RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC wasn’t kind to me, and I didn’t make it back to Leidseplein until six-thirty. I hoped Hilger, who knew he would get another try tomorrow, hadn’t given up for the night. But I had a feeling he’d stick it out for a while longer. Silencing Boezeman was important, and he’d want to do it as soon as possible so he could complete the op.
The real question wasn’t whether, but where. I put myself in his shoes again.
No need for anything to look natural. Just a bullet in the back of the head, or a knife in the liver, ideally while he’s going in his own front door.
But you couldn’t wait right by his front door. There were too many apartments, too many passersby. It would be too suspicious. The end of the street? Similar problem. You might miss the target entirely.
Vondelpark would be ideal. It was big, dark, and had lots of bushes and trees for concealment. You could lurk there for hours, with a view of Boezeman’s apartment. If you had a sniper rifle, all you’d need would be line of sight. With a pistol, maybe you could drop the target from just on the other side of the Vondelpark fence. With a knife, the trick would be getting from the park to Boezeman’s door before he got inside. At a run, it would take ninety seconds, considerably longer than it takes a man to let himself in with a key.
Unless, of course, someone’s broken off something inside the lock.
That was it. That’s how I would do it. Even with a rifle, you’d want to slow the target down, give yourself extra time for the shot.
I parked the car and set off, pulling my wool hat down low over my ears and turning up the coat collar as I walked.
I started walking down Overtoom street, thinking I would enter the park from Van Baerlestraat, the northwest side of the eastern quadrant of the park, and a good distance from Boezeman’s apartment. That would maximize my chances of seeing Hilger while he was focused on spotting Boezeman, before he had a chance to see me.
It made sense, but suddenly it felt wrong. The iceman didn’t like it, and he was trying to tell me why.
And then I knew. I’d considered the possibility that Hilger would be here. Why couldn’t he, with all his experience, have come to similar, mirror-image conclusions? Sure, by all means, jam Boezeman’s lock. But then monitor the door some other way, from somewhere else in the park-from where he could ambush me.
I thought for a moment. What about another man? I doubted he had any left. Dox had said four on that first phone call. After New York and Singapore, that left Hilger.
A camera, then? A magnetic mount, or even duct tape, on the iron fence would work. And then he could wait anywhere. He could set up at Van Baerlestraat, the direction from which he knew I would hunt him. Lie flat on the ground, the muzzle of the gun up, waiting and watching.
I changed direction and entered the park from Stadhouderskade, the eastern end. As soon as I was inside the gate, I moved off the path and into a line of trees. I dropped into a squat, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. There were a few people about, all with umbrellas, all hurrying through the rain, doubtless on their way home from work. I saw no one loitering anywhere.
I moved slowly along the trees at the northeastern edge of the park, knees and elbows the whole way, my face an inch from the sodden ground. It felt like coming home. I paused frequently to check my surroundings. A few bicyclists went by on the path to my left, but that was all.
A hundred yards in, I stopped. Straight ahead of me was a thick cluster of trees. It was where I would have waited for me. I crept closer. There, at the base of the thickest of them. Prone on the ground. Hilger.
I waited and watched him. He was on the eastern side of the tree, taking cover and concealment from anyone approaching from the west. It was as I’d thought: he’d anticipated me. Only I, and the iceman, had played one step further ahead.
It was hard to tell in the dim light, but it looked like he was holding a pistol in his right hand. Something glowed periodically on his left. A small monitor, maybe a mobile phone. I’d been right about the camera setup, too, which meant he had no one with him.
Slowly, painstakingly, I circled behind him, and then gradually moved in. The rain muffled sound, but I didn’t need it. If there was one thing my body had learned and would never forget, it was how to move silently through the mud. Hilger had said his conflict had been in the desert. Too bad for him.
Twelve yards. Ten. It was easy to get overeager at the moment of the kill, and I forced myself to stay slow and steady.
“Don’t move,” I heard from behind me, in a commanding tone.
