The pilot of the speedboat gave his motor a squirt of gas and turned the boat toward us. Another man crawled from the cockpit, a fresh AK-47 at the ready.
The houseboat lumbered forward; no way could we outrun them. Our advantage, if you could call it that, was size and heft.
I turned the helm to the left and motored into the middle of the canal. The speedboat pilot was so fixed on getting into a good firing position that he didn’t notice that I was nosing him toward the canal’s opposite wall.
The shooter raised his gun, but I drove him off the hull with three quick shots from my Walther. I had seven bullets left and a fresh magazine in my coat pocket. I fired two more in the direction of the speedboat’s pilot. He eased off the throttle long enough for me to nudge him closer to the canal wall. We were now thirty feet away and closing.
The speedboat pilot finally realized the danger and hollered in panic. He jerked the throttle and tried to reverse his engine. The boat didn’t respond.
I spun the helm to the left. Now there was nothing to cushion the blow with the canal wall except the speedboat trapped between us. That was the plan.
A surge of water lifted the speedboat, and the houseboat slammed the tiny hull against the concrete. The speedboat splintered, taking both pilot and gunman down with it.
I didn’t look back. I eased the throttle back on the houseboat and guided it into the middle of the channel, toward a second canal on the left and a stone bridge. I heard sirens. I saw patrol cars with blue lights flashing on their roofs. One parked close to the railing on the opposite side, and a searchlight lanced across our flotilla of gondolas.
From what I could see, there was no sign of the gunmen on the thoroughfare by this time. I filled my lungs and took note of my heart rate: sixty-six. A little high, but not bad given the excitement.
I urged the houseboat’s two crewmen to their feet. “Take the wheel,” I said to the helmsman. I pointed to a wooden pier jutting out into the water a hundred yards ahead. “That’s my stop. Get me close.”
Then I caught the radioman’s eye. “Alert the channel police. And get an ambulance over here. Then get downstairs and check on your passengers. If you’ve got a first aid kit, I’d bring it along.” He just stared at me. I snapped, “Now, sailor!”
He jumped to it, powering up his radio and tapping an area-wide emergency number. We were closing in on the pier. I gestured at the helmsman’s jacket and hat. “Mind if I borrow those?”
“What?”
My Dutch sucked. I switched to English. “Your hat and jacket.”
I realized the Walther was still dangling from my hand, and I stuffed it into my shoulder holster. I fished a roll of euros from my pocket and gave him half. I stripped off my coat. He did the same. It was a poor disguise even with his baseball cap, but the police would be looking for brown suede, not sailor blue, so it was better than nothing.
The helmsman cut the power and turned the nose toward the pier. “Ten seconds,” he said.
“Sorry about your boat,” I said. What else could I say? I half expected him to say, Screw you, but he didn’t. In fact, as I was jumping from the bridge to the main deck, he said, “Good luck.”
He swung the stern within two feet of the pier. I jumped. I looked back long enough to raise a hand, but by then he was busying steering his shattered boat back into the middle of the canal, his world changed forever.
In the distance, I saw the spires of an ancient church illuminated by a gibbous moon. When in need of a hiding place, look for a house of worship. Mr. Elliot must have said that to me a dozen times, but I’d always thought he was kidding. Maybe not.
I walked. Running might have felt like the right thing to do, but running had one very negative side effect: people took notice. I also thought people might take notice of the helmsman’s jacket — not exactly my style — so I shed it as I walked along a cobbled walk lined with gift shops and street-side cafés. I saw an empty table on the patio of a coffee shop and took a seat facing the walk. I hung the jacket on the back of the chair. I powered up my iPhone. I entered Roger Anderson’s phone number and typed a short text: Trouble. Change of plans. Nieuwe Kerk. One hour?
I waited, allowing my eyes to drift from one end of the block to the other. By now the police would have my description. By now the guys in the delivery truck would have called in reinforcements. But they’d had their opportunity and blown it. You only get so many chances at the perfect ambush. They’d played it poorly. Too much drama. I’d learned one thing a long time ago: guys with guns love making a big show of things, but the best kills were the ones no one sees coming.
My phone vibrated. Two words: Roger that.
I got up, left the coat, and tugged at the brim of my newly acquired hat. The Nieuwe Kerk was only a thousand yards or so from where I was standing as the crow flies, but I took the back streets. I hadn’t spent much time in Amsterdam, and when I had, it had always been work related. I never really had the chance to appreciate the ancient melding of wood, brick, and stone that carried from building to building or the houses fronting the maze of tree-lined canals. I could see the romance that drew couples here. Oh, yeah. And of course, everyone knew that Amsterdam’s red-light district had few rivals, and their lax drug laws were the stuff of legend, so maybe there was an appeal to the college kid on holiday or someone looking for an uninhibited place to drown his sorrows. Me, I’d take a quiet stroll on a New Jersey beach any day.
I crossed under the viaduct and into a residential district populated with multistory apartment buildings with latticed windows and graceful gables. Here, the bottom floors were crowded with the offices of lawyers and dentists. A trio of muscle heads, vapor steaming from their thick necks and sweat-soaked jerseys, ambled out of a gym. To the north stood the Montelbaanstoren clock tower with its white-columned top and matching spire. Lumbering on my right was the itinerant water of the Oude Schans canal.
I stopped in the shadows of a magnificent elm and sent Moradi a text. He replied that he was okay and asked me where I was. I didn’t reply right away. Moradi wasn’t my problem, I was sure of that, but the problem was too close to him for me to work that side of the street again.
I would need the MEK again once I reached Tehran, but for now I needed some distance. But Moradi deserved at least one last communiqué. If Kia Akbari hadn’t put himself in harm’s way tonight, I might not have survived. His death was worth a couple of words, so I typed: I’ll make sure Akbari didn’t die in vain. Then I pressed the send button.
I was a block from the Nieuwe Kerk when my phone vibrated again. I stared at the screen. General Tom Rutledge. His message read: The chief of staff needs a word. See the map.
CHAPTER 8
This wasn’t a good idea.
I’d just seen a man killed. The mission was compromised by sources I hadn’t yet determined, but I knew for sure I couldn’t trust the DDO’s men any more than I could the MEK’s.
The answer was to play one against the other, but that kind of counterintelligence took time and resources. Right now, I just needed to get to Istanbul and make damn certain I covered my tracks into Iran. And here I was waiting for a phone call.
Politicians. They always needed to be front and center. And anyone who tried to tell you that the president’s chief of staff wasn’t a politician had been living under a rock for a very long time.
“The chief of staff needs a word,” General Tom Rutledge had said exactly six minutes and twenty seconds earlier. I was sitting in the back pew of the Nieuwe Kerk, a Gothic masterpiece that history dated back to the fifteenth century and more or less made it hard to justify that Nieuwe Kerk translated literally into “New Church.” Well, maybe not so new, but way back then it served as the replacement for a slightly smaller house of worship called Oude Kerk. You guessed it: “Old Church.”