Island of Thieves

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “A boat. Other side of the woods.”

  “But the cops. Can’t we just wait for them?” Morton untucked his shirt. The tapes holding the wire around his middle had torn loose during their escape. The transmitter had been lost. Who knew how much Guerin and the others had heard. Maybe nothing.

  Morton tugged the wire off his belly and dropped it onto the tiled floor. Karla had done good work convincing Morton to turn informant. The chemist had been smart enough to take the deal. Immunity on one hand, the probability of winding up like Kelvin Welch on the other.

  “They’re coming, right?” Morton said.

  “I don’t know.” Feds would announce their arrival as loudly as possible. Intimidation tactics. Shaw hadn’t heard so much as an air horn.

  But he did hear something else. Movement, from within the dark house. Near the central stairwell.

  Shaw motioned for Morton to wait. He moved past a dining area with a sideboard and a china cabinet and ten seats at the elongated table. The sound was footsteps. More than one person, descending the central staircase.

  He looked around the corner. It was Rohner, and Anders, the latter’s tall frame obvious even in the dim space.

  “Hold it,” he said, training the Browning at a point between them. “Drop the guns.”

  They turned. Shaw saw that their hands were empty. Anders’s right hand was wet, a black sheen. His arm hung limply at his side.

  “Don’t shoot,” Anders said. “We’re not armed.”

  “Shaw?” said Rohner.

  “Move back,” Shaw said, “into the kitchen.”

  “Shaw, get us out of here.”

  “Move.”

  They went. Anders walked very slowly. Rohner, as if to compensate, could hardly stand in one place. Shaw came up quick behind them. He patted each of them down, the jumpy Rohner first. Patches of blood, seeping from the arm beneath, had stained Anders’s suit sleeve. The tall man leaned against a monstrous Liebherr refrigerator.

  Rohner clutched at Shaw’s arm. “You made the right decision, coming back. You won’t regret it.”

  Morton, attracted by the voices, had come to the stairwell. “Come on,” he whispered. “Before they catch up.”

  “Where?” said Rohner. “Do you have a way off the island?”

  “A boat,” said Morton.

  “Then we’ll go together,” Rohner said. The confidence of the statement undercut by a quaver he couldn’t quite stifle. “All away from here.”

  “Too small a boat for four of us,” said Shaw. “And besides, no one gives a shit.”

  “We can make it,” Rohner said. “Name your price.”

  Shaw almost laughed. Second time tonight that someone had offered him a blank check. Shaw didn’t believe Rohner any more than he had C.J.

  “He can’t take us, Sebastien,” Anders said.

  “He can. He will,” Rohner said, blinking furiously.

  The tall man stared at his employer. He pushed himself upright, his palm leaving a wine-red smear on the brushed-steel face of the refrigerator.

  “Sebastien,” he said.

  Rohner looked back. Finally focusing on something. He was in shock, Shaw realized. Death had walked right up to spit in his face. Impossible to ignore. An adventure that Rampage Rohner could not command or control.

  “It’s over,” said Anders. He sat down, or his legs gave out, depositing him on a kitchen chair.

  Rohner blinked once more. He took a step toward the table, wavered, then finished crossing the room with three increasing sure strides. “Take Olen,” he said to Shaw. “My offer stands. Take him.”

  Anders sighed. “No.”

  “I’ll hide in the house,” Rohner said to him. “They won’t find me.”

  “I can’t make the journey, Sebastien.”

  Rohner put a hand on Anders’s shoulder. Maybe to offer comfort. Maybe to steady himself.

  “Who’s still alive?” Shaw asked Anders.

  “Kilbane was shot dead. By Hargreaves or someone else, I’m not sure. I don’t know about the rest.”

  “Castelli was killed, too. And at least two more on Hargreaves’s side.”

  “The helicopter,” Rohner said with that tremble again. “Came right down on one of them. Oh.”

  “Hang on,” Shaw said. “The cops will get here.”

  “I could help,” Morton said from the corner of the kitchen. “I have EMR training. I could stay. Stanch your bleeding.”

