Brotherhood and Others (7 page)

“Behavioral response,” she replied. “I mean, you still haven't told me where that gold you stole went, or where you disappeared to for four years after your parents died.”

Monarch flashed on that image of the older woman with the long gray braid and then of young boys playing soccer barefoot in the dust.

“What gold?” he asked.

Wolfe groaned. “You're incorrigible, Robin Monarch.”

“I'm a lot of things,” Monarch replied in an agreeable tone.

She studied him once more before saying, “You know I wasn't sent here to end up in bed with you. That just kind of happened.”

Monarch studied her, wondered if he should go for his gun. “What
were
you sent here for, then?” he asked.

Wolfe cocked her head to one side. “To offer you a job. The CIA director thinks he could do a lot with a man like you. And you know what, Robin?”

“What's that?” Monarch asked.

“I think the director is right,” she said, moving on top of him hungrily. “There's lots and lots to do with a man like you.”

The Art of Rendition

 

 

Berlin

June 2005

Cold rain struck the German capital shortly after sunset on that raw March night. Robin Monarch pushed open the windows of a darkened room on the fourth floor of the Ellington Hotel. Gazing through the pelting rain across the street and down at a lighted office suite one floor below, he dwelled on the fact that he really did not like kidnappings.

Snatching people, in Monarch's experience, was almost always messy, rarely clean, and rarely contained, which was the way he liked things to be. But maybe that had just been his luck in the past.

In his mind, a young girl appeared. She was fourteen and dressed in a white tennis skirt and a blue polo shirt. She was frightened, sobbing. Twenty years ago. He still felt horrible.

A tall man with an athletic build and a face that could fit in almost anywhere, Monarch was the team leader of a CIA “Special Operations Group.” Operating on an Italian passport, he carried nothing that linked him to the U.S. government. Indeed, if he were caught at something like this, the government would quickly disavow any knowledge of his activities and pretty much hang him out to dry. His job was to achieve his objective with zero casualties and zero trace left behind. He and his teammates were expected to be ghosts who barely haunted the landscape.

Trying to become that ghost, Monarch watched the office suite windows and reexamined various facets of the plan he was about to set in motion. By nature and nurture, he was, suspicious of assumptions, especially when things had the potential to turn deadly; and he kept trying to determine which assumptions might be dangerous to him, or to his—

The suite lights across the street went out.

“He's moving, Rogue,” came a woman's voice through the earbud Monarch wore.

“Rogue in motion,” he said into a voice-activated mike, using a handle given to him in the U.S. Special Forces. He grabbed his cap and went quickly out the door.

Jogging down the hall to the staircase and ignoring the looks of several hotel patrons who gawked at his uniform, Monarch took the four flights to the lobby in seconds. Setting the cap on his head, he smiled at the bellman who cried to him in German, “
Alarm für Cobra 11!,”
referring to a popular television show about the Autobahn Police.

Monarch smartly saluted the bellman before exiting into the storm, turning right, and going straight to a no-parking zone where he'd left a Brabus CLS Rocket, a 735-horsepower four-door sedan that carried the blue-and-white markings of the Autobahn Police.

He climbed into the driver's seat, started the engine, flipped on the wipers, and watched the space-age dashboard come to life. The CLS Rocket was the fastest street-legal sedan in the world, with a top speed of two hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. Pretty nice for a loaner car.

“He's taking his usual route,” the woman's voice said in his ear.

“Eyes?” he asked.

“Solid.”

“I'll be right along behind them,” Monarch said, putting the police car in gear, heading toward Kantstrasse, where he drove west toward the E 51, the autobahn that linked Berlin to Leipzig.

Turning south onto the ultrahigh-speed freeway, Monarch began to accelerate into the driving rain, chewing up the miles that separated him from the target, thinking once again that he did not like kidnappings. And then, through the windshield, in the falling rain and the headlight glow, he seemed to see an opaque rendering of a memory from times long ago.

