Authors: Mark Sullivan
Thief
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Forever, Betsy
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I AM INDEBTED TO
many people who helped in the course of writing
Thief.
João Carlos Desales and Lais Tammela were my excellent guides in Brazil. My son, Connor, read and reread the drafts, and helped me with the science behind the story. Keith Kahla, my editor, pushed me to make the story bigger and better. Hannah Braaten, his assistant, kept everything moving and on schedule. My agent, Meg Ruley, was and is the book's champion. I thank you one and all.
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CONTENTS
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In January 2007, Brazil's National Indian Foundation used satellite imaging to confirm the presence of sixty-seven primitive, uncontacted societies in the upper Amazon rain forest, thereby surpassing the island of Papua New Guinea as the region with the largest number of so-called lost tribes left on Earth.
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BUENOS AIRES
THE THUNDERSTORMS BEGAN LATE
that afternoon and continued on into the night, lashing the Argentine capital with six inches of rain that backed up the drains in the rich neighborhoods, and turned the streets to oozing mud in the slums.
Around nine thirty that evening, the fourth wave swept over Villa Miserie, the worst slum in the city, and drummed down on the steel roof of a small medical clinic. Inside, a missionary and physician named Sister Rachel Diego del Mar worked feverishly to save the life of a woman bleeding out after childbirth.
“Maria,” she called to the woman, who was moaning. “You need to stay with me now. Your beautiful baby boy needs you.”
The second Maria Vasquez walked into the clinic, the sixty-two-year-old physician had noticed the swelling around the pregnant woman's eyes, cheeks, wrists, and ankles, and suspected she'd developed a life-threatening clotting disorder. The doctor's suspicions were well founded. Tests revealed mom and baby were in mortal danger.
Sister Rachel had done a spinal block and performed a Cesarean section almost immediately, saving the baby. But ever since the baby's birth, Maria had been hemorrhaging. It took all of Sister Rachel's skills to stem the tide, but at a quarter to eleven she believed she'd done it. The young mother had lost a lot of blood, but her vital signs had stabilized. God willing she'd live to care for her baby boy.
The missionary hung her head, and thanked her lord and savior for guiding her. She'd been up for nearly nineteen hours, and felt woozy. Inez, the night nurse, sat in a rocker by Maria's bed, the baby in her arms. Sister Rachel told the nurse that she was going to clean up and get some sleep, but to wake her if Maria's condition changed for the worse.
“Yes, Sister,” Inez said. “You sleep all night. I'll be right here.”
The idea of an entire night's sleep was almost too much to hope for, the missionary thought. When she worked at the slum clinic, she rarely had more than four hours straight rest before some poor soul would turn up on her doorstep, sick or broken, and desperately needing her skills.
Sister Rachel was in no way bitter or self-pitying about her lot in life. Even after nearly thirty-two years as a member of the Sisters of Hope, the doctor believed she was doing God's work, and she prayed she would do that work until the day she died.
After showering and changing into a fresh set of scrubs, she let down her long silver hair and tied it in a loose ponytail. Then she headed to her office at the rear of the clinic, wondering how life was at the orphanage she ran outside the city.
The burden of the clinic and the orphanage sometimes felt too much. She looked forward to setting the weight aside for a few hours at least. Shutting the office door behind her, she turned on the light switch and pivoted to see her cot was made up already, which made her smile.
What would she do without Inez?
Then Sister Rachel heard a floorboard creak, and twisted left. A big man with a goatee was already upon her. He wore a black stocking wool cap pulled down over his ears. There was a small camera mounted on a harness strapped to the cap. Before she could scream, he clamped a hand across her mouth and jabbed her in the neck with a syringe.
In seconds the room swam toward darkness.
But before she passed out, she heard him say, “Let's see if you can save Robin Monarch this time around.”
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GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT
THIRTEEN WEEKS EARLIER â¦
IT WAS TIME TO
steal the son of a bitch blind.
That pleasing thought coursed through the thief's mind as he huddled in a silver Range Rover parked at the Babcock Preserve, a three-hundred-acre park in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was December the eighteenth, the Friday before Christmas, and snowflakes were beginning to fall. The all-news station was calling for fifteen inches of snow by morning.
