by Jeff Abbott
“He works for Nic,” Piet said. “Hacker.” For some reason he retreated back toward the table.
The Asian kid stumbled forward into the dim light and I saw he’d been beaten. Really worked over. One of the twins—the bald one—said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”
The answer was a bullet that sang out and caught the bald twin in the throat. He sagged to the floor. His brother bellowed a shocked scream and started blasting the boxes with his assault rifle. Puffs of brown powder danced in the air: the fragments of cigarettes, tobacco exploding into miniature clouds by the impact of the bullets ripping through the boxes.
And someone, from cover near the front, shot out some of the lights. I saw the Asian kid scream and run, and then he caught a bullet and sprawled to the floor.
Chaos. Near darkness. I couldn’t let them shoot back—this could be Mila. Piet ran around one corner of the stacked boxes and I followed him.
Ping. Another light shattered. One light left, directly over the metal table.
I saw a figure standing near us, laying a round down toward the remaining twin. A dark-haired man. Piet fired before I could react and the man toppled, screaming in English. Both he and Piet raised to fire and I yanked Piet back, out of the line of fire. I needed him alive for now.
“God damn it, what the hell…,” Piet coughed.
“These have to be cops,” I said. “Who else would give Nic a wire like that? We need to get the hell out.”
We ran and an explosion of bullets tore through the cardboard maze.
52
I HEARD A CLANG, metal landing on concrete, and then a blast tore open the biggest stack of the cigarette boxes. Flame erupted from the flying debris; the hot, sweet scent of tobacco crowded the air. The thrum of the blast nearly deafened me. I turned as Piet fired back and I saw him drawing aim on a man through the tendrils of smoke.
August. The Company was here.
I grabbed Piet’s arm, spoiling his shot. The bullet pinged to August’s left and he ducked behind an unused machinist’s lathe. He hadn’t seen me.
“What the—”
“Just run, come on!” I shoved Piet toward the exit. I ran back toward the attackers, vaulted over the lathe and hammered both feet into the side of August’s head as he risked standing up. He sprawled. I didn’t think he had seen me yet. I had to keep it that way without killing him. I grabbed his gun.
The remaining twin ran toward me, expecting me to put a bullet in August’s head. Instead I raised the gun I’d just taken off August and fired right between the twin’s eyes. He had about a second to look surprised before he collapsed.
I ran like hell.
If Howell took me back into custody now, I was done. I would spend the rest of my life in a prison. I couldn’t prove that I worked for Mila’s secret do-gooders, that I was trying to infiltrate a criminal’s inner circle. I would just be a bitter ex-employee keeping company with a slaver. I would vanish back into Howell’s prison, sealed in stone. Or be dead and buried, unmarked, unmourned. Everyone who thought I was a traitor was going to think they were right.
I heard a roar from the lathe. Howell’s voice. Yelling.
I ran past Nic’s body. Piet reappeared, gun in hand, and laid down fire behind me, driving Howell back into cover. I could see Howell returning fire, and then—in a moment when Piet paused to reload—fire coming from the front door.
Someone was shooting at Howell from the other side.
He turned, returning fire. On the other side of the steel door I heard the captive women screaming and sobbing.
I grabbed at Piet. “Come on.”
“No. I’m not leaving these bitches here.”
“They’re not worth your freedom. They’re not worth losing the big job.”
I could see on his face he hated to give up—but he listened.
We ran down a hallway and hurtled out into the clouded light of the gray day. A Volvo van was parked in the rear.
Piet held out an electronic key. The van’s lights blinked; it made the oh-so-welcome click of locks opening. We jumped inside; Piet jabbed the keys in the ignition and slammed into reverse. We roared backward, straight, Piet not taking the time to spin out and turn yet.
Howell came through the back door when we were about thirty feet away.
He saw me, and a scowl swept across his face. He had been wrong to give me a moment’s trust. I was a traitor. A criminal.
