Blindside(41)

He had, on occasion, appreciated killing someone. Like those asses Janos and Alice. He and Ollie had made good money for that one, but it had been fun, too. It had been satisfying.

He found Ollie at his favorite coffeehouse on the edge of the tourist district in Amsterdam. He usually went to a place on Handboogstraat called Dampkring. Tonight, he was in a smaller place, down the street, that didn’t mind when Ollie dozed off in a booth, as long as he spent plenty of money and didn’t cause problems.

They both had been careful to keep their profession a secret. Since they had met Endrik Laar, who liked to be called Henry, their fortunes had seen a serious upturn. They didn’t have to seek out work. Henry paid well. And they liked their small, shared apartment in Tallinn, Estonia.

In Amsterdam, Christoph maintained his own apartment. He brought home too many women to make sharing an apartment reasonable. It also gave him a sense that he was on vacation whenever he came to his hometown.

Ollie lived with his father, who operated a bed-and-breakfast in the suburb of Haarlem. His father didn’t know and didn’t care what Ollie did for a living. That worked out great for Ollie. Aside from occasionally taking out the garbage or checking in a guest, Ollie did little to help his father.

Christoph took a moment to shake his partner out of his hash-induced daze. The thirty-eight-year-old blinked his eyes a dozen times and sat up straight, as if he’d just heard a fire alarm. He brushed his brown, greasy hair from his eyes and tucked the long strands behind his ears. He looked surprised to see Christoph.

“Hello, my brother. What brings you to Nirvana?”

Christoph said, “You need to straighten up. Henry has a job for us.”

“Where?”

“I’ll give you a hint. Our Nordica flight leaves in two hours.”

“Shit. Back to Estonia?”

Christoph said, “It shouldn’t be too bad. Henry is going to give us a bonus for going to New York to kill Janos and Alice.”

“Those assholes had it coming.” He scratched his head, then looked at Christoph and asked, “Why do you think Alice shot the Asian chick in the back?”

“I guess she was just a bitch. We’ll never know. And Henry is pissed.”

Ollie said, “He’s been quick to use us lately. He’s cutting into our party time. I wonder what he wants done now.”

Christoph said, “He said something about a cop from New York.”





CHAPTER 59


THE NEXT MORNING, I was up and moving early. Early by Tallinn, Estonia, time—it was the middle of the night in New York, and I got a text telling me to call home no matter the time. I made a quick call to let Mary Catherine know I was safe. Somehow I neglected to tell her about my excitement at the airport. Just that I was staying in a lovely city with a beautiful Old Town district on a hill not far away.

Her sleepy voice made me homesick. She said, “You promise to be careful?”

“Sure, but what could go wrong? I’m in a country with a low crime rate looking for a missing girl who hangs out with computer geeks. I think I’ll manage.”

She let out that warm Irish laugh and said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Then it was back to reality.

The breakfast in the main room of the hotel included three different kinds of fish. I’m not used to salted smelt for breakfast, but they weren’t bad.

Then I hit the streets with a vengeance. Not like I might in New York. There, I knew every street corner, most hustlers, and a lot of cops. Here, it was just me, hoping I didn’t do anything to be noticed.

I had several addresses I wanted to check out from Tony Martindale’s Intelligence Bureau resources. The folder he’d handed me on Henry hadn’t provided much information, but this turd looked to be bad news from the description they’d acquired through different informants.

Usually a criminal was known to be either tough or smart. This guy appeared to be both. But he had no actual criminal history. No arrests at all. That was the sign of the worst kind of criminal: one who was smart enough to work the system or avoid detection altogether.

The brief from Intel said he’d attacked the computer system of Aldi grocery stores in Germany. He had crippled all of their systems, then demanded ten million euros to let them operate again.

The only thing that had stopped him was a bank screwup. Somehow the account he had been using in Russia at the time was viewable by the police. That saved the German company a fortune.

In addition to several other cyberattacks, Henry was listed as responsible for three separate murders, two in Estonia and one in Russia. I thought, And at least one in New York. That didn’t count the dead at the coffeehouse.

The more I found out about this “Henry,” the more I looked forward to finally meeting him.

I walked along Pühavaimu, on the edge of the Old Town district. The medieval city walls rose right from the sidewalk, and a plaque advised me that Old Town was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It explained that the first wall went up around the capital in the year 1265 during the reign of Margaret Sambiria, thus it is named Margaret Wall.

The streets were filled with tourists, and among them I heard a number of American accents. My cabdriver had told me Estonians greatly preferred to hear English to Russian if someone wasn’t going to speak Estonian. Cruise ships docked at the main port and shuttled busloads of tourists to Old Town to see Toompea Castle as well as farther east to see the Kadriorg Palace. At the moment, I was dodging those crowds.