Adrenaline

by Jeff Abbott

  “These bars are a chain?”

  “No. Each bar is unique. But each can serve as a safe house for you.”

  I took a step toward her. “I am so close, Mila. So close to finding this Edward jerk, and to finding my wife and child. To saving Yasmin Zaid. Please don’t walk away. Help me.”

  “You don’t need me, Sam. You need only yourself, and your unbroken focus. Everything else is a distraction. And I have to help these women. I have to.”

  She spoke from a place of pain and I couldn’t argue with her. “All right.”

  “I can always be reached at this number.” She gave me a cell phone number; I repeated it and she nodded.

  “Good luck, Sam.” She left. I didn’t want her to go; but in one way it was easier. Because there was no way in hell she would agree to what I was going to do next. I went to my duffel bag, where I’d stashed it under the bed, and I pulled out the cell phone August had given me a lifetime ago in Brooklyn.

  I went downstairs and I walked a half mile away and stood on a bridge that spanned the Prinsengracht. A sightseeing boat cruised below me; a group of students, laughing, walked past me. I dialed.

  It rang seven times before it was answered. “Yes?”

  “Hi, August.”

  A pause. “Where are you?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You better be turning yourself in.”

  “No. I need to see you. Face-to-face.”

  “Um, I was shot today, you know.”

  “Are you in the hospital?”

  “No. Flesh wound in the arm and I took a blow to the head. The bullet is out and my head’s hard as steel. But I get sent home tomorrow. They didn’t have a plane available tonight.”

  “I need your help.”

  “You need help, all right, Sam. You know there was a dead body in the apartment next to you, don’t you?”

  “I knew that.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  “Well, he started it,” I said. “Can you come see me? Without Howell or anyone else?”

  “You have to be kidding!”

  “The guys I was with are tied to the man who set off the London bomb and kidnapped my wife,” I said. “Now, if you want to grab me, you will ruin any chance of getting this guy. He’s behind the bombing in Amsterdam and he’s working on getting experimental weapons of some sort to the States. He sent the dead guy who tried to kill me. He’s tied to the Money Czar we were investigating in London. August, it’s all knitted together and I’m this close to pulling it apart. I need your help.”

  “You are so major-league screwed up, Sam. Look, come in; tell us all about it and let us help you.”

  “I can’t, August. They’ll just put me back in jail. Howell thinks I’m in with these people. I don’t have time to explain to him that I’m not.”

  “I’ll lose my job if I don’t report this conversation, and you know it.”

  “Yes, you will.” I waited.

  “Where are you?”

  61

  AUGUST ARRIVED AN HOUR LATER. Alone. I was at a back table in the Rode Prins, near the curtain screening the corridor that led to the kitchen. He sat heavily across from me. I’d kicked him in the side of the head and a purplish bruise stretched from temple to jaw. I could see the heft of a bandage underneath his jacket.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like hell. Howell’s gone to a meeting and I told them I needed fresh air.” He stared at me. “Sam. What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “One of the crime families the Company had an interest in are the Lings. They’re based here. One of the Langley guys mentioned them in London.”

  “Okay. They behind the grab on Lucy?”

  “No. But I need to know if they are still being tracked by the Company.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to know where their shipments are. I need to steal one.”

  His mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Insanity doesn’t agree with you, Sam.”

  “It’s the only way for me to get close to the guy who took Lucy. He… he has a hostage, August, so I can’t force my way in. I have to draw him to me. But I need to know what we know about the Lings’ routes.”

  “You’re crazy, Sam. I can’t imagine what you’ve lost. I can’t. But I think your grief has damaged you. Badly. And you have to accept—you’re not getting Lucy and the baby back. They’re gone. You know they wouldn’t have kept her alive for months. They wouldn’t have been saddled with a baby.” He stopped, as if horrified by his words.

  I stared at him.

  “This is all… for nothing,” August said. “You’re not getting them back. I’m sorry, man, sorrier than you will ever know. But I—”

  “Please just do as I ask. If we were ever friends.”

  “Friends don’t put friends in positions like this, man. I could lose it all.”

  “You could. I already have. August, I know that you, as a decent man, are going to help me. You can’t not help me.” I wanted to say I saved your life today but I couldn’t play that card; he hadn’t seen me and it wasn’t fair.

  “Howell will have my head.”

  “Howell left a group of women behind in that machinists’ shop.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After you and the other agent were hit, and he chased me out, did he secure the building?”

  “He did.”

  “Did he tell you there were a group of sex slaves being held captive in the back?”

  August paled, dragged a finger along his unshaven jaw. “No. I didn’t know. I swear.”

  “I believe you. Because Howell is Ahab, and I’m the white whale,” I said. “He’s losing perspective, August.”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  I took a deep breath. “I knew about you and Lucy seeing each other before Lucy and I dated. She never mentioned it. You both kept it secret and I don’t blame you; the Company doesn’t need to be in your business. But I knew. And you didn’t dump me as a friend for going out with your ex,” I said.

  “Lucy and I weren’t a good match,” he said. “It only lasted a month.”

