EXCERPT - THE HUNTRESS

PROLOGUE

ALASKA

        Freda O’Neil reached above her head and ran her hands over the cracks and fissures in the rock. Her delicate, young fingertips crabbed across the fracture lines, reading like Braille the surface just beyond her line of sight. Freda found a grip, jammed her boot sole onto a tiny lip of rock and raised up until her eyes peeked above the ledge.

        "What do you see, Freddie?" a voice called up from below. "Is it there or not?"

        "Shush, Daddy!" she whispered. "It’s there. It’s huge!"

        The bear stood up on its hind legs and lifted its nose to the wind. It sniffed, then turned toward Freda. Freda pulled herself up onto the ledge and belly-crawled to a sheltering boulder.

        "What is it, Freddie?"

        "A brown," Freda said. "A boar, maybe ten feet tall." The bear dropped onto all fours and walked toward her. Its rippling fur flashed in the sunlight. 

        "Come on down and we’ll wait awhile," her father called to her, an artificial calm in his voice.

        Freda did not move.

        "Freddie!"

        "I’m okay, daddy. I’m just watching him watch me."

        "Then I’m coming up." John O’Neil reached up and grabbed at the rocks. His hands found nothing but smooth surfaces. He moved sideways and tried again.

        "Freddie! How the devil did you get up there?"

        "Daddy, be quiet!"

        John O’Neil checked his rifle, a .375 H&H Magnum hanging at his side, and tried yet again to climb the rock.

        Freda stared as the bear walked toward her. Crouching behind the boulder, she slipped her long bow off her shoulder. She’d made the bow herself, modeled after a brand designed for bear hunting.

        "Freddie, get down here!" John O’Neil shouted.

           Freda ignored her father and pulled three homemade arrows from her quiver. Each one represented eight hours of labor. Each one should fly true. Her hands caressed the Sitka spruce shafts searching for any flaws. She checked the fletching, three sharp-shinned hawk feathers that trisected the rear end of the shafts and made the arrows rotate at high speed and fly straight. She touched the broadhead arrow tips which she’d wired to the shafts. The arrows all looked perfect. Nevertheless, she chose one and returned the others to her quiver. Freda kissed her fingertips, laid them on the arrow and closed her eyes for a moment. She heard a noise and looked up.

        The bear was much closer, maybe 70 yards away. Freda knew the bear couldn’t see her behind the boulder, but bears have noses like bloodhounds and he was walking straight toward her. His massive shoulders rolled with the gait of his thousand pound body.

        Freda caressed the rattler that hung on her necklace. She remembered the day. Hot and dry, with a wind to light fires. Her father had taken her hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. Freda was looking into the brush, her hand above her brow in the intense sunlight, when she heard the snake burst into agitated alarm. She pulled an arrow from her quiver and let it fly. It was only when she reached for the dead snake that she saw the bear trap in the high grass right where she would have stepped had the snake kept silent. The trap was old and showed the rust of years of abandonment. Freda tossed a branch onto the trap. It snapped shut with such power that the wood was cut in two.

        Freda touched the rattler again and leaned out from the boulder to see the bear.

        He was 50 yards away and coming toward her at a steady pace. If he smelled her and knew she was there, she would be much safer. But if he didn’t sense her presence and was surprised by her scent, he might charge. At forty miles per hour, she would need a miracle.

        Freda nocked her arrow and raised her bow. The bear was close enough to shoot if she had a 60 pound bow. But she was not that strong. Her 45 pound bow was good to 30 yards. Much better to be closer still, 20 or 25 yards to make the kill.

        Freda waited as the bear came closer. Her arms shook with a tremor. Sweat ran into her right eye. She blinked at the sweat. To make the kill she needed to hit the bear’s lungs and heart just behind his shoulder. But the bear was facing toward her. A shot from the front might glance off his massive shoulder bones. Even his skull would deflect an arrow.

        He was now only 20 yards out. Freda drew her arrow, her small shoulder muscles bulging.

        Freda did not hear her father yelling. The bear did. He turned, stopped and lifted his head up to sniff the air.

        The bear charged.

        Freda released the arrow.

        The arrow entered the bear just behind his shoulder bones but at too shallow an angle to hit his lungs.

        The bear roared, spun and bit at the wound. Frothy balls of saliva arced through the air.

        Freda nocked another arrow and drew it back. She stepped out from behind the boulder into full view of the bear. The bear spun again and started to run toward her, but not before Freda released the second arrow.

        The bear bit at the second wound and turned to run away. But the arrow had found its mark.

        The bear dropped to the ground.

        "Freddie! What are you doing?" Her father scrambled over the edge of the rock. He jumped up, his rifle ready, but stopped when he saw Freda standing there, her bow at her side. His eyes traveled down her line of sight until he saw the huge bear lying motionless on the ground.

