Van der Heuvel looked at me with scorn.
“Mr. Hawkins, if you shoot me, you will be in a prison for the rest of your life. Henri will still be alive and living in luxury somewhere in the world.”
“Take off your coat,” I said, hefting the gun in my hand. “And everything else.”
“What is the point of this, Hawkins?”
“I like to watch,” I said. “Now shut up. Take off all your clothes. The shirt, the shoes, the pants, every stitch you have on.”
“You are really a fool,” he said, obeying me. “What have you got on me? Some pornography on my computer? This is Amsterdam. We are not prudes like your citizens of the United States. You can’t tie me to any of it. Did you see me in any of those videos? I don’t think so.”
I stood with the gun clasped in both my hands, leveled at Van der Heuvel, and when he was naked, I told him to grab the wall. Then I whacked him on the back of his head with the gun butt, the same treatment Henri had given me.
Leaving him unconscious on the floor, I lifted Van der Heuvel’s tie from the pile of clothes on the chair and used it to secure his wrists tightly behind his back.
His computer was connected to the Internet, and I worked fast, attaching the Henri Benoit videos to e-mails that I addressed to myself. What else?
There was a box of marking pens on his desk, and I dropped one of them into my coat pocket.
Then I walked through Van der Heuvel’s immaculate, full-floor flat. The man was house-proud. He had beautiful things. Expensive books. Drawings. Photographs. His closet was like a clothes museum. It was sickening that a man this base, this vile, could have such a carefree and luxurious life.
I went to Van der Heuvel’s magazine-quality kitchen and turned on the gas burners on his stove.
I set dish towels and two-hundred-dollar ties on fire, and as flames reached for the ceiling, the overhead sprinkler system opened.
An alarm rang out in the stairwell, and I was sure another alarm was ringing in a firehouse nearby.
As water surged across the fine wooden floors, I returned to the main room, packed away the computers, slinging both mine and Van der Heuvel’s over my shoulder.
Then I slapped Van der Heuvel’s face, yelled his name, jerked him to his feet. “Up! Get up. Now!” I yelled.
I ignored his questions as I marched him down the stairs to the street. Smoke billowed from the windows and, as I’d hoped, a thick crowd of witnesses had congregated around the house: men and women in business attire, old people and children on bicycles that the city provided free to residents.
I sat Van der Heuvel down on the curb and uncapped the marking pen. I wrote on his forehead, “Murderer.”
He called out to people in the crowd, his voice shrill. He was pleading, but the only word I could understand was “police.” Cell phones came out and numbers were punched.
Soon sirens screamed, and as they came closer I wanted to howl along with them. But I kept Henri’s gun trained on Van der Heuvel and waited for the police to arrive.
When they finally did, I set down the Ruger on the sidewalk, and I pointed at Van der Heuvel’s forehead.
Chapter 120
SWITZERLAND.
Two cops were in the front seat, and I sat in the back of a car speeding toward Wengen, a toylike Alpine town in the shadow of the Eiger. Despite the ban on cars in this idyllic ski resort, our armored vehicle twisted around the narrow and icy roads. I clenched the armrest, leaned forward, and stared straight ahead. I wasn’t afraid that the car would sail over a guardrail. I was afraid that we wouldn’t get to Horst Werner in time.
Van der Heuvel’s computer had yielded his contact list, and in addition to the complete playlist of Henri Benoit’s videos, I’d turned over my transcripts of Henri’s confessions in the trailer. I’d explained to the police the connection between Henri Benoit, serial killer for hire, and the people who paid him.
The cops were elated.
Henri’s trail of victims, dozens of horrific killings in Europe and America and Asia, had been linked only since the recent murders of the two young women in Barbados. Now the Swiss police were optimistic that with the right kind of pressure, Horst Werner would give Henri up.
As we sped toward Werner’s villa, law enforcement agents were moving in on members of the Alliance in countries around the world. These should have been triumphant hours for me, but I was in a state of raw panic.
I’d made calls to friends, but there were no phones where Amanda was staying. I didn’t know if it would be hours or days before I would know if she was safe. And although Van der Heuvel had referred to Henri as a toy, I had more evidence than before of his ruthlessness, his resourcefulness, his lust for revenge. And I finally understood why Henri had drafted me to write his book. He wanted the Alliance, his puppeteers, to be caught so that he could be free of them, to change his identity again and lead his own life.
The car I was riding in braked, wheels shimmying on ice and gravel, the heavy vehicle sliding to a stop at the foot of a stone wall. The wall fronted a fortresslike compound built into the side of a hill.
Car doors opened and slammed, radios chattered. Armored commando units flanked us, dozens of men in flak jackets who were armed with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and high-tech equipment I couldn’t even name.
