by Jeff Abbott
But not careful enough.
“Could you play that again for me?” I asked. My throat dried and I felt the ache of my near-strangulation in the apartment in Brooklyn. He nodded and did so. I watched it carefully. “Again, please.” He replayed the clip. But this time I studied Bahjat Zaid. His mouth worked as he watched his daughter’s abduction.
“Do you recognize those men?” he asked me. “You look as though you do.”
One of the kidnappers, I felt sure, was the man who’d tried to kill me in my apartment, with the Novem Soles tattoo. “Yes, I do. He’s dead now.”
His gaze met mine.
“My Yasmin, being manhandled by those animals. It makes me sick.” He pinched the tip of his nose with his fingertips. “They have no right. My daughter belongs to me.”
I didn’t like that last comment at all. “What happened next, Mr. Zaid?”
“There was a phone number included with the e-mailed video. I phoned it immediately. A man spoke to me. He had a slight Dutch accent. I was instructed not to call the police or report her kidnapping, otherwise they would kill Yasmin.”
“Was there a ransom demand?”
“Yes. I was asked to transfer five hundred thousand euros to an account in the Caymans. I did so immediately.”
“And all they asked for was money?”
“Yes. I complied and they did not return her.” Pain flashed in his eyes.
“And then. The next e-mail. Another video.” He moused over a window on his laptop; another video began to play. The Centraal train station in Amsterdam; I recognized it from the photos that Mila had shown me. A dark-haired woman entered the train station, a knapsack on her back. The video jumped to her walking out the doors. Without the knapsack, the scarf concealing the bottom half of her face. The scarred man walked four feet or so behind her now.
The clip stopped.
“The train station explosion hit ten minutes later,” Mila said. “Five dead.”
“They have made Yasmin look like a monster.” Exhaustion framed Zaid’s face. He got up and paced the floor, pale with worry. “Her face—it is so blank. Like it has been wiped clean and a nothingness put behind her eyes.”
“You haven’t heard from her or the kidnappers again?”
“No.” Zaid shook his head. “I have heard nothing.” Ice coated his words. “They don’t need to ask me for anything. They have destroyed her, and if this video gets out, they will have destroyed my family, my company, as well.”
27
YOU THINK SHE’S STILL ALIVE,” I said.
“I have to hope—if they wanted her dead, they would have exploded the bomb while she carried it. This video is leverage against me.”
“Why not call the police now? They haven’t returned her.”
“And I would tell them what? That she has been kidnapped, but that she planted a bomb that killed people? If I go to the police, the kidnappers will release that video, and that will be the end of my business.” He wiped a hand across his brow. “I do a great deal of business with NATO governments, with the United States, with Russia. My daughter as a bomber? It would destroy everything I’ve built.”
“People would understand that she was brainwashed. Think of Patty Hearst,” I said.
Zaid’s voice was iron. “Patty Hearst was convicted, Mr. Capra. The world did not see her then as a victim: it saw her as a good girl turned anarchist and bank robber. The world is an even less forgiving place now. There will be enough doubt to undo my entire business. Even the mere suggestion that my daughter could be a bomber would destroy my company.” He closed his eyes. “My company gained billions in contracts when Western governments wanted to show they held no bias against Muslim-run firms. You see the trap they have set for me? I cannot go to the police. I dare not defy their demands.”
“Maybe this isn’t about Yasmin, or the ransoms. Maybe they want to bring you down.”
“Then they would release the video now and destroy Bahjat,” Mila said quietly. “But they haven’t. They’re using Bahjat’s hope against him.”
I glanced at Mila. “So you want me to find and rescue Yasmin.”
Zaid’s stare was steel. “Oh, more than that. I want you to find these people who took her… and kill them.”
“Kill them?”
“Kill her kidnappers. I don’t care if there are only two or two dozen. No one who could tie her to this act can live to indict her name,” Zaid said. “If she is rescued, and any of them survive, they could release the tape in revenge.”
But I needed the scarred man alive to answer my questions. “If I get Yasmin out, surely that is the primary goal.”
“Of course. But all of them must be dead. That is nonnegotiable.”
“You’re afraid once she’s rescued that the kidnappers might come after you?”
“Yasmin has seen their faces. They won’t let her go. Ever.” He looked at me, a long measured stare, and then he looked at Mila. “You said he could rescue Yasmin. I am not sure.”
“I don’t rush in like a fool, Mr. Zaid. This is not a suicide mission, especially since you want to be sure no one escapes your wrath.”
He raised an eyebrow at the dryness of my tone.
“Bahjat,” Mila said quietly. “Let Sam do what Sam does.”
“I would like to ask you both a question. Have you heard the term Novem Soles? Or Nine Suns? Does it mean anything to either of you?”
Both of them shook their heads.
“I would like to know how you propose to take action,” Zaid said.
“You don’t need to know. It’s better you don’t.”
He swallowed. “I want to be sure Yasmin is safe…”
I sighed. “Mr. Zaid. Yasmin may not even be in Amsterdam anymore. In which case I’ve got to find where she’s gone. I have no leads to follow right now. And if her face is on the cameras in the train station, and the Dutch forensics teams figure out she planted the bomb, then the police are going to be looking for her. We’re on a deadline. I am not spending my time asking your approval or permission.”
