The Nightmare Thief

by Meg Gardiner

  “Because of a snake?” Tang said.

  “He’s phobic. He went berserk. I mean berserk. I should have known better—that was the last time I agreed to use snakes in a scenario.” His voice was dry. “So Haugen did this?”

  “Very possibly.”

  “Then it’s about more than money.”

  The EMTs loaded him in the ambulance. Tang and Evan exchanged a look.

  Evan got her phone out and typed a message to Jo. She didn’t know if it mattered, whether she was writing to the air.

  Tang said, “Really?”

  “You gotta have faith.”

  Or at the very least, you had to act as though you did—and you had to try, without evidence, proof, or promise of an answer, to get through. Perhaps, if you went through the motions with enough conviction, you could make it real. Wasn’t that what hope meant?

  Haugen and Sabine waited for the tattooed and tatty Ruben Kyle Ratner on a clear patch of hillside where sunlight flowed over the lip of the mountains. The light was cold but clarifying. At the edge of the clearing, a chunk of the mountain had washed away in the night’s flood. The rock and dirt dropped twenty feet, a raw wound in the earth. It seemed, to Haugen, a fitting symbol of the nature of change. It was violent, and painful.

  True transformation was agony. That’s what Peter Reiniger hadn’t yet grasped. That’s why he thought Edge Adventures was a hero factory. But in fact Edge offered merely puerile diversion. Its moments of illumination were fake. Whereas this moment, here on the mountain—life and death, wealth beyond imagining—this was real. All or nothing. Reiniger didn’t understand that. Nor did Terry Coates, the lackey who did Reiniger’s bidding and forced people to confront their worst fears.

  Face your demons. That was simply code for getting Peter Reiniger’s employees to piss their pants.

  Edge was fake. But by taking Autumn, Haugen had made things real. And her father was soon going to understand the true meaning of all or nothing.

  Ratner stepped from the trees, leading a bay horse. His bandy stride was cocksure. He wore a sleeveless wife-beater shirt, shamelessly displaying the snake tattoos that coiled around his arms. Cheap prison tats, the mark of mediocrity. For years Ratner had been the go-to guy for Haugen’s intimidation needs. But now Haugen saw him clearly: lying, unpredictable, uncontrollable. If only he had fired the loser before he killed Phelps Wylie.

  Haugen and Sabine walked to the center of the clearing.

  “Two against one,” Ratner said. “It’s fair I get fifty percent. I done all the work, rounding up your chicks after they escaped the coop.”

  Haugen remained composed. “Proof of life. Now.”

  Ratner showed Haugen a cell phone photo of him with Autumn. In the dark, someplace close. Then he tossed a hunk of Autumn’s long brown curls, tied with a rubber band, on the dirt.

  “The other two kids, I presume they can be set aside for now, or forever,” Ratner said. “I want to know how you plan to boogie out of here. ’Cause you’re taking me with you. How we getting out of this wondrous shithole wilderness?”

  “In good time,” Haugen said.

  “Now’s a good time,” Ratner said, “because there’s a trail out of here that meets the road down below the washed-out bridge. It comes out at the clearing where Von and Friedrich shot that kid Grier. If you don’t think this place is going to be crawling with cops soon, you’re dreaming.”

  “I have a plan,” Haugen said.

  “I want to see it put into motion before we go further,” Ratner said.

  “All right.” Haugen waited a beat. “But a cell phone photo and a lock of hair aren’t proof of life. I need to hear Autumn’s voice in conversation with me.”

  This was the moment, the instant where everything was going to fall into place. If Autumn was alive, he was about to get her. Then the money would flow from Peter Reiniger’s fingers into his own account. It would land in Bermuda, for a few minutes, before being broken up into smaller transactions and winging around the world, account-hopping: Dubai, Singapore, Guernsey, Honduras. It would turn into gold and platinum and back into cash. Its trail would dim with each hop, until eventually it faded out completely.

  And what a surprise awaited Peter Reiniger. Because twenty million was just the start.

  The ransom was only stage one of Haugen’s payday, because Haugen knew there was only one way Peter Reiniger could get that much cash within the deadline. He had to raid the reserve account at Reiniger Capital.

