Thief (4 page)

“Got to bug out,” Arsenault corrected.

That was the beauty of the cocktail the tan dart had delivered to the tycoon's system: ethanol mixed with midazolam created a hypnotic sense of well-being and total separation from reality. U.S. intelligence agencies had used a variety of the recipe for years. It was unlikely that Arsenault would remember much of the experience.

“Yes, we must to bug out, senor,” Monarch said. “Give Carlos the combination and he opens the safe for you.”

The mogul had trouble with that. He raised his finger, waved it uncertainly, and gave up. Finally, in a monotone, he said, “M-two-B-five-Z-twenty-six-P-eleven-C-eleven.”

Walking straight to the digital pad Monarch entered the combination using his finger overlain with that replica of Arsenault's fingerprint. There was a whirring noise and the locks in the safe door relaxed and withdrew.

“We're in,” Monarch said into the microphone.

“You've got forty-three minutes.”

He understood. It was two minutes past eight. At eight forty-five, Arsenault was expected to raise another toast of holiday good cheer to his guests. The thief intended to be long gone by the time someone thought to come looking for the tycoon.

The safe was large enough to be called a vault, with room for a man of his size to duck down and step inside. Steel boxes and drawers were stacked floor to ceiling on both sides of the vault and along its rear wall.

Monarch went through them fast, finding eight or nine set aside for Louisa's extensive jewelry collection and an equal number that contained deeds, titles, and other documents. Every thirty seconds or so, he looked out to make sure that Arsenault was still sitting at his wine-tasting table with a look that said, “Was I just kicked upside the head?”

Ordinarily, given the quality of the jewelry, Monarch would have been stuffing it all into sacks along with the gold coins and bars that filled at least fifteen drawers. But there was no way he could carry even a fraction of what the Arsenaults had squirreled away in precious metals and stones.

Besides, Monarch believed there was something equally valuable and infinitely more transportable and negotiable in the vault. He found it, or them actually, stored in legal-size clasp envelopes in a wide drawer at the bottom of the rear wall.

Corporate and government “bearer bonds” are unregistered. There is no recording of ownership or the transaction that led to ownership. If you are in possession of such bonds, they are yours, hence the term “bearer.” Prior to 1982, such financial instruments were commonplace. The United States used to issue them in denominations of up to a million dollars.

But in the late 1970s, due to their involvement in money laundering schemes, the issuance of such bonds in America was greatly curtailed. All bearer bonds issued by the United States prior to 1982 matured by 2007. But as of 2009, there were still about $100 million in bearer paper yet to be redeemed. A quick look in the first envelope and Monarch knew he was looking at approximately $4.5 million in negotiable U.S. instruments. The second envelope contained bearer bonds worth $7.2 million. The remaining three envelopes contained similar paper issued in 1977 by Ford and IBM, and worth $8.24 million.

Total haul: $19.94 million.

It was enough, more than enough, Monarch decided. He tucked the five envelopes inside the jacket and under his left arm. Leaving the vault, he glanced at Saunders and Pratt, and saw they were laboring for breath. Animal tranquilizers can be tricky things when administered to humans. People under their influence have been known to suffer respiratory failure.

Arsenault, however, was still looking off into the distance with the stunned expression of an absinthe drinker on a binge, and in a singsong voice, kept saying, “I know … I know.”

The thief retrieved the cigarette pack from his pocket once again. After reloading the fake cigarette with the last dart, he got out that small hypodermic syringe. By that time, the security chief was making asthmatic noises and the attorney was choking on every second breath.

Monarch checked his watch: 8:26
P.M.
He now had nineteen minutes before someone might come looking for Arsenault and his aides. He found and retrieved the darts from Pratt and Saunders, and then used the syringe to shoot them each with diprenorphine, an opiate antagonist that would neutralize the effects of the tranquilizers. They'd come around within fifteen or twenty minutes, suffering headaches of biblical proportions but essentially okay.