“It is just… I feel I failed her. I failed to protect her.” The words came from his mouth as though pulled by force. He was a man used to iron control of situations, and I guessed his helplessness ate at him.
I leaned forward. “I know what you’re going through. I know what it is to be missing a loved one. I will get your daughter back for you.”
Bahjat Zaid looked at me and then he smiled: an awful, stressed smile that held no joy. Like a dog showing its teeth. “If you fail, or you take an action that results in Yasmin’s death, there will be consequences, Mr. Capra.”
He was probably good at handling contracts and subordinates and accounts. I was none of those things. “Don’t threaten me, Mr. Zaid. I so easily crumble under pressure.”
He closed his mouth and his stare turned to a glare.
“I need all the information you have on your daughter and the kidnappers.”
He handed me the laptop. “It’s all there.”
“Thank you.” I studied his drawn face, knowing he had just handed me every hope of finding his daughter. “Why you?”
“Pardon me?”
“Why did they target you?”
He blinked, once, twice, glancing at Mila. “My money. Why else?”
“If money was all they wanted, then they could have asked for more. They want more. I’m wondering what it is you have that they want.”
“I expect,” he said, “being savages who are intent on violence, they could ask for arms, for military equipment.”
“They haven’t?”
“No.” He folded his hands on the table.
“What kind of research did Yasmin do?”
“It is classified, and not pertinent to this discussion. And nothing she is working on relates to current weapons systems. I doubt they know or care that she is a researcher. They have shown no interest in her work to me.”
“What about future systems?”
“Y
es, like ten years down the line. This is not about her research, Mr. Capra. This is about her belonging to me. That is why they took her.”
I stood.
“I was told you were one of a handful of people in the world who could do this incredible work,” Zaid said. “Yasmin is all that matters.”
I made no promises to him. We shook hands, awkwardly, and Mila walked him downstairs.
I opened up the laptop. Files on Yasmin’s life, photos, listings of friends in London and Budapest and the United States. The e-mails and the video files he’d received. An electronic portfolio of a kidnapping, and I hadn’t an idea where to start looking for her here in Amsterdam.
Mila came back with two steaming coffees and set them down on the small table. “You don’t like him.”
“He strikes me as the worst kind of control-freak parent. And I don’t think he’s telling us the whole truth,” I said. “Same as we’re not telling him.”
“Pardon?”
“They produce this video to rip his guts out and don’t demand a ransom? Bull. They’ve asked him for something and he’s not telling us. He’s just hoping I can find them and kill them before he has to deliver.”
“They simply may not have asked for ransom yet.”
“You didn’t tell him I had a personal stake against the scarred man.”
“He might be concerned you have two agendas. He only cares about Yasmin. Not about your wife.”
“I can’t decide if he’s more worried about Yasmin or his reputation.” I drank some coffee. “How do you know Zaid?”
“Does that matter? I know him and I want to help him. And I want to help you. Tell me why you asked about the name Novem Soles.”
I explained. She leaned back in her chair. “It cannot be a coincidence. The CIA’s interest in this term and the tattoo. There are groups that mark their members.”
I studied the photos. I tapped the scarred man’s face. “There has to be a history on this guy. He’s somebody somewhere.”
“I have access to government databases around the world,” Mila said, “and we’ve found nothing since that photo arrived. It’s like he’s been… erased.”
She claimed access that even people inside governments did not have. “You can work all sorts of magic. You own this bar, too?”
“My employer does.”
“I like this bar a lot,” I said. “It’s nice.”
“When all this is done, then you and I shall have a drink together. Not before.”
“I’m going to get to work now,” I said. The scarred man was within a few miles of me if he was still in Amsterdam; it is an amazingly compact city. Which meant, just maybe, I was far closer to Lucy and my son than I had ever hoped before.
Hang tight, babe, I thought. I’m coming to get you.
28
I WAS GOING TO BREAK the scarred man’s world.
This was what I knew. The scarred man had conducted two bombings, including one in a highly secure Company office. He had kidnapped both a prominent scientist and my wife, a Company agent. He had stayed off the grid; he had kept his identity secret. I suspected he might be in the employ of the Money Czar I’d been investigating, who had been tied to serious government corruption. He had resources, including dispatching a man to find me and kill me in Brooklyn. He’d made no political claims, so one had to assume all this was done for profit.
He was part of a network.
Every world has an opening. The new world of how criminals operate has more than most.
Law enforcement broke much of the Mafia in the United States because the Feds could pressure people on the inside—offer them witness protection, indict anyone connected to the illegal trade, not just those actually conducting it.
The postmodern criminal networks come together for a particular function—smuggling in ethnic laborers, muling heroin hidden inside televisions from China that were diverted first to ports in Pakistan, or setting up a train bombing to short-sell a transportation stock price. The cells are small and nimble, and they snap together and break apart into new shapes, like a child’s plane or tank or wall made from the little plastic blocks.
