“Let’s go shopping,” Janson said, standing up.
Cooper was not taken aback by the sudden change of topic; his cannabis haze made the world as aleatory as a roll of the dice. “Cool,” he said. “Munchies?”
“Clothes shopping. Fancy stuff. Top of the line.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Well, there’s a place I never go, but I know it’s real expensive. On Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, just off the Dam, a few blocks away.”
“Excellent,” Janson said. “Why don’t you come along? I might need a translator.” More to the point, if anybody was keeping an eye out for him, they would not be expecting him to be traveling with a companion.
“Happy to,” Cooper said. “But everybody understands ‘MasterCard.’”
The building that housed the Magna Plaza was erected a hundred years ago as a post office, though, with its ornate stonework, vaulted ceilings, pilasters, stringcourses, and little round-arched galleries, it seemed overdressed for the purpose. Only after it was converted into a shopping mall did its excesses come to seem appropriate. Now forty stores lined its gallery walkway. At an upscale men’s clothing store, Janson tried on a suit, a size 53. It was Ungaro, and its price tag came to the equivalent of two thousand dollars. The regularity of Janson’s frame meant that off-the-rack clothing tended to look bespoke on him. This suit did.
A salesman with a stiffly gelled comb-over glided across the floor and attached himself like a remora to his American customer.
“If I may say, the fit is excellent,” the salesman said. He was smarmy and solicitous, as no doubt he always was around price tags with commas. “And the fabric is superb on you. It’s a beautiful suit. Very elegant. Dashing yet understated.” Like many Dutch, he spoke English with only a trace of an accent.
Janson turned to Cooper. His bloodshot, unfocused eyes suggested that his mental fog had not entirely dispersed. “He’s saying he thinks it looks good on you,” Cooper said.
“When they’re talking in English, Barry, you actually don’t need to translate,” Janson said. He turned to the salesman. “I assume you take cash. If you can do up the cuffs right now, you’ve got a sale. If not, not.”
“Well, we have a fitter here. But the tailoring is normally done elsewhere. I could have it sent by courier to you tomorrow … .”
“Sorry,” Janson said, and turned to leave.
“Wait,” the salesman said, seeing his commission on a substantial sale evaporate. “We can do it. Just let me have a talk with the fitter, and give us ten minutes. If I have to walk it across the street, I’ll see that it’s done. Because, how do you say it in the States, the customer is always right.”
“Words to gladden a Yank’s heart,” Janson said.
“Indeed, we know this about you Americans,” the salesman said carefully. “Everywhere we know this.”
Washington, D.C.
The large man with the maroon tie flagged the taxicab at the corner of Eighteenth and M Streets, near a bar-and-grill with a neon sign in the window advertising a carbonated beverage. The cabdriver wore a turban and favored public radio. His new passenger was a well-dressed man, a little wide around the waist, thick around the haunches. He could bench-press three hundred pounds, but he also liked his beer and his beef, and didn’t see why he needed to change his habits. He was good at what he did, had never had any complaints, and it wasn’t as if he moonlighted as a catalog model.
“Take me to Cleveland Park,” he said. “Four thirty Macomb Street.”
The Sikh driver repeated the address, jotted it down on his clipboard, and they set off. The address turned out to be an out-of-business supermarket, boarded up and bleak.
“Are you sure this is it?” the driver asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Actually, would you mind driving into the parking lot and around the back? I’ve got to pick up something.”
“No problem, sir.” As the cab eased around the low brick-and-glass building, the passenger’s heart started to beat harder. He had to do this without making a mess. Anybody could do this. But he was someone who could do it neatly.
“This is great,” he said, and sat forward. In a lightning-fast motion, he lowered the garrote over the driver’s head and pulled it tight. The Sikh emitted a faint rasp of escaped breath; his eyes widened, and his tongue lolled out. Unconsciousness would come quickly, the passenger knew, but he could not stop there. Another ten seconds of maximum pressure, and the anoxia would result in permanent respiratory cessation.
