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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Brotherhood

The Art of Rendition

Escape Artist

Excerpt from Outlaw

Also by Mark Sullivan

About the Author

Copyright

Brotherhood

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

March 15, 2003

The Castle lay in ruins that bitter late-winter morning. Huge wrecking balls were pulverizing the formidable brick structure, once the American military’s sole maximum-security prison.

In the backseat of a blue Ford sedan, U.S. Army Major General Percival Barrens barely glanced out his window at the destruction. A lean African American with short iron-gray hair and a face that revealed nothing, General Barrens’s attention was focused a mile ahead on the new military prison that replaced the Castle.

“What are the chances he accepts, General?” asked the woman in a dark pantsuit sitting beside him. Her name was Ellen Wolfe. Attractive, chilly, with short blonde hair, Wolfe worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Man who’s been through as much as he has, it’s hard to say,” Barrens replied as they pulled into the parking lot outside the visitors’ entrance to the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks.

The USDB was more like a fortress than a prison and featured the kind of security common at so-called “super-max” facilities such as Pelican Bay State Prison in California and the U.S. Penitentiary, Florence in Colorado. Guards in the towers carried submachine guns. Guards inside worked in bulletproof “pods” with portholes for shotguns. They operated gates, air locks, and the lives of prisoners with computer controls and dispassion.

Inside, one such guard nodded at General Barrens and Wolfe and slid their identification back into a steel retractable box. They retrieved their papers and passed through an air lock, where they submitted to a body scan.

On the other side, they were met by Colonel Harrison Craig, commandant of the USDB, who looked at Barrens and said, “This kind of short notice is most unusual, General. Completely out of protocol and—”

“I don’t give a damn, and neither does the secretary of defense,” the general barked. “Where is he, Colonel?”

Colonel Craig’s cheeks burned and his jaw stiffened, but he replied, “Special segregated facility. Follow me, sir.”

“Segregated?” Wolfe asked. “He did nothing violent that I—”

“A precautionary measure,” the colonel snapped. “Have you read his file?”

The general said nothing. But the details of the complete file—not one the commandant had seen—sped through Barrens’s brain. The inmate he was about to meet had seven years with U.S. Special Forces, Rangers first and then as part of a JSOC unit, an elite team drawn from all four branches of the military. He spoke eight languages and tested genius on IQ tests. A master of disguise and subterfuge, he was an expert in hand-to-hand combat and versed in virtually every kind of weapon known to man. He had also endured one of the strangest childhoods Barrens had ever heard of.…

“General?” Wolfe said.

Barrens had fallen behind. He hustled to catch up. He, the CIA officer, and the warden passed through six more sets of steel bars and doors, climbed a stairway, ducked through a hatch, and eased out onto a catwalk of sorts. The opaque roof allowed little natural light. Below the catwalk and to either side were rows of deep rectangular cement wells, exercise yards for the segregated prisoners, who used them one hour out of twenty-four.

“That’s him,” Colonel Craig said, gesturing to the second exercise yard on the right and the shirtless man in his late twenties doing handstand push-ups. “Robin Monarch.”

Monarch appeared to have heard the warden because he came to his feet fluidly, changed directions with the grace of a natural athlete, and looked up at the three on the catwalk. Better than six feet tall, lean, and hard-muscled, the prisoner had a dusky tone to his skin and possessed a handsome face of smoothly melded features. He was, as Barrens had heard him described, “a man who could fit in almost anywhere.”

Monarch’s almond-shaped and -colored eyes took in the warden and Wolfe, whose nostrils flared under his gaze, before fixing on Barrens and the two stars he wore on either shoulder. His attention remained on the general, even when Colonel Craig said, “Exercise is over, Monarch. You have visitors.”

*   *   *

Five minutes later, guards armed with pump-action shotguns led the now manacled prisoner into a room bare but for a table and four chairs bolted to the floor. Barrens, with Wolfe beside him, sat facing Monarch.

The inmate showed no emotion as the guards ran a chain from his ankle irons to a heavy-gauge eyebolt sunk in the cement floor. With a shorter length of chain they secured his wrist manacles to the underside of the table. Barrens’s focus went to Monarch’s inner right forearm and a tattoo that read “FDL” in flowing script that looked like calligraphy. The inmate did not seem to notice the general’s interest. He was looking at Wolfe, the CIA officer, who at first seemed amused and then slightly flustered by his unwavering attention.

When the guards left them alone, General Barrens introduced himself and Wolfe before saying, “We have a few questions for you, Monarch.”

The prisoner looked at Barrens, blinked. Said nothing.

The CIA officer cleared her throat and said, “It would greatly help your cause if you’d first tell us where the money from the stolen gold went.”

Across the table, Monarch took the question in stride, but flashed on the mental image first of a kind woman with a long gray braid, and then of boys running barefoot through dusty streets. He could almost smell the air, hear the music.

He held his tongue for several seconds, but then said, “As I told the court, I have no idea what happened to that gold. And help my cause in what way? And with who, exactly?”

General Barrens grimaced. “The court didn’t believe you. How could it? Eyewitnesses saw you enter that Afghan chieftains’ compound. Afterward nearly a quarter of a million dollars in gold—gold generated by the opium trade—was gone. Do you think the judge and judge advocates were stupid, Monarch? Do you think the jurors were complete imbeciles?”

Monarch shrugged and said, “Help my cause in what way? And with who?”

Wolfe glanced at Barrens, who said, “We have the power to get you out of here. But only if you level with us.”

Monarch was stunned by the offer but did not show it. For several beats he studied Wolfe, an attractive woman to say the least, but one whose body language betrayed her. She was lying, or at least not telling him everything. These two had the power to release him from Leavenworth? No, there had to be another angle here beyond simply telling the truth, which he would definitely not do.

Monarch said, “Besides the gold—whatever happened to it—what do you want to know?”

“Why did you lie on your enlistment documents?” Barrens said. “That’s a federal offense all by itself.”

It was true. Monarch had lied on those documents. But he said, “Did I?”

“You did,” Wolfe said. “We know who your real parents were, Robin. We know what they did for a living, what they had you do as a boy. We know how they really died.”

This time, Monarch flashed on an urban street scene at night where salsa music played. He saw uniformed police climbing from unmarked cars. He saw himself at thirteen, fleeing from those officers into the sweltering darkness.

“We know almost all of it,” Barrens said. “It’s a big part of why we’re here.”

“We just want you to fill in the gaps a little,” Wolfe added. “So we know we’re justified in trusting you.”

Monarch almost smiled. “As the court martial panel decided, trusting me would be a mistake, Ms. Wolfe.”

The general’s lips twisted in annoyance. “You disappear in Buenos Aires for more than four years after your parents’ murder, and then you just show up in Miami at an enlistment office. Where were you during those four years?”

Monarch fought the urge to glance at his FDL tattoo and said, “Surviving.”

“How?” Wolfe demanded.

Monarch had nothing to say. That part of his life was a secret. It would remain that way, no matter the consequences. He had sworn an oath, and above all he was a man of his word.

He said, “You don’t care about my past. That’s not why you’re here. What’s really going to get me out?”

Barrens hesitated, then said, “We want you to steal something, Monarch. If you’re successful, after your return, you’ll be granted your freedom.”

Monarch almost smiled again. “Full pardon?”

Barrens nodded. “And your conviction expunged from the record.”

Monarch shook his head. “Sorry, General, but a two-star does not have that kind of authority.”

“But the secretary of defense does.”

The secretary of defense. That surprised Monarch. “What am I supposed to steal for the secretary of defense?”

Over the course of the next ten minutes, they told him. Monarch listened, digested, calculated, then said, “And you expect me to survive that kind of mission, in those kinds of conditions?”

“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Barrens replied.

Wolfe said, “It’s the deal, anyway, Robin, and it’s on the table for exactly one minute.”

“Take it or leave it,” the general said. “Freedom or back to the cell.”

Monarch considered each of them in turn. “I may be in isolation, but I read. I know what’s going on in the outside world. The protests. And I’ve read the justifications for … Let’s just say that the evidence doesn’t strike me as overwhelming, you know?”

The CIA officer said, “From your position, isn’t that quite beside the point? And think about it: You’ll be saving lives in the long run.”

Monarch looked at her and thought about their offer. “Restoration of rank? Full reinstatement?”

The general shook his head. “We can only go so far. You’ll be a civilian if you survive.”

Monarch thought, cocked his head, and rotated his palms up, causing the chains to clink and jingle.

Wolfe smiled. “You’ll do it, then?”

“Sure,” he said at last. “Why not? I was taught as a child to be a gambler who always bets on himself.”

“Congratulations, then,” Barrens said, sounding greatly satisfied. “In a half hour you’ll see the real light of day.”

“I look forward to that,” Monarch admitted.

Wolfe’s smile intensified, and then she turned somber. “But first the gold, and where you were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.”

“Sorry,” Monarch said. “Not part of the deal.”

She hardened. “You’re hardly in a position to negotiate.”

“Really?” Monarch replied. “The way I see it, you are in no position to negotiate. If you so desperately want me to steal for you, those are my terms.”

The CIA officer glanced at the general, who paused but then nodded.

*   *   *

The biting air outside the USDB gates made Monarch feel so good he swore he could taste freedom in every breath. Six months. It was the longest he’d ever gone without seeing the sun.

He climbed into the backseat of the Ford. Wolfe got in the other side. General Barrens rode up front. As they drove past the ruins of the Castle, Monarch caught the CIA officer watching him with a look of bemusement.

“What?” he asked.

“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.

He started to resign himself to his fate. But what fate was that? A Buenos Aires jail? He flashed again on that image of police officers leaving an unmarked car with shotguns. He saw himself running hard away from a movie theater and the bloody bodies of his mother and father sprawled on a cold sidewalk.

No, he could not go to jail. He couldn’t chance an encounter with any police officer whatsoever, certainly not in this city, even now. They’d kill him if they caught him. No doubt.

“Well?” Claudio demanded.

Torn as he was, Robin realized that he only had one way to get where he really wanted to be—inside the Brotherhood with Claudio. Protected. Part of something bigger than himself.

“Okay,” Robin said at last. “I’m getting the bracelet and I’m getting the painting. I am not going to get caught. I’m going to steal them blind.”

Claudio grinned. “Just like any good little thief would.”

Diego Garcia

Central Indian Ocean

March 19, 2003

3:37 P.M.

Beneath an open-air hangar that shielded him from the sun but did little to cut the brutal tropical heat, Monarch buttoned an oversize green military fatigue top, hiding a chest harness beneath that held two Heckler & Koch USP .45 caliber pistols and four loaded clips for each. There was also a small but powerful handheld satellite radio, two Mag lights, and a GPS tracking device that he had just turned on.

Monarch could smell the sea, but was barely aware of the beck and call of men working around him. Wiping at the sweat already beading on his forehead, he picked up the bib-style bottom of the squirrel suit and struggled into it.

Made of Kevlar and cable-reinforced parachute fabric, the squirrel suit was two-piece, jet black, and featured soft wings like a flying squirrel’s that hung down from the arms to the waist and between the legs of the suit from the crotch to ankle. An integrated hood fit him like a glove. Extreme sports base jumpers had invented the suits to fly off cliffs, but over the years Monarch had found them perfect for high-altitude jumps, giving him the ability to soar in virtually any direction and at varying speeds, all while plummeting toward Earth.

He checked the altimeter on his right wrist and then a second GPS device on his left. Two feet above sea level. Thirty-three hundred and fifty-two miles to target. He put a headlamp on over the hood, and then swung his arms into the straps of a lightweight parachute pack that he’d use at ultralow altitude.

Sweltering now, Monarch nevertheless picked up a helmet and a set of clear goggles and turned toward General Barrens and Ellen Wolfe. The general wore short sleeves and aviator sunglasses. The CIA officer wore a khaki top and shorts and Ray-Ban sunglasses sat on top of her head. For the first time, she looked genuinely concerned about Monarch’s safety.

He looked beyond Barrens and Wolfe at a black B-2 stealth bomber that was also inside the open-sided hangar. The stealth bomber featured special coatings that allowed it to slip past radar undetected and had a range of six thousand miles The pilot and navigator bombardier were making their final inspections. A team of U.S. Navy ordnance specialists were maneuvering the last of sixty-five five-hundred-pound Mark 82 bombs into the belly of the flying beast.

“You sure those are going to hold above me?” Monarch asked.

Barrens nodded. “There’s a foolproof rack system up in there; you’ll see it. The ride will be uncomfortable, but you’ll have plenty of room. Test your radio and headset once you get yourself situated.”

Monarch nodded. “Oxygen? Water? Pressure?”

“Four tanks of O_2,” Wolfe replied. “More than enough. And two gallons of water, two bags of jerky, dried fruit, nuts, and a bar of dark chocolate.”

“They’ve rigged the bay so it will have about the same pressure dogs get when in transport on commercial jets,” Barrens said.

“What more could a man want?” Monarch said, and moved past them toward the bomber, irritated by the ungodly heat.

“Robin?” the CIA officer called.

Monarch glanced back over his shoulder at her.

“Be safe,” Wolfe said.

He smiled and said, “You too, Ellen,” and kept going.

The bomb bay doors were open. Monarch flipped on the headlamp. Bombs filled much of the bay above him, stacked and positioned on hydraulic racks linked to a retractable pin system that the bombardier alone controlled. But between the underbelly of the bomber and the first actual bomb, there was a gap of five feet. Strapped to the empty racks below the bombs were the four oxygen canisters, water jugs, and a nylon sack, which he guessed held his food.

Monarch donned leather gloves and the helmet, then climbed up inside. He got to his feet, got a firm grip on the empty bomb racks before looking down at one of the ordnance specialists, a thickly set Hispanic whose name tag identified him as Corporal Escobar.

“Dude, you out of your frickin’ skull, or what?” Escobar said.

“I’ve considered that more than a few times,” Monarch admitted, then gave the man a smile,\ and said into his mic, “Let’s button her up.”

He held tight to the rack above him and lifted his feet. The bomb doors hissed and slid shut, leaving him in a steel sauna lit only by his headlamp. He grabbed one of the water jugs and drank as much as he could stomach, hearing the B-2’s turbines start and gather power.

When the bomber began to move, Monarch removed the helmet. He took the mouthpiece and hose connected to the first oxygen tank and fit it over his nose and lips, then got the helmet back on.

Using the handle given to Monarch back in the Special Forces, the pilot, a Texan, drawled over the speaker in his helmet, “Rogue, you ready to get up close and personal with a little ‘Shock’ and ‘Awe’?”

“Roger,” Monarch said, then sat on the bomb doors and braced himself, the heels of his boots pressed against two nubs of steel on the doors, his back against the rear wall of the bomb bay, holding tight to the empty racks again.

Given the sheer tonnage of the bombs above him, he was surprised at the power of the B-2’s engines, which roared and hurled the stealth down the Navy airstrip toward the ocean. The force of the acceleration pinned him against the fuselage, and they climbed steeply.

Two minutes into the climb, Monarch became agitated. His muscles began to throb and his teeth began to ache.

“This is Rogue, are you pressurizing the bay?” he asked as the heat around Monarch became overwhelming, smothering, swiftly robbing him of consciousness.

“That’s a negative,” came the Texan’s response as Monarch plunged into darkness. “We are having problems with initiation. Rogue? Rogue, do you copy?”

*   *   *

His face blackened with dirt, Robin stood in the alley shadows beside the rear wall of the compound immediately north of the one where the party was taking place. Claudio had pointed out that several stout limbs from the ancient live oak tree in the darkened compound hung over into the shadows behind the revelers. The older boy had also pointed out that the alley wall of the dark compound doglegged slightly, a corner that could be climbed. That would be his route in. How he got out was his own problem.

Robin felt in his pants pocket for the pocketknife and the three thin picks Claudio had given him as his only tools. Satisfied, he bowed his head and pleaded with the spirit of his late father to watch over him. The teen remembered when he was much younger, perhaps six, and Billy was coaching him as he climbed through a jungle gym at a playground in Germany. His father showed Robin how he could hang from things as well as a monkey if he just allowed his fingers, arms, and shoulders to rotate effectively. With that in mind, Robin began to ascend the alley wall, his fingers and rubber-sole shoes finding niches in the brickwork and mortar that he clung to or pressured against to inch his way ever upward.

As Claudio had warned, there were glass shards embedded along the top of the wall, except in one small section, up at the top of the jog he now climbed. Claudio had been on the wall three nights before. He’d broken off the shards there and filed them down smooth.

Still, Robin had to kip his way up onto the ledge with care lest he slice his feet and hands. He perched up there for three short breaths and then somersaulted forward off the wall and into a splayed position. He landed with an oomph in a freshly tilled flowerbed, just as Claudio had said he would.

It took several seconds for Robin to catch his breath and another several to get to his feet, but then he was running across the interior of the darkened compound, praying that the older boy was right, that there were no dogs patrolling the yard.

He reached the base of the live oak without incident and saw to his surprise that a children’s swing hung off one of the bigger limbs, one that could not be seen from that high spot in the flowering trees across the alley. Without hesitation, he grabbed the chains, twisted them together, and began to haul himself up into the tree hand over fist.

Soon he was twenty feet up in the tree. Foliage surrounded him, blocking anyone’s ability to see him, certainly anyone attending the party, which was now less than one hundred and fifty feet over the wall and down from him.

Amid the music and the happy din echoing over to Robin, a man’s deep, boastful voice boomed something about the wonders of the Perón family. Anger flooded through Robin with such hot intensity that he wanted to fling himself over the wall and find and attack the man. What did he know? How could he know?

Robin flashed on images of his parents leaving that movie theater and uniformed policemen exiting a dark unmarked sedan, seeing the entire scene as he had from far up the sidewalk. For a moment, there in the oak tree, he relived those terrible memories as if they were unfolding right in front of him. Echoes of shotgun blasts pounded inside his head.

*   *   *

“Rogue? Rogue, do you copy?” came the pilot’s Texas drawl.

Monarch roused in the bomb bay, gasping for air, aware that it was cold and that the terrible pressure and heat that had built inside his body was gone.

“Copy,” Monarch managed.

“Sorry ’bout that, partner,” the pilot said with a sigh. “Pressurizing system kind of locked up on us there for a minute. You feeling all right?”

It felt as if every muscle in his body had been worked hard, but nothing was broken. “Just tell me if that’s going to happen again.”

“It won’t,” the pilot promised. “We are at thirty-five thousand feet. ETA twenty hundred hours and fifteen.”

Monarch shook his head, coming more awake, feeling colder still. He got to wobbly feet, breathed the oxygen deeply, then eased over, hanging on to the rack until he got to the food sack. He sat with the food and water and forced himself to eat half of the ration they’d given him.

Two hours later his feet were turning numb and he was fighting chills. He ate the rest of his food and drank half a gallon of water. Ten minutes later, he strapped the smallest oxygen tank to his chest.

At twenty hundred hours and ten, the pilot said, “You ready, Rogue?”

“Affirmative,” Monarch replied, checking the oxygen mask once more. Trying to minimize the effect the squirrel suit’s wings would have as he exited the bomb bay at better than four hundred miles an hour, he took a narrow stance, parallel to and above the seam of the doors, almost like a diver out on a high board.

“Once the doors open, you have ten seconds to be away,” the pilot said. “I’ve got targets that will be right out in front of you. Copy?”

“Understood,” Monarch said, and went down inside himself, breathing and pushing away all thoughts until there was only the seam of the bomb bay reflected in his mind.

*   *   *

Robin lay belly-down on the branch and grabbed leaves, his heart beating wildly at the memory of the shotgun blasts that killed his parents. Gasping for air, furious yet again, he noticed that the deep male voice that upset him so much had died back into the good-natured din of the party. In the next few moments, the anger in the teen chilled and iced until he believed he could hang from it, rely on it, use it to do whatever he wanted.

And in that process, in that icing, something transformative happened to Robin. All those things his mother and father had taught him, all those things Claudio had been teaching him, they all came together and gelled, and quite suddenly the idea of cat-burgling a multimillionaire’s house during a party became the normal, the expected, the longed-for.

I am my father’s son, I am my mother’s son, Robin thought fiercely. I will be a member of the Brotherhood. I’m going to take these things right from under their noses.

He imagined that the bracelet and the painting belonged to the Perón supporter with the booming voice, and that set him in motion again, scrambling among, over, and along the branches of the live oak with the nimbleness and light touch of a monkey. He stopped, belly-down again on the largest of the upper limbs. About eight feet below him he could see the top of the wall.

Robin looked down into a narrow spot between the wall and the side of the mansion, which was covered in thick leafy vines. Waitresses in gray uniforms exited and entered through a door about forty feet to his left, carrying dishes that smelled indescribably delicious and made him realize he hadn’t eaten at all since the morning.

The tree limb ahead twisted and stretched toward the mansion, coming closest to a small arched dormer up on the third floor. He judged the space that separated the tree from the roof of the dormer at four feet to the wall and about a six-foot drop. The shutters on the window had been thrown open and the sash lifted to catch the night air. Inside he spotted gray dresses hung in a row. A closet for the domestic help, Claudio had said

Robin studied the branch and the dormer for another minute until he saw how to cross that gap and snag the lip of the arch above the window. From there it was a cinch.

However, if he missed, if he didn’t snag the lip of the dormer, it was at least thirty feet to the ground. He’d break bones. Lots of them. He never wavered. He was going to get in that window or he was going to bust up, maybe die trying.

The latest round of waitresses exited through what he assumed was the kitchen door. They passed around the corner and out onto the terrace where the party was in full swing, the air full of music, bravado, and the self-satisfied laughter of the moneyed and the privileged.

The laughter rang in his ears as he locked his ankles and hands around the tree limb and then rolled intentionally to his left. The teen’s body swung like a pendulum and now hung below the branch like a sloth. Robin slid and reached, grasping, covering distance, focused completely on his hands and ankles, which screamed at him to let go. He didn’t until very near to the end of the branch, and then only with his legs.

That sudden change in his position caused the branch to dip and quiver. Robin kicked his feet up and down as a frog might, encouraging the branch to rise and fall, rise and fall, and …

On the way up that third time, Robin let go, felt momentum toss him up, forward and then into a fall. He stared at the lip of the dormer as if it were his own dead mother, hands outstretched, and willed himself to grab it. But the edge of the roofing tiles scraped the tips of his middle fingers, three inches short, and Robin knew he was done for.

*   *   *

“Bomb door opening, Rogue. Go with God.”

Monarch did not reply. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God. He did, or at least in a power much greater than his own. But in that moment he thought of the older woman with the long gray braid, asked her to watch over him, and then focused his entire being on that seam in the bomb bay as it separated, giving him a view of a broad swath of lights miles below in a sea of inky blackness.

The wind howled, threatened to throw him off his feet.

“Five seconds,” the pilot said.

Monarch wrapped his arms across his chest and somersaulted forward out of the bay above Baghdad much in the same way he had into the darkened compound in Buenos Aires when he was a boy.

He hurtled past the underbelly of the B-2, blasted by the jet wash of the bomber, and was sent cartwheeling out into space with such force that it was ten, maybe fifteen seconds before he’d slowed enough to risk opening his arms and legs.

Monarch had an uncanny sense of direction, even when falling. Like a cat instinctively turning to the floor, he rolled over until he saw the lights of Baghdad below him and then spread his arms and legs.

The wind caught the wings, slowing Monarch’s descent dramatically. Indeed, for several seconds, he felt as if he were hovering and not dropping inexorably toward what was about to become the mother of all war zones. Even with the helmet on, he heard the whistling of bombs dropping somewhere in front of him.

Then, below and ahead of him tens of thousands of feet, he saw the flaming arrow of the first cruise missile heading across the Tigris River toward central Baghdad. The explosion was bright as magnesium igniting and louder than thunder. It threw a rolling plume of fire, smoke, and debris that he could see from five miles up. Air raid sirens began to wail. Lights began to die everywhere, and Monarch hurtled toward hell on earth in a gathering darkness.

The bombs from the B-2 struck beyond the cruise missile’s target, blowing like a string of firecrackers attached to balloons filled with gasoline. Monarch aimed the headlamp at his altimeter. Sixteen thousand feet and dropping. On his other wrist, the GPS indicated he was 2.4 miles southeast of his target.

Monarch dipped his left wing and soared northwest toward central Baghdad, right at the bombardment as more planes began to drop their payloads. He’d fallen below eight thousand feet and was less than a mile and a half from his target when the antiaircraft guns opened up below, sending up rounds that began to explode in the sky above and around him.

*   *   *

Robin’s hands slapped the ivy leaves before his fingers found a vine and grabbed, halting his fall but slamming his lower body into the wall of the mansion. He clung there, shocked that he wasn’t lying broken on the ground below. Another dose of adrenaline surged through him, took over his every impulse, and drove him to claw his way up through the vines until he’d reached the bottom of the windowsill.

Desperate, he let go with his left hand and stabbed it up over the sill and snagged the back edge of it. His left followed. Robin hung there, panting, and then with what seemed like his last ounce of strength, he hauled himself up over the sill and dropped onto the closet floor.

He lay there, grunting, soaked with sweat, and wanting to laugh himself sick. He was in and Claudio had to have seen how he’d pulled it off. He looked at his scraped and bleeding hands and forearms, already imagining a tattoo there.

*   *   *

More antiaircraft rounds blew above Monarch, throwing shrapnel. A hot piece of it glanced off his left cheek, flaying open skin. He reacted by slapping his arms to his side, holding his legs together, and going into a nosedive. As he hurtled toward the ground, a symphony of bombs erupted to the east inside Baghdad’s administrative district, the heart of Saddam Hussein’s political regime.

General Barrens had explained the “Shock and Awe” concept to Monarch on Diego Garcia. The intense barrage was intended to throw Hussein’s forces into disarray, especially the top command, while U.S. infantry, tanks, and helicopters invaded Iraq from the north and the south.

The barrage would also cover Monarch’s entry. At least that was the plan.

He pulled out of the dive at five thousand feet and threw the wings wide again. Shedding the oxygen tank and mask, he swooped at a hard angle toward the target. He could make it out now. Streetlights still glowed on the absurdly wide avenues inside Saddam Hussein’s vast presidential compound, making it look some ultra-affluent neighborhood in the desert southwest.

The blast and rumble of the aerial bombardment continued unabated as Monarch soared toward the compound, close enough now to the explosions that he felt their shockwaves as he passed under fifteen hundred feet, spotting people on the roofs of houses that surrounded the palace compound.

No one shot at him. No one shouted. No one even seemed to notice. All eyes were turned to the east and the flash and loud rumor of the bombardment.

Monarch waited until he’d passed over the palace wall at eight hundred feet, waited until he’d cleared Saddam Hussein’s personal palace, and headed toward the deep back corner of the compound before he pulled the chute.

It popped open but deployed oddly, with only three of the four panels splayed against the wind. The lines that controlled the sail’s front right corner were knotted up.

Less than four hundred feet above the ground, Monarch was thrown into a fast spiral that he was able to control only marginally as it bore him toward a second compound wall and a dimly lit multistory palace inside. As he crossed over the wall at one hundred feet, Monarch saw several other buildings and then a pond. The grounds were thick with irrigated pine and eucalyptus. He wanted to land in a shadowed area well to the right of the target.

But the wind picked up, and shifted the angle and speed of his final spiral descent, taking him over the pond and deep into the darkest part of the compound. He thought he caught sight of steel fencing right under his boots before he plunged into a pit of some sort. His heels slammed into the ground and he fell, crashed, and rolled across gritty, sandy soil before thudding to a stop.

Monarch lay there, the wind knocked out of him, listening for voices, for alarms raised, but he heard none. He fought for air, forced it through his nose, and smelled cat urine as strong as smelling salts, as if he’d landed inside the yard of some crazy old woman and not the sadistic oldest son of a dictator.

Monarch rolled up to his knees and got free of the parachute harness. He felt the blood dripping down his face and knew he was going to need to patch it. He rolled up the chute first, removed the helmet, took off the jacket part of the squirrel suit, and unzipped the bib. He got out the satellite radio and turned it on.

“Barren Wolf this is Rogue,” he said.

“We’ve got you, Rogue.” Barrens’s voice came back immediately. “GPS signal’s strong. Well done. You have forty minutes until the next sortie arrives. They are targeting that palace. Repeat, they are targeting Uday’s palace.”

“Roger that,” Monarch said. “I came in spinning and screwed up. Having trouble getting oriented.”

There was a pause, and then the general’s voice came back. “It appears you landed inside Uday’s personal zoo.”

