Island of Thieves

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “Thank you for coming,” Chen said.

  Rohner stepped forward. “I should be thanking you. I’m very sorry for what happened to Nelson Bao. He seemed like a good man.”

  Sebastien had barely met Bao, Anders thought. But what else did one say in such circumstances?

  Chen indicated the dock and the conveyances tied to it. Most of the people on the island were already preparing to leave, the household staff aboard the motor cruiser and the planes waiting to receive the guests.

  “Time is limited,” Chen said. “I suggest we speak plainly. Nelson will not mind.”

  “The sheriff seems to be leaning toward a finding of misadventure,” said Rohner.

  Flynn crossed his arms. “What do you believe?”

  Rohner looked at each of the men before responding. Anders was familiar with the tactic, which didn’t mean that it was ineffective. Sebastien was expert at making each person in any gathering feel engaged and included.

  “I believe two things are possible,” the Droma CEO said. “One is that Nelson slipped and struck his head. I feel strongly that will be the sheriff’s conclusion. As soon as the police allow us all back on the island, we can resume our business.” Rohner inclined his head in sympathy. “The other possibility is that Nelson was attacked. However unlikely that is, we should consider it. If so, then he was assaulted for some reason, and the most logical assumption is that he was carrying something his attacker wanted.”

  Rohner turned to Chen. “Was Nelson holding anything for you? For us? Perhaps he noted some details of our deal on his computer or phone . . .”

  “My concern is identifying Nelson’s assailant,” Chen replied.

  “I’ve been thinking about that as well,” said Rohner, as if Chen had not ignored his question. “To state the obvious, all of us have a substantial interest. We still have validation tests to run, but we all share the confidence that those tests will be successful. None of us here has anything to gain from delaying our deal.”

  Chen nodded.

  “This would point to an outsider,” Rohner continued. “Someone seeking to steal one of our components or inhibit our progress. I don’t have to remind you of the potential value of our collaboration.”

  “And how would that person know what to steal?” Flynn said. “How would they know about any of this?”

  “Inside information,” Anders said. “It would have to be.”

  “Yes,” said Rohner. “Information provided by someone aware of our tests here this week and how much the resulting solution could be worth. But not one of us.”

  He looked at the three other men in the circle. None of them volunteered anything beyond frowns.

  It was Zhang, of all people, who broke the silence. “The caretaker. Shaw. He is not a caretaker.”

  They looked at him. Chen didn’t turn around but inclined his head slightly to one side. An invitation for his man to continue.

  “He is too . . .” Zhang reached for the words in English. “He watches too much.”

  “Observant,” Chen said.

  “Yes. He is military, or government. A high percentage of training.”

  Chen hummed agreement. Zhang seemed to take that as a sign that he’d said enough.

  “Shaw did strike me as capable,” said Anders.

  “A tough-looking SOB,” Flynn said. “No question. You’re the one who brought him on, Sebastien.”

  “He was recommended,” Rohner clarified. “But let’s not run ahead of ourselves. Shaw was the one who found Nelson Bao. Though he also called Anders to the scene. Would he do that if he were Bao’s attacker?”

  Flynn shrugged. “Maybe Shaw thought someone spotted him on the beach. He had to cover his tracks.” He pointed to Chen. “He kills your guy for what he’s carrying, hides it somewhere, and pretends to find the body. Which leads me back to the first question. Is anything missing?”

  They all looked at Chen. After a moment he nodded.

  “Shit,” Flynn said.

  “You’re certain?” Rohner had gone stone-faced.

  “A portion of the chemical sample,” said Chen.

  “Not the whole thing, then? Is there enough left to test?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Flynn paced. Not so close as to distress Zhang, who Anders noted might be spoiling for some flavor of conflict. “What kind of answer is ‘perhaps’? If we can test it, let’s move forward.”

  “We cannot,” Chen said without changing the even tone of his voice, “until I have a new chemist.”

  That stopped Flynn abruptly. “We’ve got Morton.”

