The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

  Friedrich hauled the wheel back and straightened out.

  The gun in Von’s hand fired.

  Jo ducked. Peyton and Lark screamed. The windshield spidered and the Hummer swerved. Von kicked furiously. The pistol waved in the air. Dustin clawed at Von’s hand, trying to grab the gun.

  “No, turn the barrel away from us,” Gabe repeated. “Pin his hand against the dash and aim the gun away.”

  Von’s legs muscled wildly back and forth. Ritter dived for his knees. Gabe continued battering Von’s head against the door frame. Von weakened. The Hummer veered left.

  Jo yelled, “Steer. Hold the wheel and stop the car.”

  Lark threw herself onto a seat and grabbed a seat belt. She wrapped her arm through the shoulder strap and gripped it like a vine. The Hummer shuddered. The left front wheel caught the lip of the hill. Friedrich jerked the wheel, fighting, foot still to the floor. Jo saw Autumn’s eyes gleaming with fright.

  From the driver’s compartment came grunts and shouts. The gun boomed again. Then again. Glass shattered and Friedrich’s hands dropped from the wheel.

  The Hummer straightened momentarily and tilted. The light turned in the sky, shadow overtaking the window.

  “Oh my God,” Autumn said.

  Then everything went sideways, fast. Jo hit whoever was next to her. She cried out. She saw Gabe, arms around the headrest, gripping Von’s head. He let go, grabbed a seat belt, and braced himself. He snapped the buckle and grabbed for Lark.

  The front of the Hummer angled down, sliding, fast. Through the window Jo saw the slope, covered with trees and boulders.

  They flipped.

  The Hummer capsized, hard. The roof of the car hit the slope with a crunching sound. The windows shattered. People flew around the interior of the limo. Jo hung on to the shoulder strap of her seat belt like a commuter in a subway car that had just been kicked into a tumble cycle. The gorge steepened, and upside down, they slid forward down the slope. Jo saw light, shadow, felt the roof crushing. Dust blew through the shattered windows. She saw boulders and the silver glint of water at the bottom of the gorge. Her mind went firework white. They were going down, all the way.

  12

  Evan Delaney paused at the foot of the marble staircase. She wanted to look meek and inconspicuous. Luckily, in the vaulted echo chamber of San Francisco City Hall, that wasn’t hard. City Hall looked like the U.S. Capitol, but gaudier. It had a gilded dome. It flashed a little leg. She backed against the banister and watched the man in the pin-striped suit descend the stairs toward her.

  The word ambush had a lovely ring to it. It was full of hope.

  The man came down the stairs slowly, his white hair bouffanting like a televangelist’s. He was surrounded by minions. He was a mortgage banker who had been testifying before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He had also been a client of the dead lawyer Phelps Wylie, and he was her last hope for an interview.

  He drew near. She stepped out from the banister.

  “Mr. Higgins, I have some questions about Phelps Wylie,” she said.

  The minions rushed to block her, like a flannel wall. She persisted, batting them away as if they were Brooks Brothers moths.

  “Mr. Higgins, do you have any comment on your lawyer’s death?”

  He swept past her, down the stairs, into the cavernous foyer, and out the door.

  She followed him to the street. Higgins climbed into a waiting car and zoomed away. The car disappeared into traffic, followed by the minion swarm.

  Ambush? Strikeout. None of Wylie’s clients wanted to speak to her. Only a few had even bothered to give her a no-comment. The rest had deflected her calls. Higgins had been her final shot.

  Maybe it was time to go home. She turned and headed for the parking garage. She could already hear her credit card, shrieking in pain. And then her phone beeped.

  It was a text message from Jo. She slowed. No—it was three messages. She opened the first, and stopped.

  I found Wylie’s 2nd cell. He was carjacked. Drove to Sierras under DURESS.

  Evan’s lips parted.

  Wylie recorded conversation during drive. 2nd person in car. FORCED HIM.

  “Oh my God.”

  More to come.

