Thief (19 page)

Things had been going almost smoothly until then. Life had become, perhaps not routine, never routine, but at least fairly predictable. Travelling with an angel through an alien world might not be usual, but at least it was what he expected each morning when he woke. Camping with wild, potentially deadly animals no longer shocked him. They still scared him and he knew he would never get used to waking up in the middle of a herd of predators, but he had finally come to accept that they were safe. They wouldn’t attack him. His body was adapting to the new diet and he was even beginning to enjoy it. Daydreams of steak still haunted him, but only a little.

Physically in fact his health seemed to be improving. He’d always been fit, strength, endurance and flexibility being essential in his business, now he felt more so. For the first time in longer than he could remember his body was singing again, a feeling of vitality suffusing his flesh. He told himself it was the diet and exercise, and maybe even the rest as he was beginning to think of this little trek as a holiday. But he suspected it was more than that. That it was also the benefit of spending so much time with an angel, as some of her own health and vitality rubbed off.

Their progress was also positive. They’d been making steady headway, nearing their goal with every day that passed. Sherial knew they were closing in, and through her so did he. From her he somehow thought in terms of arriving within only a few more days, though Sherial typically was far less specific. Hell he gathered, was not geographically bound in the same way as a normal town, it moved. But still she felt them approaching their destination.

It wasn’t all good of course. For while she was excited about the chance of freedom for her kith and kin, Sherial was also worried. Sherial he knew wasn’t at all certain that he could do what he had set out to. Neither was he, but still he almost looked forward to the challenge. Perhaps it was false pride, possibly just foolish bravado, but still Mikel felt stronger and more confident with every day that passed.

On the even more positive side, Mikel was becoming satisfied with his own progress in dealing with her charms.

He’d been practicing his self-discipline routines daily, and could feel the effort paying off. Every day he felt stronger and more in control of himself. His attraction to Sherial was still there, still unbelievably powerful, but finally he could control it now with his focus. In time he was sure, he could rid himself of his animal lusts, and become once more the completely rational being he was always meant to be. For logic and reason were what made him as capable and successful as he was, while base emotion would destroy him, and everything he had become.

However, honesty compelled him to admit that another emotion was also lending him the power to resist her charms, a surprising one, rage. For every time he saw her, an anger would surface, one so long and so deeply buried, he’d thought it gone if he’d ever thought of it at all. For he raged against God, and Sherial by her very presence, told him that target existed.

For many long years he’d simply accepted that there was no god. That it was all simply a sham by the religious orders to gather money and feel good about themselves. But now that Sherial had come into his life he finally had to accept that there was a god, and it enraged him. Where had he been when Samantha was killed? Where had he been when Billy was beaten to a pulp? How about when he was cast out of his family? When his aunt beat the crap out of him? Every damned day? Mikel remembered only too well crying out every night for the Lord’s help, and receiving nothing, while every morning his aunt would be there spouting more moronic religious nonsense and hatred.

That anger, so long repressed was now out in the open. It built and built within him, like water behind a dam, and every so often it burst out, usually every time Sherial tried to explain. And with it too, he held her at bay, rejecting her as angrily as he did God. It wasn’t her fault, it was his. But he identified her with God, and since he couldn’t target the creator, she became his target. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right but it was there.

The rage had been growing slowly in him since the first moment he’d laid eyes upon her, but in this last week as he’d lived and travelled with Sherial it had grown to become something much more. A living breathing monster. For finally, he had found someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong in his life. In the lives of his friends and those of people he’d never even met. And yet it wasn’t a consuming anger such as he had felt towards the Mafioso who had destroyed his life. It was more a spontaneous volcano of rage that lay dormant mostly, but occasionally surfaced and exploded when conditions were right. Which was mostly when Sherial tried to tell him of the wonders of God and the Universe.

The terrible thing was that Sherial understood his anger. She felt it, she knew his rage and its source, and she forgave him. Every time she told him that it was alright, that he had a right to be upset, that he simply didn’t understand. It was of course the worst thing she could have said. Every time it was as though a nuclear bomb went off inside him, a detonation of blind fury far beyond anything he’d ever experienced. Again and again that titanic explosion drove her away more surely than a bullet, and afterwards left him bereft and empty.

Later, when his anger had cooled again, and he felt human once more, he felt terrible. Shame and pain beset him, for he had hurt her surely, and the pain of that was nigh on impossible to bear. Yet Sherial would forgive him that too, making him feel lower than an earthworm and twice as miserable. Until the next time.

It had not been easy. Yet even if it was hard, he was gaining from their journey.

As they travelled Mikel was also learning more of her, of this world, and of the universe in general. For while when she spoke, he could not help listening, feeling and experiencing what she spoke of. He might not understand nine tenths of what she said, but somewhere deep inside he absorbed it anyway.

Afterwards, when she was further away from him, he could sort through it in his mind, apply critical analysis, and learn far more than she intended to tell him. Things he suspected, she’d never intended for him to know. Things perhaps it wasn’t intended for any man to know.

For a start he knew something of the home life of angels, little enough perhaps, but still something. He knew Sherial had a family, parents and siblings. He was certain that the church, every church on Earth would deny that as completely heretical, but he knew it for truth. For when he spoke to her of his long lost family, he felt the echo of her own memories as she thought of her own. But unlike his, her family were always with her even when she was physically nowhere near them. They too were a whisper in her soul.

