Thief by Greg Curtis Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
     
    Being caught in the nude had been merely embarrassing, but staring at her for perhaps twenty minutes in the middle of a burglary – that was straight out suicide. Mikel had spent decades training himself - perfecting his operations and planning them to the tiniest detail - and yet in a single day, a single moment she had undermined everything. Mistakes could not be tolerated.
     
    First, on a hunch, he began with the halo. He focused on her with one of the security cameras, almost surprised it was still working, and studied her.
     
    At first he’d worried the halo would be entirely in his mind, but seeing it there in the camera reassured him it was actually there. He wasn’t completely mad. Until he tried to spectrally analyse it with the computer. Far from breaking it down into its different light components, the computer couldn’t even find it. That made his head pound furiously as he tried to understand how that could be. He saw her halo even through remote electronic imaging equipment, but the equipment itself couldn’t see it.
     
    Logically he finally decided, it meant that the halo wasn’t actual light after all. If it was, the cameras would see it. Neither was it some form of psychic projection. Otherwise, how could he see it through a camera, when she couldn’t even know he was watching? Instead it had to be a product of the viewer’s mind, but one that related to the viewer’s perception of the woman as an angel, rather than the angels’ own being. The viewer saw it but the angel didn’t project it. As an explanation it made no sense at all. But then what else about her did?
     
    Just to be absolutely certain of his sanity, Mikel had the computer scan a photographic image of her and then reduce it to a tracery, which thankfully it did. The outline sketch although not particularly flattering, showed a woman with wings. He let out a small sigh of relief. Computer cogito, ergo sum. The computer thought it could see her, therefore she existed. It was the best proof of her reality he was likely to get.
     
    Next he decided to study her speech. Not that she could, or at least, did speak with him. But whenever she was around he’d listened to her making a fantastic variety of sounds. Her voice was incomparable to anything he’d ever heard. It stood somewhere between birdsong and whale song, but with a few splashes of other creatures thrown in, and a large dash of something else all together. It flowed from her sometimes in response to him, sometimes to the animals that worshipped her, and sometimes without any reason. Whatever it was, it was wondrous, surely the sound of the ancient sirens as they lured sailors to their watery graves. Of course they too were mythical creatures. Did that mean, he wondered, that they too might exist?
     
    Microphones a thousand times more sensitive than mere human ears, recorded her every note for about five minutes, while the most advanced voice analysis software started breaking it down. But even as he was waiting for the final results, he knew it would be a lost cause. Looking at the early data, he could see clearly that she was cooing and whistling at ranges far beyond human ability to hear let alone utter. It slowly dawned on Mikel that she didn’t speak not simply because she didn’t want