a detailed equipment list since coming out of the jungle the last time, and it had merely been an issue of dividing up the task of buying it all. From the time Monarch had promised her the money, she'd been on the go, chartering the flight and arranging for the equipment to be moved to the airport even as she dealt with the death of her research assistant.

The scientist had insisted they delay their departure until Lourdes Martinez's father had her coffin put aboard a flight to the States. Homicide Detective Neves was there to see the body off as well. Neves had refused to answer any questions about the autopsy, and gotten angry when Santos told him they were all heading deep into the Amazon for an indefinite period of time. He'd demanded to know exactly where, and the scientist had refused to say. With no cause to arrest or retain anyone, however, he'd let them take off with demands that they report in immediately upon their return.

Who killed Lourdes Martinez? Why? Was her death related to that attempt to grab Santos?

The sun rose higher in the sky, revealing deeper parts of the jungle and throwing a glimmering sheen across the river. The thief pushed thoughts of the slain assistant and the equipment into a box in his mind, closed it, and opened another that held Sister Rachel.

He prayed Vargas or whoever had her was keeping her in good health, and that she was staying mentally strong. Monarch had been imprisoned several times in his life, once for nearly nine months, and he knew how debilitating the experience could—

Santos leaned across him, gestured to the northwest.

“That's the main channel of the river out there.”

The vast river plain seemed to have quadrupled in size with lake after lake spilling into the wide muddy river. It was awe inspiring, and for several long moments he gave into the spectacle. They banked out over the main channel and followed it west, and the thief's gaze swam back and forth, catching sight of hundreds of tributaries feeding the mightiest of Earth's rivers like so many veins.

He glanced over at Santos, whose eyes were glistening with excitement that struck him as deep-rooted.

“You never did tell me how you got onto all of this in the first place,” he said.

The scientist cocked her head thoughtfully, and said, “It's a long story.”

“Pour me another cup, and give me the high points.”

Santos hesitated, poured him more coffee. She told him that her father, who was Brazilian, got his master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, where he'd met her mother, a second-generation Japanese who worked as a secretary at the school. When Estella was born, her father's grandmother came from Brazil to help with the baby's care.

“Vovo stayed,” the scientist said.

“Wait, your institute is named for her?”

“That's right,” she said. “Vovo cared for me throughout my childhood. She lived with us until she passed away my first year in college.”

Monarch remembered that picture in Santos's office that showed her as a girl with that older woman with the tobacco-juice skin and the beaming smile.

“Vovo had this energy that was just remarkable,” Santos recalled. “She was fun. She was strict. She was loving. She always worked hard, and demanded you did, too.”

Vovo spoke Portuguese, some broken English, and an Indian dialect. From the time Santos was a baby, Vovo had spoken to her in that dialect. She picked it up quickly. Her father spoke some of the language, but Estella got better at it.

It was as if the great-grandmother and great-granddaughter shared a secret tongue. When the old woman put Santos to bed she often spun fantastic stories in the language. Many of the tales described Vovo growing up deep in the Amazon jungle.

“She said she lived in a hidden valley that was the most beautiful place on Earth,” the scientist said. “They slept in caves and beneath underhung cliffs, and there was food growing everywhere. Life was easy. Every night they sat around fires and told stories of their people, and how they were the valley's protectors.”

Monarch saw where her story might be going. But Santos surprised him. She said her great-grandmother told her there were tribal shaman in the valley who claimed to keep records of every birth and death, and because they studied the stars and the moon as the gods had taught them, they claimed to know the age of everyone in the tribe.

The scientist gazed off into a distant memory. “I must have been six or seven when she told me that some members of the tribe, boys and girls, died around the age of sixteen, but others passed away in their sixties and seventies. She also claimed that there were tribal members, often these shaman, who lived to more than one hundred and forty years old.”

The thief's face screwed up skeptically. “How is that possible?”

“Exactly my reaction,” Santos replied. “By the time I was ten or eleven I just thought it was Vovo making these crazy stories up. She had a way of embellishing everything. Truly fantastic.”

For example, the scientist's great-grandmother said that during her childhood, when one of the sixteen-year-old children died, their bodies were burned, and out of their ashes came other adolescents given to them by the gods to become part of the tribe.

Vovo told her great-granddaughter that she had been frightened as her sixteenth birthday approached. But she awoke that day feeling fine and expecting to be married off by sunset to one of several young men in the tribe. Instead, her parents gave her a special drink. As she finished it, they wept.

“Vovo said the next thing she knew, she was lying out in the jungle wearing a ragged yellow dress,” Santos said.

The pilot came on over the loudspeaker, said they were ten minutes from landing. The other members of the expedition began to rouse.

“To be continued once we get on the boat?” Santos said. “We have a long journey to Tefé and then beyond.”

Monarch was fascinated, wanted to press her, get the rest of the story, but he could tell she was already thinking of other things.

“I look forward to it.”

Out the plane window Monarch watched the jungle give way to clearings, farms, and shantytowns before a surprisingly large city appeared on the horizon. Manaus sat on a lake formed by the confluence of two big tributaries of the Amazon, the Negro and the Solimões, and, according to Santos, the capital of Amazonia had long been the largest trade and industrial base in northern Brazil, with almost two million residents.

“This doesn't feel remote at all,” he said, noting the soccer stadium, the spires of old churches, and minor skyscrapers.

“It's the major jumping off point into real jungle,” Santos said. “The road system beyond here is virtually nonexistent. You can go deeper by plane, but with this much gear it would be insanely expensive. We'll take a high-speed ferry to Tefé, about a hundred and twenty-five miles upriver. Beyond that it's largely untouched wilderness to the Peruvian border, where the terrain starts to rise toward the Andes.”