An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam

by Michael Grant

  Ah, the information you can get from facial expressions and eye movements. They both – even my weepy friend from the stairwell – shot choreographed suspicious glances at Willy.

  Willy hadn’t told them what the take would be. I barely resisted laughing.

  I said, ‘Everything I know is well-dispersed to people and places you have zero chance of silencing. Fuck with me and it all comes out, and I don’t think Daniel “the Chipster” Isaac, or the CIA, would be happy about that. Do you?’ Time for me to press my advantage. ‘You boys want to call the cops? No, you don’t. Do you want to stab me on this bridge? Go for it, but you’ll never get the Vermeer or the fifty million that way, will you?’

  ‘You don’t know who you’re fucking with, Mitre,’ Willy snarled. But that was weak and we all knew it.

  ‘Nah, see your problem is that I know exactly who I’m fucking with. So you boys toddle off and tell the merchant of death he can have his Vermeer for the low, low price of five million dollars which, gee, is just a tenth of what he was willing to pay you.’

  I’d have felt so much better if he had raged and cursed. He didn’t. He went blank. Expressionless. Like he was already gone. It was a cold look. Cold was bad.

  But I couldn’t show weakness. I had to own the swagger. ‘So what’s happening now is that I am walking away. If you come after me I will reluctantly have to bring the cops into it. That might cost me the five mil, might even get me arrested, but there is zero chance of conviction. Whereas, if the cops find you being unpleasant to me, it would cost you prison terms. Especially you, Willy, because I was there when you murdered my buddy.’

  This part was a combination of chutzpah and information seeking. If he knew who I was – who I really was – he’d know I’d never call the cops.

  ‘Now, you three get the fuck out of my way or I’ll start yelling for cops right here, right now.’

  They didn’t move, but neither did they push back as I muscled past them, bringing me way too close to that stiletto, toward which object I affected indifference. I was not at all indifferent but I was pretty sure they’d do nothing.

  And nothing is what they did.

  Milan would run the boat up the Singelgracht just a thousand feet or so to the Holland Casino which, I may say parenthetically, is a sad piece of work that wouldn’t make it in Henderson, Nevada let alone Vegas. Milan would stroll through the casino, looking for tails, then go to a second pre-positioned boat and sail off down the canal and tie-off just a few feet from an AirBnB I’d reserved solely to get their Wi-Fi password. Which, perhaps oddly, was stroopwafels. All lower case.

  Milan would then use a burner phone to link to the Wi-Fi and we would begin the live broadcast.

  All of this would eat up a half an hour.

  I used that time to walk to an actual coffee shop and have actual coffee. What I really wanted was about twelve ounces of Talisker, but I still had a panel to do. I did not concern myself overly much with being tailed by Sarip’s cops or even Delia’s contractors, in fact I welcomed it. Look at me! I’m walking along with completely empty hands. Gaze upon my innocence, ye coppers and despair!

  Then it was off to intersect with Madalena’s movements in the little square near Waterstones.

  I had some moments of anxiety when I couldn’t spot her there and I had to kill more minutes than I’d have liked and had to order still more coffee to explain my loitering. But then, there she was. We made eye contact. She walked down a row of parked bikes and dropped her phone into a bike basket. I sauntered by a minute later and picked it up.

  And ping, ping, ping went the cell phone towers.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The blank, nearly emotionless, but hyper-alert condition I’d been in from that first laying on of hands in the Rijks, dissipated to be replaced by a hollow fear. I had experience with moments like this. I knew the dilution of the adrenalin in my system would leave me feeling jumpy and exhausted. You can only maintain that disembodied fugue state for so long before all the suppressed fear comes bubbling up.

  My stomach was not enjoying too much coffee on top of too little food and the residue of used adrenalin, all my tangential Nazi bruises were reminding me that they weren’t gone just yet, and there was a part of me that really just wanted to sit down, right there on the sidewalk, and weep till it was all over. But again, aspiring criminals, this is where experience is so helpful. This was not my first day of school. I’d been here, I’d done this, I’d felt exactly this way – aside from the bruising – and I had endured.