Now he returned the wooden-handled garrote to his breast pocket, and dragged the limp body of the driver out of the car. He popped the trunk, and arranged the body around the spare tire, the jumper cables, and a surprising number of blankets. It was important to get the man out of the driver’s seat as quickly as possible; he had learned this from unpleasant experience. The incontinence that sometimes followed a sudden death could cause a soiled seat. Not something he cared to deal with at a time like this.
His RIM BlackBerry communicator purred from deep in his breast pocket. It would be an update on the location of the subject.
He glanced at his watch. He had little time remaining.
His subject had less.
The voice in his earpiece gave him the precise coordinates of his subject, and as the passenger-turned-driver maneuvered the taxicab toward Dupont Circle he was given regular updates as to her movements. Timing was essential if he was to succeed.
The crowd in front of the department store was sparse; the subject was wearing a navy peacoat, a gold silk neckerchief knotted loosely around her throat, a shopping bag with the elegant logo of the upscale store in one hand.
It was the only thing he was conscious of, the figure of the black woman, growing larger and larger as he gunned the motor of the cab and then, abruptly, swung the steering wheel far to the right.
As the cab lurched onto the sidewalk, shrieks of disbelief filled the air, blending into a sound that was almost choral.
A curious intimacy, again, the woman’s startled face coming close and closer to his, like a lover leaning forward into a kiss. As the front bumper smashed into her body—he was traveling at close to fifty miles per hour—her upper body smashed onto the hood of the cab, and only when he braked did her body fly forward, vaulting through the air and finally landing on the pavement of the busy intersection, where a Dodge van, despite its squealing brakes, left tire tracks on her broken body.
The cab was recovered later that day, abandoned in an alley in Southwest Washington. It was an alley that, in the best of times, was littered with the brown and green shards of broken beer bottles, the clear curved glass of crack vials, the translucent plastic of hypodermics. The local youth treated the cab as just another found object. Before the car was recovered by the authorities, it had been stripped of its hubcaps, its license plate, and its radio. Only the body in its trunk was left undisturbed.
Chapter Nineteen
Aside from its location, across the street from the Liberty Foundation headquarters, there was little that would draw anyone’s eye to the small canal-bank house, or voorhuis. Inside, Ratko Pavic regarded its furnishings with a purely utilitarian eye. There was a faint but cloying kitchen odor—pea soup, was it? It must have been from the night before, but the smell was oddly permeating. He wrinkled his nose with distaste. Still, nothing more of that sort would be cooked here. He thought of the two bodies sprawled in the bathtub upstairs, the blood seeping steadily down the drain. He had no feelings about what he had done: the elderly couple, engaged to maintain the house while the owners were in Corfu, were in the way. They were faithful retainers, no doubt, but they had to be dispatched. And it was for a good cause: seated by the small square window in a darkened room, Ratko Pavic had an excellent view of the mansion opposite, and two parabolic microphones conveyed conversations from its front-facing antechambers with reasonable clarity.
All the same, it had been a tedious morning. Administrators and staff arrived between eight-thirty and n
ine-thirty. The scheduled visitors made their scheduled visits: a senior civil servant from the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs was followed by the deputy to the Dutch minister of education, culture, and science. A U.N. high commissioner for refugees was followed by a senior director of the U.N.’s Division for Sustainable Development, and then by another exalted bureaucrat, from its Economic Commission for Europe. Others in Ratko’s team had complementary perimeter views. One of them, Simic, was stationed on the very roof of the voorhuis, three stories directly overhead. None had glimpsed any sign of Paul Janson. It was not surprising. A daytime infiltration made little sense, although the agent was known to do the unexpected simply because it was unexpected.
