“Hi.”
Startled, Sam turned to look at the speaker. He’d come up behind her quietly.
The man was tall, at least six foot three, with broad shoulders and lean hips. His shaved head gave him a look of menace, and a reddish soul patch made a point on his lower lip. Gray-green hazel eyes, like those of a big jungle cat, surveyed her impassively and held deep melancholy. The black biker leathers and heavy-metal concert T-shirt didn’t give much away. He could have been a dockworker or a Goth.
“Are you American?” The man spoke English flawlessly.
Because she felt contrary and because she didn’t want to let anyone know her business, Sam answered in French. “I don’t speak English. Do you speak French?” Languages and computers were her specialty at the CIA.
He switched to German, which she also understood. “No French. I speak German.”
Sam decided to cut the guy a break. He might even know more languages. She spoke in German. “Your German is very good.”
“I’m told my English is really good, too,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know,” Sam replied.
The man shrugged. “I’m amazed.”
Sam arched an eyebrow.
“You’re so gifted linguistically.”
“What makes you think that?”
Again the shrug, just a slight lift of the broad, leather-covered shoulders. “You speak French. You speak German.” He reached out slowly, without threat, and touched the pamphlet in her hand. “And you read English. Quite an accomplishment.”
Glancing down, Sam saw that she was indeed holding an English language pamphlet. “Busted.” She smiled, but she was wary at the same time. The man was very observant.
“I came over because you look like a tourist. This is a dangerous place for tourists.”
“You just volunteer to wait with strangers in the train station?”
He gave a slight nod. “It’s a hobby.”
“Maybe,” Sam said sweetly, “you should seek counseling.”
Perhaps he had a comeback for that, but Sam didn’t find out. At that moment the warning Klaxons went off, filling the station with noise and vibration. The crowd moved around her, getting ready for the train’s arrival.
In that moment, Sam got a clue as to what the man’s real interest was. Two men dressed in casual streetwear moved toward the platform. They had short, military-style haircuts and wore light jackets. An air of danger clung to both of them.
The big man, dressed in black, moved with them, shifting so that they stayed in his view.
The two men kept their distance.
Sam looked at the man in black. Are you hunting them? Or avoiding them? The situation intrigued her.
The train stopped with a grinding screech of brakes. Seconds later, the doors opened and the passengers began to debark in a press of moving bodies.
Sam stood on tiptoe to peer through the crowd.
Elle Petrenko stepped out from a middle car. She was carrying a baby and chatting amiably with a woman only a little older than her, who was carrying another toddler.
A baby? Sam was shocked. Elle hadn’t said anything about a baby. But then, there was a lot Sam didn’t know about her twin. Elle seemed outgoing and friendly, always willing to share her life, but Sam didn’t do that because of her upbringing. Naturally she assumed others held back things they didn’t want known as well. But a baby?
Three meetings in person over the last eighteen months, combined with several phone calls that were, no doubt, monitored by their respective intelligence agencies, and off-the-grid e-mails—none of it could complete a relationship that had a twenty-three-year gap.
Elle wore caramel-colored twill pants and a black, short-sleeved turtleneck that flattered her slender figure. Boots and a carry-on tote completed the ensemble. Unlike Sam, Elle wore her hair up.
After a brief conversation, Elle handed the baby to the young woman, who waved goodbye and managed to head out under a full head of steam with both kids. Sam released a breath, but a bit of wistfulness tugged at her heart. She was beginning to understand what it felt like to be a sister, but what would it be like to be an aunt? Just the sight of Elle holding that baby had started a whole kaleidoscope of possibilities tumbling through Sam’s head. She’d never really thought about family before. Now she was seeing generations of it ahead of her.
Glancing across the waiting area, Elle spotted Sam and walked over.
“Hello, sis,” Elle said, sounding totally American instead of Russian.
“Hi,” Sam replied.
Elle glanced up at the man beside Sam. “Who’s your friend?”
“You’re twins,” the big man observed.
Elle smiled but didn’t take her ice-blue eyes off the man in black. “He’s cute, but has he always been this slow?”
The man frowned at her.
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “I just found him.”
Looking a trifle uncomfortable, the man crossed his arms over his broad chest.
“He’s big,” Elle said, grinning slightly. Her blue eyes sparkled. “Can we afford to feed him?”
“He’s not staying,” Sam said. “Do you have bags?”
Elle patted the carry-on. “Just this one. I knew you said we’d be on the go tonight, so I made arrangements to have my bags delivered to my room.”
“Good.” Sam was already feeling antsy to be moving. She looked up at the big man. “Well, good luck finding another tourist to guard.”
He nodded.
Elle fixed him with the full force of her ice-blue eyes. “Do you have a name?”
“Joachim,” he said, then looked a little irritated.
Sam thought maybe it was because he’d answered before he could stop himself. Elle had that effect on men.
Even though they were twins, Elle was able to do more with her looks and her personality than Sam was. She’s just more willing to take risks than I am, Sam thought for what must have been the thousandth time.
“I’m Elle.” She offered her hand.
Joachim took Elle’s hand and held it for a moment, then seemed reluctant to let go.
