Adrenaline

by Jeff Abbott

  “That’s where the more interesting work opportunities are.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as stuff I really shouldn’t tell a stranger,” I said, with a kidder’s laugh, and he laughed, too.

  “No, really,” he said after an awkward silence. “You put a man through a window for me, Sam. We’re friends now.”

  “Protecting stuff. I guess it’s like protecting people. I just made sure the stuff got to where it was supposed to be.”

  That was a kind and subtle description of smuggling, but if Piet was a smuggler like Gregor suggested, then I might be more interesting as a potential employee. Or at least I might get an interview. I just had to get close enough to scout them out, kill them all except the high-ranking one—which I assumed was Piet—and force him to lead me to the scarred man.

  Simple.

  Subtle worked on Nic. He lit a cigarette, sipped at his beer.

  “Like to where?”

  “Mostly to North America.” Getting a secret shipment to there was Piet’s goal, I hoped. And I wondered, from the Turk’s words, if maybe he’d arranged illicit passage to the States, and now the arrangement had gone sour.

  “I might be able to offer you a job, but I need to speak with the client.”

  “Your client’s not this Piet guy who doesn’t pay, is he?”

  “Piet pays. Those dumbass Turks need to learn patience.”

  I made a noise in my throat, shrugged. “Look, I’m good at getting stuff to the States, protecting it, making sure nobody screws with it. If that sounds good to you, fine. If not, thanks for the floor show.” It was critical I not look too eager.

  Nic waited a few seconds and then said, “I think I can use you. The pay is excellent. Two thousand euros a week, in cash.”

  “Well, I’m running low on beer money. So yeah, I guess, maybe.” I ran my finger in a circle along the beer smudge on the table. “How do I get in touch with you?”

  “You got a cell?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pushed a napkin toward me. “Write it down.”

  I did. I didn’t put my name on it. “Decide quick,” I said with a shrug. “I get bored, I might move on.”

  He tucked the napkin into his pocket. “All right.”

  “Question,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You pulled a gun on me after I helped you. You’re kind of a jerk.”

  He cracked a smile. “I have to be. I wanted to be sure you didn’t really come after me next. You told the Turks Piet owed you money. You might have fought them just to get at me.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know your Piet. I said that just to get them to shut up,” I said. “Didn’t work.”

  “The fists worked well enough. All right, Sam.” He tossed more euros on the table. “Treat yourself to more blows on the head, or get yourself dinner. You did me a favor tonight and I think we can do business together.”

  “Okay. You got my number.”

  He got up and left. I had my back to the wall and I watched him go out of the door and across the long flat stretch of Dam Square, under the Nationaal Monument.

  I stepped out into the night and caught sight of Nic at a distant corner. He was heading south, in the direction of the Prinsengracht. It was full dark now, and I hung back in the shadows as he crossed a street and a bridge. I followed. If he turned he might see me, but no, he was back on his electronic nipple—the cell phone—talking.

  I followed, but not too close. A car stopped, picked him up. He got in and the car roared off then turned toward Singel, a major street that made a large U-shape through Amsterdam.

  I looked around for a cab. None.

  I just started walking the direction he’d gone. You never know what you might see. And home—the Rode Prins—was the same direction.

  Thirty seconds later a small blue sedan pulled up next to me. The passenger door opened. Mila. “Get in, dummy.”

  “You were watching me?”

  She roared away from the curb before I even had the door shut. “You could have screwed up, gotten captured. I would have had to kill you. Can’t have you talking about us.”

  It was hard to know with her if she was serious. “If he’d grabbed me you would have killed me instead of rescuing me?”

  “If you screw up the first job, no point in giving you harder work,” she said. “Cut losses, move on.” She turned, revved fast, slowed as we caught sight of the car that had picked up Nic.

  “I got into a bar fight.”

