by Jay Deb
“Hurry,” said Gibbs, and the three men started running along the slender road right outside the jailhouse.
Soon, they were on the main road, where a pearl green compact car was waiting. The passenger-side door flung open, and Gibbs got inside. Janco and Taylor entered the vehicle and sat in the rear seats.
A woman was in the driver’s seat. Janco surmised her age was a tad above thirty. She started the car’s ignition, and the vehicle started moving.
Taylor leaned forward and asked Gibbs, “You think we should call them and let them know the guard’s situation?”
“No,” said Gibbs. “Not now.”
Janco peered outside. The sun was yet to come up, but the view was soothing to his eyes.
BOOK 1
Chapter 1 Amsterdam
Max Doerr, the CIA assassin, was getting ready for work. It was a cloudy morning; the little ducks were moving around quietly, and he saw some swans searching for food. Doerr pulled the blinds on both the windows in his hotel room and put on a pair of shorts and a white T-shirt to make him look like a typical American tourist, but his purpose was to hunt down the man who had sucked all the happiness from his life. At six feet four inches, two hundred twenty pounds, not a shred of unnecessary fat in his body, he was physically strong and mentally ready for the hunt.
In the right pocket of his shorts, he tucked in a Glock 27, a preferable choice when stealth was more important, with a short barrel and easy to conceal. In Doerr’s parlance, he called it a tank. He could take any target down with it from a reasonable distance. Many in his profession preferred a Glock 23, a gun with more precision, a heavier caliber bullet and a longer barrel. But for Doerr the precision was in his hands, brain, and the endless amount of time he had spent with his firearms – not in the length of a barrel. He was one of the best shooters the CIA ever produced.
In the other pocket of his shorts, he placed a magazine with additional bullets, a Swiss knife, and an encrypted smartphone. He put on a pair of white sneakers and then waited for a text message from his handler. No text message came for five minutes, which meant the agency folks didn’t have a visual of the target. There had been reliable intel that Rafan, the target, was in Amsterdam to carry out a transaction. So the CIA had spread the word around, extended its tentacles to locate Rafan, and sent their best assassin – Max Doerr.
Unable to just wait in his room, Doerr closed the door of his hotel room and proceeded to the elevator. Once inside, he pressed the button marked G and tried to create an image of Rafan’s body in his brain – five feet four inches tall, almost a foot shorter than Doerr, broad shoulders and a medium belly. Last time Rafan had been located, he wore a thin beard, which was probably gone by now or maybe he’d put on a thick and long beard to make him look older, like a mullah.
Doerr walked through the hotel lobby, visually scanned the area out of habit, pushed the revolving main door of the hotel, and then stood at the curbside for a cab. He took out his smartphone to check for the text message – nothing.
The concierge came up. “Need taxi?”
Doerr nodded as he put the phone back in his pocket. A silver-colored cab, TCA written on its top, pulled up. The concierge opened the gate, and Doerr sat down in the rear seat, and the cab started moving slowly.
“Van Gogh Museum,” Doerr said, and the cabbie nodded.
“You from America,” the cabbie asked as the vehicle picked up speed and overtook a tiny white electric car.
“Yes,” said Doerr and looked outside through the window glass.
“I know people. As soon as I see someone, I know where they’re from.”
“I see that,” Doerr said grudgingly.
“I’m Thyagi. From Sri Lanka. I came here to study engineering.”
“Then what happened?”
“Don’t like engineer work, so I started driving. This way I see places.”
“Good point.”
“What do you do?” the cabbie asked, the most annoying question for Doerr.
It was a question he’d been asked a million times, so he had an answer ready. “I run a business.”
Most people were happy with that reply but not this cabbie.
“What kind of business?”
“I buy and sell pianos.” This wasn’t too far from the truth. He had bought and sold pianos many times though not for money. Playing piano was his hobby, and he had upgraded his instrument many times, sometimes just because he was bored with the older one.
