Brotherhood and Others (2 page)

“You've piqued my interest,” Wolfe said.

“That right?” Monarch said.

“Your mysterious past. I feel like a bull that's seen a fluttering red cape.”

“You calling me a matador?” he asked.

Wolf half laughed and said, “I'm a stubborn woman. You watch, Monarch. It may take me a while, but I'll figure out where you went after your parents died.”

“Good luck with that,” Monarch said, and closed his eyes.

He meant only to end the conversation, but soon realized that his sudden, dramatic reversal of fortune had left him strangely exhausted. Over the years he had learned to rest when his body told him to rest, and he soon dozed off into an altered state of vivid dreams.

*   *   *

Monarch saw himself at fourteen. It was dusk, summer, still hot, and he was walking with an older, much larger boy named Claudio on a busy commercial street in one of the better neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Beneath the right side of the black ball cap Robin wore, he felt a scar itch. He'd taken to scratching at it obsessively, even through the stiff fabric of the hat.

“Quit picking at it, or you'll get yourself all infected again,” said Claudio in Spanish. “Rule number ten, Robin. Take care of yourself. Except for a brother, no one else will.”

“Sometimes I think you and the others have too many rules, Claudio,” Robin complained, but lowered his hand, felt the scar itch for attention almost immediately.

“Eighteen rules are too many to live by?” Claudio demanded sharply. He'd stopped to glare at Robin. “If you think that, you are an even bigger fool than I thought when I found you lying in the
ano
's mud. And
I
am wasting my time.”

Robin remembered coming to at the base of the garbage heap after the pipe had hit him, left his scalp split open and his face covered in blood. Almost nine months ago now. He remembered the pain, the nausea. But most of all he remembered what had come before the attack, the grief, the loneliness, and the want that had permeated his terrible existence.

“What is it, then?” Claudio demanded.

The older boy had folded his arms. Robin's attention flickered to the ornate calligraphy tattooed on Claudio's inner right forearm: FDL. The top of the
D
had been crafted to suggest fingers about to pluck something. In a moment he recalled all that Claudio had taught him in the nine months since their meeting. How to glide and bump during a pickpocket scheme. How to swarm a mark as part of a team, to pick a dozen different locks, to disable alarm systems, to steal creatively.

Robin's left hand reached across to scratch his own inner right forearm.

“I guess eighteen rules are not too many to live by,” he said.

Claudio smiled, tapped his lips. “I knew you were not so dumb, my friend.”

As night fell over the city, the older boy said, “You know, we will not always be thieves. I, for example, will be a great artist someday.”

Robin had seen Claudio drawing and painting on walls and pieces of cardboard, but laughed. “An artist?”

Claudio's face clouded. “A great painter. You watch, I'll paint the city with all that I have seen.”

After that boast, he led Robin through a park and into an alley that ran out behind fourteen-foot-high brick walls that helped create individual compounds surrounding a row of ornate mansions. Across the alley, opposite those walls, a steep ivied bank rose and disappeared into a stand of flowering Palo Borracho trees.

Claudio inspected the rear gates of the compounds until they reached the sixth, the one that boasted a red wooden door. Robin could hear people laughing and glasses clinking inside.

Claudio surveyed the alley in both directions, turned away from the red gate, and began to claw his way up the steep ivied bank and into the trees. Robin clambered after him, ignoring the thorns that ripped at his arms. He reached the top, gasping beneath the flowering trees. The air was sweet, and for some reason it caused the boy to think of his mother, Francesca, and he had to fight the tears that welled in the darkness. She'd been dead ten months.

Claudio took no notice of Robin's sudden grief. The older boy was peering down at the mansions. Robin wiped at his eyes and joined him. The compounds to the left and right of the one with the red rear gate were silent. No lights on in those houses. No lights on in those yards. But in the middle compound, behind the red gate, a party was under way, not a formal affair, but a generous gathering of “the wealthy and well dressed,” a description Robin's late father, Billy, had liked to use.

