Adrenaline

by Jeff Abbott

  I ducked out of the line, smiled at the pretty woman, and hurried back to the building’s lobby.

  His apartment was on the top floor. I ran up the stairs, found the door, listened. Silence inside. I knelt before the door. Mila had pronounced my plan “stupid” yet had geared me up.

  The lock was a simple one: with two picks I had it open in forty seconds. I eased the door open and stepped inside, shutting the door without a sound.

  The apartment was unkempt. Half-full beer glasses, left over from last night and smelling stale, sat on a coffee table. Yesterday’s newspaper lay scattered across a couch. I moved soundlessly through the littered den, the small kitchen. Three doors beyond the kitchen. I opened the closest: it was a small bathroom. Then the next one. And froze.

  An elderly lady lay asleep in a bed, snoring. An empty vodka bottle stood guard on a night table. Her hair was a mess and the slightest odor of dirtiness wafted above her. I eased the door shut.

  Damn. This was too dangerous. But this might also be my only chance… I tried the other door. Nic’s room. And it was as spotless as the other rooms were dingy. Most of it was taken up by a desk, with three computers sitting along it. Above the monitors were rows of books on database design, programming languages, and many books on computer hacking and security. Perhaps he was more than a spammer. A scattering of photos sat on a side table. A younger Nic, without the ponytail and the beer weight, standing next to the woman who lay in the other room’s bed. She looked younger and healthier, and next to her was a man who looked like a much older version of Nic.

  Nic, the wannabe badass, was a computer geek who lived with his mother.

  I’d come equipped. I needed information, and most information these days is parked on computers. I tapped the keyboard’s space bar. There was a login prompt, asking for a password. I slipped a USB portable drive into one of the ports on the first computer. The software loaded on it started its work to crack the login password. Mila said it was NSA-based technology and didn’t say how she’d gotten her dirty little hands on it.

  While the cracker attempted to, well, crack, I searched the room. Nic had a gun, a Glock, under his bed. Nothing else.

  The woman’s snoring rose in volume, snuffled, went quiet.

  The computer pinged. I was in. I removed the password cracker and slipped in a different USB drive, one designed to copy his entire hard drive. Mila had promised me that it would work much faster than a conventional drive. It started its work and I went to the listing of his most recent applications and documents to see what he’d been working on. He’d been looking at PDFs. I opened them all up.

  He’d been reading and capturing news website accounts of the Centraal Station bombing. I scanned them. Nothing I didn’t already know. Five killed. Four Dutch, one Russian. The Russian’s name had not yet been released, the police said, because of difficulty locating his family. The bomb had gone off in a small bookstore; it had been left behind a cardboard display of books that were on sale. Police speculated it was not left in the open area of the station because there was no place to easily dump a backpack without it being spotted.

  Next up were pictures of the devastation and I’d looked at them for five seconds before realizing: no way these came from a news website. These were crime-scene photos, the kind simply not made available for public viewing, taken by the police.

  They were gruesome. People buying their papers, their magazines, chocolate candy for a snack or a bad-for-you breakfast. One cashier, just doing a simple, honorable job. All dead. Their shredded bodies lay among the torn and burned remains of the shop. Blood splattered the walls. Limbs torn from the corpses.

  It brought back the most horrible memories of the Holborn bombing.

  How did Nic have these photos?

  There was a police analysis of the bomb, stamped as classified.

  What had he said last night at the urinal? I got the goods. The cops don’t know. I thought he’d meant smuggling goods, but I was wrong. The smug bastard had hacked into the police database. He was following the investigation.

  A chill touched my skin. Nic was far, far more than he seemed. I had badly underestimated him.

  I examined the details of the bomb. A small amount of Semtex explosive, believed to have come from an inventory stolen in the Czech Republic six months earlier. Simple.

  But. But.