The evidence was running away before his eyes.
Piet jerked the wheel and we hurled around the edge of a building, gunning out of their sight.
“They’ll throw up roadblocks,” I yelled.
He just spun the wheel around and floored the van. We exploded out of the industrial park, revving onto the service road, dodging around several slower-moving cars.
“Got to get enough distance then find new wheels,” he said. “We can carjack someone. There’s a school nearby, a mother won’t fight us.”
“But she’ll see our faces.”
“You still have a bullet?”
“Let’s do this the easy way. I can hot-wire anything.”
“Takes too long.” He slammed a frustrated hand against the wheel. “I hate losing those whores.”
I was free from agonizing about the captive women; Howell would make sure they were safe. Now I just had to keep Piet from killing someone else so we could catch a ride.
“Those weren’t cops,” I said. “They’d already have blocked out the industrial park. They didn’t. So who the hell was Nic working for?”
Piet didn’t answer for a minute so I did.
“Rivals.”
“Rivals?” Piet said. “You mean other traffickers.”
“Or maybe whoever the Turk was working for,” I said. I wondered if Piet would now mention Bahjat Zaid’s name.
“Well, we are going to take care of that problem.”
I loved that we, although he was horrifying company. Fine for him to think we were a team; easier for me to slide the knife past the ribs when the most happy time came. I fought down the thought. Enjoying killing people? That was a downward slide in which I had no interest.
He pulled into another sprawling industrial park that wore a concrete gray anonymity. He wore a mulish frown on his face; he seemed almost eager to find a victim, to vent his rage.
He spotted a young man carrying a box, walking toward a Mercedes parked at a remove from the others. “Him. We’ll take his.”
“I don’t want you to kill someone over a car, Piet. Every small crime we have to do is a crack in the chances of pulling off the bigger job.”
“Don’t talk to me like I haven’t worked before,” he said, annoyance in his tone.
“I’m not. But you kill only when absolutely necessary.” That was true. “This isn’t necessary yet.”
His face reddened. He did not like being lectured.
“I’ll take care of the car. Without killing the guy. You stay here. Keep your face out of sight. I don’t want him to see you.”
“He’ll see you. If he does, you kill him.”
“He won’t see me.” I slipped out of the van as Piet kept driving, slamming the door, running. The guy, bespectacled, thin, started to turn toward me and I hit him, a single precise blow at the base of the neck. He crumpled and I caught him. I pulled him out of sight, gently set him down in front of a cluster of other parked cars, where a narrow strip of anemic grass lay facing the concrete wall of the office park. His breathing was regular.
He had Mercedes keys in his pocket and I fished them free. Piet was already out of the van and running toward me. I ran to the Mercedes, unlocked it and slid behind the wheel.
“That was extremely smooth,” he said. But his tone of voice wasn’t admiring. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“Canadian Special Forces.”
He said nothing more. I peeled out of the industrial park. “Where to?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I trust you, Sam,” he said. And he tightened th
e grip on the assault rifle he held.
53
MILA RAN. She’d fired four rounds into the machinists’ shop, with calculation. She wanted to confuse, to unsettle. She’d winged the blond in the arm and had forced Howell and his men to concentrate on her for a full minute, which hopefully had given Sam time to flee.
Then she’d retreated, running across the parking lane and around a corner. A CLOSED sign—Gesloten— hung in an office and she’d worked the lock with a kit in her pocket, ducking inside before she could be spotted. She slammed the door closed and hurried to the curtained office window to watch.
Five minutes later Howell and his two men emerged. No sign of the Chinese hacker. The big blond clutched his arm, his jacket sodden with blood. The other man stumbled, hit in the leg. Both men looked more pissed than hurt. Howell’s face wore blind rage.
The van pulled away. So. Howell was not treating a crime scene like a crime scene. Maybe he would call the Dutch police; but then there would have to be explanations as to how Company personnel had arrived at the warehouse and engaged in a gun battle. And although the industrial park looked neglected and empty, someone nearby might have heard the shots and summoned the police.