“You see, I used to play pianos,” the cabbie shouted, making sure Doerr heard every word. “I played many types of pianos.”
Thirty minutes later, Doerr entered the art museum that contained the best collection of works by Van Gogh, the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter from the late nineteenth century, Doerr’s favorite artist, who had died from a gunshot at the age of only thirty-seven. Many believed the painter committed suicide, but Doerr thought that wasn’t the case. Why would a man of immense creativity destroy his own life?
“Do you need a tour?” someone asked, breaking his train of thought.
Doerr shook his head. He knew enough about Van Gogh, and this was the fourth time Doerr had visited this museum. He put his pouch with the gun inside a locker in the museum and then took the elevator to the top floor.
Doerr took his smartphone out, expecting a text – nothing.
So he sent a text to his handler: “Has the bird left town?”
Within minutes, he received a text back: “No report of leaving.”
Doerr texted: “Is the bird spotted in the city at all?”
A reply text came back: “We have been bird-watching. But not spotted in the city yet.”
Doerr: “Then how do you know the bird even reached Amsterdam?”
Reply: “We don’t. Per the source, bird came to town yesterday.”
Doerr: “Who is the source?”
After a delay of two minutes, the reply came back: “The source’s reliability is as high as the fee we paid to secure the info. Hang on. You’ll see the bird soon.”
Doerr didn’t send any more texts; he knew it was best to leave them alone and let them do their work while he waited for his moment. Doerr put his smartphone back into his pocket and proceeded to the third floor of the museum. He enjoyed art for an hour and then headed for the cafeteria and ordered a cheeseburger.
He stood in the pickup line, waiting for his food to arrive, three other customers ahead of him. He watched the first customer take a tray full of burgers and fries. And that was when he felt a vibration in his pocket. He pulled out his smartphone.
A text message was waiting: “Bird sighted in flower shop in Westerpark.”
Doerr’s body went into alert mode immediately. Another text came with the address of the flower shop. Luckily the place wasn’t too far, ten minutes’ cab ride. Doerr left the cafeteria without waiting for his burger. As he ran down the stairs, his phone buzzed again. This time, it was a phone call from the handler.
“Yes,” said Doerr into his phone.
“A cab will be waiting at the museum. Its plate number ends in 124. Get inside the cab.”
“I need to hire a cab myself.” Doerr had faced this situation before. The agency always wanted to use its own vehicle, more transparency, and better control. But Doerr wanted to hire his own ride, giving him the control.
“Why?” the handler barked. “Our cab is fitted with a radio and multiple monitors. You know it’s better. Don’t argue with me.”
“I don’t need a radio or monitor as long as you or somebody is online, answering my questions. Sometimes your vehicles are bugged, or the instruments hacked into.”
Doerr picked up the pouch with his gun from the locker and was approaching the museum’s main door. “Besides, I won’t have time to stare at some fancy monitor.”
“It’s a protocol defined by the top bosses, Doerr. We don’t want you to shoot from a cab and see the cabbie giving an interview on a TV channel an hour later. See my point now?”
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br /> “I won’t be doing anything like that from inside a taxi,” Doerr whispered as he walked out of the museum. He could see a cab approaching; its plate number was SJT-124. From outside it appeared like an ordinary cab.
Doerr detested the CIA when they tried to control the whole shebang. But he recognized it was pointless to argue with the handler. The time lost might prove crucial later. The cab stopped where Doerr was standing, and Doerr hung up the phone, entered the cab, and sat on the passenger seat. As the vehicle moved slowly away from the museum, the cabbie pressed a button on the dashboard. All the meter displays went dark, and the dashboard turned into a monitor displaying a video feed showing the front of a flower shop.
“That’s the shop where Rafan is right now.” The handler’s voice came up on the radio.
“How long has he been in there?” Doerr asked.
“Two to three minutes, I would say.”
“And how many minutes is it going to take for us to reach there?”
“I would say five to ten,” the handler replied. “But confirm with your driver.”