It was Hilger’s voice. I froze and didn’t try to turn. The person on the ground in front of me remained still.
“Very slowly, place the gun on the ground, far from your body. Then get your hands up high, fingers spread.”
I did as he had asked, then snuck a glance back. I couldn’t see much more than a silhouette holding a pistol, ten feet away. The muzzle was abnormally long, and I realized it was a suppressor. With the gun on me, it was too far to rush him. If he shot center mass, the Dragon Skin might carry the day. But if he aimed low or high, I’d be done.
“Who’s the guy on the ground?” I asked, wanting to engage him, see if I could create an opening.
“I have no idea.”
“You just shot someone to use as a decoy?”
I heard him laugh. “It worked, didn’t it?”
I couldn’t deny it.
“Are you going to give me a hard time about it?” I heard him say. “How many people did you kill this week?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
He laughed again, and I felt a slow-burning rage ignite deep within me. He hadn’t moved to pat me down, probably because he was wary of getting too close after our run-in in Saigon. I had the knife Boaz gave me clipped to my front pocket. If I rushed him, I could probably open him up even as he was shooting me. I might die, but I’d take him with me to hell.
Do it. Do it now.
It was the iceman talking.
No. There’s a better way.
A distraction. That’s what I needed. Something to buy myself the extra second.
“Tell me where Dox is,” I heard him say, and I realized that was my opening. He didn’t know how messed up the big sniper was. He thought he was here.
“He’s with Boezeman,” I said. “Boezeman let him into the container. He disarmed the bomb.”
There was a second of silence while his mind grappled with his new understanding of just how much I knew. Boezeman, container, bomb, disarmed…it was a lot to process. It required thought, and made it hard to focus.
“You’re lying,” he said.
This time I was the one to laugh. “You’re right. You want to know where he is? Dox. Take him out.”
Hilger had spent enough time in the military, and was sufficiently acquainted with Dox’s deadly skills, for the words take him out to have an almost Pavlovian effect. Klaxons were going off in his mind now: Rain must be wearing commo gear, Dox is close by with a scoped rifle, where’s the line of sight, get off the X-
I spun and rushed him. I was five feet away when the first slug hit my chest. I felt like I’d run into a tree, and the air was driven out of my lungs. He got off two more, both to my torso, and then I had both hands wrapped around the gun. I twisted hard to the left, forcing the muzzle out to his right. He rotated his body to keep his wrist from breaking, and two more shots went off to the side. We struggled with the gun.
I couldn’t draw breath. It felt like I’d been kicked by a horse, by three horses. Hilger snapped a knee into my groin and pain rocketed through my abdomen. I got a hand around the long suppressor and shoved back and over, toward Hilger’s right shoulder. He couldn’t get out of the way, and he couldn’t let go. His wrist snapped. He howled and I tore the gun away from him.
I took a step back, and with my last strength blasted a desperate side kick into his knee. He yelled again and collapsed. I fell to my knees a few feet away, fumbling with the pistol, trying to breathe, breathe…
I bobbled the gun and dropped it in the mud. Hilger, his face a rictus of pain, was struggling with his belt buckle with his left hand. I remembered Saigon, and thought, belt knife.
Of course, no backup pistol. That’s what I’d seen in the dead guy’s hand.
Breathe, breathe…
I groped for the gun. I couldn’t find it. The outer edges of my vision were going dark.
Hilger twisted the buckle, and suddenly there was a blade in his hand.
I gritted my teeth, and with all my strength tried to suck air into my lungs. No go. Tiny red dots danced before my eyes. My phony command to Dox had unbalanced Hilger enough to deny him the time and the focus to shoot for my head or pelvic girdle, but the rounds had reverberated through the Dragon Skin to hammer my diaphragm into spasm. The knee to my groin had made it worse. My brain wasn’t getting oxygen, and it was beginning to shut down.
Hilger slid toward me, the knife in his left hand, his left forearm digging into the mud, pulling himself forward like an injured reptile.