Standing and turning to check Arsenault, Monarch figured it would be closer to an hour before the mogul would own his own thoughts. At the moment, he was pointing at the thief, jabbing the air as if he were on an invisible phone.

“Don't worry, senor,” Monarch said. “You will feel better in the morning.”

As he headed toward the door, he held the champagne flute in his left hand to camouflage the fact he had the envelopes clasped under his armpit, and had the fake cigarette between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

“Exiting,” he said.

Then Monarch opened the wine cellar door.

Louisa Arsenault seemed to have been reaching for that same door from the opposite side. The mogul's wife stumbled, surprised, looked right into the thief's face at close quarters, and then past him, seeing Saunders and Pratt on the floor, and her husband looking like he'd drunk the better part of the wine in the cellar.

“Who are…?” she cried. “What is…?”

Monarch smiled, raised the fake cigarette to his lips, and blew the last dart. It struck her dead center of her forehead. She squealed, stepped back, and raised her hands to swat at it. As she did, the thief grabbed her above her emerald and diamond necklace, plucked the dart from her skin, and threw her into the wine cellar. She crashed into the tasting table, and was going to the floor when he slammed shut the door.

“Fuck,” Monarch said.

“What?” Barnett demanded.

“It's not good,” he said as he began to jog back toward that arcade room and the stairs to the main floor. “Louisa got a good look at—”

Monarch heard the door to the wine cellar open behind him. He slowed for a step, looked over his shoulder, and saw Arsenault's wife holding Saunders's Glock. The socialite was squared off in a combat stance, arms rising, but unsteady on her feet, fighting the tranquilizer.

She won't shoot, Monarch thought an instant before the gun barked.

The bullet punched the thief in the gut, spun him around, and he crashed against the wall.

 

6

EARS RINGING, MONARCH THREW
himself sideways toward the game room to avoid a second bullet. Glancing back, he saw Louisa succumbing to the drugs, dropping the gun, and pitching forward onto the hallway rug.

“I'm hit,” he said, gritting his teeth, and struggling to his feet through the game room.

Barnett came back all business. “How bad?”

Looking down the thief saw that the cummerbund showed blood spreading. He set the champagne glass on a foosball table, and probed the wound in front and behind, finding no exit wound.

“Abdomen, lower right ventral side,” Monarch replied, reaching the stairs. “It's still in there.”

“Mayday?”

“Not yet,” he said, though he felt like puking with every step.

“Can you bind it?”

“I'll let you know,” the thief said, climbing the stairs.

At the top he could hear voices and realized he was sweating hard. Still holding the bonds inside his tux jacket and up under his left armpit, Monarch opened the door, finding several guests and staff members staring back at him.

“We heard a loud noise,” one of the servers said.

“A shooting!” Monarch squealed in that Mexican accent. “Big Beau shot Louisa! I saw it!”

Gasps and screams went up, and he went on, “Call the police! Run for cover! The rich one, he goes insane!”

Whether it was fear of a pistol-packing mogul gone haywire, or fear of getting caught up in a scandal sure to be plastered all over the
New York Post,
everyone in the hallway broke into a blind sprint toward the ballroom and the front door. Monarch slammed the basement door shut, and went in the opposite direction, toward a pair of closed doors he knew led to Arsenault's library and private office.

The thief was suddenly and wildly thirsty. It's a common symptom of a gut shot. The body demands water to flush out the acidic digestive fluids seeping into the wound. There was a caterer's cart there in the hall. It carried coffee cups, saucers, and cloth napkins. Monarch stuffed a wad of napkins inside the cummerbund as he tried to run, provoking a true blast of pain, the first agonizing spasm to break through the early shock, so strong it forced him to wonder if he had the strength to get free of the estate before the police arrived.

Flashing on the interior of a prison cell—a common enough memory from Monarch's past—he swallowed the pain, opened the door to Arsenault's office, and stepped inside a room decorated like a British men's club. The revelers in the ballroom seemed not to have heard about the shooting because all he could make out was laughter and the strains of a cello as he shut the door behind him.