  “Good way to stay in the shadows.” She sounded disgusted. “You could have gotten arrested. Guess what happens when they run a check on your face, dumbass? You’re on your way back to your boogeyman Howell.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “We’re not like the Company, Sam. I don’t do job reviews. I just cut you loose if you’re a problem.”

  “It’s nice to know you have my back.”

  She glared at me. “Don’t misunderstand me. I will have your back, always. As long as you prove it’s worth having. Now all you prove is you like to make stupid fight.”

  “I made contact and he’s trying to get me a job with the blond guy. Named Piet.”

  We watched Nic’s car turn onto Singel. “Tell me all the details.”

  Mila drove with intensity while she listened, keeping just the right amount of distance behind. I wondered where she had worked, who had taught her her skills. “So he might be going to talk to Piet,” I finished.

  “About you? A job applicant? You flatter yourself,” she said.

  “I meant he made a call that said he had the goods. And he’s having problems with a Turk who’s making trouble for Piet, who was setting up a route. You understand smuggling? You don’t just load your illegal goods up and hope for the best. You plan out the exact path your goods take, with all supporting documentation and people along the way to protect it and keep it out of the authorities’ attention. Solid, unbreakable routes are a valuable resource. If their route has been messed up or compromised by this Turk, it might cause a meet to happen.”

  She kept Nic in her sights as he turned onto another side street.

  “These guys are weird,” I said. “They’re smugglers. So why do smugglers kidnap Yasmin and have her blow up a train station? Can you get me more details on the bombing, on the victims, the response, the investigation?”

  Mila didn’t look at me as she made the turn. A soft rain began to fall. “All right. I’ll get you what I can. But you don’t have a lot of time, Sam, to be analyzing these guys. You just need to find them and get Yasmin back. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  “Understanding them will help me find them.”

  She snap-snap-snapped her fingers. “Our time. It is going, Sam. You can’t conduct psychoanalysis on a bunch of crooks before the Dutch police ID Yasmin on a security tape. Right now she’s just some girl with a backpack. But if they can ID her… we’re out of time. The damage to Zaid’s company will be done.”

  “If I was going to psychoanalyze anyone, it’d be you.”

  She glanced at me. “Analyze away. You will simply have to trust me that we are the good guys.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know. Ah.”

  Nic’s car sped up, took a hard turn. She revved, followed close. In the street where he had taken the left, five streets led off, like the spokes of a wheel, each street short, intersected with another turn.

  “You distracted me,” she said. “Your fault.”

  Nic was gone. The rain began to come down harder.

  33

  TEN DAYS BEFORE, in an office in New York that hid behind a sign claiming it was a financial advisory firm, Howell raged. “Find him. Find him, and bring me his head on a plate.”

  “That’s very Salome of you,” August said.

  Howell touched his temple. The slow, arterial throb of a migraine began to pulse behind his eyes. “He has to be heading to London. Has to be. That’s
ground zero for him. I want every office alerted to his profile. I want him found now, put under the control of our people, not under anyone else.”

  “I want to know who the dead body was,” August said. “Don’t you think that matters?”

  “Yes, of course,” Howell said. “I want IDs on this guy, and I want to know how and when he died.”

  “I think he died Friday night,” August said. “Just from a visual check.”

  “Christ.” Howell blanched. “He must’ve killed the bastard right before I got there.” He got up and paced to the window. “I should take you off this, Mr. Holdwine. You’re his friend.”

  “My being his friend is the reason you should leave me on,” August said. “I’m the only one he might surrender to.”

  “Guys who leave bodies in tubs like party favors for us to find aren’t interested in surrendering,” Howell said. “I thought we broke him of escape when he couldn’t get the passport.”

  “You questioned him for how long? But you never got to know Sam,” August said. “You don’t know how he thinks. I do. Take me with you. Get me reassigned to your team.”

  “All right,” Howell said. August Holdwine might just be a superior secret weapon against Sam Capra, he thought.

