She assembled one of her cell phones and called him straight away.
“My brother is going to make the—”
“Device,” Katla interrupted, before Brandt would use the word ‘bomb’ over an unscrambled cell phone. “I understand. Is he going to make it at your apartment?”
“I don’t know. He’s going out. You think I should follow him?”
Jesus, the guy thought he was Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor.
“Please don’t try anything like that. Is he still carrying the same smartphone?”
“Yes. And he’s taking my car.”
Brandt gave her the make, model and plates of his car that she had already noted after the meeting, but Katla let him finish and said, “Don’t do anything suspicious. Allow us to do what you pay us for, all right?”
“All right.” Brandt sighed audibly. “I guess I’ll have to trust you.”
“Yes, I guess you have to. Don’t worry. We don’t want him to succeed either.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, please try to act like nothing is out of the ordinary. And don’t underestimate your brother’s paranoia, he’ll be ultra-wary about you and everyone else prior to the act. You’ve done a good job, we’ll try to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”
“Thanks.” Brandt heaved another deep sigh. Not eager to console him much longer, Katla terminated the call and disassembled her phone, started her Vespa again and hurried home.
PRESENT DAY IV
Muhammad watched the two policemen converge on the martyr, who seemed oblivious to the threat. Fahd was close to the railing though. The martyr still had a chance to put down the pink poodle in the right position for maximum damage, if Muhammad could find a way to distract the policemen.
Of course, he could detonate the bomb right now, but it might be better to wait. Not just to increase the damage, but also the drama. The various cameras aimed at the balcony would capture the event in detail and there was a perverse pleasure in waiting for the police to capture Fahd before detonating the bomb.
Although he was mildly surprised, Muhammad had expected some degree of intervention. No matter how tight cards were held to the chest, plans tended to leak. If not by him, then by less careful members of the brotherhood. A secret held by more than one person is not a secret. Still, these guys looked like professionals, so the threat had been taken seriously. And they were careful. The security staff seemed still as oblivious as Fahd to the interceptors, so they probably hadn’t been alerted. Smart move, because they probably wouldn’t be able to hide their excitement. Or their fear.
The undercover policemen’s presence and poise raised flags though. Muhammad wondered where the rest of the team was. Two men seemed awfully spartan to run an operation like this.
Aiming his Olympus higher, Muhammad pretended to take another picture of the glass dome while he observed his surroundings.
A sharp gaze studying the crowd alerted Muhammad to the third interceptor coming up the escalator to his floor. Wondering if the interceptor knew what he looked like, or even if the man knew there would be a remote controller, Muhammad turned away to a display of classic music compact discs, using the reflection of the plate glass window to keep track of the interceptor.
The third man reached the top of the escalator, trying hard to appear casual as his wary gaze flitted over Muhammad to study the other customers before turning to the railing.
This was the moment Muhammad had been waiting for.
In three steps he bridged the distance to the interceptor, who was talking softly under his breath. Grabbing between the man’s legs, Muhammad squeezed the guy’s nuts while he pulled him up and heaved him over the railing. One of the man’s flailing arms hit Muhammad in the face and send his sunglasses flying.
Teetering over the railing, the man’s screams alerted his colleagues who were momentarily distracted by their friend’s desperate cries for help. Muhammad pushed down on the man’s shoulders and send him over the railing. Screaming his head off, the man plunged down, then managed to grab one of the bars of the railing. The weight of his body swung his body further than his elbow could handle. A muted snap and the man cartwheeled through the air, landing with a dull thump on the lobby floor.
Customers all over the building rushed to the railings to watch the man lying like a broken doll on the marble floor of the lobby below. Muhammad moved away from the railing and shielded his face with his camera while he watched Fahd use the distraction to lift the poodle up to his chest in order to place the bomb on the railing.
The moment was there. Finally.
“Allah is Great,” Muhammad spoke under his breath as he threw himself back to avoid the shrapnel from the blast.