“Are you going to be in Amsterdam long?” Elle asked.
“A few days.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around.”
Sam didn’t think that was a good idea. Joachim was rousing her warning senses. Maybe it was the quiet way he moved, or the fact that he’d avoided the two suspicious-looking men who now seemed to have disappeared, or maybe even the fact that Elle was acting twitterpated over him, but Sam wanted him gone.
“Perhaps,” Joachim replied. He offered a small wave. “Have a safe trip.” Then he was in motion, walking away from them.
Elle watched him go.
Despite her misgivings, and feeling a little guilty because Riley was back home missing her, Sam also watched the big man walk away. The tight leather pants hugged his firm butt in ways that Sam could appreciate even though she was spoken for.
“Wow,” Elle said.
“Wow?” Sam grumbled.
“Definitely wow,” Elle replied. “He’s one of those guys.”
“What guys?”
“Those guys you hate to see go but you love to watch leave.”
Sam grimaced. During the last year of getting to know Elle, she’d found her sister was much more outspoken than she was. “Personally, I thought he was creepy. He appeared behind me, out of nowhere. He told me he thought I was a tourist and shouldn’t be alone.”
“Doesn’t sound creepy to me. Sounds like a nice guy.” Elle glanced at her meaningfully. “You’ve already got a nice guy. Maybe that’s why you’re invulnerable to Joachim’s mutant abilities.”
“Mutant abilities ? “
“It’s from a children’s cartoon show,” Elle explained. “The X-Men.”
“In your country?”
“In yours.” Elle gave her a perplexed look. “You know, it surprises me sometimes how little you know about being a kid.”
I didn’t get to spend a lot of time being a kid, Sam thought.
“What mutant abilities does he have?” Sam asked.
“Irresistible charm and devastating looks. Definitely. Oh, and brooding menace.”
“I must be invulnerable.”
“You,” Elle countered, “have Riley.”
The crowd flowed steadily out of the building as the train powered up to depart again. Joachim and the two other men were nowhere in sight.
“What’s on the agenda?” Elle asked. “You said part of this little get-together was going to be a working vacation.”
“I’ve got to find someone.”
“We already found someone. You let him go.”
“Look,” Sam said, more shortly than she intended because she was tired and tense from meeting with Elle and dealing with Allison and Alex’s unexplained request, “if you hurry, you might be able to catch up to him.”
A calm look filled Elle’s face. She touched Sam’s arm. “Hey, just joking, Sam. I’ve been really looking forward to seeing you again. It’s been three months. I’m kind of jet-lagged from the trip. To make this happen, I’ve had to be up and running for the last thirty-seven hours. I’m not at my best.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. My sisterly skills could definitely use some improvement, she thought. During their time together, Elle was always the more relaxed one, more able to accept everything that happened. As a foster child, Sam had always fought to maintain security and familiarity. She didn’t like it when things changed.
“No biggie,” Elle said. “Buy me a mocha latte along the way and you’ll find I can be all about forgiveness.”
Sam smiled and shook her head. “Do you realize that sometimes you sound more American than I do?”
“I,” Elle replied, “take that as a compliment. I’ve worked hard to sound that way.” Leaning in, she whispered conspiratorially in a thick Russian accent that she had once assured Sam came from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Sam had gotten on the Internet to learn who those cartoon characters were. “Eet vas all included een my secret spy training, comrade.”
“Terrific,” Sam said. “Are you ready?”
“Yes. Why haven’t you already found the guy that you were sent here to find?”
Sam led the way out of the terminal. “It’s possible that I’ve been looking in the wrong places.”
“Where did you look?”
“At his house.”
“Hmm. That’s a good place to start. He wasn’t home?”
“No.”
“What about his place of work?”
“He’s a criminal,” Sam said. “He doesn’t keep regular hours or an office. He lives on a houseboat, so even his residence moves around a lot.”
“Makes it more difficult, but not impossible.”
Sam nodded. “This guy has pissed off a lot of the wrong people from what I’ve been able to find out. Someone may have killed him.”
“So instead of a person,” Elle said, “you could be looking for a boat anchor or fish chum.”
“Exactly,” Sam said. “I have to tell you, this could be dangerous.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Elle replied with a smile. “I’m a secret agent. I figured it out all on my own. C’mon. If I’m going to have to stay on my toes, we need to find me that mocha latte.”
Chapter 2
Standing in the shadows in front of Central Station, Joachim Reiter watched the two young women leave the building. They headed toward the red-light district and that didn’t please him. Although the sex shops and brothels were tourist attractions, they were also places were people got into trouble and sometimes got killed.
And those two women—or maybe only the one he’d first met at the train station—were in trouble. Otherwise Arnaud Beck’s men wouldn’t have led Joachim to them.
The last hour had been quite the circus, Joachim reflected. Tension and nervousness rattled through him. He didn’t want to be there, so far from home and his family. Being out of the country right now threatened everything. If any of his subterfuges were found out, he was dead. More important, so was his family.
He exhaled and avoided the fear clamoring inside his mind. One step at a time, Joachim. You won’t make any mistakes. Just get this done and get back home.
