The Amsterdam Chronicles: Def-Con City Trilogy Part 1

  At six o'clock on Monday morning Wall's alarm clock went off. He opened his eyes and realized he had left the TV on. The anchor mentioned something about Amsterdam, but it was the end of the bulletin and had no idea what it was about. He got out of bed - did some quick stretches, then took a shower. At seven he was down in the breakfast room on the ground floor eyeing up everything the Hotel had on offer to help him get through his full official day at work.

  He had been in the hotel for nearly a week and this was only the second time he had breakfast there. Most mornings he was either too late or decided to get something in the city center. He made his choice - scrambled eggs, two scones, a slice of brown bread, jam, cheese, and black coffee. He picked a quiet table in the corner where he had a view of all the other guests in the breakfast room. A force of habit. Always park yourself where you have an eye on who is coming in the door, and where you can see everyone in the room.

  In the opposite corner was a German family. The father in his middle thirties, his wife, son and a daughter in their early teens. Now at the breakfast buffet, the mother instructed the children what to take. They did not look too pleased.

  Next to them a Dutch family with two girls roughly the same age helped themselves to everything they could see, including white bread, Nutella chocolate paste spread, chocolate flakes and chocolate milk. The German mother frowned at her kids as they tried to copy them. Seated at another table was a middle-aged French couple and spread around the room a few businessmen. At this time in the morning he did not expect so many people. He looked at his watch, it was six thirty-five A.M. Wall got up from his table and went to the reception across the corridor from the dining room.

  "Could you call me a cab?" He asked the young male receptionist.

  "Of course," he replied, and promptly walked out the front entrance and beckoned the taxi parked a little further up in the street. Wall checked his pockets. Wallet, mobile, keys, but no gun. He still felt naked without it and hoped he would get it back soon. The chief had said a Walther P5, but he wanted his own gun, his friend, his peacekeeper. The one thing that kept him alive in New York after three scumbags try to shorten his expected lifespan of seventy plus.

  The taxi pulled up to the front of the hotel, another Mercedes, only this time it was black.

  "Your taxi is here, sir," the receptionist said.

  "I'm onto it," he replied, as he headed out the main door. "I'll see you guys later."

  "Have a nice day Sir."

  "I'm sure I will," he shouted back.

  In the back of the taxi, he handed the driver at the address. His first day at work in a new job, a new country. He felt a kind of excited nervousness - not knowing what to expect - although judging by what he had seen so far it was going to be a pushover.

 

  Harvey Wall arrived at the station at seven o'clock and was greeted by a very different desk officer than last week. Another female, but the moment he stepped through the door it was evident she had an entirely different demeanor from the blonde he met there. Instead of a smiling, warm face that was also easy on the eye, this desk officer looked like a prison guard, and one who had at least hundred and fifty years of experience under her belt.

  "I'm here to report to Chief Harry Ribb," Wall said. She looked at him with cold deep gray eyes that resembled stones of marble.

  "Name?" She asked in a strong Dutch accent.

  "I'm Detective Harvey Wall," he announced.

  "Humph," was the reply. Wall thought he heard something that resembled a grunt, but then again it could have been something in Dutch he was not familiar with. She made a call and was told to sit. The seats were cold, gray, and so uncomfortable he hoped it would not take too long. There was a couple of wanted posters pinned to the walls, but all in Dutch.

  The only thing he recognized was the amount of money offered for what he believed was a reward. Five hundred euros and on another poster, one thousand euros. Not much, he thought. FBI and local police usually offered a lot more. But then he remembered that this was a small country with a population that was only twice the size of New York City, roughly sixteen million people. He heard the desk officer mentioning his name on the phone. Within a couple of seconds, she hung up and stared blankly at him.

  "Wait," she commanded.

  After ten minutes of sitting on the uncomfortable chair, he suddenly felt a longing for his old precinct back in New York. He looked around the waiting area for the umpteenth time but did not spot anything new this time around. He took out his iPhone and checked updates for apps, there were none. He then searched anything interesting that could be useful in Amsterdam.

  "No photographing in here. Not allowed," she harshly announced.