THREE DAYS EARLIER
The lock on Brandt’s cabin was a common tumbler lock. Katla passed it with her lock picks in less time than most people would take using keys. She stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind her before she switched on the Petzl LED lamp on her forehead.
Without touching anything, Katla quietly studied her surroundings: the halogen lamp arching over the workbench like a metal stork, the blacked-out windows, the Olympus camera and the pink poodle on the work surface gazing at her with unseeing bulbous eyes.
She looked up at an oversized light bulb connected to the main light switch by the door. There was something weird about the bulb. Apart from its size, the glass sphere seemed dark as night.
Katla placed a chair from a nearby desk under the light bulb and stood on the seat to study the bulb up close, smelling gasoline before she saw what she had expected: a simple and deadly booby-trap. The large, heavy wattage bulb had a hole drilled near the E27 male screw base to enable filling the bulb with gasoline just shy of the filament wire.
Roel Brandt was an engineer all right. An amateur would’ve filled the gasoline to the brim, figuring the more gasoline the better. Brandt would know that gasoline itself isn’t flammable. You can throw a lighted match in an open tank of gasoline and it would just extinguish. The flammable part of the gasoline is not the liquid but the fumes rising up.
The small amount of gasoline poured in the light bulb had been just enough to fill the glass sphere with gasoline fumes. Flip the switch and the incandescent filament wire would ignite the rapidly expanding fumes, filling the workshop with a huge fireball that would disintegrate everything inside.
While the gasoline alone would be enough to set the workshop ablaze and discourage anyone from a closer inspection due to the hot shards of glass peppering their faces, Brandt had put in some extra effort and added something grainy to the gasoline. Katla couldn’t be sure, but most likely the grainy stuff would be baking soda to turn the gasoline from a mere fireball into a searing burst of sticky napalm that would make sure intruders wouldn’t be able to escape the flames that would cling to them like shrink wrap.
Nasty.
She stepped down from the chair and went to the workbench.
The pink poodle was on its side, apparently untouched. Katla studied the underbelly. The seam looked slightly more irregular compared to the factory seam.
From her messenger bag she took a flat digital kitchen scale and carefully pushed it under the pink poodle. After she weighed the poodle, Katla took photos from all angles and walked back to the door. She fished a small screwdriver from her pocket, removed the cover of the light switch and checked the inside dimensions. Not much room, but enough for her purposes.
Leaving the cabin as quietly as she had entered it, Katla locked the door behind her, leaving no trace of her passing.
PRESENT DAY V
Fahd felt the presence of the men behind him just a microsecond before the piercing shriek that echoed through the stilted air inside the shopping center galvanised him into action. Darting forward, he lifted the poodle over the railing and released it, then threw himself back, away from the railing, away from the blast.
Covering his face with his arm, Fahd crashed backward into the spindly ta
bles and chairs from the nearby sandwich shop. He landed heavily on the tiled floor. The two men landed an instant later on top of him, their elbows slamming hard into his chest. He could hear his ribs snap with a sickening crunch, but he blocked out the pain and listened for the thunderous explosion that would follow as the poodle hit the tiled floor of the lobby.
There was only a loud crash as the heavy toy landed on top of some display. Glass shattered and tinkled across the tiles, but no thunder.
No explosion.
The two men holding him down looked up with the same expressions of incredulity that was pasted on his face.
The piercing shriek that had frozen the men before came a second time and this time one of the men came to his feet and said, “Keep that fucker down.”
As the man sprinted away Fahd relaxed and held up his hand to the other guy. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Damn right you’re not, fuckface.”
The man rolled him over on his belly and painfully wrestled his arms on his back while leaning his full weight on a knee jammed against the back of his neck. With a ratcheting sound a thin wire tightened around his wrists, but Fahd didn’t care.
I’m alive, he thought. I’m alive.
