The Wrong Girl (39 page)

Stations were good for crowds. Good for other things too.

For ease of mind he went to the nearest ticket machine and bought two singles to Schiphol. An obvious destination. One of the most popular short routes there was from here. And the tickets would save them any hassle on the train.

There were two towers on the station. Hanna was looking from one to the other. Puzzled. Most people were. One was a clock. The other looked like one but with a single hand that baffled newcomers since all it indicated was the direction of the wind.

Northerly, Vos thought. He knew that steady bitter chill of old.

Then she stopped, raised the phone to her ear. Eyes fixed on the cobbles and the steel tramlines through them, listening intently.

It couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. After that she was marching into the station, phone locked to her ear.

He watched her go past, not a glimpse in his direction. Then she called.

‘He says I have to catch the train to somewhere called Vlissingen. Platform five. Carriage three. The upstairs compartment. It goes in four minutes. Where the hell’s Vlissingen?’

A three-hour ride south.

‘A long way,’ he said. ‘There are lots of stops before that.’

Schiphol. The Hague. Delft. Rotterdam. Middelburg. They could be headed anywhere.

‘Hanna. I’ve got a ticket you can use.’

She was walking so quickly it was hard to keep up.

‘I’ve got a ticket already,’ she told him.

Platform five. The double-decker train was pulling in as they got there.

It was one of the long-distance services. Lots of space. Not too busy.

She went upstairs in the third carriage and sat in the last part of the forward section. He went to the opposite end.

Quick turnaround. Station staff yelling at tourists to get on the train.

Then they pulled out. Vos picked up a spare paper someone had left. Pretended to read it. Looked around.

Eleven people. Four women. Six men. One kid no more than twelve. A boy.

Hanna was staring out of the window. Phone in hand.

Natalya might be anywhere on the train. He could put in a call, halt it at an early stop. Haul everyone off. Question them until they narrowed things down.

Vos put down the paper and wondered how he could be so slow.

They wouldn’t have the girl here. Too obvious. Too easily detected. It had to be more complicated than that. And when things were complex you approached them slowly. Let a picture emerge. Analysed it. Worked out where to go next.

Maybe seven minutes to the next station, Sloterdijk. After that Lelylaan.

Then the airport station at Schiphol.

He couldn’t believe they were going far.

Rapenburg was a quiet narrow street. Old houses. Some offices. Neat cobblestones. Like Zeedijk without people, neon and sleaze. Residential, Kuyper guessed. He didn’t know this part of the city well. But it was obvious most people were out to work.

A good place to hide.

Another red door. Much like Smits’s office. No name on the bell. He rang it anyway. Waited a long minute. The sound of bolts being drawn back, a key in the lock. Then a curious, not unfriendly face. Clean-shaven, recently by the looks of it. There was the rough, red shadow of a vanished beard on his cheeks.

Perhaps fifty. A bulky man he wore a capacious knitted brown cardigan, the sleeves too long, and pale cream trousers. The size of him seemed odd. And gross.

‘Henk Kuyper,’ he said. ‘Come in. Please . . .’

He followed the waddling figure down a narrow corridor into a small room at the back. There was one window onto a tiny courtyard. Nothing else except a desk with a computer on it and two chairs.

The man took one, fell into it heavily. Kuyper sat opposite him at the desk. The sound of a radio newscast was coming out of the PC. More about the economy. And the football riot. Nothing else.

‘I am Khaled,’ the man said and held out a flabby hand.

Kuyper took it. Warm, soft and dry. Five years he’d been waiting to get close to these people. Now it felt unreal.

‘Here.’

He poured two glasses of water from a bottle next to the PC. San Pellegrino. Warm. Flat.

‘What a mess,’ Khaled said with a shake of his head. ‘So many high hopes at the beginning. That we might free our brother Alamy. Right a few wrongs.’

‘The girl . . .’

‘And this offer of yours. A daughter. Granddaughter of a monster. It seemed so . . . generous.’

‘I thought I’d meet Barbone.’

Khaled’s eyes narrowed.

‘Who’s Barbone?’

‘Please . . .’ Kuyper sighed. ‘Smits said—’

‘Smits is an employee. A minor one. A fool. He shouldn’t speak out of turn.’