  “No.”

  “You can trust his skill. I only hire the best.”

  “I require independent verification,” said Chen. “Someone I will engage.”

  Flynn fumed. Rohner stepped in before the impulsive Bridgetrust man said anything else. “How long will that take, Mr. Chen?”

  “I will be in touch when I know. Gentlemen.”

  Chen rose. Zhang fell into step next to him as they walked toward the dock.

  The Bridgetrust CEO waited until the two were out of earshot.

  “Our Mr. Chen is playing games,” he said.

  Rohner was still looking after Chen and Zhang. “His employee is dead. He’s cautious.”

  A moment passed before the other man turned to Rohner. His heated emotion gone, as if his face and spirit had been wiped clean by a damp cloth. Even the blue eyes had dimmed to a flat steel.

  Anders stared. It was a surprising transformation, even knowing that Bill Flynn was merely a mask that the man had donned for Chen’s benefit.

  When he spoke, even the voice was hollow. Stripped down to icy syllables.

  “A few billion on the table, you’d think Chen could see his way past one chemist,” he said. “Call me the moment you hear from him.”

  When Rohner and Anders didn’t reply, he marched away in the direction of the estate.

  When he was gone, Sebastien Rohner turned to his chief of staff.

  “If Shaw truly is to blame for Nelson Bao, then we have a larger issue to contend with.”

  Anders’s lips tightened. “I should never have sent Kilbane to oust Shaw from the island.”

  “No.”

  “A miscalculation,” Anders said. “I thought that with Shaw’s intractability, having him leave sooner than planned would be better. We could still have blamed him for the theft once the solution went missing.”

  “And now a key element truly is lost. And Shaw may have it. I don’t enjoy the irony, Olen.”

  “No. Of course not,” Anders said.

  “If Shaw took the sample from Bao, he can only be a pawn. We hired him barely a day before coming here.”

  “I agree. Someone must have made Shaw aware of the chemical’s value—or simply paid him to betray us.”

  Rohner glanced in the direction of the man who had just left. The one whom Chen Li and the rest of the guests knew as Bill Flynn.

  “It has to be Hargreaves,” he said. “We know how he operates. Infiltration. Duplicity.”

  Anders considered that. Sebastien was at least partially right, of course. James Hargreaves was not to be trusted. Anders had no difficulty imagining the man resorting to violence if it suited his aims.

  But the timing was wrong. If Hargreaves had been behind the theft, maybe with Shaw as his catspaw, then surely he would have waited to steal the chemical sample until the tests had proved its worth. Else he might be left with nothing.

  The same reason that he and Sebastien had chosen to wait. There was little point in purloining the solution from the gallery—and making enemies—before they were certain of the rewards.

  “It may be Hargreaves behind the theft,” Anders said. “Though I don’t believe even he would risk upsetting the deal this close to victory.” He cleared his throat. “There is one other person within Droma familiar with Shaw. And our history with the chemical.”

  Rohner’s brow creased. “Linda?”

  “She knows a
ll of the particulars. She could easily have contacted Shaw before he arrived here, and come to a mutual agreement.”

  “No. I won’t entertain the idea.”

  “It’s doubtful, I agree. I’m merely weighing the possibility. We’ll investigate. Lay our fears to rest.”

  The sputter and roar of a seaplane engine came from the dock. Anders had taken the initiative to call the pilot of the larger yellow aircraft, who had lifted off from Seattle shortly after the police arrived. It would return to the city with most of the guests, while C.J. would fly the remainder to Friday Harbor. The staff would have to make the brief trip aboard the Vóllmond.

  Rohner looked at the stream of people leaving.

  “We need this to happen, Olen,” he said. “To keep all that we’ve built, we need this.”

  It was rare that Sebastien allowed a chink to show in his armor of confidence. Anders treated his friend’s openness with the care it deserved.

