Part 21 (1/2)

'Birdshot, solid shot, whatever. I need at least two hundred rounds.'

We reached the bottom of the stairs.

'No need for receipts.' I grinned and held out my hand. 'Lock up, so real people still think the place is empty.'

We agreed that he'd come back at the same time tomorrow, and I headed back up the stairs. I waited by the first exit onto the fire escape until I heard his key in the top lock, then legged it three at a time to the top floor. I grabbed the mallet, ran to the mailroom and scrambled up the ladder. I t.w.a.tted the bolts and lifted the roof hatch.

I'd wanted my new best friend on foot today not just because of security but also because I wanted to start finding out what the f.u.c.k this guy was all about. Making him walk was a way of slowing him down. It might give me the chance to see what he did next.

I kept low to minimize exposure as I headed towards the top of the vacant office block.

Yesterday Bradley had claimed he didn't know what was going on - and didn't want to know. Yet this morning it seemed like he knew everything. He claimed he didn't have comms, yet he'd been talking with Tresillian. It was all a bit too foggy for me. And having comms didn't mean they 'had you'. That was b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. If it were true, I'd have dumped my comms on day one. No one will ever call when you're not expecting them to: it could compromise the job. The only danger lies in pa.s.sing on mixed messages - like this f.u.c.ker had been doing. Maybe he'd made the mistake of thinking I was a knuckle-dragging gorilla from London who should be kept in the dark. And maybe Tresillian had too.

I reached the next-door building and moved to the edge. I poked my head slowly over the parapet and looked down onto Papaverhoek. Bradley was almost level with me, hands in his pockets, heading for the main.

I slid back, took a bit of a run-up and jumped towards the higher roof. I managed to hook my hands over the raised brickwork at its edge and scrabbled with the tips of my fifteen-euro trainers to continue my upward momentum. One elbow followed, then the other, then my right knee as I swung my legs to the side like a pendulum. Ten seconds later I was lying on my stomach on the tar-and-gravel surface. I got to my feet and ran past the entrance to the central stairwell to the far side of the block.

Bradley had a BlackBerry in his hand. He was taking too much time just to dial. The f.u.c.ker was waiting for secure comms. He finally raised it to his ear. I watched his back as he walked down towards the junction. His free hand was cupped around the phone. Whatever Tresillian was saying, he had Bradley's full attention. His head was down, and he kept close to the wall, as if it was giving him a bit of protection, and preventing him from being overheard.

So he had comms after all, and he was bulls.h.i.+tting. I'd been correct not to trust him, and not to say a word about the girl.

I watched him veer right at the junction and disappear. There was a gap through which I could see the main drag between the big and small roundabouts. I waited for a while, in case he came back into view.

If I'd had more time I might have followed Bradley to see what the little s.h.i.+t got up to, but I had more important things to do. I gave it another ten minutes.

18

I sheltered under the little ferry's gla.s.s canopy and watched the city grow slowly bigger as we crossed the bay. It looked more like a Second World War landing craft than anything a tourist would leap onto. But, then, who in their right mind would want to visit the decaying docks and warehouses of Noord 5?

The other seven pa.s.sengers all had bicycles. A couple in workmen's overalls munched their lunchtime sandwiches. The rest were in jeans and trainers, like me. They all had day sacks.

On the other side of the scratched gla.s.s, boats of all sizes zigzagged between the big cargo vessels nudging their way east along the waterway into Europe or west out towards the North Sea. High in the air, and so far away it was scarcely visible, I could just about make out the pinp.r.i.c.k of a helicopter. Not many people would have noticed it. Even fewer would have known the reason it was static. There was probably a surveillance operation on. More than likely, it would be something to do with drugs.

I could picture what was going on up there. Somebody would be sitting in the co-pilot's seat with the world's most sophisticated optics at their disposal. The heli was an eye in the sky. These things could hover kilometres from the target area and still get a grandstand view.