  There was nothing in the report about how the bomb was detonated. I paged through the rest of it. There should be a timer, or a cell phone to trigger the blast with a call. None was present. Even a devastating blast should have left forensic evidence of how the bomb was activated and blown.

  The next page was labeled unidentified electronics. I glanced through it; there was gear in the knapsack that had been annihilated in the blast but left enough fragments to indicate that it wasn’t from a cell phone. The police were still piecing it together. Maybe that was the detonator. But if it wasn’t obviously a cell phone or a timer, what was it? I could see a half-melted grid, no bigger than a hand—it looked like a honeycomb, forged from metal. I had never seen its like before. Apparently it had blown through the paperback display and into the intestines of one of the victims, preserving it from the worst of the blast.

  The police did not yet know what this gear was, and that troubled me.

  Next door the snoring rose again, and then stopped. I could hear movement in the bed. I stopped typing. The rustling stopped, but the snoring didn’t resume. I glanced out the window. It was a straight drop four stories down to the café’s awning.

  I waited. No movement. Maybe she was awake and staring at the ceiling. I checked the portable drive; halfway done. Maybe Mom was used to the soft insistent click of the keys; she might just assume that Nic was home.

  I looked at the files on the people who had died in the blast. The four Dutch citizens were the cashier and three customers, including a nineteen-year-old girl, a forty-five-year-old man, a fifty-year-old woman, and a twenty-seven-year-old man. They were wives and husbands, fathers and daughters, friends. Each had in their electronic dossier a photo from either a driver’s license or a passport.

  The file on the Russian was blank except for an autopsy report. No name. No age listed, no passport number listed. No photo.

  Weird. The Amsterdam police, among the best in the world, didn’t have a read on who the fifth victim was. That astonished me.

  I looked through the rest of the files that Nic had stolen from the police databases. Found a video labeled toezicht and dated the day of the blast. Toezicht meant “surveillance.” I activated it.

  The security camera feed had gone into a central security station; if the tape had been only at the store, it likely would not have survived the blast. I had five minutes of the feed that Nic had managed to filch off the police servers.

  I watched the last moments of the lives of innocent people.

  The young cashier at her station, giving change with a slightly bored frown. She kept scratching her ear. Customers coming and going, most not lingering long. I did not see Yasmin, which meant she must have dropped off the bomb before this section of the feed started. Dozens of people, leaving and arriving and leaving again. The store was busy—it was amazing that more people hadn’t been killed. I saw a man stop before the book display; next to it was a newspaper display. He reached for the paper and then the screen went white-hot blank.

  I backed up the film and froze it. Five people in the store, caught in the camera’s unblinking eye. The four Dutch I could see and guess at from their photos in life. The Russian was the man reaching for the newspaper display when the bomb detonated. I backed up, a frame at a time. He stepped back from the newspaper display. He was in profile, his face turned slightly away. He backed toward the magazine display. And then I saw his face.

  I know him. It can’t be.

  37

  BEHIND ME, IN THE HALLWAY, a door opened. Feet shuffled on hardwood.

  “Nic? Ben je wakker?” Are you awake?

  �
�Ja,” I called in my best impersonation of Nic. I couldn’t stay. I pulled the drive from the port. I could hear the bathroom door shut and then water running in a sink, the flush of a toilet. A shower started. And beyond that, I heard the front door open.

  Nic was home.

  No way out the front. I tapped carefully on the computer, making sure I was not leaving traces of my time there. I logged out and the screen returned to its prompt page. I put it to sleep.

  I put my leg out over the window. I could still hear the crash of the water in the shower and I hoped Nic wasn’t heading straight back to his room. I pulled myself out, standing on the sill.

  I couldn’t go down: I looked up. There was a beam extending from the brickwork several feet above my head. Most of the buildings in Amsterdam had them; I presumed they were used to haul large pieces of furniture up to the homes, given the narrowness of most Dutch stairwells.