  "I wasn't planning to." He replied, then turned his attention back to the apps.

  There were more than five hundred apps relating to Amsterdam. Mostly guides and maps. There was even one called Anne's Amsterdam, about exploring places and events connected to Anne Frank. A walking guide of Amsterdam, some soccer apps related to the local club Ajax. He eventually downloaded a Wi-Fi map showing free hotspots in the city, and a world Explorer app. It was at least fifteen minutes before the door opened and another female officer arrived to collect him.

  "Detective Wall?" The female officer said as she peered around the door.

  "Finally," Wall whispered under his breath.

  The seemingly relaxed detectives' squad room he walked into last week was completely transformed into a hectic and seemingly panic ridden situation room. Five large whiteboards were lined up next to one another at one end of the room. One had a photo of a woman and the other three were men, with their names printed above. The last board had a large map of the city pinned to it.

  There were at least thirty men and women in the room, rushing around, making phone calls, in discussion or staring at computers. What seemed to be a sea of tranquility last week had turned into a rush of chaos and madness. Harvey Wall was guided into Ribb's office who was behind his desk and on the telephone. His guide quickly left the room, Wall remained standing. When Ribb finished his call, he looked up at Wall with exhausted eyes.

  "Mr. Wall, I would love to explain everything to you about what's happening at the moment, but I don't have the time. I've seen your file, I know what you can do, so I am posting you to work with detective Bakker."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Mr. Bakker has been working most of the weekend non-stop so he is now catching up on some much-needed sleep. He should be here in about an hour or two. In the meantime, I'll get one of my other officers to brief you, and Mr. Bakker will fill you in on the finer details later."

  "Yes, sir."

  Ribb signaled to an older detective sitting behind a desk on the other side of Ribb's glass partition. He immediately got up and entered Ribb's office.

  "This is Hendrik Pastoor, he will brief you."

  "Thank you, sir," Wall replied, and followed Hendrik Pastoor to the whiteboards. Hendrik was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. He was slightly smaller than Wall, but taller than most of the men at the station, and had a girth that was much too large for the shirt he was wearing. He was certain the buttons were going to pop before the end of the day. Probably about thirty years ago would have had an incredible build, like a weightlifter, but all that muscle had now turned to blubber. Harvey recognized the darkened pores under his eyes; nicotine addiction. The heavy smell of tobacco from a distance of at least two meters was also unmistakable. Hendrik pointed to the whiteboards with the photos.

  "We have four deaths in four streets but actually it is one street." Hendrik told Wall, in a very strong Dutch accent.

  "What? I don't get it." Wall replied. "Four streets one street? What does that mean?"

  Hendrik pointed to the map of Amsterdam on the board. Identical to the one in chief Ribb's office it also had a black line running across it. Only now it was twice as long as last week. There were red dots with numbers, one, two, three, and four, which corresponded to the numbe
rs on the four boards. Hendrik showed Wall a copy of the Telegraaf newspaper. There was a picture of the same section of the map of Amsterdam on the front page with the caption "4 mysterieuze doden in A'dam'. He didn't need to speak Dutch to understand that.

  "Can you translate it?" Hendrik asked.

  "Four mysterious deaths in Amsterdam?"

  "Very good, your Dutch is coming along great."

  Hendrik pointed to the different markers on the map. "This is the Bilderdijkstraat," he said, pointing to the far right, "the same street further changes to the Eerste Constantijn Huygensstraat."

  Wall knew he would never ever be able to pronounce that.

  "Then you have the van Baerlestraat which carries on up to here to the Roelof Hartplein," he said, pointing to the far left. "All one street, four different names."

  "When did all this happen," Wall asked.

  "Last week, but first every person were thinking natural causes. Now they don't know."

  "You mean everyone was thinking natural causes," Wall said, correcting him.

  "I know. That is what I said."

  "Okay," Harvey nodded. "What can I do?"

  "How is your Dutch?" Hendrik asked.

  "Shit." Wall replied.

  "That's a great Dutch word," Hendrik said humorously. "Don't forget it. You will be using it a lot here in Amsterdam."

