The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

  Sabine checked her gear. “It will not be simple to kill the Red Rattler.”

  “His name is Ratner.”

  She almost sneered. He could sense her disdain even in the twilight. He could also sense her inhaling, so the tattoo of the serpent swelled on her breast. Provocateuse.

  She slung her backpack across her shoulders. “Mister Ratner is sneaky.”

  Same as you, sweetheart.

  “You should have gotten rid of him long ago,” she said.

  “This turn of events could not have been predicted.”

  “Of course it could have,” she said. “It was practically a certainty in any model you could have devised.”

  Haugen climbed to his feet. “I could not have foreseen that Edge would hire Ratner for this scenario. How could I? He is no longer in my employ.”

  “Are you stupid?” It came out as styoo-pid. “He never was in your employ. He was your enforcer. Your cleanup crew. But he’s a coyote. A lone predator.”

  Haugen had to concede the point. “Peter Reiniger must have asked Edge to fine-tune Autumn’s scenario so she could confront some specific fear. I couldn’t know it would involve Ratner.”

  “And who hired him to begin with?” Sabine said.

  “It was only after that party that I realized his skills extended beyond parking cars.”

  He didn’t know what Ratner had done to terrify Autumn, except that it must have been effective. And, with his weight loss and prison haircut, Ruby Kyle Ratner looked completely different from the day Autumn would have formed her childhood impression of him. Ratner was twelve years older, and had shaved a Zapata mustache, cut his Kemo Sabe ponytail, and lost sixty pounds.

  Haugen credited himself for those changes. And he had given Ratner the chance to . . . let his natural instincts find fruition. Ratner had, for years, been a useful man to have at hand. Until he exceeded his remit.

  Sabine stood blocking his path, arms akimbo. “What if Autumn recalls where she first met him? At a party thrown by an executive who worked for her father’s firm? At the splendid former home of disgraced financial wizard Dane Haugen?”

  His breath frosted the light. “It hardly matters now, does it?”

  “It matters a great deal,” she said.

  She was testing him. He despised it.

  Disgraced? No—betrayed. Haugen had been betrayed by Peter Reiniger, cut loose from Reiniger Capital over nothing—over trumpedup charges that he had slept with the wife of a major investor.

  Insider trading, heh-heh-heh. Everybody did it. But Reiniger had used that as an excuse to dump him. Haugen, and everybody at Reiniger Capital, knew the real reason he had been fired: because of the incident at the Edge Adventures weekend.

  The memory of the king snake, sliding from beneath the driver’s seat of the car, climbing up his leg, onto his lap, gagged him. He forced himself to stay calm. He tried to suppress the memory of how he had screamed. He couldn’t keep from hearing the engine rev, or from recalling the outcome: He had driven, out of control and shrieking, with a car full of his colleagues, across a lawn and into the revolving doors at the resort where the game was taking place. The crash trapped him in the car, battering at the windows, weeping, kicking, while a four-foot-long, legless muscle with a flicking tongue coiled around his haunches.

  Peter Reiniger had special-ordered the snake to test Haugen’s response to fear stimuli. But Terry Coates, Mr. Edge Adventures, had put it beneath the seat. Coates, the son of a bitch who was now dying or dead in the back of a big rig. The image soothed him.

  “Everything is manageable,” Haugen said. “None of this should have happened, but we will recover.”

  “Really? You set all of this in motion. It was completely foreseeable. It has been, ever since you told the Red Rattler—excuse me, Ratner—to keep your lawyer on the leash.”

  “Phelps Wylie was a buffoon. I presented him with the opportunity of the century, and he botched it.”

  Wylie could easily have arranged everything Haugen requested, while keeping his hands clean. Or, at least, while keeping himself willfully ignorant of Haugen’s intentions. It was a lawyer’s duty to zealously represent his clients—not to question why they wanted so many shell companies incorporated and so many accounts linked together, most of them offshore, all of them hidden from the financial regulators.