  She opened the second message. It included Wylie’s cell phone number and forwarded his call list. Data corrupted, Jo warned, and, indeed, Recent Calls turned up as incomplete phone numbers. But most had the first seven digits, including area codes.

  Jo’s third message included the log-in information for her voicemail service.

  Sent Wylie’s recording to my voice mail. Log in and listen. Must take cell to Tuolumne sheriffs in Sonora. Will call when get better signal.

  She smiled at her phone. “Oh, Jo. I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

  Pulse racing, she tried to phone Jo back. She got a recording. The number you are calling is out of range. Please try again later.

  A misty wind gusted. She found a seat on a nearby bench and, with trepidation, called Jo’s voice mail and logged in.

  She heard Wylie’s voice. “Where are we going?”

  A chill inched up her back. She closed her eyes, and listened to Wylie’s desperate attempt to save himself and to leave a trail of evidence behind.

  A new voice entered the conversation. “Shut up.”

  It was a creepy reply from across Wylie’s car, swaddled in engine noise. The hairs on her arms stood up.

  “—punishment.”

  She couldn’t tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman. But its tone, flat and imperative, frightened her.

  The recording ended. She opened her eyes, stunned. Jo had sent her a message in a bottle—from a dead man. Wylie had tried to tell people what was happening to him, even as he was being driven into the mountains to his death. He must have feared what lay up the road. But he kept talking.

  She slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed to a Starbucks across from the Civic Center Plaza. On a legal pad she cross-referenced the corrupted data from Wylie’s Recent Calls list. Different portions of each number had been lost, almost like a glass of milk had spilled across the screen. But she quickly saw that Wylie had called only a few numbers from the second cell phone. And he had received calls from only a handful of numbers. By cross-referencing, in most cases, she could assemble the entire number.

  None of them belonged to Wylie’s clients, friends, or family.

  She went online, pulled up a crisscross directory, and tried to put names to the numbers she had pieced together. No luck.

  Time to cold-call.

  She got out her phone and dialed the first number on the list. The number rang three times, paused, and rang again with a new tone, as though the call were being forwarded. A woman picked up.

  “Ragnarok Investments.”

  The voice was brusque, sharp. Impatient.

  Evan paused. Was Wylie using the second cell phone for sex or for bad business? “I’m calling about the charity drive—for Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow church.”

  The Ragnarok woman hung up.

  Evan stared at the phone. Now, wasn’t that interesting.

  She turned to her computer and typed Ragnarok.

  13

  The hissing sounded like a geyser, hot and wet. The light trickled through windows that had shattered white. Dust hung thick in the air, motes spinning.

  Jo coughed. She was breathing.

  The hissing continued. The radiator. Behind it she heard the sound of rushing water. She blinked. Her fingers and toes and skin were tingling, sending adrenaline distress signals: Hell was this?

  The roof of the Hummer was beneath her back. She was lying on pellets of shattered safety glass. She turned her head and heard the glass crunch, like broken bottles in a Dumpster. Other sounds infiltrated her pounding head. A low drone, like a moaning animal.

  Hot fear jumped through her. “Gabe?”

  Oh God, the roof of the Hummer was hard beneath her back but the floor was close
above her head. Too close. The Hummer had been smashed on its plunge down the side of the gorge, like a gargantuan jaw squeezing down. Her chest caught.

  She put her hands up and pressed against the floor of the limo. It was crushing her. She stifled a cry. She had to get out. Where was Gabe?

  “Quintana.”

  Across the vehicle, behind the dust, someone moved. “Jo.”

  “Gabe . . .” The rest of her words disappeared in relief and overwhelming fear.

  They had to get out. The car would crush them. “Move.”

  The wire of panic heated her voice. She coughed back tears. Where were the others? Were they okay?

  She was bruised and cut in a dozen places, her head was thundering, her muscles tighter than if she had tried to deadlift half a ton, cold. She had gripped the shoulder harness so hard that she had nearly sent her whole body into spasm. She fumbled for the buckle, punched it, got it to release.

