by Seeley James
“A lot of good people left the State Department and the FBI and the intelligence services, and hell, most overseas postings. President Charles Williams has only been in office for three weeks. He’ll get things sorted out eventually.” He swallowed hard. “You’re onto something huge and villainous and evil here but … I don’t have any ‘people.’ None of the legat offices have any ‘people’ left. I’ll make some calls. I met a guy named Pavard in the Paris police department. He’s a nice guy. I’ll talk to him.”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “He’s the one who started the story about me killing two innocent tourists.”
“Oh. Well, then.” He made a note on his yellow pad about Pavard. “Dennis is out in front of us on this, and god only knows what he’ll do—if anything. I’ll confront him about it.” Mark sighed and wiped his face with his hands. “He’ll do what he did last time, tell me to keep in my lane. Hell. This is bad.”
Miguel stood.
“But, I’m getting right on it.” Mark looked up at the giant Navajo. “You guys shouldn’t do anything. You don’t have a great rep in France. Or Western Europe for that matter. Eastern Europe either. Rest assured, I will make things happen. I will sound the alarm.”
Tania stood.
“Who’s Dennis?” I asked. I rose as well.
“Station chief, the drama queen who played James Bond with you in the garden next door.” Mark rolled his eyes.
Nice to know we had the same opinion of the CIA’s man in France.
“Thanks for your help. We’re going to pop smoke.” I extended a hand.
He shook it. “Pop smoke?”
“Call for extraction. When you’re outnumbered and call for evac, you pop a smoke bomb so the bird can find you.”
He nodded. “My duties in Kabul were with the police there. I didn’t hear many military terms. Look, you must leave this in our hands now. We can’t afford any more ambiguous incidents like Saint-Sulpice. We’ll make things happen, Jacob. You can count on me.”
CHAPTER 37
“We can’t count on him,” Tania said as we waited for Florian outside the embassy. “The Bureau is good, but they never get it done quicker’n six weeks.”
“At least he listened to us.” Miguel, the optimist.
I looked around for directional mics that might feed our conversation to Dennis-of-the-CIA. The building appeared devoid of cameras and microphones. That meant they were well hidden.
“Oh, isn’t that nice?” Tania snarked. “Face it, he’s a self-licking ice cream cone. The only people he knows in Europe are standing outside his embassy.”
Mercury hopped out of a cab and walked up to me. Yo. Is Sunday getting closer or further away? Get moving. I just doubled down on you getting this worked out.
You bet on me to succeed? I asked. I thought you were joking. As usual. Thank you for having a little faith in me for once. Where should we look?
Mercury slapped his hand over my mouth and looked both ways, plus up. I can’t be telling you that shit, bro. You know that. Especially when you know where three of them were headed. Think about it. On second thought, have Miguel and Tania think about it. When it comes to thinking, they outclass you.
“We know where they’re going.” I pulled my phone and brought up a map. “We could split up and search all three cities.”
“What is this, a horror movie?” Miguel asked. “Split up so we can die in different cities together?”
“Better ideas?”
“We gotta think about this,” Tania said. “Fake-Zack said these guys were experts at going off the grid. There’s no way they were going to Cologne or Antwerp. Luxembourg maybe. They have the highest incidence of racial violence in Europe after Finland. Maybe they feel safe there.”
“Finland?” I asked. “I thought they were the Canadians of Europe.”
“That’s Netherlands.” She noticed me wondering how she knew stuff like that. “When you’re a person of color who travels a lot, you keep an eye on certain statistics. And a Glock. You keep a Glock handy in case the stats are wrong. Anyway, the answer’s right in front of us. I can feel it.”
Florian pulled to the curb. We piled in.
I tapped our driver. “How many Sabel people can we get to help us? We need to search three cities.”
“Is this all?” He craned around to scowl at me. “Ms. Sabel exposes money laundering by the previous American administration, and suddenly we become the most popular security company in the world. Everyone is deployed, working extra shifts, eighty-hour weeks. Over a hundred job openings are availble in the Paris office alone. This is my thirty-sixth consecutive hour on the clock. This is SO not French.”
