by Gregg Loomis
He heard Louis's surprised intake of air, something between a gasp and a grunt.
Lang mentally kicked himself. He had fallen for one of the hoarier surveillance tactics. Leather Jacket had had every intention of being spotted, of keeping Lang's attention, so that when he failed to follow Lang and Louis from the copy shop, Lang wouldn't notice a second tail.
Shit.
The two men were a good five feet apart. No chance Lang could draw the SIG Sauer from its holster and fire before at least one of the intruders could shoot.
Lang slowly raised his hands, his fingers manipulating the envelopes so that one was squarely behind the other. "What can I do for you gentlemen?"
Leather Jacket motioned with his weapon. "The envelope you have in your hand, Mr. Reilly, put it on the counter and slide it toward me."
There was a trace of an accent Lang couldn't identify.
As Lang slowly lowered the hand with the packets in it, he turned his profile slightly so the hand was briefly hidden from the intruders. He let one envelope drop into a jacket pocket. He hoped the widening of Louis's eyes didn't give the sleight of hand away.
The question was whether these two intended to take what they had come for and leave, or if the plan included making sure Lang did not trouble them further. The silencers on each gun did not suggest a happy ending. It was unlikely a man would risk carrying something that bulky if he had no intent of using it.
If Lang was going to do something, now seemed about the right time.
But what?
SIXTEEN
Headquarters, Atlanta Police Department
Ponce de Leon Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia
At the Same Time
Det. Franklin Morse read the report for a third time. It made no sense. None. Somebody over at the state crime lab been sampling the shit the narcs sent for analysis from drug busts. Either that or the place had gone loony tunes.
The powder from that professor's lab over at Georgia Tech... Something here was totally and terminally fucked. But then, why should Morse be surprised? Everything that had to do with that Reilly guy Was equally screwed. Couple of years back a burglar had taken a dive off Reilly's twenty-fourth-story balcony. Year after that, some dude put enough sulfur nitrate and diesel fuel in Reilly's little toy of a car to reduce it to metallic confetti.
No reason, no explanation.
The worn casters of Morse's swivel chair squeaked as he pushed back from his cubicle and tried to think of something else for a second or two. This report combined with Reilly was enough to ensure a permanent migraine.
Think of something else. The hum of the office, the sound of rain.
He did not have to look out a window to know it was raining. He could hear the dripping of water from leaks in the football field-sized roof into a dozen or so buckets, trays, and whatever else could be requisitioned from a cash-strapped city. It wasn't enough to keep the smell of mildew out of the worn and soiled electric blue carpet or the faded and peeling gray wall covering.
City Hall East, they called it. An old, clapped-out, and outdated Sears mail-order center was what is was, a real estate acquisition from the venerable old retailer that rivaled only the sale of Manhattan for twenty-six dollars' worth of beads in naivete.
The city's naivete.
But the purchase had funneled a lot of cash in commissions to the then-mayor's friends, as well as demonstrating that his minority-participation plan would really work.
And that P. T. Barnum had been right.
The neighborhood had been so tough that female officers demanded escorts to the dark, damp parking lot. There were more winos, hookers, and small-time thieves on the streets than cops.
But that was changing. Fifty-dollar-a-week flops were being transformed into fashionable loft condos for yuppies and dinks (double income, no kids), and word was, the city was going to sell the old brick pile to developers who, no doubt, were friends of the present mayor.
Morse pushed his chair farther back, almost colliding with the woman who had the cubicle next to his. He stood and, clutching the report, made his way to the captain's office across the room. Let the brass try to make sense of this one.
If Morse couldn't solve the problem, he could do the next best thing: kick it upstairs.
SEVENTEEN
University of Amsterdam
"I said, slide the envelope toward me," Leather Jacket repeated.
Lang was now about 90 percent certain he and Louis were not supposed to leave this laboratory alive. The silencers, the fact that Leather Jacket had to have been told Lang was likely armed but made no effort to take his weapon—neither bode well.
He gave the envelope a halfhearted push a few inches.
"The envelope, Mr. Reilly."
Leather Jacket's irritation was obvious.
Lang lifted the packet and flicked his wrist, sending the envelope spinning toward the door.
The two intruders' reflexively lifted their eyes and reached, if only for a split second.
Not much.
But all he had.
Lang slammed Louis under the adjacent counter as he rolled under the other, freeing his automatic.
A string of spitting sounds filled the room as splinters, glass, and cement flooring fragments flew like shrapnel.
Lang popped up on the far side of the counter and let loose a volley of his own. Leather Jacket cursed, spun, yanked the door open, and staggered out, blood flowing down his leg. He had dropped his pistol.
His companion stood against the wall as his finger slipped from his weapon. The man started to say something as a dark red stain spread across the front of his shirt as though the bladder of ink in an old-fashioned fountain pen had leaked.
His feet seemed to take forever to slide out from under him as he sat on the floor.
Lang was beside him before the wet breathing sound stopped. He kicked the gun out of reach before a hasty search of his. clothes revealed just what Lang had expected: nothing. No ID, no wallet, a total absence of anything by which he might be identified.