It was then that the bombardment stilled. In that pause, over the faint ringing in his ears, Monarch heard the hollow, wet rattle of breath exiting the throat of something very large and very close. He holstered the radio and grabbed a pistol and a flashlight, all the while backing away from the sound. He did not want to use the light, but felt compelled to flip the switch.

In the Maglite’s powerful thin beam, a black-mane African lion sniffed at the line of blood drops that separated them.

*   *   *

In the closet on the third floor of the mansion in Buenos Aires, Robin recovered enough to stand and inspect his surroundings. The row of gray dresses proved to be maids’ uniforms; on the other side of the closet were a row of dark pants and white shirts. Butler? Waiter? Certainly help of some sort.

He remembered one of the rules Claudio had taught him. He could never remember the exact number of the rule, but he distinctly recalled the advice: “Fit in.” Pausing only for a beat, Robin tore off his filthy t-shirt, ripped jeans, and sandals, then climbed quickly into a pair of pants that were only slightly large and a white collared shirt that fit him perfectly. He didn’t see socks, but found a pair of shoes that fit.

He remembered from the drawing Claudio had showed him that the closet was off a landing at the top of a staircase along with two bedrooms and a bathroom irregularly used by servants. He squeezed the door handle, opened the door, and peered out into the hallway, hearing the muted sounds from the party coming up the staircase and even louder through the closet window behind him.

He sniffed, smelled meat frying, felt hungry again. But he pushed his appetite aside and strode lightly out into the hallway, hand along the banister, peeking over into the well and seeing no one. He danced down the hall, spotted laundry and trash chutes low on the near wall, and reached the bathroom in three seconds. He shut the door behind him, locked it, turned on the light, and looked in the mirror over the sink.

Robin looked like the street urchin he’d become in the months since his parents’ murder, face streaked with grime, hair matted to his head, skin scratched and cut, the last purple hues of a black eye he’d gotten trying to outbox Claudio.

The clothes aside, Robin didn’t fit in at all. He turned on the water, ducked his head under the spray, ran a bar of soap through his hair and all over his face, took off the shirt, and washed under his armpits too. He rinsed as best he could, then found a towel, wetted it, and turned it near black cleaning his torso.

His dusky skin now had a reddish glow to it and he’d managed to comb his hair into something resembling neat. He smiled, bowed his head as if to a powerful employer, then summoned up his courage once more.

He shut off the light in the washroom and eased open the door. The hall was empty. So was the stairwell.

Robin stalked down the stairs, found himself within two doors of the master suite, where Claudio said the woman of the house kept her jewelry. The sounds of the party were louder here, coming up another stairway from below. He could hear the slap of shoes on tile and odd snatches of conversation and the building chords of a piano solo. The aroma of coffee brewing drifted up to him.

The double doors to the master suite were right there at the head of the lower staircase. The floor seemed deserted at the moment, but he was going to need sheer luck not to be seen by someone on the first floor, which sounded increasingly crowded and raucous.

Then he heard that man’s deep voice from before, yelling that he wanted everyone out on the terrace to sing to his wife on her birthday. Robin waited, listening until the last footsteps were fading before bolting toward the master suite. He grabbed the door handles. Locked.

Trying not to panic, the boy fished out the three picks, dropped to his knees, and began to toy with the lock, all the while praying to his mother and father to watch over him, to bless him in his …

He heard people start singing “Que los cumplas feliz,” but over it came the quick slap of someone running and then a creak directly behind Robin. Someone was coming up the stairs.

*   *   *

Monarch thought for a moment that the shrapnel had hit him harder than he thought, that he was wounded and hallucinating in shock. But then the lion lifted its head and looked straight into the flashlight beam, so close Monarch could see the cat’s yellow eyes dilate.

He had never stopped moving, however, rolling backward, toes to heels, gun aimed at the lion. He could and would kill the animal if it attacked, but he didn’t want to shoot for any number of reasons, not the least of which was noise. Though the lion began to pant, it did not move as he backed up. Indeed, it acted as if mesmerized by the light, expecting something.

Monarch flicked the beam off the cat and around and saw that he was indeed in a pit with sheer walls and a steel fence above. The top of the wall had to be seven feet, the top of the fence another six.

He swung the light back at the cat and perhaps twenty feet behind the lion saw a steel door set in the wall under an overhang. Monarch heard the sound of a gate clanging. He flipped off the light, listening to the cat’s breath come in deeper pants that swelled into a low, salivating roar.

Monarch heard someone walking above him, the strike of a stick and then shuffle, stick, shuffle, followed by the nervous bleating of a lamb. Over it, he heard a man muttering and shouting gibberish in Arabic. Monarch pressed tight into the wall, heard the padding of the big cat coming closer, stalking him now.

When he picked up the shadow of the lion less than five yards away, he felt certain he was going to have to shoot it and then kill whoever was walking above him, and …

Light played into the pit, cutting back and forth.

“Here, kitty,” called a drunken man in Arabic. “Come here, my love. Daddy has a present for his vicious kitty love.”

*   *   *

Robin felt the lock to the master suite give, squirted inside the door, and heard a woman’s voice behind him say, “Is the powder room up here, Estella?”

Another woman’s voice said no, it was around the corner and to hurry because cake was about to be served.

Robin shut the door, slumped to his side on the carpet, and wondered if he had a thieving heart after all. But that doubt lasted less than ten seconds. He heard a car honk and sat up. He was in an anteroom that opened into a softly lit master bedroom, a large, airy space dominated by a four-poster king-size bed.

Claudio said the diamond bracelet was in a box in a drawer in the woman’s dressing room. It was an odd place for it to be kept, but the maid had told Claudio the woman wore it so often she rarely put it in the safe, which was supposedly behind a painting somewhere in the master bedroom.

Robin heard the car honk again. He crossed to a window. Below him, a red sports car idled in the circular driveway. Beyond, he could see a steel gate closing. A boy several years older than he, but dressed in much the same way as Robin—white shirt, dark pants—was holding the car door open and saying something to the fat silver-haired man trying to extricate himself from the bucket seat.

Robin left the window and found the dressing room between one of two walk-in closets and a luxurious master bath. An ornate dressing table with a lighted oval mirror was pushed against the wall beside a hamper and clothes butler. He started going through the drawers, looking for the bracelet.

The top center drawer held brushes, combs, pins, barrettes, and, in a corner, a small, plain key on a sterling silver chain. But no bracelet. The side drawers contained makeup, nail polish, scissors, and the like. The bottom right drawer featured hair rollers and a bag of cotton. The bottom left a hair dryer.

But no bracelet.

He double-checked to be sure. The woman was either wearing it or she’d returned it to the safe. In any case, Robin couldn’t be faulted for not coming out with the bracelet. He couldn’t steal what he couldn’t find, now could he?

That left the painting. Where would they put something like that, a painting that had been in a book? He imagined it was valuable, and his mother had taught him that rich people like to show off their expensive things.

“They’re like birds,” Francesca had once told him. “They like flashy things, and they like to show off in gaudy colors.”

So where do you show off a painting from a book?

He figured downstairs, probably as the centerpiece of a large room, probably fitted with an elaborate alarm system. How could Claudio expect him to get at something like that? A fourteen-year-old boy might get away with walking through the house in an official uniform, but he’d never get the chance to disarm a security system.

Robin endured a moment of confusion and then decided the heck with it. It was enough that he’d gotten in, reached the dressing room, and searched for the bracelet where the maid had said it would be. If he could get out now, clean, it would be enough. Wouldn’t it?

Yes, he decided. It would be enough to earn the tattoo. How many of the other Brothers had made a jump from a tree like that? None. He was sure of that. And Claudio had witnessed the leap. He was sure of that as well.

Now all he had to do was get out of the house and the grounds without being stopped, or better, noticed. He left the dressing room thinking that his best chance was not to sneak out, but to just walk straight out the front door, act as if he did work there, convince the kid parking the cars to open the front gate, and he would be gone.

Robin returned to the master bedroom, gave it all a quick glance before stopping short. Hanging on the wall directly facing the bed was the painting Claudio had told him to steal.

*   *   *

“Where are you, Kitty Vicious?” the man called in a hoarse slur. “Come out! Come get your lamby!”

The lion turned its head toward the voice, panting, drooling.

Then Monarch heard a squeal of fright, followed by a thump. The lamb began screeching in pain. The lion leapt away, became a bounding shadow until the trembling light found it biting into the lamb at back of its neck and shaking the poor beast until it hung limp and bleeding from his mouth.

“Good Kitty Vicious,” the man purred. “Daddy’s best Kitty Vicious.”

Monarch leaned slightly away from the wall and peered back up and along the fence until he found the source of the beam and saw the man holding the torch. Uday Hussein was weaving on his feet, light in one hand, a fresh bottle of whiskey in the other, a leer smeared across his face as he watched the lion tear into the lamb.

Monarch pressed back into the shadows, hearing Saddam’s eldest son’s voice change, become almost melancholy. “Kitty will stay with Daddy, won’t she?” he asked before his tone turned bewildered. “Or will you be like all the other pussies? Bitches … cunts … that’s all they…”

The light fell with a clatter and bounced off the bottom of the pit, but did not die. The beam cut away from Monarch, away from the lion, shone tight on the wall. Not far away, the antiaircraft guns opened up again, and bombs began to explode once more. The sky flashed with reddish light and Monarch plastered himself against the wall for fear that Uday would spot him.

But then he heard wood—a cane? a staff?—strike above him followed by that shuffle, strike, shuffle, and then the sound of a man choking against tears.

Twenty seconds later, he heard a gate clang shut, and the dictator’s son scream, “Why?”

In the glow of the flashlight Uday had dropped, Monarch saw the lion still busily feeding. He went straight across the pit and found the door in the wall. Maglite in his teeth, he quickly picked the lock, levered the door open, and exited into a short tunnel that climbed and exited behind the pit and the fence.

He checked his watch. Thirty-four minutes until the bombs came to lay waste to the palace. He scanned the compound, seeing a second, smaller residence by the main one. The windows were dark. He was about to circle toward the big palace when a light went on in a window on the first floor of the smaller residence. He thought he saw Uday walking around inside.

Better yet, Monarch thought, and began to jog in a loop around the lion pit, alert for any movement. But there was none, and it was becoming apparent to him that the dictator’s son had been abandoned by his guards.

Uday Hussein was alone here, drunk out of his mind, clinging to the last vestiges of his power and grandeur.

Better yet, Monarch thought again.

*   *   *

Robin’s heart began to pound. That had to be the painting there locked inside a glass case hanging on the wall. He walked closer and saw, exactly as Claudio had said, that it was signed in the lower left-hand corner, “Xul Solar.” The painting depicted in gaudy watercolors the shapes of a distorted city, with orange and red buildings that curved and bulged as if seen reflected in a curved mirror.

The teen got close and studied the glass box that held the painting from several angles, could see the clear material was thicker than glass, stronger too, probably bulletproof, and it seemed connected to a steel frame of some kind set in the wall. But Robin couldn’t see any wires. Then again, maybe the wires were behind the painting where he couldn’t see them. He fretted a moment, then reached out, touched the box. He tried to move it left, right, up and down, but it didn’t budge. It was locked to that frame in a way he couldn’t figure out.

Robin tugged on the box. He felt resistance, and then to his surprise the entire box and painting swung out toward him on two thick extending steel hydraulic arms a full eighteen inches from the wall. He looked behind it and saw a safe sitting inside the steel frame.

He didn’t know how to crack a safe, and was about to shut it back up, when he thought to look at the rear of the bulletproof box. Ducking under one of the arms, he saw that there was a door and a lock. The lock was embedded deep inside three layers of bulletproof glass. No dial like the safe. It took a key to open the box.

Robin blinked, thinking of that key back in the top center drawer of the dressing table. He raced back to the dressing room, found the key, and raced even faster back.

Fitting the key in the lock, he heard muffled voices somewhere, and then the piano music starting up again. He turned the key. An audible click. His heart jumped with joy. He glanced at his inner right forearm and let the door slide down dovetailed grooves into his hand.

Heart still pounding wildly, he stared at the rear of the painting and the frame that held it. Bolts, screws. He’d never get the back off, and he couldn’t carry it anyway.

Scissors. He’d cut it out. For the second time, he sprinted back to the dressing table, found the scissors, and dashed back. He lifted free the painting, turned it to face him, pressed the bottom of the frame against his hip, and stabbed the narrow blade of the scissors in the lower right corner. It punctured easily.

He started cutting, surprised that the painting was not on canvas, but paper glued to a piece of cardboard. And this ended up in a book?

It took Robin less than a minute to cut it free of the frame, and less than ten seconds to roll it up. He ran back to the dressing table a fourth time, got hair bands and barrettes, and made the rolled painting into a tight tubular package.

He put the painting under his shirt and tried to pin it beneath his arm. He looked stiff, but it could work. Before he could talk himself out of it, Robin went straight to the glass box and pushed it back to hide the safe, then crossed to the suite door and twisted the knob. He peeked out, saw no one at the bottom of the stairs, and stepped out, closing the door behind him.

Down and out, he thought, and took a step toward the stairs.

Then he saw a woman appear below, her back to him, looking the other way. He saw what she was wearing and panicked.

It was one of the hired help—someone who would know who was working the party. Robin no sooner had that thought than she started to turn toward him.

*   *   *

Monarch had the pistol leading when he slipped into the smaller of Uday Hussein’s palaces through the front door, finding himself in a brilliantly lit foyer with a rose marble floor, elevator, and lurid red wallpaper. The nearest door, the one on the left, the one that led toward the room where Monarch figured he’d seen the dictator’s son, was open. It too glowed with light. He took a step in that direction, then heard something smash somewhere in the palace above him, followed by screaming and ranting.

Uday was losing it big time.

Monarch ran across the foyer past the elevator and a white grand piano that looked as if it were on loan from Liberace and started up the curving staircase. Everything about the place was garish: the chandeliers, the shag rugs at the top of the stairs, the gold-flake fixtures, as if it had been designed and decorated in homage to a whorehouse, or some demented caricature of one.

When he reached the landing, Monarch heard another item smash, large, like a lamp or a vase, down the hallway, past several closed doors.

“I have the power to destroy you!” Uday shrieked. “The power!”

A girl began to weep and beg for mercy.

Monarch went straight at him then. He eased around the corner and found himself in the bedroom of a decadent sultan. There was a tufted green-and-gold silk ceiling. Matching drapes framed huge gilt mirrors. There were snapshots pinned all over the drapes, every one of them a picture of a naked woman, many of them shot with a Polaroid.

Wearing pajamas and a robe, surrounded by the pornography of his life and the shards of a drunken tantrum, Uday had a large ceramic vase raised overhead and looked poised to hurl it not at the naked young girl cringing and weeping on one of the couches, but at the last of the intact mirrors.

“I have it,” Uday drunkenly promised his mirror image. Then he raged, “The power over life and death!”

Then his head jerked and Monarch realized the dictator’s son had spotted him in the mirror. Uday dropped the vase, shattering it, and pivoted, wild-eyed, homicidal. Until he saw the gun, and the uniform Monarch was wearing.

“Did you come to protect me?” Uday asked, the rage fleeing before fear. He stopped in his tracks and began to weave. He turned away, went to a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and chugged on it, one eye on Monarch, who stepped closer, trying to figure out how best to handle the situation.

He had a good idea why Saddam’s oldest son had just asked if he’d come to protect him. Monarch was wearing a uniform that identified him not only as a member of the Republican Guard, Iraq’s elite fighting force, but also a member of Uday’s father’s palace guard, the most loyal of his troops.

When the dictator’s son lowered the bottle, Monarch half lowered his gun.

“Your father sent me,” he said in flawless Arabic. “He needs you to give me something.”

Uday’s eyes screwed up in anger. “My father?” he asked. “That fucking cocksucker? Disowning bastard fuck of his crippled son.”

Monarch understood some of that as well. Eight years before, when Uday was primed to be his father’s successor, there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on him. Uday took multiple rounds and lived. But the attack caused brain damage and left him with a deformed right leg. Soon after the shooting, Saddam began favoring Uday’s younger brother, Qusay, as his political heir.

Uday sneered at Monarch. “Why doesn’t my father come see me himself?”

The dictator’s son stumbled and weaved again, looking at the girl now. Uday began to fumble with the drawstrings of the pajama bottoms he wore, as if Monarch were not even there.

“Your excellency!” Monarch shouted. “Your life depends on getting me what your father wants. Now.”

The dictator’s son frowned, looked back at Monarch, and asked caustically, “What does my dear disowning bastard fuck father want for my life?”

Monarch said, “The three other copies have been destroyed in the bombing. He needs your copy. Now.”

For a beat, Monarch thought Uday was going to argue further, but then he appeared won over. “It’s in my computer in the other house.” He glanced at the girl, looked back at Monarch, and added, “Shoot the bitch. Then we go.”

*   *   *

Robin vaulted away down the hall, back toward that narrower staircase that led to the third floor of the mansion.

“Alejandro?” the maid hissed after him. “What are you doing? You crazy?”

He heard the woman pounding up the stairs just as he ducked into the narrow staircase and sprinted toward the top. He reached the landing, heard her calling in that hiss, “Alejandro!”

She was coming all the way. There were only two bedrooms, the bathroom, and the closet. He couldn’t jump from the window. It was thirty feet. She was going to find him. And the police would be summoned. And the police would question him and then talk. And soon the men who’d killed his parents would come for him and …

The dormer.

Robin raced to the closet. The maid stormed up the narrow stairs behind him, hissing, “Alejandro?”

He dropped the painting out the window, heard it slap the grass below as he climbed out backward, reached up, and grabbed at the drip edge of the dormer at the same time he heard the maid call, “Alejandro, she will fire you!”

*   *   *

“Shoot the cunt,” Uday ordered, looking excited at the prospect of watching the poor naked wretch of a girl endure further suffering, as if she were nothing more than meat for the lion’s bottomless appetite.

Monarch couldn’t take it anymore. Though he might have been able to carry on the charade of being a palace guard on a mission from Saddam, he just couldn’t stomach the dictator’s son any longer.

He swung the pistol, took a step forward, jammed the muzzle of it between Uday’s eyes, and said in English, “I’d rather blow your head off, you depraved excuse for a lunatic.”

Uday’s suddenly terrified eyes looked at Monarch right down the gun barrel. “I have the pow—” he began in Arabic.

“No, Uday,” Monarch replied. “You don’t.”

Monarch grabbed the dictator’s son and slammed him up against one of the drapes, grinding Uday’s nose against the snapshots of the naked women he had defiled in the room. “You don’t have anything anymore,” Monarch growled in his ear in Arabic, the gun against the back of his head now. “You have nothing but me. I am your lord and master, the only thing separating you from death. Do you understand?”

Bombs fell so close to the compound, the place shook and dust fell.

“Do you?” Monarch shouted as he slipped zip ties around the wrists of Saddam’s eldest son.

Uday whimpered, nodded, and said, “Allah, have mercy on a true believer.”

“A true believer?” Monarch snorted. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be counting on virgins waiting for you at the gates of paradise. More like guys with knives, fired up for a castration.”

“Let me go,” Uday pleaded. “I’ll pay you. Anything you want. A fortune is yours for the asking, my friend.”

Monarch thought about that, then said, “Deal. Your life for the battle plan.”

“The battle … of course,” the dictator’s son said. “Yes. That’s all?”

“We’ll see,” Monarch said.

Then he looked at the girl. “Get dressed. Get out of here. Now.”

The traumatized girl went for a robe. Monarch hauled Uday out into the hall. “My leg,” he complained. “I must have my cane.”

Monarch wanted to hurl him down the marble staircase, but held him by the collar of his robe and dragged him to the bottom and out through the front door into the night. The bombs fell stunningly close—just outside the greater palace compound now, no more than seven, eight hundred yards away.

Uday was crying, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not without that final battle plan,” Monarch said. “Where is it?”

“In my office upstairs,” Uday said, pointing at the big palace. “The computer, it is—”

The bomb went off just outside Uday’s compound with a flash that blinded Monarch, threw him off balance, and made him release his hold. He ducked, arm raised overhead to ward off debris, then realized that Uday was trying to flee. Monarch sprinted after him, hit him across the center of his back, forced him to his knees, and then jerked the now sniveling dictator’s son to his feet.

“I told you I am your lord and master, Uday,” Monarch yelled, stuffing the barrel of the pistol into the man’s mouth. “Get me that plan or you will die and face the cosmic castrators right now.”

*   *   *

Robin pulled, kicked, and hoisted himself up onto the roof of the dormer not five seconds before he heard the door to the closet open and the maid call yet again, “Alejandro?”

The boy stayed frozen, but looked over the edge of the dormer, hearing her cross to the open window and pause. After several beats, her hand reached out and pulled closed the shutters.

Robin took two deep breaths after hearing the closet door shut. Then he willed himself off the roof of the dormer and clung to the thick ivy vines. He started to drop down the wall, every muscle in his body shaking and then screaming in pain as he fought his way down, stopping twice when waitresses returned from the party and entered the kitchen.

Ten feet from the ground, his grip slipped and he fell, hit with a jarring landing that shook his teeth.

But his brain whirled. Why wasn’t he laying there too cracked up to move? How had he gotten down that wall? He thought of his parents the way he’d last seen them, Billy’s arm around Francesca, exiting the cinema, both of them smiling at him from down the block.

They had to be watching over him. There was no other explanation.

Fortified by that belief, Robin got to his feet, spotted the painting lying in the grass in the shadowed yard. Quick now. You’re not done yet. He grabbed it and headed for the front of the mansion. Behind him and around the back, a woman was singing for the party, which had fallen quiet except for the piano that accompanied her.

His feet crunched onto a gravel pathway. Ten feet from the corner where the pathway met the front yard and twenty feet from where it met the circular driveway, the older boy who’d been parking cars came around the corner, face to face with young Robin Monarch.

*   *   *

Uday Hussein sat propped against a gilt-framed couch, wrists still in restraints, watching Monarch the way a trapped hyena might, sidelong and twisted with impotent menace.

They were up on the second floor of the main palace in an office decorated with lewd paintings of women. Monarch sat at a black lacquer desk, watching the screen of a laptop and an upload icon blinking to tell him that the data transfer had been a success.

There was a lull in the bombing again. But Monarch had less than twelve minutes now to get out before the entire presidential palace compound became a hard target.

Monarch picked up the satellite radio and said, “Barren Wolf, you should have it now, Saddam’s most up-to-date battle plan, position of all planes, tanks, bunkers, missiles. Everything.”

“That’s an affirmative, Rogue,” General Barrens said. “You’ve just saved thousands of allied lives. Extraction?”

Monarch thought about that. “I’ll stay in Baghdad until U.S. troops arrive, maybe at that hotel where all the journalists stay. The Al-Rasheed?”

A pause, then, bristling, the general shot back, “No, that is completely unacceptable, and—”

“I don’t follow your orders anymore,” Monarch said. “Deal’s a deal, and I’m done.”

“Wait, wait,” Barrens replied. “Uday? Have you seen any sign of him?”

Monarch looked at the dictator’s son, who stared at him, pleading-eyed.

*   *   *

“Alejandro!” Robin said as if he and the valet were the best of friends, and went straight at the older boy, right hand extended, offering him the rolled-up painting. “Look what I’ve found for you!”

It was dim there in the side yard, dim enough that the older boy looked confused, his focus jumping from Robin’s face to whatever he had in his hand, distracted enough that he did not see the punch coming. Robin connected with a perfect left hook to the valet’s jaw, which broke his middle and ring fingers, but crumpled the boy in a heap. Grunting in pain, Robin nevertheless jumped over Alejandro and walked around the front of the house, seeing a white Mercedes-Benz sedan at the gate, which began to open.

The Mercedes pulled through and up to the front walk, where Robin stood at attention, acting like a pro, broken hand and painting held behind him. Biting his inner lip against the pain, he reached around with his good hand and opened the door for a middle-aged woman who once must have been beautiful.

“Welcome to the party,” he said. “You haven’t yet missed the cake.”

“Cake?” she said dismissively, getting out, eyes on the front door. “I just hope they haven’t drunk all that fine wine Louis loves to bray on and on about.”

She weaved ever so slightly on her feet heading toward the front door. Robin realized the car was still running, keys in the ignition. He climbed in, tossed the painting on the passenger seat, and threw it in gear. He’d never driven a car before and promptly plowed over a flowerbed in the front circle and clipped off the driver’s side mirror exiting the gate.

*   *   *

Monarch smiled at the dictator’s son and said, “No Uday here, General. That rat’s fled the ship.”

Then he twisted the radio off and tucked it back in its holster.

“So,” Uday said, brightening. “We have deal?”

Monarch came around the desk and said, “We do.” He pushed the man onto his side, knelt over him, caught the horrible goat smell he gave off, but then used a knife to cut free the restraints.

Uday looked at him and said in stilted English, “Why you no kill me?”

“Because I’m a thief, not an assassin,” Monarch said, and headed toward the door to the office. “Not so nice doing business with you.”

“What about me?” Uday demanded in English.

“What about you?” Monarch said, not turning.

“Take me with you,” Uday called. “I have much to tell.”

Monarch looked over his shoulder, saw that the dictator’s son was back on his feet, right hand down the front of his pajamas.

“Take me with you,” Uday said again, more insistent. “Get me some whiskey and girl, maybe two. Virgin like this last one, the cunt, and yes, I have much, much to tell you American. You will see.”

It was as if some power far greater than his own seized hold of Monarch then. He raised the pistol and said, “I don’t think anyone wants to hear about it, Uday. I really don’t.”

Uday threw up his hands. Monarch shot the dictator’s son in the groin, left Uday on the floor of his palace office, screaming, writhing, and holding his bloody crotch.

*   *   *

“You didn’t get the bracelet,” Claudio said two days later.

“I got a Mercedes,” Robin shot back indignantly.

“Busted side-view mirror,” Claudio sniffed. “Hard to fence.”

“Take it apart, then,” Robin said. “Sell it for parts.”

Claudio said nothing.

Robin couldn’t stand it. “I got the painting.”

The older boy pursed his lips, glanced at Xul Solar’s twisted painting laid out on a table beside him, and smiled. “You did.” Then he nodded to the tattoo artist poised with the needle above Robin’s right inner forearm.

“Ink him, Raoul,” Claudio said. “He’s one of us now.”

Robin smiled fiercely at Claudio and the fire of the electric needle that penetrated his skin. It was the best feeling he’d had in almost a year.

*   *   *

Monarch came out of the bathroom inside a room on an upper floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel and flopped on the king-size bed. The television was on, showing CNN’s coverage of the fall of Baghdad, of tanks rolling into the city, of citizens tearing down statues of Saddam, and of the widespread looting and chaos.

Monarch turned and looked at Ellen Wolfe. The CIA officer lay beneath cotton sheets, watching him.

He smiled and said, “Glad you tracked me down.”

She grinned back. “I was just thinking that I should hook up with men just out of prison and in a war zone more often.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Wolfe said.

“Happy to be of service.”

“Me too,” she said, as CNN began to describe the hunt for Saddam and his two sons.

Monarch was surprised to hear that Uday’s bombed palace had been searched, but his body had not been found. He flashed on the brilliant explosions that had rocked the palace as he helped the poor girl escape. Could Uday have lived through that? In any case, Monarch was positive that the dictator’s son wouldn’t go far or long before being caught. And he sure wouldn’t be using his favorite tool ever again.

“A lion?” said Wolfe. “Did you hear that? Uday kept lions?”

“Did he?” Monarch asked. “I don’t recall seeing any.”

The CIA officer studied Monarch for a moment, ran a finger down his chest. “Why do I get the feeling that you haven’t told me the entire story?”

“Some ingrained insecurity on your part?” Monarch asked.

“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.”

*   *   *

The truck appeared from the direction of the autobahn, a large cargo transport with a high ceiling box on the back. It pulled in front of DeGrave’s Porsche and stopped.

Monarch glanced at his watch—ten past eight—and timed what happened next.

The rolling rear door flew up. Two men lowered ramps. A third man ran a winch cable to the front bumper of DeGrave’s Porsche. Monarch reached in and released the parking brake. The Porsche slid up into the box. The door lowered.

Thirty-seven point four one seconds.

“Copy?” Monarch said.

“Affirmative,” the woman said.

“Tell our contact the keys will be in the gas tank.”

“ETA at crossing?”

Monarch checked his watch. “One hour, forty minutes.”

He went around the truck and climbed into the passenger side. The driver, Abbott Fowler, was dressed in a gray workman’s coverall. Shorter than Monarch, he had a face that also seemed a meld of many races, the kind of guy you could walk by on the street and never notice.

Fowler set the truck in gear, pulled out, and drove on toward the town of Möckern. A mile down the road, they passed a gate. Fowler gestured at it. Monarch nodded, figuring they’d be going through it sometime before dawn.

