Thief (33 page)

The shaman woman said something in her language that seemed to take Santos aback. The scientist replied rapidly, looking confused. But Fal-até seemed confident in her reply, and the chief and the tribal elder nodded.

“What'd she say?” Rousseau asked.

Santos was staring at the cave paintings. “She says this is a picture of the beginning of time and life as they know it.”

“You mean like their creation myth?” Monarch asked.

The lead scientist took her eyes off the painting, reappraising the thief, said, “That would be the smart thought, except she says it's when actual time, the canyon, the people, and everything here came into being.”

“All at once?” Carson said.

“She says the moon god sent fire to create the canyon, and with it time began,” Santos replied, before speaking to Fal-até again.

The shaman replied, gesturing all around her for several minutes while the scientist listened intently, taking her eyes off the old woman only to look at the wall of moon symbols. When Fal-até stopped speaking, Santos appeared slightly dumbfounded.

“What is it?” Monarch asked. “What did she say?”

“The wall is a recording of every moon phase since the beginning of time.”

“Which was when?” Rousseau asked.

Santos started talking. The old woman looked at the botanist like Rousseau was an idiot before replying and pointing at the creation paintings again.

“Okay,” Carson said, reaching into his knapsack and pulling out a small digital camera. “Ask her how long the cave paintings go on like this.”

“Yes,” Rousseau said. “And ask her where time is right now.”

Santos did, and Fal-até started to reply. But then Carson snapped a picture. The flash went off and things quickly degenerated.

Naspec, Fal-até, and Augus acted as if they'd been shot, and hurled themselves away from Carson. The shaman woman began shouting at him in a weird, wavering, voice that reminded Monarch of a short-wave radio being tuned. The effort required to make the sound had the old woman trembling from head to toe.

Santos put up her hands in surrender, and babbled at them. But Fal-até kept up her infernal screeching while Naspec and Augus flanked her with their spears extended at Carson.

“That the first time you've tried a flash photo?” Monarch asked Carson, who looked chagrined.

“I didn't even think about it,” the chemist said, shaking his head.

“What are they going to think when we start testing them and using the computers?” Rousseau said. “You see? The pollution of their culture has begun, and we are the pollution. You see? Just by being here, despite our best intentions, we are already destroying them.”

By then the old woman had stopped her wailing, and Naspec and Augus were listening to Santos. But the lead scientist must have heard some of what the French-Canadian was saying, because she whipped around, and said, “So what do you want to do, Philippe? Leave? Or try to do our job?”

“And what job is that?” the botanist shot back.

“We do our research,” she said. “We document everything we can and use it as an argument that this place and these people should be left alone.”

“After we learn their secrets so we can capitalize on them,” Les Cailles said with a tinge of disgust.

“This is true,” Rousseau agreed. “I mean, what do we do if we find some plant, or even the water is responsible for them living so long?”

“We don't know
if
they are living longer than most people,” Santos shot back. “That's what we're trying to determine first. Remember?”

“We must think of these issues before we face them,” the Canadian insisted.

“You face them,” she said. “I've got work to do. And for the time being, let's keep the high-tech gadgetry to a minimum.”

Santos and Kiki returned to the shaman, the chief, and Augus, who remained openly hostile.

Santos spoke with them a few minutes before turning. “Fal-até says the current moon phase is a long walk from here, but she will show us if we want.”

“I want,” Monarch said.

“Me too,” said Carson, and his assistant nodded.

“Coming Professor Rousseau?” Santos asked.

The botanist looked at his assistant, and then said, “Of course.”

By Monarch's wristwatch they walked for nearly two hours beneath the overhang, passing several settlements like the one where he'd awoken. The people were all uniformly frightened, and several children screamed and cried until Naspec spoke to them, calling them “
nee-fal
” or “friends of the moon.” But then, in each case, Augus told his people not to trust them. Fal-até didn't help things, again referring to Monarch as a “demon who threatens us all.”