  Reiniger’s investment pile, his hedge fund mini-empire totalling a billion dollars in assets, was heavily leveraged. Reiniger Capital maintained a slim cash reserve, in the form of instantly accessible money market accounts—a mere 2 percent of funds under management. That reserve cash amounted to just over twenty million. To ransom Autumn, Reiniger would have to plunder it.

  Leverage. It was about to become Haugen’s doomsday device.

  Because Reiniger Capital was structured so that, if its reserves dropped below 2 percent, it triggered a margin call. Reiniger would have to pony up extra cash. But Reiniger was going to be tapped out. So the only way to replenish the reserves would be for Reiniger’s investors to pony up. Immediately.

  The thing was, all of Reiniger Capital’s investors were highly leveraged too. They’d have to call on their own banks, and on the institutional investors behind them, to raise the necessary funds. That meant that they’d have to conduct fire sales, all around the world.

  Haugen knew this for a certainty, because he had enticed many of those investors to sink their money into Reiniger Capital. Not only that, but he had written their investment contracts.

  To be sure, lawyers had read the contracts. But the contracts were sixty-five pages of fine print. And Haugen had, without any difficulty at all, added wording at the last moment, unnoticed, almost certainly unread—a short phrase about mutually assured liability. It looked like gobbledygook, boilerplate, but in fact it meant that if the hedge fund’s cash reserves dropped below 2 percent of gross assets, each investor was obligated to provide additional cash immediately.

  That wasn’t the brilliant part. The brilliant part was that, thanks to Haugen’s rewording, the contracts obligated each investor to make up the difference between the required reserve and the amount it was underwater.

  Each of Reiniger’s investors was on the hook for the entire twenty million.

  There was going to be a massive scramble by all of them to come up with the cash.

  And Haugen was going to profit from it.

  Reiniger Capital’s investors were multimillionaires and financial partnerships—people who had deep-pocket institutions behind them. When the investors dumped their assets to raise the cash—each of them racing to pull out twenty million by trashing positions they’d held for years—Haugen was going to make a mint. To raise so much cash so quickly, the investors would need to call on their backers—institutional investors, banks overseas, some of them unforgiving—at outrageous interest rates. And because the whole edifice was highly leveraged, all the way down, those deep backers would have to unwind positions at fire-sale prices. It was going to be a slaughter.

  And Haugen had hedged his bets against those deep backers. He was short against all of them.

  The twenty-million-dollar ransom was nothing. Haugen was set up to get bonus megabucks by his back-end investments. The second Peter Reiniger paid the ransom, massive amounts of money would start moving. He estimated that he stood to make up to two hundred million dollars in the next forty-eight hours.

  And he would thereby send Reiniger down in flames.

  It had taken him a year to set up the scheme. He’d first dreamed it up when he realized how much he loathed Peter Reiniger. His initial idea, in fact, had been to kidnap Reiniger. But then he’d been fired, and the timing was ruined. But that was all right. Autumn was an even better prize.

  He simply needed to push Reiniger Capital past the tipping point. After that, the house of cards would collapse.
/>   And when he landed in Brazil, he’d have decades to savor his victory.

  He just needed to put a radio to Autumn’s lips and let her sob for rescue, so she could melt her daddy’s heart.

  Ratner shifted. “I said, how we getting out of here ahead of the cops?”

  Haugen got out the portable police-band radio Sabine had taken off the body of the dead deputy, D. V. Gilbert. He considered for a moment and handed the radio to Sabine.

  “More dramatic if it’s a woman.”

  She switched the radio on. Cleared her throat. Pushed the button.

  “Hello?” She sounded cold and shaky. “Is anybody out there?”

  She let go of the button. Waited. Called again. “Hello?”

  Static crackled. A voice, distant, official, said, “Come in. Who’s this?”

  “Oh my God. Thank God—I’m trapped on the mountain. There’s been a wreck. I need help.”

  Haugen smiled. Sabine was pitch-perfect.

  “We got lost hiking in the storm, but Deputy Gilbert found us. We were coming back toward Sonora on the gravel section of the logging road and a rockslide took us out.” She let her voice crack. “The cruiser, it went over the side. And now the road . . . the bridge is washed out. I don’t know how long we can last.”

