A World Without Secrets (32 page)

"I understand you were involved in an incident last evening just a few blocks from here."

"Yes. An apparent drunk driver came close to running me down."

"As I heard it, you dove into the canal to avoid being killed by someone driving a stolen car."

"I guess we won't know which version is correct until you catch the driver."

"Yes, that is true. I have also heard that you are here to investigate the art theft at the Amstelveen Museum. Do you think this incident and the one last evening might have something to do with your investigation?"

"I don't know, but this is my first time in Europe, so I doubt I had any enemies here before I arrived."

The medical people completed their preliminary examination and wheeled the gurney out of the restroom. My assailant, his head bandaged, was still out cold, but each arm was handcuffed to the frame of the metal stretcher and an officer accompanied him to the ambulance. The police officer taking my statement had the gun, three knives, and cell phone in plastic evidence bags.

"I guess that's all for now, Special Agent James. I'm sure someone else will be contacting you about the incident very soon."

"I'm available whenever you need me."

The police officer followed the rest of the people out of the restroom. I straightened my clothes and waited until the hotel people came in to clean up, expecting that any reporters might follow the cops out of the building as they tried to learn what had happened. Then I left as well. I decided not to go out just yet and instead headed back up to my suite. The hotel manager stepped into the elevator with me, and as the doors closed he turned towards me.

"Mr. James," he said, "on behalf of the hotel, I want to apologize most strongly. Since I became the manager here, no guest has ever been attacked in the hotel."

"I don't blame the hotel. Uh, was he a guest here?"

"No, and no one knows his name. He's come in several times to have a meal here and has also stayed to have a few drinks in the lounge. He always pays in cash."

"Well, I suppose the police will find out who he is."

"I can assure you that if he ever comes into the hotel again, he will not be welcome, and we will immediately summon the police."

I was peeling off my clothes and dropping them to the floor before I had even finished closing and locking the door. I hadn't come out of the fight unscathed. When I had driven my assailant into the wall, his gun had still been half inside his jacket. My right shoulder had hit it at midpoint and jammed it into his body while also jamming it into my shoulder. While it's true that I had some protection from the padding of my jacket and his, and that he had definitely gotten the worst of the deal, my shoulder ached nevertheless.

I turned on the water in the shower, adjusted it to as hot as I could stand it, then finished peeling off my clothes. A hot shower relaxed me like nothing else, and I couldn't wait to feel the spray on my shoulder.

As steam began to rise from the shower stall and fill the bathroom, I climbed in and stood spreadeagled against the shower wall with my head hung low. The water streaming down on the back of my head, my sore shoulder and torso splashed off like rain hitting a roof. This was my favorite thinking position, and I had a lot to think about. In less than twelve hours there had been two attempts on my life. If they had taken the direct approach on the first attempt and just shot me or stuck a knife in my chest, I probably wouldn't have survived. It would have been too unexpected. The second attempt had failed because my senses were on high alert, and I was vigilant for anything out of the ordinary. I wasn't going to assume that something suspicious was most likely innocuous. If that second attacker had only been pulling out a cell phone that was vibrating in his waistband, I would probably have been arranging for bail instead of standing in the shower, but I would gladly take that risk again if something similar happened.

Although I didn't want anyone else to know, I had learned almost nothing during my trips to the seamier places in Amsterdam. A few drunks had indicated the images I was showing looked familiar, but they would have agreed the sketches were good likenesses of their mothers if it got them a free drink. However, it would seem that I had made someone nervous. Perhaps having the world famous art recovery expert, Colton James, sniffing around in bars they frequented made them believe I was hot on their trail. They would have been right, of course, but not for the reasons they suspected.

I stayed in the shower until my fingers began to prune from the water, then reluctantly stepped out and toweled myself off. I felt better but only physically. I still had no idea how to wrap this case up, but I suspected I needed to wrap it up quickly or I'd be fighting off assailants until my luck ran out. In this game, I could only lose once.

