Pieter saw the door open and Commissaris Huijbers come through, hunched over and rolling his shoulders in an attempt to look all menacing and streetwise, mealy-mouthed and frowning, his baseball hat pulled down. Two members of his personal security team came with him, though why he thought he needed them in here escaped Pieter, and they trailed after the police chief as he made for the chair at the head of the table, two or three places along from Pieter. He lowered himself into his seat and clasped his big, meaty hands together on the tabletop. His bodyguards stepped back.
Huijbers gave a nod of his head and the lights in the room slowly dimmed and the projector screen flickered to life.
The familiar figure of Dyatlov appeared from the shadows, the ex-Spetsnaz commando and head of the Armed Response Division sporting his usual buzz-cut, and his short, squat and muscular frame drew the room’s whole attention and the general chatter ebbed away.
Behind him, the screen was now divided into six smaller squares, each segment showing either a still photograph or moving video footage taken from various CCTV cameras. Pieter saw the familiar-looking black van from the photo-still that Floris had sent him several hours earlier, and each frame was time-stamped with a slightly different time, but all dated from the night of the hit and run at Ransdorp.
“Right ladies and gentlemen,” Dyatlov began in his thick Russian accent. “Time is short so let’s commence the mission briefing. This is a very time-sensitive situation.”
He strolled over to the screen and turned sideways on, looking at the flickering images. In his hand, he held a tiny remote control.
“Our colleagues at NCSC have come up with some excellent work at very short notice. This was their target.” He indicated the black van in one of the video clips. “This first image was taken at the passenger ferry terminal at Buiksloterweg, on the north side of the river. It’s dated Friday evening, at a little after 6pm. It shows our suspect – and we are fairly sure the driver is Tobias Vinke – leaving the car park next to the old Toll House building. We then pick up the same vehicle at various points as he drives through the suburbs towards the ring road. As he leaves the city the camera network switches over from city district to the motorway network, but we can still follow his progress northwards for several miles.”
The set of images flickered and then disappeared, to be replaced by six more, each one following the black van, and each one showing a change of the time in sequence from shortly after six in the evening.
“However, at some stage after crossing the main ring road, Vinke branches away to the north-east, using minor roads as he hits the more rural areas beyond the city limits. We lose him for a short time until we pick him up again here.”
Dyatlov pointed to a picture in the top left corner of the screen, and Pieter recognized it as the same image that Floris had sent him, showing Vinke driving through Ransdorp shortly before the hit-and-run.
Dyatlov continued.
“We follow him at various points along his journey. Here re-joining the N247, here driving around Edam, and again at Oosthuizen. If you would like to switch on your laptops, I have provided each of you with an interactive map plotting his route.”
There was a flurry of movement and clicks as each person seated around the desks powered up their laptops and scrutinized the screens, their eyes panning back and forth from the maps to the projector screen.
“He travels around Hoorn on the N307 as far as the town of Enkhuizen right at the very tip of the Ijsselmeer Peninsular. After that, this camera here,” and all eyes were fixed on the big projector screen, “shows his driving up onto the road along the Houtribdijk, the 30km-long dam across the Ijsselmeer stretching to the shore at Lelystaad way across the water to the southeast.”
Dyatlov paused for dramatic effect, his eyes taking in each face in the dimly-lit room, his gaze lingering slightly on Pieter’s and giving him a nod.
“We have checked the cameras at the other end of the dam. They show nothing. No sign of the van whatsoever. So, people, he drove up onto the road across the water here, but did not exit from the far side. Which means, when this footage was taken, he stopped overnight somewhere in between the western ramp onto the dam road and the eastern exit ramp. He holed up on the dam itself.”
The split-screen CCTV images disappeared from the big screen, to be replaced by a single satellite image of the Houtribdijk Dam. Pieter leaned forward in his seat to study the large photo. The atmosphere in the room was stretched taut.
The Houtribdijk Dam. Built between 1963 and 1975 to hold back the North Sea from flooding Amsterdam, it was one of the biggest building projects in the world, and is still a marvellous feat of engineering to this day. Seen from above like this, it resembled a thin crooked brown line anchored on the two towns at either end, with the huge expanse of grey water, part of the North Sea to all intents and purposes, all around. The sea had frozen in places where the water ran up to the edge of the broad road that ran along the top of the embankment, creating a silvery sheen to the image, and Pieter realized they were actually looking at a real-time live satellite feed. They’d spared no expense in setting this operation up, and in double-quick time.
Dyatlov went on, his own eyes now fixed on the screen, his features etched with concentration.
“There is actually only one point on the dam where he could have been staying. One place where he could have been holding Nina Bakker. One location where the woman Janssen and the shooter could now be. And