  Harvey looked at him, not knowing whether to laugh or write this guy off as a total blockhead. Hendrik went over to an empty desk across from where Bakker sat and collapsed into the small swivel chair. Wall was sure it was going to explode in all directions, it didn't. Hendrik beckoned Wall to take the seat next to him.

  "This is now your desk and computer from now on. "

  "Okay."

  He pushed a paper with two words printed on it towards Wall. "This is your username and password. When you login next time you can change them to anything you want."

  "I got it."

  Hendrik pointed to a number on the top left-hand corner of the screen. "This is a case file number. For now you will only have access to this file. If you are a good little boy then maybe the chief will let you play around with the rest of the files."

  "I understand. Thanks." Wall mumbled.

  Hendrik opened the file. "As you see, everything is in Dutch but after hearing shit I know it will not take long before you have mastered the Dutch language."

  Is this guy for real? Wall thought.

  "But to help you we have built into the system a translator that will immediately translate the file to another language. You speak German?"

  "No."

  "French?"

  "No."

  "Spanish?"

  "No, I only speak English."

  "Ha, the American education system."

  "Yeah, thanks."

  "Well, how many languages do you speak?" Wall asked.

  "English, German, French, a little Russian, and Spanish, although it is better than my Russian."

  "Of course you can speak those languages," Wall said. "Most of those countries are just around the corner from Amsterdam, right?"

  "True," Hendrik agreed, nodding. "That is true. But Mexico is just down the road from you. Montr?al, where they speak French, is nearly as far as Paris is from Amsterdam. Just up the road, correct?"

  "Okay, right, thanks for the geography lesson." Wall pointed to the four boards. "So these are the murders?"

  "No. They are not yet murders, but, you know, the papers are making a circus of it."

  This guy is a total nutcase, Harvey thought. How the hell do they manage with people like this. Bakker was another oddball, but this guy badly needed to be put out to pasture. It probably will not take that long before lung cancer, a heart attack, or crashing through one of those swivel chairs will finish him off.

  "What do I do?" Wall asked.

  Hendrik handed Wall a paper file. "These are interviews from people connected to the people who died. Neighbors, friends, family, people like that. They are all in Dutch but the same files are in the computer and you could translate them with a little click. Okay?"

  "Great, thanks," Wall said, with a deep sigh.

  As Hendrik got up to leave, he turned to Wall. "I nearly forgot. The biggest help you will have at the moment to work through this is out the door, to the left and at the end of the corridor."

  "What the hell is there?"

  "The coffee machine and it's free." Hendrik said, then turned, and went back to his desk.

  The coffee machine was little different to the one back in the New York precinct, except this also had tea and soup. Wall opted for a cappuccino, which was surprisingly good.

  As he slowly began to settle down to work, he noticed Ribb on the phone and indicating to a number of officers in the room, including Hendrik Pastoor, to come into his office. Something was going on, but impossible to understand exactly what. When Ribb put down the phone, he started to address the men in the office in Dutch. Less than a minute later they hurried out of the chiefs cramped office to their desks, grabbed what they needed, then rushed out of the squad room double time. Of all the detectives originally in the room, only two were left. Ribb remained at his desk typing into his computer for another couple of minutes, then got up to leave. As he grabbed his leather jacket on the back of his chair, Bakker arrived, looking tired and haggard.

  "I think some serious shit is going down." Wall told Bakker, as he was about to remove his scruffy coat.

  "Do you know what it is?"

  "Sorry, I wasn't invited to the briefing."

  As Ribb came out of his office, he pointed to Bakker and Wall, "with me," he said, as he rushed quickly past them and out the door.

  "Take your own car," Ribb shouted from the corridor, "and just follow me. I've no time to explain."

  Outside in the enclosed car park on the right-hand side of the building Ribb got into an unmarked Volkswagen Golf and quickly sped away towards the exit barrier, which slowly began to open.

  "My car is this way," Bakker shouted, as he ran towards a battered Citroen 2CV sitting in a corner parking slot. Wall looked on incredulously as Bakker jumped into the wreck of a car.

  "You've got to be kidding," Wall cried.

  "Come on, we have to hurry," Bakker yelled, as the engine came to life and he put it in reverse.

