by Jeff Abbott
Then I saw Lucy, sitting across the room from me.
I blinked at her.
“Hello, Sam.”
“You cut your hair,” I said. My voice sounded thick, heavy, broken.
“I’m supposed to kill you,” she said. Five words to end a conversation before it started. I could hear a truck’s engine rumbling in the distance. The plonking sounds of crates being moved. I heard those sounds and I couldn’t wrap my head around the words she had just spoken to me.
“Lucy—”
“I told Edward I would take care of you, but take care has a whole range of meanings.”
“Lucy. Where is the baby?” My mind swirled with a thousand questions, but that was the one that knifed through the shock.
“Sam. You’ll die if you don’t listen to me.”
I looked at the flat of her stomach. Her dark blouse was neatly tucked into blue jeans. “Where is our son?”
“He’s not your concern, Sam.”
“He’s my only concern. Now that I know what you are.” Hello, anger, boiling up in my chest.
“Will you please listen, monkey? I am trying to save you.”
Her use of her old term of endearment made my stomach twist. But I kept my voice steady. “You. I don’t even have the words for what you are.”
“You’d rather argue with me than live?”
“What you are. I know what you are now,” I said.
“Smarter. Quicker. Stronger. Richer. You could try those on for size.”
The woman I loved. I thought I loved. She sat there, wearing the face and the body that I knew so well, that I’d treasured; she spoke with the voice that had murmured love into my ear; she regarded me with the intelligence that sealed the deal to spend my life with her. But she was a stranger. I hadn’t known her.
Let me say that again: I hadn’t known her.
She had been a complete and utter lie and she had stolen far more than three years of my life. The scale of the lie staggered me. She had stolen my sense of who I was, and what I knew in the world. The marriage was done and I didn’t even have time to grieve for it. All this flashed through my head in a second, not even in words, just a coldness that covered me.
“All right, smart and rich,” I said. “Where is our child?”
“Don’t you want to know why?”
“No. I’ll ask and you’ll lie, or you won’t tell me. You’ve done what you’ve done and that’s it,” I said. “I don’t understand it but I don’t need to understand it. I only need to stop you.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen.” Now she showed me a half smile, the one when I used to tease her and she’d tease back.
“Fine. We’ll play it your way. Tell me why. You’re clearly dying to,” I said. “You seem to have a reason for keeping me alive. Just to taunt me?”
“I’m not heartless, Sam. I do have… feelings for you. You were a good cook. Good in bed. Thoughtful company. You were a good husband.”
“I was good camouflage,” I said. “I was a good pawn.”
“I’ll bet you insisted to the Company that I was innocent. Very chivalrous.”
“Very naïve.”
“No. I’m just very good at fooling people,” she said. An emptiness seemed to hollow out her words.
I got to unsteady feet, my head rocking. “What is going on here, Lucy? Who are these people, what are you doing?”
“Sweet mystery,” she said. “I’m supposed to find out what you know and shoot you. But I can’t. I can’t just shoot you in cold blood, Sam. I think…”
I took a shambling step toward her and she raised the gun. “It’s not cold blood if you attack me. Then I do what I have to, Sam. And I assume you don’t want to die.”
I stopped. “Yes.”
“I’m glad I didn’t wreck your will to live, then.” I couldn’t read the emotion in her face. She wasn’t smug, despite her earlier words about being smarter and richer. She looked unsure. Like she wasn’t used to seeing consequences staring back at her.
“I want to know where our son is.”
“You say nothing to the police, to the Company, that I’m alive. You don’t mention me and, in a week or so, I’ll be in touch with you. I’ll tell you what you need to know to find the baby. You can have him. Just say you never saw me, okay?”
“Is the baby all right?”
“He’s safe, Sam.” She glanced up at me. “A healthy, beautiful boy. We made us a good one.” She stood and I saw a swallow work her throat. A silencer capped her gun. “I really need to go. Now. So here’s what we’re going to do. I am going to leave. You are going to be quiet and not make a sound. Edward and I will be on our way. Eventually the police will come and you will have to answer questions. You keep my name out of it—and I’ll know if you do or not—and then I’ll let you know where the baby is. Mention me and you’ll never, ever see him.”
“Why would you let me live?”
“I stole three years of your life. This is restitution.” Her voice was unsteady. The spouse always knows. August had said that, so had Howell. The spouse always knows when treason is in the house. I hadn’t.
“That’s not reason enough. Why?” She had to have another motivation. One based on her own advantage.
“Don’t be an ingrate,” Lucy said.
I thought of our three years together, how every word, every action, had been choreographed to protect her.
“Did you ever love me?” I asked. I hated asking; it didn’t matter. She didn’t love me now. Any question was sentiment. I’d lost years of my life as surely as if I’d been stranded on an island or walled in a prison. The only thing that could matter was my child, not my ego.
“I must have. You’re still breathing.”
She looked past my shoulder. Out the window. And I heard the blast of gunfire. She slammed the door, locked it. I staggered to the door. I started kicking the lock, trying to break it.
The gunfire stopped. I looked out the window. A van roared into the parking lot, spilling three men out onto the pavement.
One of them was Howell.