  It was quite a jump. I waited for someone on the street to notice me but no one was looking up. I gathered my thoughts; let the muscle memory of hours of parkour training settle in. I could do this. I raised my eyes to the beam. I jumped. I extended my hands to catch the beam.

  I missed.

  I fell. I reached and barely seized, with my palms, the brick ledge below the windowsill I’d been standing on. My body hit against the brick and pain lanced up my arms. My fingertips burned like fire but I didn’t dare cry out. I used my feet to muffle the impact and that gave me leverage to strengthen my hold on the brick. Parkour hardens the hands and the arms and the abdominals, but I was too out of serious practice. I glanced down. The street was mostly empty. A woman walked out of the café, past the bright yellow awning, didn’t look up.

  I heard the door open. Nic, inside his room. Whistling. I was screwed. I heard a clatter on his desk; he was probably only a foot away from me. He might even see my hands if he looked out the window. I heard him speaking rapid Dutch to his mom, annoyed, telling her he didn’t have time to chat.

  Thank God. I risked a pull-up and saw through the window that he was walking away from me, down the hall. But he’d left the bedroom door open.

  Parkour is about effective movement from place to place. Efficiency. I made my mind a knife. I cut the problem into small steps that could be done in one fluid movement. I had been hanging on to the windowsill for less than ten seconds. I had no time to spare.

  I pulled myself up cleanly. I managed to get a foot on the sill and I stood the rest of the way. Nic’s mom called to him from her room, complaining about him not bringing her breakfast. Nic told her to piss off and go back to bed until she was sober. His voice got louder, walking back in the direction of the bedrooms.

  I had to make the jump again. I jumped, and this time I closed hands around the beam. I swung my legs up quickly, hearing Nic’s voice berate his mother and her answering bray. I heard a shout from the street—I’d been seen. All I could do was to vanish quickly, before the police were summoned. I moved to the top of the beam and eased myself out of view onto the roof. On the roof no one could see me. I lay and I stared at the sky and I caught my breath. Slowly, I slithered off Nic’s roof onto the neighboring one. I made my way, carefully, silently, staying out of the street’s sight. It seemed to take forever.

  A little girl in one of the attic apartments watched me, goggle-eyed, as I reached the end of the block, a dozen buildings away from Nic’s house. She was maybe four, bright-eyed, apple-cheeked. I waved and she waved back. Then I put a finger to my lips and so did she, laughing. I pantomimed cranking open the window; she did.

  I slipped through the window into her room. She stared at me. I patted her head and pantomimed silence again. She laughed again. I slipped out of her room, heard bedroom noises that sounded like a mom getting dressed, bathroom noises of a shower. In moments, I was out of the apartment and heading down the stairway.

  38

  YOU KNOW THE DEAD RUSSIAN? How?” Mila said. She’d plugged the portable drive into her own computer and was looking at what I’d stolen from the thief Nic.

  My voice felt thick. “The day of the bombing in London… I gave a presentation on a guy who we believed was tied to financing for international crime rings, ones that even reach into governments. We called him the Money Czar, a guy no one could put a finger on. Nothing on him, he was a blank slate; we only had the one picture and mentions of him by a couple of informants who ended up dead. This is the guy. This is the guy I was hunting, that I wanted to catch. I thought the scarred man might have been working to protect the Money Czar. Instead, the scarred man kills him.” I could hardly breathe, my chest felt cut from stone. “They killed my target. Who the hell are these people? What are they after? Why did they take my wife?”

  Mila stared at me.

  “This was no ordinary bombing,” I said. “This was a hell of a lot more. This was a murder. I need to go through everything we lifted off Nic’s laptop. I have to find a reason for him to bring me into the operation.”

  “Then let’s find you one,” Mila said, leaning over the computer.

  39

  I DON’T THINK I CAN BRING in new people right now,” Nic said on the phone. I suspected he’d gotten a lockdown order from Piet. They were in panic mode over the attempt of the Turk to infiltrate them. Or, a scarier possibility, he figured out someone had been in his computer or his room. No one new was going to be trusted; the Turk had soured my chances.

