Текст книги "Adrenaline"
Автор книги: Jeff Abbott
Соавторы: Jeff Abbott
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
24
I WATCHED MILA BUILD the new versions of me. I was like Frankenstein’s monster crafted out of watermarked paper and credit histories and life histories. She made me a Canadian, an American, a German, and a New Zealander. All under different names. I watched her use backdoor entries into what should have been ironclad government databases in Washington, Berlin, Ottawa, and Christchurch to insert the codes for the passports into the appropriate government databases, making me a legitimate traveler. She slid with ease into banks, issuing credit cards to me in my various old identities.
“The Company could be looking for my old names, too,” I said.
“They could. A risk we must take.”
I wondered again—who was this woman? Mila whistled a Bananarama tune as she worked.
Rotterdam. The port accommodated around four hundred ships a day, both ocean-bound and for inland waterways, and a labyrinth of rail and road. The port itself was like a city, loading cranes the jagged skyscrapers, vast avenues of water the streets. This was a critical artery between the hundreds of millions of people in North America and the hundreds of millions of people in Europe and beyond.
I rode out in the same container I rode in on. Mila was unwilling to risk that passport control at the port hadn’t received the alert on my passport. And she was worried about the crew talking. She spent the morning of our arrival greasing more palms. Silence cost money.
I waited for the container to settle and for her to come and open the door.
When she did, a uniformed man, a port inspector, stood with her.
“Everything is fine,” she said to me in Russian. The inspector stepped inside and displayed great interest in the Vermonter soap. Mila spoke rapidly to the inspector in Dutch; he nodded, didn’t look at us.
Mila and I walked out into the gray cloudy day.
“You are very handy with the bribes,” I said to her, as we hurried across the busy docking area.
“I am beloved and popular,” Mila said. “I have friends in every corner of the world.”
And we vanished into the flood of goods and people coming into Europe.
25
WE TOOK THE TRAIN TO AMSTERDAM, fifty-six kilometers away, and I watched the flatland of Holland unpeel before my gaze. I was back in Europe, where I had been happiest with Lucy, and imprisoned by the Company. I thought of the dead intruder and his own ticket to Amsterdam.
I leaned back against the train seat. I’d traded one chain, from Howell, to another from Mila. I watched the brief stretch of Holland pan out in silence. I’d had months to sit and think about what I’d do if I got the chance to find Lucy, and here it was, and my skin felt like lit matches lay under it. The possible truths—that Lucy and our baby were dead, or that Lucy had betrayed me—loomed large, the monsters I didn’t want to see and yet had to see.
Fine. I was going to find the man with the scar, force him to tell me where my wife and child were. Then I was going to be the last thing he ever saw on this earth.
PART TWO
APRIL 10–14
“The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”
–Marshal Ferdinand Foch
26
THE BAR IN AMSTERDAM was called De Rode Prins, the “Red Prince,” and it was located along a lovely old canal called the Prinsengracht, the “Prince’s Canal,” with many small cafés, hotels, stately residences, and offices on both sides of its long curve. The Anne Frank Huis stood a few blocks away (usually with a quiet, respectful crowd snapping pictures), and the only boat on the canal was one of those get-on/get-off tour numbers, purring forward while the tourists took their snaps of the waterside buildings and soaked up the charm.
The air smelled of morning rain but the sun had scattered the clouds. The second thing you notice about Amsterdam—after the canals, of course—are the bicycles. They are everywhere, and on an early spring day they swarm like bees rising from hives. The bicycles are not at all fancy, since they are often stolen, but you will see them ridden by lawyers in suits, mothers with the kids balanced on the back or on the handlebars, students and office workers hurrying along. No one wears a helmet. A steady stream of bikes—although rush hour was over and lunch not yet beginning—zipped their way past the small Rode Prins. A few tables perched on the outside, and two gentlemen sat drinking spring beers, watching the light dance on the water beyond the parked houseboats.
Mila and I stepped inside and I could see, from my couple of trips earlier to Amsterdam, that the Rode Prins was a prime example of a dying art. It was a “brown bar,” so called because in the olden days an incessant stream of tobacco smoke stained the walls. Now there was no smoking in the bar, and the walls were brown because they’d been painted that way. The room was narrow, with a long-running leather banquette with several tables on one side, a large table near the window, and a beautiful bar along the opposite wall. Red-shaded lamps hung from the ceiling. A painting of some forgotten royal hung on the wall, and there was a red smear across the canvas—across face and finery and hands—as though a glob of blood or paint had been hurled at it years ago. The painted prince looked very alone. To me, Rode Prins sounded like Road Prince, a king of the wanderers.
I glanced at a menu while Mila waited for the barkeep. They offered beers brewed especially for each season. This was my kind of bar. It surprised me that Mila would choose such a spot for a meeting.
A bartender, tall, bald, heavy-built, and with a small gap between his front teeth, appeared from the back. Mila and the man spoke rapid Dutch; he gave me the wariest of glances. Then Mila said to me, “Sam, this is Henrik. Henrik, this is Sam. Sam will be staying upstairs. Give him whatever he needs.” Henrik shook my hand, a solid, firm grip. Where Mila seemed all exotic secrets, Henrik seemed like a bartender to whom you could talk. I was staying here? I didn’t say anything but Henrik just gave me a polite nod.