  I walked into Waterstones at 5:51 p.m. A rather disturbing video live stream was about to go public in nine minutes, 6 p.m. local, 9 a.m. Las Vegas time. The dominoes were toppling one by one, and there was now nothing I could do to help things along.

  ‘Hi, I’m David Mitre. I’m on a panel tonight.’

  The front desk clerk called his supervisor and there was a blur of handshaking and expressions of delight and I was whisked away to the green room – a musty office with some ragged lounge chairs, bottles of water and packaged snacks of various kinds, all encroached upon by cardboard boxes and steel rolling carts piled with books.

  ‘Am I signing stock? Because I’m early and I’d just as soon start.’

  I was indeed signing stock, and they had a decent but not amazing pile of three dozen of my latest, and another dozen of my previous works. So I sat there opening my books to the copyright page and scribbling my deliberately over-dramatic but entirely illegible scrawl with a fine-tip black Sharpie, all the while waiting for …

  Ting!

  I opened my phone, opened my Signal app and there was the single word: Gouda.

  Because when your crime partners – Milan and Madalena, M&M – want to tell you they’ve launched something you don’t want them saying, ‘Hey, we launched something!’

  I instantly wiped the message. I double-checked that the cloud was turned off and for extra measure, deleted the app and restarted the phone. I excused myself to the restroom where I smashed the phone against the porcelain until the guts were exposed. I used my pocket Swiss Army knife to pry out the battery and dumped it in the trash. Then I used my cigar torch and burned a good forty-five seconds’ worth of butane flambéing the memory. I pried out the heat-blistered flash memory and flushed it down the toilet, muttering, ‘There you go, NSA, read that.’

  I then carefully wiped down the case and the starred screen and tossed the mess in the bin along with the battery.

  I went back out to the green room to finish autographing, a task made more difficult because I’d singed my ring finger burning the phone.

  So far, so good, as the man who’d jumped off the Empire State Building was heard to say as he passed the fiftieth floor. It was up to the Fates now.

  I hate when things are up to the Fates.

  By now the Rijksmuseum security, no doubt aided by Dutch police, perhaps even my friends Sarip and DeKuyper, would be going through all the video footage. They would know they’d been robbed. They would know the ‘fire’ was just a harmless smoke bomb. They’d have the drone and the Bluetooth speakers and the motorized wheelchair. Battalions of Koninklijke Marechaussee would be frantically comparing serial numbers to shipping lists and they’d be cursing as they discovered that none of my toys had come from Amsterdam.

  So inconvenient.

  Beat cops would soon be showing up at shops in Rotterdam and beyond, looking for credit card details that would lead to stolen numbers and irrelevant addresses.

  They’d probably be able to pull up footage of me walking out of the main door with my black zipper bag and down the archway to the street. Right through a flash mob whose presence would only serve to confirm that I had been very damn serious about getting away with the Vermeer.

  The one thing I worried about was in the queue to exit when I’d collapsed the art bag, but I was reasonably confident that this move had been blocked from camera view by the crowd. What Rijksmuseum security would see was an old dude in a wheelchair sudde
nly spry, snatching the Vermeer, hiding it in a zipper bag, carrying it away, appearing before sequential cameras, swapping disguises and in the end walking off through a confusing flash mob and into the sunset.

  ‘Are you David Mitre?’

  I jumped. The Sharpie flew from my hand, spiraled through the air and left a small black mark on the spine of a Harry Potter book.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you, I’m Jennifer Choo. We’re on the panel together?’

  She looked like her author photo: Asian-British, or British-Asian, early forties, graying gracefully, dressed in jeans and a down jacket. I forced a greasy grin onto my face and stuck out a hand. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to fling a Sharpie at you. Too much caffeine.’

  We chatted: publishing people we’d dealt with. Agents. Deals. Options. The usual artsy, literary stuff we literary artistes talk about in real life. This was in lieu of either of us having to pretend to be big fans of the other.