  Wylie. The prig. Having an attack of cowardice—or, as he’d called it, “conscience”—and daring to tell Haugen that he wished to withdraw as his attorney. Daring to say he knew Haugen’s intended transactions were illegal. Worried about money laundering. Worried that his law firm might be tarnished. Besmirched was the word the toad had actually used, standing in his office wringing his hands.

  Haugen had not stood for it.

  “Wylie would have talked. He was on the verge of emotional collapse. He had no stomach for high-stakes finance.”

  “But telling Ratner to ‘put the fear of God’ into him was unwise. Dane, can you not finally admit that your choice of words gave Ratner undue leeway?”

  Haugen had wanted to scare Wylie into shutting up. Ratner was adept at that sort of thing. But, as Sabine had so helpfully pointed out, Ratner was a psychopath. Instead of frightening Wylie into silence with a bit of carjacking, he killed him.

  So, when Ratner phoned him from the road, saying oops, Haugen had found himself with no choice but to engineer Wylie’s disappearance. He had already reconnoitered the mine while preparing for Autumn Reiniger’s ascension to high priestess of abductees. He told Ratner to dispose of the body.

  And now Ratner had captured Autumn and her friends. If he couldn’t be brought down, this would become his big score.

  Haugen zipped his coat. “Leeway ends. Now.”

  The walkie-talkie squawked. “Yoo-hoo. Dane? You there?”

  51

  The Tuolumne County sheriff’s cruiser eked its way up the highway. In the predawn twilight, Sheriff Walt Gilbert could only see as far as his headlights. What unfolded in front of his car was storm damage: rocks and mud washed across the road, trees down, one side of the tarmac undermined by wave action as gushing water had run off after the downpour. He eased through it, careful not to get snared by debris.

  He reached the clearing. It was empty.

  He parked, put on his hat, and got out and walked the perimeter of the clearing. It was a muddy washout. He hiked two hundred yards up the trail, and back, heels sinking in the wet earth. He returned to his cruiser and radioed it in.

  “No sign of Ron or the hikers’ pickup—at all?” the dispatcher said.

  “None.”

  He gazed up the gorge, where the logging road climbed out of sight into thick forest and steeper, more mountainous terrain.

  “I’m going to drive up the road a ways and see if I can find them,” he said.

  He pulled out. His heart, his gut, all his instincts, were dark.

  Ten minutes later, he swung the cruiser downhill to the bridge across the river. He stopped. The bridge was broken in two. The river gushed past, brown with mud, ferocious.

  Jo turned up the volume on the walkie-talkie. Gabe and Peyton crowded round.

  “Here, kitty-kitty . . .”

  The voice was creepy, singsong, a timbre between tenor and alto.

  “Here, Dane. Here, Sabine. You want your mice?”

  Jo murmured, “It’s Ratner.”

  A new voice. Male, deep, studied—actory. “I want to finish this in a professional manner. If you wish to participate, let’s meet and we’ll join forces.”

  Jo said, “Haugen?”

  Ratner said: “Look at these mice. They’re squirming. They’re hungry. You know what happens to mice in the wild? They become food.”

  Another squawk. “Enough. Speak plainly.”

  The singsong voice didn’t relent. “You doubt me. I’m crushed. Here, listen.” Snuffling sounds. “Talk. Tell him.”

  A girl’s voice came through clearly. “We’re with Kyle. Me, Noah, and Lark.”

>   Jo looked at Gabe, her heart rushing. They were all alive.

  “Let me hear from each of them,” Haugen said.

  More static, then Lark said, “It’s me.” Finally, Noah. “Holloway.”

  Ratner’s voice. “Ain’t that a scream?”

  There was a long pause. “Very well. Let’s come to terms.”

  “Hee,” Ratner said. “Here’s your terms. Fifty-fifty, or Daddy Reiniger gets no proof of life. All he’ll find is his baby girl and her buds, taking a dirt nap.”

  Jo put a hand to her forehead.

  “Fine,” Haugen said. “Let’s rendezvous.”

  “Fifty-fifty?” Ratner said.

  “Yes. I’m a realist.”

  “Ain’t that nice. Sit tight. I’ll get back to you on the when and where,” Ratner said. “Over and out.”

  The walkie-talkie went quiet.