TWO DAYS EARLIER
At two hours past midnight, an Audi with dipped headlights crunched onto the gravel of the deserted picnic area nestling against the embankment that protected the Waterland meadows and farms sleeping peacefully in the tenebrous darkness from the deep cold waters of the IJsselmeer lake. Katla parked her car and looked in the backseat where two bulbous eyes looked back at her, the comical head of the pink poodle belying its deadly purpose.
The scent of grass carried on the warm evening breeze as she stood next to the car, but she couldn’t really enjoy it. Even with her own explosives she was wary, but lugging someone else’s bombs about was nerve-wrecking. She popped the trunk of the Audi and donned her drysuit, then opened the rear door of the car. After gently undoing the straps that held it tight on the backseat with its wheels aloft, Katla moved the pink poodle carefully out of the car and closed the door. With the poodle in her arms, she walked to the uneven steps leading up the embankment and carefully climbed the stairs.
Sweating profusely from the tension, Katla reached the top of the embankment and stood on the narrow bicycle path. Her gaze studied the lights of Durgerdam to the south and then moved slowly over the wide expanse of the IJsselmeer to the huge wind turbines to the north.
Down at the waterline, a small rubber dinghy with a weatherbeaten outboard motor bopped on the choppy waves of the immense lake.
Katla descended down another flight of concrete steps set in the embankment down into the water. The lowest steps were slippery with algae, so she moved slowly, making sure her feet found solid ground before putting her weight on them.
Holding the poodle with one arm, Katla pulled the dinghy closer before she carefully placed the shrapnel bomb inside to tie the toy down with its wheels pointing at the sky.
She had no idea if Brandt had armed the bomb, so she had to act as if it could explode at the merest touch. When the poodle was fixed in position, she pulled the starter cord of the dinghy’s outboard and waded into the lake, the drysuit protecting her against the cold water. The outboard was stuck at a slight angle to make sure the dinghy would make a wide circle.
As Katla released the dinghy, the small boat puttered away from the shore onto the dark water. She quickly waded back to shore, climbed up to the bicycle path and ran down the other side of the embankment to the passenger side of the Audi. With her pack in one hand and her crossbow in the other, she climbed back up the embankment.
Lying down on the grassy slope, she armed the crossbow with a harpoon dart and aimed at the slowly circling dinghy. With a slight twang the harpoon dart flew at the dinghy, flying over one side and puncturing the inside.
Not enough.
She armed the crossbow with another harpoon dart. This time the dart sliced deep into the rubber close to the outboard. The dinghy slowed down, the outboard sinking slowly below the surface. Through the crossbow’s scope she studied the dinghy being swallowed by the lake. Despite the weight of the outboard the dinghy took almost five minutes to disappear below the surface with its deadly cargo.
Katla donned a pair of nitrile gloves and removed the Olympus from inside the plastic bag in her backpack. Hoping the doctored Olympus didn’t have a self-destruct setting, Katla switched the camera on, then looked out over the lake and pressed the shutter button.
With a muted whoomph a column of water rose to a spectacular twenty meters high. A pressure wave buffeted the embankment and blew back her hair with a moist spray. Something flew by her head and she ducked behind the embankment. Her ears filled with a rushing sound as the column of water crashed back into the lake. The choppy surface near the shore turned into waves that lapped up the embankment and almost reached the bicycle path.
An explosion like this would draw attention.
Katla scrambled down the embankment to her Audi and ran around the front to the driver side when she noticed something black and yellow on the hood of her car. A foot long rubber swath from the dinghy lay across the hood like a dead animal. Laughing, she grabbed the rubber detritus and swung it over her head before she threw it back over the embankment, listening to it splashing back into the lake.
Katla tossed her backpack on the passenger seat and drove away, heading back to the cabin to return the camera and leave Brandt a little surprise.
PRESENT DAY VI
Muhammad looked up into the wide eyes of shoppers, gazing down on him with a mixture of concern and disgust. He whirled to his feet and grabbed his camera. A burly bald guy with round glasses stepped forward and said, “You just threw his ass over the balcony.”