‘The girl—’

‘—was not your daughter. The weapons Bouali possessed . . . they were not what we expected. You toyed with us, Kuyper. This was all a game, wasn’t it? A dangerous one. From everyone’s point of view.’

The man’s attitude annoyed him.

‘If you thought I wasn’t genuine why did you go along with it?’

Khaled frowned, puzzled.

‘Curiosity. And because we believed there might be some advantage. Why else?’

‘I did my best to help you,’ Kuyper insisted. ‘If I wanted you in jail why am I here alone?’

The man in front of him puffed out his cheeks then looked around the room.

‘What was it that play of yours says? Conscience just makes cowards of us all.’

‘A coward wouldn’t be here,’ Kuyper said.

‘True. But you have a conscience, don’t you? It’s cost us all dear. Now Barbone is mad. With you. With me. With everyone. He tells me I must leave Amsterdam. A city I enjoy. He’s not a man to upset. Life isn’t safe here any more. Why?’

‘You took the wrong girl. Not my fault.’

Khaled opened a drawer and retrieved a sheet of paper.

‘Pink jacket. Blonde hair.’ He pushed the printout across the table. ‘This is the picture you sent us. This is the girl we took. Please, Kuyper. Abandon this pretence. Barbone’s no fool. He saw through you that first day in the park.’

Kuyper looked at the sheet. The photo was Natalya Bublik. He’d taken it in the street surreptitiously when she was coming home from school with her mother. Cropped Hanna Bublik out of the picture. If things had gone the way they should none of this would have mattered.

‘I must have made a mistake,’ he murmured.

‘A big one,’ Khaled agreed. ‘Not to know what your own child looks like.’

The way he sat was wrong somehow.

‘This girl you took has no value,’ Kuyper said. ‘If you let her go . . .’

The bemused look again.

‘You assume she’s still ours. You assume so much. Why?’

‘Because I don’t believe an eight-year-old child’s your enemy.’

A shrug. Then Khaled took a packet of cigarettes from the right hand pocket of the bulky cardigan, shook one free, lit it. His hand was trembling.

‘What can I give you?’ Kuyper asked.

‘Freedom. Tell your people I want out. Safe passage from Holland. Let me be honest. I’m like Smits. An employee. Not a fanatic. I do this because I must. My family’s in their custody in Iraq. You think I choose to cause this trouble?’

Kuyper stayed silent.

‘I sense we’re both at the mercy of others, Henk. If we can find a solution that’s to our mutual advantage . . .’

A glimmer of hope.

‘I’ll take you in myself. See what we can do.’

‘No, no, no,’ Khaled said firmly. ‘After all this nonsense how can I deal with the likes of you? Get me someone whose word means something.’

‘My word . . .’

He stopped. The fat man opposite had leaned back in his chair and was gazing at him, amused.

‘What do you want?’ Kuyper repeated.

‘Bring me your handler. Your boss. Someone who’s what they seem. Not a fool who can’t see his own shadow. If I hear it from him then we’ve something to talk about. Otherwise be gone. The arrangements are made. We’re fleeing, man. You understand why?’

He thought about how Mirjam Fransen would relish this opportunity. As always she’d want to raise the stakes.

‘If I bring in someone they’ll want Barbone. The network.’

The shrug again.

‘If it’s in my interest I’ll give you what you want . . .’ A brief smile. ‘That’s a lot. Believe me. He’s still here. Others of his men too.’

‘You said they had your family.’

Khaled’s big head went to one side, amused.

‘What’s that proverb of yours? Out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes a man has to look after himself. No one else. There’s nothing I can do to help them now.’

Henk Kuyper pulled out his phone. He hadn’t called Mirjam Fransen directly in years. So he had to look up the number. Then, in a couple of seconds, he was through.

Just a minute out of Centraal Hanna’s phone rang. He could hear the tinny trill all the way down the carriage. Set to maximum volume. What else?

Brief conversation. She was staring out of the window, watching the grey city go past.

Two big men marched down the carriage. Black leather jackets. Grim faces. Could have been anyone. But they were looking. Vos’s eyes stayed on the newspaper. They strode past Hanna, went down the stairs at the far end.