In front of the thief and to his left, a woman in an ankle-length black coat stood with her back turned, facing a credenza. She seemed to wince at the sound of the door closing, and then threw back her head, finishing a drink, and slamming down the glass before she said in a defiant tone, “I'm here as you demanded, Beau, but I won't do it. Not here. Not with your bitch of a wife and all those people in the house. In fact, I'm telling you we won't do it ever again. And I don't care if your lack of support hurts my career. I really don't—”

Cassie Knox had turned enough by then to see Monarch. The singer's hand shot to her mouth, and she stammered, “I'm sorry. I thought you were…”

“The rich prick that somehow leveraged you into fucking him?” he said.

Her chin retreated a second, and then shot forward. “Who are you?”

“Someone else with a beef with Big Beau Arsenault,” he replied, before being wracked with pain so bad he gasped and bent double.

“What's wrong with you?” Knox asked in alarm, taking a step toward him.

The thief looked up at her, realized the truth was the only way to get her on his side, and gasped, “Louisa shot me while I was stealing a chunk of Beau's secret, and highly illegal, cash stash so I could give it to orphans in South America.”

The singer gazed at Monarch, head slightly tilted for several puzzled moments before saying, “What? Like fucking Robin Hood or something?”

“Close enough.”

Knox smiled. “Serves the bastard right.”

Realizing he had an unlikely ally, the thief said, “Can you help me get out of here? Just off the estate? To the stables? I've got a car there.”

She hesitated, thought, and said, “You have the money?”

“Right here,” Monarch said, growing weaker. “I'll give you a million untraceable dollars if you get me off this estate.”

“Oh, no, you won't,” the singer said in a scolding tone. “I'll help you, but Cassie Knox does not steal from orphans.”

Monarch managed a smile. “Do you have a car?”

“Parked in their carriage house,” she said, and put her arm under his shoulder. “C'mon, I know the way.”

The pain pulsed through the thief's stomach with every step, but he drove himself to keep moving. Knox led him out the other door of the library and down a hallway off the kitchen, which was still bustling with caterers and cooks. He kept looking at the floor for blood, but so far the napkins seemed to be absorbing it all. Knox opened a door beside the pantry, revealing a staircase.

“Where's that go?” he gasped.

“The tunnel to the carriage house,” she said. “You don't think folks like the Arsenaults go outside if they don't have to, do you?”

Monarch was light-headed, but managed to stay on his feet as she got him down the stairs to a narrow hallway about two hundred feet long, and decorated with the mogul's substantial collection of modern art. They exited into a carriage house, which was more like an auto museum with exotic cars stacked on lifts at the rear of the space.

“Leaving so soon, Ms. Knox?” a man's voice called.

The singer pivoted toward a security guard in his late twenties, smiled, said, “I have to be back in Manhattan so I can finish shopping in the morning, and my friend, Mr. Harris, isn't feeling well.”

Wrapping his arms around his wounded gut, Monarch grunted, “Oysters, they do it to me every time.”

“Snowing hard out there,” he warned. “Nor'easter.”

“Thankfully, I've got all-wheel drive, great tires, and fog lights,” she said.

The guard hesitated before gesturing at a black Audi Q5 on the other side of the garage. “Your keys are in it. I'll get the door raised for you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and started to lead Monarch away.

“Ms. Knox?” the guard said.

She hesitated, glanced at the thief, and then looked back over her shoulder, saying, “Yes?”

“I just wanted to say what an honor it is to meet you. I'm a big fan.”

Knox conjured up a thousand-watt smile, said, “Well, aren't you the sweetest thing for saying so?”

“Be safe on your drive,” he said.

“I will,” she replied, hurried Monarch toward the Audi, and got him in the passenger seat. Sitting down like that almost knocked him unconscious, and he could not help groaning as she climbed in the other side.

Concerned, Knox nevertheless started the car, and said, “I can't take you to a hospital like this. It would get out that I was involved.”

“Just my car,” the thief gasped. “It's across the street at the stables.”

“I can do that,” the singer said, and threw the Audi in reverse.