He drove us to the Sabel offices while we explained our three-city problem. He had little to offer other than the approximate populations. Cologne is the largest at roughly a million; Antwerp has half that; and the entire country of Luxembourg rounds up to six hundred thousand. Then he went back to work, leaving us in a meeting room.
We borrowed laptops to bring up a wall map of the region. In the triangle between the cities, we found little to stand out as a central meeting place. Liège, Aachen, Eindhoven, Hasselt, and Maastricht were too small for the anonymity they would need. We looked for private estates like the one they used in Spain. Nothing popped out at us. If they had a benefactor in the region, like the owner of the hacienda in Spain, they were in the wind.
Tania tired of speculation and stared out the window.
“What about Fake-Zack?” I asked Miguel. “What do we know about him?”
“He’s heavier than he looks.” Miguel stared at the map. “His French was fair, his English fully American, so I doubt he was one of Hugo’s men pretending to be American.”
“Pretending!” Tania came back to the table. She picked up her phone. “Seville is not Paris when it comes to European aviation. If you fly from Seville to some rando town, you have to change planes.”
She dialed a number and walked away from us.
Miguel and I weren’t following her logic and she didn’t explain, so we turned back to our maps. We searched for shooting ranges and large spaces like the one in Andalusia. The region has a much higher population density than Spain, making obvious locations harder to spot. Satellite maps didn’t help.
Where would terrorists party before flying around the world for an attack? Anywhere. An office building, an estate, a farm, an abandoned warehouse.
When the project felt overwhelming, my thoughts returned to Jenny. I toyed with the idea of listening to her voicemail. Her dumping sounded damn final. If she wanted me to bring a pastry back from Paris, that would be painful. If she wanted to tell me to buzz off again, that would be even more painful. If she regretted dumping me and wanted to get back together again, that would lead me to abandon the search for Nema and go back like a dog with my tail between my legs. Which would lead to me feeling guilty the rest of my life for letting ROSGEO happen. Even more painful.
The Sabel Security helpdesk texted me. They found contact information for Dennis Trapp, CIA Chief of Station, Paris. I called him.
As soon as he picked up, I said, “Dennis, have you found them yet?”
“Who is this?”
“Jacob Stearne. If I’m right, and ROSGEO goes down without you lifting a little finger, how will you sleep?”
“I’ve lifted a finger. Do you know what I found under it? A confidential informant for the British Crown who claims you made the whole thing up when she refused your advances.”
“Did she offer you video proof of that? Because I’m sending you a clip I think you’ll find works against her story.” I texted him the video Miguel took when we boarded the jet to London. Arrianne, being her sexy-self, smiled and chatted and bumped against me as we crossed the hangar. I looked and walked straight ahead before saying something to her that left her crestfallen. I said, “More importantly, did Hugo tell you why he introduced me to Zack Ames?”
“Our server won’t allow videos. Too much spyware.”
His voice didn’t move an inch from hardass. “Hugo claims he presented Zack as our agricultural attaché to you at Saint-Sulpice and any assumptions from there were your own.”
That much was true. I screwed that one up because of my hatred for Nuristan Zack. I asked, “Why did Fake-Zack pick the name of a hated agent?”
“Not my problem.” He clicked off.
Tania strode back to the table, put her hands on it, and leaned over. She had a smug look on her face. “Amsterdam.”
Miguel and I looked at each other, then back at her.
“Idiots.” She rolled her eyes. “All three of those guys flew from Seville to Amsterdam. They were then supposed to change planes to reach their final destinations. If you want to drop off the grid—skip your connecting flight. They’re gonna drop off the grid in Amsterdam.”
“Passports?” I asked. “Never mind, they’re inside the Schengen Area. No passports required. You’re right, walk straight out the door and onto the street. That makes a lot of sense.”