*   *   *

Monarch saw himself at sixteen, as Robin, a long, lanky kid, just coming into his own body. Robin was in Buenos Aires, walking through the streets with a boy two years older and a man in his early twenties. All three wore stylish clothes and had discreet tattoos on their inner right forearms: “FDL.”

Two years had passed since Robin became a full member of La Fraternidad de Ladrones, the Brotherhood of Thieves. Almost three years had evaporated since his parents were murdered in front of him, and he'd been cast into the streets, orphaned and impoverished.

Since joining the Brotherhood, however, he'd become a favorite of the gang's leaders, especially the two who were with him that day: Claudio, who was like a brother to him, and Julio, who'd founded La Fraternidad and devised its eighteen rules. Both had come to believe Robin was capable of almost anything, a thief of the highest order, and they had just told him so in light of what they wanted him to do now.

“A thief, yes,” Robin replied in hushed complaint. “But a kidnapper? No. I don't steal humans. My parents, well, my mother, she thought it was unlucky. Stealing people. Kidnapping, I mean.”

“You're mother's dead,” Julio scoffed. “And besides, what did she know?”

“A lot,” Robin said hotly, his hands gathering into fists. “She thought you could get just as much money out of people from other ways.”

“Like long cons?” Claudio asked.

Robin nodded.

“Long cons take too much thinking, too much time, and there's too much of a chance you get caught,” Julio said. “This way, we take her. Hold her maybe a few hours. She's their only child. We hit them for a small chunk, so they pay and we trade. Nice and fast. And The Brotherhood will be good for months, maybe a year.”

“I don't know,” Robin said, remembering his mother, but looking to Claudio, who shrugged.

Julio put his arm around Robin's shoulders, said, “C'mon, my young thieving genius, for you this will be such a simple thing. And I give you twenty-five percent of whatever we get.”

*   *   *

“Rogue, target has accelerated. You are losing ground and two miles to optimal rendition site, the woman said.

Monarch shook free of his memories, glanced up at the road signs. He was well south of Berlin now, approaching the High Fläming Nature Park, part of the rural landscape that separates the German capital from the cities of Wittenburg and Leipzig.

He pressed on the gas, feeling the Rocket leap over one hundred and ten miles an hour, closing the final gap to the target, who was somewhere just ahead and driving a Porsche Turbo Carrera with a top speed above two hundred and forty.

Monarch wondered whether the driver would pull over when he lit up the sirens and the lights, or whether he'd make a run for it. It was pouring rain, but you never knew. A trained evasive driver, Monarch had no doubt he'd eventually catch the Porsche no matter how its driver reacted.

But at what cost? What if the target crashed? What if he wasn't going home? What if he continued south on the autobahn toward Halle? Ultimately, you wanted as few eyes as possible in and around a rendition. It could get ugly—and quick—and it usually did.

To his relief, Monarch first spotted the black Turbo Carrera as it exited the autobahn onto a local road that led west along the southern border of the nature park, toward the village of Zerbst, where the target had a second home. When Monarch came up on the bumper of the Turbo Carrera and flipped the lights, the driver looked in the rearview and then almost immediately slowed and rolled to a stop on the shoulder.

There were no house lights visible in front of or behind him. He'd timed it perfectly. Maybe his luck with kidnapping was improving after all these years.

Taking his time, asserting his control, Monarch reached into the glove compartment, got a small gas canister attached to a short plastic tube, and stuck it in his pocket. Climbing out of the patrol car into the rain, he set his cap on his head, put his right hand on his holster, and moved forward with a large flashlight.

The driver's side window was partially down.

A sign of compliance? Or an opportunity to get off a clean shot?

The driver was in his late forties, but boyishly handsome with a blond goatee and hair that seemed perfectly tousled. He wore a black short-sleeve shirt and jeans. He could have been anything from a music producer to an attorney. But Monarch knew differently.

“Did I do something wrong, officer?” the driver asked in accented German. “I drive this stretch often and know I was within the limits.”

Monarch could smell liquor on the man's breath. That helped.