I rubbed frantically at my diaphragm. A tiny whistle of air made its way into my lungs.
Hilger slashed with the knife. I fell away from him to my back, getting my feet between us, still rubbing, trying to coax my diaphragm out of spasm. Another snatch of air stole down my throat, like a prisoner dashing across a mine field.
Another slash. The blade hit my boot. I drew a tiny, hitching breath. Hilger screamed and slashed again. Again he hit a boot.
I put my hands down to shove away from him, and my right fingers touched cold metal. The gun. I grabbed it and kicked away to create a precious extra two feet, then got it out in front of me with my right hand, my left still massaging my abdomen. I drew an inch of breath. Then another. The red dots disappeared, and the darkness retreated.
Hilger saw the gun, saw that he couldn’t reach me. His body sagged and he dropped the knife in the mud.
We sat there like that, neither of us able to move. After a few moments, Hilger laughed and said, “I guess you are bulletproof, after all. Body armor, right?”
I didn’t answer. I was still working on getting my breath back.
We sat there like that for almost a minute, neither of us able to move. When I could finally speak, I sighted down the muzzle and said, “Tell me how to disarm it.”
He smiled. “Then you haven’t yet. You were lying.”
“I don’t know. Somebody’s been working on it. Tell me, and I’ll let you live.”
He laughed.
I thought about calling Boaz. But without Hilger’s cooperation, there was nothing I could do to help him. And a phone call could distract him at a delicate moment. I would have to wait.
“Who are you working for?” I asked. “AQ? Hamas? Hezbollah?”
He laughed again.
“What?” I said.
“I work for my country.”
“I don’t get it.”
He sighed. “Someone has to deny America’s enemies their funding, Rain. How can the country prevail against radical Islam while simultaneously underwriting it?”
“What does this have to do with Rotterdam?”
“It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America’s oil addiction is a sickness that’s killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work. And Congress is worse. The idiots actually proposed to offer taxpayers a hundred-dollar rebate to buy more gasoline-they want to give the addicts more money for a fix, more money to send to the mullahs and the al Saud, our enemies.”
“So Rotterdam is an inoculation.”
“Yes. That’s well put. You increase the price of oil enough to lower demand and create market incentives for alternatives, but not so much that the patient goes into the shock of economic depression. It’s a shame the patient doesn’t have the sense or the will to inoculate himself through a carbon tax, but denial is the nature of addiction, and doesn’t change the fact that the patient badly needs help.”
“What about British Petroleum, then? Prudhoe Bay?”
He looked at me. “How do you know about that?”
“What difference does it make?”
There was a pause, and I thought he would refuse. But I’d told him I might let him live. No matter how tough you are, in extremis, it doesn’t take much for a drop of hope to blossom into a full-blown mirage of salvation.
“Prudhoe Bay was a test of the new treatment,” he said. “On the one hand, it was a failure because it didn’t have the desired effect. But it was successful, too, because it demonstrated that for the patient to get well a higher dose was needed. There were other possibilities, including Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. But…”
“You had an unwitting access agent in Rotterdam. Boezeman.”
“That’s right. And I wanted to keep casualties to a minimum. The layout at Rotterdam is good for that.”
“So with Rotterdam inoperable…”
“Right. The price of oil would spike, demand would slacken, and I would single-handedly have hastened the advent of a post-oil, post-OPEC world economy. You get it now? Do you understand what’s at stake? We live in perilous times. We’re battling a new kind of enemy. An enemy that can’t be deterred. What do we do to fight him? Become like him?”
“Haven’t you?”
“I didn’t say ‘me.’ I said ‘we.’ Someone has to do what needs to be done, Rain. Someone has to live in the shadows so others can enjoy the light. Someone has to sin so others can enjoy innocence. Now, if you don’t understand my reasons, go ahead. Do the only thing you’re good for. You beat me. You won. Again.”
I didn’t say anything. The only thing you’re good for. It was stupid, but the words cut into me.
