rescuing me?”
“If you screw up the first job, no point in giving you harder work,” she said. “Cut losses, move on.” She turned, revved fast, slowed as we caught sight of the car that had picked up Nic.
“I got into a bar fight.”
“Good way to stay in the shadows.” She sounded disgusted. “You could have gotten arrested. Guess what happens when they run a check on your face, dumbass? You’re on your way back to your boogeyman Howell.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“We’re not like the Company, Sam. I don’t do job reviews. I just cut you loose if you’re a problem.”
“It’s nice to know you have my back.”
She glared at me. “Don’t misunderstand me. I will have your back, always. As long as you prove it’s worth having. Now all you prove is you like to make stupid fight.”
“I made contact and he’s trying to get me a job with the blond guy. Named Piet.”
We watched Nic’s car turn onto Singel. “Tell me all the details.”
Mila drove with intensity while she listened, keeping just the right amount of distance behind. I wondered where she had worked, who had taught her her skills. “So he might be going to talk to Piet,” I finished.
“About you? A job applicant? You flatter yourself,” she said.
“I meant he made a call that said he had the goods. And he’s having problems with a Turk who’s making trouble for Piet, who was setting up a route. You understand smuggling? You don’t just load your illegal goods up and hope for the best. You plan out the exact path your goods take, with all supporting documentation and people along the way to protect it and keep it out of the authorities’ attention. Solid, unbreakable routes are a valuable resource. If their route has been messed up or compromised by this Turk, it might cause a meet to happen.”
She kept Nic in her sights as he turned onto another side street.
“These guys are weird,” I said. “They’re smugglers. So why do smugglers kidnap Yasmin and have her blow up a train station? Can you get me more details on the bombing, on the victims, the response, the investigation?”
Mila didn’t look at me as she made the turn. A soft rain began to fall. “All right. I’ll get you what I can. But you don’t have a lot of time, Sam, to be analyzing these guys. You just need to find them and get Yasmin back. Don’t lose sight of that.”
“Understanding them will help me find them.”
She snap-snap-snap ped her fingers. “Our time. It is going, Sam. You can’t conduct psychoanalysis on a bunch of crooks before the Dutch police ID Yasmin on a security tape. Right now she’s just some girl with a backpack. But if they can ID her… we’re out of time. The damage to Zaid’s company will be done.”
“If I was going to psychoanalyze anyone, it’d be you.”
She glanced at me. “Analyze away. You will simply have to trust me that we are the good guys.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Ah.”
Nic’s car sped up, took a hard turn. She revved, followed close. In the street where he had taken the left, five streets led off, like the spokes of a wheel, each street short, intersected with another turn.
“You distracted me,” she said. “Your fault.”
Nic was gone. The rain began to come down harder.
33
Ten days before, in an office in New York that hid behind a sign claiming it was a financial advisory firm, Howell raged. “Find him. Find him, and bring me his head on a plate.”
“That’s very Salome of you,” August said.
Howell touched his temple. The slow, arterial throb of a migraine began to pulse behind his eyes. “He has to be heading to London. Has to be. That’s ground zero for him. I want every office alerted to his profile. I want him found now, put under the control of our people, not under anyone else.”
“I want to know who the dead body was,” August said. “Don’t you think that matters?”
“Yes, of course,” Howell said. “I want IDs on this guy, and I want to know how and when he died.”
“I think he died Friday night,” August said. “Just from a visual check.”
“Christ.” Howell blanched. “He must’ve killed the bastard right before I got there.” He got up and paced to the window. “I should take you off this, Mr. Holdwine. You’re his friend.”
“My being his friend is the reason you should leave me on,” August said. “I’m the only one he might surrender to.”
“Guys who leave bodies in tubs like party favors for us to find aren’t interested in surrendering,” Howell said. “I thought we broke him of escape when he couldn’t get the passport.”
“You questioned him for how long? But you never got to know Sam,” August said. “You don’t know how he thinks. I do. Take me with you. Get me reassigned to your team.”
“All right,” Howell said. August Holdwine might just be a superior secret weapon against Sam Capra, he thought.
The past ten days had not been pleasant for Howell. First the discovery that Sam Capra wasn’t whiling away an hour in the Brooklyn library; then the discovery that the Company had an agent who had left a dead body in a neighboring apartment; then tracking the stolen car to the truck stop, and then… nothing. For days.
Sam Capra could have hitched a truck ride to anywhere in the country. They had scant few customers to track from the truck stop in the window of time that Sam might have been there: most of them paid cash for their lunches and coffees. Three days later, one of the waitresses remembered that a man matching Sam’s description had left at the same time as another trucker. No, she didn’t know the trucker’s name, but he’d paid for his lunch and fuel with a credit card.
Every credit card charge had been traced, until a trucker named Vince Trout was found who said, yes, he’d given a young man a ride to a Port of New York and New Jersey terminal.
“The bastard is sneaking into Europe on a cargo ship,” Howell said. He was empowered to send teams to London, Rotterdam, and Marseilles to scout crews, to see if anyone had seen a man matching Sam’s photo. But hundreds of ships and the crews that might have seen Sam would be back at sea and not easily questioned.
“We could go public with his face,” August said now. “Invent a story about him.”
“No,” Howell said. “We don’t want him front and center in the press. A possibly rogue CIA agent? We don’t do that kind of self-destructive publicity. Horrible at funding time. We don’t call them out until we’ve got them in handcuffs or a coffin.” He crossed his arms, stared at August. “Or we catch him and we find out what the hell he’s up to.”
“The guy he killed might have been sent to kill him. I think someone took the bait.”
“Then we want to find said someone. I have an ID on the dead guy. He’s a low-level thug connected with smuggling operations in Paris. Simon Tauras, long criminal record. Nothing special.”
“Low-level thugs don’t normally cross the ocean to try and kill a Company agent.”
“Yes, that’s interesting to me,” Howell said. “I’m going to follow that lead, see where it takes us. I want you to focus on seeing if there were any communications from ships out of New York that implied anything unusual. Like they found a stowaway. Or they had any odd radio transmissions.”
“It will take days to search that database. There are millions of conversations in it.”
“Then get started.”
The trail, gone cold, grew hot two days before Sam Capra arrived in Rotterdam. August discovered in the Echelon database-which monitored a vast number of the world’s communications and could be searched for critical keywords-radio chatter from the captain of a Liberian-registered cargo vessel to the owning company about an approaching helicopter; the ship’s captain was told the helicopter should be allowed to land. No further explanation.
Howell ran into a stone wall when he contacted the shipping company. The helicopter was explained as an at-sea inspection by the owners. The flight plan referred to didn’t exist, though. So someone had maybe chased the ship out to sea for a reason: to find Sam, or to bring him back.