Although I'd earlier been anxious to hit the streets again, I had lost interest in venturing out until I formulated a new plan. So after I dressed, I plopped onto the sofa and lost myself in my thoughts.

An hour later I had still not experienced the epiphany I'd hoped for when assuming the role of couch potato. Two important facts tainted everything else. One, someone
urgently
wanted me dead. And two, there seemed no way for me to learn who or exactly why without using the gizmo. I feared using it anywhere in my suite because there might be a dozen cameras hidden here. I needed a place where I could use the gizmo without worrying that anyone was watching. The downstairs lavatory by the bar was now definitely out— forever, so I needed a new place. The place also had to be relatively safe from attack. That would seem to rule out all of Amsterdam and perhaps all of the Netherlands.

Rising from the sofa, I walked to the desk and pulled out the map of Europe provided by the hotel. I wanted a city large enough to get lost in and not too close to Amsterdam. The latter ruled out Brussels. Paris would do nicely, as would Berlin. And although I didn't really want to leave the continent, Great Britain was an enticing destination. It would be nice to be somewhere where almost everyone spoke a language at least close to my American English while I tried to formulate a plan for wrapping up my investigation and keeping my health intact.

After a little more debate with myself and a glance through a number of travel brochures I'd picked up in the lobby of the hotel, I decided on London. I would travel by InterCity train to Rotterdam, then to Hoek of Holland on the local Sprinter train, followed by an overnight crossing on the Stena Line's luxury super-ferry to Harwich. A train to London would complete the journey.

Booking the trip online as a one-price fare, referred to as the Dutch Flyer train and Ferry ticket, would have been preferential, but I didn't want anyone to know what I was planning. Okay, I know that sounded super paranoid. But it was a fact that there had been two attempts on my life during the past twenty-four hours. I didn't yet know who was responsible, and I just didn't know who I could trust on this side of the Atlantic. I was beginning to believe I should have stayed on the American side of the pond.

I knew I would be less conspicuous traveling without a suitcase, but I would need several changes of clothes. I didn't want to think about clothes shopping in an unfamiliar city, so I took the smaller of my two cases. At the desk I told them I had left clothing and personal articles in my room and would return from Paris in a few days.

The doorman wanted to summon a cab for me but I declined. Someone might be out there waiting at a cab stand to pick me up should I leave the hotel. I wasn't going to allow myself to just fall into their hands, so I began walking north until I came to a taxi stand well away from the hotel.

The cab delivered me to the train station with time to spare. I had looked over my shoulder several times, but no one seemed to be following me. That made me wonder if there was a bug in my clothes that I hadn't located. I wished again that I had brought my portable electronic sweeping gear.

As I sat in the train station, I constantly scanned the area, looking for any familiar faces or simply anyone who seemed to have taken an interest in me. I saw no one I recognized, and everyone seemed to be concerned with their own problems or interests.

The trip to Hoek of Holland was, thankfully, uneventful, and at the Stena Line's terminal I purchased a ticket to Harwich. Since it was an overnight cruise, I booked a Comfort suite. It looked great in the brochure; it wasn't too small and it wasn't too large. As Goldilocks would say, "It was just right."

Passengers were already boarding and vehicles were being loaded into the belly of the ship, so I went aboard immediately and tracked down my cabin. It contained two single beds, and I was pleasantly surprised that it looked just as nice as the images in the brochure.

My stomach had been reminding me for several hours that I hadn't eaten since breakfast, so I headed up to the restaurant and enjoyed a delicious meal. So far the ship had earned five stars out of a possible five stars in my book, and we hadn't even left the port.

I was very anxious to get some information, so with my appetite sated, I headed back to my room. Once there, I wasted no time getting the gizmo up on the wall and operating.