But because the glue of the bricks is temporary, they can be isolated. Where you cannot break a wall, you can shatter a single brick. I just needed to find the right brick.
I sat and I drank a soda at an outside table at a café near the sprawling street bazaar of the Albert Cuyp Market, on the south side of Amsterdam, in the dim gleaming sunlight. The air smelled of fish, of herbs, of flowers. I read a Dutch paper and tried to put myself in the mind of Peter Samson, the Canadian smuggler I was on a Company job a year earlier. Samson was a nice guy as smugglers went: paid his fees, paid his bribes, didn’t kill people. I’d stung two Ukrainian weapons traffickers who were attempting to ship contraband uranium to a radical group in New York. The uranium turned out to be fake (counterfeited by them), as was the radical group (counterfeited by me). Samson was held blameless in the grapevine of the criminal community when the two men ended up dead in a Prague apartment, killed by their business partners who didn’t take their failure well. They were screwed by their carelessness and greed and breaking of the bare-bones trust. Networks form because of necessity and a distant trust.
As Samson, I would still be distantly trusted by the man I wanted to see. I’d found him by calling my old contacts in Prague and learning that one of them had moved six months ago to lovely Amsterdam.
I was on my third soft drink when he came ambling along, walking past the tent stalls, shoulders hunched, a cigarette dangling from his mouth like a long, broken fang. I’d positioned myself because I figured he would come this way, through the street market, to reach his little store. I could imagine the smell of the lavender oil in his hair, the slightly rotten smell of garlic on his breath. I remembered he chewed garlic lozenges with enthusiasm because he was scared of colds.
He went inside one of the doors close to the corner. A sign announced a watch repair shop called, in tribute to his craft and his adopted homeland’s national color, CLOCKWORK ORANGE. He closed the door behind him.
I crossed to the door, counted to thirty. It opened up onto the ground-floor business: a tiny old CD and record shop, where the guitar riffs of an old Clash album drilled the smoke-scented air. In the store a bored punk sat at the cash register, waiting for punk rock to come back. Stairs led up to the Clockwork Orange. I went up and tested the door. It swung open. He hadn’t locked it, because his hands were full of bags.
I stepped inside. I saw Gregor setting the bags on a wooden counter. Glass counters showed vintage and collectible watches. A table, covered with black velvet, held a snowfall of gleaming gears, and next to them lay watch-repair tools, craftsman’s tools, laid out in straight lines, ready for work. Gregor was very good at bringing order to chaos.
I shut the door behind me.
He turned and stared at me for twenty long seconds, and then he said, “I know you.” He had seen me only a few times, but watchmakers are detail people. “From Prague.” He did not look overjoyed. “You knew the Vrana brothers.”
“Yes. They tried to cheat me. But I guess I wasn’t as pissed about it as their partners were.” The Vranas had been the morons trying to grab from me money that didn’t exist, for goods that didn’t exist, and the sting I’d run helped the Company empty their bank accounts. Their business partners took it hard. They expressed their disappointment with an ax.
“They buried them in a single coffin,” Gregor said. “No need for two.”
Gregor had been a bit player with the Vranas, a guy whose business they used as a cover to mule goods out of eastern Europe to Britain.
“I remember you were always worried you’d catch a cold. You like the climate in Amsterdam better?” I asked.
“It’s hardly tropical, but I sneeze less.” He was nervous because he couldn’t know what role I’d played in the death of the men he’d known. His eyes narrowed. “Samson from Toronto. Is that still your name?”
He didn’t smile back. He tested whether I was armed by saying, “I need a lozenge,” and slowly reaching into his pocket. I tensed but I didn’t pull a gun yet. Gregor pulled out a package of garlic lozenges. He slid one between his thin lips.
A test. I wasn’t here to kill him. I was here either to offer a deal or get information. He’d provided the setup for the smuggling route for the fake uranium, but, since it was never smuggled, the Company had decided to leave him alone, in play, to be useful again. But he’d moved to Amsterdam for what I guessed was a fresh start. Amsterdam had better smuggling routes, and more of them, tied back to the massive port in Rotterdam.
“How do you like Amsterdam?” I said.
“Lovely. The Dutch are very pleasant people.” He sucked hard on the lozenge, drawing out every bit of the garlic’s restorative powers. “They have an excellent health-care system.”
I gestured at the small shop, brimming with inventory. “Business looks good.”
He shrugged. “Watches are a leftover from an analog world. Books, records, movies, everything goes digital.” He sniffled, clicked his tongue. “But analog watches, people still like them. They are both necessity and luxury. We must always know what time it is and we must look good doing it.” He cleared his throat, wiped at his lip with the back of his hand. “How may I help you?” Like I was here to look at his Rolexes.
You don’t ever answer a question when asked. At least, a man like the one I was pretending to be wouldn’t. Instead I invaded his privacy. I peeked inside the bags. Party stuff, for a kid, a girl. Napkins, plates, wrapped candies. “A party?”
“I married a woman here four months ago. I have a stepdaughter. My life is… calmer. I don’t think I can be of help to you, Samson. I am no longer connected.”
