Thief (5 page)

He groaned aloud at the sight. So much work destroyed in a single night. Cedric, his gardener was going to give him no end of grief when he turned up on Thursday. He had painstakingly tended the garden for the last five years. And this was after only a single night and a morning. What would the gardens be like by the time he actually got here?

Of course he realized eventually, the animals hadn’t visited this day simply to annoy him. They should have surely fled at the sight of him. He stared at them, then waved his arms and screamed, while they in turn ignored him as just another stupid human. They had come to pay their respects to Sherial, and as long as she stayed, so would they.

“Ahh Sherial. There’s some people here to see you.”

As soon as she came out to see, he knew he was right. The change in the congregation was positively electric. Every single one of them whipped its head around to see her, ears pricked and nostrils flaring. He’d have bet dollars to dimes they even stopped blinking when she came near. Yet they didn’t move towards her. They waited patiently, something animals weren’t know for.

There was an air of expectation as she approached, and a sense of longing and adoration. Despite the shocks of the morning he found he could understand their reactions, much as he might not want to.

The instant she reached the garden it was as though a switch had finally been flicked on. As one they mobbed her, all wanting to be close, and Sherial welcomed them to her with a smile that outshone the sun. He gathered it wasn’t a completely unexpected event for her.

But at least while they were with her they’d stopped eating his gardens. His mind in chaos he fled the scene, needing to find some peace.

Entering the gym he discovered he was right about the birds. More right than he could have guessed. They’d left their calling cards over every single piece of equipment he owned, giving it an aroma far less pleasant than the sandalwood he normally favoured. But at least he found, after carefully checking the indoor pool, they’d made it no further. Swimming in bird droppings would have been simply too much.

He busied himself with a mop, thanking every god known to man for the fact that the floor and equipment was all easily cleaned, and in half an hour had the place looking like new. Nailing up a board over the broken window hopefully ensured it would stay that way if his guests remained. He could have left it till Tuesday when Mrs. Pool visited but thought it wouldn’t really have been fair. Besides what would he have done until then?

All the while as he worked, he kept an eye out for Sherial, determined to know and understand everything she did and was. Yet while it was relatively easy to see everything she did through the French doors, to see everything she was, it was close to impossible for him to accept it.

For the most part she sat on one of the small garden seats he’d laid several years ago, surrounded by her adoring audience, and accepted their love. And while that was all she did and he saw absolutely everything, it explained nothing about what was really happening. For animals don’t generally just start loving people, nor do they live in peace with one another. Yet these did, and he could even see it in their eyes. As perhaps had he looked in a mirror he would have seen in his own eyes. It was a depressing thought for a man of secrets and self-confessed paranoia like himself.

Stranger still, he could also watch her aura glowing around her, a visible corona of golden light that extended around her like firelight to encompass her entire audience. It had been with her ever since he had first seen her, but only now did it finally occur to him to wonder about it. People don’t usually bathe in golden light.

Then there were her wings, huge and glorious wonders which were far too big for her when she sat and trailed along the grass behind her. She extended them high above her head each time another adoring animal jumped to her lap for a blessing, an automatic reflex he guessed. She had easily a twenty foot span, and considering her light weight Mikel was almost willing to accept that they’d support her in flight, or at least gliding. But the previous evening he’d had a distinct recollection of seeing her hovering, with the wings only moving gently in the still night air, barely creating a breeze. That too was surely impossible according to all the laws of physics.

Of course, he finally had to admit, perhaps the laws of the world simply don’t apply to angels. He wondered what if any laws did.

Mikel followed his labours with a light workout which was all that his muscles could take after the previous day’s hammering. An hour at the weights, another in the dojo and a quick three miles in the pool. In the next few days if he was able to continue with his schedule, he’d return to full training, five or six hours a day of intensive, gruelling weights, aerobics and combat, coupled with swimming and meditation for breathing and focus. Then just before his next job he’d add in the gymnastics, rings, horse, parallel bars and sprints. A work out that almost no one else in the world could have done. On the other hand as no one else in the world did what he did, no one else needed his physical abilities.

It was odd. Everywhere he went people would look at him, assess his shape as somewhat over weight, his build as oversized, slow and clumsy, and then guess him to be an out of shape banker. Yet he ate less and worked harder than any ten of them put together, and just to cap it all, he’d gained his black belt in three different martial arts. If it ever came to fisticuffs, most would think him soft. None would expect him to fight like a kick boxer. Then again he was careful never to remove his shirt in public any more. One look at his ropey muscling might give him away.

Once it would have upset him as people’s opinions seemed important to him as a younger man. But no longer. Now, far from insulting he found people’s opinion of him an effective and useful tool and actually cultivated it, dressing to conceal his physique. More than one cop had ignored him completely in an investigation, because there was no way he could possibly be the cat burglar they sought. Cat burglars were small, wiry, athletic people. Similarly most people would have had an image of a master criminal as an athletic, good-looking, Adonis. A middle aged office worker simply didn’t cut the mustard.

