by Jeff Abbott
“What do you think?” she asked.
“This could be a Company trap. A test to see if I’m willing to sell my services. I don’t know who you are and I don’t care. I cannot help you. I am practical.”
She made a face at the word. “Practical is what Soviet architecture was. Practical is not always the answer. The offer expires in one minute.”
“And if I say no?”
“I’ll get you to Holland. But then we part ways and you never saw or met me, and be certain you will be back in prison within days. With no hope of ever finding your family.”
“And if I say yes?”
Mila tasted the Scotch. “Find Yasmin. Bring her back to me, and you may exact whatever revenge you like on the scarred man. If he knows where your wife and child are, it’s your concern. But Yasmin is saved first.”
“She’s killed people.”
“No. You can see it in her face—she has been drugged or broken. Break this group of kidnappers for me, and I will give you every resource to find your wife.”
“And then what? The Company will be after me.”
“Not if you produce evidence of your innocence. The scarred man might have information that clears the name.”
“Who are you?” I said, so quietly I wasn’t sure that she heard me.
Mila set down the glass. “I work for a group that prefers to remain anonymous. You have no reason to trust me, but via this group I am bringing you the best hope you have of finding your wife. I am giving you freedom and resources. Do you care so much for little questions that have little answers?”
She had a bizarre way of talking but I saw her point. It didn’t matter who these people were; all that mattered was Lucy and my son. Daniel. I wondered if she’d been able to give him that name, if they were still alive.
I decided. “And if I get caught?”
“You’re on your own. We can’t acknowledge you, we can’t help you.”
I waited in silence for her thin smile to fade. She wanted a response. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“I dislike seeing your talent wasted. You should be put to good use.” Mila lit a cigarette; she was not the kind of person to ask if I minded in the close quarters of the cabin. “Not just good use. Extraordinary use.”
I picked up the photo from the train station. Stared hard at the man’s scar.
“How many seconds left in that minute?” I asked.
“Ten.”
“Yes,” I said.
23
WHATEVER BRIBES MILA TOSSED AMONG the ship worked: the crew left us alone. I was surprised, as I had nearly shot one of them.
I had decided Mila was part of some group within the government, unleashed to do dirty work without the boundaries of law, and, since I was damaged goods, I was a perfect recruit. They had limited access to Company information like my file, but the Company didn’t know about them.
I didn’t care who they were as long as they helped me get Lucy back.
So. I exercised in my room, lifting myself on a bar, running in place, thinking, clearing my head. I endured a self-imposed captivity for three days, then I couldn’t do it anymore; not after the long weeks in the Polish prison. So I went up to the deck and I ran among the containers in the bright open sunshine. The crew watched me. I waved. They didn’t wave back.
I thought about the best ways to try and find the scarred man. I had to assume he knew my face. This was going to be the most dangerous job I’d ever undertaken, and I was doing it with an unproven ally in Mila.
When I turned past one stack of containers Captain Switchblade was there, helping to clean the deck.
“Hello,” I said.
He stared at me in surprise.
“You okay?” I asked.
After a moment, he nodded.
“Good.” I wasn’t going to say sorry, since he’d pulled the knife on me, but I didn’t want more trouble with this guy. We were still days away from the Netherlands.
I went past him and kept jogging. I didn’t look behind me and no knife landed in my back. I wondered how much his forgiveness had cost Mila and why she’d bothered to pay it.
I was lying on the cot in my cabin when Mila knocked and came in.
“The Company has sent your face to every passport point of entry in Europe and Asia. They’re telling people your passport may have been taken and be in use by a fugitive.”
“If they’re looking for me, they might consider that I’d use an earlier legend.” Legends are cover identities used by field operatives. I’d played the part of a Canadian smuggler, a German money launderer, an American mercenary who wanted to make quick money guarding blood diamonds. The people who could have said He wasn’t really any of those guys were all dead or in prison. The legends could still be counted as clean. I had no documentation in those names—passports, or credit cards—but I could get that from Mila. Those names were known in the criminal underworld. But the risk of using one to infiltrate the scarred man’s ring posed serious consequences. The Company could have burned all my old names, told any contact or informant that I was not to be trusted. Worse, they could be listening, watching for me to try to step into my old shoes.