Ten seconds after the van roared off, she made her decision. Howell wasn’t waiting for the police, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t calling them, and they might arrive within minutes. She had very little time to scope out the building.
Mila slipped back inside the old machinists’ shop. The smell was of close-in gunfire, acrid; the sweet smell of tobacco.
She saw a spill of blood drops, heavy, near one of the lathes. The Chinese student had taken a bullet in the head. She glanced down at him, didn’t see breathing. The ID on him was still in place and she took that; anything that could delay the police investigation was to her advantage. She checked an abandoned office. Empty. She hurried through the entire office space, tense, her breath tight, expecting to see Sam’s dead body. But there was no sign of him.
Then she headed down a short hallway and found a shuttered steel door. Here. They had to be here.
Mila picked the lock with care, as quietly as she could. The mechanism eased and her hand went back to her gun. She took a deep, calming breath, leveled the weapon and kicked in the door. Screams greeted her. Eight women, half-naked, bruised, chained to the wall.
For a moment she faltered. A pain as sharp as a steel blade went through her chest, made her spine ache. She stared at the women and they stared back at her. Then a surge of indignant strength rose in her bones. Revenge was its marrow. Had Howell not realized these women were here? Or did he not care? Or was he calling the police anonymously to report their presence? It didn’t matter. She could not, would not, leave them.
Most of them kept their gaze low to the ground, but one, a redheaded teenager, glanced up at her.
Mila tried English. “It’s okay. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
The red-haired girl spoke to her in Moldovan. “Who are you?”
Mila switched to Moldovan. The words tasted like a sweet she’d loved as a child. “You’ll be safe. I’m getting you out of here. The bad men have gone.”
“Who are you?” the redhead asked again.
“A friend. I want you to do exactly what I say, because we may not have much time. I’m going to get you to safety. And then home.”
“We have no money to get home,” one of the other women said. Her lips were purple with bruising.
“I know,” Mila said. “I will take care of you all.” She stepped back out in the hallway, knelt by Nic’s body. In his pocket she found a set of manacle keys. In his palm she saw Sam’s transmitter, stripped apart. She scooped it up from the dead man and tucked it in her pocket.
Her hands shook as she unlocked the women from their restraints. Her head flooded with forgotten sensations: the low rumble of the traffic on the boulevard, the odor of cheap pizza, the warmth of a gun in her hand, the breeze through the open windows of the warm Israeli night as she walked through the rooms of the damned, the man that she’d left alive roaring that she’d be killed a thousand times one day for what she’d done. She shoved the memories down.
A couple of the women started to moan and cry, in Moldovan, hardly believing that their horrific ordeal might be over.
She was thinking: they need shelter, doctors, documents. She was not thinking about Sam Capra. For the moment, he was on his own.
54
I WATCHED THE GUN POINTED in my direction. “I just saved your life. If I wanted you dead, I could have shot you in the back when we were running to the van.”
“But I don’t know you. And you walk in and everything goes to hell.”
“Everything went to hell because of Nic turning against you. I gave him to you and everything that happened since then confirms he was trying to screw you over.”
“But I don’t know you.” Logic wasn’t his strong point. “I’ve lost everybody. Everybody.”
He was scared.
“Listen, Piet. I have a few friends in Amsterdam. Maybe you know them. Gregor, he used to run a watch shop in Prague, he’s living here now. He was a friend of Nic’s. We did a bit of business last year. Ask him about me.” I was gambling huge here that Gregor would play along. Welcome to the tightrope.
“I know Gregor. The watch geek. Who else? Give me another name. One is not enough.”
The only other person I knew was Henrik, the soft-spoken bartender at the Rode Prins, and I’d only talked with him once or twice. But—if he was smart, he could cover me. I had no idea if he knew what kind of work Mila and I did. And by giving Piet the Rode Prins, I was giving him my hiding place in Amsterdam. Mila would kick my ass.