  She tried to turn over and banged her head on the roof—the floor—of the Hummer. Dust stung her eyes.

  Behind her, the moan turned to hacking. Autumn was hanging from her seat belt, like a skydiver tangled in her harness. With the Hummer smashed, her knees scraped the roof below her. She was conscious, eyes wide. She hit the buckle release.

  “Get out. Come on.” Jo could barely keep from screaming.

  She saw the other kids splayed around her. Lark had already unhooked her seat belt and was crawling toward Jo. Peyton was facedown across the vehicle, crying. Her lungs seemed to be working powerfully well. Her blond hair was streaked bloody red.

  The air felt electrically charged. It prickled her skin like a million needles. Not from the dirt that had piled through the broken windows or the gray talcumlike dust from the airbag or the tiny motes of glass spinning through the vehicle, but from pure hellish energy. Jo turned onto her belly and looked for the door. It was four feet away, crushed shut. The sound that bled from her mouth was a whimper.

  She began to shake. She heard a humming in her head. The light seemed yellow and cold. It smelled like cement dust, like the creaking of tons of roadway, pressing down on top of her father’s car. The view spun, seemed to darken, to splinter.

  She had to get out.

  Get out before the top deck of the Cypress Viaduct collapsed completely and crushed her and her dad and brother and baby sister inside their old family car.

  The view clouded, as if tons of pressure had obscured the sun. Gray, brown, dark. Smoke. The stench of gasoline and burning tires gagged her. She kicked and crawled and didn’t care about the broken glass—she had to reach the door, before there was an aftershock and the whole double-decker section of freeway came down with them inside.

  “We gotta move. Hurry.”

  “Jo, no.”

  “Now. Move.”

  A hand grabbed her shoulder. She yelped and shoved it away and scrambled for the darkened door. The hand swept over her shoulder and stopped her, pulled her tight.

  “Jo. Hang on.” Gabe held her hard. “Wait.”

  She was half a moment from hyperventilating. She buried her face against his chest and held her breath.

  Jesus.

  Her vision returned. She wasn’t in her dad’s car. She wasn’t trapped on the Cypress Viaduct. The Loma Prieta quake had happened ages back, not now.

  “Sorry.” She held on to him. “God.”

  Her claustrophobia had jumped on her, rung her bell, chased her into a near-panic. Tears stung her eyes. “You all right?”

  “Gonna be hellaciously sore tomorrow. But I can move.”

  His T-shirt was sharp with bits of glass. She didn’t care. He was okay. “Sorry. I freaked. But we need to get out of the Hummer.”

  He held her back. “Not that door.”

  Jo wiped dust from her eyes. The crushed door in front of her would never move. The glass in the window had fallen out in a single, cracked sheet. It had landed outside, on top of Friedrich.

  During the crash the driver’s door had been flung open, and Friedrich had been thrown out. His body lay right outside. His face was crushed, his head deformed. In the blood and the mud, something else was trickling beneath him.

  Gasoline. “The fuel line ruptured.”

  She couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice. She would have been in more trouble if she’d climbed out and not just because she would have ended up face-to-face with the corpse.

  Von. She whipped around to look at the topsy-turvy driver’s compartment.

  Empty. The passenger door was twisted open.

  “Where’s Von?” she said.

  A voice from the back of the Hummer said, “Gone.”

  Kyle Ritter, the Edge Adventures employee, had propped himself up and was looking out the big stretch-limo-size side window.

  “When we left the road he jumped ship,” Kyle said.

  Relief coursed through her. Both gunmen were gone. Then she understood what Kyle had just said. Von had jumped.

  “So he may be coming down the slope after us,” she said.

  Gabe glanced around the Hummer. “Let’s get these kids out of here.”

  Kyle moved. “Before he comes back. And brings his partners.”

