Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us

by Stephen Cole

  She looked up as Demnos and Coldhardt re-entered the room. Yianna gazed coldly ahead; Tye had the distinct impression that if the girl’s good leg hadn’t been half-pulverised in the rockfall she’d have been kicking the place in. As it was, she was a captive audience in every sense.

  Demnos looked at his daughter, his eyes brimming with tears and compassion. ‘Coldhardt has told me how Samraj abducted you. Brainwashed you. Turned you against me.’

  ‘She did no such thing,’ Yianna hissed. ‘I have always hated you, Father.’

  ‘You see?’ said Coldhardt sadly. ‘Samraj did her job well.’

  ‘He’s lying, you idiot! Can’t you see that?’ Yianna cried. ‘He was working for her, against you! His people broke into here when you were away, photographed your pieces of the Ophiuchus parchment –’

  Coldhardt sighed. ‘Such a shame to see a young mind so poisoned.’

  Tye wasn’t sure whether to feel happy that they were getting away with it, or sorry for Demnos. It was obvious that he didn’t believe Yianna’s accusations for a moment – or, more likely, didn’t want to believe that his daughter could despise him so deeply without an enemy’s help. ‘Oh, my poor child,’ he said, ‘I have neglected you so badly. You shall see the finest psychiatrists, specialists –’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my mind, you useless old fool!’ Yianna shouted. But Tye could see that with every mean word she dug her grave a little deeper.

  ‘These people will help you … no matter how long it takes. I will have you back again, my own sweet Yianna.’

  Coldhardt cleared his throat. ‘Of course, now it’s clear that Amrita is a dead end, perhaps conventional medicine can help Yianna’s body while you care for her mind.’

  ‘We shall explore every possible route,’ said Demnos, putting a bearlike arm around his skinny daughter, who held herself stock-still in his grip. ‘From now on I shall tend you more closely than ever. Whenever you turn around I shall be here. Ready to cherish you.’

  Yianna let out a deep, mournful wail.

  Demnos smiled and nodded fondly. ‘From now until our dying days.’

  Coldhardt and Tye saw themselves out.

  ‘Yianna may not live for ever,’ said Tye, ‘but I’ve a feeling it’s going to seem like it.’

  Tye was glad to learn that Con had put the champagne on ice for their arrival back in Geneva. The job was pretty much a wrap, and it was time to celebrate – a good result, and no casualties.

  This time.

  Demnos had paid Coldhardt well for his services, not only for laying bare the truth of Samraj’s entire operation, but for bringing back his daughter. Now he had information on Serpens Biotech’s horrible researches on the cultists’ genomes, he intended to use it to his own advantage. Revelations of illegal human experimentation could knock millions off Serpens’ stock value, allowing him to steam in and buy up the whole enterprise – always assuming he had any money left once he’d attended the forthcoming auction of Ophiuchus’s treasures and relics. A select handful of private collectors had been invited to Berne to bid. Coldhardt was expecting record levels of profit – and his Talent would each receive ten per cent for their labours.

  ‘Enough to keep the wolf from the door for a while,’ he’d said thoughtfully. ‘The wolf and her many familiars.’ A familiar, haunted look had crept into his eyes as he spoke. Even the memory of it sent a little chill down Tye’s spine.

  But she’d decided there would be no dwelling on things. Not tonight. Tonight they would go out and party. The Fête de Genève was in full swing just twenty miles away, with food and fireworks and music from all over the world. For a few hours they would give themselves over to normal life, blend in with the faceless crowds, forget the darkness and the shadows. Act their ages for once.

  ‘Someone go get the geek outta his room,’ Motti grumbled, wrestling the cork from a magnum of Krug in the hangout. ‘Coldhardt’s gonna show in a minute and I wanna get swilling.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Tye casually.

  Con gave her a knowing look but Patch and Motti didn’t seem to notice.

  She ran upstairs and knocked on his door. ‘You decent?’

  ‘No, I’m doing unnatural things to a computer,’ he called.

  ‘Again?’ Tye opened the door. Jonah was looking good in blue Diesel, getting up from his office chair, turning his back on a screen full of sums and squiggles.