  "What the fuck is this for a police car," Wall shouted back at Bakker as he jumped in the car and they sped after Ribb, who was now out of the car park and heading over the bridge.

  "This isn't a regular police car I hope?"

  "No, of course not. This is mine."

  They raced after Ribb's Volkswagen which had now crossed the bridge and turned left onto the busy Nassaukade. Ribb turned on his siren and planted a blue magnetic police strobe light on the top of the car. Bakker drove out into the middle of the road and sped past other vehicles, doing his best to keep up with Ribb, and narrowly missing oncoming traffic.

  As they came up to the corner of the Overtoom Wall saw three police cars, an ambulance, and a forensics van parked outside an apartment near the corner on the left-hand side.

  A large section of the footpath and street in front of the building was being cordoned off with tape by uniformed police. Two motorcycle cops were off their bikes and directing traffic to drive over the tram rails, usually only reserved for taxis and trams. A forensics team were putting on white protective overalls and shoe coverings, then began carrying small cases of equipment into the apartment. As Wall got out of the Citroen he spotted another couple of police cars, an ambulance, and traffic cops about a hundred and fifty meters further up the street, just before the next set of traffic lights. It looked like a separate incident.

  Bakker, Wall, and Ribb changed into white overalls, then put on white plastic coverings over their shoes. When the latex gloves were on they followed Ribb up the stairs to the top floor apartment that looked recently renovated.

  Inside, Wall recognized the IKEA furniture throughout the living room. A white leather sofa and two
matching armchairs dominated the center of the room. Modern prints in white wooden frames hung on the walls with single large tropical plants tastefully positioned in each corner. The floor was covered in large black and white Marmoleum squares making it look like a giant chessboard. Wall followed Bakker and Ribb into the equally modern and tidy bedroom.

  Next to the Apple laptop on the bedside table was a scene he had never come across before in his life. Wall stared in disbelief at two bodies lying on the bed. On the left, a young male in his early twenties lay with part of his upper jaw bone, teeth and lower jawbone melted onto the pillow. The girl next to him looked normal until a forensics assistant pulled back a sheet to reveal her stomach. Half of her waist had melted onto the bed.

  "Ever see anything like this back in the States, Mr. Wall?" Ribb asked.

  Flashes of many of the crime scenes he had witnessed over the years raced through his mind. Stabbings, gunshot wounds to the belly and face, mutilation of bodies, even bits of body parts spread all around apartments, the worst was a head in a fruit bowl and partially covered with fruit. But never anything like this.

  Wall shook his head slowly. "No sir," he said and stared in disbelief at the gruesome sight.

  "Okay, let's go." Ribb commanded, and went quickly out of the apartment and back down the stairs. Back on the street, Ribb headed for the next crime scene, roughly one hundred and fifty meters away.

  "There are three different crime scenes along this stretch." Ribb told them, as they walked up the street dressed in their white overalls and white plastic cover shoes. "There could be more so we are going to have to knock on all the doors."

  Cars and trams slowed to stare at the unusual sight as they headed up the Overtoom towards the traffic lights. At the second crime scene they put on fresh shoe coverings, and entered the apartment. The layout was roughly the same as the last apartment, but the interior was entirely different. Unlike the last apartment which was bright and modern, this was old and gray and probably had not seen any paint or fresh wallpaper for more than thirty years.

  From the living room, they could hear the sound of an old man weeping. Ribb, Bakker, and Wall went in to the room and saw a man in his seventies sitting in an armchair, dressed in faded blue striped pajamas. His hands were clasped around his head as he rocked back and forth.

  "I was meant to go first," he cried. "She was the strong one. Too much drink she kept telling me. And now look at her."

  Next to him stood a female medical assistant. "What happened to her," the old man shouted. "What in God's name has happened?"

  "Let's go outside," the medical assistant said. "Get some fresh air."