Doerr looked at the driver, who gave a meaningful nod of agreement – yeah, it should take about five to ten minutes.
Doerr set his eyes on the road; traffic was thin. At one p.m., the rush period was a few hours away. The cab passed two vehicles and allowed four more to pass; it could certainly use a bit more speed.
“Can’t we go faster?” Doerr said to the cabbie. The man made a hand gesture in reply, indicating that a cop might be present on the roadside, armed with a speed-checking device.
Doerr wondered if the driver was a mute. If he were, then that was perhaps a good choice on the agency’s part. A silenced cabbie would not be able to give interviews to the TV stations.
Three minutes passed. Keeping an eye on the monitor, Doerr asked the handler, “Does the shop have a back door?”
“Not sure. If it does, then it opens to another road.”
Doerr was in a quandary now. Should he head for the road in front of the shop or the back? “Do you have someone near the shop’s entrance?” Doerr asked.
“No. There is a guy standing opposite the shop. The video you’re seeing is coming through his wristwatch.”
Obviously the agency had hired someone to stand there, wearing a watch with a tiny camera pointed at the shop’s front door.
“The cab will drop you five hundred feet away from the shop,” the handler said. “There is no surveillance there, so the cab will simply drive away while you take care of business and vanish from the site on your own. Understood?”
“Understood.” It was standard procedure. Doerr didn’t need much help, the less, the better. “I want to go to the back entrance of the shop.”
“Why?” The handler sounded irritated. “I see no reason for the bird to exit via the back door.”
“I’ve got a good feeling that he’ll come through the back. These guys always take precautions. Now tell the driver to go to the back road. Looks like he takes orders from you only. We have someone at the front anyway.”
“No way. The guy at the front is an unarmed civilian. He can’t do much. Go to the front.”
Doerr knew there was no point arguing with the handler.
Seven minutes had passed since leaving the museum. Doerr made a hand gesture to the driver, asking him to go to the back. The driver shook his head forcefully. He wouldn’t listen.
A minute later, Doerr could see the flower shop and spotted the young man standing in an awkward position so that the camera on his wristwatch pointed to the shop.
The cab stopped after the ten-minute ride from the museum, and Doerr got out of the vehicle and trudged to the shop. Ten minutes were way too long. Rafan was probably out already. Within seconds, Doerr was inside the shop.
The flowers in the shop were arranged in three rows. One row had yellow tulips, the second one had red, and the third row contained all the other flowers. Regardless of color, the most expensive ones were kept in the back row. At the front, there were many boxes, one stacked on another. Doerr knew those were packaged flowers to be picked up by couriers, waiting to be shipped across the globe.
Doerr visually checked the shop and then rushed to the back – no Rafan. He knew he should have hired a private cab from the street and used that thousand euro cash he had in his back pocket. That way he would have arrived at the shop early. The agency’s driver couldn’t afford to speed up and get apprehended by a local cop, who might have decided to check out the vehicle and discover all the high-tech gizmos; that would be scandalous.
Doerr was sure that Rafan would not wait in the shop for ten minutes. Rafan would make the transaction as quickly as he could and then make a hasty exit. Doerr rushed to the shop’s back door, opened it, and stepped outside. He looked right and then left. No Rafan, no human. He saw a black cat, which fled swiftly.
An employee of the shop, a middle-aged bald man, rushed to Doerr. “Do you need any help, sir?”
“I was supposed to meet someone here,” Doerr lied. “Did you see a short stocky Middle Eastern man who came here alone?”
The employee thought for a few seconds and then asked thoughtfully, “With little bit of gray hair at the front?”
“Yes. Yes. Was he here?”
“In fact, yes.” The employee smiled. “He was here a minute ago. He ordered a bunch of flowers to be delivered.”
“Really? Can you show me the delivery address?”
“No.” The employee’s face turned serious. “We can’t give away customers’ information.”