  They looked at the chemist.

  “For money?” Anders said to him.

  “Well, sure. Yeah. Since I’m risking my life, why not?”

  Anders turned to Shaw. “And you?”

  Shaw shook his head. “I’ve done enough business tonight.”

  He went to the rear door to peer around the curtain covering the window on the upper half. The few yards of grass separating the house from the forest were empty. The stygian black of the woods looked inviting. Safe.

  “Good luck,” he said, and ran for the tree line.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Riley radioed Taskine. “I’m at the boat. Ready to leave in three.”

  “On my way,” the reply came back.

  Riley pushed hard on the bow of the twelve-foot speedboat. The thing looked like a toy, and it weighed less than Riley and Taskine put together, even with its twenty-horse engine. But it was fast. Reaching civilization quickly would be worth getting soaked again out on the waves. He and Taskine had beached at low tide and hauled the boat high onto the shore to camouflage it with a tarp. Now, with the waves lapping at the edge of the green plastic, it required only a few hard shoves from Riley, the hull scraping over the rock, before the transom was in deep enough water to lower the outboard. Holding the boat’s bowline to keep it from floating away, Riley waded back ashore to collect his rifle and other gear.

  Over the steady patter of rain on his cap, Riley heard a rustling sound from up the beach. He dropped to one knee, drew his Colt from his hip, and aimed in the direction of the sound. The rustling happened again, simultaneous with a gust of wind.

  Jumpy, he chastised himself. But it was a good night to be on edge. He waited until he was sure the sound wasn’t caused by anything living. A heavy rock pinned the bowline as Riley went to see what was making the noise.

  A tree branch. He looked up the short bluff to the forest above. Even in the night, he could see scrub growing from the cliff face. It looked as though the branch had fallen over a lump in the rock. When the wind gusted, the leaves crackled against one another.

  In another ten paces, Riley recognized what he was seeing. An inflatable lifeboat, up on its side, with a tiny engine. He stared at it for a long moment before his face split in an irrepressible smile.

  Shaw. No damn way this boat wasn’t the Ranger’s. He might have stashed it here days ago. And Riley and Taskine had beached their own boat barely fifty yards away.

  A new realization dimmed his mirth. If that cockroach Shaw was still alive, this would be where he was headed.

  He edged back, slowly, listening for other signs of movement. When he heard none, he unsheathed his ASEK knife and plunged it into the rubbery inflatable. The first rush of escaping air made a juddering moan around the blade. The boat sagged into the split in the rock as it deflated.

  Wait for Shaw to show up and blow him away? Or count on Taskine making it here first? They could be gone inside a minute.

  Riley’s habitual grin was back. Leave it to chance and see which one wins the race. It would be slow and noisy work to hide their speedboat under the tarp again. He left it where it was, bobbing on the incoming waves.

  There wasn’t much cover on the beach. But in his black waterproofs, he’d be obscured if he stuck to the cliffside. He picked up his sniper rifle.

  On the opposite side of Shaw’s shredded inflatable, the face of the cliff was extra rough. Plenty of concealing juts of rock to let him hunker down and wait.

  If Shaw came around the tip of the island to his right, Riley had
the Colt. Otherwise the rifle. From two hundred feet away, he heard the low thump of their speedboat, borne on a wave against the rocky shore.

  Perfect, Riley thought. Perfect bait.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Shaw moved through the dark forest. Without a flashlight the going was slow. Because he was making as little noise as possible, doubly so. His normal footfall was very quiet, but in the woods he could hear every pebble that shifted under his soles.

  His weren’t the only sensitive ears. A crunch of moving brush came from the trees far to his left. Blacktail deer, or raccoon, or something else with enough heft to broadcast its hasty exit from his presence. Shaw stopped and listened until the patter of the rain on the branches was once again the only sound.

  He’d tamped down the instinctive urge to rush through the trees, reach his boat, and get gone. Short of offshore the woods were the safest place he could be. Even if the cops never showed, he could hide in the dense brambled acres for hours or even days.