The party was on a terrace beside a glimmering pool. Tiny white lights glowed in the trees. Soft piano music filled the air.

“Which one?” Robin asked, gesturing to the darkened compounds to either side of the one hosting the party.

Claudio shook his head, pointed at the party compound. “You want in to La Fraternidad de Ladrones, you go big, my friend. You want in to the Brotherhood of Thieves, you got to sneak in there, right under their stinkin' rich, don't-care-about-nobody-but-themselves noses, and then you got to steal 'em blind.”

*   *   *

“Monarch? Robin?”

Monarch heard the voice in his dream, felt the nudge at his shoulders, bolted awake into a defensive posture, arms set, ready. He glanced around wildly, seeing General Barrens and then Wolfe, who cringed back in her seat.

“Plane's waiting,” Barrens said.

Monarch glanced out the window and saw a military transport jet idling on the tarmac at Sherman Army Airfield, twelve miles from the prison. It was real, then, not a dream. He
was
free. He got out of the car, did not bother with a last look around at the bleak Kansas winter, and climbed up into the plane's hold.

Folding seats and harnesses were bolted into the flanks of the inner hull. The rest of the space was bare but for a huge metal table on which a stack of large maps lay beside a bank of computer screens. Three people, two men, one woman, in Army Air jumpsuits, worked at keyboards.

Monarch sat beside Barrens, clipped himself into the harness, a move that felt oddly comforting to him, a familiar gesture that had been lost to memory inside the Disciplinary Barracks. Wolfe took the jump seat across from him.

“Where to now?” he asked as the jet rolled onto the runway.

“Andrews, then Diego Garcia,” the general replied, referring to the U.S. military's island base in the Indian Ocean

“Diego Garcia?” Monarch said. “So you want this done sooner than later.”

“No exact parameters yet,” Barrens admitted as the jet took off. “But I'd say we're within days of launch.”

Monarch shifted with slight discomfort, wondered whether the six months in solitary confinement had dulled his skills, his instincts, whether he'd be up to this assignment. He didn't have a choice, did he? This was literally a case of do or die, and he did not plan on dying anytime soon.

He heard Claudio's voice say:
“Rule number one: You have the right to survive
.
”

Monarch half nodded to affirm his belief in one of the rules by which he lived, and by the time they'd reached cruising altitude, he had begun the process of convincing himself that he could and would succeed and survive this mission. Monarch did this by closing his eyes, breathing deeply, and eliminating all other thoughts. Within moments, as far as he was concerned, there was no past, no future, just this one thing to do.

He was ready when the jet leveled off and he heard Barrens unbuckle his harness and say, “Let's show you the latest intelligence. Ellen? Can you bring Monarch up to speed?”

Monarch opened his eyes to find Wolfe already free of her harness and moving toward the metal table. He pulled the buckles free and joined the CIA officer and the general, who were spreading out several large blueprints.

“This where you think it is?” Monarch asked, his eyes scanning the construction diagrams, which detailed the inner and outer workings of a massive building that featured two long, low wings jutting out to either side of a shorter but more multilevel space bordering a large swimming pool.

“Yes,” Wolfe said. “Among other places.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we believe from NSA intercepts that there are copies, perhaps four,” the CIA officer replied. “We have rumored locations on all four, but this target is a lock and features penetrable security.”

“And you know that how?”

“From CIA Special Activities Division and Ranger teams that have been inside the city already,” Barrens said. “You'll get their reports, see the video they shot.”

“They can't handle this?”

“Not without a gunfight,” Wolfe said. “We came to you looking for finesse.”

Barrens nodded. “Obviously we'd much rather this go off without notice.”

Monarch responded skeptically, “From the chaos you expect at the time of launch, I don't think anyone will be noticing a little light weapons fire.”

“Just the same,” Barrens said. “This is how the joint chiefs and the secretary want it run. No undue attention. Lives are at stake.”

“Mine more than most,” Monarch said.

“Get-out-of-jail-free card's a costly thing,” Wolfe said.