Then he ducked between the seats, through a curtain, and into the rear of the truck. The interior was brightly lit. DeGrave’s Porsche had already been ratchet-strapped to the floor at the rear of the cargo space. The South African was up on a hospital gurney, stripped free of everything except a medical bracelet on his left wrist that indicated he was allergic to sulfites.

DeGrave was fitted with an oxygen mask. A big Samoan man in street clothes was frowning as he worked to get an adult diaper on DeGrave. The diaper was protocol in a rendition. You didn’t want them pissing or shitting the bed during transport.

“Get it nice and tight, Tats,” Monarch said to the Samoan.

John Tatupu winked at him. “Just what I trained my whole life for, Robin.”

The IV in DeGrave’s arm was also protocol, and the doctor and two nurses, all CIA contractors, were attaching leads to DeGrave’s chest that ran from monitors that were bolted to the wall of the truck and spitting out data on his pulse, blood pressure, and O2 saturation.

“He stable?” Monarch asked the doctor, a sandy-haired man in his thirties. He didn’t know the doctor’s name. He didn’t want to know the doctor’s name.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “We’ll ease him into a twilight sleep for the ride.”

Monarch stared down at DeGrave, thinking about what they knew of him.

South Africa is the only country to have ever unilaterally dismantled its nuclear weapons. When it did, in 1989, the decision effectively ended all government funding for weapons-based nuclear science. Men whose lives had been spent developing these weapons were suddenly out of jobs.

DeGrave, a physicist with a doctorate from Cambridge, had been one of the rising stars in South Africa’s nuclear brain trust. He was also a man given to excess when it came to women, wine, cars, and food. Suddenly without an income and no wish to work at a pittance for a university, DeGrave took an alternate route, one that led him into the shadows.

In the prior sixteen years, the South African had advised the nuclear weapons programs of Pakistan, India, Israel, and Russia. He’d made a fortune doing it and owned homes in six countries, including Germany. The CIA now believed DeGrave had been hired by Iran. The agency had bugged his homes, offices, and computers, but the South African had been clever, revealing no hard evidence that could link him to the Iranians.

That ended when the scientist for hire bought a ticket to Istanbul. Agents trailed him across Turkey to the border crossing east of Dŏgubayazit, where he was seen entering Iran. He surfaced at the same border crossing two weeks later, and made it to Istanbul with enough time to catch his flight back to Berlin. As it had been described to Monarch, the threat that DeGrave posed was potentially life altering for millions of people in the Middle East.

A decision was made. DeGrave would be taken, interrogated with the use of cutting edge techniques, and then returned to his home with his car and tucked into bed, reeking of the German vodka he liked to drink. He’d likely never remember being pulled over at all. The truck sped up and curved right. They must have passed Möckern, and Fowler was taking them east on the E 30 to E 21 autobahns that crossed Germany south of Berlin.

Monarch pivoted back toward the curtain, and was crouching to return to the cab when the automatic gunfire erupted, raking the side of the truck, which veered hard, went up on two wheels, and began to tip over.

*   *   *

The chauffeur who drove Antonia Valera to and from school also drove her mother all over Buenos Aires. But with few exceptions, he was always in the area of the school a solid forty-five minutes before the girl’s pickup. He usually stopped for a cup of coffee in a café not far away and flirted with a particularly bosomy waitress.

Julio considered taking the chauffeur as he left the café, then opted for a better choice. On those days when the chauffeur drove Antonia to tennis lessons, he often parked in the shade of trees by the Palermo Woods, a large city park, where he reclined the back of his seat and took a nap.

Hiding in the thick vegetation not far away, Julio and Claudio were ready when the chauffeur at last tugged his cap down over his eyes. Robin was less sure. Then again, he was taking the biggest risk, wasn’t he? If it all went wrong, wouldn’t he be the one to take the fall? As much as the sixteen-year-old hated the Perón family and their friends, he feared the Buenos Aires police even more. Two officers had killed his parents.

Getting caught was unthinkable. Not an option. Getting caught meant death. Robin was still sure of that.

Julio, who was watching the street and the sidewalks, tapped Robin on the back and whispered, “Now.”

Robin glanced at Claudio, whose eyes danced with excitement.

There was only one thing to do then, he decided. He broke from the bushes, jumped off a low retaining wall and, ambled toward the black Mercedes carrying a thin metal bar, a window jimmy that Claudio had fashioned to boost cars. Robin walked right up to the passenger side door, and as if he had not noticed the sleeping chauffeur, started working the jimmy into the gap between the window and the door gasket.

He’d made three quick tries before he heard the chauffeur yell, “Hey!”

Robin prayed the man was unarmed and ducked down as if to peer into the tinted window. The driver’s side opened. The chauffeur shot out. He was ten years older than Robin and surprisingly fit.

Robin waited until the driver almost had him before bolting back down the sidewalk with the man right on his heels. Vaulting up onto the retaining wall, he dodged into the brush, taking no more than five steps before he felt the driver’s fingers grab the back of his T-shirt.

Then he heard the impact, and a grunt, and felt his shirt tear before a crashing sound slowed him. Julio had tackled the chauffeur, who was cursing and struggling. Claudio carried a homemade sap—a sock packed with sand—swung it hard, and hit the man behind the ear. He slumped.

“Okay, then,” Julio said, panting and looking at Robin. “Strip.”

Less than five minutes later, Robin climbed into the Mercedes wearing the chauffeur’s uniform, cap, and sunglasses. He lay back on the reclined seat, trying to control his breathing, hyperaware of every minute that passed until it was time to pick up the girl.

Robin was roughly the man’s height if not his girth. The girl usually looked tired and irritable when she left her tennis lessons, and normally climbed into the backseat without the driver having to get out. The theory was that she would not look at him too closely until it was too late. But what if she ducked in, said something to him, and expected an answer before taking her seat? What if—?

It was time. Taking deep breaths to calm down, Robin twisted the key and the Mercedes started. He put the car in gear, drove to the entryway to the Buenos Aires Lawn Tennis Club, and pulled in exactly where the driver had the last six times they’d watched him pick up Antonia Valera. He had the vehicle in park no more than ten seconds when she appeared at the front door of the club. It was the first time he’d seen her up close.

Antonia’s long black hair was wet, as if she’d taken a shower minutes before. Carrying a bag with her tennis rackets, she wore a white tennis skirt, blue polo shirt, and sandals, and walked to the car in a gangly, awkward gait. She reached for the door handle. Robin looked straight ahead, picking up her movement in the rearview.

He saw the tennis bag thrown across the seat before she climbed in and slammed the door. “Fuck, I hate tennis,” she said, and slammed back into the seat, arms crossed, eyes closed. Her fingers came up to pick at her braces.

Robin threw the vehicle in gear, causing the door locks to set. He reached over to the controls and, as Julio had told him, turned on the child protection buttons for the windows and rear doors. Leaving the tennis club, his attention darted constantly to the mirror, but she just sat there, eyes closed, fuming.

The girl did not figure out something was wrong until Robin slowed to a stop,and flipped the car door locks open. Wearing a hood, Julio yanked open the door on the girl’s side, and pushed her toward the center, even as Claudio came in from the left.

Antonia Valera became hysterical and began to fight.

*   *   *

Why is it that kidnappings, renditions, stealing someone never goes exactly according to plan? Monarch wondered as he slammed into the right wall of the truck.

The truck righted, accelerated. Amid the chaos that ensued after that evasive maneuver, Monarch ignored everything but the threat.

“Abbott, get them behind you,” he shouted. “If you see them try to shoot the tires, hit your brakes. But warn me!”

Monarch lurched toward the rear door of the van, grabbed a .12 gauge semiautomatic shotgun hanging in a bracket on the wall. He threw the locking mechanism. The door sagged.

“Moving behind us!” he heard Fowler shouting.

Monarch went to his right side on the truck floor, with his right arm extended overhead and holding the shotgun. He grabbed the roll-up door handle with his left hand and raised it three inches, revealing the near-blinding headlamps of whoever the hell was shooting at them.

All Monarch could see was the vehicle grille and part of the windshield. That was enough. He swung the barrel of the gun at the driver’s side and touched the trigger twice, aimed left and touched it twice more.

The windshield turned into a milky gray spider’s web. The late model BMW veered, braked, skidded, and was rear-ended by a lorry.

Monarch slammed the door down and shouted, “They’re done.”

The doctors and nurses seemed shaken by the ordeal, but went back to working on DeGrave. Tatupu said, “Any idea who they are?”

“None,” Monarch said, moving toward the South African nuclear scientist’s Porsche. “And I’m not going back to find out.”

He set down the shotgun and said to the Samoan, “There was no tail from the transfer. They just came out of nowhere. Glove up.”

Tatupu understood. He put on latex gloves, got out Maglites and started going over the car. Monarch triggered his mike and said, “Rogue.”

“Go Rogue,” the woman replied.

“We had company. East bound E 30, east of Shopsdorf. Late model BMW four door, unknown license, unknown occupants. Autobahn police should be responding.”

“I’ll let our contact know.”

“They knew our line of travel, Monarch informed her. “We suspect a bug and will reroute when it’s found. .”

“Anticipated delay?”

“One hour,” he said.

“That doesn’t give them much time to work with him.”

“Better than not getting there at all.”

A pause. “Agreed.”

Monach clicked off the mike. The Samoan held up a magnetic GPS transmitter that had been fitted inside the rear bumper of the nuclear scientist’s car. They deactivated the device and put it in an evidence sleeve to be checked for fingerprints.

“Iranians?” Tatupu asked.

“Crossed my mind,” Monarch admitted. “Or the Russians. Or the North Koreans. Or DeGrave might just have a serious security company on call. Maybe he tripped a signal when I pulled him over. I don’t know.”

Monarch called forward to Fowler, told him to get off the autobahn, then he went over to DeGrave, and the medical team caring for him, thinking that a man had to lead a very, very complicated life to cause two different armed teams to come after him on the same night.

What have you been up to, Mr. DeGrave? Monarch thought. What deep dark secrets will you reveal tonight?

*   *   *

The doors slammed shut and Robin pulled away, his heart exploding in his chest because Antonia Valera was freaking out in the backseat of the Mercedes. Still hysterical, she tried to lunge across Julio toward the door, but he clamped one hand against her mouth and another against the back of her neck, and slammed her back between him and Claudio, who held down her arms.

“You hush up now,” Julio commanded from under his hood. “You hear? You hush up. Be cool, and you’ll live. This’ll all be just some bad dream.”

The girl looked terrified in the rearview, and Robin felt hollow, like he’d done something very, very wrong. He didn’t mind stealing things. In his mind, stealing had always been about survival, a way to get by without hurting anyone.

But Antonia Valera’s reaction made Robin feel the way he had seeing his parents gunned down. Orphaned. Petrified of the next moment.

He wanted to stop the car and tell Julio and Claudio to let her go, But it was far too late for that. The gang leader shouted at her, “You hear?”

The girl began to sob and tremble, and Robin smelled something acrid.

“God damn!” Claudio said. “She pissed herself. God damn.”

That only served to upset her more. Antonia Valera’s face flushed with shame. Robin felt just as shamed as he drove, unwilling to look at the girl again while Julio put a gag in her mouth and Claudio tied her wrists. Julio got out another hood and lifted it over her head. She began to squeal again and Robin couldn’t help it. He looked in the rearview one more time and found her straining and staring at him pleadingly, as if she still thought he was her regular chauffeur, as if she couldn’t understand how he’d betrayed her.

And then her face disappeared beneath the hood, and Robin was left breathless at the wheel. “Jul—” he began.

“No names, idiot!” Julio roared, causing the hooded girl to begin crying again. “Drive! Just drive!”

*   *   *

It was a quarter to eleven by the time Fowler drove the truck across the border at SŁubice. Because Germany and Poland were signatories of the Schengen Agreement, which abolished border controls in the European Union, they passed without interruption and proceeded toward the Polish village of Drzecin.

“Rogue, I got something on the BMW,” the woman said in Monarch’s ear.

“Tell me, tell me,” Monarch said. He was back in the passenger seat in the cab, looking out at drab gray buildings made drabber by the storm.

“Vehicle was abandoned by the time the autobahn police reached it.”

“Surprise.”

“Yes, well, it was stolen almost a week ago in Munich. The driver of the lorry that hit the BMW said there were three men in it. All exited quickly after the crash, and ran off the autobahn south toward the village of Buckau. Lorry driver claims he never got a good look at any of them.”

“So we’re nowhere.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“We’ve got the tracking device. There might be fingerprints.”

“I’ll run them when you get here,” she promised.

Ten minutes later, in the village of Starków, they turned onto a dark, puddled, and potholed backstreet then pulled into the parking lot of an old gray building and backed up to a loading dock. The second they stopped, Monarch was up and moving again, following Tatupu and one of the nurses as they wheeled DeGrave past his car and onto the dock where they were met by two thin pale men. They could have been accountants or academics were it not for the green hospital scrubs they wore.

There was a woman with them as well, a tall, reedy redhead in jeans and a heavy wool fishing sweater. “Tracking device?” she said to Monarch by way of greeting.

Gloria Barnett was in her late thirties, the same woman who’d been speaking to him over his satellite link since the Ellington Hotel. She’d washed out of the Agency’s clandestine training program, but as far as Monarch was concerned, Barnett was the most competent operations runner at the CIA. If he needed something, Barnett got it for himor told him where to find it.

“Hi to you, too, Gloria,” Monarch said, handing her the evidence bag as the pale men took over from Tatupu and the nurse. Tatupu blew a kiss at Barnett and went back into the truck as the pale men wheeled the unconscious South African physicist through doors on the left side of the loading dock.

“Where are they taking him?” Monarch wondered.

“I didn’t ask,” she said.

“So we’re just a delivery service?” Monarch said, not liking it.

“A highly trained delivery service,” Barnett agreed. “Something to eat?”

“And some dry warm clothes,” he said.

“Already thought of that. They’re inside.”

“Gloria, has anybody ever told you you’re the best?”

“Why, yes, Robin,” she said,beaming.. “Nearly everyone I know.”

Monarch grinned and followed her through a door opposite the one where they’d taken the South African, ending up in a depressing and decrepit hallway lit by weak bare lightbulbs. The pale green paint was chipped and filthy.

“What was this place?” he asked.

“Some Communist-era widget factory.”

Barnett turned into a second hallway and into a large room with much better lighting. It smelled of fresh coffee. A space heater hummed. A folding table in the corner supported a tray of bread, dried meat, cheeses, and fresh fruit. Another featured two laptops and a headset. Several inflatable sleeping pads were piled in the corner along with socks, wool pants, a black turtleneck shirt, and a dark fleece top.

Monarch grabbed the clothes, returned to the hall, stripped off his wet things, and was clambering into the dry stuff when Tatupu appeared.

“Fowler went to fill up before the return trip,” the Samoan said.

Much warmer now, Monarch nodded and said, “Better get something to eat, Tats, and a little sleep. We’ve got to be rolling by 0500.”

“That’s all the time they’re giving Mr. and Mr. Pale?” Tatupu said, surprised.

“That’s all the time we’re giving Mr. and Mr. Pale.”

“Whatever. When this is over, I’m taking some R and R in Berlin.”

“Which will make you what? Like an Englishman in New York?”

He broke into a grin that seized his entire face. “I’ll be a Samoan man in Berlin,” he sang, hitting the Sting melody spot on. “‘Oh, oh, I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m a Samoan man in Berlin!”

Laughing, they entered the room where Barnett was running a small optical device over the GPS tracker.

“Anything?” Monarch asked, tearing off a hunk of bread and making a sandwich with roast beef and cheese.

“Two solid prints,” she said, and gave the computer an order. The prints appeared large on the screen. “I’ll send them through, see what we get.”

Monarch washed down the sandwich with a can of orange juice, belched, and said, “I’m going to sleep.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Barnett promised.

“Latrine?”

“Take a right, end of the hall there’s a door takes you outside.”

A moment later, Monarch stepped out the door, feeling the cold, raw wind again, but not the rain. As he relieved himself, he looked around, making out the long flank of the building and wondering where they’d taken DeGrave.

When he got back, Tatupu was already on the floor, trying to fit his massive frame on one of the camping pads.

Monarch got one for himself, walked by Barnett, and whispered, “What do you think they’re doing to him? DeGrave?”

She looked up at him. “You mean, exactly?”

He shrugged.

She looked awayand said, “I didn’t ask the pale guys, and they didn’t offer.”

“What I figured,” Monarch said.

He lay down on the air mattress and drew a blanket over his shoulders. Over the years in the U.S. Special Forces, long before he was recruited to the CIA, Monarch had learned how to switch off his brain and sleep when he could. He considered it one of his most important skills because he believed that a tired mind was a vulnerable mind, and a vulnerable mind could be fooled, and a fooled mind was a dead mind.

He shut his eyes and fell into sleep, trying not to think about how vulnerable his mind had been to Antonia Valera.

*   *   *

It had all happened so quickly. They’d pulled into a garage well away from the Villa Miserie, and the graffiti-covered overhead door lowered behind them.

Julio got the girl from the car. She was whimpering as he led her by the elbow out the back door into a dimming light. They crossed an alley and went through a second door. Robin and Claudio followed.

“What about the car?” Robin asked.

“We’ll call some of the others to take it apart,” Claudio said. “Mercedes. Nice car. Nicer than the one you stole a couple of years ago.”

“Oh, really?” Robin shot back. “That one may not have had a side-view mirror, but it didn’t have a piss stain on the backseat, now did it?”

“Move,” Claudio said, acting disgusted with him, handing him his clothes. “Get the uniform off.”

Going through that door on the other side of the street, Robin faced a steep set of stairs. Julio and Antonia Valera were already up there. He could hear them walking on the creaky wooden floor as he climbed.

He found Julio with the girl in a windowless room lit by a single bare lightbulb. There was nothing in the room except a stained mattress, a box of canned and dried goods, and several bottles of water. The fourteen-year-old lay on her side on the mattress, sniffling beneath her hood.

“You watch her,” Julio said. “Make sure she drinks, eats. She has to piss or take a dump, she uses the bucket down the hall. She gets no time alone. None. I want this to be simple, clean, no ’Count of Monte Cristo’ stuff going on.”

Among other things, Julio liked to read, especially adventure stories. It had been one of the things about the gang leader that Robin had liked right away, the fact that he was interested in something beyond the Brotherhood. Claudio was like that, too. He wanted to be an artist, a painter. But now it seemed like Julio and Claudio were putting too much of the weight of the scheme on him.

“Why do I have to watch her?” Robin demanded.

“Because you’re the youngest,” Julio said. “And we can’t trust anyone else.”

“Twenty-four seven?” Robin asked, incredulous.

“We’ll spot you,” Julio said, glancing down at the girl, who seemed to be listening to them. “Use a hood yourself when she’s eating.”

Claudio handed him the sock filled with sand. “If she gets out of control, use this. Slight tap to the back of the head is all it takes.”

Robin took it, tossed it in with the food.

Claudio and Julio made to leave. Robin said, “What are you doing?”

“What do you think?” Claudio said. “Giving Papa a call.”

And then they were gone, and Robin was alone with the girl, who began to whine again. He didn’t know what to do.

“Be quiet,” he said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

But she began to whine even louder.

“Shut up,” Robin said, getting angry. She wasn’t like a painting or a piece of jewelry, unable to speak, unable to plead, and that confused him.

She began to struggle and whine louder still.

Robin feared if someone happened to wander down the alley they might hear her. He looked at the sock filled with sand, hesitated, but then grabbed the hood Julio had left, pulled it on, and went over to her. He knelt down and said, “If I take off your gag, do you promise not to scream?”

She nodded.

“If you scream, it will go back on,” he said. He removed her hood, smelling her damp hair everywhere.

Antonia Valera looked back at him walleyed as he worked free the gag.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Let me go,” she cried softly.

“I can’t do that,” Robin said. “Not until your father gives us some money.”

“He won’t do that,” she said, her lip trembling and her eyes watering.

“Sure he will,” Robin said. “He loves you, doesn’t he?”

“He said it,” she replied, her voice tremulous. “I heard him just last week, talking with my mother after they watched some Mel Gibson movie about a kidnapping. He said the worst thing you can do is give in and give them the money because they always ask for more.”

“We’re not asking for more,” Robin said. “This is a one-time thing.”

“He won’t give you the money,” she said. “So what will you do with me?”

Robin didn’t answer because he honestly didn’t know what Julio would do.

“How old are you?” she asked after several moments of silence.

Robin did not answer.

“I need some water,” she said.

He got a bottle, sat her up, and put it in her hands. She raised the bottle and her bound wrists and gulped at the water.

“Easy,” he said, pulling the bottle away from her. “That’s got to last. You hungry? You got to go?”

She glared at him, but then shook her head before glancing at the stain on her skirt. “I need a wet cloth. To clean myself.”

He flushed inside the hood, but then said, “I have to gag you again.”

“Okay,” Antonia Valera said. “But please, no hood. I’m claustrophobic. It’s like I’m suffocating in it.”

Robin debated, and then nodded. He fitted the gag in her mouth, got up, and made to leave the room. There was a sink across the street in the garage where the Mercedes sat, awaiting a chop crew. He glanced back at her. “Don’t move from there. If you do, the hood goes back on. Understand?”

She looked sickened by the idea, but nodded.

Robin went down the stairs, through the entry and out into the alley with Julio’s warning about not leaving her alone echoing in his head. He found the key to the garage in a rusty coffee can, opened the door, and went inside, hearing the last tics of the Mercedes’s engine cooling. He put on the car’s headlights, saw a few T-shirts on a bench in the corner, grabbed them, soaked them in the sink, and left.

Locking the door and stowing the key, he dashed across the street and through the other door. He locked it behind him and bounded up the stairs. Robin stepped into the open doorway, saw the empty mattress, and cursed.

Before he could think, the door came flying at him, striking him in the nose and knocking him off his feet. He went crashing to the floor.

*   *   *

Monarch jerked awake, blinking at the light in the safe room. Barnett was still up and working at her computer. It was two forty-five A.M. Tatupu was sprawled on his air mattress. Abbott Fowler snored under a blanket.

Monarch knew he should try to sleep more, but he felt restless. How could he lay there in the middle of a rendition? These things had a way of getting out of control fast, didn’t they?

Getting to his feet, he groaned. Barnett looked over at him and held her finger to her lips. He got a cup of coffee and drank it black.

“Any hits on the prints?” he whispered.

“Nothing yet,” she said. “I’m expanding the search.”

He yawned, nodded, and said, “I’m going to take a walk around.”

“Mr. and Mr. Pale were kind of down on that idea.”

“Seems I’m always letting someone down,” Monarch replied, and left.

Monarch was most comfortable moving, and he liked to know the terrain around any place where he stayed stationary, prowling the area so he would get a sense of how an enemy might approach him. Flipping on the switch on an LED headlamp, he set out to do just that, opening various doors on the hallway, finding them empty but for the odd piece of pipe or lumber that lay in the dust.

At last he reached the door where he’d gone out to urinate. He stepped outside, extinguished the light. A bitter wind off the North Sea gnawed at his cheeks. Monarch shivered, thought to go back inside, but then decided to walk the perimeter of the abandoned factory.

The darkness did not bother him. From childhood, he’d had a knack for traveling in the shadows, using his peripheral vision to find his way. Padding along parallel to the factory wall through dead matted grass and weeds that soaked his pant legs, he toed aside rusty cans and piles of trash with the ease of a prowling cat.

The two-story factory was perhaps one hundred meters long, with a broken concrete pad out back that abutted a forested area. Looping to the building’s east side, the dead grass was tamped down here and he moved at a quicker pace, smelling the night odors of spring on the cold moist wind. Halfway back to the loading dock, Monarch spotted a thin vertical strip of light glowing through a window on the factory’s second story. He flashed on the image of the pale guys. What were they doing to DeGrave? What could they possibly do to him that would cause him to talk so quickly?

It was not his responsibility and above his pay grade, yet those questions would not stop. Monarch knew he should just return to Barnett and his team, have another cup of coffee, wait for the pale boys to do their thing, and concentrate on getting DeGrave in bed before sunrise. It’s what he would do, he decided. No use clouding the mission.

But he’d taken no more than two steps when he heard echoing from the factory the mournful sounds of someone suffering.

*   *   *

Robin hit the floor and felt the breath blown out of him, dropped the wet rags, understanding that Antonia Valera had somehow gotten to her feet, hid behind the door, and slammed him in the face with it. He should have listened to Julio. He should never have left her alone.

The girl wrenched the door back open. The gag was still in, and her wrists remained bound, but her ankles were free. She tried to leap over Robin, going for the stairs, but his hand shot out, snagging her by the left ankle. He thought sure she’d sprawl on her face, but she was uncannily athletic and managed to stay upright enough to twist and kick at his face.

Robin deflected the blow, which finally upset her balance and she crashed onto her side. Still fighting for air, trying to stop her from kicking at him again, he threw himself on top of her and pinned her to the floor.

She struggled, staring up at him, her wide hateful eyes darting all over his hoodless face as if wanting to remember every bit of it.

“You had to do something stupid,” Robin said. “I was trying to be nice and you had to do something stupid.”

The girl said nothing, just continued to study his face coldly. He jerked her to her feet, pushed her onto the mattress, and retied her ankles. Then he undid her wrist restraints, got her arms behind her back, and bound her again.

He reached for the hood and she began to squeal like a wounded animal. She was claustrophobic. What did he care? She’d tried to run, hadn’t she? He grabbed the hood. She screamed so loud against her gag that her skin turned purple. Veins quivered on her neck.

“Okay, okay,” Robin said, setting the hood down.

Her chest still heaving, Antonia Valera began to calm. Robin looked back into the hallway, saw the wet rags, debated, and then got them. He pushed her over onto her back and said, “Open your legs.”

Her fear exploded and he said, “I’m cleaning you. That’s it.”

She studied his eyes and then looked past him up at the ceiling, relaxing her thighs. Robin ran the wet rags over her legs twice, tossed them in the corner, and got off the mattress. “That should feel better.”

She wouldn’t look at him, but she nodded.

He turned away, thinking about Julio and Claudio. What would they say? Not only had he left her alone, she’d seen him, she’d studied him. Would she know him? Of course she would. He considered putting the hood back on, but decided that was dumb. She’d seen him. Up close. He was already screwed.

Behind him, he heard her trying to talk against the gag. He thought about just leaving her in the room while he sat in the hall, but then he went over and removed her gag.

“Thirsty,” she said. “And I need something to eat.”

He went to the food box, dug around, and returned with the water bottle. He held it to her lips and poured it into her mouth. Then he fed her some cookies and gave her more water.

“Thank you,” she said, when he got up.

“Following orders,” Robin said as he walked over and slid down the wall facing her.

She was studying him again. “Are you going to kill me now that I’ve seen you?”

“I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

A silence. “Have you killed anybody before?”

Robin shook his head.

“Have those other two?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What’s that tattoo on your arm?”

Robin saw a piece of it sticking out from beneath the sleeve of his shirt. He tugged the cuff over it and said, “Nothing. And you ask too many questions.”

“Everyone says that,” she said, and sighed.

He studied her. Even though her hair was all crazy and her face was covered with tear streaks, she was pretty. “Who’s everybody?”

“My teachers. My coaches. My mom and dad.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Robin said.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

The girl thought about that. “You’re not like them, the other two.”

Robin’s face screwed up in anger. “I’m exactly like them.”

“No,” she said. “My mother has always thought me a fine judge of character, and you are definitely not like them. You could let me go.”

“Oh, right, and you go running to the police and then my friends come back, find you gone, and either way I end up dead.”

Antonia Valera’s eyes roamed over him. “Is that why you do this? Because you think ‘your friends’ will kill you if you don’t?”

“No,” he said emphatically.

Before the girl could respond, Robin heard a key in the lock and the door down the stairs squeaked open.

*   *   *

Monarch stood in the darkness by the factory, listening to the low rolling and breakingtones of someone in agony. What were they doing to him?

Then the moaning stopped and all he heard was dripping. He felt as hollow and wrong as he had when seeing Claudio pull the hood down over Antonia Valera’s head in the back of the Mercedes all those years ago.

Monarch understood full well that DeGrave was a nuclear mercenary who’d just left Iran. But when the hell had the agency gotten into torture? And who the fuck were those pale guys?

Monarch absolutely knew the smart thing to do was to return to the loading dock, complete his phase of the mission, and mention what he’d heard to his superior, a conniving guy named Slattery. But what would Slattery say? Probably nothing, even if he knew anything. The CIA wasn’t about sharing knowledge, it was about hoarding it. It was another reason why Monarch was beginning to dislike working at the agency.

