Adrenaline (33 page)

She bit her lip, clutching her elbows. “You will have to fend on your own. I need to help the women.”

“You’re abandoning me?”

“
You
abandoned
them
.”

“You know that’s not true. I set it up so they could be freed. Mila, why are you being this way?”

She looked at the ground. “Because I have to be this way, Sam. Listen carefully. If you have to leave Amsterdam, my employers own a bar in just about every major city in the world. Do a search for ‘Roger Cadet’ on your phone and you’ll find the address for the closest one. Go there and tell the manager that Roger Cadet asked you to stop by and you will be helped, whatever you need.”

“Who’s Roger Cadet?”

“The supposed owner. But he doesn’t exist. It’s just a password. But every bar’s location is encoded with it so it’ll show up on a GPS map.”

“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?”

A
UGUST 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.”

T
HE 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.”