  “Why?”

  “I never trusted her.” He put his hands into his coat pockets and I wondered what I would do if he pulled a gun on me. I honestly didn’t know. August felt like the last strand of my normal life, and now I was asking him to do a job that was incredibly dangerous. I didn’t know what he was suggesting to me about my wife. I just couldn’t go there.

  A long silence, and then he said, “Can I call you on this number if I find out about the Lings?”

  “Yes.” I tried to keep the relief from my voice. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. No promises.” He turned and walked out of the Rode Prins without another word.

  I sat and drank Henrik’s good coffee and closed my eyes and thought through how I would steal the shipment, given what I could guess about the limitations I would face.

  Five hours later August called. “We have an informant inside the Lings’ operation. The Lings’ trucks stop at a sweatshop in France. You do not hit them at the sweatshop, you hear me? You do not. You’ll dirty up a current investigation into them.” He gave me the address. “Their trucks are marked as being part of a company called Leeuw en Draak. Lion and Dragon.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And meant it.

  “Don’t call me again, Sam. Good luck.” And he hung up. Now I’d lost my best friend as well. I mourned for all of ten seconds.

  Then I called Piet. “I have what we need.”

  62

  THE NEXT DAY, we waited in the rain, just north of Paris. It had taken us nearly five hours to drive south from Amsterdam, to the locale August had given me. It was early afternoon and the day was gray and sodden. Piet sat next to me, sharpening his wakizashi sword on a whetstone. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. It made the flesh on my neck jerk. How sharp could you make a sword?


  The sweatshop was off the E19/E15 expressway, hidden in a gray huddle of buildings. I wondered how pleasant it would be to be rid of Piet. Very soon, I thought. Very soon. We sat and watched absolutely nothing happen at the sweatshop. Hours passed; twilight began to approach.

  “How does a Canadian soldier get into this business?” Piet asked, breaking the silence.

  I glanced at him. “I was bored. How did you get into trafficking women?”

  He smiled. “I needed money for art school.”

  “I didn’t expect that answer.”

  “An annoying percentage of young people in Amsterdam harbor a secret desire to be Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Anyway, I knew a guy. A friend of my mom’s. He needed help getting girls to Holland. I helped him buy a van so we could move them, and eventually I took over the route.”

  “Took over?”

  “He got married and thought he shouldn’t traffic girls no more. What, you thought I’d killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Known him since I was twelve.” He rubbed at his bottom lip. “He owns a coffee shop now.”

  I really didn’t want to know Piet as a person, but some instinctive need to understand took control. So I asked, “Why the sword?”

  “The sword is who I am.”

  “But it makes you memorable. I thought the idea was to stay under the radar.”

  “It honors my mother.”

  “She was Japanese?”

  “Yeah. She came here for love. Boyfriend brought her, dumped her, she stayed.”

  I remembered Nic called Piet a whoreson. Perhaps he meant it as more than an insult, as a description. His mom might have been a worker in the Rosse Buurt; many of the women there were not Dutch.

  “I thought I wanted to study art, do Japanese-style stuff, like netsuke or watercolor painting. My mother did that in her spare time.” He shrugged. “But art school didn’t work out. They hated me there and a girl made trouble for me. Assholes. So I left.”

  I had not thought of Piet as someone with smothered dreams. He read my expression. “Eh, you thought I was just a snake.” He laughed.

  “Well, I—”

  “Man, we’re all snakes. Gregor likes to pretend he’s shed his skin, been reborn as an honest soul, but his scales are still there. And I suspect you’re a very crafty snake, Sam.”

  I shrugged. “Sure. I got run out of the army. I spoke some Czech from my grandmother’s side of the family. I couldn’t find a real job in Prague so I made my own there. So you went straight from art school into trafficking?”

  “Not right away. I used to do contract work for the police department in Amsterdam, designing their websites and brochures,” he said. He gave a long, low laugh. “Then I saw how much the opposition paid.”

  I glanced at him. “That’s a switch.”

  “You make serious money by being a player. If I’d stayed with the police, then I would have been a cog in their operation. I paid attention. I wanted to own cogs—not be one.”

  “So you picked girls for your commodity.” My mind kept saying shut up, but it was a strange thought to sit here, making conversation with a monster in the shape of a man.

  He shrugged. “Good profit margin. Growing demand. Not likely to run out of raw materials.”

  It was brutally cold accountancy. I wondered if it was a sort of twisted revenge on his mother. “You sell people, Piet.”

  “You sound like a schoolmaster.” He shrugged. “I think of it as selling comfort and convenience.”

  “Not to the people you sell.”

  He flicked a smile. “They don’t have money. They don’t count.” The smile turned greasy. “You know, they live better here, even as whores, than they do back home. I’ve done them a favor, I have.”

  “It would be one thing if they chose it. But most don’t.”

  He gave me a look of disapproval. “I didn’t know I’d offended your sacred morals.”

  I had overstepped. I could show my loathing for him when I killed him, not before. “I just think counterfeit merchandise is a lot easier to control than people.”