74
PIET HAD PARKED HIS VAN on a side street and stumbled along the Prinsengracht. He remembered walking along the grand canals with his mother, hand in hand, before Mama would go to her job, kneeling before the disgusting strangers. He’d dreamed of living in one of these nice homes, with the canal glistening in the morning light. He’d become a great artist and have a studio along the Prinsengracht or the Herengracht. It had never happened, and now it never would.
Most of the windows were dark, but the apartment immediately above the Rode Prins had every light blazing.
He staggered to the Rode Prins’s front door. What was the barman’s name? Henrik. He could ask for Henrik. Maybe Henrik was the manager; maybe he lived above the bar.
The job had gotten too messy. Information on Edward could buy him passage. He’d go someplace quiet like Panama or Honduras. Warm, under bright skies and slack laws. Lots of girls there that could be shipped up to brothels in the States and Canada. He’d start over. You could always start over when you had good people skills.
Heavy velvet curtains covered both the front windows and the door. He knocked on the door. Once, almost timidly. He didn’t want to attract police attention. He didn’t see that a small camera, hidden in the doorway, watched his moves. He knocked again, slightly louder, and was very surprised when the curtain on the front door slid slowly open. A woman stared at him through the glass, and to his surprise he felt a shiver. Odd, the night wasn’t cold. Maybe he was losing blood.
“Samson sent me. He needs help. Please.”
The woman seemed to study him. She was a nice little number, maybe thirty, but a bit older wasn’t always a drawback. Blond hair, petite. Through the pain he assessed her, out of habit, as though she might bring him value. He remembered her now; he’d seen her in the bar before, when he drank beer with Sam. A prime little number, he’d joked.
“I don’t know who Sams
on is and the bar is closed.” She spoke with the very slightest muddle of some eastern European and British accent. Her words were hard and precise. He liked the accent. He’d developed a taste for hearing broken English with Slavic pronunciations, usually in a begging scream. He knew how to deal with Slavic girls.
“I don’t care if it’s closed. I want to see Henrik or whoever runs the place. I got information to sell.” He remembered the name Samson had used at Taverne Chevalier in Brussels. “Roger Cadet. That’s who I want to see, whoever works with Roger Cadet.”
“What sort of information?”
“On who Peter Samson is chasing.”
“His name’s not Peter Samson,” the woman said. Now he really didn’t like her tone, a bit clipped and impatient. Bitch needed a lesson in respect, he thought. “It’s just Sam,” she said.
“Well, Sam what-the-hell-ever. He works with you, right? You and the people in Brussels with the same bar? Can you make me a deal or not, bitch?”
She smiled at him. “Yes, I think I have a deal for you.”
He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Your boy is fighting some badasses right now. He needs help.”
“And you want protection from those same people. Your type, it is very predictable to me.”
He didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t care. “I got stuff of value.”
She looked hard at him. “I am Sam’s… superior. Come inside.”
She opened the door and he stumbled in. She closed the door behind him and shut the curtains. “Christ. Thank you. Can I get a drink?”
She went to the bar, poured a stiff shot of jenever. He eased onto a stool and drank it down. The alcohol seared his lacerated gums. “Sam kicked my teeth out.” He sounded like a whiny child.
She stayed on the other side of the bar and poured him another. “Yet you are here.”
“Sam had backing. You don’t just show up at a bar and leave armed to the teeth.” He slammed the second one down. Warmth seeped through him.
“My name is Mila,” she said. “And I’m not offering anything in trade. You will simply tell me where Sam is.”
Piet spat blood onto the bar, feeling nauseous. “Nothing’s free in this world.” He poured himself a refill and gulped the jenever again.
“Pain is.” She raised a small black stick. A baton. It telescoped out to an arm’s length. And she lashed it hard across his nose and mouth. He screeched in agony as the jenever glass shattered in his face. He swung blindly toward her and missed. She vaulted over the bar and began to hit him with a precision that rivaled a surgeon’s, delving past nerve and blood vessel to diseased tissue. He felt his nose break on her second blow. He lunged, trying to close his massive arms around her pixie’s frame, and she shattered his knee with a blow. Air vacated his lungs.
Her fist closed around his testicles, and agony replaced breathing. Then she hammered her forehead against his broken nose and he lay flat on the floor.
He opened his eyes. A lock of her blond hair, daubed with his blood, lay between her eyes. She was breathing hard.
“Do not move,” Mila said. “Do not raise your hands. Do not do anything except breathe and listen.”
He gasped and he listened.
“I know what you did to the women in the machinists’ shop,” she whispered. “I know. I know what you are. In the old days, Piet, you would have been the captain of a slave ship. Or a Nazi commandant, whipping laborers to death. You are cut from the same foul fabric. I know what you are. I know every inch of what you are.”
He moaned and writhed. His knee. The thought that he might never ever walk right again scratched past the pain in his brain.
“The bar has a concrete floor. The walls are soundproofed. None of that is an accident,” she said. She ran the edge of the telescoping baton along his shattered knee. “You will tell me what I want to know or I will rape you with this baton.”