Even back in the nineties, when I was doing surveillance in places like Belfast and Derry, the gear was phenomenal. I once lost the target in a crowd in the Segments, a shopping area protected by turnstiles and security fences. I didn't have to panic. The boy was obsessive about his trainers and bunged them in the was.h.i.+ng machine most nights with a scoop or two of Daz. The optics were so good I could just rattle around looking at feet rather than bodies, waiting for a pair of spotless white trainers to appear - which they did.

Nowadays helicopters were used to track vehicles that have had small GPS devices hidden on them, or to support covert police surveillance teams on the ground. The eye in the sky means the surveillance team don't have to be right up the target's a.r.s.e all the time; they can go where the heli operator tells them to, only closing in when they're about to be unsighted. If he goes into a building, they can stay back: they don't have to have the trigger on the house because the helicopter can do that.

My walk from the safe-house to the ferry had taken me past the tile warehouse. I had the mallet with me. It always felt better having a weapon. The parking s.p.a.ces were filled with s.h.i.+ny but battered Transits - Distelweg's factory units were doing a roaring trade. Almost every one of the bays was full. I'd kept my hands in my pockets as I mooched past the flour silo, head tucked down inside my new nylon padded jacket but eyes up. The gates were still chained and padlocked.

I'd pa.s.sed the hole in the fence without giving it a second glance. The oil tanker that had been parked up yesterday had gone. The lads waiting for the ferry leant against their bikes, smoking or chatting on their mobile phones.

The Panda, for now, was static and hidden. I wasn't going to take it back to a place I'd been honked at. I wanted to check out the silo without being pinged by the neos.

The ferry was now about halfway across. The sky was still trying to make up its mind whether to rain or s.h.i.+ne. Now and again a shaft of sunlight broke through, but it was soon beaten back. I stared out of the window, yawned and checked to see if the pinp.r.i.c.k was still above us. There'd be a lot of covert ops going on in the Costa del Clog. This city sold a whole lot more than red cheese and tulips. It was the world's drugs hypermarket and the United Nations rolled into one.

The Russians and Turks controlled the heroin, the South Americans the cocaine. The Moroccans, Jamaicans and Africans ran weed. The challenge for British gangs was transporting the stuff home. Most tried to s.h.i.+p it as bog-standard cargo, but there were other ways. The East Europeans helped them out. A mule can swallow about a kilo of c.o.ke packed into condoms. f.u.c.k Dragons' Den Dragons' Den. The big-time drug tsars could eat the men in suits soft-boiled for breakfast. If only these lads could apply their skills to the real world, we'd be out of recession in no time.

Deals were done here because it was a perfect distribution hub, east and west, and not just for drugs. For Brits like Flynn, the UK was only a ferry ride away, or less than an hour on a plane. Friends and family could pop over for the weekend. The Dutch all spoke English and they looked like us, so it was very easy to blend in. No wonder a third of all British fugitives were tracked down in this neck of the woods. One Brit was lifted by the Dutch police with a PS125 million haul ready for s.h.i.+pment to the UK.

The landing-craft ramp came down at the end of Tasmanstraat. The bikes trundled off first and I followed. The road was dead straight, built on reclaimed land. I wanted to get hold of a map, but I wasn't going to find one here. The smart apartment blocks on my right looked like they'd been built in the thirties. On my left, the road was lined with trees and bikes. The ca.n.a.l was wide, with more apartment blocks on the opposite bank. They were Gucci too, and there wasn't a sc.r.a.p of litter or an election poster in sight. This must be where the professionals lived. Perhaps they were all so rich they didn't need shops. They had everything delivered.

I carried on towards the west end of the city. Daffodil buds poked through the ground, searching for sunlight. It was trying really hard to be spring, but it wasn't happening yet. What was going on here? I was on a job, not a nature trail.

I finally came across a shop on the ground floor of an apartment block. It wouldn't sell maps but the green cross meant it would have something else I needed. I went inside. Maybe a pharmacy in the building gave some indication of the age group of the people who lived here. I bought three packets of aspirin in tin foil and a bottle of water. I washed down a couple of Smarties and moved on.

The road became busier and wider still. I came to a bridge at a T-junction. Traffic lights were strung on cables across about five converging roads. The apartment buildings looked more sixties now, but were still upmarket. One to my half-right was arranged in an open square. A shopping plaza filled the ground floors. I headed over. There was another pharmacy, a newsagent and a cafe with chairs and tables outside.