  ‘Sorry,’ he began, ‘I was working on another decryption. Lost track of time.’

  But Tye wasn’t listening. She’d seen the two fat suitcases by the foot of the bed.

  ‘So you’re leaving again,’ she said quietly. ‘Thought maybe …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That you were maybe sticking around.’ She stiffened, turning to go. ‘Doesn’t matter. You’re still coming out with us tonight, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, but –’

  ‘So get your ass in gear.’

  ‘Tye,’ he said, catching hold of her arm. She looked down at his fingers, then up into his blue eyes. ‘I’m staying. That’s luggage I’m moving in, not out.’ He smiled bashfully. ‘It was good of Con to pick me out a wardrobe, but her tastes and mine …’ He shook his head. ‘We’re not a match. Not in a million years.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘So Coldhardt let me kit myself out. My way. But I haven’t unpacked yet, got waylaid …’ Jonah smiled a little awkwardly. ‘So. Pleased I’m staying?’

  She turned quickly to go. ‘Motti says you’re to hurry. He wants to get mega-wasted, and you’re holding him up.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Sorry. It was the computer that distracted me.’

  Tye glanced at the computer again, caught a dark sparkle there. Pressed into a blob of Blu-Tack in the top left corner of the monitor screen was Jonah’s smokestone.

  ‘Motti’s right. I really am just a geek.’ Jonah paused. ‘Except …’

  ‘Except?’

  ‘Well, I’m meant to be bright, right? So how come I can crack secret codes and forbidden ciphers and all that stuff, no problem …’ He looked at her, his eyes bright and brilliant. ‘But when I try to work out how the people I care about are feeling, I get nowhere?’

  She held his gaze for a few moments. Then she smiled.

  ‘I guess that will come in time,’ she said.

  Jonah came downstairs with Tye to a round of ironic applause.

  ‘’Bout time!’ Motti shouted, offering an overflowing glass to each of them. ‘We have some serious partying to do, my friends, and I want no wimping out till the last of us has spewed in a stranger’s lap, ’K?’

  ‘Me, I love him for his sophistication,’ said Patch, knocking back the last of his glass.

  ‘Funny, Cyclops,’ said Motti. ‘But not as funny as you being on Appletise for the rest of the night.’

  ‘Come off it!’

  ‘Poor little Patch,’ said Con, pulling him to her in a theatrical hug. ‘Maybe I’ll slip you something later.’

  Patch grinned. ‘That was gonna be my line.’

  She shoved him away in disgust and Jonah joined in the laughter. But then Coldhardt walked in and a more respectful atmosphere prevailed. He looked fully his old urbane self – the dark, impeccable suit, the black rose in his lapel, the icy smile about his craggy features.

  He surveyed each of them in turn. ‘Our car is waiting outside.’

  ‘But we ain’t finished the Krug!’ Motti complained.

  ‘Good. I trust there’s enough remaining for our traditional toast?’

  Jonah noticed the others smile between themselves. ‘Toast?’

  Coldhardt took a brimming champagne saucer from Motti and raised it aloft. ‘To talent,’ he said, ‘and to our continued success. While it lasts.’

  ‘While it lasts,’ the others chorused. Jonah swigged back his drink and chanced a glance at Tye. Just in time to catch her looking away.

  Nothing lasts for ever, he’d told her, back in the crumbling catacombs. Not helplessness.
Not fear. Maybe not even love.

  But while he was here, Jonah was going to make the most of every second.

  Draining the last of his drink, he followed Coldhardt and his children out into the balmy night, towards the distant sound of fireworks and the cheering of happy crowds.

  A Note on the Author

  Also by Stephen Cole

  Featuring Jonah Wish:

  The Aztec Code

  The Wereling trilogy:

  Wounded

  Prey

  Resurrection

  Read on for a sneak peek at the next

  action-packed adventure in

  Thieves Till We Die

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was ten in the morning when Jonah dumped his heavy holdall on the spotless marble floor of Livingston’s finest hotel. He rubbed his gritty eyes and wished he could just keep them closed. Tye was on the phone, bypassing the posh receptionists, trying to get through to Coldhardt to see if a) the big man was up and b) he was ready for an audience with his employees.

