by James, Seth
Ahead through the trees, light danced in the motion of their running. Sally slowed their pace, brought them to a walk and then to stillness as their breathing quieted. Tobias wondered how she had guided them; he hadn't seen her use a compass. Sally selected an observation point and, crouching, they made their way to the edge of the wood. Over the wide green lawn, past several old and majestic trees, stood Jon Thoblon's plantation-style house.
Probably built in the 1920s to resemble an actual plantation mansion, though with all the modern conveniences, Thoblon's house had wide porches running the length of the house, a colonnade of supports, neoclassical touches alongside the practical necessity of laying out a house—in the age before air conditioning—to capture every ounce of breeze and channel it through each room. Stables and a kitchen building stood away from the house, both converted to guest or servant's quarters, seemingly, and both dark. Indeed, in the main house, only the front room and one upstairs room were lit. It made sense: Thoblon and his wife had only been home a day and unexpectedly.
“How do we know they're still here?” Tobias asked.
“I saw some movement behind the curtains upstairs,” Sally whispered back from behind a pair of small binoculars. “I just hope it’s not the help or this will get complicated.”
“Shit,” Tobias cursed. “I hadn't thought of servants. What if some are here?”
“We set the house on fire,” she said simply.
“What!” he gasped.
“The servants would rush out and stand in front of the house, waiting for the fire department,” she said, turning her head but not her eyes toward Tobias. “We could then slip upstairs and find the Niger documents.”
“This is getting very real,” he mumbled.
“Shh,” she said, returning to her binoculars at a sound.
The light upstairs had gone out and a door had closed behind the house. A few minutes passed before a large SUV came around the far side of the house and braked in front. Mrs. Thoblon came out the front door and walked down the steps; Jon shouted something and waved an arm from the driver's side window; Mrs. Thoblon swiped at the air in front of her and stamped back to the house and there locked the front door's dead bolt before returning to the SUV. In an impatient screech of rubber, the vehicle sped off down the half-mile driveway that wound amongst stately trees to the upscale community’s circling road.
“Bad good news,” Sally whispered. “The door is locked but she wouldn't have done that if servants were here.”
“Whew,” Tobias said. “Alright, let's go.”
“Easy,” Sally said, keeping him crouched with a hand on his shoulder. “Let's give them a half hour. People sometimes forget things when they leave for parties and then rush back for them.”
Thirty minutes dragged themselves by in the cold darkness of the wood. Some small animal foraging suddenly amid the leaves to their right scared the hell out of them halfway through their vigil. Checking a watch every three minutes can be a painstaking way to go mad but eventually time did pass and Sally and Tobias left.
Following the edge of the woods, they kept out of sight of the house while they moved behind it. After rolling their stocking masks into place—and a deep breath—they dashed across the open lawn to the low window of some room adjacent to the backdoor. Tobias, with some difficulty, suppressed the desire to editorialize this very large departure from his usual life.
He wore the knapsack now. At the back of the house, Sally motioned for him to kneel and keep watch around the corner in case the Thoblons returned. The stable-turned-garage and kitchen-building-turned-guest-house both seemed to stare with open mouths and shocked expressions at what they saw. Sally slipped a few implements out of the knapsack that, to Tobias, looked like paint scrapers and miniature jumper cables without clamps but thin plates.
“What are those?” he whispered before returning his eyes to the long tree-filled acres which led down to the driveway's end.
“It didn't look as if Mrs. Thoblon had taken the time to set an alarm system,” Sally whispered. “But on the off chance Jon had some remotely activated system installed, which he could activate from his keychain, I'm going to bypass this window's sensor.”
“Shit,” Tobias said. “Didn't consider that possibility either. What if there are motion sensors?”
“Could be,” Sally said cheerfully. She then slid two of the paint scrapers into the front of the window and peeped between them. “But given the rural environment, and that they're never here, motion detectors would be going off all the time because of animals. Probably don't have them.”
“And if they do?” he asked, breaking away from his watching the driveway for a moment.
“We'll,” she said and paused. “Have to be,” she said through gritted teeth as she slipped the plates connected by wires into position. “Quick! That ought to do it. Now for the latch.”
“Encouraging, really,” Tobias said, returning to the road.
Sally strained the windows apart as far as she could and slipped an oddly shaped piece of metal into the house, rotated it about and used it to hook open the window's latch. Then she slipped the two windows as far apart as the magnetized metal plates' wires would allow, about eighteen inches. The sensor, because of the wires, remained in circuit and fooled the system into believing the window was closed.
“Let's go,” she whispered and swung a leg through the opening.
Tobias passed in the knapsack and then crawled in after her. They were in an obviously renovated mudroom, just off the back door. Two huge washers and driers glowed metallically in the starlight through the window. Sally eased open the door to an equally renovated modern kitchen and peered slowly about. Satisfied, she opened the door, took a moment to wipe her shoes off and indicated to Tobias to do the same, and then they weaved through the dark kitchen to the hallway forward. The lights in the living room held a certain menace for Tobias, a symbol of the life here upon which he was invading.
