Книга - The Rapids

The Rapids
Carla Neggers


She has no time to take a break after playing a key role in the arrest of dangerous fugitive Nicholas Janssen. But with Janssen fighting extradition from his Dutch prison, U.S. diplomatic security agent Maggie Spencer isn't about to back off–even when U.S. marshal Rob Dunnemore turns up asking some very tough questions. Maggie has no reason to trust Rob, especially when she learns he has a personal interest: he was almost killed thanks to Janssen.Then Maggie and Rob discover the body of an American diplomat, and they realize there's another killer on the loose. Determined to tie up the case, Maggie heads to upstate New York following a questionable lead. Knowing she's holding back on him, Rob's right on her tail. And now she has no choice but to trust him. Because a trap has been set and they have both walked right into it.






Praise for the novels of

CARLA NEGGERS


“No one does romantic suspense better!”

—New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich

“Neggers’s brisk pacing and colorful characterizations sweep the reader toward a dramatic and ultimately satisfying denouement.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Cabin

“These pages don’t just turn; they spin with the best of them.”

—BookPage on The Waterfall

“Neggers delivers a colorful, well-spun story that shines with sincere emotion.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Carriage House

“Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more can a reader ask for? The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

—New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen

“Tension-filled story line that grips the audience from start to finish.”

—Midwest Book Review on The Waterfall

“Carla Neggers is one of the most distinctive, talented writers of our genre.”

—New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber




CARLA NEGGERS

The Rapids










ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


A special thank-you to my Dutch cousins Henk and Christine Nouwen, Jan and Martha van de Leur, Amy Knechten, Sonja van den Akker and Bart, Leo, Marie Louise, Nanny and Rob Neggers for their warm welcome and many family stories on our visits to the Netherlands. Christine was my “Dutch pen pal” when I was growing up in small-town western Massachusetts and she was growing up in Eindhoven. Henk—who for some mysterious reason thinks the Neggers family is a bit argumentative!—went above and beyond the call of duty in answering my many questions for this book and even put me in touch with a Dutch police inspector, who was equally generous with his time and expertise. I’ve promised to keep working on my Dutch vocabulary…but I’ll never get those “g’s” down!

I’m so glad we got to see my cousin Carla, for whom I’m named, before her recent death. I will always remember our lunch in her beautiful garden…she and her husband, Daan, had the most gorgeous roses….

Many thanks to the deputy U.S. marshal who was so gracious and helpful in talking with me, and to my brother Mark and sister-in-law Kathy Neggers for showing me around the scenic and very special Hudson River Valley.

As I write this, hiking season is about to get under way here in northern New England. I’m still determined to hike all forty-eight peaks over 4,000 feet in the White Mountains…but it’s going to take a while, because I really like walking on the beach, too! I’m also diving into my next book. If you’d like to get in touch with me, please visit my Web site, www.carlaneggers.com.

Thank you, and take care!

Carla Neggers

P.O. Box 826

Quechee, VT 05059


To Kate Jewell and Conor Hansen




Contents


Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One




One


Maggie Spencer stood paralyzed in front of the glass case in a small Dutch bakery not far from her apartment. Decisions, decisions. She’d arrived at the American embassy in The Hague three weeks ago, her first foreign assignment as a diplomatic security officer and already had fallen in love with Dutch bread.

“You’ll kill for a Krispy Kreme in another two months.”

She laughed as Thomas Kopac, a midlevel diplomat at the embassy, joined her. “Be careful. I’m talking myself out of chocolate sprinkles.”

“Ah. Hagelslag. It’s more like dessert than breakfast.”

“So’s Krispy Kreme.” Maggie smiled at him. “You said that so well. Hagelslag. My Dutch vocabulary is improving, but pronunciation? Forget it. Nobody understands what I’m saying.”

But she’d had chocolate sprinkles on buttered bread two mornings in a row and decided, instead, on a whole-grain roll with smoked gouda.

Tom didn’t order anything. “I just saw you in the window and figured I’d make you homesick.”

