“You’re not cops!” the barista shouted. Too much caffeinated courage, Mila thought.
Howell glanced at Mila as he walked past; she knew she should drop her stare. Everyone else, cowed by the guns, had. She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She didn’t glare. She just looked at him.
He met her stare for a moment; if she had known they’d seen her on a security tape feed from the port, dressed in leather and wearing giant sunglasses, she would have killed them all where they stood. But Howell, intent on his prize, didn’t linger on her face. He followed the man and the Chinese boy outside without a backward glance.
The other man-thick-necked, with dark hair-lowered his gun and said in perfect Dutch, “Our apologies. You may return to your work. That man has been conducting serious cybercrime attacks using the cafe’s server. We apologize for frightening you all, but we didn’t want him erasing his data before we could stop him.”
The barista started to argue again, saying, “We didn’t know, you can’t just come in here like that waving guns, you could have shot us.”
The thick-necked man kept a broad smile in place. “Our apologies again.” He turned and hurried out as the cafe broke into rapid-fire talk, the barista yelling at the man’s back, reaching for the phone, vowing to call the police.
Mila stepped out after the muscle. He broke into a full run, hurrying after Howell and the blond. He caught up. Howell carried the boy’s laptop.
Mila looked across the canal toward the cafe where Sam sat with Nic.
Gone. Both men gone. Choice: follow the Company thugs or try to find Sam. The Chinese boy might be a link back to the scarred man’s group, and she wanted to see what the Company people did. She followed Howell and the others, keeping back a discreet distance.
She dug her earpiece from her purse, slipped it back into place and hurried toward her car.
44
Nic put me in the back of a van. He held up a blindfold.
“You asked me to trust you,” I said. “That works both ways.”
“It does. But I’m not going to let you see where we’re going. You don’t need to know. Everything within our group is need-to-know. You get to that point, you’ll be told.”
It wasn’t a bad thing for him to believe he had full control of the situation, so I allowed him to put the blindfold on me.
He said, “I’m going to search you,” and he did, thoroughly. From hairline to throat to belly and below, down to my heels. He was thorough, but he missed the transmitter under my collar. I’d made the choice to keep it alive and broadcasting despite knowing that if he found it he would kill me immediately.
I didn’t fight the search; I told him once it tickled and he ignored me. I heard him go back up to the front of the van, crank the engine, and, with a sway, we pulled back out into traffic.
“Where’re we going? Am I going to see Piet?”
“Yes.”
I wanted to ask, and his bosses? The scarred man and Yasmin might be there. The scarred man would recognize me; I had to assume if he’d taken Lucy he knew my face. I didn’t want to end up tied to a chair like the Turk. But I had to take the risk.
The van drove for a long while; I figured given the number of short, sharp turns that we weren’t heading out of Amsterdam, but rather that Nic was trying to shake off any possible tail. Or confuse me. I wondered if Mila was sticking close to me. I could only hope she had dodged Howell and August. Otherwise I was alone. How on earth had he found us? It had to be the hit on my Peter Samson ID from Nic’s computer guy. He must have been working in the Internet cafe, perhaps masking his work behind its server. But Howell and August were in Amsterdam, hunting me no doubt, and they’d cornered Nic’s hacker. Which meant Howell might be hot on the trail of Nic’s people, and in that case he’d ruin my chance to find my family.
There is a time on every job where you say, Screw caution. I’m not foolhardy. I’m not stupid. But sometimes you have to be the battering ram. Howell was getting way too close. So my time to find the scarred man was running short.
“I want to tell you how to handle this,” Nic said. “Piet will be there, and so will another man. You don’t need to know his name.”
I realized I was holding my breath. “Okay.” Let the other man please be the scarred man. Please.
“You will tell them exactly how to set up an alternate route.”
“And in return, I get money and work?”
“Yes. But I want you to make Piet look bad. You tell Piet’s boss that you know of Piet through smuggling in Moldova-that you’ve worked the same routes. That Piet sold girls that he moved, along the way, and pocketed the money before delivery. He cheated his clients.”
My guts twisted. “Piet is a human trafficker.”
“Piet is mostly a mover of commodities.” I could practically hear the shrug in Nic’s voice. “Women from Moldova, shipped to Britain and Germany and Israel for the whorehouses. Babies sold to adoptive parents in Italy, brought in from Macedonia and Albania. Mass-produced counterfeit goods, brought in from China to western Europe. It doesn’t much matter. He moves what needs moving.”
A sick tickle feathered the back of my throat as the van stopped. I could smell a tang of fuel, of exhaust, and in the distance I could hear the purr of freeway traffic.
“We’re here, Sam. Showtime,” Nic said. “Do good and I’ll do good by you.”
45
The fourth blow to the face produced their desired result. It was Howell’s experience that hired computer hackers were easily broken. Their loyalty was earned only with money and access to technology. The Chinese boy- who, according to his ID, was a graduate student in computer science at the Delft University of Technology-made it through two black eyes, a torn lip and a badly cuffed ear before he screamed out an address. It was a warehouse off the A10 highway, which ringed Amsterdam. Van Vleck stepped back from beating the hacker, and August checked the address with his smartphone.
“And who will we find there?” Howell asked.
“Nic. Nic.”
“Who’s Nic?”
“Guy who hired me.” The boy broke into a babble of Mandarin, calling Howell a worthless stump of a penis, and Howell slapped him and told him in Mandarin that his mother was a disgusting whore and to not talk to him that way. The student’s mouth twisted in shock and pain.
“And Nic hired you why?”
“We have a back door into a passport-monitoring exchange… used by North American and European governments.”
“And you were checking Peter Samson’s passport and records.”
“Yes. To see if he was for real.”
“Who does Nic work for?”
“He does work for hire.”
“For Samson?”
“No, Nic wanted to be sure Samson was who he said he was. He was hiring Samson.”
“For what kind of job?” Howell’s voice sharpened. He leaned close to the battered face and he could smell the milk and stale coffee on the student’s breath, under the coppery blood from his ear and his nose.
The Chinese student started to cry. “I don’t know any more. I swear. I was just supposed to verify his story as he told it to Nic. That he was a Canadian named Samson.”