“But grant me a last request,” he said. “Let me call my sister. She’s the only one I have to say goodbye to. Or is a small mercy against your code of killing?”
I watched him, the front sight of the pistol even with his forehead. I thought about how easy it is to retract a fingertip, how easy to take a life.
It had always been easy for me. What others could accomplish only with the greatest encouragement, with fear and regret and swallowed revulsion, I could just…do. And I’d kept on doing it. There would always be a reason, it seemed. And if there weren’t, maybe I would invent one.
“My mobile phone is over there,” he said, inclining his head toward the dead guy by the tree. “My knee is broken, I can’t get to it. Would you lend me yours? Please?”
What difference did it make? A small mercy, like he said. I pulled my mobile out and tossed it to him.
“Thank you,” he said. He grimaced and flipped it open with his good hand.
If I was going to stop, I had to find a way to stop, a time and place to stop. I would have to make a decision to stop. The decision would carry risks, it was true. But so, always, would the alternative.
Maybe this was what Delilah had been talking about, when she told me about choices, and how I would make the right one.
Hilger was supporting himself on his left elbow, inputting his sister’s number with his left thumb. It embarrassed me to have to hear whatever he might say to her.
Yes, that was it. I’d been telling myself for so long I had no choice, that maybe my choice reflex had atrophied. But I could reawaken it. I could let him live. By walking away, I would prove that Dox and I were no threat to him. He’d have no incentive to come after us after that.
It made sense. I could do this. It was up to me. My choice. Everything would be possible. A thousand new directions. I thought about how I would tell Delilah, how she had been right, and how much her confidence had meant to me, how much it had helped me. I would tell her…
The phone! Not his sister, he’s detonating the bomb!
Without any other thought, I brought the gun up and shot him in the face. Again. Three times. He jerked and twitched and dropped the phone.
I sat there dumbly for a long moment in the sudden silence, the rain beating a steady drumbeat on my arms and shoulders. A tendril of smoke curled coyly from the muzzle of the gun.
I stood and picked up the mobile. I checked the screen. An access code, then 1, for America, 212, for New York…and six more digits. Christ, he’d been one digit away.
But was it the bomb? Or did he really have…
It didn’t matter. For all I knew, Boaz was elbow deep in the device right now. If Hilger had detonated it, Boaz would have died. Even if I was wrong, I had no choice.
The rain beat harder. And through the echo of that sodden drumbeat, I thought I heard a whispered voice, at once familiar and distant.
No choice.
I stood there in the cold and dark and rain. I’d known, at some level, of the possible danger if he made a call. But I’d let him make it anyway. Because once he had the phone in his hands, I had…
No choice.
My mobile buzzed. I looked and saw that it was Boaz.
I picked up. “You okay?” I asked.
“Did you hear a boom?”
“No, I didn’t. But I wasn’t listening closely.”
He laughed. “I have a simple rule. If there’s no boom, it’s good news.”
“You disarmed it.”
“Disarmed and disabled. We’ll need experts to handle the radioactive material and make sure it’s disposed of properly, but that’s someone else’s concern.”
I started walking toward the car. Jesus, I didn’t know I had so many places that could hurt. “Whose?” I asked.
“Let’s just say Mister Boezeman is very eager for no one ever to learn of this incident. And my organization is very eager to own a Rotterdam port official. It’s going to be a beautiful friendship.”
“You’re going to bring the organization in on this?”
“Of course. With results like these, a little-what do you call it, moonlighting?-is easily forgiven. But enough about me. I’m so relieved not to be blown into a million pieces that I’m forgetting to ask you about Hilger.”
“He’s dead.”
“How?”
“How do you think? Bullets.”
“And you’re okay? You’re not hurt, you’re out of danger?”
“I’m okay.”
“Fantastic! Naftali will be so pleased he might talk again. He was hoping to do it himself, but he’s a big boy, he understands that what matters is, it’s done.”
“Where are you?”
“On the train, on the way back to Amsterdam. Let’s have a beer. Debrief, decompress.”