  “How many of you are there?” the voice said.

  “Three of us. Me, my boyfriend, and the deputy. He’s hurt awfully bad. Can you send a helicopter?”

  “Hang on. We’ll get you help.”

  “He needs a medical evacuation. He’s so weak . . . Please help us. Please.”

  “Just hold on, ma’am. We’ll get a bird in the air as fast as we can. Where are you?”

  Sabine looked at Haugen. He pointed at the top of the ridge, beyond the power pylons, where the trees thinned.

  “Hold on . . . my map’s wet . . . it’s . . . we’re southeast of the state logging road about three miles, way up in the mountains. There’s a clearing on top of a crest above us, with power pylons. We’ll get to a high spot and set up a signal for you.”

  “Can I talk to Deputy Gilbert?”

  “He’s unconscious. God, he’s so cold. He lost a lot of blood.”

  “Roger that. You hang in there.”

  “Hurry. Please,” she said, her voice breaking.

  She let go of the button.

  Haugen doffed an imaginary cap. “Brava.”

  Ratner smiled crookedly and said, “Take a bow. But where are we going to go in that rescue chopper—back down to the sheriff’s office parking lot?”

  Haugen said, “Reno. Peter Reiniger is waiting at the airport with a private jet that will fly us wherever we want to go. It’s fueled and waiting.”

  Sabine said, “Let’s go.”

  Ratner raised a hand. “Not so fast. I need a guarantee that I’m getting my fifty percent.”

  Haugen said, “Do you have your bank account number with you?”

  Ratner scoffed. “You’ll pay me in cash.”

  Haugen nodded without hesitation. What a buffoon. This was going to be far simpler than he had imagined.

  “Fine. And as a guarantee of your safety, I’ll walk ahead of you all the way to the chopper. Which will also be a guarantee of my safety. Because for you to get the money, I have to be alive to provide access codes and transfer information to my bankers. Sabine doesn’t have that information. Only I do. I need to be conscious and talking. And none of that will take place until we get Peter Reiniger in front of us.”

  Ratner seemed to think about it. His heated gaze—those burning eyes that stared out from sunken sockets—was full of cunning. The white snake around his iris told more than he knew. He expected vipers in every basket. But he couldn’t see any flaw, any chip in Haugen’s reasoning.

  “You should have brung me in on this gig from the get-go,” Ratner said. “None a this would’ve happened. We’d be sitting pretty on a yacht somewhere already, smoking cigars.”

  “Lesson learned,” Haugen said. Moron. As soon as he got Autumn, Ratner could be disposed of. The fool didn’t even know that Von was still alive.

  “Now give me proof of life. Let me talk to Autumn,” Haugen said.

  Ratner nodded at the walkie-talkie in Haugen’s hand. “Turn up the volume and listen in. She’s broadcasting. Daddy’s Little Princess, playing her Top Forty, nonstop.”

  55

  Jo pushed deeper into the mine. In her left hand she held the flashlight, in her right the buck knife. She kept her eyes on the path ahead and counted footsteps. Anything to keep her mind focused on finding Autumn and not on her sense of suffocation, of being squeezed by the throat in the dark. She glanced back, at the now-distant square of sunlight at the entrance. Claustrophobia tingled along her skin. No. Don’t let it hit. Don’t.

  She swept the flashlight along the ground. How she wished she had her climbing harness and ropes now. She hurried past the side shaft where Wylie’s body had been dumped. As she neared the flood pit filled with punji sticks, she chopped her steps.

  Taking a deep breath, she jumped it. Landed in dust, slid, and kept going.

  “Autumn?” she said.

  Her phone vibrated. Startled, she tucked the flashlight beneath her arm, pulled out the phone, and read a surprising message from Evan.

  She heard a muffled cry.

  “Autumn?”

  She put away the phone and scurried around a curve. Her view back to the entrance vanished. Sweeping the flashlight, she spotted, fifty yards ahead, the split in the tunnel.

  “Autumn?”