The trademark of a professional assassin.
The room stank of cordite and was hazy with burned gunpowder.
Louis crawled out from under his counter and wobbled on shaky knees. He looked at the dead man and quickly averted his eyes. Lang was certain the Belgian was going to throw up. Instead he stared at Lang with equal shock and horror, as if he were observing his boss sprouting a second head.
He muttered something in French, then, "Monsieur Reilly, I..."
Then he lost it, the old Technicolor yawn.
A man stuck his head in the door and asked something in French.
Lang followed his bewildered gaze around the devastated laboratory, then to the still-heaving Louis. "Sorry. I can't ever remember whether you can add acid to water. Or is it water to acid?"
The man left the door open. Lang could hear him shouting as he ran down the hall.
By this time Louis had recovered somewhat, although he still looked like he wouldn't be sitting down to a bowl of moules anytime soon.
"Louis," Lang said evenly, "listen closely. I'm going after the other guy. In a few minutes the police will be here."
He nodded. At least he understood something.
Lang continued. "You are to tell them he took me with him."
He seemed to comprehend so far.
"Those men came in here and we jumped them, comprendez-vous pas?"
He didn't.
"It is very important that we say the same thing. We thought we were going to be shot and killed, so we attacked first. In the scuffle one of them got shot. The other made me go with him, used me as a shield."
He might as well have been trying to explain algebra to Grumps.
He tried to keep the urgency out of his voice, although he could hear the pulsating sirens of approaching police cars.
"We had to get the guns, Louis, or we would be dead instead of this guy. You were very brave, Louis, attacking a man wi
th a gun. The other man, the one who got away, used his gun to make me go with him."
At last, comprehension.
At first the trail of blood drops was unmistakable.
On the street they were becoming farther apart, and the sunlight was fading. After two blocks the telltale splatter disappeared. The guy must have stopped to apply some sort of tourniquet—which meant he couldn't be far away on a gimpy leg.
Lang continued down the street, rewarded by the sight of a man with an obvious limp dodging in and out of the early evening stream of pedestrians.
Keeping back, Lang followed.
Lang was thankful that Amsterdam was less than automobile-friendly. He dodged several bicycles, a tram, and one or two cars. He cleared the street just in time to see his quarry cross a canal bridge.
On the other side the trees lining the waterway spread their limbs under streetlights, making moving specters on the mottled walkways. Street signs—Dude Spiegel, Wolvenstraat—meant nothing to Lang as he followed across another canal, the fleeing figure ahead of him making no effort to conceal his direction of retreat. He obviously thought Lang would have remained behind to interrogate his partner.
Even so, there was no point in being reckless. Lang ducked into a coffeehouse with a view of the length of the street. His first breath filled his nose with the musty smell of marijuana, maybe enough to leave him stoned if he kept breathing the air. There was a time in his college days when a free high would have been appealing, but not this evening.
Lang had chosen the ideal time to hide from sight. The man ahead looked over his shoulder and slowed slightly. Lang waited for him to disappear around the next corner before sprinting past the same intersection and to the next. Flattening himself against the cold brick of a canal house, Lang peered out. As anticipated, Leather Jacket had now slowed to a painful limp, more interested in what might be behind him than in front. As he passed, Lang drew back from the streetlights' warm glow.
Halfway down the walk beside the canal, the mart gave a final look over his shoulder and climbed down to one of the narrow boats tied bow and stern along the waterway. A moment later, lights appeared at a porthole.
Now what?
If there were some way to Capture Leather Jacket, there was little reason to think he would yield any more information than his confederate. Professional hit men weren't known to be loquacious.
Lang noted the name painted across the stern of the boat, Manna, and a registration number, and decided to wait.
An hour later no one had come or gone from the boat, but police sirens seemed to be crisscrossing the city. How long before someone became suspicious of his loitering and called the cops? If he wasn't going to get any information from Leather Jacket about contacts, he might as well make certain the man didn't get another chance to kill him.
Lang waited another full five minutes before leaving the concealment of the shadows. With his hand behind his back on the butt of the SIG Sauer, he approached the boat. Since there had been no lights on before the man's arrival, it was a near certainty that the boat had only the single occupant. But how to get aboard? The craft's narrow beam ensured that even the lightest step onto the deck would produce telltale rocking. And even if he could surprise the man on board, sounds of a fight or gunshots in this peaceful neighborhood would surely draw police, who, sooner or later, would figure out that the dead man back at the university had not been shot with his own weapon.
Lang would have to think of something other than forcing his way aboard.
He watched two boats pass, neither wake sufficient to cause as much motion as climbing aboard would. He watched the sluggish current until it gave him an idea.
There was no power line from the craft to shore, no pigtail connection that would have acted like a third mooring line. The boat's electricity, then, was provided by a generator-powered battery. The lights would stay on whether or not the vessel was tied up.