        John O’Neil looked back at his daughter. His eyes were wide with shock. Then they softened. He grinned and shook his head in amazement. John O’Neil walked over and wrapped his arms around his daughter. "Freda May O’Neil, you are an exceptional child."

        Freda stood silent in his grip, her eyes streaming tears as she looked out at her first big game kill. She thought of how majestic the bear had looked as he wandered his kingdom. She remembered the great bear on his hind legs just moments before, surveying a world that he ruled until Freda struck him down.

        She looked at the bear, prostrate now, bleeding his last life into the grass. His eyes were open and glassy.

        Freda O’Neil stood in her father’s arms and vowed never to shoot any live thing ever again.

        She was twelve years old.

CHAPTER ONE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

        Toro Fernandez wore his best into his new life. His shirt was pink silk, smooth as mother-of-pearl. The wool of his black suit was so fine the threads were invisible to the eye. On his feet were Gucci shoes, on his wrist a gold Tiffany watch. His black hair was slicked straight back.

        Presentation is everything, his mother had told him many times when he was a little boy. If you look good, perhaps you won't feel so terrible, Toro thought now.

        Toro Fernandez was flanked by two men as they rode in the dark backseat of an unmarked squad car down Pennsylvania Avenue. The smoked windows of the car made it impossible to see in. Several blocks before the White House the uniformed cop at the wheel turned off on a side street, drove a quarter mile and pulled into the drive of a large, squat, gray building.

        Toro leaned across one of the men to look up at the drab edifice. A light snow was falling, collecting bright white on the window ledges and accentuating the dirty facade.

         The driver paused in front of a surveillance camera at a corrugated steel garage door. The door rose and the driver eased the car forward into relative darkness.

         A minute later the men were in a room lit with bare fluorescent light fixtures. One of the tubes flickered and clicked.

        "Sit," said a plainclothesman. He pointed to a folding chair on the other side of a masonite banquet table.

        Fernandez sat.

        The uniformed policeman stood at the door, his feet planted wide, his hands clasped in front of his crotch. The other men left.

        Waiting in the room, Toro worried. He was being given a new chance, but his world had caved in. Most painful of all was knowing he would no longer be around for Angelo Rosales, the skinny kid he'd grown so close to in the Big Brother program in New York City.

        Angelo was fourteen now. When Toro met them, Angelo had been eleven and his sister Juanita two. The children had been abandoned by their heroin-addicted mother and left in the care of their aunt.

        Angelo was small for his age, with thin delicate fingers and soft skin. He always looked down when addressed. Toro did not see the striking yellow brown of Angelo's eyes until their third meeting.

        Toro promptly inserted himself into Angelo and Juanita's lives, navigating between the children's needs for a responsible adult and the social worker's concern that if Toro became too important a fixture in their lives and then for whatever reason became separated from them, the trauma would be great. The words of the social worker haunted Toro now. He'd done just that. It was perhaps a worse crime than the one that had brought him here.

        In a few minutes one of the plainclothesmen returned with a man who wore John Lennon spectacles and a ragged brown sweater with elbow patches. The man carried a thin briefcase. He sat at the table and opened the briefcase.

        "I’ll get straight to the point. As of this moment your life as Toro Fernandez is over. Your security is dependent on the degree to which you dedicate yourself to eliminating your old identity from your psyche. I understand that your old boss may try to find you."

        The man shuffled some papers, scanning the information. "Your new name is Mario Rivas. Your father was Carlos Rivas, an illegal immigrant who worked the fields of California's San Joaquin Valley until he was killed when an almond harvest truck rolled over on him. Your mother was Luisa Montoya. She was a housekeeper in Bakersfield. She died during your birth. Both of your new parents' death certificates exist and are on file in their respective counties. The first five years of your life you were raised among Mexican immigrants speaking Spanish, hence your slight accent.

        "As Mario Rivas, you've worked for Haufmann Brothers on Wall Street ever since you graduated from Sacramento State University. Your first job was trading bonds. Later, you worked as a derivatives analyst. You rose quickly through the corporate hierarchy and were recently awarded a vice presidency. But Western Diversified in L.A. has made you a very attractive offer.

        "Western Diversified owns electronics firms, banks, insurance companies, an automotive parts manufacturer, shopping malls and so forth, a total of forty-two different concerns. Through their real estate brokerage they have arranged for you to purchase a house in Long Beach, only ten minutes from their main offices. The money for your new house came from the sale of your apartment in New York City. Western Diversified is paying your moving expenses and they have designated one of their secretaries, a man named..." the man paused as he looked over the papers. "A man named Felix Cruz will be your personal liaison. He will meet your plane which leaves in an hour and ten minutes."

        The man looked up from the papers. "A gentleman on the board said that your work in derivatives makes you eminently qualified to serve them.