Sally bound up the stairs two at a time but silently. As if she'd visited the house often, she guided them to the upstairs room that had been lit as they watched the house earlier. The knob turned and the door gave.
Pale blue starlight made a luminous atmosphere in the room but no detail emerged from the objects within. Sally pulled Tobias inside and shut the door before finding a desk lamp and lighting it. Tobias questioned her with a look, disjointed as it was by the stocking over his face.
“If they come home suddenly,” she said, “they'll think he left it on.”
The room was paneled in knotty pine; the carpet had been luxurious twenty years ago; the desk was far too large for the room, dwarfing the pictures and an expensive gold writing set atop it; curtains of a vague green color obscured the well-carved moldings; and pictures of men who looked and dressed like Jon Thoblon lined the walls. A picture of the President shared the desk with Thoblon's wife and sons—and a briefcase.
Tobias forgot his trepidation at sight of the one place they knew the Niger docs had once resided. He dodged around the desk and tried the briefcase's latches: locked. He looked up to find Sally, with her knapsack open beside her, kneeling in an open closet in front of what looked like a large metal ice chest.
“A document safe,” she said when she saw him looking at it, as she retrieved a couple lock picks from her bag. “Not as secure against explosives—or crowbars—as a real safe but it's only meant to survive a fire. The locks can be good, though,” she added slowly as she probed the lock, looking absently at the back of the closet. “Can you watch the road?”
“Yeah,” he said and stood with his back to the desk lamp and cupped his hands against the window pane. He could see the darker driveway amid the canopy of trees as it wound through a hundred or so acres to the road below. The light above the front porch reduced the quality of what he saw, however: he suddenly remembered a piece about burglaries he'd read, about how some alarms are silent and ring at the local police station. If they drove up the driveway without headlig
hts, he thought, I might not see them until they're on the porch.
“Before we left yesterday,” Sally said as she worked the lock, “you said you'd been kidnapped by the FARC.”
“Yeah,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder, her hands still in motion. “You never told me that before,” she said.
“No,” he said and then laughed through his nose. “No, I didn't. If I talk about it, I dream about it; so I don't talk about it.”
“I'm sorry,” she said, pausing in her work.
“Don't worry about it,” Tobias said, smiling at her briefly before turning back to the window. “It wasn't that horrible. They only had me for about ten hours. Then they tried to move me, by car, out of Bogotá. They tried to zigzag through the city's back streets and wound up ziging right into a traffic jam. Some sort of car accident ahead. Cops all over the place. So, they pushed their guns between their seats and I figured this was the only chance I'd get and reached across the guy to my right and opened the car door. He tried to stop me but wasn't strong enough to hold the door with one hand and so, with me half out of the car—he pushed me! I went ass over head into the street and when I got up, they were gone.”
“Wow,” she breathed. “That's as close as it gets.”
“Tell me—shit!” Tobias hissed. He pressed himself against the window, trying to see. “Headlights!”
Sally tried to work faster.
“Headlights!” Tobias repeated.
“I heard you,” she said calmly. “Tell me when they're here.”
“Christ,” Tobias swore. “No, never mind. They're not coming up, they’re passing by. This damn porch light: I can't see the edge of the property clearly.” He looked back to see Sally smiling at him over her shoulder. “Must have been a car passing on the road,” he tried to explain, lamely.
“Probably looking for their Christmas Eve party,” she said.
With a slight scratching noise, the lock turned.
“Bingo,” she said. “Let's have a look.” Sally rifled the rows of folders in the document safe. “I don't think they're here. Deeds, investments, and more investments; his will.”
She closed the safe and stood up, stretching her back.
Tobias shook a couple drawers of the desk. “You want to start with the desk or the briefcase?”
“Briefcase,” she said. “It's the easier of the two.”
“Don't suppose Thoblon would have some kind of James Bond incendiary in there to burn up everything if someone opened it the wrong way,” he said and smiled. Sally's hands froze an inch from the latches; she glared at him. “You can, you could tell, right?”
“With an X-ray machine,” she said. “Hell.”
Within seconds she had both latches open but only very slowly did she raise the lid. Once an inch separated the two halves, Sally flung open the briefcase. She swallowed loud enough to hear it in the dead-quiet room.
“They're here,” she said.
“The Niger documents,” Tobias said, stepping beside her and looking into the briefcase. “That's the title of the official who oversees the country's mines,” he said, pointing.
“Not just a pretty face,” she said, running a finger down his jaw.
“Particularly now,” he said, tugging at his stocking. “I compiled a list of the officials' names that should be on the documents—as well as their predecessors and replacements—while at the UN, in October. Need them to write the story.”
“I better get to work then,” she said.
Tobias returned to the window and Sally put the briefcase on the desk's chair. Setting the pile of Niger documents in the center of the desk, she took a picture off the desk of Thoblon's wife and laid it next to the documents to prove their authenticity in each photo she'd take, one at a time. Using a small but powerful digital camera (capable of 1200 dpi resolution), Sally began photographing each page of the Niger documents.