  Tucker and Hargreaves and the two shooters with their sniper rifles. Those were the remaining hostiles. Maybe Pollan, the female member of Kilbane’s team. No one seemed to know what had happened to Pollan.

  Five left, then, to be safe. Some of them maybe fleeing. Maybe under arrest.

  Maybe hunting him through the woods, right this minute.

  He kept going. The scents of fresh pine sap and decaying bark suffused his nose. The alpha and omega of forest life. He came across a trail, or at least a line through the trees a little wider and clearer of vegetation than the woods around it. Shaw followed its path west.

  A piece of wood snapped, somewhere behind him.

  Shaw ducked low and froze.

  Breaking wood was not an animal noise. Not of the light-footed beasts of the San Juans.

  He waited. The snapping sound didn’t repeat. He moved off the trail, very carefully, feeling with his foot before each step to be sure there was nothing beneath his boot but moss and sodden leaves.

  Ten feet from the trail, he crouched behind the rotted shell of what had once been the trunk of a massive hemlock. Shaw’s eyes had long since adjusted as much as they would to the deep black under the forest canopy. He could make out the trees and the larger bushes. Looking upward from his crouch, he could see individual branches outlined against patches of overcast sky. Rain was still falling. More heard than felt, an arrhythmic tapping on leaves and in puddles.

  Over the raindrops Shaw caught another noise from down the trail. Closer this time. Within half a minute, the new sound had divided in two: the repeated beat of footsteps and the soft rasp of waterproof fabric moving against itself.

  Someone coming. Along the same path Shaw had found. Moving faster and consequently less quietly.

  The person neared. A large man, hooded and holding a long rifle, its barrel down and to the left. The man’s breath hissed through his nose. In and out, a quicker rhythm than his steps. He was pumped up and alert.

  One of Hargreaves’s hitters. The bigger of the two, the bearded Viking. Not searching for Shaw. His attitude and attention were focused on covering ground through the dark with speed. Heading for whatever extraction point he and his partner had arranged.

  Without conscious thought Shaw raised and aimed the Browning. One less enemy. He didn’t even have to kill the man; putting a round through the killer’s leg at this range would be as easy as through his heart, even in the gloom.

  But the shot would be heard by every person on the island. The rest of the Paragon team might be in the forest, or on the shore to either side. Giving away his position would be giving away his primary advantage.

  Hargreaves’s people could scatter. They could run as far as they chose, pick new names, new faces, even. If the law didn’t find them, he would. Shaw made that promise to himself as he let the man pass. In order to let the man pass. Feeling his teeth clench tighter with every fading step.

  After a count of fifty, he carried on. The map in his head told him the forest extended another quarter mile before the steep bluff and the shore beneath, where he’d concealed the Zodiac in the rocks.

  A hundred yards along, he heard a drum’s low beat far off to his eleven o’clock. Seconds later the same thump. And again. A familiar sound. The hull of a lightweight boat bumping against land.

  That must be their escape route. A boat not far from his own. Had someone found the Zodiac in its hiding place?

  He should hang back until he heard their boat leave. There was nothing to be served but his own ego from going after Hargreaves’s hired killers now. Pride could get him killed, and quickly.

  Better to let them escape. Absolutely.

  Shaw turned off the path and headed toward the sound.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Hargreaves pointed, and Tucker ran to the nearest outcropping of rock on the shore. When Tucker waved, Hargreaves moved past him to the next. Leapfrogging positions as each covered the other. They had made fast progress up the bare southern shore. Less than five minutes before, they’d spotted the FBI tactical team leaping from the beached police boats near Rohner’s personal art museum.

  The two men had cut across the estate, seconds ahead of the Feds. Getting soaked to the bone by the frigging rainstorm.

  Tucker had nearly tripped over something that turned out to be a chunk of aluminum flagpole, one end of it flattened and torn. The helicopter’s doing. Louis’s final flight. The night had gone to hell fast after that.

  Was Rohner dead? Hargreaves hoped not. He wanted his own chance to end that Swiss prick. And Karla. He was sure the whore had been behind the cops showing up. She and Shaw must be working together. They’d convinced Rohner to pay up and then bolted before the trap snapped shut.