The only sure way to know if the legends were still good was to try and use them.
I gave Mila the background on my old names and we went into her cabin where she broke out a kit full of diplomatic paper, cameras, a small but powerful printer and a laptop. A forger’s paradise.
“So what’s the first step when we arrive?”
“We meet Yasmin’s father in Amsterdam.”
“Her father?”
“Mr. Zaid can tell you more about Yasmin and her kidnapping.”
Mr. Zaid? Was he Mila’s boss? “You tell me.”
“I’d rather you hear details from him.”
“What does he know about me?”
“Just that you can help him get his daughter back. That’s all he needs to know.”
“Where will we meet him?”
“At a bar.”
“You sure like bars,” I said.
“Yes,” Mila said. “I sure do. Now. I want to be sure you are not rusty. The rest of the day, we only speak Russian. And how is your Dutch?”
“Poor.”
“I will expect it to improve quickly.” She rolled her eyes. “I hope you won’t embarrass me with poor verb choices.”
24
I WATCHED MILA BUILD the new versions of me. I was like Frankenstein’s monster crafted out of watermarked paper and credit histories and life histories. She made me a Canadian, an American, a German, and a New Zealander. All under different names. I watched her use backdoor entries into what should have been ironclad government databases in Washington, Berlin, Ottawa, and Christchurch to insert the codes for the passports into the appropriate government databases, making me a legitimate traveler. She slid with ease into banks, issuing credit cards to me in my various old identities.
“The Company could be looking for my old names, too,” I said.
“They could. A risk we must take.”
I wondered again—who was this woman? Mila whistled a Bananarama tune as she worked.
Rotterdam. The port accommodated around four hundred ships a day, both ocean-bound and for inland waterways, and a labyrinth of rail and road. The port itself was like a city, loading cranes the jagged skyscrapers, vast avenues of water the streets. This was a critical artery between the hundreds of millions of people in North America and the hundreds of millions of people in Europe and beyond.
I rode out in the same container I rode in on. Mila was unwilling to risk that passport control at the port hadn’t received the alert on my passport. And she was worried about the crew talking. She spent the morning of our arrival greasing more palms. Silence cost money.
I waited for the container to settle and for her to come and open the door.
When she did, a uniformed man, a port inspector, stood with her.
“Everything is fine,” she said
to me in Russian. The inspector stepped inside and displayed great interest in the Vermonter soap. Mila spoke rapidly to the inspector in Dutch; he nodded, didn’t look at us.
Mila and I walked out into the gray cloudy day.
“You are very handy with the bribes,” I said to her, as we hurried across the busy docking area.
“I am beloved and popular,” Mila said. “I have friends in every corner of the world.”
And we vanished into the flood of goods and people coming into Europe.
25
WE TOOK THE TRAIN TO AMSTERDAM, fifty-six kilometers away, and I watched the flatland of Holland unpeel before my gaze. I was back in Europe, where I had been happiest with Lucy, and imprisoned by the Company. I thought of the dead intruder and his own ticket to Amsterdam.
I leaned back against the train seat. I’d traded one chain, from Howell, to another from Mila. I watched the brief stretch of Holland pan out in silence. I’d had months to sit and think about what I’d do if I got the chance to find Lucy, and here it was, and my skin felt like lit matches lay under it. The possible truths—that Lucy and our baby were dead, or that Lucy had betrayed me—loomed large, the monsters I didn’t want to see and yet had to see.
Fine. I was going to find the man with the scar, force him to tell me where my wife and child were. Then I was going to be the last thing he ever saw on this earth.