        "Incidentally, the only history of you that Western Diversified knows is your new history, the history of Mario Rivas. We arranged to put them in contact with two people who do jobs for us. Western Diversified thinks our people used to work with Mario Rivas at Haufmann Brothers." The man took off his glasses and looked long and hard at Toro. "You should know the federal government told no lies in this process, a fetish of the woman who oversees this operation. Ours were sins of omission, unlike yours."

        The man collected the papers, put them into the briefcase and latched it. He slid the briefcase across the table. "This is yours. Everything you need is in it. Plane ticket, passport, California driver's license, ATM card with a PIN number of your old birth date backwards, check book, Visa, Master and Amex, all platinum cards. Your current bank balance is nineteen thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars, the net after the broker sold your Audi, furniture and other personal effects. I understand your salary and probable bonus are worth somewhere over four hundred thousand a year. Your stock options will be much more." He stopped, slipped on his glasses and peered intently at Toro through the gold-rimmed lenses. "Well, Mario." The man stood up.

        Toro, now Mario Rivas, stood and shook the man's outstretched hand.

        "The U.S. Government thanks you for your testimony. Good luck in your new life." The man looked at his watch. "A helicopter will take you to the airport." He gestured toward the door.

        The plainclothesman escorted Mario up to the roof where the chopper, its rotor spinning fast, waited on tip-toes inside a yellow circle. Mario climbed in, pulled the helicopter door shut and was at the airport 15 minutes later.

        At a bank of pay phones he placed a call to the New York apartment where Angelo and Juanita lived with their sometimes-sober, sometimes-high aunt.

        "Juanita," he said when Angelo's five-year-old sister answered. "This is Toro. How is my favorite cutie?"

        There was a short silence. "Angelo's mad at you." Her voice had more puzzlement than distress in it.

        "Why?"

        "He says you're leaving and never coming back. He says you hate us."

        "Juanita, my little darling. I don't hate you. I love you. It is only that I must go away for a long time. I will see you again. That is a promise. I better talk to your brother."

        The phone banged on the table.

        "Yeah?" Angelo said. The pitch of the boy's voice had been falling fast the last few months and Mario had a hard time reading its inflections. The boy was angry. That much was clear. Maybe sad. But Angelo wasn't going to let that show.

        "Angelo, I'm sorry."

        "Right. That’s why you moved away and didn’t say where."

        "I told you, Angelo. I am leaving on government business. But I will call."

        "What's a phone call? I'm raising Nita alone."

        "Aunt Carmen helps," Mario said.

        "Cokehead Carmy." Angelo was scornful. "The gang does a better job with kids than her."

        "Angelo," Mario pleaded. "Please don't tell me you are seeing the gang. We've talked so much about priorities. Your hobbies. Rock climbing. And stamp collecting. You want to stay with good activities." As Mario said it he felt a wave of guilt over his own criminal behavior sweep up and steal his air. Angelo didn't know what had happened. Angelo didn't read the papers or watch the news.

        "My life is too busy for climbing or stamps," Angelo said. "At least the gang is here for me. They care."

        "I will send you money if you want," Mario said. "If you need more, just say so."

        "Your money buys everything, is that it?"

        Mario felt stung. "Angelo, I have to go now, but I will call. Please remember what kind of a brother Juanita deserves."

        When Mario hung up the phone it was like closing the door on his old life. He handed the attendant the ticket with his new name on it and walked through the loading gate.

LOST POINT, NOVA SCOTIA

        "I'm offering you a percentage of what you help me retrieve," William St.Sebastian said. "If you're successful, you will be a rich man."

        George Greaves listened with doubt as the man paced back and forth in the remodeled fisherman's cabin. St.Sebastian was thin in a way that made Greaves think of a knife blade. He chain-smoked Winston 100s. A butt bobbed in his lips as he spoke to Greaves. Smoke curled up around St.Sebastian's thick black hair tinged with silver at his sideburns. Despite the man’s narrow frame and his cigarettes, he moved with a tense athleticism, like a caged cheetah.

        "You're not just a bodyguard," St.Sebastian said. "We checked you out before we hired you. Straight A's in your business classes at Notre Dame. I was the same. A jock who graduated with a four-oh. So I can see through a smart athlete. In nineteen sixty-six I was state champion in high school skiing. Then I led the Dartmouth team to the championship four years in a row." St.Sebastian stopped and gazed out the window. "I didn’t make the Olympic ski team, but I switched to the luge and won a silver medal in the seventy-four Olympics. So your athletic facade is transparent. You've got the size, but you don’t fool me." St.Sebastian resumed pacing.

        George Greaves pondered the offer. He had been hired to set up security for property as well as personnel. Three weeks after he started work, Federal agents seized the Wall Street company. Greaves was the only one out of fourteen in St.Sebastian's firm who hadn't been indicted and convicted. Lucky for him, but he was still out of a job. "I have questions before I get involved."