  The past ten days had not been pleasant for Howell. First the discovery that Sam Capra wasn’t whiling away an hour in the Brooklyn library; then the discovery that the Company had an agent who had left a dead body in a neighboring apartment; then tracking the stolen car to the truck stop, and then… nothing. For days.

  Sam Capra could have hitched a truck ride to anywhere in the country. They had scant few customers to track from the truck stop in the window of time that Sam might have been there: most of them paid cash for their lunches and coffees. Three days later, one of the waitresses remembered that a man matching Sam’s description had left at the same time as another trucker. No, she didn’t know the trucker’s name, but he’d paid for his lunch and fuel with a credit card.

  Every credit card charge had been traced, until a trucker named Vince Trout was found who said, yes, he’d given a young man a ride to a Port of New York and New Jersey terminal.

  “The bastard is sneaking into Europe on a cargo ship,” Howell said. He was empowered to send teams to London, Rotterdam, and Marseilles to scout crews, to see if anyone had seen a man matching Sam’s photo. But hundreds of ships and the crews that might have seen Sam would be back at sea and not easily questioned.

  “We could go public with his face,” August said now. “Invent a story about him.”

  “No,” Howell said. “We don’t want him front and center in the press. A possibly rogue CIA agent? We don’t do that kind of self-destructive publicity. Horrible at funding time. We don’t call them out until we’ve got them in handcuffs or a coffin.” He crossed his arms, stared at August. “Or we catch him and we find out what the hell he’s up to.”

  “The guy he killed might have been sent to kill him. I think someone took the bait.”

  “Then we want to find said someone. I have an ID on the dead guy. He’s a low-level thug connected with smuggling operations in Paris. Simon Tauras, long criminal record. Nothing special.”

  “Low-level thugs don’t normally cross the ocean to try and kill a Company agent.”

  “Yes, that’s interesting to me,” Howell said. “I’m going to follow that lead, see where it takes us. I want you to focus on seeing if there were any communications from ships out of New York that implied anything unusual. Like they found a stowaway. Or they had any odd radio transmissions.”

  “It will take days to search that database. There are millions of conversations in it.”

  “Then get started.”

  The trail, gone cold, grew hot two days before Sam Capra arrived in Rotterdam. August discovered in the Echelon database—which monitored a vast number of the world’s communications and could be searched for critical keywords—radio chatter from the captain of a Liberian-registered cargo vessel to the owning company about an approaching helicopter; the ship’s captain was told the helicopter should be allowed to land. No further explanation.

  Howell ran into a stone wall when he contacted the shipping company. The helicopter was explained as an at-sea inspection by the owners. The flight plan referred to didn’t exist, though. So someone had maybe chased the ship out to sea for a reason: to find Sam, or to bring him back.

  For three days the shipping company stymied him. Then they told him that the man he wanted to interview, the captain of the Elisa Martin, was already back out at sea and wouldn’t be available for a face-to-face interrogation until he docked in New Jersey in another week.

  He decided to question the man by satellite phone, which he did, and ran into a wall of denial. Someone had paid well for silence, Howell thought.

  “Let me at least send his face to the authorities. Say his passport may have been compromised, stolen by a known fugitive and whoever is using it needs to be contained immediately,” August said.

  Howell agreed.

  So. Rotterdam. Homeland Security had constant satellite surveillance going on all major ports in the world. Howell pulled strings to get the imagery analyzed. It took a team of twenty and they found a dozen leads. They coordinated it with security camera footage from the port itself and caught a photo of a man who might have been Sam Capra walking out of a secured crew area, next to a blonde pixie in leather jeans. The crew area was close to where the Elisa Martin had docked.

  So Sam Capra was in Holland. Probably trying to figure out a quick way to London. Howell alerted the Dutch intelligence service, who promised to coordinate with the police in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague, and the border police, all quietly. Eurostar and the ferry companies were alerted. The Dutch authorities had their hands full with a train station bombing, and Howell could tell his request wasn’t a priority. He contacted his counterpart in the British intel service, who, given that the Company bombing had taken place on their soil and they had lost several civilians, were most eager to find Sam Capra themselves.