A soft sob echoed from the factory. Monarch turned on his headlight, aimed it at the factory wall, saw an old drainpipe bolted to the exterior. Turning the light off again, he climbed the drainpipe like a monkey, reached the second floor in thirty seconds, and stepped out onto a ledge. Back pinned to the wall, Monarch side shuffled down the ledge to the first set of windows. Locked.

But one of the windows in the second set was loose. He felt about the sash, sensing that the wood was punkie. He used a utility knife he had in his pocket to pry at the wood, breaking away chunks until the lock came free of the sash. He raised the windowand slid his leg inside, his foot probing for a floor. It was so dark inside he couldn’t tell what was below him.

Cupping the headlamp, he flicked it on and spotted an iron catwalk about three feet beneath him. Turning the beam off once more, he eased around and dropped onto the catwalk, absorbing the impact and sound with his knees.

His hands groped to his sides and found the wall and the rail, which was wobbly. Monarch slipped forward, hearing DeGrave choking and pleading.

“Please,” he was saying. “Please, no more.”

Monarch could make out a crack of light showing beneath a door at the end of the catwalk about sixty feet away. The closer he got, he realized that there was also a thin sheet of light shining between the side of the door and the jamb. It was hitting the bank of windows where Monarch had seen the glowing outside.

He covered the last sixty feet to the door in complete silence, pressed his eye to the crack, and peered in.

*   *   *

Wearing one of the hoods, and carrying a second one, Robin met Julio out on the landing above the stairs.

“Why’re you wearing a hood?” Julio demanded instantly.

“Because she can’t,” Robin said. “She’s claustrophobic.”

“Who the fuck cares?”

“What does it matter?” Robin asked. “Either way she can’t see me.”

“But she can see what’s around her,” Julio snapped. “Stuff she could tell the police when we let her go.”

“What? Four walls? A mattress? A box with some food?”

Julio’s left eye squeezed almost shut, then he snatched the extra hood from Robin’s hand and tugged it over his head. He made to move past Robin, but the boy put a hand in his way.

Julio stiffened as if he were going to jack Robin for touching him. Then Robin gestured at the tattoo on Julio’s right forearm, which was showing. The Brotherhood’s leader relaxed, nodded, and rolled down his sleeve.

He stepped inside. Antonia Valera lay on her side, the gag in again, the ends of which were tucked beneath her head but not tied. Robin prayed Julio would not notice.

“Take the gag off,” Julio said to him.

Robin leaped across the room, knelt, and made a show of fumbling behind her headbefore coming up with the kerchief.

“Your father says he won’t pay your ransom,” Julio said.

Antonia Valera began to cry and look pleadingly at Robin. “I told you.”

Julio glanced at Robin, hesitated, but then said, “He won’t pay the ransom unless he hears your voice.”

That seemed to calm the girl somewhat. “Give me a phone.”

“No,” Julio said, taking a couple of steps toward her and drawing a small shiny minicassette recorder that Robin recognized.

He’d clipped it off a businessman a few months before and Julio had asked for it in tribute. Julio put it down on the mattress in front of her, thumbed the record button, and nodded at her.

The girl paused a beat, glanced at Robin, and said in a tremulous voice: “Mom? Dad? It’s Antonia. Please pay the ransom. I heard what you said about that movie, Daddy, but please! I don’t want to be here anymore.” She collapsed, sobbing.

Julio reached out, clicked off the cassette player, and said, “Nice job. Any luck, and you’ll be home by morning.”

He stood, said to Robin, “We’ll be back when we have the money. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

*   *   *

Monarch was taught methods to deal with torture when he was with Special Forces. But looking through the crack in the factory door, he knew he’d never seen or heard of what was going on inside.

At first glance the room could have been a modern in-patient surgery room. There was a domed operatory light in the center of the ceiling. DeGrave lay on a table below it, strapped down at his ankles, chest, wrists and forehead. Metal stands supported keyboards, screens,IV bags, and lines that ran into the backs of the South African’s left and right hands. Electrodes were hooked to his head, chest, and arms and ran to machines monitored by Mr. and Mr. Pale.

They were talking softly to DeGrave.

“No!” The South African moaned louder. “No, I don’t know. This is all just a bad dream, a nightmare.”

One Mr. Pale said, “You’re right, it is like a nightmare, Stephan. But to suggest that you don’t know is false, and you know it. Trying to say otherwise is useless. No matter how you fight it, our method will soon find its way, and unlock your amygdala. You have two of them, deep in your brain, left and right of your stem. The amygdala regulates memory, and emotion. It also regulates the magnitude of anxiety and fear surrounding a particular memory or emotion.”

DeGrave insisted: “I don’t know what the Iranians are doing—”

“Too bad, Stephan,” the second Mr. Pale said.

Both men turned to keyboards and began typing.

They’d no sooner finished when DeGrave’s eyes rolled up in his headand his face contorted as if against a broken tooth. Then his body began to writhe and arch against the restraint straps. It was like some Hollywood depiction of a demonic possession, only the South African appeared to be face-to-face with the devil in his mind, or at least the thing that frightened him most.

“No!” DeGrave shrieked. “No! Get it away! No!”

He was wracked by spasms and convulsions. The first Mr. Pale released the strap holding the South African’s head to the table. DeGrave’s head tried to come free of his neck. His eyes bulged wide as if the terror that had seized his mind were trying to push its way out his sockets.

Mr. and Mr. Pale simultaneously hit their keyboards and DeGrave collapsed backward, panting, covered in sweat, as if he’d just awoken from the worst nightmare he’d ever had.

“Now, Stephan,” the second Mr. Pale said softly, “tell us about the Iranians, and what they have paid you to do.”

*   *   *

Still wearing the hood, Robin heard Julio shut and lock the downstairs door behind him.

Antonia said softly, “What if my father still says no?”

“I can’t help that,” Robin said, removing the hood, which was making him feel suffocated. He pulled her up into a sitting position, then sat against the wall opposite her again, got a cookie from the box, and ate it.

She said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

Robin made a scornful noise. “You can’t possibly understand, can you?”

“Understand what?” she said. “What could drive someone like you to do this? To help those men kidnap me, and ask my father for ransom?”

Robin felt disgusted, and then angry. “Your world is so little, so protected, so perfect. You have no idea what real life is like. To live on the street. Nowhere to sleep. Digging through a garbage pile for your food.”

Antonia Valera’s face fell and she looked away from him, as if she had not considered this justification.

“Have you done that?” she asked softly. “Dug through garbage for food?”

Robin did not answer. But the pressure of those memories built in his head, and he saw himself that way not too long ago, a creature more than a human, desperately clawing for his existence in the stinking garbage pit that was once his home. His eyes began to tear and he looked away, rubbing at them with his sleeve. When he glanced back, she seemed to be reappraising him.

“Where are your parents?” she asked.

“Dead,” he said. “Murdered in front of me.”

“What? When?” she asked, genuine concern in her voice. “How?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied coldly.

“So you’re an … an orphan?”

“Well, isn’t that kind of obvious when your parents are dead?” he snapped.

The girl shrank from him. “I’m sorry. I was trying to—”

“Don’t bother,” Robin said, angry again. “Living in your compound with your servants, with your tennis and ballet, and piano, and skiing trips. You couldn’t possibly understand what most people have to do to just survive for one day.”

During this attack, Antonia Valera’s cheeks had rippled with emotion before she screamed back at him, “What the hell do you know about my life?”

“It’s perfect!”

“Then you know nothing!” she shouted, infuriated now. “You couldn’t possibly imagine spending your life in a cocoon, where there’s an exact way to do everything, and if you don’t, you’re ridiculed, torn down, made to feel stupid. You couldn’t possibly imagine having only two friends in the whole world you can see outside of school. You couldn’t possibly imagine having parents who are gone almost every night, all the time. And a mom who is beautiful, and everyone compares you to her. And a father who’s like a genius, and everyone compares you to him.”

She breathed hard and her shoulders fell. She looked forlorn when she said, “You couldn’t imagine any of that.”

Robin blinked and said sadly, “You’re right. I couldn’t.”

*   *   *

“Who did you meet with in Iran?” the first Mr. Pale asked as his partner fiddled with the IV line into the back of DeGrave’s right hand.

Monarch watched the South African blink as if drugs were sapping his last bit of will before he said in a slight slur, “Ahmadinejad.”

Monarch didn’t recognize the name straight off. But then again he wasn’t exactly up on Iranian nuclear officials.

But the second Mr. Pale knew the name and looked surprised. “The presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?”

DeGrave nodded. “Crazy man. He plans to begin enriching uranium with the equipment in Isfahan the moment he is sworn in. And he wants to finish the IR-40 heavy water reactor as soon as possible. He said he would pay me to tell him how, right after the election.”

“How much?”

“Twenty million Swiss Francs.”

“What did you say?”

The South African laughed as if wandering cynically through a drug-induced nightmare. “What do you think?”

Monarch stepped back, his mind churning through what he’d seen and heard. There was no doubt in his mind that whatever Mr. and Mr. Pale did to DeGrave was torture.

Monarch was not in the habit of abetting torture, and that pissed him off. He’d been deliberately deceived about the nature of his mission by men and women much higher in the CIA food chain than he was, and that pissed him off even more. Yes, they’d told him there would be drugs involved, cutting-edge truth serums. But nothing about invading the man’s brain, chemically amplifying his nightmares.

He turned and began to pad back down the catwalk toward the window he’d used to enter the factory, thinking: But is it torture if DeGrave never remembers it? If he wakes up and thinks it’s all a dream? There was also the fact that the information the South African had given up was potentially huge should Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win the election and become president of Iran.

That counted, didn’t it?

Monarch had no answers, but felt used and confused to a certain extent by the events of the evening and by his own reactions to those events. He climbed out the window and was side shuffling back along the ledge toward the drainpipe when he decided to turn down all future rendition offers. Nothing had changed. Kidnappings, for him, were never good, always filthy affairs.

Several feet from the drainpipe, he paused, feeling better for having made the decision. He’d get through with this op, and then tell his handler he was done with that particular area of tradecraft once and for all—

Monarch thought he caught movement in his peripheral vision, below and to his left, out there in the shadows where the matted grass turned to forest. He stayed perfectly still, kept adjusting the angle of his left eye click by click until—

There it was again. Something large. Make that someone large, moving from the tree line in a crouch.

Shit, Monarch thought. Shit.

How many were there? How had they known they were here? Should he risk talking and alert Barnett, Tatupu, Fowler, and Mr. and Mr. Pale?

Instead, he started clicking the mike on and off, using Morse code to spell out, “Intruder moving in from east.” Then he slid over onto the drainpipe, and climbed down it, half expecting a gunshot to find him there, and thinking that no matter what you called them, kidnappings were always a cluster-fuck like this.

*   *   *

Robin came to consciousness slowly, confused, but hearing pounding somewhere. He saw the light on in the room and jolted awake, looking around and seeing Antonia Valera waking on the mattress.

His heart raced. Was it the police? Someone who’d heard them arguing?

Robin got up, completely alert now and shaking. He went to look down the stairwell, and heard more pounding below. He turned, meaning to climb to the roof and make his escape, but then heard Julio shout drunkenly, “Robin, you dick head, open up. I lost my key.”

Robin wanted to get down on his knees and give thanks, but instead took the stairs two by two, twisted the lock and flung open the door. Julio stood there, carrying a half empty bottle of cachaca rum, shining a flashlight on his sweaty shit-eating grin.

“We hit it, my thieving genius!” Julio said, barging by him and starting up the stairs. “Ten thousand dollars!”

“Ten thousand? Where’s Claudio?”

“Who cares?”

Julio stopped on the landing, and tugged an envelope from inside his shirt. He opened it and showed Robin the wad of American cash. “As soon as daddy heard her voice on the tape, he did exactly what we told him. It went down so slick.”

Now Robin was excited. “A quarter of all that’s mine?”

Julio took a drink of rum, gazed at him without commitment, and said, “We talk of money in the morning.” He took another sip of rum. “Where is she?”

“In there, on the mattress,” Robin said.

“Mmmm,” Julio said with half lidded eyes. “Gimme a hood.”

Robin handed him his. Julio smiled like a man about to get what he wants. He patted Robin on the cheek. “Go home. I’ll watch her until morning.”

Julio was brilliant, cunning, and a street fighter who took no prisoners. He was also a ladies’ man, and something in Julio’s posture made Robin fearful for Antonia Valera. “I thought we were letting her go,” he said.

Already turned, tucking away the money, and heading toward the lighted room, Julio replied, “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, Julio,” Robin said, following him, grabbing the other hood and putting it on. “You said this was a short deal. Ask low, get paid quick, and walk away.”

“Did I say that?” Julio said, pulling on the hood and stepping into the room. He stood there, looking at the girl on the mattress.

“Yes, you did,” Robin said from behind him.

Julio looked over his shoulder, sneering. “I changed my mind. Ten’s not enough.”

He looked over at Antonia Valera and said softly, “Not nearly enough for someone as pretty and dear as she is to her daddy.”

“What?” she said, starting to cry again. “You’re not letting me go?”

Julio soothed, “Once your daddy has paid me twenty-five thousand. By tonight, I’m sure you’ll be home.”

“That’s what you said—” she moaned. “No, please. He did what you—”

Julio tossed the corked rum bottle on the mattress, snatched up the gag, got around behind the girl, and forced the fabric into her mouth. He raised his head, looked over at Robin with stone-cold eyes showing beneath the hood, and said, “I told you to keep her gagged, didn’t I? Go home. Now. You screwed up.”

Robin said nothing. He was watching Antonia Valera, who was looking at him as if he were her only hope.

“Leave,” Julio snapped. “I’ve got business to take care of here.”

Robin hesitated, glancing from Antonia Valera to Julio and back again. He did not want to leave her with him. But Julio ran the Brotherhood. He’d founded the gang. Robin owed the man his loyalty and his obedience. And there was no way he could physically stop Julio. The man would tear him apart.

“Go!” Julio roared.

Blood roaring in his temples, his cheeks on fire beneath the hood, Robin turned and left the room. He ripped off the hood, feeling ashamed and then angry at his powerlessness to protect Antonia Valera. He started down the stairs, a hollow sensation occupying his chest. He reached the door, turned the lock.

Upstairs, the girl began to scream against the rag.

“Don’t be scared,” he heard Julio say. “I think you’re going to like this.”

*   *   *

“Rogue, copy?”

Monarch moved forward, pistol held loosely in his right hand, not responding to Barnett’s call in his earbud. He double clicked on the mike to let her know he could not speak. He was too close, no more than fifty yards from the intruder who was heading toward the other end of the factory.

“Rogue, you’ve spotted an intruder? Copy?”

He double clicked again, his mind ripping off more questions than answers: Who was the man right in front of him? Was he connected to the attack on the autobahn? Or was he a different player? A local who heard noise coming from a supposedly abandoned factory? Were there others with him? Or was he a lone wolf?

When he was forty yards behind the man, Monarch slipped off his shoes. At thirty yards, he eliminated all thoughts except the physical movements required to creep up on a man who’s doing a fair job at creeping himself.

Fixed on the vague silhouette of the man’s back, Monarch rolled his now cold, wet feet inside to outside, his toes groping the ground, alert for any branch he might snap as he closed to twenty yards, and then ten.

They were almost to the parking lot now. When the intruder started to cut diagonally from the shadow of the woods toward the corner of the factory, Monarch flanked him in the darkness, staying to his blind spot off his left shoulder. He realized the man wore a hood and held a gun loosely at his side.

Monarch cursed the fact that his own pistol was not sound suppressed. The village was not a large place. There were homes close enough to the factory that a gunshot would be heard, and that could bring very unwanted attention to the nefarious activities of Mr. and Mr. Pale, and to Monarch and his rendition team. He had no other choice. He would have to disarm the gunman.

Monarch changed the hold on his pistol so his fingers gripped the barrel. He went up on the balls of his feet, and took three bounds toward the intruder with his right arm cocked back low, holding the pistol like a tomahawk.

*   *   *

Robin shut the door firmly, scratched his key against the deadbolt, and then threw it. He stood there in the darkness listening to Antonia Valera pleading for her innocence behind her gag, and Julio saying drunkenly, “A girl needs to have a real man her first time. Show her what’s what.”

Robin went barefoot, stalking up the staircase on all fours, using every bit of thieving skill he had to make no creak, no skuff, no noise that might lead Julio to believe he was anything but alone, free to do what he wanted with a captive fourteen-year-old rich girl.

Near the top of the stairs he caught a glimpse of Julio standing above Antonia Valera. The jeffe of the Brotherhood was enjoying the power he held over her no doubt.

“Gonna show me them little-girl titties?” Julio asked. “Your little mystery?”

Antonia Valera’s sobs were shot through with humiliation now, which only made Robin firmer in his resolve as he reached the landing and slipped along to the edge of the doorjamb.

“First thing you got to learn?” Julio announced. “This here’s not your enemy. This here’s your friend of all friends.”

Robin heard the clink of a belt buckle, followed by a quick unzipping.

The girl’s cries stopped, replaced by a low, mournful sound.

“You quiet down now,” Julio said. “I’ll take care of that gag for you, show you how you can show your appreciation to me for all I’ve done for you today.”

Antonia Valera began to wail against the gag again, and to thrash. Robin took advantage of the noise to dart around and into the room. Julio’s pants were around his ankles and he was crouched over the girl with his back to Robin, blocking his view of her upper body.

“C’mon, it’s just like candy, you’ll see,” Julio said.

She turned hysterical. He snorted in amusement, picked the rum bottle off the mattress beside him, uncorked it with his teeth, spit out the cork and drank the bottle dry

Robin snatched up that sock filled with sand, took a long silent step toward the leader of La Fraternidad, who tossed the empty rum bottle, roughly grabbed the crying girl’s hips, and began to lower himself to his knees behind her.

Robin swung the sap with a whipping motion just the way Claudio had taught him.

*   *   *

Monarch chopped at the intruder’s forearm.

But the hooded man sensed something the instant before the butt of Monarch’s pistol could strike him. His body sagged ever so slightly inward. The side of Monarch’s pistol grazed the fabric of his jacket, causing him to lose his balance forward. The intruder encouraged that by striking with the barrel and butt of his own gun as Monarch tried to twist his upper body to face him. The blow hit Monarch on the inside of his right elbow, throwing a numbing shock through his entire arm. His pistol fell.

Instincts honed through thousands of hours of training took over, and Monarch’s left hand jabbed at the man’s temple, hitting it square with his knuckles, causing enough disorientation that the man staggered. Monarch punched his temple again, pivoted, and tried to knee the man in the side. The intruder tried to block it with his gun arm, and took the full force of the kick in his wrist, causing him to drop his weapon.

Monarch made to punch him again, this time to the side of the neck. But the guy had uncanny reflexes even after taking two shots to the head. He dropped under the line of Monarch’s blow, spun, and lashed out with his left foot. It connected with the side of Monarch’s knee. He heard a crunching noise, started to fall, and then went with it into a roll.

He tried to come up on his good foot, but slipped in the wet grass and went down. Twisting immediately to his right, he felt the intruder’s next kick whistle by his ear. He acted like he was going to roll again, but then got up onto his knees, ignoring the flaming pain in his right knee and offering a clean target.

Monarch saw him coil his body, readying himself to kick, read the angle of his attack and, as the blow came, adjusted the corresponding angle of his own body. Then he reached in his left hand along the intruder’s right foot and ankle, grabbed him by the calve muscle there, and heaved upward.

It was like the man had been clotheslined.

The back of his head hit the ground first. Monarch threw himself on the intruder, pinning him, knees on his shoulders, left hand around his throat, even as he heard footsteps and saw the cutting beams of flashlights.

*   *   *

The sap hit Julio right where his spine met his head. His whole body turned to jelly and he slumped forward and to his left, his pants and ankles still on Antonia Valera, and the rest of him sprawled and out cold on the floor.

She saw Robin standing there and involuntary shudders ripped through her at what might have been. He said nothing, just pushed Julio’s legs off her, stepped behind her, released her wrists, and worked at her ankles while she tried unsuccessfully to remove the gag. Both of them kept looking at Julio, who was breathing, but lay there, unmoving, still unconscious.

At last he got her ankles free, stood and offered her his hand. She looked at it in a daze, and then took it. He hauled her to unsteady feet. He offered her his arm to hold on to and they turned to leave.

Claudio stood in the doorway, arms crossed, looking at them.

*   *   *

“Rogue, copy?” Barnett said in his earbud.

“Copy,” Monarch gasped as he flipped on his headlamp. “New friend is taking a nap. Cavalry galloping in.”

“Good. And we got a hit on the prints we took off the GPS transmitter.”

Monarch pulled off the man’s hood, trained the headlamp on his face, and was surprised he recognized it. “Don’t tell me. An Israeli?”

“Why, yes,” she said. “Is our friend?”

“Copy that,” Monarch said as Tatupu and Fowler got closer and shone their lights on the intruder, a swarthy, muscular man who was starting to revive.

“Local?” Fowler asked as Monarch made to get off him.

“Mossad,” Monarch said, standing and wincing in pain. “I think he tore something in my knee.”

The Israeli squinted into the lights, held up his hand to shade his eyes, blinked, and then said in great confusion, “Rogue, is that you?”

*   *   *

“Hey,” Robin said, still holding on to Antonia Valera.

Claudio glanced over at Julio sprawled on the floor..

“He got a lot drunk,” Robin explained. “He got dizzy, fell, and hit his head.”

Claudio took in the homemade sap and said, “I could see that.”

“You could?” the girl said in a squeak.

Claudio did not look at her, but kept his gaze squarely on Robin. “Poor guy got too drunk, tried to take advantage of the girl, and then passed out. She used the knife that was in his pocket to cut herself free, and she stole the keys to the Mercedes—they were in his pants pocket, too—to make her escape.”

“A potentially embarrassing event for him,” Robin observed.

“Very embarrassing for Julio,” Claudio agreed. “Something he won’t be talking about any time soon.”

Robin hesitated, then said, “Too bad she took the ten thousand dollars her father paid to ransom her. It was in an envelope inside his jacket.”

Claudio glanced again at Julio and made a soft clucking sound. “An awful thing that should be kept quiet. Am I right?”

*   *   *

Uri Ben-Shahar sat by the heater in the safe room drinking coffee and holding a cold pad to the back of his head. Monarch sat opposite him, holding a cold pad to the side of his knee.

It made sense, Monarch had realized. The Mossad would have targeted DeGrave the second he entered Iran. Simply a coincidence was the fact that the agent the Israelis sent to oversee their own rendition was a man Monarch had worked with several times during his years with the JSOP Unit.

“Shotguns on the autobahn?” Monarch said. “Hardly subtle, Uri.”

The Mossad agent grunted, shrugged, and said, “We didn’t know what the fuck was going on. We were tracking a GPS bug on his car and had DeGrave heading for his house, where we were waiting, and then suddenly he drives right on by. And his car’s inside a truck? For all we know, you were the Iranians or the North Koreans.”

“Sorry about your windshield,” Monarch said.

Ben-Shahar shrugged again. “A miscommunication.”

“More like no communication,” Barnett groused. “Can you believe post 9/11 we’re still not sharing this kind of stuff with allies?”

Before either Monarch or the Mossad agent could reply, Tatupu stuck his head in the room. “Mr. and Mr. Pale have informed me that they are done with their interrogation.”

“And?” Ben-Shahar said.

The Samoan said, “They’re not exactly the sharing type. I think it goes along with the extreme lack of melanin.”

The Mossad agent looked confused. “No, I meant DeGrave.”

“Sorry, Uri, but he goes back into his bed for now,” Monarch said. “You want him, you’ll have to go after him there another time.”

Ben-Shahar thought about that. “Easier to access whatever your interrogators got.”

Monarch got up, winced, and pointed at him. “Always took you for a smart guy. You good to drive, or do you need a lift back to Germany?”

“I’ll be picked up,” the Mossad agent said, following Monarch as he limped back to the loading dock.

“By the way, how’d you track us here?” Monarch asked.

“When we not so subtly shot at you back on the autobahn, there was a GPS tracker in one of the shells,” the Israeli said.

“You shot a beacon onto us? I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Latest thing,” Ben-Shahar said. “Uses a—”

Mr. and Mr. Pale appeared and relinquished control of DeGrave’s gurney to the doctor and two nurses, who wheeled it into the truck around the South African’s Porsche. Without a word, the interrogators went back the way they came, disappearing toward the torture chamber they’d built inside the factory.

“Who are those guys?” Ben-Shahar asked, his distaste evident.

“Honestly, Uri,” Monarch said, “I don’t think we want to know.”

*   *   *

Robin wore gloves as he drove through the city an hour before dawn, pulling to the curb close to the tennis club where they’d grabbed Antonia Valera less than fourteen hours before.

“You can make it from here,” he said.

“I’ve never driven a car before,” she said.

“Which will make the story of your escape even more amazing,” he said, reaching for the door handle.

“Wait,” the girl said. “How … how can I thank you?”

“Forget I ever existed,” he said. “My name, my face, my friends, where we live. We don’t exist. We were just some nightmare you woke up from.”

“What about the other guy?” she asked. “The one who…”

“I think he’ll try to forget you ever existed.”

Antonia Valera hesitated, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll never forget you.”

Robin nodded, climbed out, shut the door without looking back, and trotted up the street. As he did, his thoughts were not of the girl, but of what he had done to Julio to save her, and he realized for the first time that it was not enough for him to follow the eighteen rules of La Fraternidad. There were personal rules that you had to make up as you went along.

Then he thought of how quick he and Claudio had been to form a secret alliance against the leader of the Brotherhood. Without a doubt, life would never be the same for either of them.

What if Julio figured it out? What if he was not as drunk as he had appeared to be? Robin decided right then and there that he did not like kidnappings. They were always messy dramas.

Robin heard the Mercedes put in gear, a squeal of tires and the chirp of brakes. He looked back and saw the taillights of Antonia Valera’s car slowly moving away from him toward a life he could not imagine.

When she was gone, Robin started to run back through the streets of Buenos Aires toward the Villa Miserie and his brother thieves. It would be dawn soon. Before then he wanted to be far from where he did not belong.

*   *   *

Dressed in workout gear, and with an ice pack on his knee, Monarch sat in a chair in his room at the Ellington Hotel around midnight, two days after the thankfully uneventful conclusion to the DeGrave rendition. He was sipping a cold Berliner and thinking of how peaceful the nuclear scientist had appeared lying in his bed after they’d left him with an almost empty bottle of Petrov Vodka on the bed stand, and his Porsche parked on the front lawn, driver’s door open, keys in the ignition.

He compared that image to another of DeGrave, hooked up to Mr. and Mr. Pale’s devious drugs and devices, his eyes bugging out of his head in abject terror of whatever had been conjured and blown out of all proportion in his mind. Monarch considered the information that the South African may have coughed up to his interrogators, and how he had been forced to make those admissions, trying to make them balance each other out.

A distinctive three-tap knock at the door to his room interrupted all that. He went to the door, opened it without looking through the peephole, found big John Tatupu dressed smartly in a leather jacket, jeans, and a collared shirt. Abbott Fowler leaned against the wall behind him, wearing a long dark coat and a black turtleneck.

“Let’s go out on the town,” the Samoan said.

“It’s midnight.”

“In Berlin, that’s like cocktail hour,” Tatupu said.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “The best places are just opening.”

“What are we after? Wine? Women? Song?”

“All of the above and in copious quantities,” the Samoan said.

“The bum knee will help you with the sympathy factor,” Fowler offered.

Monarch came to a conclusion about the DeGrave rendition and said, “Have a drink in the bar downstairs. I’ll take a shower and join you in fifteen minutes.”

He shut the door, turned on the shower, but instead of stripping he went to his computer and called up an anonymous Skype account he’d opened the year before. Then he launched a browser and surfed through a particular Web site. When he believed he’d found a likely candidate, he noted the name and dialed the phone number.

“The Washington Post,” came a nasal voice. “How can I help you?”

“Eric Lord,” Monarch said.

“One moment, I’ll connect you,” the operator replied.

Monarch thought it likely he’d get the reporter’s voice mail if he was —

“Lord.”

“You cover National Security, Mr. Lord?” Monarch asked.

“Among other things,” Lord replied. “Who is this?”

“Call me a concerned citizen,” Monarch said.

A sigh. “We have an ombudsman who takes care of reader complaints.”

“Not complaining,” Monarch said. “Just pointing you in the right direction.”

“Uh-huh,” the reporter replied, skeptical. “And where might that be?”