  Ribb, Wall and Bakker turned and headed for the bedroom which was like the rest of the apartment, old and dull. Aged flowery wallpaper was peeling in one corner, where fungus had taken root. A large plant had been placed in front of it as if to cover up the eyesore. The old woman lay on the bed looking as if she was just resting. When Ribb entered the room, a forensics officer pulled back the cover to reveal part of her body. It looked similar to the girl in the last apartment. The woman's middle, from just below her chest to her pelvis had melted into the bed sheets.

  Bakker muttered something guttural in Dutch Wall could not understand, but he reckoned it was the same thing he said in his mind at the sight of the body. Ribb gave instructions in Dutch to other detectives in the room, then left the apartment.

  Back outside, Ribb had arranged a driver in a marked police car to drive them to the next crime scene. He got into the passenger side while Bakker and Wall took a back seat.

  "All we know is that all the deaths occurred sometime last night," Ribb told them in the car. "We know that because the first couple went to a concert, and the second couple were on the phone to their daughter. I hope nothing has been tampered with. Maybe now we might find some evidence this time."

  Wall looked puzzled. "Were other crime scenes tampered with?"

  "They looked at first like natural deaths," Bakker said. "Heart ailments, that sort of thing. So family and friends cleaned up their apartments when they died making it difficult to find evidence if there was any at all."

  "It seems to me these deaths have something in common," Wall said.

  "What's that?" Ribb replied.

  "None of them lived on the ground floor, whoever did this came in from the roof."

  "That sounds logical, it's something we investigated in the other deaths but failed to find anything."

  "But," Wall continued, "most rooftops remain untouched for years, so it's easy to leave footprints."

  "We checked that. There were no footprints."

  "Okay, so it is also easy to hear somebody walking over a roof above you. What if the intruder just walked along the gable walls. Sure he has a bigger chance of getting spotted but if he was wearing dark clothes? These things happen at night. He could easily walk along the edge of the front or the back of the building without being seen by anyone."

  "Welcome to Amsterdam Mr. Wall," Ribb said.

  "Thank you sir. I'm very happy to be here. I thought I'd seen everything there is to see in murders and general crime in New York, but your city has definitely topped that."

  "One more thing Mr. Wall."

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Please don't call me sir. My name is Harry or in the presence of my other officers chief Ribb."

  "Yes sir, sorry, Harry, chief." Wall blurted out. "You can just call me Harvey."

  "Will do," Ribb said.

  The apartment of the third victim, was again on the top floor. When they entered the living room, they saw a male sitting in his chair watching television with his back to them. His fingers were still in the coffee cup handle resting on the armchair. Standing behind, everything looked normal but when Wall walked around to the front he was stunned to see part of his body had melted into the seat of the armchair. The only reason he was still sitting upright was because he was stuck. In his late fifties, grossly overweight, and slightly larger than the armchair, it was the tight fit held him up right.

  "You don't see something like that every day, that's for sure." Wall remarked.

  "Not true," Bakker said in a near whisper. "We found a body of a man in the bathtub last week that resembles something like this. The only part of him that did not look like a cartoon figure was his hair."

  "No shit," Wall replied. "And no evidence?"

  "The cleaning lady who found the body had wiped everything clean."

  "Nasty," Wall remarked, as he turned and went to look at the rest of the apartment.

  In the kitchen, forensics were dusting down surfaces and taking samples of coffee left in the coffee pot.

  "There is no sign of forced entry," a young female officer in uniform told chief Ribb.

  "Okay," Ribb said, then turned to the photographer. "Could you get some shots on the roof? Also, check the front and back gables to see if anybody has walked them."

  "I'll get onto it right away." The photographer finished taking the photographs, packed up his equipment, and headed for the bedroom at the back of the apartment. Ribb and Bakker left the apartment while Wall went back to look at the man in the armchair.

  He leaned in close to get a better look at the victim. A liquid slowly oozed from the body, and ran slowly down the leather seat. Apparently the process had not finished working. Wall called over one of the forensics team.

  "This stuff is still active. Maybe you could take a sample and get it down to your lab right away."

  "Yes Sir," the forensics guy replied. It suddenly hit Wall that Sir was said a lot back in the states, but here in a foreign country it seemed to be out of place. Back home it was either used in authority or respect from a younger to an older man. Wall wondered if there was a Dutch equivalent that worked the same way.

