Zero Hour (2010)

indication of the age group of the people who lived here. I bought three packets of aspirin in tin foil and a bottle of water. I washed down a couple of Smarties and moved on.

The road became busier and wider still. I came to a bridge at a T-junction. Traffic lights were strung on cables across about five converging roads. The apartment buildings looked more sixties now, but were still upmarket. One to my half-right was arranged in an open square. A shopping plaza filled the ground floors. I headed over. There was another pharmacy, a newsagent and a cafe with chairs and tables outside.

There’s something magic about the number three. If I tried to buy four packs the pharmacist might get sparked up - it just tipped the scale. If they balked even at three, I had my excuse ready. I took one a day to keep heart attacks at bay.

The newsagent fixed me up with a shiny new postcard-sized tourist map. The target road was about a kilometre away, at the start of the narrower canals. I’d soon be in Van der Valk country again.

Heading back towards the main to get my bearings, I noticed a bunch of daffs around the base of a tree that had managed to leap out of the mud and burst into flower. Either the plaza had its own microclimate, or the bulbs hadn’t paid any attention to Mother Nature’s timetable.

I went and sat outside the cafe and waited for someone to come and take my order. I admired the daffodils again, and then I found myself looking at all the people around me, doing everyday stuff like going into shops and walking around with mobiles; mums pushing prams; a couple of old men sitting on a bench under the tree, reading newspapers as they waited to die. I looked at the tree. It would also be budding soon, I supposed.

I’d never really bothered with this sort of stuff. When I was a squaddie, I only knew three types of weather: wet, hot, and cold. Even as a kid, I didn’t understand about seasons. I didn’t know how it all worked. Council estates were grey all the time, so what was the point?

I made a decision. I didn’t want to die without living. Once this job was over, I needed to have a look at the real stuff. I’d head for Moscow with Anna and go and see some paintings I’d read about and try to work out what had got everyone so excited. In the meantime I’d sit here for a while and let my unconscious soak it all up. This could be my one and only chance at a bit of normality. Maybe I’d thought of it as shite all my life because I couldn’t be bothered to get off my arse and go and have a look. Then again, maybe it was because I was scared of getting too close to what these people did - going to work, having a mortgage, raising families, looking in the mirror, being real.

19

A group of toddlers played in the square, watched over by their mums. The weapons-grade buggies they were pushing had probably cost more than my first car. I watched them for a while, then sat and stared at the speck hovering high over the eastern side of the city for so long it almost hypnotized me.

I was woken from my semi-daze by the arrival of coffee and a sticky bun. Good. I had to start concentrating. The job was the thing that mattered, not some daffs sticking out of the mud or me wondering what the view was like from the eye in the sky.

I drank my coffee, then fished out my map. The streets and canals became narrower from here on in. Westerstraat lay at the base of a triangle of land, with canals framing the other two sides. A road ran down from the apex, and vertical streets either side paralleled Westerstraat, forming a grid of sorts. I hadn’t taken much notice of this yesterday. I’d just concentrated on Anna’s directions and getting to the meet on time.

Anne Frank’s house, another place I should add to my bucket list, was a bit further down. I’d walked past it a few times when I was a squaddie, but never gone in. It hadn’t offered strippers or beer.

I headed back to the junction with my pockets full of aspirin. I’d get a whole lot more later on: I’d need a Bergenful to achieve what I had in mind.

I crossed a bridge over the west-side canal. As I walked down it, I scanned the roads parallel to Westerstraat; they were narrow and one-way. I was coming into the Amsterdam I knew best, in Van der Valk country: canals, trams, cyclists weaving between pedestrians, cobbles, narrow one-way streets. Centuries-old houses leant out over the brick-paved streets. Bikes were parked everywhere. Pedestrians were segregated from cars by lines of bollards. The buildings were immaculately kept and predominantly residential. Even the houseboats looked expensive. A James Bond villain would have looked completely at home among their timber and glass.

I remembered reading somewhere that a couple of hundred years ago these houses were taxed according to how much land they occupied. Surprise, surprise, the Dutch went narrow and high. There were at least four or five storeys to all these places, with big, warehouse-style winches sticking out of their attics so anything large and heavy could be hauled up to the higher floors.

It was going to be a nightmare to recce in these narrow roads. There was no cover and no reason to be here. I couldn’t just stand in the middle of a lane and study my target. I’d be able to do one walk-past, maybe two at a push, as long as I came back in an hour or so from a different direction.

There was the odd shop, and yet another pharmacy. I went in for more aspirin but also discovered something else I was after. Pure alcohol. Well, 95 per cent pure. It wasn’t for drinking, but the sort old people use as an antiseptic. I bought two 500ml plastic bottles of the stuff and crossed it off my mental shopping list.

Eventually, I turned left onto Westerstraat. It seemed out of place somehow, an eighty-metre-wide boulevard among the lanes. There was even a central reservation big enough for two cars to park nose to nose.

A lot of the expensive-looking seventies and eighties apartment blocks boasted shops on their ground floor. They were independents rather than chains: a bike shop, a couple of small supermarkets, an Internet cafe next to a mattress store, a newsagent.

118 was down at the end of the street, as Bradley had promised. I saw a sign for an Internet cafe that turned out to be more of a 7/11. There were four or five banks of screens. You paid in a slot machine and could order food and drink, even buy music CDs.

I logged on with five euros for thirty minutes, then hit Google Earth and Street View for my virtual tour of the target. I could see the striped canopy that ran outside the cafe. The target house’s pitched roof was immediately to its left. It was narrower than those on either side of it. It backed onto a square, with four similarly proportioned terraces lining each side. I clicked the arrows anti-clockwise along each of them, looking for a gap between the buildings. I finally found an archway. I could imagine a coach and horses rattling through to the stables after dumping the good burghers of Noordermarkt outside their front doors. The whole area had now been segmented, with fences and walls bordering private parking spaces and places to store industrial-sized wheelie bins.

I soaked up the imagery. This was the only known location for the target, and not a bad one. At least it wasn’t exposed to the real world, unlike the cafe next door. Whatever went on inside was kept inside. For a while, anyway.

I wanted to get into 118 later today, to work out the best access route when I came back later to finish the job. I needed to check out the alarm system, and might even be able to adjust a window or door lock to make re- entry a whole lot easier. Once I’d sorted the competition, I’d have bought myself the time to get everything in place to hit the silo. My number-one priority was still the girls, whatever Tresillian had in mind.

I Googled Anne Frank’s house and a couple of galleries to mix the session up a bit, then deleted my history and closed down, making sure the log-off really did log off.

20

The white cafe with striped canopies and a blue door was open for business on the junction ahead. The canal was less than a hundred metres further on. White plastic sheeting protected a run of stalls in a small, brick-paved square between the two. There were no green Passats in sight.

I crossed the road opposite 118 so I had the clearest possible view of its front elevation. A small glass porthole protected by a metal grid was set into the solid wood front door. The windows on all three floors were