Ignoring him, Muhammad stepped sideways to have a clear view of the balcony. The pink poodle was lying amidst the glass of a shattered display on the ground floor. For some reason both detonators had failed.
The burly guy stepped in front of him. “Did you hear me, eikel?”
Muhammad took two steps back and pressed the shutter button, bracing himself for the shock wave. Nothing happened. He pressed the shutter repeatedly while the burly guy stepped forward, raising his arms as if to grab him by the neck. Muhammad feinted a kick. When the burly guy lowered his hands to protect his crotch, Muhammad swung the useless camera, the sharp edge hitting the burly guy’s bald head just above the temple. While his stupid glasses sailed away, the bald guy crashed to the floor like a felled tree.
Muhammad grinned at the stupid faces of the onlookers. “Next?”
He spotted an angry-faced man in a burgundy windbreaker sprinting up the ascending escalator. Muhammad flung the camera in his direction and ran for the emergency exit, smashing the glass window of the electronic lock and kicking open the doors.
Racing down the steps, Muhammad could hear the cop one flight above him, screaming into his earpiece.
“Suspect. Emergency, South-East.”
Fuck.
Air burned in his lungs, but he flew down the stairs. Someone had fucked up this operation and that someone was going to pay. Pay dearly.
He burst through the emergency door, slamming into a pack of tourists, which tripped him up and sent him sprawling onto the sidewalk. Rolling to his feet, Muhammad charged into a guy waiting with his moped scooter at the traffic light. He elbowed the guy in the face and followed through, dumping him in the gutter. Slinging his long legs over the scooter’s low seat, he glanced sideways at the cop blocked by the fallen rider he’d just unseated. As the scooter surged forward, Muhammad felt hard fingers scrabbling his coat for purchase, but the fingers fell away and he sped onto the intersection.
Narrowly missing a taxi cab, Muhammad ran another red light and raced down Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. The running steps behind him faded in the distance. He hooked right after the Albert Heijn supermarket onto Paleisstraat and rode down Gasthuismolensteeg to the Nine Streets area.
Knowing he had shaken off the pursuit, Muhammad slowed down and rode the scooter down to the Herengracht, where he headed in the direction of the Utrechtsestraat. He abandoned the scooter behind a flower stand and walked down the narrow sidewalks of the Utrechtsestraat until he heard tram 4 behind him. He sprinted to the next bridge and got on the southbound tram, sinking down on a hard bench and resting his head in his arms.
They had a traitor in their midst. Someone had tampered with the detonators. Fahd wasn’t technical enough to disable the bomb. Fact was, nobody in the group could’ve sabotaged the bomb. His brother Peter didn’t like his conversion to Islam, but the brotherhood had made sure he was ignorant of their plans. Even if Peter had wanted to stop him, he lacked the technical know-how to disable a bomb.
And nobody knew the location of his workshop. Nobody needed to, he had done all the work himself.
Could Peter have set the cops on him? Doubtful, but a possibility.
If so, the most important thing was to destroy his cabin. Too bad he hadn’t made it self-destructing, but there was enough flammable fluid in the cabin to incinerate all the bomb making evidence. The poodle had been swabbed with alcohol to remove all fingerprints, but the Olympus hadn’t. The cabin hadn’t been rented in his name though, so it wouldn’t be traced back to him.
He got out at the RAI congress center and walked to the parking lot, looking for an older car without electronic locks. When he found an old Opel Kadett, Muhammad took a coiled fishline from his pocket, pulled out about ninety centimeters and made a small loop in the middle of the line. After inserting the fishline into the gap behind the upper corner of the car door, he sawed the line back and forth until the loop appeared on the inside of the window. Slowly edging the loop down to the door handle, Muhammad twirled the fishline between his fingers until the loop slipped over the lock button pushed down in the door frame. He kept tension on the line as he pulled upward and the lock button popped up.
Fundamental Error - A Katla KillFile (Amsterdam Assassin Series) Page 3