  The forensics expert took a small container out of his brushed aluminum case and began to collect liquid oozing from the body.

  Suddenly there were shouts from outside the apartment. Wall went to th
e window and looked down to see Ribb being mobbed by a group of reporters, photographers and TV crews as he left the building. Wall smiled. At least that was a scene he could relate to.

  His captain back in New York loved the limelight, in fact he tried to be in the picture at every major crime scene as often as possible. But he saw Ribb do his best to avoid the hordes of journalists and ignore questions they were shouting at him. At that moment, the sound of a woman screaming somewhere on the street caught everybody's attention.

  Roughly one hundred and fifty meters further up the Overtoom a middle-aged woman came screaming out of an apartment.

  The attention of the media crews suddenly left Ribb and all cameras turned towards the woman. In a crazed panic state she ran out onto the road and narrowly missed running under a bus. One of the traffic cops mounted his motorbike and was about to race off when Ribb waved him down and jumped on the back. For some reason Wall could not see his boss pulling off that one.

  The media people quickly picked up as much equipment as they could carry and dashed after Ribb, who had now reached the woman. Wall turned and rushed down the stairs, out the door and onto the street.

  When he reached the scene, Ribb had already gone into the building.

  The hysterical woman outside was comforted by the traffic cop, who was doing his best to calm her down. She was still screaming and shouting in Dutch. Wall ran into the building. The entrance led immediately to a stairs which went all the way up to the top apartment.

  There he found Ribb standing over a dead cat on the floor next to the kitchen. Wall suddenly thought it was a joke. The cat looked as if it had been flattened by a steamroller. Its fur, legs and head all looked normal, except flat. A dark gray brown liquid had drained out of its mouth and anus and spread over the floor. The smell was horrific.

  "Take a look around Mr. Wall. See if you can find something of interest. But don't touch anything."

  "Yes chief," Wall said, still not feeling comfortable enough to call him by his first name.

  "I'll check out the kitchen," Ribb replied.

  In the living room there was nothing apparent, only lots of greenery covering the windows and everywhere else. Potted plants covered every available flat surface of the room. The Dutch do like their plants, Wall thought.

  The bedroom had a single bed, the woman obviously lived alone. A large cross hung above the bed, Greek and Russian holy icons covered all the walls. A religious nut, Wall thought, and he didn't like cats either. When he went into the kitchen, Ribb was gone.

  Like the other kitchens he had seen in the other apartments, this one was also small and compact. He checked the windows. There was a small square open window at the top. It would have been easy to access the latch on the larger window below it, he thought. Wall looked down at the windowsill on the outside.

  There was a mark that looked like the print of a large bird at one end, three toes at the front and one at the rear, and the opposite end of the windowsill a couple of sharp indentations. He removed his iPhone from the inside of his jacket pocket and took a couple of photos. As he zoomed in on the other end, he realized it looked more like scratching from a sharp metal object; possibly a knife. But there were no shoe prints or any other type of identifiable mark.

  He could hear chief Ribb in the other side of the apartment. "Chief," Wall called out. "In here."

  "There are some marks on the very edge of the windowsill as if whoever it was did not want to leave any prints. I think they reached in through the small window at the top and opened the larger window below it to get in."

  "Very good Mr. Wall. That's what I suspected. Apparently the woman gave the cat coffee milk. I don't think you have that in the states, but it's very popular here, only the woman who lives here drinks her coffee black." Wall gave him a puzzled look.

  "There are used coffee cups in the sink, not yet washed, and I think you'll see that the remains of coffee left in them is black," Ribb said. "No milk."

  "Yeah right, I would have worked that one out."

  "And I think you'll find there is a substance in the milk that was actually meant for her."

  Wall nodded in agreement. "But don't cats get diarrhea when you give them milk? I thought they were lactose intolerant," he said, looking down at the liquid mess that had come out of the cat.

  "Yes, it does seem like it. Are you a cat lover Mr. Wall?"

  "Not really, no."

  "Neither am I. But I'll get forensics up here to check out this apartment anyway."

  Wall looked at Ribb in the eye. Was that a joke? But Ribb stared back with a deadpan face.