  A third author showed up, one of those fusty old men with dandruff and nose hair who wrote a single book ten years ago and fuck-all since. His name was George, I think. George something. Didn’t know him either, but he’d read my books and managed without saying so to convey that he was not impressed. He wore a vest, a too-colorful vest, like something one might wear at Christmas if you were drunk enough and your maiden aunt had knitted it from her cat’s fur and was waiting there all dewy-eyed for you to offer effusive thanks.

  I didn’t like George. I’m funny that way with people who don’t like my books.

  More blather and time passed and I didn’t pull my phone – the phone Madalena had handed off to me – out to check the time because I had to appear cool and in no hurry.

  Did Mr Mitre appear distracted?

  No, officer, he was just rambling on about IP lawyers versus agents.

  There’s nothing worse than waiting, waiting for your future to be decided when you had no ability to influence the outcome. Well, maybe not the worst thing. Ian would argue that his end of this caper was worse.

  The event was running late because we were waiting on the arrival of the night’s big star. Meanwhile the first video stream had been up online for ten minutes. I kept chatting with no bloody idea what I was saying because in my mind I was with Milan. Everything now relied on a headbanging pickpocket I barely knew. If he wandered off, all was lost. If he decided to chat on the phone with some friend, all might be lost. If he just got tired and fell asleep, all was lost.

  At the twenty-minute mark, in just ten minutes, Milan would shut down the transmission. Then he would sail off to the next AirBnB and resume transmission there on the hour.

  Suck on that NSA. Good luck GCHQ. As for the Koninklijke Marechaussee? Puh-leeze.

  Sure, if somehow a land-speed record for bureaucratic cooperation had been set, the big eyes and ears in the sky would track the broadcast to Amsterdam. But that just added to the authenticity, because of course the signal would originate in Amsterdam. Given the elapsed time it would have to.

  And the sigint folks would be able to locate the AirBnBs in time, but that was crucial: in time. Not in twenty minutes. Not in a time frame that would give them an ability to react. They could send action teams all over the city and they wouldn’t get to any of the Wi-Fi sources in time.

  Yes, they would realize – again assuming unprecedented levels of interagency cooperation – that the thief was using AirBnBs, and they’d pop the top on AirBnBs servers like opening a beer can, and they’d get the credit-card data which would show … a stolen credit-card number bought online.

  Maybe they would share that info with Sarip’s people and the law enforcement folks would hastily track down the owners of the apartment who would admit that, nope, they never did meet the tenant. Just gave them the combination to the front door lock and, oh, right, also the Wi-Fi password.

  But this would be where the LEOs would get clever. The second broadcast which would also be tracked back to an Amsterdam AirBnB – quicker this time because they knew what they were looking for – and the LEOs would rejoice because they had a pattern.

  Round three of the broadcast at nine p.m. local would confirm the pattern. Their excitement would be unbounded. ‘Pattern!’ Sarip or his equivalent would cry in their simple-minded way. Quick, everyone start calling AirBnB owners who’ve rented recently to someone they didn’t meet in person. We’ve got ’im now!

  Do you though? Do you, Lieutenant? Check the fourth broadcast. Oh look! That’s not an AirBnB ISP, that’s a fucking coffee shop. Hah!

  Would it be oversharing to admit that as this scenario played out in my head I felt something bordering on sexual gratification?

  I was good. I was better than good. I was a fucking criminal genius.

  If it all worked.

  ‘So what are you working on?’ George asked, head tilted skeptically to hide his shame at being a mere one-and-done in the presence of Mr Five Books.

  I shrugged. ‘Same old, same old,’ I said. ‘Joe Barton’s been good to me.’

  ‘You don’t ever aspire to anything else?’

  Why? Is that what you’re doing? At the end of a ten-year-long ‘aspire’ are you, George? Muse-talking on a regular basis, are we? Of course I didn’t say that because it would be unkind. Also my mouth was as dry as a college freshman who’d been up all night smoking weed and snorting Adderall.