PART TWO
APRIL 10–14
“The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”
—Marshal Ferdinand Foch
26
THE BAR IN AMSTERDAM was called De Rode Prins, the “Red Prince,” and it was located along a lovely old canal called the Prinsengracht, the “Prince’s Canal,” with many small cafés, hotels, stately residences, and offices on both sides of its long curve. The Anne Frank Huis stood a few blocks away (usually with a quiet, respectful crowd snapping pictures), and the only boat on the canal was one of those get-on/get-off tour numbers, purring forward while the tourists took their snaps of the waterside buildings and soaked up the charm.
The air smelled of morning rain but the sun had scattered the clouds. The second thing you notice about Amsterdam—after the canals, of course—are the bicycles. They are everywhere, and on an early spring day they swarm like bees rising from hives. The bicycles are not at all fancy, since they are often stolen, but you will see them ridden by lawyers in suits, mothers with the kids balanced on the back or on the handlebars, students and office workers hurrying along. No one wears a helmet. A steady stream of bikes—although rush hour was over and lunch not yet beginning—zipped their way past the small Rode Prins. A few tables perched on the outside, and two gentlemen sat drinking spring beers, watching the light dance on the water beyond the parked houseboats.
Mila and I stepped inside and I could see, from my couple of trips earlier to Amsterdam, that the Rode Prins was a prime example of a dying art. It was a “brown bar,” so called because in the olden days an incessant stream of tobacco smoke stained the walls. Now there was no smoking in the bar, and the walls were brown because they’d been painted that way. The room was narrow, with a long-running leather banquette with several tables on one side, a large table near the window, and a beautiful bar along the opposite wall. Red-shaded lamps hung from the ceiling. A painting of some forgotten royal hung on the wall, and there was a red smear across the canvas—across face and finery and hands—as though a glob of blood or paint had been hurled at it years ago. The painted prince looked very alone. To me, Rode Prins sounded like Road Prince, a king of the wanderers.
I glanced at a menu while Mila waited for the barkeep. They offered beers brewed especially for each season. This was my kind of bar. It surprised me that Mila would choose such a spot for a meeting.
A bartender, tall, bald, heavy-built, and with a small gap between his front teeth, appeared from the back. Mila and the man spoke rapid Dutch; he gave me the wariest of glances. Then Mila said to me, “Sam, this is Henrik. Henrik, this is Sam. Sam will be staying upstairs. Give him whatever he needs.” Henrik shook my hand, a solid, firm grip. Where Mila seemed all exotic secrets, Henrik seemed like a bartender to whom you could talk. I was staying here? I didn’t say anything but Henrik just gave me a polite nod.
He gestured toward the back of the establishment, to a narrow hallway decorated with black-and-white photographs of the Prinsengracht through the years. I followed Mila as she headed for the rear of the bar and up a flight of stairs.
Mila stopped and looked at me. “Bahjat Zaid is a man who is absolutely terrified for his daughter. He doesn’t know you and he’s trusting his daughter’s life to you. Don’t rattle his trust. We’re his only hope. He can’t go to the police.”
“Why?”
“He can explain.” Mila turned and I followed her up the stairs. In a private apartment above the Rode Prins, a tall man sat, shoulders hunched, as though he’d played at Atlas carrying the world, and failed. He stood as we entered, smoothing his palms on his tailored suit jacket.
“This is the man I told you about, Bahjat,” Mila said. “Sam Capra.” I was surprised she used my name but I didn’t let the shock show. A woman like Mila had a reason.
Bahjat Zaid shook my hand, measuring me with his eyes. He had a firm grip and a firmer stare. He looked at me like a boss looks at an employee who might be about to give him bad news.
We sat; Mila asked if I wanted coffee. I said no.
Bahjat Zaid had a narrow face, worn with anguish, and he spoke his English with the faintest of Beirut accents. His navy silk tie was perfectly knotted at a collar of snow-white cotton. A cup of coffee, grown cold, sat untouched at his elbow. He was immaculate and enraged, all at once.