“Your driving looked a little erratic,” Monarch replied in perfect German “License and registration, sir.”

“Erratic?” he said. “I've had a beer or two, but I'm in no way impaired.”

“License and registration, sir.”

The man seemed mightily displeased now, but sighed and handed them to Monarch. The driver's license was international, and identified him as Stephan DeGrave, a native of South Africa and currently a resident of Berlin. Monarch knew him by sight, but it never hurt to double-check.

“Sir, I'd like you to take a simple breath test,” Monarch said, drawing out the canister and plastic tube, twisting on a disposable mouthpiece. “If it's negative, you'll be on your way.”

DeGrave eyed the device, turned visibly hostile, but then snatched it from Monarch's hand. “It
will
be negative. How does it work?”

“Teeth above and below the mouthpiece, sir,” Monarch said. “Inhale, exhale, and we're done.”

The phony Breathalyzer was suction activated. When DeGrave inhaled, chloroform filled his lungs. He collapsed into himself. Monarch took the tank from his fingers, turned it off, and stuck it in his pocket. He had not expected it to go this easily, but then again, maybe his luck
had
changed.

There are protocols to renditions. Monarch followed them, grabbing DeGrave by the collar of his shirt so he could control his head should the man vomit, a common enough reaction to a charged dose of chloroform. He rested him against the door and went back to the cruiser, saying, “Target secure.”

“Transport arriving ninety seconds, Rogue,” the woman replied.

Monarch reached into the police car, flipped off the blinking lights, and looked around: He heard and saw nothing. He stripped off the uniform right there in the rain, ending up in a pair of runner's tights and a heavy long underwear shirt before returning to DeGrave, who was still out cold.

Monarch kept his feet moving. He was going to be soaked before the truck got here, but it couldn't be helped. Shivering, waiting, once again he flashed on that image of the fourteen-year-old girl.

*   *   *

Her name was Antonia Valera. She was the only daughter of Nino Valera, a wealthy Argentine textile trader Julio said was connected to the Perón family. For that reason alone, Robin agreed to help kidnap the girl. His parents were murdered for swindling a second cousin of Evita Perón; and Robin had irrationally hated everything about the family and their friends ever since.

Antonia attended a private Catholic secondary school. Every morning she arrived at 7:55 in a black Mercedes E500 with tinted windows, driven by a young man wearing a uniform with a cap and dark sunglasses. Every afternoon at 3:45, she got back in the car, and was driven to tennis, piano, or equestrian lessons. She had two friends who lived similarly inside secure compounds in one of the finest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. They seemed to be her only other contacts outside her family.

“She's guarded everywhere she goes,” Robin complained to Julio after they'd done enough scouting to figure out her routine.

They sat on a bench outside a ramshackle wooden house on the outskirts of the Villa Miserie, the Village of Misery, one of the worst slums in Buenos Aires, a wretched place a world away from the posh existence of young Antonia Valera.

But to Robin, the house was home. It served as a kind of barracks for the Brotherhood. Some nights as many as fifteen tattooed members slept there, along with half a dozen recruits, street kids who wanted into the gang.

That morning, while others in La Fraternidad formed teams to either run a pickpocket operation in a popular tourist area or a short con elsewhere, Julio had asked Robin to stay behind to discuss the kidnapping.

The gang leader was not quite as tall as Robin, but outweighed him significantly. Smart and cunning, Julio had an angle on everything, which made him highly unpredictable, and highly creative.

“You're right, Robin, she is guarded,” Julio said at last. “And we don't want to be involved in any kind of shooting if we can avoid it. So we've got to follow Rule number ten: Improvise.”

Robin shook his head. “I don't get it.”

“When you improvise, you've got to let your brain think left, right, upside down,” Julio replied. “Sooner or later, it comes to you.”

“How to kidnap the girl?”

“That's right,” Julio said smiling, revealing a gold tooth he'd had put in to replace one he broke in a street fight. “In this case, we just had to think left right, instead of upside down.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning to kidnap the girl, we have to kidnap her driver first.”