There's something magic about the number three. If I tried to buy four packs the pharmacist might get sparked up - it just tipped the scale. If they balked even at three, I had my excuse ready. I took one a day to keep heart attacks at bay.

The newsagent fixed me up with a s.h.i.+ny new postcard-sized tourist map. The target road was about a kilometre away, at the start of the narrower ca.n.a.ls. I'd soon be in Van der Valk Van der Valk country again. country again.

Heading back towards the main to get my bearings, I noticed a bunch of daffs around the base of a tree that had managed to leap out of the mud and burst into flower. Either the plaza had its own microclimate, or the bulbs hadn't paid any attention to Mother Nature's timetable.

I went and sat outside the cafe and waited for someone to come and take my order. I admired the daffodils again, and then I found myself looking at all the people around me, doing everyday stuff like going into shops and walking around with mobiles; mums pus.h.i.+ng prams; a couple of old men sitting on a bench under the tree, reading newspapers as they waited to die. I looked at the tree. It would also be budding soon, I supposed.

I'd never really bothered with this sort of stuff. When I was a squaddie, I only knew three types of weather: wet, hot, and cold. Even as a kid, I didn't understand about seasons. I didn't know how it all worked. Council estates were grey all the time, so what was the point?

I made a decision. I didn't want to die without living. Once this job was over, I needed to have a look at the real stuff. I'd head for Moscow with Anna and go and see some paintings I'd read about and try to work out what had got everyone so excited. In the meantime I'd sit here for a while and let my unconscious soak it all up. This could be my one and only chance at a bit of normality. Maybe I'd thought of it as s.h.i.+te all my life because I couldn't be bothered to get off my a.r.s.e and go and have a look. Then again, maybe it was because I was scared of getting too close to what these people did - going to work, having a mortgage, raising families, looking in the mirror, being real.

19

A group of toddlers played in the square, watched over by their mums. The weapons-grade buggies they were pus.h.i.+ng had probably cost more than my first car. I watched them for a while, then sat and stared at the speck hovering high over the eastern side of the city for so long it almost hypnotized me.

I was woken from my semi-daze by the arrival of coffee and a sticky bun. Good. I had to start concentrating. The job was the thing that mattered, not some daffs sticking out of the mud or me wondering what the view was like from the eye in the sky.

I drank my coffee, then fished out my map. The streets and ca.n.a.ls became narrower from here on in. Westerstraat lay at the base of a triangle of land, with ca.n.a.ls framing the other two sides. A road ran down from the apex, and vertical streets either side paralleled Westerstraat, forming a grid of sorts. I hadn't taken much notice of this yesterday. I'd just concentrated on Anna's directions and getting to the meet on time.

Anne Frank's house, another place I should add to my bucket list, was a bit further down. I'd walked past it a few times when I was a squaddie, but never gone in. It hadn't offered strippers or beer.

I headed back to the junction with my pockets full of aspirin. I'd get a whole lot more later on: I'd need a Bergenful to achieve what I had in mind.

I crossed a bridge over the west-side ca.n.a.l. As I walked down it, I scanned the roads parallel to Westerstraat; they were narrow and one-way. I was coming into the Amsterdam I knew best, in Van der Valk Van der Valk country: ca.n.a.ls, trams, cyclists weaving between pedestrians, cobbles, narrow one-way streets. Centuries-old houses leant out over the brick-paved streets. Bikes were parked everywhere. Pedestrians were segregated from cars by lines of bollards. The buildings were immaculately kept and predominantly residential. Even the houseboats looked expensive. A James Bond villain would have looked completely at home among their timber and gla.s.s. country: ca.n.a.ls, trams, cyclists weaving between pedestrians, cobbles, narrow one-way streets. Centuries-old houses leant out over the brick-paved streets. Bikes were parked everywhere. Pedestrians were segregated from cars by lines of bollards. The buildings were immaculately kept and predominantly residential. Even the houseboats looked expensive. A James Bond villain would have looked completely at home among their timber and gla.s.s.