  The luxury resort certainly seemed a million miles from the filthy, impoverished town where they’d dumped the 4×4. Seeing just how many bullets had churned up the bodywork made him feel sick, and the others had looked pretty shaky too. Even Motti had kept his usual smart comments to himself.

  While Patch had gone scouring the town for rucksacks so they could shift the swords a little more discreetly, Tye had bought them a battered Subaru from a dealership – refusing to let Con ‘persuade’ the owner to give them one for nothing. ‘She has no idea what it’s like, living some place like this,’ she’d said. ‘To be so trapped.’

  Jonah hadn’t answered. Sure, Con had been educated in the best schools all over Europe, but only because she’d been shunted round from relative to uncaring relative after her mum and dad died in a car crash. Maybe she’d felt just as trapped in her own way. Why else would she have split at fifteen and turned to conning dirty old men out of their cash to survive?

  He watched Con now, taking a long swig from a can of Seven Up. She glanced at Motti, who was slumped against an ornate pillar beside her, and offered him the can. He just shook his head. He’d barely said a word since they’d got away, and Jonah found himself feeling bad for bawling him out. God knew Motti had been ready enough to forgive in the past when Jonah messed up. And despite the brown-trousers getaway, things had worked out. Hadn’t they?

  It was funny. Jonah knew that Patch had lived rough round London from the age of nine when his mum had finally flipped out for good, knew that Tye had been forced into smuggling as a kid to support her drunken father. Their stories made Jonah’s spur-of-the-moment decision to divert funds to his foster mum’s bank account so they could escape her cheating, manipulative husband seem a bit lame. But Motti’s hard-luck story was a little different. He used to design elite security systems for different companies in his native Minnesota – until he was caught exploiting hidden weaknesses he’d built in so he could rip them off himself. Was it greed or boredom that had driven him to steal and first brought him to Coldhardt’s attention? Or something more?

  ‘Coldhardt will see us now,’ Tye announced, jolting him from his thoughts. She slipped her mobile back into her jeans pocket and led the way over to the lifts.

  Hastily Jonah picked up the holdall and fell into step with Motti, who was last in line. ‘Hey. I’m sorry about having a go, before,’ he said.

  ‘S’OK,’ said Motti, looking straight ahead. ‘I’m sorry you’re a pussy.’

  Jonah decided to leave it there.

  The lift whooshed them up to, where else, the penthouse. The doors opened on to a large air-conditioned room, done out in black suede and calico. The sudden dip in temperature brought Jonah’s skin out in gooseflesh.

  Who was he kidding? He got shivers every time he was summoned to the presence of Nathaniel Coldhardt.

  The boss man was maybe in his early sixties. He sat in the dead centre of the room in a high-backed chair, watching as they filed in to face him, deathly pale in a dark, tailored suit. A mane of white hair framed the craggy features, lined more with experience than the years. And age had done nothing to diminish the rogue’s sparkle in his piercing blue eyes.

  Coldhardt sat and watched them, as if daring them to fill the chilly silence. He could easily be taken for a big businessman, Jonah decided, a mover and shaker. You might put his arrogant half-smile down to decades of deal clinching, or assume his easy confidence and charm was simply the badge of someone at the top of his game.

  And in a way, you’d be right.

  Coldhardt was a crook. A master-planner. Getting too old to pull off heists himself, he’d recruited kids to act for him, all from the wrong side of the tracks and all experts in the fields he needed. One by one Coldhardt’s ageing hands had scooped them out from their dead-end situations and into a life their peers could only dream about: luxurious homes, the coolest creature comforts, fast cars, bikes, yachts, even a plane, for God’s sake . . . Pools, gyms, amusement arcades, they had them all in half a dozen homes all around the world.

  The only thing they didn’t have was the option to turn him down. Whatever they were told to do, they did, trading their lives and skills for 10 per cent of Coldhardt’s net profits. And with the kind of capers the boss man set up, those profits could easily roll into millions.