Silently he crept to the stern of the boat, untying the line that moored it to the bollard at the edge of the canal's embankment and letting the rope slide into the listless water. As yet another craft passed, he did the same for the bowline, this time holding on with one hand and keeping the other on the gun butt.
Slowly, ever so gently, the sluggish current moved the boat from the space it had occupied along the embankment and pushed it along at a pace Lang's slow walk could easily match. The first bridge presented a problem: Lang couldn't both hold the line and let the craft continue. He let go, following the narrow ship along the canal.
After what seemed a mile or so, Lang saw rows of bright lights ahead and perpendicular to his path. That, he guessed from what Louis had said and the brief reading he had done on the train, would be the Amstel, the river that crossed all canals and was the route of much of the city's commercial and industrial transportation.
The man inside was blissfully unaware he had gone from a tranquil residential canal to one of the busiest waterways in Europe, a highway of commerce that operated twenty-four hours a day.
Running ahead, Lang found a spot not occupied by another craft and leaned over, catching the trailing bowline. Gently he slowed the craft until it was stopped at the intersection of canal and river. From his right Lang could see a string of barges pushed by a smaller vessel, something resembling a tugboat. Patiently Lang waited until the relative positions seemed about right.
Then he let the rope go.
The canal boat edged tentatively into the river, gaining speed as the stronger current turned it abruptly to port. The sudden motion must have alerted its occupant. His head suddenly appeared through the hatch on the upper deck just as the tug saw the smaller vessel and let go a warning blast from its horn.
There was no way the multiple barges could stop in time, and the canal boat was not under power to maneuver. Lang felt the crunch of steel cutting through wood all the way to his bones.
Lang waited for nearly an hour, watching the multitude of light-flashing police craft until the divers surfaced with a limp form that was immediately zipped into a body bag. The crowd along the banks and the nearest bridge dispersed, returning to restaurants and bars.
Lang hoped he could remember the way back to the university. He was fairly certain he couldn't pronounce it well enough to ask.
As he walked, the tension of pending action was replaced by a sour taste, bile that rose in his throat at the thought of killing. In all the years he had been employed by the Agency, his most violent act had been jostling someone on the Frankfurt U-Bahn, his greatest peril, other than one foray behind the Berlin Wall, an accident on the Autobahn. Since his retirement to what he and Dawn had anticipated would be a much safer civilian life, Lang had suffered a half dozen or so attempts on his life and been forced to defend himself with deadly force.
It was, perhaps, by divine scheme that Dawn had not lived to see the ordinary American lifestyle she had so longed for become a game of life and death.
The thought gave him little comfort.
The memory of his wife, their dreams of a family, and a domestic life enjoyably dull was largely illusion, he admitted to himself. Realistically, the day-to-day predictability would have led to a tedium even spirited court battles could not have entirety dispelled. Life among normal people would have become monotonous.
On one level, he knew these truths to be evident. On another, in the place he reserved exclusively for Dawn, he refused to admit their existence. He was certain that even ennui with her would have made him happy.
Quite another compartment was reserved for Gurt, the second love of his life. He doubted she would long have tolerated a life where the only excitement was the weekly installment of 24 on television. Indeed, the prospect might well have been the reason she left despite his overtures of marriage.
So much for tripping down Memory Lane.
Lang had the present to worry about. There was no way to know who wanted the foundation's project halted, even if it meant murder. Nor could he be sure how many killers
might be in Amsterdam.
He could, however, make several informed guesses.
The uniformity of armament, the Heckler & Koch automatic rifles, the silenced pistols, suggested organization. These were high-quality weapons and almost impossible to procure by civilians in the firearm-paranoid European nations. AK-47s would have been unremarkable. The most easily obtained gun on the continent, if not the world, it was a version of the Russian assault rifle once manufactured in almost every former Iron Curtain country and still plentiful on the arms black market. The variety of knock-offs carried an assortment of problems, such as jamming, misfires, and unreliable parts.
Instead, someone had the means and knowledge to acquire quality weapons.
The fact that he had been met at the Brussels airport suggested organization also. Either the group had the ability to hack into Europe's air traffic control or they had a network that extended back into the United States, where someone had reported his departure.
Once again he was the target of some ill-defined association whose chief purpose at the moment seemed to be eliminating him. Although the feeling was becoming familiar, it was far from comfortable.
EIGHTEEN
University of Amsterdam
Thirty Minutes Later
By the time Lang had returned to the university, only a couple of uniformed policemen remained in the ruins of what had been Benjamin Yadish's laboratory.
Louis stood to one side, anxiously smoking a cigarette.
"You have spoken to the police?" Lang asked pointedly.
Louis nodded. "I told them we knew we were about to die and how you threw something to divert their attention. I was not sure what happened next."
About as good as Lang could have expected.
He looked at the cigarette in the Belgian's fingers. "I didn't know you smoked."
"I quit ten years ago."
Lang Reilly: the antidote to Nicorette.
In addition to the cops in the room, a distraught little man in a seedy sweater and wrinkled corduroys was walking over. Lang didn't fully understand Louis's introduction, only that the man's name was Pierson, a professor and some sort of official at the university.