Footsteps thumped on the porch below them. Tobias shot out an arm and took hold of Sally's shoulder. She listened and the footsteps sounded again; two pairs, she thought.
“Lock the door,” she whispered and returned to her work.
Tobias sprang across the room on toe tips and turned the latch.
“He'll have a key,” he hissed.
“It'll buy us time,” she whispered, flipping pages and photographing them as quickly as she could. “If they come upstairs, we'll go out the window.”
Tobias returned to the window as the footsteps sounded again.
“What the hell are they doing?” he whispered. “Maybe it's cops. Maybe there was a silent alarm and they're peering through the windows. I don't see their car,” he said, trying to hide behind the drapes and see through cupped hands beyond the circle of light the porch light cast.
“Halfway,” Sally mumbled.
The camera continued to click as they strained their ears for the sound of someone coming up the stairs. Knocking down Jon Thoblon was one thing; Tobias was not prepared, he thought, to knock down a cop. By the mist on the window, he barely breathed at all.
“Good fucking Christ,” he said and laughed loudly.
Sally ducked and turned surprised and almost angry eyes on him.
“It's a deer,” he said. “There's a deer in the lawn. He just walked off the front porch.” Sally joined him at the window and cupped her hands to the glass, as well. “I guess you were right about the animals,” he said. “They're not used to humans being here.”
“Maybe he escaped from Santa's sleigh,” she said and returned to the desk. “I'm almost done.”
“That'd be appropriate,” he mumbled at the glass. “What with us looking like the evilest elves to ever get kicked out of the North Pole, with these stockings over our heads,” he said, flipping the leg of it that ran down his back.
Sally laughed in spite of herself. “Shut up,” she said. “I have to keep still.” Another minute passed. “There, done,” she said.
Tobias turned and stepped beside her, putting a hand on the small of her back; they both looked at the camera.
“We have them,” he said.
“We have them,” she said.
Sally slipped the camera into a zippered pocket in her running suit before replacing the Niger docs in Thoblon's briefcase, returning Mrs. Thoblon's picture to its place on the desk, and the briefcase to its former position.
“Let's get out of here,” she said.
They turned off the light and crept back downstairs, through the hallway, into the mudroom, and out the window. Sally reset the window frame and latch before carefully withdrawing the wires that had occupied the security system. Immediately, they ran for the woods. Once among the trees, they were forced to slow their progress; the scant light of stars filtering through the canopy above left the ground all but totally obscured. A twisted ankle now could prove disastrous. After a mile, Sally realized she still had the wires in her hand and stuffed them into the knapsack that Tobias wore. They removed their stockings then, too, though not pausing in their exfiltration. The cool night air was bracing, almost delicious after the strangling closeness inside the improvised masks. Once again Led Zeppelin occurred to Tobias's mind: he mumbled snatches of No Quarter's second stanza as they hurried along, but they did not talk.
A mile from their car, Sally halted to change out of her running suit, making sure to transfer the camera to her jeans. Tobias felt the light sweat on his skin hit by the night air after he removed and stowed his jacket.
“We must be safe enough for this,” he said and pulled her to him and kissed her, quickly but without restraint.
“Best to keep our eye on the ball, mister,” she said, giving him a shove and then taking his cheeks in her hands and pulling him down for a second kiss. “Oh crap,” she said suddenly. “Which way were we going?”
“That's not in the least funny,” he said.
She laughed and looked at the sky. “Ah, this way.”
“Are you navigating by the stars?” he asked.
&
nbsp; “More or less,” she said. “Although over an hour has passed so we should head a little more to the right.”
Indeed they should have. They hit the road down from the strip mall rather than coming to its parking lot. They backtracked quickly, exerting a supreme self control in order not to run once out in the open and in sight of their car. At the car, Sally put her stockings, rolled up, in her suitcase—among her other things of that sort—and her burgling tools in a tool box containing the usual automotive necessities. She took out Tobias's laptop and then joined him in the car, which he had running. They sped away from there about as fast as the law allowed: this was no time to receive a speeding ticket, which would place them in the vicinity at the time and near the place of the theft of the Niger documents.
Chapter 8
They drove through the rest of the night. Sally transferred the Niger doc photos to Tobias's laptop and then compared the names on them with the list of officials, past and present, Tobias had compiled earlier. The forger had lacked the most basic attention to detail: the names listed in the documents of people in crucial positions in the Niger government and at the mine were of current holders of those positions, not those who held them years ago when the documents were supposed to have been written. Offices were misnamed or misspelled; the grammar was poor enough for a government work, but the French was written by someone using English grammatical structure. Sally made notes of everything she found, verbally exploding with each new revelation. Even if Tobias hadn't been too wired for sleep, he should have had no trouble remaining awake with every other minute punctuated by a shouted exclamation from Sally.