Thief (10 page)

Twenty thousand dollars that heist had netted him according to the radio, although when he counted it, it seemed somehow much closer to seven. Life, he had discovered, was full of crooks. It was just that some of them were rich enough to get away with it. No doubt the bank’s insurance companies would pay, never knowing they had over paid, and the bank would profit from their loss. He would live with the crumbs, but at that time, seven thousand dollars was still a fortune, more than enough for him to get a fake passport and flee the country.

In Paris he had set himself up as Mikel the artist. It was a good cover. There were so many of them that another would never be noticed even if he couldn’t paint. And he’d used that cover as he’d returned to crime. It was the only way he knew to live. But at least he’d learned better how to not get caught. Slowly he’d started to amass a fortune from his criminal endeavours, and each new job brought more success than the last. It seemed that he might have only limited life skills as a normal member of society, but his criminal abilities were far less limited.

Before he was twenty he had over a million pounds in the bank, and none were any the wiser. The police hadn’t even realized that only one man was pulling off many of the heists. It was also then that he started helping out some of the few decent people he’d met along the way. A gift here, a little cash there, and he could start to wipe some of the guilt out of his mind. Always his father’s words were with him, like the proverbial albatross around his neck. He sent moneys back to some of the friends he’d made on the mean streets, but most had no addresses.

For a while there, he’d had a life he could almost be proud of. He was comfortable, fed, housed and clothed. He had many friends and acquaintances with which he could enjoy the long days and nights, even if he never told them what he truly did for a living. He trusted them, but only so far. Trust could have landed him in jail for many years. He could sooth his conscience with the gifts, and massage his ego with his successes. It might not be perfect, but it was something.

Then had come the crime lords, ripping into his life with a vengeance. Drugs, racketeering, gambling, murder and prostitution were their calling cards. He’d always tried to steer clear of them; life while perhaps not perfect was something he wanted to keep hold of. Samantha hadn’t been so lucky. She had been his lover for three short wonderful years and one of the most fabulous things in his life, yet somehow he’d never guessed that she had a drug habit. Even now he kicked himself for his ignorance. He should have seen it, he’d seen so many others taking that terrible path. But he hadn’t. There are none so blind as those in love. Nor any so pathetic.

One day he’d come home to find her dead on their bed. She’d had no more money left, having sold her entire life’s worth of possessions for one last hit, and she’d made it a big one. He nearly died of self-loathing when he found her. He’d had money but had never told her. How could he have told her he was loaded without having to reveal what he did? Yet even to his own ears it was a pathetic excuse. He could have paid the dealers off and then put her in a recovery programme. Doctors and nurses could have cared for her, bringing her back to health. But instead she’d killed herself, and it was entirely his fault.

The shock alone was crushing. He’d loved Samantha as he hadn’t loved anyone since his family had sent him packing. She had been a wonderful, joyous woman, generous of heart, compassionate, and in love with life and living. It had made it so much harder to understand what had happened. On some level he still hadn’t accepted it. Perhaps he never would.

But even her death wasn’t the ultimate darkness that was to blight his soul. For the evil that was organised crime wasn’t through with her yet. Even dead and buried she still owed them money, and since she couldn’t pay, they decided he should. But not just him. Her family, sister, brother, and parents all owed them, and they meant to collect.

Three men had turned up at his apartment while he was still grieving over her body, stolen everything they could lay their hands on, and beaten him to a pulp. What they didn’t steal they destroyed, setting the building on fire as they left. Why, he’d never known. Perhaps it was to cover their tracks. Maybe it was just something to do.

Either way as he’d lain there on the floor in agony, unable to move, and watching the flames licking at his boots he’d learned to hate with his entire being. When the firemen had carried him out, he’d learned to give thanks. And while the doctors had tended his injuries, he’d mastered revenge. They’d never understood why he laughed like a hyena through the long hours as they set his bones, thinking him demented from the pain. Perhaps it was better they hadn’t. They wouldn’t have understood. Her family might have though.

While he was still recovering in the hospital from the beating the gangsters gave him, Samantha’s sister was raped, her brother shot and her parents had their house and shop burnt to the ground. In desperation the family had taken out a huge bank loan to pay the hit men, and then had their arms broken for being late. They couldn’t even go to the police since the gangsters owned them. Completely out numbered and trying to save what remained of their family, the Steines had given in to urban terrorism and lost everything including two of their three children in silence. They hadn’t had a choice.

But Mikel had a choice, and he was mad. Angrier than he’d ever been in his life. Angrier and far more dangerous. The rage that possessed him was as nothing he’d ever known, a living, breathing entity that screamed inside him. But it was his mind that guided it, making it truly lethal. Once more the thugs were hurting his friends and family, breaking their bones, destroying his life. It was Billy all over again. And there was no way in Hell he’d let that happen again. But this time he was older and wiser. He knew that there was always a price to pay for getting caught, often a price more expensive than mere money. He knew he had to be careful. He planned accordingly.

It had taken him less than a week to destroy that entire crime family. A week that must have seemed like an eternity in Hell for them. In three lightening fast raids over three short nights he had taken more than five million francs in cash from them and left behind staggering amounts of drugs for the police to find. Their illegal gambling halls he torched as they had torched his home. A few judiciously placed bugs, a few calls to the police and another forty odd members went to the slammer in a dozen separate incidents.

Finally he’d taken down the grandfather of the group, a snake eyed maggot of a man, who pretended to be some form of lord or prince. He had simply gone to sleep one night in his bed and awoke stark naked in a locked bank with all the sirens going off at once. Must have damn near had a heart attack.