  It had been slick, Shaw’s thing with the bomb or the smoke grenade or whatever that had been. And Hargreaves knew that the polymer invention was viable now. Morton had done at least that much good. That knowledge was worth something. He could get another operative inside Avizda. Take another batch of the chemical, by force if they had to.

  There was a way off this island. The boat he’d arranged for Taskine and Riley. Had they cast off already?

  Speed counted. If he and Tucker could beat them to the boat—or better yet catch them there by surprise—then finders fucking keepers. Those two psychopaths had exhausted their usefulness.

  EIGHTY

  The cliff wall lent Riley some shelter from the rain. He’d decided on a sitting position, one knee up to support his arm, the rifle nestled easily into the crook of his elbow. Not quite textbook, but more comfortable. He watched the little speedboat bob on the waves.

  Riley didn’t know fuck-all about the tide tables in the Northwest, but the waterline had been much lower when he and Taskine first arrived on the island. The tide had come up far enough to fill the pools near the cliff since then, and it seemed to be retreating now. The boat floated when the waves came in, thumped the rock when they went out. Wouldn’t be long before it was aground again.

  “Hey,” said Taskine over the radio, “I’m at a damn drop-off. Way above the beach.”

  Riley spoke low. “Where?”

  “Maybe half a klick from you. The woods were so dark I couldn’t hardly see my feet.”

  “Follow the cliff west. Find a place to climb down.”

  “Copy.”

  “And keep quiet. We might have company comin’.”

  Good. Taskine was close. Five minutes, maybe less, and they would be gone.

  And just like Christmas, another present arrived. A big, broad-shouldered shape, one shadow splitting off from the others near the cliff. Moving to the boat as it nodded hello on the waves.

  Riley smiled wide, his cheek pressing against the rifle’s stock. Howdy-do, Shaw. Ran like a rabbit across the whole country from NYC. All that way just to get dead at home.

  He took a deep breath and let it out slow. When the walking shadow was calf-deep in the water, reaching to grab the boat’s bow, Riley squeezed off one round.


  Dead center. The bullet spiraling through breastbone and organs and spine so easily that it was an instant before the dead man collapsed, his arm skidding along the boat’s hull and pushing the little craft aside.

  The body lay facedown. Riley sat for a moment to watch with satisfaction as the tide lashed around the slack limbs. Fish food.

  He stood up and walked toward the corpse. Maybe he should take a trophy. Wasn’t normally his thing—Taskine liked souvenirs when he played with marks, especially women—but Shaw had required some goddamn effort. He should remember this victory.

  Four shots came out of the darkness. Two taps of two. From low to the ground. Forty yards off, maybe fifty. Riley’s senses noted all these facts even as his eyes were dazzled by the muzzle flare and a pain like a flaming sword sliced through his left shoulder, or neck, or both. Blood splashed over his face. His own. He fell to one knee, rolled, and somehow managed to keep rolling in his panic, more pain as he banged over the rocks. Scrambling for the cover of a boulder near the cliff face.

  Shaw had a partner. Somebody planted early on the island, just like he and Task had been. Goddamn it. They should have guessed that.

  Riley’s left arm was limp. He pushed himself up with his right to lean back against the boulder. He drew his Colt with his good hand. His shooting hand. He’d lost the rifle.

  And he was bleeding. A warm flow down his chest and belly. Scary fast. His trap muscle, he could tell now, just a couple inches off his neck. How bad? He wanted to reach to feel, but not so much that he wanted to let go of the Colt. His left hand lay useless in his lap, fingers curled like a shriveled spider.

  The sneaky shit might think Riley was finished. Might show himself. Riley hoped that happened fast. Or else he was fucked up one side and down the other. Another warm pulse spread down his chest.

  Where was Taskine? Riley didn’t want to risk talking out loud. He couldn’t reach his left hand to tap the comm and signal distress. Screwed. He’d have to hope Task had heard the gunfire. Was coming to take this mother out.