Fifty yards away, across a snowy field, glass shattered. A window had been knocked out in a corner room of the villa. Bullets flew, and grenades boomed as they exploded inside the target area.
Under covering fire, a dozen agents charged the villa, and I heard the rumble of snow cracking loose from the steep grade behind Horst’s stronghold. There was shouting in German, more small-arms fire, and I visualized Horst Werner’s dead body coming out on a stretcher, the final act of this takedown.
With Horst Werner dead, how would we find Henri?
The massive front door opened. The men who were leaning against the wall aimed their weapons.
And then I saw him.
Horst Werner, the terror who Van der Heuvel had described as a man with long arms and steel fists, “the last man you’d ever want to meet,” came out of his house of stone. He was barrel-chested, with a goatee and gold wire-framed glasses, and he wore a blue overcoat. Even with his hands folded on top of his head, he had a confident “military” bearing.
This was the twisted man behind it all, the master voyeur, the murderer’s murderer, the Wizard of some hellacious, perverted Oz.
He was alive, and he was under arrest.
Chapter 121
HORST WERNER WAS BUNDLED into an armored car, and Swiss cops piled in behind him. I went with two Interpol investigators in another. An hour after the takedown, we arrived at the police station in Bern, and the questioning of Horst Werner began.
I watched anxiously from a small observation chamber with a window onto the interrogation room.
As Werner waited for his lawyer to arrive, his face streamed with sweat. I knew that the heat had been turned up, that the front legs of Werner’s chair were shorter than the back, and that Captain Voelker, who was questioning him, was not getting much information.
A young officer stood behind my chair and interpreted for me. “Herr Werner says, ‘I do not know Henri Benoit. I haven’t killed anyone! I watch, but I do nothing.’ ”
Captain Voelker left the interrogation room briefly and returned holding what looked like a CD. Voelker spoke to Werner, and my interpreter told me that this disc had been found inside a DVD player, along with a cache of other discs in Werner’s library. Werner’s face stiffened as Voelker inserted the disc into a player.
What video was this? The Gina Prazzi murder? Maybe some other killing by Henri?
I angled my chair so that I could see the monitor, and I took a deep breath.
A man’s bowed head came on the screen. I could see him from the crown of his skull to the middle of his T-shirt. When he lifted his swollen and bloodied face, he turned away from the camera, away from me.
&nb
sp; From the one brief glimpse, the man looked to be in his thirties and had no distinguishing features.
An interrogation was clearly in progress. I felt the most extreme tension as I watched. Off camera, a voice said, “ Onnn-reee, say the words.”
My heart jumped. Was it him? Had Henri been caught?
The bloodied prisoner said to his questioner, “I’m not Henri. My name is Antoine Pascal. You’ve got the wrong man.”
“It’s not hard to say, is it, Henri?” asked the voice from the wings. “Just say the words, and maybe we will let you go.”
“I tell you, I’m not Henri. My identification is in my pocket. Get my wallet.”
The interrogator finally came into view. He looked to be in his twenties, dark-haired, had a spiderweb tattooed on his neck and the inked netting continued to his left cheek. He adjusted the camera lens so that there was a wide shot of the bare, windowless room, a cellar lit by a single bulb. The subject was hog-tied to a chair.
The tattooed man said, “Okay, ‘Antoine.’ We’ve seen your ID, and we admire how you can become someone else. But I am getting tired of the game. Say it or don’t say it. I give you to the count of three.”
The tattooed man held a long, serrated knife in his hand, and he slapped it against his thigh as he counted. Then he said, “Time is up. I think this is what you’ve always wanted, Henri. To know that moment between life and death. Correct?”
The voice I’d heard from the hostage was familiar. So was the look in his pale gray eyes. It was Henri. I knew it now.
Suddenly I was filled with horror as I realized what was going to happen. I wanted to shout out to Henri, express some emotion that I didn’t understand myself.
I had been prepared to kill him, but I was not capable of this. I couldn’t just watch.
Henri spit at the lens, and the tattooed man grabbed a hank of his brown hair. He pulled his neck taut. “Say the words!” he yelled.
Then he made four powerful sawing strokes at the back of Henri’s neck with the knife, separating the screaming man’s head from his shoulders.
Blood spurted and poured everywhere. On Henri. On his killer. On the camera lens.
“ Onnnn-reee. Henri. Can you hear me?” asked the executioner. He brought the severed head on a level with the camera.
I backed away from the glass, but I couldn’t stop watching the video. It seemed to me that Henri was making eye contact with me through the monitor, through the glass. His eyes were still open — and then he blinked. He actually did that — blinked.
The executioner bent to the camera, his chin dripping sweat and blood, smiling with satisfaction, as he said, “Is everybody happy?”