The three men who’d attacked him and his lover’s family, he’d reserved a special place in hell for. He’d ratted them out to their boss as their betrayers and then ensured they shared the same jail with him. Word was they hadn’t done well in prison. In days they’d all broken their arms and legs in separate accidents. They’d been gang raped possibly because the police had charged them also with child sex abuse after another anonymous tip off, and finally they’d been stabbed, though sadly not killed.

Perhaps it wasn’t the lawful thing to do, but it was at least a form of natural justice, and try as he might Mikel had never felt guilty for their pain. Sometimes he worried about that, his lack of remorse. But every time he thought of it, the image of Samantha’s body swam before him, and the cold hatred returned. Time would pass and hell might even freeze over, but he would never forgive them.

Perversely the hardest thing about it all had been finding the self-control not to kill them. For with his talents he could easily have destroyed them all a thousand times over. A bomb, poison, bullets, drugs or fire. Any and all of them he could have used. And he had wanted to. He ached to see their blood run down the streets, to hear their screams as their bones snapped and laugh in their faces. He craved the thought of them knowing who it was that had destroyed them, and why so that they could beg for mercy as he laughed in their faces. Yet on some fundamental level he’d known that if he ever gave in to his rage, if he ever let it loose, he’d be lost. He’d have become what they were, and everything his father had feared in him. It hadn’t been easy facing down the burning hatred that consumed him. But he had done so, time and again. Not for their sakes, but for his own.

None of the family had ever known who had torn them apart but they all spent long, futile hours swearing endless vengeance regardless. That still brought a smile to his face. There they were, a family of murderers, rapists, drug dealers and thieves, and yet somehow they felt they were the ones who’d been wronged? Go figure.

No sooner had one crime family departed however, then another moved in, and then another and another. It was a problem without end he realized, and also a source of revenue without end. A clean source of revenue, and that was suddenly important to him. Banks and people he might have qualms about stealing from, but these guys, never. And above all else it gave him a chance to take out his rage on them. For Mikel had a hatred of them, like nothing else he had ever known. It was nuclear hot and at the same time, icy cold and logical. It consumed him, paradoxically fuelling him as it did so. His revenge would never end he had sworn, not until either he or all of them were gone.

His life from that time on had found the one thing he’d never known, a purpose. He had started specializing in taking them down. Learning how they operated, identifying their weak spots, and then going in for the kill, while at the same time stealing everything they hadn’t nailed down. He stole their money and then their liberty.

It had been a busy time, the challenge forcing him to improve his skills as never before. He’d learned how to find and crack the most advanced private safes, how to overcome every security system known to man. He’d studied every type of con known, and practiced most of them. Electronics and intelligence had become his stock in trade, while secrecy became the air he breathed.

He’d also determined to improve his mind and body through the martial arts and education, ultimately taking three black belts and a Ph.D. in sociology. The irony of the subject appealed to him, the study of society, which was something he lived completely outside of. He wondered what his lecturers would have made of him, had they ever known what he did. Perhaps they would have understood; academics were always the most understanding of people, but he could never have trusted them enough to find out.

He’d found satisfaction in his abilities, and in the adrenaline that came with each job. Destroying the evil that they were was good, but over time its reward began to fade. In time even the strongest hatred can die, or at least burn a little lower. But the satisfaction from knowing he was protecting the weak from their evil endured, as did the rewards of giving to those who needed it the most.

In memory of his father, he never again tried to punish the guilty himself despite the anger, or perhaps because of it. From there he knew it would have been a short slide to becoming a vigilante and murderer, one of the very creatures he was trying to destroy. Instead he always arranged for the right information to land in the hands of the law. Justice could then be done, while his hands were relatively clean.

Charity, always important to him, became a way of life. It wasn’t just the guilt, though that was there. It was his certain knowledge that there was so little worth saving out there, so few decent people mixed in with so much evil. They had to be protected at all costs.

He had long since accepted that there was no God to look after the good people of the world. If he existed then he’d never given a damn about Mikel or any of the other poor souls on this pitiful hunk of dirt. The law was also a pitiful defence against organized crime and its agents were often criminals themselves. There was no one and nothing to stand between the darkness and the light. There was no afterlife to reward those who suffered now. Therefore Mikel had to be that. He had to protect and encourage the lives of those that lived now, and leave the question of souls for priests to play with. He hadn’t been in a church since he’d been driven from his family.

It was a view that was now suffering a horrible demise as he spoke with an angel of the Lord.

From those early days it had been a simple progression to the present. The scale and complexity of his crimes had grown over the decades, as had the profits, but he’d kept little of them back for himself. Once he was housed and fed he found he had little use for the excess money. Some people, he knew, would have spent every last cent on a magnificent edifice with countless servants, but it just wasn’t him. His own modest home on the island was more than comfortable enough for him, and he had lived here for so long he couldn’t have faced the thought of living anywhere else.

He kept a modest cash reserve for himself, a just in case fund, and an operational budget, but that amounted to the tiniest fraction of his takings. Then again he had to admit looking at the angel, that he was by no means poor either. That tiny fraction he’d kept back for himself, amounted to multi-millions in anyone else’s books. He had bought himself some expensive toys, an E type Jaguar housed in his Paris apartment, and a fleet of other expensive cars that he never used. He had other houses and apartments all over the world. Partly they were convenient, but still all were much more luxurious than he really needed. He had a yacht, something he’d bought on the spur of the moment and then never really felt at home in. Crime had done well by him also.