Monarch swallowed, thinking that there was no turning back at this point, before he said, “I think you should look into sanctioned kidnappings of foreign nationals who threaten U.S. national security, and secret prisons in Poland where they’re being taken to be interrogated by the CIA.”

A choke, as if he’d been sipping coffee, then coughing, before he replied, “Say that again.”

“You heard me. Good-bye, Mr. Lord.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” the reporter pleaded. “You can’t just leave me with that.”

“I have to,” Monarch said. “But from the looks of it, you’re resourceful. You’ll find the evidence if you work hard at it.”

“Who are you? How would you even know—?”

Monarch shut down the connection, feeling better, as if he might have restored a little balance somehow. Then he stripped as he walked toward the shower, wondering if this time he’d feel cleansed of the stains kidnappings always seemed to leave behind.

Escape Artist

Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo

March 16, 2007

3:45 A.M.

A fourth explosion ripped the night, sending off a brilliant flash that was followed by a barrage of bullets. Slipping from the side of the house toward the east stockade wall, Robin Monarch moved away from the explosion and the shots, hyperaware of the hundreds of armed soldiers around him in the pitch-dark compound.

A woman’s voice came over the radio disguised as a hearing aid in Monarch’s left ear.

“Slattery says well done, Rogue,” she said. “The both of you.”

“That was the easy part,” Monarch muttered. “Now to get the hell out of here.”

Twelve hours before …

The rain forest steamed. The red-dirt road, if you could call it that, was greasy slick where it wasn’t potholed or washed out altogether. Making matters stranger, there was some kind of frog migration occurring.

Monarch had encountered hundreds of them as he drove north, heading toward some of the remotest, wildest terrain left on the African continent.

“You’re almost to the coordinates,” Gloria Barnett said through the earbud.

A tall, ruggedly built man in his thirties, Monarch replied, “Sure feels like it. Road’s getting worse by the yard.”

“I still say you should have gone in there with Tats,” Barnett said.

“This kind of thing is best done alone.”

“You are not alone,” Barnett replied firmly. “We’re just not there with you.”

Monarch knew better than to argue with—in his opinion—the best operations runner at the Central Intelligence Agency. Plus it was true that as long as he maintained communications, she and the rest of his team across the border in Rwanda could support him through just about—

A silhouetted figure carrying a machine gun appeared on the road.

“Here we go,” Monarch said, as he rolled down the windows and slowed to a stop. He turned off the engine. Thirty or more figures surged out from the jungle on either side of the route.

Every one of them carried a weapon, mostly knockoff AK-47s, which they trained on Monarch. Over sweaty jet skin they wore faded fatigues, tattered shirts, and ragged shorts. Some sported filthy baseball caps with basketball logos, wearing them cockeyed, like rappers. They looked gaunt and battle-hardened, but the oldest of them couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

Someone yanked open the passenger door. Monarch was aware of a rifle barrel close to his head now, but kept his eyes focused on the oldest boy, the leader, who strode toward him furiously, cheek welded to his gunstock.

“Put hands on your head,” he barked.

In his head, Monarch heard his mother say, “Sometimes the greatest strength is acting weak.”

This was not long before she was murdered. She was teaching her then twelve-year-old son about the intricacies of con games, and how crucial it was for the marks to believe that they had the upper hand in all phases of a swindle, so that they willingly handed over their money.

Monarch did as he was told.

The lead boy jerked the driver’s side door open. “Get out.”

Again, Monarch did as he was told, acting as if he’d never had a gun pointed anywhere near him. He glanced at the boys searching his gear, rifling through a duffel bag, and the knapsack that held his camera. Other boys were trying to pry open the locks of the metal case in the back.

“Tell them to stop messing with the case or they’ll ruin my instruments,” Monarch complained as two boys came in to search him.

The friskers grabbed his U.S. passport and the documents that identified him as Robin Monarch, a mineralogist from the University of Chicago, and stepped back.

“Unlock the case,” the lead boy said.

“This kind of humidity could screw up the electronics,” Monarch said, then tapped his ear. “It’s already screwing with my hearing aid.”

“I don’t care,” the boy said. “Unlock it or we leave you here.”

Monarch made a show of sighing. “Can I reach for the key?”

The lead boy’s gun was inches from Monarch’s face when he nodded.

Monarch fished out the key, which was on a lanyard around his neck, pivoted, and held his hand out to the two still trying to bust the locks. The lead boy said something sharply in a local dialect. The other boys angrily thrust the case at him.

Monarch twisted a dial, heard a faint puff at the relief of the case’s inner pressure, and then fit the key in the locks. He unsnapped them, opened the lid, revealing the thickness of the case walls, and dense anti-shock foam that cradled probes, a camera that looked like a nozzle with a bug-eye on the front, various sensing devices, and a notebook computer.

The lead boy pried up the foam at one corner, and was about to pick up another, when Monarch said, “Longer you take, the greater danger to the instruments. No instruments, no bid. I don’t think that’s what Lieutenant Zed would want, do you?”

The lead boy snarled, “You know nothing of the Lieutenant.”

“We were told to bring whatever test equipment we wanted. Is that not so?”

The boy soldier hesitated, but then said, “Seal it.”

Monarch did just that as Barnett said into his earbud, “Nicely done.”

Built into the walls of the case were ultra-slim lithium batteries and into the handle a transmitter that would boost any signal Monarch or the instruments might send once they got in deep. Once he snapped shut the latches, the system was triggered.

“Much stronger feed now,” Barnett commented. “You might wipe the lens at some point, we’re getting condensation.”

Ignoring the camera pen sticking out the pocket of his safari-style green shirt, Monarch grabbed his knapsack, held out the case toward the lead boy. “Makes you feel any better, you can carry it.”

The boy looked annoyed, dug out a cell phone, turned, and made a call. The middle of wildest Africa and the cell phones still worked. Amazing.

When he’d finished, he said, “Get in your car. Drive forward. The others are waiting.”

Monarch put the case in the passenger seat and drove over the rise. Two hundred yards farther on, two Toyota Land Cruisers and a Land Rover similar to his own were parked where the road became a path that crossed a clearing and disappeared into the jungle. He pulled in beside them just as an old construction helicopter swept in from the north, landed in the clearing, and the rotor died.

Monarch climbed out. So did men in each of the trucks. The closest was Chinese, late forties, carrying two steel cases. An Indian, younger, wearing sunglasses and plain green safari-style clothes, was next. He had shockproof luggage as well. An Orthodox Jewish man who looked absolutely miserable got out of the farthest vehicle, lugging what easily could have been mistaken for a gun case.

“This is totally unnecessary,” he grumbled. He was bald and sweat began to stream out from under his yarmulke. “Why could this not be brought to us in an air-conditioned city?”

“Lieutenant Zed cannot leave the compound,” the lead boy soldier replied. “So you come. You will be back here before dark.”

Monarch acted subservient to all of them, said nothing, and followed them to the helicopter.

They strapped themselves into jump seats inside the copter while Monarch stayed on his feet and introduced himself as Monarch, from Chicago. The others reluctantly replied. Bergenheim hailed from Antwerp. Chatterjee had flown in from Surat, India. Sing called Hong Kong home.

“And what’s your name?” Monarch asked the oldest boy soldier, who stood at the door, holding on to a strap.

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t like just calling you ‘lead boy.’”

Monarch caught the faintest of smiles.

“Lieutenant Zed calls me Gahji,” the boy said. “It means ‘the hunter.’ I am good at tracking in the bush.”

“What tribe?” Chatterjee asked.

“Tribes no longer matter,” Gahji said.

“That what Lieutenant Zed believes?” Monarch asked.

“It’s what all of us believe,” Gahji said before the helicopter engine started up and the rotors began to turn, making a clanking noise that clearly unnerved everyone on board the craft. Monarch glanced into the cockpit and saw that the pilot looked ridiculously young.

But Monarch forced his mind off it, yelling: “So what’s with the frogs? They’re everywhere.”

Gahji shrugged, said, “Mating season. What is that tattoo?”

The entire chopper had begun to vibrate as it struggled to lift off. Monarch had grabbed one of the safety straps, revealing a tattoo on his inner right forearm. The letters FDL were laid out in scrollwork, with a hand coming off the D, the fingers about to pluck something.

“The initials of my first love,” Monarch said. “Almost broke my heart.”

Gahji frowned.

They rose and swung away from the road, and the clanking eased. Quickly they were above the jungle canopy, flying north.

“Volcano,” Gahji said, pointing out the other side of the helicopter.

Monarch used the straps to cross, looked where the boy soldier was pointing, and saw a huge smoking volcano with a massive slag-colored lava field stretching through the jungle to the south. More volcanoes, dormant, were visible to the north.

“When was the last time that went off?” Monarch asked.

Gahji shrugged, said, “This one goes off many times. Last year?”

Bergenheim, sitting nearest to them, asked, “How long have you been with Lieutenant Zed, Gahji?”

“Thirteen years. When I was four, he saved my life during the fighting that killed my parents.”

Monarch saw fathomless depth in the boy’s eyes. Gahji’s story unnerved him, made him think of himself at that age, still fighting for his place in life back in the squalid slums of Buenos Aires.

“Someone saved my life like that when I was thirteen, soon after my parents were murdered,” Monarch said.

Gahji looked at Monarch suspiciously, said nothing. He turned away from the volcano and looked to the north into hilly terrain choked by jungle. Something about the way the boy soldier held his head so defiantly led Monarch to think back to those long-ago days.

*   *   *

The eighteen-year-old Robin, no longer the awkward and lanky kid he’d been at sixteen, had filled out and was just coming into his strength. But that day he was tired and in a bad mood as he and his closest friend, Claudio, headed back through the streets of the Villa Miserie, the Village of Misery. This was the slum where he’d ended up, in the wake of his parents’ murder. Four years before, Claudio had saved him from the garbage heap, recruiting him to a gang, La Fraternidad de Ladrones, the Brotherhood of Thieves.

During those four years, in situations where the odds had been heavily stacked against him, Robin had managed repeatedly to steal valuable items for La Fraternidad. Which was contributing to his bad mood.

“I am the best thief, Claudio,” Robin complained.

“Of that there is no doubt, my brother,” said Claudio, older by two years, and already thickening through his middle. He stopped, gestured to a red gate set in a high wall. “I like this red, like cow’s blood, don’t you think?”

Claudio was a thief of the highest order, a talented safecracker, and the Brotherhood’s part-time fence. But he dreamed of being an artist, a painter, and was obsessed by the various shades and hues he saw all around him.

“It’s an interesting red,” Robin allowed. “But I was talking about Julio.”

“Were you?” Claudio said. “I thought you were talking of being the best thief.”

“Julio takes more than half of what I steal for himself,” Robin complained.

“That is the deal,” Claudio reminded him. “You share with those above you.”

“I see too much of it going to Julio. If I am to take risks, I want to be paid.”

Claudio scratched at his sparse beard and grinned. “You will be a rich man someday, I think.”

“Men who think for themselves become rich. My father taught me that.”

“Your father was a cat burglar,” Claudio said skeptically.

“And a good one,” Robin shot back.

“Thought we were talking about Julio,” Claudio said, walking again.

“I am talking about Julio,” Robin insisted. “He doesn’t think, sometimes. He makes mistakes.”

“Such as?”

“The kidnapping.”

“That was two years ago.”

“He still drinks too much, talks too much. And he gets crazy around girls.”

A squealing piglet ran by them. A little girl went running after the pig.

“Julio is still Julio,” Claudio said firmly. “He still leads. The Brothers support him without question.”

After several moments, Robin said, “He suspects us, I think.”

“What, that we let the girl go?” Claudio said. “Or that we stole the ransom for ourselves when he was blind drunk?”

“Maybe both.”

“I haven’t said anything to anyone. I haven’t spent any of the money.”

“I haven’t either,” Robin said. “But the way he looks at us, even when we have done a great thing, and especially when he has been drinking rum…”

“Be careful what you imagine, brother,” Claudio said as they came within sight of the ramshackle building that served as an informal home for the Brotherhood. “Just thinking something can make it so.”

*   *   *

The helicopter banked, shaking Monarch from his memories. They flew across a lake in the middle of the rain forest and saw nothing except birds in the trees and cranes standing in the shallows.

“No fishermen?” Sing said, surprised.

The boy soldier shrugged. “Sometimes. But it is far to bring in a boat. We fish more on the next lake north.”

They reached the far shoreline of that first lake, and then flew on over the jungle canopy. Monarch swiveled his head, trying to identify landmarks, places he could use to navigate. The line of volcanoes loomed to his east, and there were highlands to the west. Seven or eight miles on, he spotted the second lake.

“I like that first one as a possible pickup,” Barnett whispered in his ear.

Twice Monarch clucked softly with his tongue to let her know he agreed.

As they got close to the second lake, Monarch saw boys fishing from dugout canoes, encampments along the shoreline where cook fires burned, and a bizarre fortress. It dominated a peninsula that jutted into the lake off its western shore, some one hundred acres in size.

Dried weeds hung from a barbed-wire fence that jutted above the water twenty yards out from shore, surrounding the entire peninsula. Hundreds of tree trunks, hatchet-sharpened at the tips, had been set and lashed upright, forming the picket walls of a primitive stockade that enclosed the entire point. Armed sentries stood along an elevated walkway on the interior wall of the stockade, a cadre of boy soldiers who watched with open menace as the helicopter passed.

Monarch did his best to film it with the camera pen by aiming his left chest so Barnett and the others could see the interior, which featured an old colonial-era plantation house gone to seed. Vines and moss grew up the exterior of the decrepit mansion. The rotting shutters were flung open, overlooking a shantytown of huts, tarp shelters, and makeshift tents.

Barnett whistled softly and, duly impressed, said, “Way different than looking at it on sat photos. Up close and personal, it’s like something out of Mad Max.”

When they had almost reached the spot where the peninsula met the base of a range of hills, Monarch saw the canal. Hand-dug and flooded, it featured a retractable bridge that connected the mainland to the peninsula and the front gate of the stockade.

But as they circled in for a landing, Monarch was no longer looking at the jungle fortress. He was staring far up the hillside where the vegetation had been stripped and the earth turned, as black and livid as a scabbed-over wound.

They slowed and landed. From the sound the rotors made winding down, it was a miracle they were on the ground. Thank God Monarch wasn’t planning on leaving the same way he had come in.

“Is this the only way in here?” Chatterjee asked anxiously as he unbuckled his harness and made to get out.

“Or walking through more than one hundred kilometers of bush,” Gahji said.

“Why do I get the feeling that you came in the second way?” Monarch asked.

“Because I did,” Gahji said in a boastful tone. “We all did. Even Lieutenant Zed. If you want to be one of us, you must learn to walk before you can learn to fight. The helicopter is for supplies only. And rare visitors.”

Monarch climbed out, smelling wood smoke. He could hear the jungle now: the cries of birds, the hoots of monkeys, and the thud of something heavy running through the trees. The heat was brutal, with near one hundred percent humidity, and Monarch understood he was going to have to stay hydrated, well fed, and alert if he was to complete his mission and come out of this in one piece.

More boy soldiers appeared on the ramparts to either side of the gate. Others arrived at ground level and began hauling on a rope-and-pulley system to bring the bridge across the canal.

“The bridge is kind of overkill, don’t you think?” Monarch said.

Sing agreed. “That canal isn’t that wide. Someone could get across fairly easy if they wanted.”

“If they could get past the crocs,” Gahji said as the bridge reached their side.

Whether it was the mention of crocodiles or the infernal heat, Bergenheim looked ready to faint. Chatterjee was now looking keenly at the murky canal water.

Monarch followed Gahji onto the bridge, looked down into the stinking ditch, and saw sharp prehistoric heads lying partially submerged, seven or eight of them, maybe more. The wind shifted and he smelled death. In the reeds, he caught sight of something more chilling: a shredded white shirt that looked more bloodstained than muddy.

“So the rumors might have merit,” Barnett whispered.

Monarch caught Gahji watching him without expression from the other end of the bridge. The gate began to open.

It all reminded Monarch of a door opening deep in his past.

*   *   *

No sooner had Claudio warned Robin about imagining things than he saw the door to the Brotherhood’s building swing wide.

Julio stumbled out onto the ramshackle porch at the edge of the Villa Miserie, laughing, bare-chested, one arm around Inez, a street prostitute he favored. At six foot four, Robin was now three inches taller than the twenty-something leader of La Fraternidad, but Julio still had him on raw strength, bulk, and fighting experience.

Julio’s upper-body muscles were pumped and gleaming, as if he’d just done a hundred pull-ups or push-ups. With the tattoos of stalking tigers on each massive shoulder, the shaved head, and the black wraparound sunglasses, to Robin, Julio looked like a creature that was half ape and half rhino.

But Julio was no dumb animal. He’d founded the Brotherhood, and he’d crafted the eighteen rules that the members lived by.

“My brothers!” Julio cried. Robin instantly heard the slur in his voice.

My God, it wasn’t even noon yet, and he’d already taken his eye off business.

Robin’s late mother had always preached to him about drinking alcohol before the sun went down. “Someone who drinks during the day has no ambition,” she’d say. “No real ambition.”

Julio had ambitions, but he didn’t like to work too hard to achieve them. He preferred other people work hard to achieve his ambitions. It made Robin’s blood boil at some level, but he smiled. “Julio.”

“My brother,” Claudio added.

“You know this one?” Julio said to Inez, who looked as buzzed as he was in a tight dress that she threatened to spill from. “The great Robin? My thieving genius?”

Inez’s eyes came lazily toward Robin. She giggled, clapped Julio’s great chest, and said, “I know him, silly. All the girls in the Villa Miserie know him.”

“This is true?”

“Well, they want to know him. But he no wanna know them.”

Julio seemed to take great delight in that. “What do they think? The girls?”

“Maricón,” Inez sniffed. “He must like boys like Claudio.”

“He just don’t like skanks,” Claudio shot back. “Neither do I.”

The whore erupted from her haze. “Inez is no skank!” She looked at Julio. “Do something.”

“Why?” Julio said, taking his arm from around her neck, and turning indifferent, even scornful. “He tells the truth. Now go away. We have business.”

Inez glared at Julio, spit at Claudio’s feet. Robin ignored her completely, focused on Julio, who laughed softly as she walked away. “You have such a way with the chicas, Claudio.”

“I try,” Claudio said.

“You score last night?” Julio asked, taking a seat on the sagging front porch, and setting the rum bottle beside him.

Claudio started to answer, but Robin said, “I got inside, found the cash—U.S. dollars, more than you said, eight hundred—but only three of those gold coins.”

“Three?” That surprised Julio, who lifted his sunglasses, revealing bloodshot eyes that were sharply focused. “There were supposed to be like ten, fifteen.”

Robin met Julio’s eyes. “Eight hundred dollars, three coins.”

He reached inside his shirt, handed over an envelope containing sixteen U.S. fifty-dollar bills. Claudio hesitated, but then dug in his pocket and came up with three gold Argentine five-peso coins dated 1893.

Julio stuffed the envelope in his back pocket, and inspected the coins. “They only made these for like fifteen years.”

Julio put his sunglasses back on and looked at Robin. “Too bad there were only three.”

Robin shrugged, said, “Our cut?”

After a pause, Julio said, “Tonight. With the others.”

“Give us an advance so we can go eat like kings,” Claudio said.

Julio paused, then reached into his pocket and counted out peso bills, which Robin took. “That comes off your take,” Julio warned.

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Robin said, trying not to sound harsh.

If Julio noticed he did not react, said, “I’ve got to get some sleep. That Inez wore me out.”

“We’ll see you later, jefe,” Claudio said.

“Count on it,” Julio said, taking his rum bottle and going back inside.

When they were several hundred yards away, Claudio said, “I think we are crazy. You especially are crazy.”

“Just looking out for our interests,” Robin said. “Where are the other seven?”

Claudio patted his pocket nervously, said, “‘Rule number eighteen: Make good on promises given to other thieves.’ If Julio finds out we broke—”

“He won’t.”

*   *   *

Monarch followed Gahji through the gate of the fortress in the jungle, felt the eyes of all the boy soldiers inside the stockade, looking at them from under tarps and lean-tos as they ate from bowls of rice and sauce or worked oil into their weapons.

“How many follow the Lieutenant?” Chatterjee asked.

“More than one thousand now,” Gahji replied proudly. “But they are not all here. Many are in camps back in the hills, training. Others are working.”

They neared the old plantation house. A big wiry man appeared on the dilapidated front porch. He was coal-colored with splotches of pink on his face, arms, and scalp, a piebald man in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing reflector sunglasses and camouflage fatigues. All around the encampment the boy soldiers sprang to their feet at the sight of him, and shuffled out in front of their shanties to stand at attention.

“Lieutenant Zed, I presume,” Monarch said, reaching out his hand.

Lieutenant Zed nodded tersely. “Your trip?”

“Uneventful,” Sing said.

“The stone?” Bergenheim asked.

“Soon enough,” he replied. “Set your cases down. Fasi will bring them out to the veranda, where we will have something to eat and drink before the inspection. Don’t worry—we boil all our water. Before then Fasi will show you where you can wash your face and hands after your long, hot trip. Fasi!”

A small, wizened, tobacco-colored man wearing rags scurried out from somewhere, cowering as if he were a dog regularly beaten. Monarch was fascinated. He could not help himself; he’d never seen a pygmy in person before.

Fasi grabbed Bergenheim’s case and reached out for Monarch’s.

“I can handle it,” Monarch said. Pygmies were often taken as slaves in this part of the world and he refused to condone that sort of thing.

“Let him take it,” Lieutenant Zed insisted. “He won’t feel right otherwise.”

Monarch considered arguing, but instead handed Fasi the case. The pygmy turned and started into the plantation house.

“I’ll join you in fifteen minutes or so,” Lieutenant Zed said. “Gahji, we have several things to do first.”

The boy soldier nodded.

This wasn’t the way Monarch wanted things to go at all, but he followed Bergenheim and Fasi inside the old plantation house. Plaster had fallen from many of the walls, revealing moldering wood. But the wide plank floors were surprisingly clean, and the staircase the pygmy led them past looked like it had recently been shored up.

They exited the relic of a building onto a long, low veranda where a table had been set with bowls, pitchers of ice water, and plates of bread. The sound of the generators was louder here, though Monarch could not place their location.

Fasi set the cases down, turned immediately.

“Thank you,” Monarch said, setting the knapsack beside his case.

Fasi did not react.

“Merci,” Monarch said.

The pygmy slowed, glanced over at him as if confused, and then scurried out into the hall and down the stairs.

“Probably doesn’t hear thanks very often,” Bergenheim said.

Monarch looked out behind the veranda. The vegetation had been cut and burned all the way to the rear of the stockade, perhaps fifty yards, and he could now see that the sharpened logs that made up the wall were not only buried upright in the ground, but lashed together with thick rope. Two armed boys stood on the catwalk, looking out. In the far right corner was a stack of brush. Along the left wall of the stockade he saw boys transferring wooden boxes into a hole in the ground.

Chatterjee was pouring water into glasses. Sing was already drinking. Bergenheim appeared highly suspicious of the water. But he was drenched with sweat and finally grabbed up a glass, draining it. By the time Monarch had done the same, Fasi had reappeared with the Indian’s gear.

He looked at Monarch, made a show of washing his hands and scrubbing his face. Monarch nodded. The pygmy led him off the veranda, around the corner, and away from the house to the north at an angle to those boys loading boxes into the ground. Monarch could see markings on the boxes: 7.62 x .39.

AK-47 ammunition.

Monarch had no time to ponder the ammo dump before Fasi gestured that he should go around a bamboo screen. He did, and saw the door to an outhouse. Beside it a large metal bowl sat on a stump. Above the bowl, hanging from the branch of one of the few trees still standing inside the stockade, was a fifty-five-gallon drum. A hose snaked from it and dangled over the basin. A pinch clip held the hose shut.

Monarch used the outhouse, and then went to the basin. As he washed, he heard Lieutenant Zed and Gahji talking in a language he did not recognize. His mind coursed through what little was known about the founder and self-proclaimed lieutenant of the Congolese Liberation Army.

Lieutenant Zed’s real name remained a mystery. But the piebald man was somewhere in his late teens when he first surfaced in the late 1990s, calling himself “Private Zed” and “William Zed.” A self-proclaimed orphan of the genocides that wracked Central Africa, Zed fought with several different rebel factions during the first and second Congo Wars.

But he refused to lay down his arms along with other rebels as part of the general ceasefire in 2003, and fled into the jungle. About a year later, Zed promoted himself to lieutenant, and began recruiting orphan boys to his cause. The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo did not take Zed seriously until he emerged from the jungle in late 2004 with raw diamonds that he used to buy weapons for his burgeoning army.

Even though efforts were under way by that time to curb the African arms trade through bans on so-called blood or conflict diamonds, the stones that Zed brought were of such high quality that weapons dealers willingly traded with him.

Over the next twenty-eight months, Zed regularly exchanged small lots of diamonds for supplies, weapons, food, and ammunition. These diamonds came to the attention of Monarch’s superiors at the CIA because they were some of the most perfect ever seen, almost flaw—

“Are you done?” Bergenheim called, shaking Monarch from his thoughts.

“A moment,” Monarch said, wiping his face and hands with the towel.

He came around the bamboo screen. The Belgian, obviously in some kind of gastric distress, jumped by him, and disappeared toward the outhouse. As Monarch walked back toward the veranda, he looked to his right, back toward the shanty bivouac where the boy soldiers lived.

He stood there a moment, watching the boys, wondering if the rumors were true. CIA informants in the region had reported brutality on Lieutenant Zed’s part. Although many boys were joining his army voluntarily, there were allegations that others had been kidnapped into service. Boys who tried to leave were reportedly enslaved in a secret mine. Those who tried to escape ended up disappearing.

Were they in the crocodile pit?

Monarch walked back to the veranda feeling sour, thinking that eventually all gangs or boys’ armies, or whatever you wanted to call them, evolved toward violence and tyranny.

He glanced down at his forearm. Didn’t his tattoo prove the point?

*   *   *

In Monarch’s mind, he saw Julio the way he was a few weeks after he and Claudio had lied about the number of gold coins they’d stolen from a wealthy attorney. It was late afternoon, the dead of winter, and the leader of La Fraternidad was lying on his belly on a Buenos Aires rooftop, watching the comings and goings at a jewelry manufacturing company across the street. Robin lay to his left, Claudio to his right.

Claudio had been scouting the jewelry factory as a possible target for several months, and had told Julio about it the day before over Robin’s objections.

For the past year, he and Claudio had been working as a team of two, with rare appearances by Julio or another member of the Brotherhood. But once he heard about the target, Julio had insisted on being part of the planning, which had made Robin uneasy. He and Claudio had done three jobs since the gold coin burglary, and each time they’d withheld a significant part of the take.

Was Julio suspicious? If he was, he was a good actor. But Robin could not shake the sense that the gang leader wanted in on this job to make sure he got the lion’s share.

“I count twelve people who work inside,” Julio said.

“I told you that,” Claudio said. “I know everything about this place.”

“Where’s the safe?” Julio asked.

“On the rear wall, set in reinforced concrete,” Claudio replied. “All windows, all doors, are rigged for alarm.”

Julio looked at Robin, said, “How are you going to do it?”

Robin hesitated, and then told him.

When he and Claudio were done explaining what they had in mind, Julio rested his head in his palms, propped up on his elbows so he could see the loading dock and the rear door of the factory. After several long moments, he said, “It could work. I think it will work. But only if we get that cooperation.”

“We’ve watched him,” Claudio said. “We know his routine.”

“Okay,” Julio said. “I’m in.”

“This is a two-man job,” Robin said. “We have the best chance—”

“We have the best chance if this becomes a three-man job,” Julio said in a cold, hard voice, staring at Robin with the flat, lethal look he got when anyone challenged him. “Three men can carry more than two. Am I right?”

Robin glanced at Claudio, who said, “Sounds like a plan, brother.”

*   *   *

Fasi and several other pygmy men brought bowls of food to the table on the veranda. It all smelled delicious to Monarch, who had not eaten much since the evening before at the safe house across the border in Rwanda. But when Gahji had announced proudly that the featured dish was barbecued bush pig, Sing and Chatterjee looked mildly horrified.

Bergenheim, who did not seem well at all, grew angry. “I cannot eat swine. I wish to see the stone, give you my thoughts, and either bid or leave.”

Lieutenant Zed looked insulted, pulled off his sunglasses, said, “Soon.”

Monarch was never one to pass up a perfectly good meal even if it was barbecued bush pig. He spooned a generous portion onto a plate of rice, and dug in. After several bites, he drank from his water, and smiled at Sing and Chatterjee.

