Thief (28 page)

One of the mechanics, a younger man with a grimy face, looked over at them suspiciously, said, “I help you?”

“Looking for Alonzo,” Claudio said.

“Who're you?”

“An old friend. We grew up together. I'm just paying him a visit.”

The mechanic ogled Chavez, and then gestured with a socket wrench toward a door in the rear of the shop. “You're lucky. He's back there.”

Chavez thanked him, and they went to the door, knocked, and went in.

“Yeah?” said Alonzo Miguel, who sat turned at a desk, studying a ledger.

“Long time, brother,” Claudio said.

Miguel cocked his head, and then pivoted quickly in the chair, his left hand reaching around his back. Before he could get a gun out, he saw Chavez aiming the Beretta at him from six feet away.

“Don't do it, senor,” she said.

Miguel froze, smiled, and let his left hand drift to his lap. His eyes narrowed, and his chin retreated several degrees. “Claudio?”

“Like I said, a long time.”

“Who is she?”

“A good friend.”

“She knows how to use that gun?”

“Better than the both of us put together.”

“Huh,” Miguel said before sighing. “What's it been, twenty years?”

“At least,” Claudio said. “You look like you're doing pretty well for yourself.”

Miguel shrugged. “You know, maybe I did learn something from you and Robin. Six years after the split, I took my money and went legit. I own five of these places.”

“Good for you.”

He raised and lowered his eyebrows, said, “Heard you're a real painter.”

“It's a reasonable life,” Claudio said. “I've been blessed.”

“You here to ask me to paint my portrait?”

“As remarkable a subject as your ugly mug might be in oil or watercolor, no. I'm looking for Hector Vargas.”

That seemed to take Miguel aback. “Hector? Didn't you hear, man? Hector's dead. Shot during a bank robbery in Bariloché. They found his body in a burned-out building a few hours later.”

“Yeah, I'd heard that, too,” the painter replied, watching his old comrade's eyes. “But then about a week ago, Hector rose from the dead, tried to kill me, and Robin. Put a bunch of bullet holes in my car.”

Miguel shook his head. “Got to be someone else.”

“Same fucked-up ear.”

“I went to Hector's funeral, man. Tito said his sister identified the body.”

“I didn't know Hector had a sister.”

“Galena, I think,” he said. “She's younger.”

“Know where I can find Galena?”

Miguel shrugged. “Tito might know, but who knows where that
pendejo
is now. I haven't seen him since the funeral.”

“What was Tito into? Gone straight?”

Miguel snorted. “That'll be the day. He was into the same old shit.”

“Territory?”

“No idea, man. I try not to live in the past.”

Claudio said, “Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“An old brother is never a bother,” Miguel said with great bonhomie. “We should get together some time.”

“Sure,” the painter said. “We'll talk cars and art.”

“Don't bring your friend though. She makes me nervous.”

Chavez smiled at Miguel, slipped the small pistol into her pocket, and they backed out, shut the door. They kept a close watch until they were across the street, around the corner, and out of sight.

“You believe him?”

“About Hector having a sister, anyway. We need to find her, which means we're going to have to track down Tito Gonzalez, and that is going to be difficult.”

“Why's that?”

“Tito was always good at staying below the radar,” Claudio replied. “Back in the day, we used to call him
hombre de la sombre
. The shadow man.”

 

38

WEST OF TEFÉ, BRAZIL

MONARCH AND THE SCIENTISTS
left the main river before dawn, and followed the route Kiki had taken out of the jungle two years before. But where she had walked the riverbanks for mile upon twisting mile, they roared up the tributary.

The channel was less than a quarter the width of the big river, and curled and double-backed, a serpentine waterway with a shifting floor: deep pools that gave way within feet to shallow muddy bottoms and then to light rapids that looked like simmering cocoa. In the first three miles, they passed two skiffs and one of those SJB Mining speedboats. Both were headed downstream.

Three miles on, they reached an obstacle that had not been there the last time the scientists went up this tributary. A microburst—a brief, intense windstorm similar to a tornado—had blown tangles of trees across the river, forcing them to get out, unload the rafts, and portage.