For the next hour of the flight to Andrews Air Force Base, they showed Monarch satellite photos, more blueprints, and long-range raw video footage of the exterior of the facility. Monarch inherited perhaps his greatest gift from his father: an uncanny photographic memory that allowed him to recall virtually every line of every diagram, every shadow of every photograph, every nuance of every film frame. Organically, all these came together in his brain to form an almost three-dimensional understanding of the target facility and grounds. Seeing that model float in his mind, Monarch listened without comment as the general outlined a suggested plan leading up to the moment of entry.

“You'll float inside the walls, and from there you're on your own,” Barrens said. “You're the expert here, we'll leave the interior job to your designs and the circumstances at hand.”

Monarch chewed on all that he'd been shown, all that he'd been told.

“Extraction?” he asked.

“Your call as well,” the general replied.

For several moments Monarch said nothing, his left fingers rubbing at the tattoo on his forearm, one of the few things he ever did subconsciously.

Wolfe asked, “You think it will work?”

Monarch squinted, glanced at her. “Everything except the high-altitude jump. If deployed even at a low altitude, the parachute will be spotted with that kind of show going on.”

“You have a better idea, then?” Barrens asked.

Monarch nodded. “I'm going to need a squirrel suit.”

*   *   *

They landed at Andrews at eight that evening. A light rain fell as the jet was refueled and they got out to stretch their legs in a hangar. A courier, a female African-American Army sergeant, awaited them. She carried a large black duffel bag.

“You ordered a squirrel suit, General?” Sergeant Greene asked, as if that were an absolutely normal thing to say.

Barrens glanced at Monarch. “Against my better judgment. Where did you ever find it?”

The sergeant allowed herself the barest smile. “We at the Quartermaster's Corps have deep and wide resources, sir.”

“I appreciate it,” Monarch said, taking the bag and shaking her hand.

“You gonna put that on for real?” Sergeant Greene asked.

“That's the plan,” Monarch replied.

She looked at General Barrens. “Permission to speak frankly, sir?”

Barrens nodded, confused.

Greene looked back at Monarch and said, “Funny, but you don't look like a damn fool.”

Monarch laughed. “Appearances can be deceiving, Sergeant.”

*   *   *

They took off for the Indian Ocean twenty minutes later. As they flew out over the Atlantic, Monarch stayed in his jump seat, the squirrel suit tucked away behind a cargo net. In his mind, however, he was inside that 3-D model of the building, trying to devise the most efficient and safe route to the target.

As he did, thoughts of Billy kept intruding, echoes of his father's voice from long, long ago:
“You want the surprise, Robin, the unexpected, of course, but you're also looking for the path of least resistance. Think of how water gets into places, how it'll seep into cracks and dribble down the walls. That's how you have to be to get in and out of places unnoticed.”

Monarch examined the target facility using that filter again and again. But hours later, as exhaustion licked him into unconsciousness and vivid dreams again, he still had not figured out how to become like water in this case.

*   *   *

“Are you out of your mind?” Robin demanded, looking at Claudio in the gloaming light beneath the fragrant trees in Buenos Aires.

“Are you
in
your mind, or seeing things for what they are?” Claudio retorted. “Rule number—”

“I don't care which of your goddamn rules applies,” Robin hissed. “How can you expect me to sneak in there and steal … I … I don't even know what I'm supposed to steal!”

“A diamond bracelet and a painting,” Claudio said calmly. “The maid says there are many stones in the bracelet that we can sell. Enough to feed the Brothers for months. And the painting, this I read about in a book.” He handed Robin the torn page. “This is how you will know it is the right one.”

Robin took the paper, frowned. “In a book? That makes it like, famous?”

“Interesting,” Claudio corrected. “To me. I want to study it. The brushstrokes. The composition. When I am done, maybe I give it back. But not the bracelet. We keep that.”

“But…” Robin began, then saw the older boy was unwavering. He either had to steal the bracelet and the painting and become a full member of La Fraternidad, or he had to walk away, fend for himself again.