You
, Vos thought and wondered how much use that information might be.

It was another five or six minutes to Sloterdijk. Then four more to Lelylaan. After that another seven minutes or so to Schiphol. Then the train set off on the longer sections of the journey, through Leiden on to the south.

He knew how he’d approach this problem. And when he knew that he’d a pretty good idea how they would too.

Hanna came off the phone, seemed lost in herself for a moment, then called him.

‘They want me to leave the money under the seat and get off at the next stop. There’s a train like this back into the city in ten minutes. Fifth carriage. They say I need to go upstairs and they’ll call me there if they’re happy with the money.’

Sloterdijk. Three minutes away now.

‘Vos?’

‘Do it,’ he said.

‘Is this for real?’

‘Let’s find out.’

The pickup pair could be off the train the moment it called at the next stop and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

‘If they screw me around . . .’

‘Hanna. This is their game right now. We have to play it.’

They’d worked this perfectly. Whoever was running the operation would have people on the ground at Lelylaan checking to see if there was a police presence at the station. They could pull out before the girl was free.

Except . . .

Trains.

Too public. They’d surely want to keep her hidden until they knew they could release her without getting caught.

If any of this was serious in the first place.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ she asked.

‘As much as ever. Leave them the money. Cross the platform and wait for the train. I’ll be a little way along from you.’

‘If they . . .’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I heard you the first time.’

Van der Berg was on his second sticky bun. Crumbs were piling up all over the table.

‘Maybe we should stick with the murder case here,’ she thought.

‘The commissaris wants us to hang around with our friends from AIVD. What the commissaris wants—’

‘He doesn’t get,’ Bakker broke in. ‘Didn’t you notice? Mirjam Fransen’s running things now.’

He beamed and wiped away some crumbs.

‘She certainly thinks so, doesn’t she?’

‘And Vos?’

Van der Berg wasn’t listening. He was looking down the alley. Fransen was off the phone, summoning her team. They were leaving Smits’s office.

‘Something’s happening,’ Bakker said.

‘Something’s always happening.’ Van der Berg finished the pastry then swigged the dregs of his coffee. ‘Just a question of whether it matters.’

He got up quickly from the table and glanced at her.

‘Are we going?’

Bakker snatched at her bag.

‘Where?’

The AIVD people had called for their vehicles. Two black Mercedes saloons and a grey van.

‘Where they take us,’ he said.

The train lumbered into Sloterdijk station. Hanna got up and left by the front staircase. All she had now was the small shoulder bag. With her brown coat, new hair, new glasses she might have been going to the office.

Vos took his paper and left by the back steps.

No sign of the men in black leather jackets. He walked forward, past Hanna, up the platform. Watched as the train pulled out.

They were there, retracing their steps to the upstairs carriage.

Money delivered.

Now, if this was for real, the prize.

Ten minutes to kill.

On another day, in different circumstances, he would have been running this as a full operation. Teams of officers quietly watching, in plain clothes, rail uniforms, from carriages, platforms and bridges. Waiting outside in cars.

All that was beyond him. He could blame AIVD. Bad luck. Circumstance. But Vos wasn’t that kind of man. Mainly he blamed himself.

Hanna Bublik found a bench seat and sat outside in the cold bright day. He leaned against a lamp post and waited.

Bang on time the massive intercity train pulled into the station, brakes squealing, coughing smoke from beneath its slowing wheels.

Barely a handful of people ready to get on. Only three came off.

Fifth carriage.

She went upstairs. He took the seat at the end. The train seemed almost empty.

Hanna’s phone rang.

‘Mrs Bublik,’ a voice said.

She blinked. It wasn’t Cem Yilmaz. Just the same words.

‘I left the money,’ she murmured.

‘I know.’

There was amusement in his voice.

‘I’ve done everything you asked,’ she pleaded.

‘I know that too.’

He was toying with her. Enjoying it.

‘Where’s my daughter?’ she asked.

No answer.

‘Where?’

Gagged and trapped it wasn’t easy to breathe inside the holdall. The thing was old and smelled of dust and mould. Natalya clutched her chest, lying on the thin blanket, still in the pink jacket that was getting filthier by the hour.

Sounds.

She tried to analyse them.