He gestured toward the back of the establishment, to a narrow hallway decorated with black-and-white photographs of the Prinsengracht through the years. I followed Mila as she headed for the rear of the bar and up a flight of stairs.
Mila stopped and looked at me. “Bahjat Zaid is a man who is absolutely terrified for his daughter. He doesn’t know you and he’s trusting his daughter’s life to you. Don’t rattle his trust. We’re his only hope. He can’t go to the police.”
“Why?”
“He can explain.” Mila turned and I followed her up the stairs. In a private apartment above the Rode Prins, a tall man sat, shoulders hunched, as though he’d played at Atlas carrying the world, and failed. He stood as we entered, smoothing his palms on his tailored suit jacket.
“This is the man I told you about, Bahjat,” Mila said. “Sam Capra.” I was surprised she used my name but I didn’t let the shock show. A woman like Mila had a reason.
Bahjat Zaid shook my hand, measuring me with his eyes. He had a firm grip and a firmer stare. He looked at me like a boss looks at an employee who might be about to give him bad news.
We sat; Mila asked if I wanted coffee. I said no.
Bahjat Zaid had a narrow face, worn with anguish, and he spoke his English with the faintest of Beirut accents. His navy silk tie was perfectly knotted at a collar of snow-white cotton. A cup of coffee, grown cold, sat untouched at his elbow. He was immaculate and enraged, all at once.
“Tell me about your daughter, Mr. Zaid,” I said.
“Yasmin. She is my pride. My only child. Last year she completed advanced degrees in both chemistry and physics. She is twenty-five. She is about one point seven meters tall. Her…” He stopped suddenly, as though embarrassed by the spill of words.
“Yes,” I said, “but Mila can tell me all that. Tell me about her.”
He blinked, and opened a manila folder next to him. He seemed to gather himself.
“This is Yasmin,” Bahjat Zaid said, pushing a photo toward me.
I studied it. The young woman was lovely. A spill of dark hair, eyes alive with joy and intelligence, a narrow smile. She wore a pretty blue sweater and jeans, and the sky behind her was gray, pregnant with rain. She was pushing a windblown hank of hair from her eyes. Behind her a large estate stood, trees swaying in the wind.
“That’s a nice house.”
He swelled with pride.
“My estate in Kent. It is historically important. It was to serve as a redoubt for the government should England be invaded. It has underground offices, a bunker, that would have housed Churchill in the event of a Nazi occupation. The house has been in my wife’s family for many years. We have a town house in London, but we love living in Kent. So did Yasmin.”
I didn’t say that if England fell to invasion, Kent, being in the southeast corner, would likely go first. “How interesting for you,” I said. There were more photos: Yasmin with her family, Yasmin with the estate staff, Yasmin on horseback, Yasmin graduating from university.
The next photo was Yasmin as a small child, looking up from a book. She was smiling, her two front teeth missing. “She indicated from an early age she wished to be a scientist. You see? She is reading a picture book about Madame Curie. Given my business interests, I felt a position in one of my companies would suit her, and I began to prepare her for such a career.”
I thought, You decided her future when she was still missing her front teeth? “Your companies?”
“Mr. Zaid is one of the partners in Militronics. A major firm that does a great deal of business with Western governments,” Mila said. I knew the company; they made a large variety of small-scale military equipment. Digital binoculars, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vests, and specialized military software and hardware. Their technology was considered among the best in the world; the Company was a client.
“Yes. Yasmin works in a research facility near Budapest. Mostly on defensive technologies: building better armor, more efficient weaponry and equipment. Her research centers on using nanotechnology.”
“And how long has she been missing?”
“Twenty-five days.”
“Has she ever gone missing before?”
“No. Never. She was always a most obedient daughter.”
Obedient. Not a word you heard every day. It was up there with nanotechnology on the rare-word scale, and my own words telling Howell about the Money Czar thundered in my ears.
“You haven’t reported her disappearance to the police,” I said.
“No. I was told not to.”
“A ransom call?”
“Not exactly. Yasmin left work at our Budapest research facility on a Friday evening. As usual, she worked late—she is a devoted employee.” He pushed a printout toward me; it was from a calendar application. Nearly every hour was blocked out, for research or work or, in some cases, self-improvement projects. Learn Chinese. Read up on Puccini operas. Study macro-economics. “You see, her days are highly structured. She works best that way, so I have cultivated this fine habit in her and she agrees.”
“You keep her organized,” I said.
The dryness of my comment went past him. “I didn’t hear from her on the weekend, but that is not unusual. Then on Sunday evening I received this message.” Bahjat Zaid tapped on the laptop and a video unfurled on the screen. Yasmin, fiddling with a key at her apartment building’s entrance. The angle of the camera suggested the video had been shot from across the street, zooming in for detail on the young woman. The doorstep light gave off a feeble glow; there was little ambient street noise, no traffic cutting between lens and woman. Late night. Yasmin dropped her keys, and as she knelt to recover them, two men moved into the picture, seizing her arms, stuffing a cloth over her face. The camera caught her gaze, wide with terror. She struggled and the men rushed her away from the door, into the back of a waiting van. The van peeled away. No license plate in the shot. The cameraman had been very careful.
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?”
“Yes, 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.