  “I like the control.” His voice became a low slur of gravel. “You should try it. I’ll treat you to the choicest morsels from my next batch from Moldova. Got some girls coming in four days, an order from a house in London. You and me, we can break one of the girls in. You get a taste for this business, then fake goods will pale.”

  If I looked at him I would kill him on the spot. And I needed him. So I watched the sweatshop parking lot.

  He misinterpreted my silence. “Ah. Maybe you don’t like the girls. We get boys, too, not so many, but I know a couple of boys back in Amsterdam you might like—”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Not interested.”

  “You’re weird,” he said, “worrying so much about people. Other people don’t matter; all that matters is you. You judge me. But you are no different than me, Sam. You lie, you kill when you have to, you live under a false name. I never shot anyone down the way you did Nic.”

  “I did you a favor with Nic.”

  “True.” He rubbed his lip. “I keep thinking that I will be arrested any moment, because I don’t know what he was transmitting, or who he was talking to. I need a big payday, Sam. I need to be able to run and hide. That’s a great luxury, to hide well. That’s the mark when you’re not a pawn no more, when you’re a player.”

  “Tell me about Edward,” I said. “Is he a player or is he more?”

  “What do you mean, more?”

  “You said he’s moving experimental weapons.”

  “I think he’s pulling corporate espionage—stealing from one company to sell to another.”

  “What’s he want to put into this shipment, Piet?”

  “Not for you to worry about.”

  “If we get caught I’d like to know what I’m serving time for.”

  “You’ll never see the light of day if we get caught on this job.” Piet’s gaze went back to the warehouse. “Ach, hello.”

  A truck, marked with a stylized lion and dragon, pulled into the back of the warehouse where the sweatshop sat. Three Chinese men spilled out. Two wore black trench coats. Another, more portly, wore a regular tan jacket and blue jeans. He walked to the bay of the warehouse.

  The two in trench coats stayed close to the truck.

  “Let’s go,” Piet said.

  “No,” I said. “They’ve got shotguns under the coats.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “See the way the fabric bulges, right below the arm? One guy was riding in the cab, but the second came out of the truck itself. They won’t go into the building. They’re guards.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do?”

  “We can’t grab the truck here. They’re picking up extra goods—they’ve already dropped off fake cigs along the route. We go in now, while they’re parked at a friendly spot, the Lings get a phone call.”

  “Not if we kill them all.”

  “I didn’t sign on for a massacre,” I said. “And it’s bad business practice.” Interference with profit was the only argument that might sway Piet. “The Lings would start hunting for us fast. We need to tackle the truck crew alone.”

  “So how do we steal the shipment?”

  “We don’t,” I said. “We hijack it.”

  63

  AUGUST WAS SITTING IN THE HALLWAY of the safe house, waiting for the pilot flying him to New York, when he heard an exchange between Howell and one of the operations techs:

  “Mr. Howell, we have a match on the description of the man at the warehouse based on the description you and August gave. Is this him?”

  “Yes. Who is he?”

  “Piet Tanaka. Dutch national, formerly a contract employee for the Amsterdam police.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s dropped out of sight, sir. No listed address, no listed occupation.”

  “August!” Howell called.

  August got up and walked to
the computer screen.

  “This the guy you saw in the warehouse?”

  August nodded. “Yeah, distinctive face. That’s him.”

  Howell turned back to the tech. “Find this guy. He’s got Sam Capra working for him.”

  “I don’t think that’s accurate,” August said.

  “Don’t you have a plane to catch, Agent Holdwine?” Howell said.

  August left and found the pilot downstairs, ready to take him to the airport; Howell didn’t wish him well or thank him for taking a bullet. Treason poisoned the air; they all felt it since Howell had seen Sam Capra leaving the scene of murder and trafficking. Treason put people in a sour mood.

  64

  AFTER LOADING SEVERAL BOXES, the Chinese truck pulled back out onto the highway and we followed at a distance, three cars back. Piet was good; he knew how to tail.

  “How are we going to get this truck grabbed before they stop again?”

  “We force them off the highway.”

  “What, in broad daylight?”

  “Yes. In broad daylight. Right now, they’re split up—two in the cab, one back with the goods—and they are more on guard when they’re stopped. They won’t expect an attack now.”

  “That’s because attacking them on the highway is stupidity,” Piet said. “What do you suggest we do?”

  “Get behind them, then go past them,” I said. “I want a better look at the cargo door.”

  He inched up past the two sedans between us and the Ling truck and swerved back over. I studied the back of the truck. A sliding door, secured at the bottom by two separate padlocks. Hard to pick, roaring along at seventy miles an hour.

  “Now go past them.”

  He floored the van and hurtled past the truck. The cab door appeared to be normal, no modifications. I didn’t give it more than a glance; I didn’t want to attract the driver’s attention. But I saw him, and he was laughing.

  “Stay ahead of them.”

  I studied the map, unfolded on my lap. There was another highway intersection, cutting across northern France, perhaps fifteen kilometers distant.