  “I know,” said Anders. “We’ll see it through.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Shaw left the choice of restaurants in Friday Harbor to Karla. She chose a pub on Front Street called the Cask & Schooner. A window table was open, with a view of the marina from where they’d walked. On a Thursday morning, the traffic on and off the ferry to the mainland was light. They watched a slow thread of cars and foot passengers making their way through the roundabout in front of the pub.

  “We’ve been awake so long it feels like lunchtime,” Karla said. “Reason enough for a Bloody Mary.”

  Shaw ordered a stout, and when Karla noticed him eyeing the shepherd’s pie, she added a turkey burger to go with her drink. Since the sheriff’s announcement at the pavilion, she had changed from her tracksuit into a black blouse with epaulets and a gray skirt with black flats. Her hair was out of its ponytail and slightly windswept, even though she’d taken C.J.’s plane to Friday Harbor rather than the boat like Shaw. Shaw had changed clothes aboard the Vóllmond after noticing dirt on his pants and shirt from crawling on the north wing’s roof. Rangi, at the helm, was the one to point him to a stateroom. The boat’s head had been constantly occupied, with fifteen people sharing space on the cruiser.

  “Do you still have a job?” Karla asked.

  “Doubtful. I don’t think the island will have another meeting for a while.”

  “And not many facilities to manage until they do. Sorry.”

  “It was a temporary deal,” he said. “I took it on a lark as much as anything else. Are you going back to New York?”

  “Not right away. Since we’re already in Seattle, Bill Flynn wants to see if we can meet with potential clients. The personal touch.”

  “Do you like your work?”

  “Aspects of it.” She waved a hand at the marina and the tiny hump of Brown Island beyond, which formed a sort of natural breakwater for the harbor. “The travel occasionally takes me to nice places. Not so often that I’m forced to live out of a suitcase. I’ve done those jobs, and they get old fast. Plus, there’s the challenge. Every client has different problems, and they’re pretty intense about solving them fast.”

  “Like what? Cash-flow issues?”

  “Yes. Or their investment equity, which has been a roller coaster for everyone the past few years.” The server brought their drinks. Karla sampled a taste of hers, then stopped. “Wait. We should toast. To Nelson.”

  Shaw tapped his pint glass against hers. “Did you see Chen or Zhang afterward?”

  “Only in passing. I think the Rohners invited them to the house while the police sort everything out. Which might take a while. The sheriff doesn’t really believe it was an accident.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Karla said, frowning. “For one, a whole team of people with tackle boxes arrived in a police boat. You didn’t see them?”

  Shaw hadn’t. He’d been inside the gallery, adding to the list of crimes committed on the island that day.

  “Well, it looked to me like more people than you’d need to examine the scene of a tragic fall,” Karla continued. “And when they collected our wands, they tagged them all with our names and asked everyone again where they were around one o’clock in the morning. They’re looking for a mismatch between the stories and whatever the wands say. You know those things probably track movement in and out of the buildings, too.”

  Shaw’s own wand would show a whole lot of hours spent in the same strange spot, just outside the south wing where he’d buried it each night before watching the gallery. That could become a problem if the police started digging.

  “Sounds about right,” he said.

  “Not the sort of thing police do when they think it’s a mishap.” Karla nodded. “That whole island was just plain strange. Half vacation home, half fortress. Neither fish nor fowl. I don’t suppose Sebastien Rohner is some sort of doomsday prepper?”

  Shaw laughed. “Only for financial catastrophes, I’d bet.”

  “Well, it won’t be my first choice of vacation spots. Speaking of which, I was thinking after our client meetings are concluded I might take a couple of days off to sightsee. If there’s anything worth seeing.” Karla stirred her drink, the salt on the rim catching the red swirl and absorbing it to become pink granules.

  Shaw stalled by taking a sip of stout. Wren had made it clear that she and Shaw weren’t exclusive. The fact that he wasn’t seeing anyone else seemed to make her uneasy, like he might be just waiting around for Wren to finally commit to the relationship. This was new territory.