“Really good bush pig,” Monarch remarked. “You shouldn’t miss it.”

Over Lieutenant Zed’s shoulder he saw Fasi almost smile.

Reluctantly, the man from Hong Kong and the Indian joined Monarch, who ate ravenously before asking, “Where exactly did you find it, Lieutenant?”

Lieutenant Zed said, “I imagine all of you are interested in seeing the location?”

“Only if it is as flawless as you say it is,” Sing said.

“My sentiments exactly,” the Indian said.

Bergenheim nodded, muttered, “I don’t want to stay another minute in this hellhole if it’s not worth it.”

“I heard that,” Lieutenant Zed said sharply. “And you’re right, this is a hellhole. My entire country is a hellhole. But you will help us change that.”

He looked at Gahji and nodded.

The boy soldier got up, and went inside the plantation house. Not long after, he returned with six armed boy soldiers. Gahji carried a finely-carved wooden box about the size of a toaster, and set it before Lieutenant Zed, who smiled, said, “And now what you have traveled so far to see.”

He lifted the lid, set it on the table beside him before removing a heavy object wrapped in black cloth. Putting it on the table, he unwrapped the bundle and turned over the last piece of fabric.

Gasps went up from the three other bidders. Monarch knew next to nothing about diamonds, but there was no doubt that this one was exceptional.

“That’s not possible!” Chatterjee cried.

Sing jumped up so fast to see the gem better that he knocked over his chair. Bergenheim just sat there, transfixed by the jewel.

“What is the weight?” Sing asked.

Lieutenant Zed smiled, knowing he had a captive audience now. “We await your tests, but we’ve measured it at seven thousand carats.”

“Seven thousand!” Chatterjee marveled. “The Cullinan was what in rough?”

“3,106.75 carats,” Bergenheim mumbled. “532.2 carats cut

“Cut?” Sing said. “What would you cut? It’s like God did the job already!”

It was true. The crystal was shaped less like a conventional gem than an eight-sided translucent sculpture of a giant’s teardrop or a dinosaur’s egg. The more Monarch looked at the stone the more he was mesmerized by it.

Lieutenant Zed said, “Mr. Monarch?”

“Absolutely beautiful,” Monarch said, using the camera in his knapsack to take pictures.

“More beautiful than any woman,” the rebel leader boasted. “Why do you think I sleep with it?”

They examined the stone over the course of the next hour. Sing weighed it at 7,002.2 carats. Chatterjee tested it for thermal conductivity and found it astonishingly high. Despite physical distress that had him disappearing to the outhouse three times, Bergenheim donned loupes on both eyes and pored over the natural facets from all sides while shining a high-intensity light through it and measuring it with a portable spectrometer.

“I’m finding no lattice defects, and zero impurities,” he said in disbelief.

“No boron?” Sing asked. “No nitrogen at all?”

“Zero,” Bergenheim replied. “It has the highest refractive index I’ve ever seen and the facet edges are as sharp as the best-cut jewels anywhere on earth. The luster is just extraordinary.”

“Mohs scale?” Chatterjee asked.

Bergenheim looked like he’d been slapped. “Are you mad? No one would dare run a sclerometer across something like this.”

Lieutenant Zed said, “So you agree that it is flawless?”

“Well,” Sing said, “the only absolutely positive way to know is to run X-rays through it.”

“Which I can do,” Monarch said, reaching for his case.

“You have an X-ray machine with you?” Bergenheim said, astonished.

“You don’t?” Monarch said, unlocking the case. “This one’s state of the art. But X-rays are X-rays. Lieutenant, unless you have a lead shield handy, you and your boys should probably back off in case the diamond throws the rays wild.”

Lieutenant Zed grimaced, but then barked something in that Congolese dialect at the armed boys. They all moved off the veranda and into the yard behind the plantation house. Fasi followed them, stood off to one side. The three other potential bidders did the same, but not before Bergenheim said, “What about you?”

“The case is lead lined,” Monarch replied, and then set up the laptop on the table beside the diamond with the case in front of it.

With a thin cable he attached the nozzle-like camera with the bug-eye lens to the computer. “Ready?” Monarch murmured.

“When you are,” Barnett whispered in his earbud. “And make damn sure you point that thing away from you.”

He clucked with his tongue in agreement, pushed the massive diamond over on its side, and reached around from behind the case to press the bug-eyed lens to the surface of the stone. With his other hand, he hit the return key on the laptop, which caused a split-second hum as X-rays spit out.

Monarch glanced over at the screen, seeing the diamond in black with the lattices exposed as thin white lines.

“They want three more perspectives,” Barnett said.

Monarch clucked and did as she’d asked. When he was finished, he murmured, “Good?”

“More than good,” she said. “They say it’s for real. No detectable flaws whatsoever. Which means you are a go for phase two.”

“Gotta check out the mine first,” Monarch muttered as he disconnected the miniature X-ray camera from the computer.

“What did you find?” Lieutenant Zed was walking back to the veranda.

“Look for yourself,” Monarch said, turning the laptop screen to face the others who were coming back to the veranda. “It’s perfect.”

*   *   *

“Nothing’s perfect, Robin,” said Claudio after they’d left the rooftop across from the jewelry factory and Julio, who’d gone off in search of Inez. “We’ll just have to deal with him.”

“Julio knows,” Robin said, leading them down an alleyway.

“I don’t think so,” Claudio said.

“We have to assume he does,” Robin insisted. “And act as if he doesn’t.”

The older boy looked pained, and nodded unhappily.

“What’s the matter?” Robin asked.

“Julio,” Claudio said. “He rescued me from the ano, the same way I rescued you from the ano. And this is how I repay him?”

“I have repaid him for four years,” Robin shot back.

“What about me?” Claudio demanded.

“I can never repay you in full. You know that.”

“This is how I feel about Julio sometimes,” Claudio moaned, and then rubbed his head. “Why can’t I just be by myself and paint?”

Robin felt bad, and said, “Maybe we will take enough from the factory to buy you the things you need to be a painter.”

Claudio’s jaw loosened. “You mean like canvases? Easels? Paints. Brushes?”

“Why not? We have no idea what’s really in there, do we? For all we know there could be a king’s ransom.”

*   *   *

In Monarch’s earbud, Barnett asked, “How are you going to steal it?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he muttered as he followed Lieutenant Zed, Gahji, and the three diamond experts across the canal bridge.

He set his case on the pad by the helicopter with the others, and then followed them toward a wide path that led up the hillside.

“Slattery’s telling me that it’s crucial to national security that we control that diamond,” Barnett said.

Jack Slattery was Monarch’s new boss, an abrasive guy, but smart and well connected within the upper echelons of the agency. Monarch clucked his tongue twice to indicate he understood.

As it had been explained to Monarch, American scientists had been searching for flawless diamonds for years so that they could be used to exponentially increase the power of lasers. Opposing mirrors made of flawless diamond crystals, they theorized, would allow lasers to be developed that would use X-rays instead of light waves as their energy source.

An X-ray-based laser would allow chemists, biologists, and physicists to study all sorts of things at their subatomic level. It could also be used by doctors to pinpoint and kill cancerous cells, and by engineers to create lighter, stronger substances.

“Still think this is about weapons,” Monarch mumbled.

“Slattery says it’s not,” Barnett insisted. “He says no chance of an X-ray—”

“Explain the bidding process,” Sing said.

Monarch realized that as the path grew steeper they’d all slowed down.

“How and when,” said Bergenheim, who was gasping and looking ill.

“The helicopter will take you back to your vehicles as soon as you see the mine,” Lieutenant Zed replied. “I will give you an e-mail address. You will submit your bids to that e-mail by noon the day after tomorrow. That will give you and the other bidders arriving in the morning time to come up with your best offer.”

“Wait,” Chatterjee said. “What other bidders?”

“Right,” Sing said angrily. “We were led to believe—”

“You were led to believe that there would be an auction,” Lieutenant Zed snapped. “You didn’t honestly think I would limit it to four? The South Africans couldn’t make it here until tomorrow. The same with the British. The two others—from Singapore and France—asked to join late.”

Monarch checked his watch. It was almost five. Sunset would be at six twenty, which meant the pilot would want to fly sooner than later.

“How much farther is the mine?” he asked.

“Ten minutes,” said Gahji.

“I don’t need to see it,” Bergenheim complained. “Just send me the geological reports.”

Lieutenant Zed laughed and walked on, calling over his shoulder, “We don’t have any reports, and no idea how deep the laterite vein goes.”

“What are you talking about?” Chatterjee said. “You dug it, didn’t you?”

The rebel leader shook his head, gestured back across at the plantation house. “Those people, the Coeurs, they started the mine. At one time they had almost one hundred people in here digging. But before the hole started to produce, malaria and dysentery swept through here. Killed them all, and the mine was abandoned.”

“And, what, you just stumbled on it, went in, and found that diamond?” Sing asked, dumbfounded.

“Basically,” Lieutenant Zed agreed. “It was as if God led me to it.”

Monarch noticed Fasi glaring at the ground.

“But who owns the claim?” Bergenheim demanded. “If there was a mine, someone owns the mineral rights to it.”

“We live in the jungle, but we’re not apes,” Lieutenant Zed said calmly. “I bought the rights for fifty dollars two years ago.”

“Fifty dollars,” Chatterjee said, shaking his head. “That diamond is worth … well…”

“Yes, it is,” the rebel leader said, smiling again as they broke from the jungle into a clearing chiseled flat high on the hillside.

Dark tailings had been thrown in heaps down the side of the hill, stripping it of vegetation, exposing the reddish surface soil Monarch had seen from the helicopter pad. The mine entrance looked like a black gash. Filthy, exhausted boys wearing headlamps pushed wheelbarrows laden with fresh ore from the hole. Others picked through the rocks the mine boys dumped, looking for gems.

“They don’t look much like warriors,” Monarch commented.

“Every boy takes his turns up here,” Lieutenant Zed retorted. “They do it eagerly. Isn’t that true, Gahji?”

The boy soldier nodded vigorously. “It is their honor because they know they not only fight for the revolution, they work for the guns they carry.”

But Monarch saw more desperation than pride in the mine boys’ faces. And fear. And shame. Then he noticed that Fasi was regarding the boys with what looked like pity.

He’s basically a slave, but he’s worried about the boys? Monarch thought.

“Whoever wishes to see where it was found may enter now,” said Lieutenant Zed.

In his earbud, Barnett said, “Your call. We won’t get a feed. And we’ve got the GPS coordinates.”

“I’m going in,” said Sing.

“Yes,” Chatterjee said. “It will be cooler inside, right?”

“A lot cooler,” Gahji agreed.

Bergenheim was already moving toward the entrance.

Though Monarch was interested to see the inside of a diamond mine, he said, “I’ll pass, wait at the helicopter.”

“Can’t wait to leave us, Mr. Monarch?” Lieutenant Zed asked.

“Can’t wait to deliver my assessment and bid recommendation to my clients,” Monarch said.

“Go down with him, Gahji.”

*   *   *

“I’m with you,” Julio said. “Every step of the way.”

Robin wanted to argue with the leader of La Fraternidad, but caught Claudio shaking his head.

“Perfect, my brother,” Robin replied instead. “Part one will go easier.”

It was late on a Friday afternoon in September, blustery and raining in Buenos Aires. They were on the roof across the street, keeping tabs on people entering and exiting the jewelry factory as the weekend approached.

Just as the natural light began to dim, Claudio said, “There they are.”

Robin peeked over the edge of the roof, seeing a van bearing the logo of a cleaning service backing up to the loading dock. A car parked beside it. Two women climbed out. A man in a workman’s jumpsuit exited the van.

The overhead door rolled up. The women and the man climbed onto the loading dock and took cleaning gear from the rear of the van. The overhead door rolled down.

“No security guard at night?” Julio asked.

“They replaced him with a new alarm system,” Claudio explained. “Last employee will leave for the weekend in five minutes. Then it will just be the cleaning crew. The women will leave in two hours. The man, Mr. Mendez, will stay behind ten minutes to inspect and then leave at exactly seven thirty.”

“Every time?” asked Julio, sounding impressed.

“Every time,” Claudio replied.

Two hours later, at precisely seven twenty, the two women came out the service door, lit cigarettes, climbed in their car, and drove off.

Robin, Claudio, and Julio were already in motion.

*   *   *

The pilot was there, making his inspections. Monarch walked to the shady side of the helicopter. Gahji shadowed him.

Trying to appear at ease, Monarch rested one hand on the helicopter. But he was studying everything, and trying to figure out what he could do to delay the helicopter’s departure.

He thought of that clanking noise in the rotor housing. Could he suggest looking at it and then monkey with it enough to disable the chopper?

Or steal Gahji’s gun and shoot the—?

No way. The bridge to the stockade had been retracted. The gate was closed. There were three or four hundred armed kids inside and he still had no idea where Lieutenant Zed kept the diamond.

Then something dawned on him that just might work. He stood, picked up his instrument case, and set it on the floor of the helicopter bay. He flipped the hasps open, lifted the lid.

“Thought you were scared about the humidity and heat,” Gahji said, watching him suspiciously.

“Just want to make sure my computer backed up the data,” Monarch explained, making a show of removing the computer and attaching the portable X-ray camera.

He acted as if he was paying attention to the recorded images of the diamond’s remarkable architecture. But for the next several minutes, he kept the camera aimed toward the cockpit and triggered burst after burst of X-rays toward the instrument panel.

“The others are coming,” Gahji said.

The pilot opened the cockpit door, climbed in.

“No problem,” Monarch said, detaching the camera, and sliding it and the computer into the case.

Shutting and locking it, hearing Lieutenant Zed’s voice approaching, Monarch wondered whether it had been enough.

The other diamond experts came around the rear of the helicopter.

The pilot cursed.

*   *   *

“What the hell is—?”

Julio clamped a gloved hand over the mouth of the cleaner at the jewelry factory. Claudio and Robin had stepped out from behind the van wearing hoods when he raised the loading dock door.

Mendez began struggling and making whining noises as Julio dragged him back inside the loading area. Claudio and Robin vaulted inside. Robin killed the lights. Claudio lowered the overhead door. Robin flipped one light back on.

The man had stopped struggling and sat down on the cement floor because Julio had pressed a pistol barrel to his head.

Where had that come from? No one in La Fraternidad carried any weapon other than a knife. Julio used to say that guns were unnecessary and only complicated things if you got caught.

“What’s the alarm code?” Julio demanded from behind his hood.

Mendez looked wild-eyed, said, “Señor Hernandez, he kill me I tell you.”

“I’ll kill you right now, you don’t,” Julio growled.

“Tell us and you’ll come out of this alive,” Robin said, hoping to defuse the situation.

The cleaner sobbed: “4-8-0-2-3-2.”

“How long until it activates?” Claudio asked.

“Thirty seconds you must leave before the doors and windows go alarm.”

“Smart man,” Julio said, taking out a kerchief and using it to gag the cleaner. Robin joined him with rope.

Julio tied his wrists while Robin got his ankles.

Claudio typed in the code, then went to the overhead door, lifted it, and then shut it. He watched a digital panel, saw the word “Armed” flash twice.

“I still think we should just leave the alarm off,” Julio said.

Claudio shook his head. “The alarm company has to be expecting it to be armed right about now. That’s the routine. We don’t want to break it until we’re ready to get out of here.”

Robin thought of something. “What about his van? What if someone comes looking for him?”

“He’s not due home until midnight so we won’t be here long enough for it to matter,” Claudio said.

Julio went around behind Mendez, removed his hood, and turned it backward before lowering it onto the cleaner’s head.

“Sleep,” Claudio said, removing his own hood. “No use fighting it.”

But Mendez’s body remained stiff and alert.

“Let’s move,” Julio said, starting toward the door.

Claudio caught him. “I’ve found that it’s better if our young genius leads.”

Julio thought better of it, but then nodded to Robin, said, “Show us how.”

*   *   *

First Gahji and then Lieutenant Zed went to the door of the helicopter cockpit. Monarch heard a fierce discussion ensuing.

“What’s happened?” Bergenheim moaned. “I just want to get back to my nice air-conditioned—”

“Something is wrong with the helicopter,” Lieutenant Zed said sharply.

“I thought I heard something wrong before we landed, up in the rotor,” Chatterjee said before Monarch could.

“We all did,” Sing said.

“This is electrical,” Gahji said, studying Monarch, who acted pissed off.

“Are you telling me we have to walk a hundred kilometers out of here?” he demanded angrily.

“I’ll die,” Bergenheim whimpered. “I am not meant for such things.”

“You won’t have to walk out, any of you,” said Lieutenant Zed, sounding disgusted. “But you will have to stay the night. We’ll call in a second helicopter after dawn to take you out.”

“Fuck,” Monarch said, exasperated. “I wanted to get those reports in tonight.”

“I did too,” Chatterjee said. “We had a lead on the bidders coming tomorrow.”

“Now it’s a level playing field,” Sing said, with a touch of bitterness.

The Belgian jewel expert looked like he might be sick all over again.

“Well done,” Gloria Barnett whispered in Monarch’s ear.

Monarch clucked as if he were completely irritated at the situation.

“We will feed you, and find places for you to sleep,” Lieutenant Zed said. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll know better how life is for these boys.”

Monarch sighed, looked over at Gahji. The boy soldier’s lazy attention was still on him when the rebel leader barked, “Fasi, see to food, and beds for them.”

The pygmy reacted as if swatted with a riding crop, hurrying away toward the bridge, which had been extended again.

“I’ll contract some incurable disease,” Bergenheim lamented as they trudged after the pygmy. “Some snail that will get into my liver and never leave. I’ve read about it. They have them here.”

Monarch had almost come to feel sorry for the Belgian. “You’d have to step in water with a cut on your foot,” he said.

“Malaria then,” Bergenheim said, and looked at Gahji, who had at last taken his eyes off Monarch. “Are there mosquitos?”

“Clouds of them,” Gahji said. “But we have nets.”

“And whisky,” Lieutenant Zed said. “Whisky in the blood helps keep the mosquitos away. Johnnie Walker Black Label. And strong cigars. Cuban.”

“Black Label and Cuban cigars out here?” Sing remarked.

“We live in the jungle, but we are not apes.”

*   *   *

As agile as only the son of a cat burglar could be, Robin slipped through the door that led off the loading dock into a hallway that connected it to the jewelry factory floor. He flipped on a flashlight, and then reached into his front pocket and fingered open a bag of talcum powder. Taking a solid pinch of it, he cast it underhand out and toward the ceiling.

He kept his light moving from the top to the bottom of the hall, looked over his shoulder, and said, “No beams yet.”

“I know there are some in here,” Claudio warned.

Robin nodded. He remembered them from the parts list for the alarm system that Claudio had somehow obtained. Setting off carefully, tossing the powder every few feet, they soon reached the factory floor.

“East wall,” Claudio said.

The three of them swept their lights over rows of assembly benches, a shipping department with stacks of cardboard, and a glass-faced office where the owner worked. The safe had to be in there.

They reached the door to the office without incident. Julio was a master at picking locks and he was stepping forward to open the door when Robin stopped him. He crouched, lifted the cover on the mail slot, got talcum, and blew the powder through.

When they shined their lights inside, the three red beams cutting diagonally through the office stood out like thick, taut cables.

“There’s the safe,” Claudio said with great interest. “Standup, two-hour fireproof, just as I figured.”

Robin saw it in Claudio’s light. “You know that mechanism?”

“Sort of.”

“Fuck,” said Julio, whose light was shining on the office door. “The door opens inward. Soon as we do, the alarms will be triggered.”

“So we’ll take out one of the windows,” Robin said.

*   *   *

“You like it?” Lieutenant Zed asked with a slur in his voice, several hours after dark.

All of them were back out at the table on the veranda again. Torches burned some kind of insect repellent, but they barely kept the mosquitos at bay. The generators ran, brightening the two bare lightbulbs over the table. The onions and garlic in the tomato sauce filled the air. An empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label sat mid-table. A second one, close to half empty, was in Lieutenant Zed’s hand as he poured himself a refill. He clenched a burning cigar in his teeth.

“Excellent sauce,” Sing said.

“And the fish?” Monarch said. “Tilapia?”

“The lakes are full of them,” said the rebel leader with a slight slur in his voice. “Fasi knows twenty ways to cook them. Don’t you, Fasi?”

The pygmy, who had been standing at nervous attention, nodded, said in French, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

“His mother taught him,” Lieutenant Zed said. “More whisky?”

“For me,” Bergenheim said, drunk and holding up his tin cup. “Trying to make my stomach as polluted as possible. Kill everything. And I’ll take that cigar after all.”

Fasi darted over, snagged the second whisky bottle, and hustled it and a cigar to the Belgian. He filled his cup, and then Chatterjee’s and Sing’s. Monarch shook his head when he was offered more.

“Why the boys?” Monarch asked finally. “Why haven’t adult men joined your army, Lieutenant?”

Gahji, who sat off to one side, eating, now stopped, looked up.

The rebel leader’s demeanor hardened. “Many men have joined,” he said. “They run the other camps.”

“So many more boys than men?” Monarch said reasonably.

Lieutenant Zed studied him critically before he said, “Only the young can change the world. You start them early, they cannot help but succeed.”

Monarch nodded, said, “I see your point.”

“My point and my strategy,” the rebel leader insisted, draining his cup and pouring another. “The best warriors I have ever seen have all been boys, me included. Boys make up for their lack of strength with ferocity and battle smarts. Most simply have no fear. The ones who become afraid, die. The ones who don’t, get very good.”

He drained that cup too, stood, and said, “Gahji will show you where you are to sleep. Fasi will wake you early. The helicopter will be here after dawn.”

“Will we see you, Lieutenant?” Bergenheim said.

“Of course,” he said as he moved somewhat unsteadily toward the door. “What kind of host do you think I am?”

Fasi brought mats and mosquito nets to the veranda. Gahji and one of the other boy soldiers Monarch had seen earlier in the day moved the table out onto the ground behind the old plantation house.

Bergenheim looked ready to cry, but, still smoking his cigar, got to his knees and crawled in under the mosquito net. He put the burning cigar on the cement near his head. The Belgian was snoring before Sing and Chatterjee returned from the outhouse.

“In the morning,” Gahji said, snagging the whisky bottle from the table. About a third remained.

“He’ll never remember how much was left,” Monarch whispered.

For the first time since the helicopter failed to start, Gahji reacted with something resembling a smile, and said, “I know.”

Monarch set his instrument case beside his mosquito net, crawled inside and curled up. The generator died and with it the electric lights. The torches flickered weakly, throwing shadows, and he was acutely aware of the symphony of bugs and frogs and night animals calling.

He lay there until the torches died, close to two hours, long enough for the boys on sentry duty to drowse, before finally making his move.

*   *   *

Once Claudio and Julio pried off the trim that held the glass in place, the windowpane came out easier than Robin expected.

“I’ll find what else we need,” Julio said, and set off through the factory.

Robin went into the office first. Tossing more talcum powder, he studied the three light beams and saw a path that would take him to the safe. He straddled the first beam, belly-crawled under the second, and climbed up on the desk to jump over the third. He landed in the eighteen inches of free space in front of the safe.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” Claudio said.

“It would have stopped most thieves,” Robin said.

“True,” Claudio said as Julio returned carrying a small tank of acetylene, a hose, a face shield, and two torch heads.

“Every bench has got a set,” Julio said. “Just like you said.”

“I told you I knew everything about this place,” Claudio replied as he crawled in through the window frame.

He accepted the tank from Julio, said, “I’ll need three or four more.”

While Julio went to gather the gas tanks, Robin threw talcum powder into the air and met Claudio halfway. Two trips and they’d ferried the equipment they needed through the light beams without incident.

“Two-hour fireproof, you said?” Robin asked.

“Got to be,” Claudio replied, lowering the face shield. “But that’s a regular fire, hot, but not aimed, you know?” He turned on the gas, lit the torch with a pop. “Nothing intense as this.”

He fiddled with the torch control until the flame was short, stubby, and so brilliant that Robin and Julio had to look at it sideways when Claudio started to cut about an inch and a half away from the dial.

*   *   *

Monarch turned off the satellite radio in his ear and shut off the camera. He didn’t want to be distracted in any way. He grabbed his knapsack and slipped out from under the mosquito net, glad that he’d thought to wear crepe-soled shoes. This was going to be the most delicate creep he’d ever been on. He saw no other way around it: he was going to have to slip in, find the rebel leader’s bedroom, and somehow get the—

He caught a flash of movement near the back door to the old plantation house and froze against the rear wall, watching a small figure amble by and leave the veranda. In a split second, Monarch’s instincts reversed and he padded after the pygmy toward the outhouse.

Monarch had excellent night vision and scanned the area back toward the boys’ bivouac, seeing no movement. In five soft bounds he was behind Fasi, threw his left hand over the little man’s mouth and caught him around the chest, lifted him into the air even as the pygmy squealed softly.

“Ecoutez,” Monarch whispered harshly in French. “I am an American agent. I am here to help you. Do you understand?”

Until that point, Fasi’s body had been rigid with fear. But then it softened and he nodded. “I’m going to set you down,” Monarch continued. “Then we are going to talk. Okay?”

The pygmy shook his head. Monarch set him down anyway, removed his hand from Fasi’s mouth. “Why not?”

“If the Lieutenant finds out I…”

“He won’t know anything for certain until it’s too late,” Monarch said. “Where’s the diamond?”

“The diamond?” Fasi hissed before spitting with disgust. “The diamond is mine! My people’s. You said you were here to help us, but all you want is what belongs to us. Just like everybody else.”

His story came out in a rush of harsh whispers. Fasi’s people had known about the mine for decades, and had explored it, protected it. The pygmy had been all through the place as a boy. He’d left the jungle and attended school for a while in Goma, near the Rwandan border, but then returned here because he never felt like he fit in the outside world.

Lieutenant Zed showed up five years ago because he’d heard about the abandoned mine. When Fasi’s family refused to show him where it was, the reign of terror began. Lieutenant Zed killed Fasi’s sister and then his young brother. When he threatened to kill the rest of Fasi’s family, the pygmy broke down and agreed.

“And you’ve been his slave since?”

Fasi nodded. “And these boys. They are his slaves too. He fills their minds with hate and revolution, but he is only interested in the diamonds. The boys are here to defend and work the mine. When they try to escape…”

Monarch could hear the raw emotion in Fasi’s voice.

“The canal?”

“It’s horrible,” he choked.

Monarch had underestimated the pygmy. “You’re a very brave man, Fasi, and I promise you that the United States government will make sure that Lieutenant Zed is punished, and your claim to the mine is recognized. But you’ve got to help me get the diamond. And it’s not about the money. It’s too complicated to explain right now, but that diamond isn’t about pretty rocks for women’s fingers. It could change science, medicine, all sorts of things. Save people’s lives. You have to believe me.”

For several moments there was no noise but the rustle of birds on their roost, and off in the darkness the constant rumble of frogs.

“He’ll know I took it,” Fasi said in a dull voice.

The implications of that were clear: Monarch would get the diamond, but Fasi would surely see the crocodile pit up close and personal.

“You know the land between this lake and the one south ten miles or so?”

“I grew up in there,” Fasi said.

“Then once we get that diamond, you’re coming with me.”

*   *   *

“Almost there,” Claudio said as the acetylene torch cut through the last bit of metal holding the locking mechanism into the door of the safe. “I’ll need a hammer to finish the job.”

Julio had remained outside the office, watching them work. He trotted off, and was gone longer than Robin would have thought necessary. Claudio had cut full around the dial by the time he returned.

“Should do it,” Julio said, handing Robin a hammer and several plastic shopping bags at the window.

The leader of La Fraternidad smelled of rum. He was drinking on the job? Robin couldn’t believe it, but said nothing, took the hammer, stuffed the bags in his back pocket. Thank God Julio hadn’t insisted on coming inside the office. The alarm would have already been triggered.

But he compartmentalized that idea and quickly worked his way back to Claudio, who took the hammer, shone his light on the dial, and gave it a sharp rap, and then another. On the third it budged. A fourth blow dislodged the mechanism and they heard it thud inside.

“Brilliant!” Robin whispered. “We’re in.”

“Not quite,” Claudio said, reaching into the seared hole with a screwdriver. “Gotta get the rods to disengage.”

Several frustrating moments later, Robin heard the sound of metal sliding through metal and the safe door sagged open on its hinges.

“Careful,” Robin said. “You’ve only got eighteen inches to play with.”

Claudio nodded, softly tugged at the hole in the door. It swung open enough that they could get their lights inside.

“Oh my God,” Robin whispered.

“Sonofabitch,” Claudio agreed in awe.