  14

  Dane Haugen stared at the screen of his iPhone, downloading the latest market data. Outside, the road ran straight and gradually uphill. They had finally reached the eastern edge of the San Joaquin Valley and were beginning to climb into the foothills of the Sierras. By his calculation, their Volvo SUV was two hours behind the Hummer.

  Everything else was bang on schedule.

  The iPhone was valuable for gathering quick and dirty information online, but he had needed a solid hour on his secure laptop back in San Francisco. His laptop had heavy-duty encryption and connected through an anonymizer, so nobody could trace him online. The phone was nowhere so secure.

  Everything was in place. In Dubai and Singapore and the intermediate accounts he had set up around the world. His prize today was going to be massive. And it would come home to him, where it belonged, where it should have been all along. But it would arrive only after taking a traipse around the globe, hopping from bank to bank, country to country, account to account.

  At the wheel of the Volvo, Pat Stringer frowned at the highway. He looked like a songbird, so slight and flighty, but Haugen knew he could rely on the man to do what it took.

  “Ease down. Save your mental energy for the hours ahead,” Haugen said.

  Stringer nodded curtly.

  “We’re on the winning side here,” Haugen said. “These kids are cream puffs. They’re Twinkies. This is not the yard at Lompoc.”

  The U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc, California, was a medium-security facility, hardly Leavenworth or Marion. But it was a real prison, and Stringer had done real time there, for a real financial crime. Bank robbery.

  Stringer was a real criminal and didn’t apologize for it. He had gone after what he wanted, taken the risk for the chance at the reward. It hadn’t worked out, and he had done his time. The problem, as Haugen saw it, was that Stringer wasn’t cut out for management. He couldn’t plan for contingencies and had failed to keep a back door open so that, when his plans went balls up, he had an escape route. So that when his getaway car got clamped while he was in the bank, he had a better way to elude the LAPD than running down Wilshire Boulevard.

  But Stringer didn’t complain. Not once. And Haugen had enlightened him, when he recruited him for this venture, as to what had gone wrong with his heist. Stringer had walked up to a teller in the middle of the day, with a note in his hand. That was a classic move, but not one that gave the best returns. No, to steal real money, you needed to get an investment banker to hand a piece of paper to a hedge fund manager or derivatives trader. Do it with a smile and a stiletto in your voice. Do it big. Do it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Walk all over them. Do it that way, and you were one of the masters of the universe.

  Like Haugen should have been.

  Stringer kept his eyes
on the road and said nothing. Outside, farmland was giving way to open countryside. Golden grass was cooked from a dry summer. Live oaks dotted the hills. In the distance, where the road rose, on and on, ponderosa pine began to take over. The sun was beating down, but the wind was stiff and banks of clouds piled up against the hills ahead.

  Haugen glanced into the backseat, at Sabine. “We haven’t heard from Von and Friedrich.”

  “Cell towers are scarce up there.”

  Haugen turned all the way around, slowly, and glared at her.

  She sat up straighter, and dropped the languid pose. She had removed not only her ski mask but the blond wig, and her boyishly short red hair stood as straight on her head as a field of sorghum.

  Haugen kept his voice low and flat. “Put the wig back on.”

  “The windows are tinted.”

  “We don’t break cover. Do it.”

  Indolently, as though it were her own idea, she stretched and reached for the wig. She fit it on her head, smoothed it down with her fingertips slowly, and slid her gaze over him.

  “That’s more like it,” he said. She looked like a woman now. The mannish power was subdued.

  She wanted to seduce him, right then. They all did, women. They latched on to him, would do anything for him. Sabine was no different.

  Except she was. She had a Wharton MBA, and years working for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and an eighteen-month stint working as a bond trader for one of the big financial players in the City of London. She was a magician. A cruel, vicious, greedy magician, with a lack of scruples he found completely fascinating. But she was loyal. Fanatically loyal to the idea of the money they were going to make. But her lust for him—and her desire not only to get inside his mind, but to burrow under his emotional skin and make him want her—were what truly kept her loyal to him. She might want to take the money for herself, but not yet. Not while she was in thrall to the idea that he could love her.