The Sinai Secret (13 page)

He tried to keep the urgency out of his voice, although he could hear the pulsating sirens of approaching police cars.

"We had to get the guns, Louis, or we would be dead instead of this guy. You were very brave, Louis, attacking a man with a gun. The other man, the one who got away, used his gun to make me go with him."

At last, comprehension.

At first the trail of blood drops was unmistakable.

On the street they were becoming farther apart, and the sunlight was fading. After two blocks the telltale splatter disappeared. The guy must have stopped to apply some sort of tourniquet—which meant he couldn't be far away on a gimpy leg.

Lang continued down the street, rewarded by the sight of a man with an obvious limp dodging in and out of the early evening stream of pedestrians.

Keeping back, Lang followed.

Lang was thankful that Amsterdam was less than automobile-friendly. He dodged several bicycles, a tram, and one or two cars. He cleared the street just in time to see his quarry cross a canal bridge.

On the other side the trees lining the waterway spread their limbs under streetlights, making moving specters on the mottled walkways. Street signs—Dude Spiegel, Wolvenstraat—meant nothing to Lang as he followed across another canal, the fleeing figure ahead of him making no effort to conceal his direction of retreat. He obviously thought Lang would have remained behind to interrogate his partner.

Even so, there was no point in being reckless. Lang ducked into a coffeehouse with a view of the length of the street. His first breath filled his nose with the musty smell of marijuana, maybe enough to leave him stoned if he kept breathing the air. There was a time in his college days when a free high would have been appealing, but not this evening.

Lang had chosen the ideal time to hide from sight. The man ahead looked over his shoulder and slowed slightly. Lang waited for him to disappear around the next corner before sprinting past the same intersection and to the next. Flattening himself against the cold brick of a canal house, Lang peered out. As anticipated, Leather Jacket had now slowed to a painful limp, more interested in what might be behind him than in front. As he passed, Lang drew back from the streetlights' warm glow.

Halfway down the walk beside the canal, the mart gave a final look over his shoulder and climbed down to one of the narrow boats tied bow and stern along the waterway. A moment later, lights appeared at a porthole.

Now what?

If there were some way to Capture Leather Jacket, there was little reason to think he would yield any more information than his confederate. Professional hit men weren't known to be loquacious.

Lang noted the name painted across the stern of the boat,
Manna,
and a registration number, and decided to wait.

An hour later no one had come or gone from the boat, but police sirens seemed to be crisscrossing the city. How long before someone became suspicious of his loitering and called the cops? If he wasn't going to get any information from Leather Jacket about contacts, he might as well make certain the man didn't get another chance to kill him.

Lang waited another full five minutes before leaving the concealment of the shadows. With his hand behind his back on the butt of the SIG Sauer, he approached the boat. Since there had been no lights on before the man's arrival, it was a near certainty that the boat had only the single occupant. But how to get aboard? The craft's narrow beam ensured that even the lightest step onto the deck would produce telltale rocking. And even if he could surprise the man on board, sounds of a fight or gunshots in this peaceful neighborhood would surely draw police, who, sooner or later, would figure out that the dead man back at the university had not been shot with his own weapon.

Lang would have to think of something other than forcing his way aboard.

He watched two boats pass, neither wake sufficient to cause as much motion as climbing aboard would. He watched the sluggish current until it gave him an idea.

There was no power line from the craft to shore, no pigtail connection that would have acted like a third mooring line. The boat's electricity, then, was provided by a generator-powered battery. The lights would stay on whether or not the vessel was tied up.

Silently he crept to the stern of the boat, untying the line that moored it to the bollard at the edge of the canal's embankment and letting the rope slide into the listless water. As yet another craft passed, he did the same for the bowline, this time holding on with one hand and keeping the other on the gun butt.

Slowly, ever so gently, the sluggish current moved the boat from the space it had occupied along the embankment and pushed it along at a pace Lang's slow walk could easily match. The first bridge presented a problem: Lang couldn't both hold the line and let the craft continue. He let go, following the narrow ship along the canal.

After what seemed a mile or so, Lang saw rows of bright lights ahead and perpendicular to his path. That, he guessed from what Louis had said and the brief reading he had done on the train, would be the Amstel, the river that crossed all canals and was the route of much of the city's commercial and industrial transportation.

The man inside was blissfully unaware he had gone from a tranquil residential canal to one of the busiest waterways in Europe, a highway of commerce that operated twenty-four hours a day.

Running ahead, Lang found a spot not occupied by another craft and leaned over, catching the trailing bowline. Gently he slowed the craft until it was stopped at the intersection of canal and river. From his right Lang could see a string of barges pushed by a smaller vessel, something resembling a tugboat. Patiently Lang waited until the relative positions seemed about right.

Then he let the rope go.

The canal boat edged tentatively into the river, gaining speed as the stronger current turned it abruptly to port. The sudden motion must have alerted its occupant. His head suddenly appeared through the hatch on the upper deck just as the tug saw the smaller vessel and let go a warning blast from its horn.

There was no way the multiple barges could stop in time, and the canal boat was not under power to maneuver. Lang felt the crunch of steel cutting through wood all the way to his bones.

Lang waited for nearly an hour, watching the multitude of light-flashing police craft until the divers surfaced with a limp form that was immediately zipped into a body bag. The crowd along the banks and the nearest bridge dispersed, returning to restaurants and bars.