Miguel nodded. “It makes sense, but it’s a guess. A good one, but we can’t bet everything on a guess. What if they’re meeting in Cologne or Luxembourg? We could wander the streets of Amsterdam for days and never find them.”
“We have to split up.” I stared at the map. Something in my memory banks itched. “Cover our bases.”
“Remember, Nema’s real name is Joan Vanrijn,” Miguel said. “Why does that feel important?”
I Googled it. It came up as the surname of Rembrandt. We looked at each other and shrugged. Highly unlikely Nema was a descendant of Rembrandt. We resumed thinking in silence for a few minutes.
Florian came in to see if we needed anything. He waited hoping we didn’t with the expression of a very tired person.
“She has a tattoo on her neck,” I said. “Crossed keys, like this.”
I drew two antique keys with the handles at the bottom, and the teeth turned outward.
I’m no artist. Never said I was. My compatriots looked like art patrons asked to explain a Rothko painting. I said, “Keys. They’re keys.”
“It looks like a drunken X,” Miguel said.
Florian looked over my shoulder.
I said, “She said they had something to do with her grandfather. It was a memento, or something.”
“Ah, the keys of Leiden,” Florian said. He pointed at the map on the wall screen.
To the left and a bit down from Amsterdam was a town called Leiden. Wikipedia showed a flag with crossed keys in the middle.
Florian continued, “Leiden’s like a miniature version of Amsterdam with canals and guild houses. It is home to the University of Leiden, Airbus headquarters, and it was Rembrandt’s hometown. They’ve been successful attracting companies that would normally go to Amsterdam, Paris, or London but want lower rent. Lots of commercial renovation.”
“Holy shit,” we said in unison.
“Rembrandt’s hometown. Maybe she’s a descendant,” I said. “She introduced herself as an artist.”
Miguel said, “Renovated office buildings would make the perfect cover for Free Origins’ command center.”
“It makes sense,” I said, “but you’re right, we’re still drawing conclusions from threads of clues. We don’t have anything concrete to go on but a tattoo and a surname. And we have to find that command center. It’s our only chance to stop all the attacks at once.”
“Damn. We do have to split up.” Miguel nodded as he came to his conclusion. “Tania goes to Antwerp; I go to Cologne; you go to Leiden.”
“Why do I get Leiden?”
Tania looked as if the answer were obvious. “It has the best chance of being filled with forty-nine terrorists having a rah-rah party, and that means whoever goes there is most likely to die.”
“Yeah.” Miguel nodded with her, then shrugged. “Better you than me.”
CHAPTER 38
Everyone rides bicycles in Leiden. The machines lean against every building in every street. Not the fancy bikes Americans ride dressed in all their spandex splendor, but sensible utility vehicles. Most were designed in 1939. Some of them looked like they were built then too. Two-wheeled tech hasn’t changed much over the last eighty years. They came with mudguards and a rack for small items. The fancy ones had hand brakes. The one I rented was basic, which was fine by me. I hadn’t spent much time on a bike since I got my driver’s license.
I was the only customer sitting inside the Café Barrera. Everyone in their right mind enjoyed the warm, sunny day at the sidewalk tables scattered around the intersection of Rapenburg and Nonnenbrug. The former meaning “turnip town” and the latter meaning “nun’s bridge,” if my translation app was any good.
My favorite deity insisted I watch the university on the other side of the canal from inside so no Free Origins people would see me. As bougie cafés go, Barrera ranked up there with the best. Plenty of avocado toast for a smidgen under €10. I often wished I’d been the guy who thought of smashing fifty cents worth of avocado on a piece of leftover toast.
Mercury sat next to me, nursing a strange-looking coffee. Quit messing with your ankle, brutha. Keep your eyes on the university across the canal.
I said, I tweaked it on the landing. I need some Motrin.
Mercury said, I thought you were an expert HALO jumper.
I said, You can’t see every gopher hole.
Mercury said, Tania and Miguel making you jump was mean.
I said, Who keeps reminding me Sunday is coming? They didn’t have time for a drop-off at an airport. That doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why would Free Origins need a university? Most of those guys struggled in eighth grade.