  Gabe said, “He’ll never turn them over alive. Not all three of them. Maybe he’ll keep Autumn alive until she can talk to her father on the phone. But the others, forget it.”

  His voice was strained. Jo’s stomach had knotted.

  They could get out of here, she thought. With Haugen and Ratner maneuvering around the forest like pieces on a chessboard, it would be possible for her and Gabe to slip under their net and disappear.

  Maybe.

  But it would only be possible if it was just the two of them. Peyton was near the end of her rope, while they were hardy, healthy—sort of—and could travel quickly over the terrain. They could escape, but by leaving the others behind.

  Jo’s throat tightened. “I know where they are.”

  Gabe’s eyes were grave. He had put on his game face. “The mine.”

  She nodded. “We don’t have time to get out and then bring law enforcement back.” She looked at the walkie-talkie. It didn’t have a police band, no emergency frequencies. “Ratner or Haugen will kill them.”

  Peyton said, “Do something. I’m useless, but I can hide beneath those rocks. You’ll know where I am but nobody can see me from the road, or from above.”

  Gabe’s eyes didn’t soften. But the look in them opened and went deeper. It almost became haunted. And Jo didn’t need to hear him say it to know what was written in his conscience, his muscle memory, his life. It was his pledge, the motto of Pararescue: So That Others May Live.

  She nodded—to him, to Peyton, to herself. They would not abandon Autumn and her friends.

  And the odd, just-out-of-reach feeling finally stepped forward and came into focus. Jo knew what had been scratching at the back of her mind.

  “I know where we are.”

  From the sports bag Gabe was using as a backpack she grabbed a map. Chilled stiff, her hands could barely unfold it.

  “We’re not far from the mine as the crow flies,” she said. “We’ve been struggling to get away, hide, get back to the road. We haven’t focused on the bigger picture—what the geography actually is.”

  Gabe tilted his head to orient himself to the map. “You’re right.”

  The logging road ran essentially west-east into the high Sierras. But, because the terrain was so rugged, the road didn’t run straight.

  Jo tapped the map with an icy finger. “Here’s the clearing, where we parked yesterday, and where the Hummer stopped.”

  She traced the footpath she and Gabe had hiked to the mine. It cut back and forth, up one ridge and down the other side, up again and down a second ridge—a journey of switchbacks and steep changes in elevation.

  “We crossed the second ridge, zigzagged to the bottom, crossed the gully, turned east”—parallel to the logging road—“and hiked up the slope to the mine. It was at least three miles. But look here.”

  The logging road followed the contours of the river. From the clearing, it kept climbing. But Jo remembered the long, severe turn the limo had taken when they were barreling along before the crash. She remembered the light angling across the Hummer as they swung around hairpin curves and climbed ever higher.

  She traced the road on the map. “It crossed the river, then crossed back again—two bridges. And a couple of miles after we left the clearing, the road made a broad, one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. It looped in a semicircle and kept climbing.”

  She traced the line on the map. Gabe saw what she was talking about.

  “The road climbed over both ridges and doubled back,” he said.

  “We’re now on the other side of the mine.” She stood and pointed north. “It’s directly that way. If we took the road it would be a sixor seven-mile drive. But if we cut straight across the hills, it’s less than a mile. Maybe much less.”

  They had a shortcut.

  She put a hand on Peyton’s arm. “You sure you’ll be okay by yourself, staying out of sight?”

  Peyton nodded, quick and tight. Jo said, “All right.”

  She stabbed the map. “These two ridgelines here. That’s where those power pylons are. And there’s a bridge that links them.”

  Gabe looked at her. “Say what you’re thinking.”

  “If we shortcut to the mine and get the kids, we can then use the catwalk to cross the ravine and keep going down to the clearing where I parked yesterday. The clearing’s below the bridge that’s out. That means the bad guys can’t reach it via car. But the authorities can.”

  He looked like he was trying not to say the obvious. So she said it.

  “I know it’s a risk. I’ll take it. I don’t think these kids have time for anything else.” She paused. “Neither do we.”

  He examined the map. His pulse was beating in his temple.