Lang hoped he could remember the way back to the university. He was fairly certain he couldn't pronounce it well enough to ask.

As he walked, the tension of pending action was replaced by a sour taste, bile that rose in his throat at the thought of killing. In all the years he had been employed by the Agency, his most violent act had been jostling someone on the Frankfurt U-Bahn, his greatest peril, other than one foray behind the Berlin Wall, an accident on the Autobahn. Since his retirement to what he and Dawn had anticipated would be a much safer civilian life, Lang had suffered a half dozen or so attempts on his life and been forced to defend himself with deadly force.

It was, perhaps, by divine scheme that Dawn had not lived to see the ordinary American lifestyle she had so longed for become a game of life and death.

The thought gave him little comfort.

The memory of his wife, their dreams of a family, and a domestic life enjoyably dull was largely illusion, he admitted to himself. Realistically, the day-to-day predictability would have led to a tedium even spirited court battles could not have entirety dispelled. Life among normal people would have become monotonous.

On one level, he knew these truths to be evident. On another, in the place he reserved exclusively for Dawn, he refused to admit their existence. He was certain that even ennui with her would have made him happy.

Quite another compartment was reserved for Gurt, the second love of his life. He doubted she would long have tolerated a life where the only excitement was the weekly installment of
24
on television. Indeed, the prospect might well have been the reason she left despite his overtures of marriage.

So much for tripping down Memory Lane.

Lang had the present to worry about. There was no way to know who wanted the foundation's project halted, even if it meant murder. Nor could he be sure how many killers might be in Amsterdam.

He could, however, make several informed guesses.

The uniformity of armament, the Heckler & Koch automatic rifles, the silenced pistols, suggested organization. These were high-quality weapons and almost impossible to procure by civilians in the firearm-paranoid European nations. AK-47s would have been unremarkable. The most easily obtained gun on the continent, if not the world, it was a version of the Russian assault rifle once manufactured in almost every former Iron Curtain country and still plentiful on the arms black market. The variety of knock-offs carried an assortment of problems, such as jamming, misfires, and unreliable parts.

Instead, someone had the means and knowledge to acquire quality weapons.

The fact that he had been met at the Brussels airport suggested organization also. Either the group had the ability to hack into Europe's air traffic control or they had a network that extended back into the United States, where someone had reported his departure.

Once again he was the target of some ill-defined association whose chief purpose at the moment seemed to be eliminating him. Although the feeling was becoming familiar, it was far from comfortable.

EIGHTEEN

University of Amsterdam

Thirty Minutes Later

By the time Lang had returned to the university, only a couple of uniformed policemen remained in the ruins of what had been Benjamin Yadish's laboratory.

Louis stood to one side, anxiously smoking a cigarette.

"You have spoken to the police?" Lang asked pointedly.

Louis nodded. "I told them we knew we were about to die and how you threw something to divert their attention. I was not sure what happened next."

About as good as Lang could have expected.

He looked at the cigarette in the Belgian's fingers. "I didn't know you smoked."

"I quit ten years ago."

Lang Reilly: the antidote to Nicorette.

In addition to the cops in the room, a distraught little man in a seedy sweater and wrinkled corduroys was walking over. Lang didn't fully understand Louis's introduction, only that the man's name was Pierson, a professor and some sort of official at the university.

"I hope, Mr. Reilly," Pierson began in accented but understandable English, "I hope you will accept a great apology for what happened tonight. This is not a normal, er, thing to happen in Amsterdam."

"I'm sure," Lang said.

"Amsterdam is a peaceful city..."

It should be. Everyone was either stoned, just laid, or both.

"... and we at the university greatly appreciate the donations of your foundation."

Now Lang understood the professor's consternation. A chemistry professor was replaceable, but a generous contributor...

The Dutch were a practical people.

An older man Lang had not seen before interrupted. "Forgive me. I am Police Inspector Van Decker."

Rotund but not obese, pug nose, dark eyes peering out from under bushy eyebrows like those of a small animal hesitant to leave its burrow. Other than contemporary dress, the man could have stepped out of Rembrandt's
Night Watch,
one of those burghers who paid the artist to be depicted with others of the city's volunteer police force.

He handed Lang a card. "You are Lang Reilly?"

Lang studied the card before putting it in his wallet. "I am."

"You knew Dr. Yadish?"

Lang shook his head. "Actually I never met the man. He was recommended by a friend."

Eyebrows arched like bushy caterpillars. "You hire people you do not know?"

Lang thought a moment, composing his answer. "Inspector, I am president of the Janice and Jeff Holt Foundation, a multinational charity. We support largely medical care and research for children in third-world countries, but occasionally other scientific causes such as the one Dr. Yadish was working on. I doubt I personally know a dozen of the people actually involved with our projects worldwide. We're fortunate to have people on site like Louis deVille here to keep an eye on things."

Van Decker turned his attention to Louis. "How long was Dr. Yadish employed by you before he died in Bruges?"

Louis thought a moment. "Not quite two years. But he really was not working for the foundation. He was a professor of chemistry here. We gave him a grant, money to do the research."

Van Decker's expression indicated that he was unsure of the distinction. The universal policeman's notebook appeared. "He was working on some sort of fuel?"

"A replacement for fossil fuels."

There was no doubt the inspector didn't understand.

"Gasoline, petrol," Lang volunteered. "He was looking for a substitute."