Chapter 122
GORGE ROSE IN MY THROAT, and I was trembling horribly, perspiring heavily. I suppose I was relieved that Henri was dead, but at the same time my blood was screaming through my arteries. I reeled from the sickening, indelible images that had been freshly branded on my brain.
Inside the silent interrogation room, Horst Werner’s unfeeling expression hadn’t changed, but then he looked up and smiled sweetly as the door opened, and a man in a dark suit came in, put a hand on his shoulder.
My interpreter confirmed what I’d guessed; Werner’s lawyer had arrived.
The conversation between the lawyer and Captain Voelker was a short, staccato volley that boiled down to one unalterable fact: the police didn’t have enough to hold Werner at this time.
I watched in shock as Werner strolled from the interrogation room with his lawyer, a free man.
A moment later, Captain Voelker joined me in the observation room, told me emphatically that it wasn’t over yet. Warrants for Werner’s bank and phone records had been obtained. Alliance members around the world would be squeezed, he said. It was just a matter of time before they had Werner locked up again. Interpol and the FBI were on the case.
I walked out of the police station on unsteady legs, but into clean air and daylight. A limo was waiting to drive me to the airport. I told the driver to hurry. He started the engine and raised the glass divider. But still, the car took off and maintained only a moderate speed.
Inside my mind, Van der Heuvel was saying, “Be afraid of Horst Werner” — and I was. Werner would find out about my transcripts of Henri’s confession. It was admissible evidence against him and the Peepers. I had replaced Henri as the Witness, the one who could bring Werner and the rest of them down on multiple murder charges.
My brain sped across continents. I slapped at the divider, shouted to the driver, “Go faster. Drive faster.”
I had to get to Amanda, by plane, by helicopter, by pack mule. I had to get to her first. We had to draw the walls around us and stay hidden, I didn’t know for how long, and I didn’t care.
I knew what Horst Werner would do if he found us.
I knew.
And I couldn’t stop myself from wondering one other thing. Was Henri really dead?
What had I just watched back there at the station?
That blink of his eye — was it a wink? Was the film some kind of video trick he’d played?
“Drive faster.”
Epilogue
By Benjamin Hawkins
A letter to my readers.
When this book came out, the sales far exceeded my publisher’s expectations, but it had never occurred to me that it would be in thousands of bookstores around the world — and that I would be living in a shack on the side of a mountain in a country not my own.
Some would say, “Be careful what you wish for because you may get it.” And I would answer, “I got what I wished for in a way I could not have imagined.”
I am with Amanda, my love, and she has adapted easily to the breathtaking beauty and solitude of our new life together. She is bilingual, and has taught me to speak another language, and to cook. From the start, we planted a vegetable garden and took weekly hikes down the mountain to a charming village for bread and cheese and supplies.
Amanda and I were married in this village, in a small church made by devout hands, blessed by a priest and a congregation of people who have taken Amanda and me into their hearts. The Foozle will be baptized here when he comes into the world, and I can hardly wait for him to be born. Our son.
But what is his birthright? What promises can I make him?
The first time I saw the off-road vehicle climbing the rut that winds up from the valley, I armed my bride and lined up guns on the table near the window.
The car was a private carrier that my publisher had hired to bring me mail and news of the world. After I searched the driver and let him go, I read everything Zagami sent me. I learned that the Peepers had been rounded up, that every one of them will go to trial for murder, and for conspiracy to commit murder, and for lesser crimes that will keep them in prisons for as long as they live.
Some days, my mind fastens on Horst Werner, his long arms and steel fists, and as his trial drags on, I think, At least I know where he is.
And then I think about Henri.
Sometimes I run the images of Henri’s death through my mind like a length of film through the sprockets of an old-time film projector. I watch his horrific execution and convince myself that he really is dead.
At other times, I’m just as sure that he has fooled everyone. That he is living his life under an assumed name — as I am. And, one day, he will find us.
I thank my loyal readers for your letters, your concern, and your prayers for our safety. Life is good here. Sometimes I am very happy, but I can’t quite dismiss my fear of the psychopathic monster I knew too well — and I cannot ever forget the McDaniels family, Levon, Barbara, and Kim.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to these fine professionals for giving generously of their time and expertise: Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk, Capt. Richard Conklin, Clint Van Zandt, Dr. David Smith, Dr. Maria Paige, and Allison Adato.
We also thank our excellent researchers: Rebecca DiLiberto, Ellie Shurtleff, Kai McBride, Sage Hyman
, Alan Graison, Nick Dragash, and Lynn Colomello.
Special thanks to Michael Hampton, Jim and Dorian Morley, Sue and Ben Emdin, and to Mary Jordan, who makes it all possible.
THE WORLD ALL AROUND YOU.
LIFE AS YOU KNOW IT.
EVERYTHING YOU LOVE.
James Patterson Page 24