The first thing I checked was the background of the assassin from the restroom. I tagged him, then went back to the day of the robbery and tried to match him up with the robbers. He never had face-to-face contact with any of them. So I went back to the day I'd arrived and watched his actions in a fast forward mode. I never saw him make personal contact with anyone, but he was in the hotel bar each time I used the restroom down there, and he had watched me come and go, including the one earlier encounter in the restroom where he had merely looked at me and left as I emerged from the stall. As I had discovered when I was trying to learn the names of the two smash-and-grab criminals in Boston, even with the gizmo and fast forward, this type of surveillance was extremely time consuming. I tracked him until after midnight my time and never learned his name. I knew where he was living and that he liked to wander around Amsterdam on his own, but his name eluded me.

The boat would dock early in the morning, so I needed to get some sleep. I turned off the gizmo, stored it in my dilapidated matchbox, and went into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. When I emerged from the bathroom, I was about to take off the shoulder holster when I heard a faint sound at my door. As I'd told Billy, whenever I heard a sound at home I grabbed my service weapon and waited to see if anyone tried to break in. The doors to the cabins aboard the ship were solid and no one was going to break them down without a fire axe, so whoever was outside my cabin must be trying to open the electronic lock. It could be a drunk who'd gotten the cabins mixed up, or it could be another attacker. I wished I hadn't turned off the gizmo because I could have used it to see into the corridor, and there might not be time to set up it back up at this point.

The room was arranged in a sort of 'L' configuration. Just inside the main door, the bathroom was on the right. This left the right-hand bed mostly out of sight, but the left-hand bed was fully exposed to the corridor doorway. I hurried over, pulled the covers back, and jammed the two pillows from the other bed under the top sheet. Then I pulled the covers back up, trying to make it appear that someone was sleeping there. I'd only had one light on— the one over the desk— so I turned that off. The only remaining light in the room was dim moonlight entering through the large porthole. As I stepped into the space by the bottom of the bed on the right with my back against the bathroom wall, I was hidden from the corridor doorway. I clicked off the safety on my Glock 23 and held it up by my head with my arm crooked at the elbow. We'd been taught never to put our finger on the trigger until we knew we were going to fire the weapon, but my finger was there now. If anyone managed to enter the cabin, I knew I was going to fire.

I worked to control my breathing as I waited and tried to predict every possible scenario. If it was a drunk outside my cabin, he'd never get in, and I could verify his identity later with the gizmo. If it was someone else, he might have enough sophistication and modern electronics to actually open the door. If he did, I was ready. The layout of the room was perfect for my needs except there were mirrors everywhere to make the space seem larger. I squeezed myself back into the corner as far as I could go to avoid having my reflection appear in the mirror over the desk.

The wait was agonizing. It may have only been a few minutes, but it seemed like an hour, and sweat was building on my forehead and running down my face. Was I scared? Absolutely. The previous two attempts had happened so fast that I had reacted with sheer instinct for self-preservation. This was different.

Suddenly I heard a noise from the door and light from the corridor streamed into the room, illuminating the 'sleeping' form. In quick succession, three shots from a silenced weapon struck the bed.

Faking a body in a bed was an old trick. I'd seen it used in numerous movies for decades. But it worked. The assassin's attention was on the bed as I pivoted to my left, stretched my arm around the corner of the bathroom wall and fired into the center of the form outlined in the doorway. I never hesitated. There wasn't time. My first shot came about a second after I had started to move, and the next two, coming in quick succession, took even less time than that.

The attacker, standing just inside the door, fell backwards when he was struck by the three forty-caliber slugs and landed in the corridor. I remained where I was. It felt like my heart was beating five hundred times a minute. It took a scream from the corridor to get me moving.

Although the attacker had been using a silenced weapon, they were never really as silent as seen in the movies, where there was only a slight 'pffft' sound. The noise made when firing an un-silenced high-caliber pistol was probably about one hundred sixty decibels. A silencer might reduce that noise by about thirty db, but in the dead of night it could sound like a sonic boom in this part of the ship. In the enclosed space of the cabin my un-silenced forty caliber sounded like a cannon going off. My ears were ringing.