It was tedious, backbreaking work in ungodly heat. Noon had come and gone by the time they were repacked and moving again. Two miles farther on, they encountered more debris and portaged a second time. When they made camp a half hour before sunset, they had only gone thirteen miles from the confluence with the main river. While the others were putting up a screen-room tent, and organizing a meal, Monarch returned to the banks of the tributary to check the rafts, the supplies they'd left aboard, and their fuel tanks.

A breeze was blowing, sending up sighs and vibrations in the forest canopy, which looked different on the opposite bank: between thirty and forty feet up there were dense matrixes of thick vines lacing the trees. Monarch was thinking that they almost looked woven when he thought he heard an engine in the distance, a mile or more downstream. Turning his head to hear better, he caught movement in that tangle of vine.

In an instant the distant motor growl and all other sounds were silenced by a primitive noise that paralyzed him.

It came from up in those vine-entangled trees across the river, an incredibly loud, and long, bellowing that grew and turned hollow. It amplified yet again, and then turned into grunts and wavering hoots that echoed and pulsed through his chest and head. He'd never heard anything close to it.

Rousseau, Carson, and their assistants came down from the camp, gaping at the sound in wonder. Santos and Kiki smiled even as they covered their ears.

“What the hell is that?” Monarch yelled.

“Howler monkeys,” Santos yelled back. “Loudest animal on Earth. They're telling their friends in other troops miles away that it's time to go to sleep.”

“Oh, I'm sure it will be easy to sleep after this sweet serenade,” Monarch said, and even Graciella and Edouard laughed.

At dark, the monkeys stopped their howling, and the insects came in furious clouds. Inside the screen room, Rousseau produced a box of Thermacel personal mosquito repellent devices that clipped to their hips. Monarch was impressed. The things actually worked.

After a freeze-dried dinner, and two fingers of Irish whiskey Carson had brought along, Monarch sat outside under a mosquito net while everyone else slept. He listened to the jungle, trying to learn its rhythm so he might notice any change.

There was a steady thrum of insect life, the shuffling of rodents in the underbrush, and night birds calling in the canopies. Late, after midnight, he swore he heard from far out in the forest the sawing cough of a big male jaguar. The thought of being in the home territory of a big cat like that thrilled him and he fell asleep contented.

*   *   *

The second day was tougher. One long portage, one shorter portage, and they managed to put only twelve more miles of river behind them. All day long, Monarch kept his attention downstream. The thief was dwelling on the engine he'd heard before the monkeys opened up. Not once during the entire day, however, did Monarch see or hear another person or boat.

Again, Monarch stayed up late after everyone else had retired, listening keenly to the forest cacophony. In many ways, the thief was a creature of the night. He was perfectly competent in the daylight, of course, but at night he thrived. Sitting in the jungle, listening to the symphony of his fellow creatures, he felt dwarfed by the complexity of it all. After finally drifting off toward sleep, his mind dwelled yet again on the sound of that distant motor.

*   *   *

On the third day, Monarch awoke with a start in the dawn light, and from deep in his subconscious, a suspicion budded and bloomed. He got up, put on his river sandals, and went down by the rafts with a headlamp and a flashlight.

He ignored the locked cases and the dry bags. Though they would provide easy hiding places, what Monarch was looking for required a clear line of sight to the sky. He examined the frame that gave the rafts lateral strength, and the steel lashing rings, the buckles and the straps and ropes. He inspected the outboard engines and even removed their housings. He studied the heavy-duty bracket that tied the motors into the tubular raft frames. On the raft he'd ridden in there was nothing amiss.

But on Rousseau's Zodiac, stuck down deeply between the engine bracket and the stern, he spotted a tube about the diameter and length of a golf pencil. He got out a Leatherman tool, reached into the tight gap, and fished it out.

