a jumble of angles and heights. Many of the shops were appropriately hipster, or aimed at students: bookshops, clothing stores, and many places to get coffee or beer. The ninth coffee shop I tried, yes, there was a ten Boom listed on the door buzzer to the corresponding doorway. I was standing at the bottom of the stairs when I heard Nic’s voice, raised, feet coming down the stairs.
Hell.
I bolted out the front door and hurried into line in the coffee shop. If he came in for his morning jolt I would have a bitch of a time explaining why I was here. I thought. Hmm. Maybe it would show initiative that I had found where he lived. More likely it would freak him out.
I heard the door jingle behind me. Best to face the music. I looked over my shoulder. It was a pretty young woman entering. And beyond her, Nic, on a cell phone, talking with animated gestures. He unlocked a bicycle, pulled it free from its railing and got on it. He didn’t bother with hands on the handlebars, like many of Amsterdam’s daredevils, and he rode off, still jabbering on the cell phone.
I ducked out of the line, smiled at the pretty woman, and hurried back to the building’s lobby.
His apartment was on the top floor. I ran up the stairs, found the door, listened. Silence inside. I knelt before the door. Mila had pronounced my plan “stupid” yet had geared me up.
The lock was a simple one: with two picks I had it open in forty seconds. I eased the door open and stepped inside, shutting the door without a sound.
The apartment was unkempt. Half-full beer glasses, left over from last night and smelling stale, sat on a coffee table. Yesterday’s newspaper lay scattered across a couch. I moved soundlessly through the littered den, the small kitchen. Three doors beyond the kitchen. I opened the closest: it was a small bathroom. Then the next one. And froze.
An elderly lady lay asleep in a bed, snoring. An empty vodka bottle stood guard on a night table. Her hair was a mess and the slightest odor of dirtiness wafted above her. I eased the door shut.
Damn. This was too dangerous. But this might also be my only chance… I tried the other door. Nic’s room. And it was as spotless as the other rooms were dingy. Most of it was taken up by a desk, with three computers sitting along it. Above the monitors were rows of books on database design, programming languages, and many books on computer hacking and security. Perhaps he was more than a spammer. A scattering of photos sat on a side table. A younger Nic, without the ponytail and the beer weight, standing next to the woman who lay in the other room’s bed. She looked younger and healthier, and next to her was a man who looked like a much older version of Nic.
Nic, the wannabe badass, was a computer geek who lived with his mother.
I’d come equipped. I needed information, and most information these days is parked on computers. I tapped the keyboard’s space bar. There was a login prompt, asking for a password. I slipped a USB portable drive into one of the ports on the first computer. The software loaded on it started its work to crack the login password. Mila said it was NSA-based technology and didn’t say how she’d gotten her dirty little hands on it.
While the cracker attempted to, well, crack, I searched the room. Nic had a gun, a Glock, under his bed. Nothing else.
The woman’s snoring rose in volume, snuffled, went quiet.
The computer pinged. I was in. I removed the password cracker and slipped in a different USB drive, one designed to copy his entire hard drive. Mila had promised me that it would work much faster than a conventional drive. It started its work and I went to the listing of his most recent applications and documents to see what he’d been working on. He’d been looking at PDFs. I opened them all up.
He’d been reading and capturing news website accounts of the Centraal Station bombing. I scanned them. Nothing I didn’t already know. Five killed. Four Dutch, one Russian. The Russian’s name had not yet been released, the police said, because of difficulty locating his family. The bomb had gone off in a small bookstore; it had been left behind a cardboard display of books that were on sale. Police speculated it was not left in the open area of the station because there was no place to easily dump a backpack without it being spotted.
Next up were pictures of the devastation and I’d looked at them for five seconds before realizing: no way these came from a news website. These were crime-scene photos, the kind simply not made available for public viewing, taken by the police.
They were gruesome. People buying their papers, their magazines, chocolate candy for a snack or a bad-for- you breakfast. One cashier, just doing a simple, honorable job. All dead. Their shredded bodies lay among the torn and burned remains of the shop. Blood splattered the walls. Limbs torn from the corpses.
It brought back the most horrible memories of the Holborn bombing.
How did Nic have these photos?
There was a police analysis of the bomb, stamped as classified.
What had he said last night at the urinal? I got the goods. The cops don’t know. I thought he’d meant smuggling goods, but I was wrong. The smug bastard had hacked into the police database. He was following the investigation.
A chill touched my skin. Nic was far, far more than he seemed. I had badly underestimated him.
I examined the details of the bomb. A small amount of Semtex explosive, believed to have come from an inventory stolen in the Czech Republic six months earlier. Simple.
But. But.
There was nothing in the report about how the bomb was detonated. I paged through the rest of it. There should be a timer, or a cell phone to trigger the blast with a call. None was present. Even a devastating blast should have left forensic evidence of how the bomb was activated and blown.
The next page was labeled unidentified electronics. I glanced through it; there was gear in the knapsack that had been annihilated in the blast but left enough fragments to indicate that it wasn’t from a cell phone. The police were still piecing it together. Maybe that was the detonator. But if it wasn’t obviously a cell phone or a timer, what was it? I could see a half-melted grid, no bigger than a hand-it looked like a honeycomb, forged from metal. I had never seen its like before. Apparently it had blown through the paperback display and into the intestines of one of the victims, preserving it from the worst of the blast.
The police did not yet know what this gear was, and that troubled me.
Next door the snoring rose again, and then stopped. I could hear movement in the bed. I stopped typing. The rustling stopped, but the snoring didn’t resume. I glanced out the window. It was a straight drop four stories down to the cafe’s awning.
I waited. No movement. Maybe she was awake and staring at the ceiling. I checked the portable drive; halfway done. Maybe Mom was used to the soft insistent click of the keys; she might just assume that Nic was home.
I looked at the files on the people who had died in the blast. The four Dutch citizens were the cashier and three customers, including a nineteen-year-old girl, a forty-five-year-old man, a fifty-year-old woman, and a twenty-seven-year-old man. They were wives and husbands, fathers and daughters, friends. Each had in their electronic dossier a photo from either a driver’s license or a passport.
The file on the Russian was blank except for an autopsy report. No name. No age listed, no passport number listed. No photo.
Weird. The Amsterdam police, among the best in the world, didn’t have a read on who the fifth victim was. That astonished me.
I looked through the rest of the files that Nic had stolen from the police databases. Found a video labeled toezicht and dated the day of the blast. Toezicht meant “surveillance.” I activated it.
The security camera feed had gone into a central security station; if the tape had been only at the store, it likely would not have survived the blast. I had five minutes of the feed that Nic had managed to filch off the police servers.
I watched the last moments of the lives of innocent people.
The young cashier at her station, giving change with a slightly bored frown. She kept scratching her ear. Customers coming and going, most not lingering long. I did not see Yasmin, which meant she must have dropped off the bomb before this section of the feed started. Dozens of people, leaving and arriving and leaving again. The store was busy-it was amazing that more people hadn’t been killed. I saw a man stop before the book display; next to it was a newspaper display. He reached for the paper and then the screen went white-hot blank.
I backed up the film and froze it. Five people in the store, caught in the camera’s unblinking eye. The four