  ‘I understand from Tye you encountered trouble.’ The Irish lilt in Coldhardt’s deep voice held a gently mocking edge.

  ‘We encountered guards armed with automatic weapons,’ said Con coolly.

  ‘AK74s by the looks of it,’ Motti added. ‘That’s Russian issue, right?’

  ‘Kabacra’s an arms dealer who operates all over the world,’ said Coldhardt, rising to his full imposing height of well over six feet. ‘He’ll locate, acquire and sell on anything to anyone, from a crate of assault rifles to weapons-grade plutonium.’

  Patch piped up, ‘But not made at that nuclear power plant, right?’

  Coldhardt shook his head. ‘He bought the Guatemalan complex when it was decommissioned fifteen years ago, stripped it bare and made it into a strongroom to hold his personal collection of weapons. Weapons that are allegedly not for sale at any price.’

  ‘Well, Cortes’s sword ain’t there, man,’ said Motti sourly. ‘May have been once, but not now.’

  Coldhardt stared hard at him. ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘You told me what to look for. There was a whole lot of metal in that containment chamber, but not the blade you want.’

  ‘The information came from a most reliable source.’ Coldhardt took a thoughtful sip of his drink. ‘An unknown collector has recently made it known that he – or she – is willing to pay an incredible sum for Cortes’s sword, and I had reason to believe it might be found in Kabacra’s collection.’

  ‘Which is why you decided to rip him off before he could flog it to them,’ Jonah realised.

  ‘There was this space on the wall,’ said Patch cautiously. ‘The mounting screws were there, but . . . Well, maybe that was where this Cortes geezer’s sword used to hang, and Kabacra’s already got rid.’

  Jonah tapped his holdall with his foot. ‘We brought most of his collection back with us if you want to check it for anything else you might like.’

  An unfathomable look came into the old man’s eyes and he slowly shook his head. ‘It must be Cortes’s,’ he said quietly, and a faint chill ran down Jonah’s spine. Coldhardt specialised in the theft of artefacts, both ancient and arcane – fabled relics that were near priceless on their own, but which more often than not held the key to secret, spooky mysteries smothered by the centuries. And Jonah got the feeling that this was the real treasure in Coldhardt’s eyes. Not just acquiring dark knowledge for its own sake, but because he knew of some way to use it. Though to what end Jonah didn’t like to think about.

  Abruptly Coldhardt chuckled out loud. ‘I shall enjoy going through your little haul,’ he told them, like an indulgent uncle, ‘and I believe it will
prove most valuable to us.’

  Con’s eyes brightened. ‘You are going to sell the swords, yes?’

  ‘No.’ That cryptic half-smile was back on his lips. ‘I am going to give them right back.’

  Jonah lay down on a sunlounger, cradling a beer. The job was done; typically that was the cue to relax and party. But there was an air of unease about the guys as they gathered by the hotel’s private pool. Glad it’s not just me, he thought.

  ‘Thank God we’re out of there,’ said Tye quietly, angling a parasol to keep the sun out of her eyes.

  Patch nodded, rocking back in his chair. ‘We nearly got ourselves killed to get those swords, and now Coldhardt’s just gonna . . .’ He trailed off as Con undid her towelling robe to reveal a tiny blue bikini. ‘Hey. That’s new.’

  She glared at him. ‘Someone stole my red one.’

  Patch grinned. ‘Who would do a thing like that?’

  ‘Someone who’s gonna go blind in his other eye if he don’t watch out,’ said Motti. As usual he was making no concession to the sunshine, lying on a lounger in black grungy gear and flicking through Manga. ‘Told you before, Con, you wanna pay me to secure your pantie drawer, I’m open to offers.’ ‘I’ll pay you to take pictures while you’re in there, Mot,’ Patch suggested.

  Con walked slowly up to him, slipped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him to his feet. But his dreamy smile vanished as she pinched him hard. ‘Patch, why are you so disgusting?’

  ‘Would you notice me if I wasn’t?’