        William St.Sebastian stopped and looked at Greaves. "Ask anything you want." His eyes were the blue of a welding torch and were hooded like a raptor's.

        Greaves hesitated. Even though he was a 260 pound ex-lineman, the man intimidated him. "How much money is involved?"

        "Eighty million."

        Greaves hid his surprise. "What's my cut?"

        William St.Sebastian sucked his butt down to the filter, lit another from the glowing end and stubbed the old one out on the side of a scotch bottle, hot ashes falling to the table. "One percent," St.Sebastian said. "Eight hundred thousand is ten times what the job is worth."

        "I assume the entire sum is no longer recoverable. Five percent."

        "Two percent," St.Sebastian said. "Final offer."

        Greaves was suspicious. St.Sebastian had doubled the offer without a pause. "Where do you think the money is?"

        "You might remember Toro Fernandez."

        "I may have seen him come and go, but I don’t recall a face."

        "A good-looking Mex," St.Sebastian said. "I hired him to write the software. He put my money in his own account. Now he's in the Witness Relocation Program."

        "If I'm to have a chance at helping you, I need to know how you stole the money and from whom. From the beginning."

        St.Sebastian paced the small cottage. Out the window behind him a dozen ragged fishing boats headed out of the harbor into the calm ocean of early morning. "It started with Benoit Mandelbrot," he said.

        "Who's that?"

        "A mathematician. Born in Poland to Lithuanian Jews. Came of age in France. Moved to the States where he has worked for years for IBM."

        "What's he do?" Greaves asked.

        "Thinks."

        "I meant, what is his job?"

        "They pay him to think." St.Sebastian took a long drag on the cigarette. "I met him in the late seventies at a party being thrown for a dean at Columbia University. I asked Mandelbrot about his book which had just come out, The Fractal Geometry Of Nature. My interest was whether or not his fractals would apply to distribution of corporate earnings and losses. He said, yes, absolutely. We spoke about it for some time.

        "Later, it occurred to me that his fractals might also apply to the derivatives analyses we were selling to our clients."

        Greaves interrupted. "Derivatives are a computerized way of hedging your bets in the market."

        "Correct. We sell a customized software package that bird-dogs the market with regard to each client's investment portfolio." St.Sebastian was talking as if he were still in business. "The market variations that our software tracks are beautifully described by Mandelbrot's fractals."

        "What do you mean?" George Greaves asked. It sounded like bullshit.

        "Think of how markets rise and fall in seemingly unpredictable ways." St.Sebastian waved his hands up and down as he walked the perimeter of the small cabin. "It turns out that fractals can predict the movements." The man's cigarette glowed red as he drew it down and lit another.

        St.Sebastian grinned through a cloud of smoke. He resumed pacing. "I figured out a way to use fractals to analyze the river of money we handle for client companies. If you look at a river of water, you see big eddy currents here and there. Look closer and you see many more smaller eddies and so on. Now imagine a cup dipping in the water at those turbulent spots. By using fractals I was able to make predictions about where the financial eddies would be. This allowed me to dip the cup many times without anyone seeing it."

        "Eighty million times?"

        St.Sebastian nodded. "The money came from several dozen companies, all so large that they never noticed. The amazing bull market of the nineties made it possible."

        St.Sebastian continued, "And now the FBI and SEC think Toro Fernandez lost it all in a bad investment scheme! He fooled them all. They think anyone who talks is a bird of paradise. Fernandez sat in my office one day and told me that manipulating software was like manipulating cards. Houdini shuffle, he called it. It's the same as sleight-of-hand. The whole point is that wherever you think to look to uncover the trick is exactly the wrong place to focus. He's got my money squirreled and they're too dumb to realize they've been had!"

        "Besides Toro, you are the only one who escaped prison," Greaves said. "How'd you get away?"

        "Except for handcuffs, the FBI did not restrain me during a transfer from court to squad car. I hired a guy to steal a van and drive by with the side door open. A deep-water speedboat was waiting on the Hudson river. Later, a fishing trawler took me into Canadian waters. I've kept this hideaway in Lost Point for just such a possibility."

        "If I decide to take the job, what do you want me to do next?" George Greaves asked.

        St.Sebastian spoke in a soft voice. "Someplace in Miami is a man named Robert DeMeur. He’s probably in hiding. I have some information about DeMeur that he'd like kept quiet. He used to run a database service that we contracted with. He will help us find Toro Fernandez.

        "Go to Miami and find him. Give him this phone number. Tell him I'm his new first priority." St.Sebastian lowered his voice to a whisper. "If he has a problem with that, tell him I'm going to run his nuts through a garlic press and put the juice in the Miami DA's wineglass."