But things had already gotten more complicated than he’d guessed. He’d been sent to Amsterdam to find a man named Tuenis Meijer and had tripped across Beck’s men while gathering information about his target. Thinking that Beck’s men might lead him to Meijer, Joachim had followed them, staying out of sight. They’d never known he was there until he let them see him in the railway station.
Then they had locked on to the young blond woman at the station. Joachim still didn’t know who she was or what threat or possibility of gain she represented to a man like Arnaud Beck, but he’d known he couldn’t let them kidnap her or kill her.
Although he had, in the past, kidnapped and killed other men, Joachim couldn’t stand idly by while something happened to the woman. He wasn’t that kind of man. And he didn’t want to be the kind of man Günter Stahlmann paid him to be.
He was working on a way out. If trying to get there didn’t get him or his family killed in the process. Still, he played that deadly game by his rules and he’d made Günter respect them. Rule number one was that Joachim would never harm an innocent
That was why he had broken his cover and revealed himself to Beck’s men. Although they’d had their quarry in their sights, his presence there had upped the stakes. For them all, he ruefully admitted. No one was supposed to know he was there, either.
That decision was going to bring him trouble. He took trouble one step at a time, though. He’d learned that from years spent living between the crush of evil and the law. None of it had been easy. Even the way out he was now reaching for couldn’t promise he would live out his life instead of getting a bullet through his head or a knife across his throat for his betrayal.
But the women had gone one way and Beck’s men, now wise to his presence, had gone another. It was a stalemate that he could live with at the moment. What happened to them later was out of his hands. If something did happen, he hoped he would never know.
One of his cell phones chirped for attention. He pulled the device from inside his jacket, but his eyes stayed on the two blond women walking toward Oude Zijde.
A freighter passing in the north canal on the other side of the station sounded its horn, the tone mournful on the night air, like some lonely beast.
“Yes,” Joachim said into the phone. He spoke Russian now. Like his German and English, his voice carried no dialect.
“I have an address for you,” the young woman’s voice on the other end announced. “Your target lives on a houseboat called Satyr Dreams down on Achterburgwal. It’s near the intersection of Rusland Street.”
“I can find it.” Joachim paused, wondering how much he should reveal. But then, there was always the possibility that the woman was tracking his progress. “Beck’s men are here.”
Some of the confidence vanished from the young woman’s tone. “Are you certain?”
“One of them is known to me. He’s a criminal named Felix Horst. He specializes in armory and wetwork.” Wetwork was a euphemism for murder and assassination. Joachim knew people who did such things, but he would never be one of them.
“You knew that it was likely you would cross paths with Beck. I told you that.”
“You did. But if Beck, or at least one of his lieutenants, is here, it affects what we are able to do in the future. If you have any influence with him…”
“Beck is not part of this organization. I told you that, too.”
She had, but Joachim hadn’t necessarily believed her. The fact that she knew Beck, and knew what kind of man he was, made her information on him suspect. Most people outside the criminal syndicate and law enforcement didn’t know about Beck. That she did told him he needed to be careful.
“Concentrate on your
mission, Joachim,” she chided him. “Call me when you reach his houseboat.”
The phone clicked in Joachim’s ear. He closed the cell phone and replaced it in his pocket. Slowly, he turned and surveyed the street. Is she watching? He wasn’t certain.
Paranoia was a constant state of his profession. The feeling was one of the things that kept him alive all these years. His world was filled with gunrunners and black marketers, dope dealers and blackmailers, thieves and murderers. The sad thing was, he felt more at home in that world than any other.
Sometimes, when he let his own doubts and limitations plague him, he lost hope that he would ever be out of the sewer he was in. All his life that he could remember had been about violence, about crime that boiled down to sex and money. Even if he got out of it, got away from Günter and men like him, Joachim wondered how he was supposed to live like a normal man.
He would never be normal.
At the canal he flagged down a water taxi and gave his target’s address, wishing he knew more about why he was there.
And why a man as dangerous as Arnaud Beck was, too.
AS SAM WALKED TOWARD THE AREA, Amsterdam’s red-light district pulsed neon against the encroaching night. It was just after 10:00 p.m. locally and the nine-to-five crowds had given the city over to the nightlife. The clubs and bars were full, and music stained the air, but traffic was sparse.
The city was shaped like a horseshoe, built on the old streets that had accommodated horse-and-buggy traffic. The canals had always offered transport, and the majority of destinations were within walking distance. Small parties and big groups walked through the streets and window-shopped.
She and Elle walked alone.
The Voorburgwal Canal lay to their right and the Achterburgwal Canal to their left. Buildings were crammed together in the space between. Trees and boats lined the canals and bicyclists weaved between the pedestrians.
The red-light district created a ruby bubble of illumination in Oude Zijde, the old side of the city. Although she hadn’t been there yet, Sam knew sex shops and brothels filled the area. What she was probably going to see intrigued her, but at the same time she was put off by reports of sexual slavery. Willing adults putting on a sex show in a window was one thing, but she had to wonder if some were forced to perform.
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