There was no blinking light, no pulse in his hand, but Monarch recognized it as a tracking device. He stood there, popping the thing up in the air and catching it, letting past evidence shift and settle in his mind: the guys who tried to take Santos the night of the Carnival ball; the guy who'd tried to stab him coming up out of the ferry hold; and those peacock bass fishermen.

Monarch decided to check for redundant devices. He found one attached with clear strapping tape to one of the welded corners of the frame in the follow raft. It was unlike the first bug, wafer thin, circular, about an inch and half long.

Why two different kinds? Were there two different parties tracking them? Or was it one, but using two different frequencies?

He came up with an argument for one entity: the big slab of a guy who came up out of the hold, and tried to stab him. He'd been down there planting the bugs. But how had he done it while the graduate assistant lovebirds were sleeping on top of the gear?

Then Monarch thought back over the past few days, to instances where the rafts had been out of their immediate control, and came up with two.

He went back to the camp, and found Santos and the others, dressed, and drinking coffee in the screen room.

“We've got a problem,” he said.

“What's that?” Santos asked, setting the coffee down.

Monarch showed her the electronic bugs, said, “Tracking transmitters. There's someone, maybe two different someone's following us.”

“What?” Santos cried.

“Who?” Rousseau asked agitated.

“I'd bet whoever killed Lourdes, and tried to kidnap Dr. Santos,” Graciella said.

“Those men back in Manaus?” Santos asked.

Monarch nodded. “The peacock bass fishermen. The question in my mind is whether those men were also involved in that attempt to grab you back in Rio.”

“How did they get the transmitters into our gear?” asked Les Cailles.

“Good point,” Monarch said. “Are you and Graciella light sleepers?”

Rousseau's assistant shook his head. “Me? No, I sleep like a log.”

Graciella said, “Me too. If I'm asleep, you could have a whole troop of those monkeys around and I'd snooze right through the howls. Why?”

“Because I think it's possible that the guy who tried to stab me on the ferry put at least one of these bugs on the raft while you were sleeping,” the thief replied. “It either happened then or when the rafts were on that flatbed between the airport in Manaus and the ferry, or in Tefé when that crew of locals was helping us load.”

“I don't think this happened when we were with the rafts,” Les Cailles said in mild protest. “I mean, I sleep deep, but I think I would have awoken if someone was moving around right next to us.”

His girlfriend looked less convinced.

Carson said, “So what do we do? Throw those things in the river?”

“That's it,” Rousseau said. “Leave the bastards high and dry.”

Monarch thought about that, and then looked at Santos, and said, “Ask Kiki when we leave the water for good.”

Santos spoke to Kiki in their language, and said, “About the same length of river we've come each of the past two days.”

“So what, ten to thirteen miles?”

She and Kiki spoke again. “More like thirteen,” Santos said.

The thief played with that information until he saw an angle that worked to every advantage, and said, “We'll keep the bugs with us a little bit longer.”

They broke camp, and were back on the river by eight. The sky was clear and the sun beat down relentlessly. But for almost two hours they made excellent time, having only to clear a few trees floating in the river. By noon, they were nine miles beyond their second camp and the waterway had turned braided again.

On the sandbars, the slender islands, and the steaming banks above still pools, they saw the thickest concentration of crocodiles yet, fifteen or twenty in a quarter mile. Santos said they were roughly on the boundary of the forbidden zone right now, and four miles from where they would leave the rafts and walk.

“This will work,” Monarch said looking around, appraising the terrain. He told Carson to pull up to a thin, reedy island to their left and cut the motor. Rousseau and the assistants drifted in behind them.

“Why are we stopping?” Rousseau demanded. “What are we doing?”

Monarch held a finger to his lips, whispered, “We're being quiet. And you are listening downstream, and Dr. Carson and I are going to do a little heavy lifting.”

“What's this all about?” Santos asked.

“Trust me,” Monarch said.

The river bottom was firmer than the thief expected when he gingerly stepped out into the ankle-deep water. The bank was relatively solid as well, and he got up onto it, pulling the head of the raft in tight to the bank. Then he and Carson brought the follow raft around, and rolled the half-full fifty-five-gallon barrel out of it onto the island.