“I hope you have not correctly grasped the thrust of what that very sincere young man is saying,” the old man said, “but I very much fear you have.”
Feeling strange, feeling as if the Beast’s mark the fundamentalists said listening to rock ’n’ roll would give you was finally glowing to red life on his forehead, 666, Mark mumbled thanks and started away. The old man called him back.
“I hope you will forgive my saying so, young man, but you look just like the Jesus of the Calvinists, with your long blond hair and your beard,” the old man said. “Fortunately I am Catholic.”
Mark blinked and smiled sheepishly, as startled at being called “young” as by the rest of what the old man said. He was in his early forties, and he didn’t feel young.
Then purposeful movement caught the corners of his peripheral vision, and alarms rang in his skull.
On Takis the assassin’s knife is just part of the decor. You reflexively learn to pick it out of the background, the way an antique freak could spot a Louis Quinze chiffonier in the clutter of an Amsterdam spring market. Or you die.
“Get down,” Mark said to the old man. He turned to run.
“Hey!” A voice shouted behind him – American English, bright and brassy as a trumpet. “Hey, you son of a bitch, stop!”
That was it. The dogs were on him. He thought it would take them longer to sniff him out. He stretched his long legs and ran like hell.
“Motherfucker,” the slender dark-haired man snarled. His hand dove inside the summer-weight off-white jacket he wore without a tie.
His beefier, blonder comrade grabbed at his arm. “Lynn, no -”
The Czech Skorpion is a true machine pistol, which is to say it’s pistol-sized and it shoots full-automatic like a machine gun. Not appreciably accurate but nice and concealable, just the thing for chopping up people at handshake range. It was a popular number with the Euroterrorist set, like the West German Red Army Fraction before the Wall came tumbling down.
The Colt Scorpion is entirely different. It’s manufactured in America for use by various government agencies, which is to say the DEA. It looks like the Czech Skorpion, it works like the Czech Skorpion, and it fires the same round as the Czech Skorpion. But the Czech Skorpion is used by terrorists, and the American Scorpion is used by the good guys. No similarity at all.
The man called Lynn used his Scorpion the way they teach at all the better law-enforcement academies: you fire short bursts and sort of slash the thing around as if it’s a scimitar. People screamed and fell. A loudspeaker popped and died. The plush-headed young man in the para pants goggled and ran for cover behind the white pillar of the monument.
The Netherlands was a peaceful place, and proud of it. Though first socialism and then Greenthink had made them self-conscious about it, the Dutch still regarded trade as a more elevated calling than murder made legal, made sport. They lacked gunfire reflexes.
Most of the crowd was just standing and staring, not realizing where the sudden loud sounds were coming from or even what they were. The tall man took instinctive advantage of this, darting this way and that through the crush like a frightened earthbound crane, his shoulder-length gray-blond hair flying a head above the crowd but not offering any kind of shot, even for someone calm enough to draw bead.
The man with the Scorpion wasn’t. His dark eyes burned like drops of molten metal, and beans of knotted muscle stood out inside the hinge of either jaw. The veins and bones of his hands seemed about to burst through the skin as his partner wrestled them and the machine pistol into the air.
“Lynn, Jesus, take it easy,” the big blond kid gasped. “There’s gonna be hell to pay if you cap too many natives.”
Lynn tore away from him with a wordless curse, raised the weapon again. Their quarry had darted behind the white cement demilune that backed the monument pillar and vanished.
The good burghers were belatedly getting the message that something was very wrong, and diving to the pavement to join those who were rolling around clutching themselves and screaming. “You son of a bitch, Gary,” Lynn raged, swinging the Scorpion both-armed in front of him like Josй Canseco in the on-deck circle. “You let him get away!”
“Yeah,” Gary said, hauling on the sleeve of his Don Johnson pastel sport jacket. “Now we’d better think about getting away before the cavalry comes.”
He dragged Lynn, still screaming, through a now-panicked crowd. The Amsterdammers didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, as if they didn’t associate the two Americans with the abrupt irruption of noise and pain. They dodged across Damrak/Rokin and down the street that ran along the north side of the square, to a silver and blue cicada of a Citroлn parked in front of the Nieuwe Kerk.
A figure dropped down from the sky to meet them. Her slim form was encased in a uniform of blue and silver. A parachute-like cape deflated around her shoulders as she touched down. Her hair was brown.
“You missed him,” she said in a flat voice.
Lynn slammed his scorpion back into its shoulder holster. “If you’d been down low covering us instead of showboating way the hell up there in the wild blue yonder, he never would’ve gotten away.”
She gave him a haughty look. She was well equipped for it, with the kind of narrow nose and fine features that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a glamour magazine, and hadn’t. There were dark circles beneath the green-hazel eyes, though, and a haunted look within them.
“I had no idea you were going to move so quickly. I thought we were going to set this up carefully and then move. Forgive me if I don’t quite have the hang of your methods.”
“Lynn saw the sucker,” the blond agent said. “It just kind of set him off. There’s history between them, y’know?”
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” the ace said. “I’d figure that going off prematurely would be one of your friend’s difficulties.”
Lynn gave her a look black and hot as the flank of a potbellied stove. Then he turned and kicked the Citro’s door. “He’s just a hippie. A fucking burned-out hippie. How the hell could he make us?”
“Somebody must have told him,” his partner said. “Somebody turned us over.”
“These damned Dutch uncles. They don’t have the stomach for the War on Drugs. They’ve been jacking with us since day one.” He shook his head. “If I hadn’t cut loose on him the second I spotted him, we’d never” The sirens had tuned up, their little voices rising and falling like a computer-simulated doo-wop group. The woman’s face went white. “You trigger-happy halfwits!” she snarled. “You just sprayed a crowd with bullets?”
“He’s an ace,” the bigger man said defensively. “What do you want Lynn to do, Ms. Carlysle, let Meadows have first crack at him? A good man’s already died on the trail of this puke.”
“Shot accidentally by NYPD,” the woman said, “as a result of his own carelessness.”
“You fucking bitch.” Lynn started forward as if to strike her.
A whistling rose around the agent. A cloud of dust swirled upward to surround him. His dark hair began to whip in his face, and his clothing to flap as if he were caught in the midst of a whirlwind. He opened his mouth, but suddenly seemed to have no air to speak with.
His partner laid a hand on his arm. “Lynn, take it easy. She didn’t mean anything.”
The whistling stopped. Lynn fell back against the car, briefly and resentfully touched the base of his throat with his fingertips.
“I’m quite capable of taking care of myself, Agent Hamilton,” the woman said. “Your being so quick on the draw is going to cause us serious problems with our hosts.”
Lynn had recovered enough to show her a smirk. “So what? They can’t touch us. We’re DEA.”