  He could not find any identification on the woman. Her eyes were masked by sunglasses, and the facial recognition software did not give any partial matches in the Company database. He asked the techs to expand the search; Sam had a friend, and he wanted to know who this most interesting woman was.

  Howell badly wanted to go to the Netherlands. He wanted to find Sam himself because he suspected this would only end with a bullet now, and he wanted to be the one to deliver it.

  “If he’s done this, it’s for a good reason,” August said. “Maybe he’s doing the job we should have done months ago—finding the people who bombed our office.”

  Howell said slowly, “Yes, that has occurred to me. But that’s my job, not his. And who’s this woman?”

  “He’s gotten some help.”

  “Yes,” Howell said. “And who would bother to help Sam, and why?”

  Howell and August took a flight to Amsterdam, hurried to a Company safe house that lay in a stately home along the Herengracht canal, and set up a communications point, waiting to hear. Waiting. Because someone was going to see or find Sam Capra in the next day. Sam was not going to be hiding; Sam was going to be looking for the people who had grabbed his wife. Howell felt certain.

  August Holdwine stood at the window watching the rain hit the bridge and the canal and thought, You dumbass, your only hope is if we find you and you are willing to talk to me. If you don’t, you’re going to jail for the rest of your life.

  And a jet-lagged Howell lay awake, listening to the rain patter against the canal and the roof’s shingles and thought, They won’t risk another embarrassment back at headquarters. They won’t care what he’s doing, even if it’s right. Now I have to find out what he knows and then I will have to kill him.

  34

  THERE IS A MAN TRYING to infiltrate our group,” Piet said. “Nic told me about him. He is a former intelligence agent. He has been seeking a means to get close to me, and
presumably to you. I’m pretty sure he’s tied to your little bitch’s daddy.”

  Edward had just gotten off a plane, his flight delayed by bad weather, and he was tired and irritable. His stomach rumbled. The lunch he’d eaten in Budapest disagreed with him. The fish, he thought. That would teach him to eat seafood in a landlocked country. And he’d gotten word that Simon, his man dispatched on a critical errand in Brooklyn, had failed. Which meant Sam Capra was alive. This was a bad night. But he would not be afraid. Fear was for fools.

  “Where is he now?” Edward asked. He put down his suitcase. He took a calming breath.

  “Earlier he was at a bar. Nic can tell us.”

  “And he wants to see me?” Edward said. “Bring him to me. I will put him to good use.”

  “And your little bitch?”

  “If anyone is my little bitch, Piet,” Edward said, “it’s you. You will undo my work if you speak of her that way. She’s one of us now. Be nice.”

  Piet sucked in air and crossed his arms. Edward hated him. But Piet was necessary.

  “You better be getting what you need to get out of her,” Piet said. His voice was a low growl. “Otherwise, you’ve risked us all for nothing. And nothing doesn’t pay my bills.”

  “Life is getting what you want, and I’m better at life than you are, Piet.”

  “Her father caved?”

  “Caved, collapsed, avalanched.”

  “You’re overconfident,” Piet said. “Bahjat Zaid is behind this infiltration; he is trying to outflank you.” He had his plaything, the wakizashi sword, pulled free from the custom holster on his pants. “Let me go van Gogh on her ear, send it to him. He’ll behave.”

  “You don’t touch her. Ever.”

  “I’m starting to think you have feelings for the little bitch—”

  On the last word, ignoring the short sword in Piet’s hand, Edward seized Piet by the throat and pushed him, almost gently, back into the wall. Piet brought the sword up quickly, the edge of it touching Edward’s wrist.

  “You know if you cut me, you’re dead,” Edward said. “The sword is a stupid prop, Piet. Carrying it, you look like a refugee from a bad samurai film. Now put your toy down or I’ll yell out and my friends will come up here and kill you with their bare hands. That’s their loyalty to me.”