Santos, however, saved the day when she spoke with the Ayafalians, which provoked gasps of wonder every time. Who was this alien who spoke their language?

The scientist told them about her great-grandmother, and used Vovo's name: “Ulé. Two very old women claimed to remember Vovo. They started to cry and hug Santos, saying that they'd grown up with her great-grandmother, and always wondered what had happened to her.

“You don't believe them, do you?” Monarch asked after they'd walked on. “That would make those women almost one hundred and, what?”

“Thirty,” Santos said. “And yes, I think I do believe them. They told me they remembered the way Vovo laughed, how she'd hold her belly like she couldn't breathe. That's exactly what she used to do. I mean exactly.”

Monarch reckoned they walked six miles from the beginning of time to the southern wall of the box canyon where the drawings abruptly ended about three feet above the ground with the moon in three-quarter phase. A charred stick lay on the limestone gravel below the last recording.

“We're past the three-quarter phase now, aren't we?” Monarch asked.

Santos nodded. “Heading into the full moon.”

In the last mile or so, the thief had noticed other symbols interspersed with the lunar iconography. He gestured to several in the last few feet of the pattern, and asked Santos to ask the shaman about them. The old woman actually smiled at him as she gave Santos a long response, and then rotated her left foot to show a faded tattoo on her ankle.

Santos said, “She says every Ayafal is tattooed at birth. Each tattoo is different, and corresponds to one of those symbols you saw painted among the lunar phases.”

Monarch saw that both the chief and Augus had small tattoos on their left ankles. So did Kiki.

“Where are
their
symbols on the wall?” Rousseau demanded.

Santos posed the question, and Kiki immediately went over about six inches to the right of the last symbol, and showed them hers. Monarch started counting, but then Kiki said something and the scientist translated, “She says there are two hundred and twelve full moons after her birth.”

Monarch had always been fast with numbers but Carson was faster, said, “She's roughly seventeen and a half years old.”

Augus showed them his symbol about two and a half feet to the right of the last moon, and said something to Santos, who translated, “He says he was born nine hundred and seven moons ago.”

Carson whistled and said, “He's like seventy-seven years old.”

“That's impossible,” Les Cailles said. “Look at him. He looks fifteen or twenty years younger. In his fifties at best.”

Monarch nodded. “And the chief?”

They went through the same ritual, and figured Naspec was roughly ninety-one, with the build and vigor of a man thirty years his junior anywhere outside of the canyon. Fal-até's symbol on the wall was over another five inches.

“She's one hundred and twenty-two,” Carson said, in awe. “Look at her. She looks about my grandmother's age when she died in her early eighties. This is crazy!”

“We can't simply believe this you know,” Rousseau said. “If we confirm their age based on their own calendar, we'll be laughed at.”

“Once they see the miles of lunar cycles recorded here?” Santos said. “No, I think people will absolutely believe us.”

“We need more,” Rousseau insisted. “Some scientific way we can measure this accurately.”

“Hate to say it, Stella,” Carson said, “but he's right. This is strong evidence, but if we can figure out a way to validate what's on the wall, we'll have absolute proof.”

They all fell into silence for several moments before Santos said, “I might have a way. I mean, in theory, it
should
work.”

 

45

BUENOS AIRES

CLAUDIO FORTUNATO LOOKED OUT
the window of his art studio, saw darkness falling once more over the Argentine capital, and felt like putting his fist through a wall.

Almost a week had passed, and he still hadn't asked Chanel Chavez to marry him because they'd made no headway in the hunt for Sister Rachel. Making matters more frustrating was the fact that Gloria Barnett, John Tatupu, and Abbott Fowler had turned his studio into a command center, and he hadn't painted in nearly ten long days.

“Claudio?” Barnett called. “You with us?”

The artist turned from the window, seeing Barnett standing impatiently in front of a large whiteboard they'd hung on one of his walls. Tatupu and Fowler sat in front of laptop computers on a long folding table they'd brought in and set up where his easels used to stand. Chavez had gone to the courthouse and hadn't returned yet.