  But I had no options. I had to sell him on me.

  “Listen, Nic. That’s cool. But you got to get me some money, man, because I have some information that’s worth real money to you and your boss.”

  “I doubt that, Sam, but—”

  “Before you got to the Grijs Gander, the Turk was talking about moving a valuable shipment for you. To the United States. I don’t think you should trust him, mouthing off in a bar. You need delicate goods moved, I can do it. Fast and safe and cheap.”

  “He talked about a smuggling route. In the bar.” Nic’s voice rose slightly.

  “He said it all in Turkish to his friends and I picked up enough,” I said. I glanced at Mila, who was listening in. “He said he’d make Piet pay if he didn’t get his money. He said he’d phone in an anonymous tip to the cops if Piet didn’t give him what he wanted.”

  “I… I can’t have this talk on the phone.” The nervousness in his voice increased.

  “But it didn’t mean anything to me until they started going off about your friend.” Of course, if they’d tortured the Turk and he’d told them a different story from mine… I could be in very great danger. But such were the risks. “Well, I will give you a better and more secure route than that Turk and I know to keep my mouth shut. I need steady work, Nic.”

  “I will have to call you back. But no promises.”

  “Look, fine, you and your friend get fried. I don’t care. Good luck to you.” I hung up.

  Mila raised an eyebrow. “You hooked him hard.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Sam.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t let emotion trip you up.”

  “I’m not emotional. Do you see emotion? I am the embodiment of a poker face right now.”

  “This Money Czar. If he was working with the scarred man, if he was the money man, why would the scarred man kill him? And why would they kill him this way? Two bullets in the head and dumped into a canal is far easier.”

  I didn’t have an answer, and that was part of the problem. Two birds: the scarred man made Yasmin Zaid look like a murderer and he’d eliminated the Money Czar—but why? I had assumed the scarred man bombed our office to protect the Money Czar. Clearly not.

  The phone rang in my hand. I let it ring five times.

  “He’s pissing himself,” Mila said.

  I let it ring twice more before I answered. “Yes?”

  “I might be able to get you some work. Just understand that my boss is extremely cautious right now.”

  I’ll bet he is, I thought. “I like a cautious
boss.”

  “I will meet you at the bar we were at last night and take you to Piet.”

  “No. In the open, the sunlight. Where I can see you and your friends coming. I know a bar…” But then Mila was shaking her head. “No, I tell you what, Nic, as a show of good faith, you pick.”

  “Do you know the Pelikaan Café on the Singel?”

  Mila nodded. I said, “Yes.”

  “Meet me there. Noon.”

  “All right. I’ll see you at noon.” Nic hung up.

  “Well.” Mila unclipped her earpiece. “They bit. But they might well grab you, force you to talk someplace of their choosing. There will be no immediate trust. We’ll have to prepare for that eventuality.”

  “Why not have them meet here on our turf?”

  “Because I wish to protect our turf,” she said. “You must treat the Rode Prins as your safe house. I know the Pelikaan. I know what we will do. Hurry, we don’t have much time.” She rose and I touched her arm.

  “Did you get a hold of Bahjat Zaid?”

  “No,” she said. “No one seems to know where he is.”

  “Look, I think he gave them something from his office in Hungary, the one that Yasmin works at. That’s what they’re smuggling across Europe.”

  She bit her lip.

  “He’s an arms manufacturer, Mila. What the hell is he giving these people? He’s paying ransoms and they’re never going to give her back to him.”

  “You and I have our orders, Sam. We rescue Yasmin, eliminate her kidnappers as witnesses and as a threat. Do that, and you don’t need to worry about whatever he gave him.”

  “Do you know? Be totally honest with me.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, and I believed her.

  “I still have to know what they want to get to America.”