  The muffled cry came from the left. She put a hand on the wall. Cold rock—but solid. She forced herself to keep going. All she could see was the narrow beam from the flashlight, hitting stone and thick soft dirt on the floor. A rat’s eyes caught the light, tiny and fervid. It spun and fled.

  “Autumn, where are you?”

  Footprints, soft in the mounded dirt, tracked in and out. Again she heard the muffled cry.

  The roof of the tunnel lowered. Crouching, she rounded another curve.

  Bright eyes.

  Caught in the flashlight, Autumn seemed stunned. Her gold sweater looked incongruously cheerful. She was gagged and hogtied against the dead-end of the tunnel. Facedown, hands tied behind her back, back arched, feet bent behind her.

  On the dirt near her face, its Transmit button taped open, was a walkie-talkie.

  Ratner was a clever bastard. That’s how he planned to give Haugen proof of life without giving away Autumn’s location: by letting Haugen hear her mumble over the radio. And in a tunnel alive with rats, she was not going to keep quiet. If, of course, the walkie-talkie would actually work this deep in the mine.

  Jo grabbed it and pulled off the tape. If the walkie-talkie did work, she didn’t want to broadcast her presence.

  The rope that bound Autumn’s feet behind her back ran up and around her neck in a noose. It was a torturer’s method of binding: to keep slack in the rope, the victim had to arch her back, tip her head back, and keep her legs tightly bent. If she relaxed by even a few inches, the rope would tauten, the noose would constrict, and she would strangle.

  Jo ran to her. “Hang on.”

  She set down the flashlight, raised the buck knife, and reached for the rope. Autumn screamed through the gag. Her eyes, crazed and gleaming, pleaded no.

  Jo stopped. Ratner had booby-trapped the flood pit before stringing Lark above it. Had he done something similar with Autumn?

  The rope around Autumn’s neck, she saw, was not a simple noose. Thin gauge, 10 mm rope that looked like a fuse, it looped twice around the girl’s throat and then ran down her back, beneath her sweater.

  Tears were bright in Autumn’s eyes. She was fighting mightily to hold still, but her trembling seemed uncontrollable.

  “Can I cut off the gag?” Jo said.

  Autumn blinked. Yes. Cautiously Jo slid the blade of the buck knife beneath the dirty strip of fabric, sliced it off, and pulled a wad of torn shirt from Autumn’s mouth.


  “Don’t tug on the rope.” Autumn gulped a lungful of air and fought against crying. “He put . . .”

  Jo went cold. She looked at Autumn’s sweater. The girl’s back was arched, but that only made more room beneath her clothing.

  Something was beneath her sweater. It was moving.

  “Snake?” Jo said.

  “Snakes.”

  Jo’s skin shrank, crown to toes.

  “Baby rattlers. In a burlap bag. He tied the end of the bag closed with the rope around my neck. Just a slipknot. If I straighten my legs the knot will come loose.”

  And so would the snakes. Nice and warm and awake, and agitated about being held captive so close to a terrified human being.

  Jo aimed the flashlight down the back of Autumn’s sweater. She cringed. “Oh.”

  The bag was writhing.

  Baby rattlers. They had potent venom and no experience at striking prey. Baby rattlers often emptied their venom in one burst.

  Jo resisted the visceral urge to pull her hands in and skitter away on her butt. If Autumn could hold it together, she damned well could too.

  “First I’m going to cut the rope by your feet.”

  “Do it.”

  “Bend your legs harder.”

  Autumn forced another inch. Jo carefully grasped the rope above Autumn’s ankles, braced her arm on her own knee, and sliced the binding. Autumn whimpered in relief and straightened her legs.

  Jo cut the knot around her hands. Autumn carefully lay flat. She shuddered and bit back tears. The rope still wound around her neck and down her twisting sweater.

  “Let’s get that bag out of there,” Jo said.

  “Good, good, good,” Autumn whispered. “It’s not just a way to keep me quiet. It’s a booby trap.”

  “What?”

  “Kyle says it’ll set off the guy in charge. ‘Boom.’”

  “Haugen. I know.”

  Autumn’s gaze slid abruptly toward Jo. “Dane Haugen?”

  “He’s behind the kidnapping.”

  “But—he’s the one who held the party. Where the Bad Cowboy . . .”