He was learning far more than just dry facts though, he was picking up skills. Sherial had a burning need to understand people, to know why they acted as they did, so she could guide them, and she had a lot of experience and miraculous talents which helped her do just that. Whenever she spoke with him he couldn’t help but pick up some of that insight as she tried to focus it on him. As she studied him, he learned her methods.

The greatest knowledge he was learning was in becoming more aware of peoples’ motivations, more insightful into peoples’ behaviour. In short why people did the things they did. It was Sherial’s first thought always, to try and understand why people acted as they did, rather than to simply react. If she understood them, she could help them better. But his was a different mission, to weed out the corrupt so the rest could grow. He had no great desire to help those who caused such misery, but he did have a need for any knowledge that might help him take them down.

Though she couldn’t have guessed it, and would never have approved if she had, that understanding could be a powerful weapon in another’s hands. In his hands. Until then he had always simply acted and reacted, knowing what people would do, scarcely troubling himself with the questions of why. But now he knew he could use Sherial’s knowledge.

Through what she had given him, though he would never let her know the truth, he could understand so much more of the crime lords he’d had dealings with over the years. Not only perhaps, why they were such evil pieces of slime, but also why they did what they did. Why so many buried their monies, their ill gotten gains in such strange places. Some he understood, would always use safes and security deposit boxes, the reassuring feel of the sold steel and vast edifices their concept of security. Some would prefer the intangibility of bank accounts, and the stock market, its anonymity their protection. Almost none however, would ever use their wife’s accounts as a security. They didn’t trust them with their money. Knowing what each lowlife would prefer would help him to separate them from their ill-gotten gains.

He could also guess their reactions to anything he might do. Know who would be likely to confess when they knew that the game was finally up, and who would deny everything to the very end. He could understand which ones would flee and which would stand and fight. He had a fair idea of which ones would think to keep records of their crimes for later blackmail or deals with police, and which would bury everything.

His new understanding however, went much further. For not only could he understand what made them use particular methods of securing their ill-gotten gains, he could see new ways to exploit them. It gave him valuable clues to break their passwords, techniques for ruining their day to day operations, ways of undermining their chains of command and destroying their ability to deal with rivals and others in the same supply chain.

The concept was a potent drug for an ageing thief, who until then had been living in the last decade of his working life. It shone its enticing light into the darkest corners of his mind, and brought forth possibilities. He’d grabbed that knowledge firmly with both hands, the moment he’d spied it, and examined it with every brain cell he had.

For the first time in his life, he could also feel the mental techniques he had practiced for decades starting to change him into what he had always been meant to be. Logic and control had always been his greatest strengths, and now they were becoming more, far more. They were becoming his entire life, the only centre he could find, when his emotions weren’t skyrocketing in every direction. And they too were giving him ideas.

He could see possibilities in the world, in his life that he’d never even considered before. Ways to improve his mind and body, skills to learn, ways to do things and new goals to achieve. In time he hoped he could raise himself to an entirely new level as a thief and international power broker, though what exactly that might be he wasn’t quite sure. What he did know was that he’d been wasting his potential. He could do more, much more. And it had taken an angel to force him to grow.

Was that why she’d come? To help him make better use of his talents? The thought had crossed his mind more than a few times, but he could never be satisfied with it. But whatever her reason for being here, it was secondary to the effect she was having on him. Very secondary. If he could continue like this for much longer, he was certain he would one day be able to solve any problem. Perhaps even destroy the cartels forever, and bring a new age of justice to the world.

And yet that was just the tip of the iceberg, compared with what else he wanted to do. It had always troubled him that while he went after the criminals, those at least who broke the laws, others too destroyed the lives of millions, but in a way that left them legally innocent, - in exactly the same way that a cockroach spreading disease and filth could be called one of god’s creatures.

The rampant capitalists, the corporate greedies had made a fortune out of the misery of others, putting millions out of work, spreading pollution across the globe in the name of profit, turning whole populations into wage slaves, and trying to turn greed into a virtue. They were probably responsible for more hardship and suffering than all the cartels combined, and yet they were beyond the law. Often they made the law through the governments they owned in everything but name.

He had always avoided them, knowing the terrible pitfalls that would beset him on the path, and the likelihood that victory could be worse than defeat as world economies collapsed. Yet now he had the beginnings of a new way of tackling their evil, one that he was stunned no-one had spotted before.

For while the companies themselves ruled the world, they were still directed by people. They still served people. That was their weak link. For while the company had surely been designed as an infernal way of safeguarding assets and protecting individuals from the results of their greed, maybe just maybe, it could be used against them. Instead of people hiding behind companies, companies could be made to hide behind people. People such as their owners. And it would be relatively simple to arrange.

A few messy divorces here and there, a few very public examples of companies themselves taking their owners to the cleaners, and suddenly the corporates would begin to feel like an endangered species. Owners and directors would suddenly have to defend themselves from their own companies, stockpiling evidence against the days to come. Similarly the companies’ own people would be doing the same, protecting themselves against their owners by storing records.