Sherial came in as he was finishing off in the pool and once more caught him off guard and red-faced. He normally swam naked in his home, there was no one to see him after all, but now suddenly there was. He cursed himself for another oversight. No one else could have walked in through those automatically locked doors, and normally no one else would have been in the house anyway. But he should have known neither of those conditions applied here. The mistake worried him. He was making far too many mistakes lately. Mistakes got you killed in his line of work.

Sherial showed no sign of leaving however as he got out of the pool, and he determined to brazen it out. Anything to show he wasn’t a complete dolt. Or just to show he still had some self-control.

Mikel tried not to give away his embarrassment as he walked calmly towards the hanging towels, though he was certain she guessed anyway. But in turn Sherial said nothing, choosing instead to stare openly. It was odd. She was a beautiful and sensuous woman, or angel or whatever, and he would somehow have expected her to be checking him out as it were. Instead he felt it was more as though he was being scrutinized, studied as a scientist does bacteria under the microscope. It sent a chill through him that mere towels couldn’t ward off. But she said nothing and no more did he.

Instead of speaking with her, he decided he would be better off spending time in his workshops, and asked if he could see her for lunch in a couple of hours instead. A proposal which, much to his surprise she accepted without question. Maybe she wanted to spend more time with her adoring fans.

Whatever her reason it was a relief. For as well as wanting to get some practical business attended to; such as checking on the police’s progress investigating his latest crime, laying more false trails, and pawning the stones, he also needed the time to address his feelings for her and control them. And to do some basic investigation.

Every fibre of his being screamed at him that he had to learn everything he could about her. He had to retake control of himself. For too long he’d allowed himself to be a puppet in someone else’s show. It was time to take over the reigns again, to pull his own strings and maybe, just maybe to learn how to pull hers. Before she returned and every fibre of his being went gaga once again. It was a black thought.

The first of his day’s chores were easily done, after all he’d had plenty of practice over the previous years and decades. The police when they started checking the clues he’d left for them, had found themselves irresistibly drawn to the new Asian crime gangs appearing on the scene. Bogus licence plates, fake financial transfers and some strange tales spread on the street, all had done their work well. No doubt the triads would be picking up some more unwelcome publicity and, quite probably for the first time in their miserable existence, would actually be innocent of it. That might at least curb their evil for a while.

The stones he decided to pawn through his vast network of jewellers, stone by stone as he usually did. Breaking them up and setting them in stunning arrangements would as always be slow. But it would net the best possible price, the tracks would be that much harder to follow and there was no sign yet that anyone was on to the ring.

Mikel had a network of jewellers always willing to deal with him, few of them even suspecting the gems were stolen. After all he was a registered dealer in precious stones. It was just that he sold far more than he bought. A little astute bookkeeping meant he showed only a relatively small profit each financial year. Enough to explain the nice though not particularly lavish home he lived in, and the frequent trips around the world. Not enough to mark him as anything more.

Likewise the gold would be traded at a huge profit through other stores, after carefully being re-smelted so it could pass as Swiss gold. Paper money was always a problem, although he doubted the serial numbers would have been recorded. But a hundred million in U.S. currency was simply too difficult to just bank. Over the coming weeks it would be banked in small deposits in a thousand accounts and under a thousand different names. Likewise, large wads of it would simply be mailed from a dummy mail box somewhere, to respective charities.

The electronic money on the other hand was a cinch to move. He simply passed it through a set of dummy bank accounts, and then deposited it directly in some of his favourite charities. It would take years and multiple court orders before anyone would be able to track it, and by then it would be far too late. The accounts would have been emptied and closed, new ones created and when they checked the owners would never have existed anyway.

Next he turned his attention to the crime scene. True to the old saying, this criminal always returned to the scene of the crime, but only ever as an electronic eavesdropper. If the authorities only knew he’d often joked, though only to himself, - they’d have had a fit.

Initial forensics reports from the New York Police Departments’ own computers hadn’t yet logged any blood he’d left behind in the hallway, which wasn’t really surprising. They were still trying to piece together what had happened in Mr. Smith’s apartment, which had apparently been vaporized in a mini explosion. Thus far they were working on the principle that the mobsters had used a rocket on it. Mikel tried not to laugh too loudly.

At much the same time the Fed’s had shown up, wanting to know all about organized crime and the evidence that had been found. Excellent! He couldn’t have planned it any better. By the time those two departments had finished snipping at each other there wouldn’t be any evidence left to worry about.

The CIA’s Cat Squad hadn’t even shown up yet officially, although there were several references to ‘agents of other agencies’ in the reports. Either they were slow for once, or else just being more discrete. In a way he felt privileged, having had an entire department of the CIA dedicated to catching just him. A tribute to his skill and success. But it was also a worry. Still, despite having an overview of his operations in dozens of different countries, having studied his methods extensively, and even knowing what he was doing with the moneys, they hadn’t come any closer to catching him in decades. Then again perhaps the current President had reined them in. Catching him would after all, be an unmitigated disaster for the so-called free world.

The routine business settled for the time, he decided to start doing a little investigating of his new house guest, desperate to understand what made her tick. More importantly, he had to find out what made her so damnably dangerous to him. It was bad enough that she knew about his criminal activities, worse that she could seemingly wander through his every defence. But that she kept him off balance, causing him to make mistake after mistake; that was simply unacceptable.