Brotherhood and Others

by Mark Sullivan

  * * *

  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 wa
s 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.”