“The thing is” – Doerr pulled out a hundred-euro bill – “my friend was probably sending a present to a common friend. Today is the friend’s birthday. But the friend has moved to a different place.” Doerr told a bunch of lies and handed the euro bill to the employee. “Can I see the delivery address?”
“Why didn’t you say it was your friend?” The smile returned to the employee’s face as he took the cash. “Come this way, please.” The man headed for the cash register. He pulled out a notebook. “Room number 436, Hotel Marina. Kattengat 12, 1019 SZ Amsterdam. Is that the right address?”
“Yes. That is the right address. Thank you.”
Doerr briskly exited the shop. After walking about a hundred feet, he pulled out his smartphone and called his handler.
“What happened?” the handler asked.
“First check this address. Hotel Marina. Kattengat 12, 1019 SZ Amsterdam.” The address had been imprinted in Doerr’s brain as soon as the shop employee had uttered it. “Tell me where it is.” Doerr waited as his heart pulsed higher. He had a thin hope that Rafan had given his address or his friend’s. Then Doerr could nail Rafan.
“I just checked. That address is nonexistent. Now tell me what happened in that flower shop.”
Doerr gave him a brief gist of it.
“I don’t know why Rafan gave a false address for the flower delivery,” said the handler.
“It’s a ploy to slow down the pursuer,” Doerr said. “I think we could get him today if I could hire my own cab.”
Doerr was frustrated because Rafan wasn’t an ordinary target. He was the man who had sucked the happiness from Doerr’s life.
Chapter 2 Rome, Italy
A year and three months ago…Max Doerr was a very happy man that day. His month-long assignment in Italy was complete, and he was waiting for his wife, Gayle, to come and join him in the historic city of Rome. He was thinking about her and could almost smell the lavender fragrance of her hair. He could visualize her hazel eyes that he never tired of gazing at. The chauffeured CIA sedan took him to Leonardo da Vinci airport.
Heading back to the hotel, inside the sedan, Gayle curled into a cocoon and rested her head against his chest. “When can we go to the Colosseum?” she asked.
“You’re tired,” Doerr said. “Let’s go there tomorrow.”
“I think you are tired, Max. I’m not,” Gayle said with her usual smile. “Today we go. Come on, life is sh
ort.”
The sedan turned right, and the hotel was barely five hundred feet away, and that was when it happened.
First an ear-piercing explosion; then the car tilted to the left. He extended his hands to protect Gayle, but his head hit the roof. He smelled smoke; the memory of what happened next was blurred. Waking up in a hospital, all he remembered was Gayle’s face.
“You’ve been in a coma for four days,” said the nurse.
He tried to look around. “Where is Gayle?”
The nurse sighed, and her chin dropped. He felt his heart collapsing and body sinking.
Plenty of sunlight was coming inside the tiny hospital room when he woke up again. Soft music was coming from somewhere, but no one was around. He knew he was alone, truly alone. A few years back, his son had been murdered in New York, and now Gayle was gone. The last words from her mouth – life is short.
Everything felt meaningless, and Gayle’s last words echoed in his heart.
Why her. Why? Why? Why?
In the next two months, his weight dropped by fifteen pounds. At night, he couldn’t remember if he ate his lunch and didn’t want to have dinner. He stopped drinking coffee because it brought Gayle’s memory. He started smoking occasionally.
He didn’t report for duty and wouldn’t return calls left by the CIA folks.
That changed when he heard a message left by CIA Director Alison Stonewall on his cell phone, explaining who had killed Gayle – Rafan Sohail.
Chapter 3 California
That woman is crazy, Janco thought. She was driving at ninety miles an hour in a sixty-five zone.
“Perhaps there are cops,” Janco mumbled, worried that his newly attained freedom might end abruptly just because that woman drove too fast.
“Chill,” the woman said. “I got a radar.”
Sitting next to him, Taylor gave him a shut up look.
While the car raced forward, Janco looked around. The sun was rising, and a view of the horizon soothed his eyes though his heart fluttered from the uncertainty that lay ahead. The land around was barren, only a few cactus plants visible here and there.