But it didn’t matter if Piet tied me to the Rode Prins; he was going to die soon. “I drink at a place called the Rode Prins, on the Prinsengracht. You know it?”
“I had a drink there, once.”
“A bartender there, Henrik, he knows me.”
“And what’s your drink?”
“Usually beer.” Henrik had served me only once, but I’d drunk the beer on his recommendation. I held my breath. “I’m not real original.”
He worked his phone, presumably summoning up the Rode Prins number from an Internet search. He pressed the button so I could hear him make the call.
But to Piet, I was Peter Samson. I was just Sam to Henrik. This might not work.
Henrik’s voice came on. “Rode Prins.”
“Henrik, please.”
“This is he.”
“Henrik, this will sound very strange, but do you know a gentleman who goes by the name Samson who drinks there now and then? Not Dutch.”
A pause. A painfully long pause. The barrel of Piet’s gun felt screwed into my temple.
Henrik said, “Samson? You mean Sam?”
“Yes, is that what you call him?”
Thank God, thank God.
“Yes, everyone calls him Sam. Dark blond hair, tall, midtwenties.”
“Yes. What is he?”
“You mean what nationality is Sam? I don’t know. Wait. I saw him once take stuff out of his pocket to get his money, set it on the bar. His passport was Canadian. I remarked on it then.”
“Do you know what kind of work he does?”
“No idea. He is one of those who doesn’t talk much about himself. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“No, he’s not. What does he like to drink there?”
“Heineken. And, you know, I have a business to run, and you sound like a goddamn stalker. You like Sam’s green eyes, maybe?” Henrik got a little edge going in his voice. “You want a date with him? He doesn’t swing that way as far as I can tell, but you could leave your number.”
Piet hung up. Silence stretched for five long seconds. “I like you don’t talk about what you do. I don’t like people who talk too much.”
He dialed another number. “Speak and you’re dead,” Piet said.
“Hello?” a voice said.
Gregor.
I could be dead in the next ten seconds.
55
GREGOR. THIS IS PIET. DO you know a man named Samson?”
A pause that ripped my heart from my chest. “Yes. But not well.” Establishing that all-important distance. “He’s in town,” Gregor said.
“What does he do?”
“Um. I would describe it nicely as transport work.”
“And?”
“I don’t know what else. Muscle when needed: Sam’s dangerous in a fight.”
“Who did he work for when you knew him?”
“The Vrana brothers, but they’re dead now. Pissed off their partners and got axed in the bathroom. He worked with Djuki, too.”
“Is Sam reliable or not?”
“Reliable. Kind of a know-it-all. But he can move all sorts of goods. He had inside contacts at legit shippers. Made things easier.”
I could feel the air give in my chest, a hollow breath. Gregor was repeating words he believed to be true.
“Thank you, Gregor. How are things?”
“Fine but slow. Do you think people don’t wear watches so much with their phones telling them the time now?”
Piet didn’t answer his question. “I can throw some major business your way. Very soon.”
“Good. Okay.” Now I could hear the tension in Gregor’s voice, the eagerness to be done with the conversation.
“Thank you, Gregor. We’ll speak soon.” Piet clicked off the phone. The barrel stayed in place.
“What the hell more do you want? A résumé?”
Now I pulled the car over to the side of the road, earning a honk from a truck behind me. I turned to look at him.
Piet was scared to death.
This stone-cold mother was in deep trouble. He’d lost his ally, who had betrayed him to an unseen enemy. He’d lost his distribution point for a lot of counterfeit goods and his slave trade. He’d lost two men that he’d counted on. He’d lost a warehouse full of goods and slaves that his clients would be expecting him to move. He had just lost a great deal of money. He’d been made by Nic, and he was being chased. This on top of the Turk blaring his name around town. Piet was rapidly becoming a liability, and he knew it.