A cold terror enclosed his heart. He looked up at her and saw, in a flash across her face, all the women he had sold. Past her shoulder he saw the red prince, in his portrait, the splatters of paint marring his face. He could see his own blood splatters, low on the bar’s front.
“Do you understand me?” Mila said.
“Y-yes.”
“Where is Sam?”
He babbled out the address of the brewery and directions. She moved the baton toward his groin. “Please… please…”
“Shut up. You don’t get to ask for please. You don’t get to ask for mercy. Those are human concerns, and you are a human being in species only.” She stood. He sobbed, clutching his knee, moaning in pain.
“Stand up,” she said.
“I can’t, I can’t, you bitch.”
“It would take ten of you to make a real person. You shot one of the Moldovan girls in the calf when she fought you,” Mila said. “I know. She told me. She managed to stand. I’m just seeing if you’re made as tough as those women were. Stand—or the baton goes up your sorry ass. Ten. Nine. Eight…”
On two, he was on unsteady feet, shuddering in pain and rage.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s not my fault, it’s just a business… I had to make money. My parents are ill…”
“Shut up,” she said. “You are Piet Tanaka. You never knew your father and your mother is a dead whore. I don’t care that you hurt right now. No one cares. You made your choice about life. Your whining bores me.”
Tears leaked from his eyes. “I told you, I can provide information…”
“Those girls you send. To Israel, to Britain, to Spain, to Africa. They don’t get mercy. They don’t get to cut a deal. They don’t get traded to the police. They get used up and then they get killed. They get raped two dozen times a day.”
“Please…” Piet tried again.
“I think you need to know what it’s like. To be taken into a dark room and know that you are only there to be used. To be hurt. To be treated as less than human.”
Piet grabbed the brass railing along the floor, in front of the bar, squeezing it in agony. He sobbed.
She pulled a phone from her pocket and dialed a number. “Hello? Nadia?”
Nadia was the name of one of the girls. He remembered: the redhead.
“I have him. He has a broken leg, a broken nose, and he’s beat up good. He can’t get away from you. He can’t hurt you. Do you want me to bring him? You all could do with him what you like.” A pause that lengthened. “Are you sure? It might make you feel better. No. All right, then.”
She rang off. “The women don’t want to ever see you again. I guess they’re better than you.” Mila shrugged. She closed the baton.
“Please… please.”
“The women are also better than me.” She pulled a gun from the small of her back and she shot him in the crotch. Pain beyond imagination. He screamed and writhed and howled and clawed at the concrete.
Mila began to count. Leisurely. “One-Amsterdam. Two-Amsterdam. Three-Amsterdam,” while Piet sobbed and shuddered on the concrete. When she reached eight—one count for each young woman she’d saved from him—she put a mercy bullet between his eyes. He jerked, his corpse hissed out a purring breath, and lay still.
She didn’t look at him again. She picked up the phone and called Henrik. He answered on the third ring.
“I need you to clean up a very serious mess. Use the dump site out past the airport—and keep the bar closed today until you hear from me.”
“I understand,” Henrik said.
She unlocked the door, relocked it, and hurried to her car, arrowing onto the still streets. She started to shake about five minutes out of town, thinking of the dying man’s terrified eyes. A gaze that pled for a mercy she could not give.
Do you think he ever thought of the women’s eyes? Mila asked herself. He never did. Ever. Let it go.
She did and she drove. She wondered if Sam Capra was still alive, if she would ever tell him what she’d done. She thought not.
75
I FELT THE LOCK GIVE. I pu
shed open the door. My back was soaked with sweat.
I ran upstairs. I could hear distant shots. The men lay where I’d left them, except for one. He was by the wall.
All of them had bullet holes in their foreheads.
I ran up to the vat room. The guard I’d shot on the catwalk was down by the stairs now. Bullet hole in forehead.
I stumbled up the hallway to the storage room. The spill of cell phones still lay on the floor; the video game had run its course, showing an empty battlefield. The steel door was partly open; I pried it back. The five I’d corralled into the freezer room sat slumped. All of them shot dead at point-blank range.
I felt stunned. Edward had killed his entire team.
Why?
I hurried back up to the loading dock area. It smelled of blood and beer.
I could surrender to Howell, tell him about Lucy.
And hope that he believed me? If Lucy was already gone, I had no proof. And Howell would not let me escape again.
So.
No surrender.
I had to get out without being seen.
I heard the back door crashing open. I ran. Or rather, I half stumbled, half ran. I darted through the wide open rooms, ran past the dead men. A window in the brickwork faced an empty field and a slightly decrepit windmill. First one I’d seen since getting to Holland.
I pulled myself up to the window, worked the lock, shoved it open.
“Stop! Sam Capra!” Howell’s voice rang out like a bolt from the blue. I stopped. I shouldn’t have. But I did. I looked behind me and he had a gun leveled at me, two men behind him, Glocks aimed at me.
“Step away from the window, Sam.”
“She was just here,” I said. “Lucy. She was just here.”
“Step away from the window and we’ll talk about it,” he said. He wanted me alive.
“You don’t believe me,” I said. “I know. She was just here. I came here to rescue a hostage they have and Lucy is with them. You were right. I was wrong.”