Mercury said, Leiden has a celebrated language department. They need more religious phrases than “Allahu Akbar”.
I said, And they want to stay off the grid, so they’re not going to use Google. Got it.
Right then, a man with his arm in a sling crossed the Nonnenbrug heading straight for me.
Lugh.
When he turned up Kloksteeg, I bolted for the door. My bike was down the canal in the other direction. I decided to follow on foot. He paced quickly up the cobblestone lane between the sidewalk cafés.
Lugh would recognize the guy who broke his arm from a hundred yards. I kept a respectable distance. I didn’t need to. He didn’t pay attention to anything around him. His mind was on something else. He crossed an open plaza and ripped open the bright red door to an ancient church.
I kept to the south side of the plaza and checked my phone. The maps called it Pieterskerk, a twelfth century church converted into an event hall. The perfect place to host a send-off for forty-nine terrorists intent on attacking religious sites. Their website offered parties as large as 500 in the nave and seventy in the café. There were meeting rooms, short-stay facilities, wedding capabilities, and all kinds of other things.
It would make a good location for a pre-game party with Paladin making toasts. It was a guess, but it was unlikely Lugh strolled Leiden for any good reason. The organization wouldn’t send their second-in-command as a decoy. A look inside could tell me more.
They wouldn’t have rented it for the command center. I’d have to find that later.
The most likely scenario was that phase one of ROSGEO was underway. There might be two or three phases. One to pump up the terrorists, the next to spark the war. The third would be alternate attacks to ensure the success of the first two. If I was right, the first attack would happen in the morning. Time was short.
I texted Miguel and Tania to turn the jet around and HALO into Leiden.
Standing out in the open was dangerous. Lugh walking around in daylight would be countered by a precautionary protocol on the part of Free Origins.
I stood across a small plaza from Lugh’s big red door surrounded by ancient red brick buildings with signs in Dutch that I didn’t understand. I opened the nearest door.
I found myself in a school office. A woman behind the desk looked up and asked me somet
hing in Dutch. I shrugged and made myself thin behind the door frame to escape notice from outside.
Across the plaza, the Hungarians from the hacienda strolled out of Pieterskerk’s red door. They scanned every direction before turning left and walking away.
The lady at the desk asked in English, “Are you here for a reason?”
My welcome was wearing thin.
I kept watching and was rewarded for my patience. At the end of the plaza, one of the Hungarians abruptly turned around and walked in my direction. Great way to expose and confront a tail. The reflected light on the outside of the door helped shield me for a moment.
I turned to the lady at the desk. “Could you help me? I was following my sister’s ex-husband, and I think he saw me. He has a terrible temper and is quite violent. Do you have a back door?”
She shook her head. “We are a pre-school for faculty only.”
Like American schools, security had risen to alarming levels for Dutch children. Doors remain locked. Only known parents, teachers, and students are allowed in. Her gaze went to the window where the Hungarian, who looked like Central Casting had sent him to play thug #3, stood in the plaza searching for any sign of trouble.
“Maybe you could go through the playground to the Kerkhof, turn right and go outside.” She pressed a button under her desk. The door to my left clacked.
I went through it to a tiny courtyard filled with toddler-sized toys. At the other end was a red door like the one on Pieterskerk. On the other side of the red door I found a graveyard. I wondered if the four-year-olds on the playground knew their great-grandmothers were so near.
On the far end of the graveyard was a gate that led to a street. I peeked my way around each corner, hoping the Hungarian hadn’t figured out my ruse. I assessed the situation. Lugh had probably been going out and coming back all morning. Walking purposeful routes like that could expose anyone following him. The Hungarians backtracking was part of that plan. It came down to one of two options: either Lugh saw me, or it was standard procedure. If it’s the former, I’d have to mount a frontal assault on forty-nine terrorists. If it’s the latter, I could observe, check their defenses, and wait for Tania and Miguel to even the odds.