  Right about now Milan would disengage the first Wi-Fi link. If it was actually working. If, if, if. Aside from that single, Gouda, I couldn’t be sure any of this was happening.

  The Star of the Evening strolled in, accompanied by a publicist. Polly Addison Theriault, the arriviste, the social media force, the kid who already had a Nero Award and was in hot contention for an Edgar.

  This new arrival, not so far from being half my age, had her phone open and without preamble or introduction said, ‘Hey, are you guys watching this?’

  ‘Watching what?’ were the words strangled out of my throat.

  ‘It’s kind of amazing,’ says she, talking too loud because she had Airpods in. ‘Some, like, famous painting’s been stolen from the big museum they have here. And someone’s threatening to destroy it unless he gets five million euros.’

  Don’t be the first, don’t be the first, don’t be the first …

  ‘What the hell?’ George demanded, taking it so personally that he stood up.

  ‘What’s that you’re looking at?’ I asked with mild concern, coming in second. ‘I’m David Mitre by the way, big fan.’

  ‘And I’ve read, I think, one of yours, David. I’m not sure.’

  I’ve always insisted that I don’t kill people, well, not deliberately, but if someday a tram happened to be coming by and I happened to be standing behind Polly Addison Theriault …

  ‘Oh. The live feed cut off,’ she said. ‘No … wait there’s a message. Heh. Intriguing.’

  ‘Are you going to share with the class?’ Jennifer Choo asked impatiently.

  ‘Let me see if I can rewind …’ She took out the earbuds.

  We all waited, open-mouthed as Polly Addison Theriault, author of two gimmicky books in what was to be the It All Started With series, swiped and frowned and then turned the phone around and played it for us.

  I had of course seen the video and heard the audio – many times – but not in an active context, so to speak.

  The picture on Polly’s phone showed Jewess at the Loom. It appeared to be tacked to a piece of plywood. It was dimly lit, but you could still see the diligent Jewess looming away. Beside it a digital timer ticked down from twelve hours.

  Eleven hours, thirty-seven minutes left.

  The tinny audio, obviously a mechanical voice, said:

  Hallo, guten tag, bonjour, hola, boa dia, hi and g’day, mates. We are the Children of Abraham. We are not terrorists. We are not politically motivated. We are simply businessmen looking for profit.

  As you see, we have the Vermeer stolen from the Rijksmuseum. In twelve hours a small but effective bomb
will go off, destroying this priceless Vermeer.

  There is only one way to stop this from happening.

  The price is five million dollars.

  At the bottom of this video is a link. Those who wish to contribute to save this beautiful and irreplaceable artwork, please click on the link and donate what you can afford in any common cryptocurrency.

  This video will stream for twenty minutes. Then it will fall silent. And then reappear in another stream.

  We don’t wish to harm the painting. It is a magnificent piece of priceless art. But our need is dire and we will carry out our threat.

  Twelve hours.

  Five million dollars.

  ‘Children of Abraham. Jews,’ sniffed Jennifer Choo.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ George rebutted. ‘Abraham had two children, Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael was the father of the Arabs.’

  So the whole Children of Abraham thing was working as anticipated. Some would blame Jews, some would blame Arabs, both would be wonderfully embarrassed when it became clear that it was neither. But in the meantime various intelligence agencies would be squeezing their sources amongst Jewish and Palestinian extremists and wasting time chasing down blind alleys.

  ‘But I haven’t even heard that a painting was stolen,’ I said with appropriately befuddled expression. ‘A Vermeer did he say?’

  ‘The message kept just replaying until, like, a minute ago. It must be a prank,’ opined Polly Addison Theriault.

  George blew out a snort. ‘Won’t work. No one’s going to fall for this, that’s probably not even a real painting.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘Unless it turns out some painting really was stolen.’

  At which point Polly Addison Theriault, the clever girl, checked Twitter. ‘OMG! There’s a bunch of people talking about … like a drone? And a fire at the Rijksmuseum?’