“Tell me about your daughter, Mr. Zaid,” I said.
“Yasmin. She is my pride. My only child. Last year she completed advanced degrees in both chemistry and physics. She is twenty-five. She is about one point seven meters tall. Her…” He stopped suddenly, as though embarrassed by the spill of words.
“Yes,” I said, “but Mila can tell me all that. Tell me about her.”
He blinked, and opened a manila folder next to him. He seemed to gather himself.
“This is Yasmin,” Bahjat Zaid said, pushing a photo toward me.
I studied it. The young woman was lovely. A spill of dark hair, eyes alive with joy and intelligence, a narrow smile. She wore a pretty blue sweater and jeans, and the sky behind her was gray, pregnant with rain. She was pushing a windblown hank of hair from her eyes. Behind her a large estate stood, trees swaying in the wind.
“That’s a nice house.”
He swelled with pride.
“My estate in Kent. It is historically important. It was to serve as a redoubt for the government should England be invaded. It has underground offices, a bunker, that would have housed Churchill in the event of a Nazi occupation. The house has been in my wife’s family for many years. We have a town house in London, but we love living in Kent. So did Yasmin.”
I didn’t say that if England fell to invasion, Kent, being in the southeast corner, would likely go first. “How interesting for you,” I said. There were more photos: Yasmin with her family, Yasmin with the estate staff, Yasmin on horseback, Yasmin graduating from university.
The next photo was Yasmin as a small child, looking up from a book. She was smiling, her two front teeth missing. “She indicated from an early age she wished to be a scientist. You see? She is reading a picture book about Madame Curie. Given my business interests, I felt a position in one of my companies would suit her, and I began to prepare her for such a career.”
I thought, You decided her future when she was still missing her front teeth? “Your companies?”
“Mr. Zaid is one of the partners in Militronics. A major firm that does a great deal of business with Western governments,” Mila said. I knew the company; they made a large variety of small-scale military equipment. Digital binoculars, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vests, and speciali
zed military software and hardware. Their technology was considered among the best in the world; the Company was a client.
“Yes. Yasmin works in a research facility near Budapest. Mostly on defensive technologies: building better armor, more efficient weaponry and equipment. Her research centers on using nanotechnology.”
“And how long has she been missing?”
“Twenty-five days.”
“Has she ever gone missing before?”
“No. Never. She was always a most obedient daughter.”
Obedient. Not a word you heard every day. It was up there with nanotechnology on the rare-word scale, and my own words telling Howell about the Money Czar thundered in my ears.
“You haven’t reported her disappearance to the police,” I said.
“No. I was told not to.”
“A ransom call?”
“Not exactly. Yasmin left work at our Budapest research facility on a Friday evening. As usual, she worked late—she is a devoted employee.” He pushed a printout toward me; it was from a calendar application. Nearly every hour was blocked out, for research or work or, in some cases, self-improvement projects. Learn Chinese. Read up on Puccini operas. Study macro-economics. “You see, her days are highly structured. She works best that way, so I have cultivated this fine habit in her and she agrees.”
“You keep her organized,” I said.
The dryness of my comment went past him. “I didn’t hear from her on the weekend, but that is not unusual. Then on Sunday evening I received this message.” Bahjat Zaid tapped on the laptop and a video unfurled on the screen. Yasmin, fiddling with a key at her apartment building’s entrance. The angle of the camera suggested the video had been shot from across the street, zooming in for detail on the young woman. The doorstep light gave off a feeble glow; there was little ambient street noise, no traffic cutting between lens and woman. Late night. Yasmin dropped her keys, and as she knelt to recover them, two men moved into the picture, seizing her arms, stuffing a cloth over her face. The camera caught her gaze, wide with terror. She struggled and the men rushed her away from the door, into the back of a waiting van. The van peeled away. No license plate in the shot. The cameraman had been very careful.