It was tedious work that required complete concealment, but it was what suited him best since he became a marked man. The jagged, glossy cicatrix that ran from his right eye to his chin—a scar that glowed red when he allowed himself to become upset—made his visage too memorable for any job that demanded visibility. He had been marked: that was the thought that filled his mind, even as his assailant had lashed out at him with a knife meant for scaling fish. More punishing even than the searing pain from his ripped flesh was the realization that he would never be able to work undercover in the field any longer. As a shooter, of course, he was as invisible as his Vaime silenced sniper rifle, which was ready for deployment at any moment. As the hours passed, he began to wonder whether that moment would ever come.
To keep himself amused, Ratko regularly zoomed in on the petite receptionist, watched the redhead’s haunches move as she bent over, and he felt a warmth in his belly and groin. He had something for her, oh yes he did. He remembered the Bosnian women with whom he and his fellow soldiers disported a few years back—remembered faces convulsed with hatred, remembered how similar the expression was to sexual transport. It required only a little imagination. As he pounded himself into them, what thrilled him most was the recognition of how utterly powerless they were. It was an experience unlike any he had ever had with a woman. It didn’t matter whether his breath was fetid, or if his body stank, because there was simply nothing they could do. They knew they had to give it up, to surrender abjectly, or they would be made to watch their parents, their husbands, their children, shot through the head, before they were slaughtered themselves.
Fine-tuning his scope, he imagined the redhead roped and pinned to a mattress, her eyes rolled into her head, her pale softness yielding to the pistoning of his Serbian flesh.
In the event, Ratko did not need a scope to see the small motorcade of three black Mercedes-Benzes make its stately way down Stadhouderskade and onto Leidsestraat, stopping at the Liberty Foundation headquarters. A uniformed driver of the stretch limo walked around to the rear and held open the door. A dark-suited man with horn-rimmed glasses and a felt-brimmed hat came out and stood next to the car for a moment, admiring the majestic stretch of southwest Prinsengracht. Then the uniformed man—the minister’s personal factotum, it appeared—pressed the buzzer beside the deeply carved front door. Ten seconds later, the door was opened.
The uniformed man spoke to the woman at the door. “Madame, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic,” the uniformed man said. “Jan Kubelik.” Captured by the twin parabolics, the voices were scratchy but audible.
The foreign minister spoke a few words of Czech to his factotum and made a gesture of dismissal. The uniformed man turned and stepped away, back toward the limousine.
“You almost look as if you were not expecting me,” the man in the elegant navy suit told the receptionist.
Her eyes widened. “Of course not, Minister Kubelik. We are most pleased by your arrival.”
Ratko smiled, remembering the small panic that had swept through the Foundation’s support staff when they received the phone call, thirty minutes earlier, telling them that the recently appointed foreign minister would be keeping his appointment with the executive director. A series of flustered underlings compared notes, for the appointment had gone unrecorded. Nobody wanted to admit to having made a scheduling error, and yet someone must have done so. Through his Schmidt & Bender scope, Ratko had seen the little redheaded woman’s consternation. Just two weeks ago, you double-scheduled the Swedish minister of foreign affairs and the man from the U.N. disarmament program, the redhead said, berating a particularly thickheaded junior secretary upstairs. The junior secretary protested that it wasn’t her fault, but did so with an air of hesitation that was tantamount to a confession. Another secretary, coming to the other’s defense, maintained that the error was probably on the side of the Czech bureaucrats. Yet it would be simply impossible, a hopeless breach of protocol, to tell them so.
Now Ratko watched the red-haired receptionist lead the minister inside to a fancy antechamber, where vision and sound alike grew indistinct. The Serb turned up the electronic light amplification of his scope and switched the microphone to a special signal-enhancement mode so that the input from the parabolics would be further digitally improved—sharpened, with meaningless noise filtered out.
“Our executive director will be with you shortly,” he heard the redhead say, as the aural signal was restored.
“You’re very kind,” the Czech diplomat said airily, removing his hat. “And this is a beautiful estate. Do you mind terribly if I take a look around?”
“Sir, we would be honored,” she replied as if by rote.