  In the late afternoon, the amount of detectives in the squad room had doubled to about fifty. There were four extra whiteboards lined up next to the others. Photographs taken at the new crime scene were stuck on each, along with relevant information such as name and age. It was all very familiar to Wall.

  The Monday morning newspapers had long arrived and were now running the news of the deaths from last week and Friday night.

  "I don't get it." Wall said to Bakker who was now sitting across from him at his computer. "Deaths from last week and they are only publishing them now?"

  "They were on the radio and TV, but discovered too late to be included in the Saturday editions, and unlike many other countries there are no Sunday papers in the Netherlands," Bakker told him.

  The street outside the police station was wide. Two tram lines ran each way with a single lane for cars on the nearside, heading towards the Leidseplein. Unfortunately on the far side of the Marnixstraat all the major national and international broadcasting companies had set up broadcast and satellite trucks to follow the story.

  Amongst the satellite vans, Wall could see a truck with a CNN logo, and a female reporter standing next to it, broadcasting her report in front of a camera. Wall went over to a television in the corner of the room, picked up the remote and handed it to Bakker.

  "Could you switch that to CNN right now?"

  "Sure," Bakker replied, and quickly found the station. The broadcast was live. The red info banner along the bottom of the picture gave her name. Kelly Westen was dark blonde, who seemed to fit in well with the Dutch stereotypes, Wall thought, and dressed in a light green body hugging dress. Harvey took the remote and turned up the sound so everyone in the room could hear.

  "So far there are no clues as to how these people died." Kelly Westen said.

  The buzz in the room quickly went quiet as everyone turned to listen. She had a typical North Midwestern accent, Wall thought. Not from Chicago, otherwise she would probably had a more nasal sound. Wall reckoned she was of Dutch descent, probably West Michigan where many Dutch had settled in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

  "It began with one bizarre incident last week," she reported.

  The newspaper drawing of Raemon Dort lying in his bathtub flashed up on the screen. "Mr. Raemon Dort, died in the southern district of Amsterdam, and then there were four suspect deaths along what is basically one street."

  A map of Amsterdam was shown marking out the deaths. "Now it seems there are a number of new deaths along another street crossing the first. From the local reports they appear to be even stranger. We have reports of people who seem to have melted into their beds or armchairs." A photo of the man in the armchair was shown. They showed most of the body but left his face blurred.

  "That was probably taken by a neighbor or the person who discovered the body in the first place." Bakker told Wall.

  "Checking with international sources," Kelly continued. "No deaths have ever occurred like this anywhere before and at the moment there are no answers to the many questions. Have these people been poisoned? Is it a virus? Could this be the start of an outbreak of something bigger? The Dutch government in The Hague say their best police officers and scientists are working on what seems to be one big mystery. Unfortunately, the Dutch police are saying nothing at all, which seems to be the norm here in the Netherlands."

  The camera
zoomed in slowly towards the sign "Politie' on the front of the building on the Marnixstraat. In the shot Harvey Wall could be seen with a coffee cup in hand staring down at the reporter and camera crew.

  "The information CNN have received is from neighbors and friends of the victims. What the Dutch police may be hiding only heightens the mystery. Could this be Def-Con City? The end of life as we know it? This is Kelly Westen, for CNN, signing off, live from Amsterdam."

  Harvey Wall switched off the television and looked around. The room was silent. Everyone had watched the broadcast, including Harry Ribb, who stood at the door of his office.

  "Def-Con City Mr. Wall?" Harry Ribb asked. "Any idea what that means?"

  "I think she is referring to the military term for defense condition or called Def-Con in short, used by the White House. I believe it was introduced in the late fifties or early sixties and was related to war. It was a count-down system that began at five. As far as I can remember Def-Con five would mean that everything was okay but if Def-Con one was reached the nuclear bombs were in the air and nothing would ever be the same again. That's what she meant. Def-Con City, the end of life as we know it."

  Nobody in the room said a word. Wall went back to his desk and sat down.

  "Great," Ribb said. "If we didn't have a panic before, we do now."

  Chapter Twenty-One