“Right here,” Claudio said, with little enthusiasm.

“I know it seems like a pain,” Barnett said. “But we need to have these intel-meetings every twelve hours so everyone knows where we stand. It makes a difference.”

The artist nodded. It made sense.

Barnett pointed to the first of four names written across the top of the board.

“Alonzo Miguel?”

Claudio said, “I've got people watching him day and night. So far he seems to be what he says he is—a thief gone straight.”

Barnett put a horizontal line under Miguel's name and said, “Tito Gonzalez?”

“Very hard man to find,” Claudio admitted bitterly. “The word on the street is he left the thieving business four years ago, and deals drugs. But no one we've talked to has seen Tito in weeks if not months. Chanel is at the courthouse, looking at his files.”

Barnett put a question mark under Gonzalez's name, said, “Galena Vargas.”

“She's driving us crazy, too,” Claudio said. “There is no birth record of a Galena Vargas born in Buenos Aires in the past twenty years. And nothing in the records in Bariloche that indicate a sister identified Hector's remains. Whoever really was cremated out there, his ashes were never claimed. We backtracked Vargas's mother and searched under her name, Maria Lopes Vargas, but the records say she had one child, Hector, before dying when he was six.”

“Hector have a father?” Tatupu asked.

“None listed on Hector's birth certificate.”

Barnett wrote, “Father?” under Galena Vargas's name, and moved on, saying, “Esteban Reynard.”

Abbott Fowler, who used to work with Barnett on Monarch's CIA team, said, “Piece of work, that one. He's done criminal law here for nearly twenty-five years and represented some serious scum balls, including members of two Colombian cartels.”

“But he's gone to ground,” Tatupu said. “You call his office and they tell you he is away indefinitely because of a death in the family. Except, he's got no family. No wife. No kids. And he was an orphan like Robin.”

“I think Hormel got word to him and he's in hiding,” Fowler said. “He's certainly not at his house or his getaway up the coast. We checked both places.”

Barnett nodded. “I've got Zullo digging into Reynard's financials. He's going for credit and debit cards first. With luck we'll be able to—”

The door to the apartment opened, and Chavez came in looking smug.

“You found something?” Claudio asked.

“A few things,” she admitted. “I took that cabbage sample to an agricultural extension place last week. They said it's a strain called a Bonnie-Mega O-S that was developed in the United States, but is sold here in Argentina.”

“Rare?” Barnett asked.

She shrugged. “It's a big cabbage. The head's like a basketball.”

“I meant rarely grown around here?”

“He couldn't answer that,” Chavez said, sobering.

“What else did you find?” Tatupu asked.

She brightened, waved some papers at them, said, “Tito Gonzalez did jail time two years ago, busted with small amounts of cocaine and heroin, and Esteban Reynard defended him. I bought the court clerk lunch, and she told me that Reynard is a notorious bagman around the court. Bribery is one of his prime tools.”

Claudio thought about that, said, “I'll bet Reynard was the one who got Vargas sprung from jail after he tried to kill me and Robin.”

“Now we're getting somewhere,” Barnett said, drawing a circle around the attorney's name. “He's our common denominator. We find Mr. Reynard, we find…”

She drew a line from the circle and scribbled, “Mastermind?”

 

46

GASPING, SWEATING, BEAU ARSENAULT
rolled off Lynette Chambers.

“My God, Lynnette,” he groaned. “I didn't think that was possible.”

A big Cuban-American, Lynette had a laugh that was hearty, a smile that was easy to join, and skin that was a glorious mix of coffee and white milk chocolate. Her breasts were works of art, and she had dark berry nipples that were a gourmet confectioner's dream.

She put her head on his chest, propped her chin with her folded hands, said, “You like that, Beau?”

“Hard to believe a woman can be a genius on stage and in bed.”

That pleased Lynette. She slid her thigh over him, rubbed him ever so sexily.