Silly bureaucrat—searching for decor tips to give to his wife. He would return to the drab presidential palace in Prague and tell his friends about the deluxe details of Peter Novak’s Amsterdam lair.
Ratko had done Warsaw Pact exercises with Czech soldiers back when he was in the Yugoslav army, long before the six republics of Yugoslavia struck out on their own, and at each other. The Czechs, he always thought, had a very high opinion of themselves. He did not share it.
A man walking very slowly in front of the house caught his attention: would Janson be so bold? The man, seemingly a tourist, stood against the low railing beside the canal. Slowly, he took out a map.
Ratko directed his scope toward him; the angle was not ideal, but as he took in the tourist’s slight build and short hair, he saw how mistaken he had been. No matter how cleverly Janson disguised himself, he could never pass for a twenty-something woman.
Once more, Ratko felt a warmth stirring in his belly.
Janson’s eyes swept over the beautifully appointed antechamber. Paintings from the Dutch renaissance were positioned in the center of squares formed by gilt moldings, with obsessive concern for symmetry. The fireplace mantel was of intricately carved marble, veined with blue. It all seemed perfectly in character for a Dutch mansion: far from the public’s prying eyes, the vaunted ideal of Nordic moderation was banished.
So far, so good, he thought to himself. Cooper had cleaned up remarkably well, and once attired in that silly uniform, he conducted himself in a manner that did not quite slide into parody. His movements were stiff and official; his expressions imbued with a servile pomposity, every inch the dedicated assistant of a very important official. Janson himself was relying upon the assumption that nobody would have any idea what the Czech foreign minister looked like. The man had been in the job for a mere two weeks, after all. And the country was not high on the Foundation’s list of trouble spots.
No disguise was the best disguise: A bit of grease in his hair, a pair of spectacles in a style fashionable in Eastern Europe, the sort of suiting common to diplomats all over the Continent … and a manner that was by turns amiable and imperious. The fact that Janson’s mother was Czech was helpful, of course, though chiefly in imbuing his English with a persuasive Czech accent. A Czech diplomat would be expected to speak English in a country like Holland.
Janson peered at the red-haired receptionist over his round horn-rimmed glasses. “And Peter Novak? He is here as well?”
The petite woman smiled dreamily. “Oh no, sir. He spends most of his time on the road, flying from place to place. Sometimes we don’t
see him for many weeks at a time.”
When Janson had arrived, he did not know whether a pall of grief would be hanging over the Foundation. But what Agger had told him remained true: they clearly had no idea that anything had befallen their revered founder. “Well!” said Janson. “He’s got the whole world in his hands, yes?”
“You could say that, sir. But his wife is in today. Susanna Novak. She helps run the NGO development program.”
Janson nodded. Novak was insistent about keeping his family from the public gaze, evidently afraid of kidnapping. His own public stature was necessary for the success of his work; he reluctantly acceded to media coverage for that purpose. But he was not a Hollywood star, and his family was not fair game: that had been the message for years, and by and large the press agreed to abide by those rules. The fact that his primary residence was in Amsterdam made it easier: the burgerlich sensibilities of that city served to shield the great man’s privacy.
Hidden in plain view.
“And what’s over here?” He pointed toward another room, to the left of the main hallways.
“Peter Novak’s office,” she said. “Where you would surely be meeting Mr. Novak if he were in town—he’d insist on it.” She opened the door and pointed to a canvas on the wall opposite. “That painting is by Van Dyck. Remarkable, don’t you think?” The portrait was of a seventeenth-century nobleman, rendered in a palette of muted browns and blues, yet curiously vivid all the same.
Janson turned on the overhead lights and strode toward the canvas. He peered closely. “Extraordinary,” he said. “He’s one of my very favorite artists, you know. Of course, the artistic heritage of the Czech Republic is illustrious indeed. But, between us, we have nothing like this in Praha.”
He reached into his pocket and, fingering the side buttons of his Ericsson cell phone, he dialed one of the numbers he had preprogrammed into it. This number went to the receptionist’s direct line.