41
TEN AFTER NOON.
Nic the scumbag was late. I sat outside the Pelikaan, on the south side of the canal, sipping a half-pint of Heineken. The sunlight shimmered on the water.
I wondered, for the first time, who the Turk was that Zaid had hired. A soldier of fortune? An actual smuggler? Someone, like me, with his own personal vendetta against the scarred man? Bahjat Zaid was a panicked father who hadn’t put his entire trust into Mila or her secret employers. After I calmed down a bit on the way to this meeting, I could not blame him. I didn’t know if my child was dead or alive, either.
I was getting closer to the truth and to Lucy. I knew it. This was the most important meeting of my life. I tried not to sweat. I tried not to think too much. Just play the right note and I’d be in.
Nic worked his way through the strolling Saturday crowds. He gave everything and everyone a disdainful glare. He did not look happy.
He sat across from me. In the daylight he looked pasty, robbed of sleep. I wondered if he’d figured out he’d had an intruder in his room, parsing his hideous secrets. But probably none of them had slept well last night after learning of the Turk’s attempt to infiltrate them.
“Hello,” I said. I absolutely had to keep the contempt from my voice. I know what you are.
“I’m having a very bad day,” he said. The waiter stopped by the table; Nic ordered a Coke. The waiter brought it and vanished. No one sat near us.
“So. This Turk compromised your route?”
“It was all bluff,” Nic said. “The Turk was a liar.”
“Was?”
“I mean is. Forgive my English.”
I had to sound like a guy desperate for a job; which I was. “Nic. Listen. I’ve moved plenty of stuff from eastern Europe to Holland, to England and America. I know how to get contraband of any sort through. If you’re worried that the Turk has screwed up your planned route, let me design an entirely new route for you, with new transport. Be safe.”
Nic sipped his soda. I waited. If they’d depended on the Turk to set up transit for their goods to the U.S., they couldn’t use whatever he’d arranged, so they had to be desperate. Unless they’d already found a solution. But the Turk had died a few hours ago, and maybe I was their best chance of keeping their operation moving forward. Nic would have been sent to take my measure.
“Why are you so desperate for work?” he asked.
“I like eating and sleeping under a roof. And I need a foothold in the Netherlands.”
“Why here?”
“A few minor difficulties for me in eastern Europe. I need to focus on smuggling goods to the West.” I took a long sip of beer. “I wouldn’t mind a slice of the action of whatever you’ve got going. What is it? Counterfeit cigs or luxury goods? Designer drugs?” All of those were trades worth billions—nearly twenty percent of the world economy these days is in illicit goods.
“You must be in dire straits to be hanging out in seedy bars looking for work to appear.”
“Actually I’m just a big karaoke fan. And if you’d said dire straits there last night, I would have sung one of their hits.”
A smile flickered and vanished. “What’s your full name, Sam?”
“Peter Michael Samson.”
Nic’s phone rang. He opened it, listened carefully. He kept a poker face, mostly—I saw the slightest tug of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He got up from the table, walked to another empty one, made a second call. He listened, watching me. I raised my glass to my lips, whispered behind the camouflage of the half-pint.
“Did you get that?” I said.
Mila answered. “Yes.” The transmitter was hidden beneath my collar, thin as a toothpick. Hard to detect under my starched shirt. Hence dressing for the meeting like it was a job interview. Mila had slipped the transmitter into my clothes. The earpiece where I could hear Mila speak to me was a risk; it would be easier to spot. State of the art; I wasn’t sure the Company had field gear this good. It made me wonder again exactly who I’d decided to work for.
“If they have passport records access… they could be digging my name up right now.”
The Company could have killed the Peter Samson legend, eliminated the IDs, the passport records. And surely there would be a trace put on any queries made against my old, discarded names, as well as watching for any use of them.
Which might bring the Company right down on Nic and his friends. But that couldn’t happen before I got what I needed from them. Not before I had the scarred man in my grip. Not before I had got Yasmin to safety and knew the truth about Lucy and my son.
I watched Nic. Nic watched me. Minutes passed. Long enough for whoever he had working for him to access a Canadian passport database? They had hacked into the Amsterdam police servers; why not the Canadians’ as well? I had underestimated Nic before.
I said nothing more to Mila; she was close, watching us from an empty office space across the Singel canal.
On the Herengracht, in the grand Company safe house, August pushed open the door of Howell’s office. Howell glanced up from looking at photos that had come through passport control in Rotterdam. Thousands of faces, none of them Sam Capra. He felt dizzy.
“Sir, we just got a query hit on one of Sam Capra’s old legends. The Peter Samson identity. It just came, moments ago, from an IP address from an Internet café in Amsterdam. Looking for passport information, military records, criminal history.”
“Where?”
“Over on Singel. A few minutes away.”
“Let’s find out who’s so interested in Sam.” God, he thought, maybe it was Sam himself, checking to see if the old identity was still active. That little bastard finally made a mistake. “Any record of the passport being used to enter Holland?”
“No, sir,” August said. “Do you want me to kill all the documentation tied to the identity?”
“No. No. Leave it active. Let’s see where it leads us.”
He and August and Van Vleck, an ex-Marine permanently assigned to the Company office in Amsterdam, hurried down the steps into the bright spring day. “We can call the Dutch police…,” Van Vleck said.
Howell raised a hand. “Absolutely not. We handle this ourselves.” He glanced at August. “This may get ugly. If he’s there, we take him down, and you can talk to him later. Don’t hesitate.”
“I won’t, sir,” August said. “We’ll catch him.”