LITMIR.BIZ

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what I’ve been able to find out. Someone may have killed him.”

      “So instead of a person,” Elle said, “you could be looking for a boat anchor or fish chum.”

      “Exactly,” Sam said. “I have to tell you, this could be dangerous.”

      “You don’t have to tell me,” Elle replied with a smile. “I’m a secret agent. I figured it out all on my own. C’mon. If I’m going to have to stay on my toes, we need to find me that mocha latte.”

      Chapter 2

      Standing in the shadows in front of Central Station, Joachim Reiter watched the two young women leave the building. They headed toward the red-light district and that didn’t please him. Although the sex shops and brothels were tourist attractions, they were also places were people got into trouble and sometimes got killed.

      And those two women—or maybe only the one he’d first met at the train station—were in trouble. Otherwise Arnaud Beck’s men wouldn’t have led Joachim to them.

      The last hour had been quite the circus, Joachim reflected. Tension and nervousness rattled through him. He didn’t want to be there, so far from home and his family. Being out of the country right now threatened everything. If any of his subterfuges were found out, he was dead. More important, so was his family.

      He exhaled and avoided the fear clamoring inside his mind. One step at a time, Joachim. You won’t make any mistakes. Just get this done and get back home.

      But things had already gotten more complicated than he’d guessed. He’d been sent to Amsterdam to find a man named Tuenis Meijer and had tripped across Beck’s men while gathering information about his target. Thinking that Beck’s men might lead him to Meijer, Joachim had followed them, staying out of sight. They’d never known he was there until he let them see him in the railway station.

      Then they had locked on to the young blond woman at the station. Joachim still didn’t know who she was or what threat or possibility of gain she represented to a man like Arnaud Beck, but he’d known he couldn’t let them kidnap her or kill her.

      Although he had, in the past, kidnapped and killed other men, Joachim couldn’t stand idly by while something happened to the woman. He wasn’t that kind of man. And he didn’t want to be the kind of man Günter Stahlmann paid him to be.

      He was working on a way out. If trying to get there didn’t get him or his family killed in the process. Still, he played that deadly game by his rules and he’d made Günter respect them. Rule number one was that Joachim would never harm an innocent.

      That was why he had broken his cover and revealed himself to Beck’s men. Although they’d had their quarry in their sights, his presence there had upped the stakes. For them all, he ruefully admitted. No one was supposed to know he was there, either.

      That decision was going to bring him trouble. He took trouble one step at a time, though. He’d learned that from years spent living between the crush of evil and the law. None of it had been easy. Even the way out he was now reaching for couldn’t promise he would live out his life instead of getting a bullet through his head or a knife across his throat for his betrayal.

      But the women had gone one way and Beck’s men, now wise to his presence, had gone another. It was a stalemate that he could live with at the moment. What happened to them later was out of his hands. If something did happen, he hoped he would never know.

      One of his cell phones chirped for attention. He pulled the device from inside his jacket, but his eyes stayed on the two blond women walking toward Oude Zijde.

      A freighter passing in the north canal on the other side of the station sounded its horn, the tone mournful on the night air, like some lonely beast.

      “Yes,” Joachim said into the phone. He spoke Russian now. Like his German and English, his voice carried no dialect.

      “I have an address for you,” the young woman’s voice on the other end announced. “Your target lives on a houseboat called Satyr Dreams down on Achterburgwal. It’s near the intersection of Rusland Street.”

      “I can find it.” Joachim paused, wondering how much he should reveal. But then, there was always the possibility that the woman was tracking his progress. “Beck’s men are here.”

      Some of the confidence vanished from the young woman’s tone. “Are you certain?”

      “One of them is known to me. He’s a criminal named Felix Horst. He specializes in armory and wetwork.” Wetwork was a euphemism for murder and assassination. Joachim knew people who did such things, but he would never be one of them.

      “You knew that it was likely you would cross paths with Beck. I told you that.”

      “You did. But if Beck, or at least one of his lieutenants, is here, it affects what we are able to do in the future. If you have any influence with him…”

      “Beck is not part of this organization. I told you that, too.”

      She had, but Joachim hadn’t necessarily believed her. The fact that she knew Beck, and knew what kind of man he was, made her information on him suspect. Most people outside the criminal syndicate and law enforcement didn’t know about Beck. That she did told him he needed to be careful.

      “Concentrate on your mission, Joachim,” she chided him. “Call me when you reach his houseboat.”

      The phone clicked in Joachim’s ear. He closed the cell phone and replaced it in his pocket. Slowly, he turned and surveyed the street. Is she watching? He wasn’t certain.

      Paranoia was a constant state of his profession. The feeling was one of the things that kept him alive all these years. His world was filled with gunrunners and black marketers, dope dealers and blackmailers, thieves and murderers. The sad thing was, he felt more at home in that world than any other.

      Sometimes, when he let his own doubts and limitations plague him, he lost hope that he would ever be out of the sewer he was in. All his life that he could remember had been about violence, about crime that boiled down to sex and money. Even if he got out of it, got away from Günter and men like him, Joachim wondered how he was supposed to live like a normal man.

      He would never be normal.

      At the canal he flagged down a water taxi and gave his target’s address, wishing he knew more about why he was there.

      And why a man as dangerous as Arnaud Beck was, too.

      As Sam walked toward the area, Amsterdam’s red-light district pulsed neon against the encroaching night. It was just after 10:00 p.m. locally and the nine-to-five crowds had given the city over to the nightlife. The clubs and bars were full, and music stained the air, but traffic was sparse.

      The city was shaped like a horseshoe, built on the old streets that had accommodated horse-and-buggy traffic. The canals had always offered transport, and the majority of destinations were within walking distance. Small parties and big groups walked through the streets and window-shopped.

      She and Elle walked alone.

      The Voorburgwal Canal lay to their right and the Achterburgwal Canal to their left. Buildings were crammed together in the space between. Trees and boats lined the canals and bicyclists weaved between the pedestrians.

      The red-light district created a ruby bubble of illumination in Oude Zijde, the old side of the city. Although she hadn’t been there yet, Sam knew sex shops and brothels filled the area. What she was probably going to see intrigued her, but at the same time she was put off by reports of sexual slavery. Willing adults putting on a sex show in a window was one thing, but she had to wonder if some were forced to perform.

      “When was the last time you were in Amsterdam?” Sam asked, curious about her sister’s life.

      “Five months ago. Perhaps six.”

      “You never mentioned it.”

      “I

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