“I’ve…got a lot to think about.”
“Bullshit. No one should be alone after something like this. Besides, you have our car and all our shiny toys. You have to give them back or we’ll get in trouble.”
I tried to smile, but I felt sick. “I’ll meet you at the station and give you the keys. But I can’t stay long.”
I PARKED NEAR Centraal Station, took my bag from the trunk, and locked the car. As I walked along one of the canals, I dropped Hilger’s gun over the side. I had left the USP in Vondelpark. I didn’t have time to search for it in the mud, but it was okay. I hadn’t even fired it, and if Boaz was using it, it must have been sterile.
I met them inside the station, as they came down the stairs from the Rotterdam train. Naftali shook my hand. “I owe you, Mister Rain,” he said.
“No, you don’t. You had my back. That’s good enough.”
He shook his head. “I know my brother was sent to kill you. I’m glad now he didn’t succeed.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said, and Naftali actually smiled.
“I told you he would be excited,” Boaz said.
I laughed weakly, then grimaced. My chest felt like I’d stopped a truck with it.
“Where will you go now?” Boaz asked. “To Delilah?”
I couldn’t have fooled him even if I’d been inclined. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t call her, you know. After Singapore. It was up to you.”
“Well, do you want me to go see her?” I said, handing him the car keys. “Or do you want to stand here talking?”
He laughed. I explained about the USP and told them where they could find the car, then went to the ticket booth to see about a train to Paris.
There was a nine o’clock that arrived at Paris Nord at one in the morning. I bought a ticket and headed to the platform. I called Kanezaki just before boarding the train.
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’s going to be okay. A lot of bruises, some fractured ribs, and a hell of a sunburn.”
Yeah, my skin was itching, too. I’d been so busy I hadn’t noticed until now.
“Good.”
“How about you?” he asked. “Did…”
“You were right about everything. And everything we came here to do, we did, including rendering our friend defunct. I’ll post the details. But you can probably reach the Israelis on their mobiles right now.”
“I may do that.”
“You did well, Tom.”
“And you did good.”
“Well, no good deed goes unpunished. I’ll be in touch, okay?”
“I hope so.”
I took my seat on the train and five minutes later, we pulled out of the station. I was wet and shivering from crawling through Vondelpark, and my chest ached. I just wanted to get somewhere warm and dry, somewhere I could close my eyes.
I leaned my head against the window. As we left the lights of the city behind and the world outside grew darker, my reflection appeared in the glass.
For so long, I’d been asking myself whether I had a choice, and always answering no. But maybe the real question was why I never had a choice. Why I always put myself in a position where I had no alternative but killing.
What was that saying of Henry Ford’s? “You can have any color you like, as long as it’s black.”
I thought I heard the iceman: You can have any choice you want, as long as it’s mine.
Maybe. But I’d made at least one right choice, in New York when I’d walked away from Midori’s boyfriend. And maybe I was making another right now, in going to Delilah.
I thought about those three small words she had uttered, the ones I didn’t know how to respond to. I’d think of something, maybe even what she had called “the traditional response,” although the thought of it scared me. I had told her I needed her to guide me back, and staring at that ghostly image in the glass, I knew I did need her, that without her I would just give up and surrender to the iceman. It would be so easy. I was used to it. A part of me even wanted it.
But there was something I wanted more. And with Delilah…
That was it. With Delilah.
The iceman was a loner. Why was I fighting him alone? That was what he wanted, the nature of the fight was itself his victory. But I had allies, Delilah foremost among them. Maybe if I could just be a little less stupid about accepting what they wanted to give me, I could stack the odds in my favor.
I didn’t need to kill the iceman. I didn’t even need to fight him. I just needed to make more of myself, so that he would be less of me.
I didn’t know how, exactly, and I was too tired to figure it out now. But I wouldn’t have to figure it out on my own. That was the point.
I closed my eyes. The reflection was still there, of course. I just couldn’t see it. And for the moment, that was enough.