  “If you’d like a guide,” he said finally, “I suddenly find my days open.”

  “Yes. I’d like that very much.” Karla smiled. Dazzlingly enough that the server seemed to pause in the action of setting down their salads to bask in the glow.

  With the last of the police leaving the island, Anders turned to business. The calamity with Nelson Bao had put him well behind. He kept a small office in the north wing of the estate for his personal use. He decided to begin with the morning’s voice mails on his mobile phone.

  That was when he saw the alarm notification.

  The estate system had multiple levels of alerts. The top level was of course for any activation of the alarm itself, or an outage that might leave the house or gallery vulnerable. Lower levels of notification were informational, such as logging the time whenever one of the Rohners or Anders himself entered the gallery or whenever doors opened and closed.

  Doors or skylights.

  Anders preferred to see everything—it was his painstaking nature—but he had set these lesser notifications to silent. His phone had made no sound when the skylight was opened earlier that morning at 06:04. And the little banner of text had quickly become submerged in the constant river of other messages.

  He stood up and fairly raced down the hall, his urgency nearly carrying him out of the wing before logic prevailed and he slowed his pace. Whatever was done was done. And he would need assistance.

  He found staff members working in the kitchen, two of the handful remaining on the island. “I require a ladder,” he said to the senior of the two. “Twenty feet at least. Have one brought to the gallery at the side of the house.”

  Anders left the man to it. He walked through the glass corridor to the house and upstairs to his bedroom. He retrieved his tablet computer from the safe. The computer had logged the same intrusion, the skylight opening just after six in the morning. But no alarm had sounded, even though it should have.

  He went outside, where two of the groundskeepers were propping the ladder against the side of the gallery.

  “What needs fixing, Mr. Anders?” The groundskeeper had donned his tool belt and had one foot ready on the first rung. Anders impatiently waved him aside and began to climb. The two younger men hurried to hold the ladder at its base while he ascended.

  On the roof he used the tablet to deactivate the gallery’s alarms and unfastened the latch of the skylight. The natural accumulation of dirt and tar grit on the roof around the bubble-shaped window had
been disturbed. Upon opening the hatch, Anders found scuff marks on the white aluminum frame. He knelt for a closer look. A black fiber had caught along the frame’s edge.

  A rope, Anders judged. Dropped into the gallery, whereupon Shaw had climbed down.

  There was no question in Anders’s mind that it had been Shaw. The criminal had means and opportunity. It was his motive that concerned Anders now.

  Bao had been dead hours before dawn. The sample taken from his body. What purpose could Shaw have had in breaking into the gallery at six o’clock that morning? Had he stolen some of the art?

  Anders climbed down the ladder and told the men to remove it. He waited until they were gone before entering the gallery.

  All the statues were in place, still draped in muslin. Every component of the laboratory as well. It didn’t appear that any of the solvent or other materials Morton had prepared had been taken either.

  Perhaps Shaw’s reason was simply to see what he could see. Curiosity and cats, Anders pondered.

  Shaw’s discovery of the laboratory was unexpected. But it might be a clue. Shaw had told Anders that he hadn’t found anything near Bao’s body. If he’d been lying—if he did have the chemical—then it was possible that Shaw had broken into the gallery in an attempt to discover what it was he held, and its value.

  Anders smiled. Sebastien’s original plan had been to have the distinctively scarred thief seen by all the guests, and an ample amount of his time spent near the gallery. Shaw would then be paid and quietly sent away. A diversion, to allow Anders to take the final steps to secure Droma’s future and make certain that neither Chen nor the treacherous Hargreaves could cheat them out of what was rightfully theirs.

  Now, if Shaw truly did hold the missing sample, Sebastien and Anders could still appeal to his mercenary nature. Money had proved an effective enticement for Shaw before; it would do so again. Sebastien could offer a better price than anyone else.

  Triumph snatched from the closing jaws of disaster. And once Shaw took that bait, Anders would make sure the man was sent far out of their way. There could be no more risk of interference.