Chapter 22
Once again, they stood outside the apartment building on Antony Moddermanstraat.
Maggie wondered if she should ask the taxi to wait for them, but she didn’t know how long they’d be here.
Willem Dekker might refuse to speak to them at all, and simply send them on their way.
Or he might be ready and willing to answer all of Lloyd’s questions.
She had once worked in a world where information itself was the prize; would Dekker simply open his door to two strangers and give them all the pieces of the puzzle?
Their taxi drove away, its taillights receding into the night, leaving them stranded.
The coffee shop across the street was now closed and dark, and except for the footfalls of a couple walking past, hand in hand, the street was quiet.
Lloyd approached the apartment entrance and hesitated outside the door buzzers, as if reconsidering his decision.
As if afraid to proceed. The footfalls of the passing couple faded into the distance, and the street fell silent.
“Lloyd?” said Maggie.
Then the lock buzzed open. They glanced at each other in surprise.
“Well, that was easy,” said Lloyd, and he pushed open the door.
Too easy, she thought.
It was a work night, and at this late hour, the building was quiet, most of the residents probably tucked into bed with their alarm clocks set for the morning wake-up.
Before she could stop him, Lloyd was climbing the stairs. As a civilian, Maggie couldn’t bring a weapon on an international flight, so she’d come to Amsterdam unarmed. And there was Lloyd, pulling her into a situation she could not control. Already, he’d reached the second floor.
She had no choice but to follow him.
The hallway had concrete walls that looked cold and sterile under industrial lighting, a brutalist interior that made it feel more like a prison than a residence.
She passed a baby stroller parked outside one door, a pair of rain boots outside another.
Number 225, Willem Dekker’s apartment, was at the far end of the hallway. The door was ajar.
“Wait,” called out Maggie, just as Lloyd pushed open the door and stepped into the apartment. “Hello? Meneer Dekker?” he called out.
Inside, a television was on, and Maggie heard the roar of laughter, a man cajoling the audience in Dutch. She glanced back up the hallway. There was no one in sight. The whole building felt empty, abandoned. Silent except for the sound of that television spilling out of #225.
“Hello?” Lloyd called out. “Meneer?”
“Lloyd,” she said. “Wait.”
But he had moved out of sight and was already in the next room.
She had to pull him out of there, now. She stepped into the apartment and glanced around at the sparsely furnished living room.
Saw a bookcase with only a half dozen titles on the shelves, a sofa with clean Scandinavian lines, a glass coffee table sporting a lone copy of De Telegraaf.
Everything about the room struck her as disturbingly anonymous, not a place where a real person lived, but merely a concept of a person, a sketch of a person, drawn in a few hasty lines.
Lloyd had stopped calling out to Dekker, and all she heard was the television.
A comedy with canned laughter, the volume turned up in a throat-clearing cacophony of Dutch.
She followed the sound through the doorway and into a kitchen, where the TV blared from the countertop. Fluorescent lights shone down from the ceiling, illuminating Lloyd’s panicked face, his wide eyes. Pressed against his temple was the barrel of a 9mm gun.
Of course it was too easy. Because it was a trap.
The man holding the gun was all muscle and sinew, his veins bulging like thick cords on his arms, his shaved head a gleaming skullcap.
He didn’t say a word, but the distinctive Vory tattoos on his ring finger and on the back of his hand told Maggie who and what he was.
She thought of her trusty Walther, safely tucked away in its cabinet at home, and she longed to feel its weight in her hand.
The gunman’s gaze suddenly flicked to the doorway.
Maggie turned to see the woman walk in. It was the same woman they’d met this morning in the apartment lobby, the woman who’d given them Dekker’s name and told them to return tonight after dark.
The woman who’d set the trap. She turned off the TV, shutting off the inane comedic chatter.
Then, in silence, she studied Maggie, just as Maggie was studying her.
They were both women with experience in the world, equally formidable, taking the measure of each other.
“There’s been some kind of mistake,” said Lloyd.
“The mistake is yours,” the woman said. She looked at the gunman and issued an order in Russian.
“We’re just here to see Dekker!” said Lloyd. “Let me explain—”
“Oh, you’ll tell us everything,” she said. “But not here.”
What did you get us into, Ingrid? Maggie thought as the van carried her and Lloyd through the streets of Amsterdam.
The fact the woman and the gunman spoke Russian did not bode well for what was coming next.
Nor did the fact she and Lloyd were now lying in the back of a van, their mouths taped and their hands and ankles bound.
The end could have come in the apartment, with a few muffled bullets from the suppressor, but the woman was not through with them.
There was a conversation to come, a probing for answers.
That was the only reason they were still alive; the woman believed they had valuable information.
Information that Maggie did not possess.
They had been driving for what felt like half an hour now, and Maggie’s hip ached from lying on the unforgiving floor of the van as it lurched through traffic.
Lloyd moaned beside her, but she couldn’t see his face in the darkness, couldn’t see his despair.
It was after midnight, and the streets of Amsterdam were still busy, making the van’s progress stop and go.
The driver had turned the radio to full blast, so even if Maggie were able to peel the duct tape off her mouth, that pulsing beat from the radio would drown out her cries for help.
She tried to remember the sequence of turns they made.
Right, then drive two minutes. Right, drive one minute.
Left . . . She pictured the streets, the sidewalks clogged with locked bicycles, the canals aglow with reflected lamplight.
A confusing maze of pavement and water. As the sounds of traffic faded, she knew they were moving out of the urban center, bound for a destination in the city’s outskirts.
A place where what came next would not be overheard.
There would be an interrogation, certainly. An execution, most likely.
The van picked up speed, unfettered now by stoplights and city traffic.
The driver shut off the radio; there was no longer any need to drown out the prisoners’ cries for help when no one was around to hear them.
She imagined them speeding past cows grazing in pastures, past farmland crisscrossed by canals.
Those canals had always been a convenient place for the Dutch to dispose of a murder victim, whether by a jealous boyfriend or by organized crime.
A bullet in the head, and then into the water you went. So tidy, the Dutch.
And this would be such a stupid death, an ignorant death.
Maggie would go to her grave without knowing why.
For that reason alone, she was furious with Ingrid.
Maggie had devoted her career to coaxing information from people, information that could save lives and stabilize nations.
Now she and Lloyd were about to die without knowing why, because Ingrid had withheld vital information.
She thought back to all the years she’d known her, trying to tease out any clues she might have missed, desperate to explain how it had all come down to this moment.
Had she ever really known Ingrid? Had the signs been there, little deceptions that Maggie had not noticed?
They’d been friends for almost four decades, since they’d first met during their training at the Farm.
Even then, Ingrid had radiated cool confidence and a razor-sharp intellect that intimidated the other recruits.
She did not have Ben Diamond’s brute strength or Declan’s affable charm, but she could think around corners quicker than any of them.
The four of them would talk late into the night, bonding over glasses of whisky and exchanging hypotheticals.
What would you do if . . . ? There’d been reunions over the years, even though their assignments had scattered them around the globe.
Every coming together felt like a return to family, their real family, bound not by blood but by the shared ordeals of their profession.
And she thought of Ingrid’s wedding to Lloyd Slocum, when the four of them became five, and how perplexed Ben and Declan had been by Ingrid’s choice of a husband.
But Maggie had understood Ingrid’s choice.
Lloyd was the rock to which a woman could safely anchor herself, a rock that no storm could dislodge.
It had always been plain to see that Lloyd adored her.
She should have been honest with him, at least, thought Maggie. Because she didn’t tell him the truth, she’s going to lose him. The way I lost Danny.
The van was slowing down.