“What?” Julio cried. “What do you see?”

*   *   *

According to Fasi, the diamond was stored beneath the floorboards under Lieutenant Zed’s cot in a south-facing bedroom on the second floor of the plantation house.

Monarch thought about that, asked, “Where’s Zed’s escape route?”

The pygmy hesitated. “What?”

“A second way out of here,” Monarch said. “The Lieutenant’s smart; he’d have another way to leave other than the front gate and the bridge.”

After a beat, Fasi said, “There’s a ditch that runs under the wall to drain rainwater. It’s in the back under a pile of brush.”

Monarch remembered the brush pile and the fishing boats behind the fortress. It took him several minutes to devise a plan and explain it to the pygmy.

“That way he’ll have no idea it was you until it’s too late,” Monarch said.

Fasi reluctantly agreed and led the way to the generators. They took four cans of gasoline and snuck them back toward the outhouse where they took the towel from beside the wash basin, and then moved closer to the north wall of the stockade where two rectangles of lashed bamboo lay on the ground.

“I’ll take it from here, get them all up and moving,” Monarch whispered. “You know what to do once it starts.”

He couldn’t see the pygmy very well, but could smell fear in the little man’s sweat. Fasi said, “Okay,” and trotted away.

Monarch waited until he could no longer see him, and then quickly set about improvising a bomb. He opened the gas cans, tore the towel into rags. He tied two strips together, making a cord about twenty inches long. He doused the cord with gasoline and set it aside. Then he stuffed more rags into the mouth of each can. Careful to make no noise, he lifted one of the bamboo covers and lowered the cans down on top of the boxes of ammunition.

He positioned half of the soaked rag down the wall of the pit and stretched out the other half of the soaked cord in the dirt. He fished the cigar he hadn’t smoked from his pocket along with a box of matches. They were damp and took several strikes before they flamed.

Monarch puffed hard on the cigar, cupping the end so it would not be seen. Satisfied that it would not go out, he lathered the butt end with saliva and set that part of the cigar on the gas-soaked rag, the smoldering coal a solid six inches away.

When he was done, Monarch flipped back on the satellite radio, started moving back toward the outhouse, and whispered, “Rogue.”

He heard Barnett sigh with relief. “Where have you—?”

Monarch cut her off, whispered, “In about five minutes I’m either going to have the diamond and be heading toward that lake, or I’ll have sent an innocent man to his death, and probably me along with him.”

A pause. “It’s rarely gray with you.”

“Tell me about it,” Monarch whispered.

*   *   *

“What’s in there?” Julio demanded again.

“Bags of loose stones!” Claudio cried.

“Diamonds?” Julio called back, excited.

“Some of them,” Robin said. “And rubies and emeralds and sapphires.”

“Nothing big, and not a ton, but they’re here,” Claudio said. He was already reaching inside.

Robin got out one of the plastic grocery bags, held it open while Claudio pulled out small Ziploc bags that held the gems and dropped them inside. In less than five minutes, they had cleaned out the precious stones. Robin tied the grocery bag shut, put it in a second bag, and tied that one up too.

“Anything else?” Robin asked, looking over Claudio’s shoulder as he moved aside a ledger to reveal four small gold ingots, each stamped with a “2.”

Eight ounces of gold! Robin thought.

“That’s all,” Claudio said loud enough for Julio to hear as he palmed the ingots and shut off his light.

Robin aimed his flashlight back toward Julio so the leader of the Brotherhood was blinded while Claudio pocketed the gold. Then they worked their way back through the light beams cleanly. But Robin was sweating when he handed the bag containing the loose gems to Julio. If the leader of the Brotherhood ever found out—

“A fortune!” Julio exulted. “Feel how heavy it is!”

He made as if to untie the bag until Claudio climbed out the window and said, “It’s past nine. We need to get out of here right now.”

Julio nodded and set off in the lead across the factory floor to that hallway that led to the loading dock. He reached in his jacket pocket, came up with a flask, said, “Found this in one of the desks.”

He drank from the flask as he swaggered down the hall to the door to the loading dock. He stuffed the flask in his back pocket, opened the door, and stepped through. “Shit,” Julio said.

Robin rushed up behind the leader of La Fraternidad to see that the cleaner had managed to get his arms free and his hood off. He was staring at them, his fingers tugging at the knots in the rope that still bound his ankles.

Julio drew his pistol, marched right up, aimed at the poor man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

*   *   *

The sound—a hollow whumph like a mortar launching, before a full blast and roar—was surprisingly loud, even from the south side of the old plantation house where Monarch was pinned to the wall below and to the side of Lieutenant Zed’s bedroom window.

Shouts went up all around the interior of the stockade. He heard cursing from the open window before the second explosion, and the third.

Somewhere up there, Gahji shouted, “They’re after the diamond, Lieutenant!”

More cursing, the chatter of more bullets, and then distinctly Monarch heard Lieutenant Zed yelling, “Get them to fight, Gahji! Get them to fight!”

Suddenly Monarch spotted a dark figure at the window. Something dropped, and hit the ground right next to him. An AK-47. Something else fell and hit. Then the figure jumped, landed with a grunt, and rolled over.

The second Lieutenant Zed tried to stand up, Monarch nailed him hard from behind, hitting him just back from the ear with a fair-size rock. The rebel leader crumpled. Monarch pivoted, saw a second, smaller figure at the window.

“It’s not here!” Fasi cried.

“I’ve got it,” Monarch yelled. “Jump!”

Fasi hung from the windowsill, dropped, landed hard, cried out in pain.

Scores of boys were running from the bivouac toward the north wall of the compound as Monarch moved to the box Lieutenant Zed had dropped, and hissed in French, “You all right?”

“My ankle,” the pygmy said. “But I’m okay.”

Monarch opened the box, pulled out the cloth wrapped around the diamond, stuffed it in his knapsack.

“Rogue, do you have the stone?” Barnett demanded.

“We do,” Monarch said, beginning to move.

“We?”

“I had help.”

There must have been gunpowder or some kind of heavier ordnance stored in the bottom of the ammo dump because a fourth explosion—more powerful than the others—ripped the night, sending off a brilliant flash that was followed by a barrage of bullets cracking. The boy soldiers were opening up now, firing at shadows. Slipping from the side of the house toward the stockade wall with Fasi limping behind him, Monarch moved away from the gunfire toward that brush pile set against the east wall of the fortress.

“Slattery says well done, Rogue,” Barnett said. “The both of you.”

“That was the easy part,” Monarch said, running. “Now to get the hell out of here.”

*   *   *

“Why’d you shoot him?” Robin cried, horrified by the hole in the cleaner’s head and the blood and gore on the floor and wall behind him. The only other people he’d ever seen die were his parents, gunned down as well.

“He saw me,” Julio said, his hands shaking as he stuffed the pistol back in his waistband. “He saw both of you, too.”

Still clutching the bag of gems, the leader of La Fraternidad reached for the flask again, draining it this time.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Claudio said. “Get the van keys, Robin.”

“What?” Robin said, still staring at the body.

“The keys,” Claudio insisted. “We’ll drive somewhere, and leave it.”

“What about him?”

“No one’s going to find him until Monday morning,” Julio said. “Claudio’s right. Leave him.”

Robin wanted to puke, to cry, and to smash his fists into Julio’s drunken face.

“Robin!” Claudio yelled. “The keys.”

“I’ll get them,” Julio said, suddenly disgusted. He thrust the bag of gems at Robin, crouched, and started rifling through the pockets of the dead man’s coverall until he came up with the car keys.

Claudio punched in the alarm code. Julio grabbed the bag of precious stones and slapped the keys in Robin’s gloved hand. “You’re driving.”

Claudio raised the overhead door several inches, sprawled on his belly, and looked through the crack. Then he got to his knees, raised the door a full two feet, and said, “Out.”

Julio ran over, lay down, and rolled sideways under the door and out into the night. Robin trudged after him with zero enthusiasm. He looked at Claudio. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

“Someone did,” Claudio said. “You can’t change that now. So unless you want to spend a long time in jail for being part of a killing during a burglary, you better get outside and into that van.”

Robin hesitated, but then nodded and crawled under the door and off the loading dock onto wet cement. It was raining hard now.

The world seemed incomprehensibly small and suffocating to him when he climbed into the driver’s seat of the van, and saw pictures of the cleaner’s children taped to the sun visor.

*   *   *

Fasi and Monarch kicked and pushed at the brush pile, trying to find that drainage ditch.

“Your signal’s getting weaker,” Barnett said.

“Couldn’t bring the instrument case with me,” Monarch replied as rounds kept going off from the ammo dump.

“Give me a pickup time and place in case I lose you,” she replied.

“North shore of the south lake,” Monarch said, continuing to rip branches from the brush file. “ETA five hours. Copy?”

But there was no reply.

Somewhere in the darkness behind him, he heard Bergenheim yell, “Where is the Lieutenant? Where is that stone?”

“Shut up!” Gahji screamed. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

Monarch gave one last push and the pile rolled away, revealing the drainage ditch, rank and watery. He jumped in, landed in loose mud to his shins. Still clutching the diamond, Fasi slid in less enthusiastically, but followed Monarch forward and under the wall of the stockade.

The shooting had all but stopped now. The air stunk of explosives. And the moon had come out from behind clouds when Monarch climbed out of the drainage close to where he expected to see the fishing boats.

But there were none anywhere that he could see.

“The Lieutenant!” he heard someone yell back inside the fortress. “He’s here!”

“Where are the fishing boats?” Monarch whispered.

“I don’t know,” the pygmy said in a whining tone. “They either leave them here, or over there, in the cove, on the other side … of the crocodiles.”

*   *   *

Driving the cleaner’s van toward the Villa Miserie, Robin felt like he’d aged years watching Julio shoot a man in cold blood at point-blank range. His parents had always avoided violence, preferring a more subtle, intelligent approach to crime. Julio used to preach the same controlled methods. But then, with no warning, Julio had a pistol, and he’d used it.

It was the rum. How else could you explain it?

Every time they’d go by a streetlight, Robin would catch sight of Julio in the seat beside him, bleary-eyed but staring straight ahead, the bag of gems in his lap. Robin wanted to backhand the man for his stupidity, to grab the pistol and—

“Go down by the tracks and that old mill,” Julio said.

Robin felt like a zombie, but followed his instructions, and several minutes later drove the van across the muddy parking lot of a decrepit textile mill. He got out, left the keys in the ignition, watched Julio tear off his black T-shirt and stuff it in the mouth of the gas tank.

Julio lit the shirt with a lighter. They ran and were several hundred yards away when the gas tank erupted.

*   *   *

Tight to the southern stockade wall, Monarch ran toward the crocodile-infested moat with Fasi limping hard behind him. How were they going to get across? Lowering the bridge was too noisy. Chancing a swim was unthinkable.

It came down to a choice of alerting the boy soldiers or trying to remain in hiding until the new helicopter arrived, and—

Monarch was fifteen feet from the edge of the canal when he heard shouts from the boys go up in French and Congolese: “Where is the American? Find the American!”

So much for leaving quietly.

Monarch decided if he was going to make noise, it should be useful noise. Flipping the safety off, he stepped up to the bank of the crocodile pit and opened fire with the AK-47, strafing the water back and forth from one side to the other. In the moonlight, he looked at Fasi, who was right there, terrified.

“No,” the pygmy said, holding up his hands.

“We’re gonna end up in there one way or the other, my little friend,” Monarch said, grabbed Fasi by the upper arm, threw him into the moat, and jumped in after him.

Monarch splashed into the foul water right next to Fasi, grabbed the pygmy around the neck in a lifesaver’s hold, aimed the gun back at the upper walls of the fortress, looking for movement even as he kicked them toward the opposite bank of the moat.

Something blunt, hard, and prehistoric bumped Monarch’s back, stopped him cold.

*   *   *

Robin was beyond numb by the time they reached the house where he’d spent the last four years of his life with Claudio, Julio, and his other brother thieves. But when he followed them through the door that night, it seemed like an alien place where he was an alien visitor.

Six or seven members of La Fraternidad were in the kitchen drinking beer and cooking. Another six were playing cards or watching a game on a television screen in the largest room in the house.

“My brothers!” Julio cried, heading into the kitchen and grabbing a beer from a brother who’d only just opened it. “Tonight La Fraternidad de Ladrones went to a whole other level. Downstairs if you want to get your share!”

The brothers jumped from their chairs and couches, cheering and grabbing more beers and rum as they headed toward the staircase to the basement, where meetings of the Brotherhood were held, especially when they were dividing loot.

Claudio handed Robin a beer, and he was instantly angry that he not only wanted to drink the beer, he needed to drink the beer and a whole lot more of them if he was ever going to sleep. He chugged it down, grabbed two more.

*   *   *

The crocodile’s corpse bumped Monarch again. It was floating belly up in the water behind him. But then he heard a powerful tail slap the water somewhere near and to his left, and realized he hadn’t killed them all. Fasi heard the slap too, wriggled from Monarch’s arms, making weird hysterical sounds as he scrambled over the dead crocodile and up onto the muddy bank.

Monarch was right behind the pygmy, threw the gun up onto the bank and tried to claw his way up after it. But the earth there was super-slick. He slipped twice back into the water.

Fasi’s hand appeared. Monarch grabbed at it.

The pygmy was surprisingly strong and hoisted him up the bank. He was on his knees, his feet still hanging over the edge, when he heard the water behind him swirl.

Monarch yanked his feet up onto land. A powerful jaw slammed shut on dozens of teeth and air right where his feet had been. The croc splashed back into the canal.

“We go!” Fasi cried, tugging at Monarch as he grabbed the gun.

Up on the walls of the stockade, Monarch saw flashes of light and figures moving. He knew he should fire whatever remaining rounds he had at them.

But something in his gut prevented him from trying to kill teenaged boys even if they were armed and dangerous. Instead, he fired two bursts horizontally about six feet below the top of the wall, forcing them to take cover.

Monarch spun and took off after the pygmy, who was limping hard past the dark hulk of the helicopter. For an instant, he considered jumping inside the bird, seeing if he could get it to turn—

The boy soldiers opened fire from the stockade. Bullets whipped by Monarch’s head, slapped at his fleeing heels.

*   *   *

“Slow down there,” Claudio said as the last of the other brothers went down the staircase.

“Why?” Robin asked, finishing his second beer. “Things can’t get a whole lot worse, can they?”

“Come downstairs, and get your share,” Claudio said. “You earned it. We’ll talk about the rest later.”

Earned it? Earned it how? Through the death of an innocent father? Those acid thoughts churned in Robin’s head as he followed Claudio into the inner sanctum of the Brotherhood of Thieves. The walls were decorated with nude pinups and posters of motorcycles and cars. Julio stood behind a table at the far end of the basement below a painting of the tattoo they all wore. The other members of La Fraternidad were taking their places on benches facing Julio, who was untying the plastic grocery bags.

Julio looked out at the Brothers, appearing to acknowledge every one of them except Claudio and Robin, before he lifted the grocery bag, dumped the contents on the table, and said, “All jewels.”

The other thieves erupted in gasps, claps, and cries of wonder.

“How did you do it, Julio?” one of the other thieves called out.

“Like you do any great job,” Julio replied, and then pointed at his head. “You think. You plan. You execute. You follow the eighteen rules and you—”

Robin cut him off, shouting from the back of the room, “You are so full of shit, man. Completely so full of shit!”

Claudio grabbed him, said, “Calm down.”

Robin wrenched free and stormed toward the front saying, “You had nothing to do with this except fucking things up, Julio. And now I suppose you’re going to demand a bigger share as a reward for being a complete drunken gun-happy fuck-up who could get us sent to prison for life!”

*   *   *

Monarch dodged over a rise, and sprinted down toward a beach several hundred yards from the fortress. Behind him he heard the gate being lowered.

“Find them, Gahji!” Lieutenant Zed roared. “Bring me back that stone!”

Hearing the creaking noise of the bridge being extended, Monarch hit the beach and ran toward Fasi, who was already pushing a dugout into the water. Tossing the gun on the bottom of the big canoe, he climbed in on his knees. There was a push-pole lying in the canoe bottom, but the pygmy handed him a crude paddle to use instead. The eastern sky was quickly softening toward dawn. It would be daylight soon enough, and there was no doubt they’d be spotted out there on the open lake.

Monarch put his back into it, knifing the paddle down into the water, and pulling it through in a J-stroke he’d learned from SEALs when he was in the U.S. Special Forces. Again and again, he stabbed the water and pulled, feeling the heavy dugout begin to pick up speed and glide.

He could hear shouting now and looked over to see a mass of dark figures coming across the bridge. A few were already past the helicopter.

“How many canoes are back there on the beach, Fasi?” Monarch grunted as he switched the paddle to the opposite side and stroked again.

“Eight or nine,” the pygmy replied. “But it will take them a while to find the paddles. I threw most of them in the lake.”

Monarch decided he liked the little man very much.

They were less than three hundred yards offshore when the first of Lieutenant Zed’s boys reached the beach, spotted them out there on the moonlit lake, silhouetted against the gathering dawn. A shout went up, and then bullets swept after them like a thunderstorm’s pelting rain.

*   *   *

Julio’s eyes had gone hard and cold. “What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” Claudio yelled. “He’s just—”

“Done!” Robin shouted at the gang leader. “Done listening to how you’re the brains, the greatest. Done letting you take so much of my take. And most definitely done listening to your lies.”

Robin looked around at his brother thieves. “Claudio figured this whole thing out. Claudio. The only thing Julio did was find some tanks of acetylene gas and a bottle of rum that he drank while Claudio and I were risking everything.”

“I killed a man,” Julio snarled. “Or did you forget that?”

“Kill?” The room was suddenly echoing that.

“How could I forget you were drunk and decided to shoot a man in cold blood?” Robin shot back.

“He saw us,” Julio hissed. “There was nothing else I could do.”

“He saw us because you didn’t tie his wrists right,” Robin said. “This is just another case of you being drunk and fucking up.”

“Name one other,” Julio said.

“That girl we kidnapped a couple of years ago,” Robin said. “The one who escaped and stole back her ransom money because you were too drunk to—”

Julio was aiming the pistol right at Robin’s head.

*   *   *

More shots. More bullets ripped the water around the canoe. Monarch heard one hit, splintering the wood right behind him.

Like a racehorse under a whip, he pulled with every ounce of strength, over and over again, trying to put distance between them and the bullets.

The wind came up at his back, helping to take them finally out of range. The shots were fewer behind them and the bullets fell harmlessly on the water. But even as the sky turned a brilliant red, Monarch kept up his relentless paddling, and was now able to see the southern shoreline of the lake ahead of him a mile or so. They’d get there, and then hike south, eight, nine miles? And Barnett? Had she heard his last transmission?

“American, look behind you!” Fasi cried.

For the first time in many minutes, Monarch looked to his rear. There were three canoes on the lake back there almost six hundred yards. There were at least five boys in each canoe, all of them paddling hard.

Monarch was swinging his attention away from them and caught movement in the trees. Bands of boy soldiers were running along the shoreline, trying to cut them off.

*   *   *

“I knew you hit me!” Julio roared at Robin. “You let that little bitch go, and stole the ransom money!”

The leader of La Fraternidad glared at Claudio. “You lied to me too, told me no way Robin did that, that I just drank too much. You’re part of it. You!”

“Julio…” Claudio began.

“Shut up, traitor,” Julio said, now swinging the gun back and forth between Claudio and Robin. “Empty your pockets or I’ll shoot you like I did the cleaner.”

They hesitated. Julio cocked the hammer on the pistol. “Do it.”

Claudio reached in and got the four gold ingots, put them on the table.

“Lying thief,” Julio said in disgust. “I knew you were trying to blind me while you got them from that safe.”

“Robin’s right,” Claudio shot back. “You’ve been taking too much.”

Julio tilted his head. “So what, you want a revolution?” He looked to the other thieves. “Against the one who helped rescue all of you from the garbage heaps?”

The other thieves were shaking their heads, none willing to come to Robin and Claudio’s side on this count, especially with Julio drunk, pissed, and armed, having already shot one man tonight.

Julio smiled bitterly at Robin and Claudio. “I know you think you’re smarter than me, but I read, brothers.” He had the gun pointed at Robin again. “You know how great men stay in power, men who lead for year upon year, decades?”

“I know dictators eliminate their enemies,” Robin said, glaring at the gun.

Julio’s anger returned. “That’s right. They do.”

“So you just going to shoot us, is that it?” Robin said. “Right here in front of everyone?”

“You broke rules,” Julio said. “You got to be punished or no one will listen to me ever again.”

“But like this? With me having no chance to defend myself? Like the cleaner tonight? Is that how you like it now? Shooting defenseless people?”

Julio’s face turned beet red, but he did not lower the pistol. “You want a chance? Is that it? To what, fight me?”

To Robin it was clearly a better alternative; he’d rather have a chance than no chance at all. “Yes,” he said. “I want to fight you for control of La Fraternidad.”

At first Julio looked insulted, but then grinned wickedly, said, “You know, I like that better in so many ways.” He glanced at the other brothers, gestured with his chin at Claudio. “Tie up this traitor up.” Then he looked back at Robin, and said, “And give this dead thief a knife.”

*   *   *

The wind shifted broadside to the canoe when they were less than two hundred yards shy of land. The boys running on the lake’s southern shoreline were at least a half mile shy of cutting them off. But the three dugouts were closing hard behind them. Monarch glanced over his shoulder, and saw Gahji in the front of the closest dugout, about three hundred yards back. He was trying to aim.

“Go left!” Fasi screamed.

“What?” Monarch said, whipping his head around and feeling like the diamond in the knapsack on his back was like a bull’s-eye.

“East,” the pygmy insisted. “Go in there.”

Monarch looked left, seeing heavy weeds on the water that became a wall of reeds far out from shore.

“How deep’s the water in there?” Monarch yelled. He cut his paddle to turn the dugout toward the marsh.

“That’s the point,” Fasi yelled. “You and me with this pole to push us, no problem. But five in the canoe, they’re in—”

A burst of gunfire cut him off. Bullets spit and sliced the water to their right. Monarch drove them forward into the lilies, heading toward the flooded marsh. Ten strokes later his paddle hit bottom.

Fasi was already handing him the push pole. Monarch stood, grabbed the pole, stabbed it into the mud, and heaved himself against it before another burst ripped the lily pads to their left.

“Shoot at them!” Monarch shouted.

The pygmy scrambled back toward him, grabbed up the gun, showed only a moment’s hesitation before leaning out, aiming around Monarch, and pulling the trigger. The recoil threw Fasi and the gun out of the canoe.

“Shit,” Monarch said, crouched as he went by and grabbed the little man by the back of his shirt, heaved him and the gun, now coated in muck, into the bottom of the dugout.

He got two more solid pushes and they were almost to the high marsh grass. Fasi was up on all fours. He wiped the mud from his eyes, said, “There!”

Monarch saw the narrow channel of the water and pushed again, and once more. The dugout hit deeper water and accelerated just in time.

Bullets slashed at the grass and reeds that swallowed them. He could hear shouts behind them and more shots. But they were harmless, just a waste of ammunition. Fasi lifted a machete Monarch hadn’t noticed before and slashed at the branches that blocked their way. In less than two minutes, Monarch had almost poled them to shore. He heard cursing behind them that intensified. Carrying the machete, Fasi scrambled out onto drier ground with Monarch close behind him, carrying the mud-caked AK-47. Up on the bank, he paused to look back over the high grass toward the lake.

Two of the dugout canoes had foundered in the mud. Several of the boy soldiers had jumped overboard, trying to pull the dugouts back to open water, and were stuck as well. But the third canoe, Gahji’s, looked like it had never gone toward the marsh at all, and he and his paddlers were now less than one hundred and fifty yards from land.

“Come,” Fasi said, and pulled Monarch after him into the jungle.

*   *   *

Robin held a double-edged fighting knife in his right hand and used it to track Julio’s movements. The other thieves had pulled the benches back and crowded the basement walls. Claudio had been bound and thrown on the ground in the corner.

“So you think you can cut Julio?” the gang leader sneered, his gold tooth gleaming. “You think you are big and strong enough to take control of La Fraternidad. My Brotherhood?”

Robin kept the knife pointed right at Julio’s chest, just the way Julio had taught him. “About to find out,” he replied.

“Ahh, my little thieving idiot,” Julio said, playing to the crowd before lashing out at Robin with a vicious backhand strike.

Robin was quick, but not quick enough. Julio’s knife flayed a three-inch gash on his right bicep. Blood spurted and ran down his arm. Some of the brothers were cheering Julio now, and Robin understood Julio’s strategy: Cut my weapon arm as often as possible, cripple me, and then finish me.

He felt the blood running onto his hand, making it more difficult to hold his knife. Julio sensed it, leered at him, and said, “You should have taken the bullet when you had the chance.”

*   *   *

The pygmy had some kind of internal compass.

Monarch realized this within five minutes of entering the rain forest. To Monarch the jungle proved a three-dimensional maze that left him feeling directionless, and clawed at by dripping vegetation, vines, and the exposed roots of trees that grew a hundred feet or more, up through several canopies toward the light and the sky.

But it all seemed familiar to Fasi, who pushed on, clambering around and over obstacles, cutting through the vines and thorns that blocked their way. Monarch kept checking the compass function in his watch, and was amazed that the needle hardly wavered off of a southeast heading.

“Shouldn’t we be going straight south?” he asked at one point.

“Soon,” the pygmy gasped. He was moving quickly, but there was a definite limp in his stride.

Monarch looked behind him, realized that they were leaving strong evidence of their passing: broken branches, crushed ferns, and turned rocks.

Easy tracking.

He’d no sooner had that thought than in the distance to his west he heard a bird call that didn’t sound quite right. And then another from due east. And a third that was directly behind them, not far north, maybe two hundred yards.

Gahji was on their trail. And he had other experienced hunters with him.

Fasi seemed to realize it as well, and started pushing himself, slashing forward, and then turning and grinning. “It’s ahead here fifty yards,” he whispered. “The main trail. We’ll move much faster now.”

“Give me the machete,” Monarch said in a low, urgent voice.

*   *   *

The slash to Robin’s upper right arm was deeper than he’d thought at first. It burned now as well as bled. There was no doubt about it. The arm was weakening. Julio must have seen that, because he started to strut and broke into a big grin.

“You feeling it now, my brother,” Julio boasted. “That’s just the beginning. You gonna die from thousand little cuts like that, my little thieving idiot. The last one’s gonna be your throat. Ear to ear. Brand-new smile.”

Whether it was from the blood loss or the beers he’d drunk so fast or the rush of adrenaline, Robin’s vision started to tunnel. He no longer saw Claudio on the floor in the corner, or any of other gang members. There was just blood-lusting Julio standing between him and life.

The gang leader feinted and then slashed upward and diagonally, just missing Robin’s belly, but the tip caught his right bicep high near his shoulder, the second cut there. The pain was white-hot, and Robin started to fear that death was staring him in the face.

*   *   *

To confuse Gahji and the other boys hunting them, Monarch cut out the suggestion of multiple side trails with the machete. Then he and Fasi took care to leave no trace as they worked their way to the trail to the lower lake. They ran the entire way, almost two hours, stopping only to drink in streams they crossed, hearing no evidence of anyone still following them.

At each stream crossing, however, Monarch dunked the mud-coated AK-47 until the banana clip released and the bolt opened. He got the live shell out of the chamber, and let water flow through the barrel, the action, and the clip after emptying it of the last five rounds. Wasn’t the best way to clean a gun, but it would work. Or at least it should.

About an hour and a half into the journey, Monarch thought he heard the thump of a helicopter somewhere far behind them to the north. That had to have been the chopper Lieutenant Zed had called in to ferry the diamond experts out. Monarch expected his own rescue to come from the southeast.

But what if Lieutenant Zed commandeered the helicopter?

That seemed the rebel leader’s most likely course of action. He called softly to Fasi, “How far to that lake?”

“Not far,” the pygmy called back. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes. No more.”

*   *   *

Robin almost succumbed to fear, almost let it make him believe that he had no hope of survival. Then he almost gave in to blind anger, almost went crazy, and on the offense.

But something held him back.

Robin had trained with a knife, but had never fought with one. Julio, to Robin’s knowledge, had never killed a man before this evening. But he had seen Julio in many knife fights where the object was to cut your opponent, but not kill him. The leader of La Fraternidad was an expert, and he looked ready to take his game to a whole other level, feinting, looking for another opportunity to strike.

Then Robin heard the voice of his dead mother saying, “Sometimes the greatest strength is acting weak.”

His tunnel vision faded. Robin was suddenly aware of everything, the smell of his blood, the smell of sweat, the other brothers roaring their approval at Julio, and Claudio watching him like he was his last best hope.