This suited the thief's purposes. Falling snow hid tracks. Falling snow erased your passing.
The last of the dog walkers and hikers reached their cars and left just after dark. The thief sat there, letting the snow build on the windshield without triggering the wipers until the Range Rover felt more like a cocoon than a car.
Finally, at 6:25
P.M
. he reached over the backseat and retrieved a clothes bag that protected a two-thousand-dollar tuxedo he'd purchased three days before. He got out of the car, left it running, and locked it. He went over to the park's lavatories, new tux in hand.
Stripping out of clothes, the thief barely glanced at the tattoo on his inner right forearm: the letters
FDL
laid out in scrollwork with a pickpocket's hand rising off the center of the
D
. He used white athletic tape to fix slender CO
2
cartridges to both inner forearms. To these he attached tiny high-pressure hoses that coupled into the rear of stubby stainless-steel tubes the diameter of a pencil. The open end of the tubes sat roughly where someone might take your pulse. Over these devices the thief put on a starched tuxedo shirt, and then trousers cut with an elegant drape. Looking in the mirror, tying a maroon bow tie that complemented a festive paisley vest, he appraised the mysterious Robin Monarch as if he were a different person all together.
Late thirties, well over six feet, and two hundred and ten pounds, Monarch was lanky and yet powerfully built. His face, however, was harder to pin down. With slightly dusky skin and gentle features, it was handsome, but also vague and malleable if the need arose. With the right makeup or prop, he could fit in almost anywhere.
To that end, Monarch slid rolls of cotton high inside his cheeks, and then put in contact lenses that turned his eyes sea green. They complemented the henna highlights he'd washed into his normally dark curly hair. To complete his disguise, he put on black-framed glasses with clear lenses, a small hearing aide, and an antique Patek Philippe watch that fit carefully over the stubby tube taped to his left wrist. High on his lapel he pinned a boutonniere that featured a sprig of holly and red seeds. Completing the transformation was a beautiful mouse-gray Chesterfield overcoat and bone-colored cashmere scarf.
Not bad, Monarch thought. Not bad at all. Now I look like any other pompous ass in the party pages of
Vanity Fair
or
New York Magazine
.
The thief exited the restroom to discover a Greenwich police patrol car idling next to the Range Rover. An officer was out and shining her light inside the vehicle.
Without missing a beat, Monarch walked over to the car, calling, “I'm right here, officer!”
Brunette, late twenties with a suspicious twist to her lips, the officer shone the light his way, said, “Always leave your car running and unattended, sir?”
“I'm sorry, can you repeat that?” Monarch said, turning his head so she could see the hearing aid. “I'm a bit hard of hearing.”
She said it again, louder this time.
“Only when it's snowing and colder than a witch's tit,” Monarch replied agreeably. “I was just getting changed for the Arsenault's Christmas bash.”
“Driver's license?” she asked.
While she inspected an impeccably forged New Jersey driver's license that identified the thief as Asa Johanson, thirty-three, he wove his cover story in an easy manner. Johanson was an interior designer and friend of Louisa Arsenault. In fact, he'd just driven down from Vermont, where he'd been working on a complete redo of the Arsenault family ski house at Stowe. He'd needed a place to change, and the toilets seemed to do the trick.
After several long moments, the officer handed Monarch back the license and told him not to drink too much; the weather was going to get a lot worse.
Assuring her that he rarely drank, and that he had a bed waiting in Greenwich, the thief cheerily thanked her for her concern, and climbed back into the Range Rover. Glancing at the dashboard, he saw that he was far ahead of schedule. His plan had been to arrive at the gates of stately Arsenault manor at a stylish seven fifteen, during the height of the crush of the several hundred people lucky enough to have been invited to the mogul's legendary Christmas party.
But now, with the officer watching, he put the Range Rover in gear, waved, and drove off. The officer fell in behind Monarch and trailed him all the way to the Arsenault estate. It was barely seven when he rolled up behind a crème-colored Bentley and a jet-black Rolls.
The patrol car continued on. While he waited for the Rolls and the Bentley to clear security, Monarch fitted a tiny macro over the lens of his iPhone and slipped it into his pants pocket. Then he reached into the glove compartment, got an unopened pack of Rothman cigarettes, and tucked it inside the breast pocket of the tux.