Brothers In Arms (7 page)

“They do,” Marie said softly. She sipped her coffee and smiled at her lover. “I wonder what she’ll be when she grows up.”

“Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be . . .” sang Isabelle.

Ilse looked up in delight and clapped her hands.

Youssef wandered aimlessly through the cobblestone streets of the Old Center of Amsterdam. He stopped often for coffee, always drinking it alone, and watching as though from a great distance the activities of the young people his own age all around him. He felt lonely, but fought it down with the patience of long practice. He forced himself to think through and recall the tenets of his advanced training as he studied the flow of people in the public places and the residential districts. The concentrations were on the trams and streetcars, the streets busy with bicyclists and pedestrians. His instructors had drilled into him that concentrations made excellent targets, especially those indoor places where air flow could be controlled. He paused beside a wall where a flyer for a concert, the Irish band U2, was plastered. There would be a huge audience.

An indoor audience.

But it wasn’t time for target selection. This was an exercise to keep his mind from other things. He made his way back to the inexpensive youth hostel where he kept the rest of his meager gear: a backpack, a sleeping bag, some clothes, a small locked Pelican hard case. A few extra euros had bought him a room to himself, and he went to his room and sat down at the tiny table and set up his laptop. He busied himself composing an e-mail to his handler that he would send from a cyber café later, then set the computer aside and lay back on the thin mattress of the bed and stared at the ceiling.

He was very lonely.

Youssef wondered about the blond woman he’d met and wondered if that was her child he’d heard playing in the background. He liked children. It was doubtful that he would ever have any. There were times that the life he’d chosen for himself seemed very hard.

Rhaman Uday stood in his private room before a window that looked out over a flourishing garden tended by patients. Uday liked to look at the flowers. He didn’t care much for the thriving vegetable garden, preferring to spend his attention on the flowers. His room gave him a good view, and the staff often found him standing here in front of his window.

A nurse’s aide opened the door while knocking. “Mr. Uday? Would you like to walk outside?”

He paused for a moment to consider, then said, “Yes. Walking would be good.”

He followed, like a large, well-mannered child, in the wake of the small nurse’s aide who steered him through the hallways and out to the garden.

“See?” she said brightly. “How lovely the flowers are.”

“Yes,” he said. “See how lovely the flowers are.”

He stood, his hands limp at his side, looking at the different roses, the impatiens, the marigolds and the daisies, the neat rows of violets and daffodils and other flowers. His shoulders settled, unlocked for a moment from their rigid set, softened by the aroma and the sight of the flowers.

“The blooming,” he said. “Blooming starts earlier. A longer period followed by the blooming. There is no sad holiday without the blooming. That makes us sad.”

“Why are you sad, Mr. Uday?” the nurse’s aide said. “It’s a beautiful day. It’s not a sad holiday here.”

“No,” Uday said. “It will be a sad holiday. Even here.”

The outdoor seating area in the patio of the Sebastian Joe’s coffee shop is shaded by trees on three sides. The last side faces the sidewalk and the busy street there. Mike Callan and Dale Miller sat in the patio facing the street and people-watched. There was no shortage of things to see: bicyclists fresh from a ride around Lake Harriet, only a few hundred yards away; suntanned couples strolling hand in hand, licking at the ice cream cones Sebastian Joe’s was famous for; and others, like Miller and Callan, just sitting and watching the summertime flow of people.

“You’re like a shark among the penguins here,” Callan said.

“Same old Mike,” Dale said.

“So what do you think about my proposition?”

Dale touched his finger to the bridge of his Ray-Bans. “I don’t know. I need to think it over, talk with Nina about it.”

“You that serious?”

“She’s a factor in everything I do.”

“I envy you. Margie was my last and final attempt at domesticity. She left me light in the moneybags.”

“We’re not like that.”

Callan nodded, and watched a short, trim blond woman jog by.
“You’d have full license . . . use who you like. You’d be responsible only to me. I’d sign the checks, and you’d report directly to me.”

“Like I said, I’ll think about it.”

“What’s to think about? Is training SWAT cops so exciting? It’s not like you couldn’t use the money. I had a look at your finances . . .”

Dale laughed.

Callan said, “Hey, two K a day is nothing to sneer at.”

Dale took up his tall glass of iced tea and swirled the melting ice around in it. “You’re right, it’s not. But it’s been a long time since I worked a protection detail. I’d need to put together a team. Why don’t you just use one of your off-the-shelf teams instead? Don’t tell me that Kroner-O’Hanrahan doesn’t have VIP protection teams.”

“You know that we do. But we want you. You’re right here and you’ve already got the best police liaison.”

“I don’t know if I want to wrap my mind around that kind of problem again.”

Callan crossed his arms on his chest. “You’ve gotten too used to the easy life, brother. You’re not fooling anybody. You need some edge to be happy.”

“I like what I’m doing just fine.”

“Maybe so. Look, will you take a ride with me to look at the principal? The guy is in bad shape, he needs top-shelf people to look after him.”

Dale watched a bird perch on a branch, then flit away. “How long would we be talking? I couldn’t take an open-ended commitment.”

Callan turned and leaned toward Dale. “Just a couple of weeks. Till the powers that be decide to keep him here or move him to a secure facility and bring the doctors to him. They’d have moved him by now, but the Center has the best people, and they won’t work offsite. They want control of their environment, and who can blame them? They’re the best in the world at what they do. So you’re looking at just a few weeks.”

“I could use whoever I wanted?”

“I’ve got a short list of experienced freelance operators if you
need it. But you can use who you like. Maybe you’ve got some local people. Up to you.”

Dale slouched in his chair and uncrossed his ankles, stretching his legs out. He sipped from his iced tea, and brushed at his shirt where a few drops of condensation dripped from his glass. “Look around you, Mike. This is life. People out enjoying themselves, raising their children, going to work. You ever feel like you’re missing something?”

“I like what I do,” Callan said.

“So do I,” Dale said. “All of it.”

Nina Capushek was thirty-four years old, a brunette athlete with a model’s face, and a respected detective in the Sex Crimes section of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit. She and Dale lived together in her lakeside condominium overlooking Lake Harriet, a short two blocks away from the ice-cream parlor Dale used as his hangout. The two of them sat in her front room with its big windows that looked out on the lake and the tree-shaded pedestrian paths there.

“What do you think I should do?” Dale said.

“That’s not for me to answer,” she said. “That’s your call. We don’t need the money, but I don’t think you want to do this for just the money anyway. You need engagement, and I don’t think you’re getting what you need from training and riding along on entries. I think you miss having a mission of some kind. You don’t need my permission to do this.”

“I’m not suggesting that I need your permission,” he said, heat in his voice. “I’m looking for your input.”

“In that case, I think you’ve already decided to do it. You’re just seeing if you can talk yourself out of it or not. You’d be in charge and you can run it your way and it’s short term, right? Couple of weeks? Why not? We can use the money for a vacation.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“You make it difficult when you get in your own way. Why not do it?”

“I don’t know if I want to get involved with the G again. Even if they’re hands-off and keeping their distance.”

“I don’t blame you for that. But it’s short term, you’ve got a trusted friend running it, and it’s a contract—you can walk when you want to.”

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am,” she said. She touched his thigh. “Want to go for a run and then get laid, or get laid and then go for a run?”

Kroner-O’Hanrahan was a world leader in security, and the management insisted that the corporate staff carry only the latest of state-of-the-art communications equipment. So Mike Callan was able to have a secure cell phone conversation with Ray Dalton, even while Callan was comfortably seated on a sunbathed bench looking over Lake Harriet, admiring the tanned and athletic women passing by.