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truly evil. They killed, cheated, stole, raped, and carried out every other obscene act possible simply for their own selfish purposes. To nearly all of them, there was nothing important outside of their own wants and needs. Once they might have been hungry or stupid youngsters. But they had grown up to become scum, pure and simple. He was not like them. He hated everything about them.
     
    But the dark side of the coin was still dreadfully real. That he too, like those he stole from, was too far gone to be redeemed. He stole, lied and swindled. He hated those he stole from, and that hatred itself was a sin. So was pride and he was always a proud man. How bad did you have to be to go to hell? Perhaps angels carried the Lord’s punishment. He dreaded to think what that might be.
     
    Then there was the more tantalizing possibility, his first thought, that she wanted to hire his services. She had as much as said so, even though she had said nothing. The angel had come to hire a thief. It made more sense and yet it also made none. Angels surely don’t steal.
     
    Then there was Mikel himself. A sinner, perhaps beyond redemption, perhaps not. OK, so maybe even he didn’t know exactly what was his state of grace, but he knew he surely couldn’t be an angel’s first choice as an agent. Unless of course she wanted the most skilled thief in existence, which he was just about vain enough to believe he might be. Certainly no other contenders sprang to mind, but then if they did exist, he wouldn’t know of them as he reminded himself. Just as they wouldn’t know of him.
     
    Yet the angel had made no attempt to make him return the stolen loot. In fact she hadn’t even commented on the fifty million in cut diamonds on the seat beside him. Or the bags of money, stocks and shares, bank accounts stored on the laptop, and piles of gold bars in the cabin of the plane. In fact she hadn’t even seemed to notice them. Maybe she just didn’t care about them.
     
    It had been a busy week. Currently he had around five hundred million U.S. held in an ancient seaplane barely worth a hundred thousand. It was one of the more delightful ironies of his life. And the hard currency he carried with him was less than a tenth of what he’d actually stolen through the miracles of the electronic banking system. When the crime lords found their bank accounts cleaned out, he suspected they’d spit blood, their own for once, and that was a pleasing thought.
     
    On the other hand the diamonds and the rest were in fact themselves probably stolen originally, though from where even he didn’t know. Would the angel have wanted him to return them to a mobster, drug dealer and murderer who himself wasn’t their true owner? He suspected not. The same applied to the gold and cash, all stolen or taken from the pain and suffering of others. Wasn’t it better that it went to those who needed it?
     
    He tried to recall what he’d read of the bible as a youngster, what he’d read of angels, but it was precious little and far too long ago. He could have asked her, but that would mean once more exposing himself to her compelling charms. And he’d only barely managed to get her to stay in the rear of the plane’s tiny passenger cabin by explaining it was too dangerous. It was. A pilot staring all day and night at an angel might well fly into the ocean without ever knowing - or caring.
     
    Angels from what little he remembered, were the messengers of God. They heralded important events, such as the birth of the lord. Somehow it seemed unlikely that this angel was here to tell him of the Second Coming, - he hoped. If she was he was surely the worst of all possible messengers to spread the word. Some of them, Seraphim?, he wasn’t even sure of the word, also spoke for the lord, while cherubs shot people with little love darts. Other angels played harps, sang a lot and generally flew around in heaven. For the first time ever he wished he’d paid more attention