Sometimes the greatest strength is acting weak.

*   *   *

Thunder rumbled close and the air was filled with the scent of approaching rain when Monarch hit the narrow shoreline of the lower lake, hard on the heels of Fasi, who was gasping and dripping with sweat. The pygmy waded out into the water and sat in it, splashing his face, ignoring the lightning in the distance.

Monarch wanted to go in there with him, wanted to get all the grime and sweat off him, but his training would not let him. Instead he found a good position where he could watch the pygmy, the southeastern horizon, and their back trail.

Less than five minutes later, he saw a wall of rain coming from the south, and was surprised when a helicopter burst out of that wall. He checked his watch. Ten minutes early.

Fasi started to wade back toward shore. Monarch looked around, saw no logical place for the helicopter to land. The shoreline was too narrow and the jungle up against it too thick.

“Stay here for now,” Monarch yelled at Fasi. “They’ll lower a rope or a basket.”

“Basket or rope?” the pygmy said, looking worried.

By this time, Monarch could clearly see the helicopter, a big construction chopper. Gloria Barnett sat in the copilot’s seat, a tall, redheaded woman. The bay door was open behind her. John “Tats” Tatupu, the huge Samoan-American who’d become an integral part of his team, was leaning out, looking for him.

Monarch stepped out into the water, signaled to Tats that they’d need an active pickup. Just as the rain caught up with them, the pilot hovered the chopper forward and Tats threw two harnesses at Monarch. They landed in the water about six feet offshore.

Fasi retrieved them. Monarch kept the gun under his armpit while working to adjust the harness for such a little man, but got it done and his own harness on quickly. The rain had turned torrential. The helicopter wash was throwing water when Tatupu snaked out the door a heavy rope with loops hanging at intervals off the side.

The pygmy looked more agitated than he had confronting the crocodiles. “I’ve never been up in the air before,” he said.

Monarch reached out and showed Fasi the carabineer attached to his harness, said, “We’ll link that to the rope. You’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

But the pygmy was no longer looking at the carabineer, the rope, or the helicopter. He was staring in disbelief past Monarch toward the trail that had led them to their rescue.

*   *   *

Robin acted dull, glanced at the two wounds and the blood running down his right arm and along his ribcage. He tried to flex the arm, and grimaced as if dealing with a racking pain.

“Please, Julio,” Robin gasped. “I can’t. My arm, it’s…”

His right arm was trembling now, quivering in spasm as if Julio’s second cut had severed a nerve. Robin struggled to keep his knife pointed at the gang leader. But with every second that passed, his right arm and the knife drooped lower. Robin finally grabbed the knife with his left hand, and heard Julio laugh.

“You gonna fight Julio left-handed?”

Robin made an awkward feint toward the gang leader, who laughed again before going stone cold, the way he’d looked shooting the cleaner at the factory.

Julio jabbed at Robin low, toward his stomach. Robin tried to block it, and took a slice to his forearm. He had been so slow to react that Julio became emboldened. The gang leader made a series of quick feints as he advanced, trying to close the ground, trying for the kill.

Robin backed up, clearly on the defensive, right arm useless. Julio tried to slash diagonally at Robin’s torso, left shoulder to right hip.

But this time Robin was quicker.

Much quicker.

His left hand shot out, knuckles and the hasp of his knife hitting the inside of the gang leader’s right elbow. Julio gritted his teeth, pushed against Robin’s left hand, and then stepped in to punch Robin with his free hand.

As Julio swung, Robin released the pressure he had on the gang leader’s left elbow, and flicked his knife to his bloody right hand.

Robin took the punch to his stomach. He saw Julio’s knife coming to stab him even as he plunged his own blade deep into the neck of the founding jefe of La Fraternidad de Ladrones.

*   *   *

The instant Monarch saw the pygmy’s expression change there was no thought, only action. He kicked his own feet out, and twisted hard left as he fell toward the water, pulling the trigger the second his mind registered bodies aiming at him through the pouring rain.

The five-shot burst hit all three of the boy soldiers before Monarch landed on his elbows in the shallow lake water. Two of the boys dropped and floated lifeless, pelted by rain. Gahji lay half in, half out of the water, forty yards down the bank, staring up at the rain, his seventeen-year-old mouth working as if he’d had every bit of wind in the world knocked out of him.

Monarch flashed on an image of Robin on the floor in the basement of La Fraternidad, stabbed in the lung, watching Julio bleed out and his eyes lose light.

Feeling like he was going to be sick, Monarch got up, and splashed through the shallows to Gahji, wanting to help him, hating that he’d had to shoot him. Gahji’s eyes found him. Along with hatred in them, Monarch saw a piteous boy who’d been cast adrift, parentless, sucked into a warped life where you could end up like this, bleeding and confused and dying long, long before your time.

“Diamond,” Gahji rasped. “Not yours.”

“I’m a thief,” Monarch explained, moved to tears.

Gahji blinked at the rain, said, “I hope some hell finds…”

The boy soldier’s words died in his throat and he stopped blinking at the rain. Monarch was overcome for a moment and he sobbed for Gahji and for Robin, the boy who’d died that night in the basement in Buenos Aires.

“Rogue!”

Tat’s voice boomed to him over the pounding of the rain.

For a moment, Monarch was unable to respond. Then he tore his attention away from the dead boy, looking through the storm to see the big Samoan holding a bullhorn.

“We have fuel issues,” Tats said. “It’s now or you wait six hours.”

Monarch’s attention fell to Fasi, who stood knee-deep in the water, back to the chopper, looking as miserable as a wet terrier.

Ever since Monarch was a young boy, he’d developed the ability to compartmentalize, to shove events and thoughts away and lock them. It was the only way he had been able to stay sane.

So he shut off the image of Gahji dying and of Robin dying, and he set off through the water toward the pygmy. He held the little man by the back of the harness as he waded out deeper toward the rope dangling from the helicopter. A solid twelve feet of it writhed on the lake surface.

Monarch snagged the rope, snapped Fasi’s carabineer to one of the loops closest to the helicopter, and his own to one of the very last before giving a thumbs-up to Tatupu and the pilot.

The chopper rose slowly. Tats set the winch in motion. The pygmy rose out of the water, riding up into the sky with Monarch lifting below him. Ten feet above the water, he heard Fasi laughing over the noise of the chopper.

The pygmy looked down at Monarch, grinning like a madman.

“Flying!” he yelled. “I’m fly—!”

The flat crack of a rifle reached Monarch at the same time Fasi took the bullet through the throat and slumped and hung from the harness and rope like a marionette without a master.

Monarch’s head swung around. Another helicopter hovered in the fog right at the jungle’s edge. Lieutenant Zed sat in the open bay door, grinning, lowering the gun to admire his marksmanship before swinging his weapon Monarch’s way.

Tatupu fired twice at the rebel leader, driving him deeper inside the helicopter, which banked away into the fog and disappeared as quickly as it had come. Monarch stared after it as he began to rise and fly away into the storm because he could not bear to look at the little body dangling above him.

Two days later …

Nairobi, Kenya

4:00 P.M.

Monarch sat on a terrace by the pool at the Serena Hotel, trying to numb himself with another rum and tonic. Three had not worked, so he’d ordered a fourth and fifth, which the waiter placed on the table in front of him.

As he started in on the fourth cocktail, Monarch’s thoughts gathered darkly on the image of Fasi’s corpse hanging above him, and then on the image of himself as Robin, lying on the floor of the basement, and then on an older woman with long iron-gray hair and a kindly face.

Why had the miracle of that woman happened to him, and not to a boy like Gahji? Why had she saved him? So he could shoot three boys and cause the death of an innocent man trying to do the right thing?

He thought about the gray-haired woman and wished she could be here to listen to him, to help him see how he should handle this. But though he kept in contact with her regularly, she knew little of his current life.

Would she even understand? What? That his life was out of balance again? That his wrongs once again outweighed the good things he’d done?

Before he could come up with answers to any of those questions, Gloria Barnett walked up wearing a floppy hat, a long-sleeved blouse, and cotton pants that protected her fair skin and gangly body from the scorching African sun.

She took in the three spent cocktails, the full one on the table, and the one he was drinking.

“Never knew you to do a lot of boozing,” she observed, taking a seat beside him

“First time for everything,” Monarch said, and drained the drink, signaled to the waiter for another. “You want something?”

“A Tusker,” she said. “Cold, please.”

The waiter walked away, leaving an awkward silence.

Finally, Barnett said, “They have people at the agency who help with this kind of thing.”

“You mean being a kid-killer?” he asked sardonically. “Or someone who sacrifices pygmies for the United States of America?”

“Those boys were going to kill you,” Barnett shot back. “I had a bird’s-eye view, remember? You had no choice. And Fasi made a choice to help you. His people and those boys will be better off because of his sacrifice.”

“That right?” Monarch asked sarcastically.

“Yes,” she insisted. “Once the Congolese were told about the quality of the diamonds in that mine, they began moving their best troops east to go in there. Zed won’t last the month. Those boys will be helped. The pygmies in the area will be helped. And the mine will be nationalized to protect the diamonds for science.”

“Which means Fasi’s family, what’s left of them, will get nothing,” Monarch said bitterly. “If I had my way, they’d get it all.”

“I know you want to go back in and impose your own sense of justice on the situation, Monarch, but you did your job, and despite everything that happened, you did it brilliantly. We have the diamond. Great good will be done with it now.”

Monarch picked up the fifth cocktail, said, “Sorry, but it doesn’t feel brilliant to me at all.”

“How does it feel then?”

He drank hard off the rum and tonic, said, “Like I’m a conniving thief who somehow always manages to escape with his own skin intact while others suffer the consequences.”

“It’s all the story you tell yourself,” Barnett replied.

“Yeah, well, I think I need a break from this story. From all of this.”

“I can give you four days,” she said. “Slattery says we’re needed in Istanbul by the end of the week.”

It was the last thing Monarch wanted. “What’s there to steal in Istanbul?”

Barnett finished her beer, said, “I’ll let you know when I know and text you the itinerary. We’ll fly Friday.”

Monarch nodded, but with zero enthusiasm. He had four days to get his head straight, four days to deal with the aftermath of what had happened back there in the jungle.

But how was he supposed to do that? He didn’t have his head straight about things that had happened fifteen and twenty years ago. Was he to spend his entire life conflicted about his past?

For years, Monarch had felt good about his life since leaving Buenos Aires and La Fraternidad. As a Special Forces operator and a CIA field agent he’d believed he was using his hard-won skills for a nobler purpose, the good of the U.S. government and the American people.

But the events of the past few days had frayed Monarch’s clear purpose to the point of breaking. He knew this feeling, like he was teetering on the rim of a dark precipice. Twice before in his life—the night his parents died, and the night the boy he knew as Robin died—he’d been hurled off cliffs of abysmal change, and yet both times and with help he’d survived and escaped into a new life

Now, for the third time, Monarch felt like he was wobbling on the edge of no going back.

Monarch suddenly understood a cataclysmic break was inevitable. It could happen here in Nairobi, or in Istanbul, or some other city he’d never seen before. But it was coming. No doubt.

So when the waiter came to ask him if he’d like another cocktail, Monarch shook his head and ordered two cups of espresso. When he crossed the line of no going back, he wanted to be sober enough to recognize it, survive, and escape into a new life once more.

Read on for an excerpt of the new Robin Monarch novel

OUTLAW

Coming Fall 2013 from Minotaur Books

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Sullivan

Prologue

A Brewing Typhoon

Sunday, October 28, 7:30 P.M. Hong Kong Time

In a private dining room above an alley on the crowded peninsula of Kowloon, the Moon Dragon spooned rare tea leaves into a fired clay pot while using his peripheral vision to examine his visitor for any sign of worry.

“You are sure that everything has been taken care of, Mr. Farley?” he asked in English as he raised the glass kettle exactly six inches above the pot and poured boiling water into it.

A British expatriate in his mid-forties, Farley exuded a competent air when he replied, “Precisely as you requested, Mr. Long.”

“I trust so,” Long replied, and sat back to let the tea steep.

Long Chan-Juan was in his early fifties, and in robust health. He wore a finely tailored Hermès blue suit, starched white shirt, Parisian silk tie, hand-sewn shoes, and a rare Cartier watch, a gift from his wife. On his right hand was a gold signet ring that depicted a crescent moon and a winged lizard, an iconic representation of his name, which meant Moon Dragon in Cantonese.

The Moon Dragon fingered the ring, said, “All records of the transactions destroyed?”

“Of course, sir,” Farley said. “But then again, I always work with the utmost discretion.”

Long leaned forward, and with precise and graceful gestures poured the fresh brew from the clay pot into Farley’s cup.

“A present for you then, Mr. Farley,” the Moon Dragon said. “I just received it from the mainland. A very rare pu’er. One thousand dollars an ounce.”

Farley looked on as Long poured a cup for himself and raised it toward the Brit. “To the future: may it be long and profitable.”

The Brit bobbed his chin, raised his own cup, and said, “Very, very long and very, very profitable, Mr. Long.”

The Moon Dragon smiled, sniffed, and took a sip of the tea, enjoying the pungent first pass aroma and taste. Farley took two longer sips, closed his eyes in pleasure.

Long set his cup on the table, studying his visitor again. When Farley opened his eyes, he said, “It pleases you?”

“Brilliantly, sir,” Farley said almost breathlessly. “That is the most exquisite tea I believe I’ve ever been fortunate enough to taste.”

“It gets more subtle with the second and third infusions,” the Moon Dragon replied. “Truly remarkable. And it’s yours. The entire ounce.”

Farley looked pleased, and said, “Very kind and thoughtful of you.”

“The least I could do given the circumstances,” said Long, bowing.

Farley drank the rest of the tea, then exclaimed, “Brilliant, Mr. Long, but I have another appointment to—”

The Brit stopped, blinked, and then coughed. He blinked again, slower this time, and the teacup slipped from his hand and fell to the bamboo floor.

Frightened now, Farley looked to the Moon Dragon, tried to speak, but couldn’t. He rocked forward on his elbows, and his head swung slightly as he began to fight for air.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Farley,” Long said, rising from his chair. “There was dried poison on your cup. My friends and allies like to keep things tidy, no loose ends that might come back to haunt us.”

The Moon Dragon stood there, watching the Brit, fascinated by the spasms and tics the poison was causing. “You were a competent errand boy. You simply knew too much and would suspect our involvement in the events of the coming days. You should have foreseen that we could not chance your betrayal. I’m sure you understand now.”

Farley’s eyes rolled up in his head and he attempted to swallow his tongue before crashing to the floor beside his teacup.

“A few more moments,” Long said to Farley as he quivered in the throes of death. “Then you meet your ancestors. May you embrace them with great joy.”

He went to an intercom on the wall and pushed a button. Moments later, a Mongolian man who was almost as wide as he was tall entered the room, said “Yes, Moon Dragon?”

Long said, “Strip him, Tuul. Take him toward Macau tonight, weight, and dump him. The sea and the sharks will do the rest.”

Monday, October 29, 7 P.M. Indochina Time

Night and clouds took jagged bites of the fiery horizon until there was only blackness beyond the aluminum halo cast by the Niamey, a 380-foot custom oil tanker cruising at six knots in the deep, deserted waters of the South China Sea, bound for the Dung Quat refinery on the Vietnamese coast north of Ho Chi Minh City.

On a balcony below the tanker’s bridge, Agnes Lawton stood at the railing feeling the wind and the storm coming amid sweltering heat. She had just watched the end of day near the equator, hoping to see the legendary green flash said to appear at the moment where day meets night in the tropics. She had hoped the flash would be a positive omen, but she had not seen it, and she wondered what would become of her.

In her late fifties, attractive, a sharp intellect, a commanding personality, Agnes Lawton nevertheless feared that her current task might exceed her capacities. She hung her head and began to pray. Before she could finish her prayer, however, she heard the bulkhead door creak, and then a male voice said, “The others have asked that we adjourn for the evening.”

Turning to face her assistant, she said, “The election is in nine days. Tell them to come out on deck, get some air, and we’ll go at it again.”

“They’re exhausted,” Reynolds protested. “You’re exhausted. Sleep does wonders for people’s dispositions.”

Agnes Lawton thought to argue, but then ceded the point. “I’d at least like a word with them before we retire.”

Fifteen minutes later, belowdeck, she paused in her impromptu speech, gathering her thoughts, her attention roaming over the worn faces of the two men, a Chinese and an Indian, who sat across from her looking as if they each carried an enormous weight.

“Both of you know that your countries seem to be at risk as much as mine,” Agnes Lawton went on. “We can’t lose sight of that fact.”

Both men nodded gravely, rose, and reached out to shake her hand, and then they left with aides trailing them out the door.

Gathering up her papers, she glanced at her assistant, who smiled and clapped silently. “Just the right tone, I think,” he said.

“I hope so. If these things came to pass … well, I can’t even imagine what the world would look like.”

Her aide bowed his head slightly. “Shall I have a snack delivered to your cabin?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said; she snapped shut her briefcase and went out into the narrow hallway. Two men in plainclothes carrying Heckler & Koch submachine guns guarded a hatchway door at the far end. The taller of the men opened the hatch.

Before Agnes Lawton stepped inside, she said, “Wake me at five, Steve.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the taller guard said. “Sleep well.”

She watched him shut the door after her. Then she threw the lock, undressed and lay on the bunk in the darkness. She had heard a storm might be brewing and as she fell into sleep Agnes Lawton asked God for a peaceful night.

*   *   *

Three decks above Agnes Lawton’s stateroom, inside the oil tanker’s bridge, Jim O’Hara, the captain, was working at a computer, plotting his course. Suddenly, horrible, off-key singing came over the shortwave radio bolted to the ceiling above the helmsman.

O’Hara cringed at the voice, screeching like a wounded cat with no hint of melody, and in a language he did not recognize. The singer sawed on a few more bars until the irritated captain walked over, reached up, and twisted down the volume. He glanced at the man at the helm.

“You understand any of that, Manu?” he asked. “You’re from these parts, right?”

The helmsman nodded, “He sings in Indonesian, Captain. He’s saying all Malays like to have sex with dogs. Giving and receiving.”

“Sounds like a hit to me,” chuckled a deep male voice behind O’Hara.

The captain looked over at a beefy American carrying a pistol in an exposed shoulder holster. Beside him was a considerably smaller Chinese man carrying a shotgun, and an Indian who had a pistol in a side holster and looked ready to doze.

“You can go below and sleep,” Captain O’Hara said to the Indian. “Supposed to get weather later, but we’re right on course.” He glanced at the radar screen beside the helmsman. “Nearest vessel is two miles away. Looks like a fishing boat.”

The American nodded and said, “Go ahead. I’ll take first…”

His voice trailed off as he caught a shadow becoming movement out the window. And then, floating out of the night into the aluminum glow, four men appeared dangling from parachutes. They wore black head to toe, and utility vests adorned with grenades, knives, and spare clips. AK-47s dangled at their waists, held level by three-point slings.

“We got company,” the American yelled, going for his gun.

The captain snatched up the shortwave microphone. He turned up the sound on the receiver. The man was still screeching his obscene songs.

The captain triggered the mic, and tried to shout over him, “Mayday! Mayday! This is the Niamey. Position…”

O’Hara glanced at the GPS readout over the helm. But before he could spit out the longitude and latitude coordinates, the helmsman dove for the floor behind the American, the Chinese, and the Indian, who were heading toward the door, shouting into their own radios, demanding reinforcements topside.

A fifth attacker floated by the bridge at less than ten feet. He had the butt of a Kalashnikov rifle slammed into his hip and sprayed bullets at them. The American was hit in the back. So were the Chinese and Indian. The captain grabbed for the shotgun, which the Chinese had dropped, intending to provide cover for the men coming from below.

O’Hara never had the chance.

He heard an explosion and then nothing ever again.

The helmsman lowered the pistol he’d taken from the body of the dead American. He dug in his pocket for his own radio and said in dialect, “Tell him to stop singing. Bridge is clear. Deck controlled. I’m disabling SHIPLOC.”

*   *   *

Agnes Lawton heard the rattle of gunfire even though her room was two decks below the bridge. She’d been drowsily preparing to sleep, but now, wide awake, she threw on a jogging suit.

A sharp rap came at the door followed by a guard, saying, “Mrs. Lawton?”

She opened the door. The guard said, “We’re under attack.”

Agnes Lawton’s hand went to her throat. “By whom?”

“Unclear. They have forces aboard. Parachuted in. They’ve jammed our communications. We’ve lost some people topside, but are moving reinforcements into position.”

“Have you—?”

Shooting from a deck above cut her off.

Going stony, the guard said, “Do not under any circumstance open this door to anyone but me.”

He yanked the hatch door shut before she could reply, leaving her to fight a sense of growing terror. She cursed the insane secrecy surrounding her mission and her decision not to bring a satellite phone with her.

Throwing the deadbolt on the hatch door, Agnes Lawton looked to her laptop, open and glowing on the bunk. She tried to call up the Internet, but got no connection. She stared at the wireless icon. It had shown strong reception not ten minutes—

An explosion roared in the hallway on the other side of the stateroom door. If Lawton had not been seated, she would have been thrown off her feet. The force of it pulsed through the door, leaving her shaken and disoriented.

How was this possible? No one knew she was there. Well, a handful of people, but they were more invested in this meeting than she was, or the Chinese, or the Indian.

The hallway went silent, revealing the ringing in her ears. A man’s voice barked orders in an unknown language. If this man was calling the shots, then her bodyguards were—

She looked around wildly, spotting the fire extinguisher and a small ax in a compartment recessed into the near wall. A key slid into the door lock.

She grabbed the ax, lifted it, and then drove the blade into her computer again and again, splintering the case, the screen, and the hard drive.

Behind her, a man’s gravelly voice said in thick English, “Drop it.”

She froze, clutching the ax as if it were a very unstable ladder.

“Drop it, or I shoot you, make mess,” he commanded, in a strange accent.

Agnes Lawton set the ax on the bed amid the destruction of her computer. No matter what calamity she had faced in her long and remarkable life, she’d never given up. Not once. And she wasn’t about to start. She threw back her shoulders, and turned to face her captor.

Wearing a hood, he was sweating and breathing hard as he glared at her over the barrel of a shouldered machine gun. He wore green cotton pants, black high-top sneakers, and a sleeveless shirt. He had ropey, hard muscles, tribal tattoos, and deep reddish brown skin, as if stained by the juice of darker berries.

But it was his eyes that held most of Agnes Lawton’s attention. Wide, glassy, fervent, and quivering, they were dominated by irises as black as night. Whatever his cause, he was a fanatic. She knew it in an instant and almost showed fear.

“Turn the round,” he snarled. “Hands behind you.”

He took a step toward her.

Agnes Lawton glared right back at the gunman. “Do you know who I am? Do you know what a nightmare you’re about to bring down around you?”

He was blindingly fast, sweeping the butt of the gun down, forward, and up so quickly she had no time to react. The gunstock caught her flush under the chin and drove her back and onto the floor.

Dazed, Agnes Lawton felt him grab her arms and haul her to her feet.

He spun her around and cinched her wrists behind her back.

“Don’t you know who I am?” she protested.

He hauled her to her feet saying, “Of course we know who you are. You were prophesized, weren’t you?”

Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a matchbook. He tossed it in the corner, and lifted the hood with his thumb, exposing a bearded chin. He spit out something ghastly red. It flew through the air and splatted against the wall.

PART ONE

A Thief, a Scoundrel, a Prophet, and a King

Chapter One

Tuesday, October 30, 1:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time

The pilot of Marine One curled the helicopter around the Washington Monument and hovered to a soft landing on the south lawn of the White House.

Inside the blue-and-gold chopper, a big athletic man with smooth features yawned and unbuckled his seatbelt. In the navy blue suit, starched white shirt, and silver tie, he could have been anyone from a visiting foreign dignitary to a favored political donor.

“Are you ready?” asked Dr. Willis Hopkins, a shorter, older man wearing black-framed glasses and a tweed jacket that made him look more like a math professor than the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“As ready as you can be for this sort of thing,” the bigger man replied. The side door opened and the staircase lowered. He followed Dr. Hopkins off the helicopter.

By all rights, he should have been exhausted; in the previous seven hours, he’d traveled by F-16 from his home in Patagonia to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. But the fifteen-minute ride in Marine One had left him feeling completely awake, as if he were hyper-caffeinated. He’d rarely felt this alert before. Then again, he’d never received a personal summons from the President of the United States before.

Two armed U.S. Marines stood at the base of the staircase as he exited into a crisp fall night, feeling and hearing the blades slowing above him. Waiting on the lawn was a blonde in a dark-blue business suit, pearl necklace, and black pumps. She looked harried and her breath smelled of mint trying to mask cigarette smoke.

“Well done, Dr. Hopkins,” she said. “The President’s very pleased you could find and get him here on such short notice.”

“The least I could do, given the circumstances, Cynthia,” Dr. Hopkins said.

She turned to the other man, regarding him with great curiosity, as if studying some exotic specimen. He could almost hear her thinking: late thirties, six-two, two-ten, olive patina to his skin, a face that seemed drawn from many races and ethnicities, a man who could blend in almost anywhere.

“The infamous Robin Monarch,” she said.

Dr. Hopkins pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, saying, “Robin, meet Cynthia Blayless, White House chief of staff.”

She reached out. Monarch shook her hand, found it clammy, but said, “A great pleasure, Ms. Blayless. Dr. Hopkins said you needed some help.”

“We do,” she said, gesturing toward the White House. “Several people are waiting for you inside. They’ll explain.”

As they walked toward the Rose Garden, Blayless said, “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Monarch. Your resolution of the Green Fields affair last year was quite impressive.”

“I had a lot of help. Look, Ms. Blayless, I’m honored, but I don’t work for the agency anymore. I have no real obligation to—”

“The President knows all that. We all know that,” Blayless said impatiently. “And we’re glad you’ve at least come to hear our proposal. I think you’ll find it quite rewarding.”

Monarch was torn. Over the past four years he’d become profoundly distrustful of government officials, any government official; and he tried to avoid them at all costs. For the past nine months, he’d been living a solitary life on a remote estancia in Patagonia. He had intended to stay there indefinitely, until Dr. Hopkins called him.

Two armed Marines stood at the far end of the colonnade in front of a pair of French doors. Blayless opened them and stepped inside.

Monarch was rarely intimidated, but he felt off balance stepping into the Oval Office. At a sweeping glance, he realized the President was not in the room. But he recognized the four people gathered under the watchful gaze of Abraham Lincoln, whose portrait hung over the fireplace.

The long, wiry man with the enormous head standing behind the sofa was Kenneth Vaught, the current Vice President and the nominee of his party in the upcoming general election. On the sofa in front of Vaught perched Elise Peck, the national security advisor, a fair-skinned redhead with a dancer’s posture.

Across the coffee table from Peck, Richard “Ricky” Jameson, the florid-faced Louisiana-born secretary of Homeland Security, tapped a packet of Equal into a teacup. Beside Jameson, Admiral Philip Shipman, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, studied the contents of an open manila file.

By the time Monarch had taken two steps, these four were scrutinizing him with sober, calculating expressions that made him want to crack a joke of some sort. He resisted the temptation.

“This is Robin Monarch,” Chief of Staff Blayless said. “Dr. Hopkins and the President thought it a good idea for him to be present at this meeting.”

“What’s this all about?” demanded National Security Advisor Peck. “Who is he?”

Blayless and Hopkins hesitated.

Monarch cleared his throat and said, “I’m a thief.”

Also by Mark Sullivan

Robin Monarch Novels

Outlaw (coming Fall 2013)

Rogue

Other Novels

Triple Cross

The Second Woman

Labyrinth

Ghost Dance

The Purification Ceremony

Hard News

The Fall Line

With James Patterson

Private Games

Private Berlin

Private L.A.

About the Author

MARK SULLIVAN is the author of several internationally bestselling thrillers, including Rogue and Outlaw, as well as the coauthor with James Patterson of Private Games and Private Berlin. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.

These stories are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

BROTHERHOOD AND OTHERS: THREE ROBIN MONARCH STORIES. Copyright © 2013 by Mark Sullivan. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

The stories in this e-book were originally published as individual e-stories in 2012.

“Brotherhood” copyright © 2012 by Mark Sullivan

“The Art of Rendition” copyright © 2012 by Mark Sullivan

“Escape Artist” copyright © 2012 by Mark Sullivan

www.minotaurbooks.com

www.marksullivanbooks.com

Cover design by Rob Grom

Cover photographs courtesy of Shutterstock.com

e-ISBN 9781466842953

First Edition: August 2013