  “We can do it,” she said.

  Gabe took out his knife. “Let’s go get them.”

  52

  The Gulfstream 5 streaked over the runway threshold and touched down, wheels squealing. In the pre-dawn light of the high desert, the sky in the east was veined crimson. Peter Reiniger held on while the thrust reversers roared and the jet slowed. The air looked cold and clear. The lights of Reno were pallid and shimmering.

  He unbuckled his seat belt and headed to the cockpit. Without knocking he opened the door.

  “Park it. Refuel. Stay at the controls,” he said.

  Both pilots frowned, but the captain said, “Yes, Mr. Reiniger.”

  He closed the door and, as the jet taxied, phoned the number his daughter’s abductors had given him.

  After a series of clicks and buzzes and delays—which told him the number was being forwarded through a series of exchanges to make it impossible to trace—it rang. A nasal double tone—ringring— like a European phone’s.

  The voice answered, disguised by the voice modulator, hobgobliny. “Yes?”

  “I’m on the ground at Reno.”

  “And the money?”

  “After I speak to Autumn.”

  A beat. “You speak to Autumn when you send me evidence the transfer can be accomplished at the click of a button.”

  Reiniger’s stomach tightened. The plane juddered over dips in the taxiway. “Nothing moves until I have proof of life.”

  “Phone again when you’ve carried out my instructions. Then we’ll discuss speaking to your daughter.”

  The call cut off.

  Shaking, so enraged and sick that he could barely focus on the keypad, Reiniger sat in one of the plush seats and phoned New York.

  Sabine shook her head. “What a bastard. ‘Proof of life.’ Who uses that phrase about his own child?”

  Haugen put away the satellite phone. “Mr. Reiniger is one of a kind.”

  His acid reflux burned. Proof of life was the nut of the matter. He couldn’t make Reiniger move the funds until Autumn cried to Daddy over the walkie-talkie. There was simply no way. Reiniger was too much of a hard case.

  He and Sabine pulled on gloves and their final layers of clothing. He took a swig of lukewarm coffee from the thermos. Then he got the walkie-talkie.

  He clicked the Transmit button, twice.

  A moment later Von clicked back. Unders
tood. He was in position, ready to close on Ratner when they flushed him from hiding.

  Sabine checked her SIG Sauer. The weapon shone dully in the dawn. She shoved it beneath her waistband in the small of her back.

  “How do you plan to get to the Reno airport?” she said.

  “Really? You don’t know?”

  “Even if the bridge were not out, the swarm of cops looking for the deputy would stop us.”

  He smiled. “Know how far it is to Reno as the crow flies?”

  “At least sixty miles. What are you planning?”

  “An airlift. We just have to time it right.” He pulled a backpack across his shoulders. “Let’s go.”

  The sky was a polished blue, the mountains charcoal with shadow and deeply silent. Jo and Gabe eased their way through the trees, cold in the morning twilight, inching their way toward the top of the ridge above the abandoned gold mine. They had left Peyton well concealed amid a field of boulders, clenching one of the carved spears.

  They dropped to their hands and knees and crept forward. Cautiously they peered over the lip of the hill at the ravine below.

  It was rock strewn and glistening with dew. The night’s manic rains had torn new channels in the hillside, claw marks where frantic water had scored the slope.

  The entrance of the mine was about a hundred meters below them. Gabe lowered his head. So did Jo.

  “Getting a direct vantage point on the entrance will be impossible,” he murmured.

  “We need to find out where Ratner is.”

  He nodded at the walkie-talkie. “Keep the volume low. If they’re close, we don’t want them to hear us overhearing them.” He looked around. “Hopefully we’re high enough on this ridge that we’ll have a line of sight and can get radio reception without the hills blocking it.”

  They lay flat and eyed the scene below them. A bird chirped. In the chill morning, the sky in the east brightened to gold, etching the crest of the mountains.

  They had come at the mine from behind, opposite the way they had approached the day before. Jo hoped that Ratner and Haugen—and his gang—would be approaching the entrance from the front, up the bottom of the ravine, and would not have the situational awareness to think about the high ground behind it.