“Do I look like the doughnut-eating type?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going there.”

They headed outside into the late August sun. A midnight rain had washed the humidity and pollution out of the air and perked up the summer roses and hydrangea blooming in dooryard gardens. The embassy was only a few blocks away. Maggie walked comfortably alongside Tom, a balding man in his mid-fifties who’d never married, a career foreign service officer who’d never rise to the top ranks of his profession. He was the sort who would wear the same suit for days on end. His job was his life. Maggie was trying to have more balance for herself, but it wasn’t easy. Still, she’d turned thirty in July and had already learned the hard way that life was too short.

There was, mercifully, nothing romantic in Tom’s offer of friendship.

“You can eat your broodje in front of me,” he said. “I would.”

“Do I look hungry?”

He smiled. “Starving.”

“I’ll have to pound the pavement after work to burn off the extra calories.”

Dutch breakfasts notwithstanding, she kept in shape. At five-five, she couldn’t count on her size to get her out of a jam. Fitness, training, experience and mental toughness were the trick.

And luck.

There was always the luck factor. But since luck wasn’t her long suit, she didn’t count on it, either.

“Look there,” Tom said. “Your hair’s the same color as those roses.”

She noticed the cluster of orange-red roses in a dooryard. “It’s not that red.”

“Is the red hair from your mother or your father?”

“Father.”

He hesitated. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about him.” She smiled to prove she wasn’t just being nice. “My wanderlust is also a Spencer trait.”

The day she’d arrived in The Hague was the eighteen-month anniversary of her father’s death. Philip Spencer, ordinary American businessman, had walked into the middle of a bank robbery in Prague.

Talk about no luck.

The bank robbers still hadn’t been caught. Nobody seemed to be looking too hard for them.

Maggie gave up on resisting, took her roll out of the bag and bit into it, welcoming the smokiness of the cheese and the softness of the bread. Normalcy. She had to establish her routines, focus on her job and continue to move forward with her life. She couldn’t dwell on the past. And it wasn’t her job to investigate her father’s death.

She and Tom walked up Lange Voorhout, a tree-lined street of stately historic buildings that was said to be one of the prettiest in The Hague, or, as it was known formally in Dutch, ’s-Gravenhage, which meant “the count’s hedge.” Even the Dutch shortened it to Den Haag. Although Amsterdam was the official capital, The Hague was the seat of the Dutch government and the residence of its royal family, as well as home to dozens of foreign embassies and the International Court of Justice.

The functional concrete American embassy was often called the ugliest building on Lange Voorhout, possibly in the entire city. The original embassy—presumably more graceful—had been accidentally destroyed by an Allied bomb during World War Two.

“Enjoy your bread and cheese,” Tom said cheerfully when they arrived. “And don’t work too hard.”

“You’re one to talk.”

He laughed. “Not me. An eighteen-hour day’s my limit.”

Maggie made her way to her desk, pouring herself a mug of coffee before she sat down. As a special agent for the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, she had a wide range of duties and responsibilities. First and foremost was the safety and security of the embassy’s personnel, property and information, whether in or out of the building, and of American citizens in the country. She’d completed six months of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, then worked in U.S. diplomatic security field offices for four years, investigating passport and visa fraud. She’d come to The Hague straight from the Chicago field office, on the heels of a major joint counterterrorism investigation that had culminated in the arrest of a sophisticated trio of Americans producing and selling fraudulent visas.

She ate the last bite of her roll and drank some of her coffee.

Having a father killed by bank robbers in Prague hadn’t hurt her security clearance, nor did it even seem to trouble anyone—at least, not beyond sympathy for her loss.

It troubled her.

But she’d had to put her questions and doubts out of her mind, because there was nothing to be gained by sticking her nose into her father’s murder investigation. The American embassy in Prague and the FBI would keep her informed of any progress. She had her own job to do.

She buried herself in it, and by midafternoon, she realized she’d forgotten lunch. She found some peanut butter crackers in her desk and opened up a bottle of water as she scanned her e-mail.



Re: Nick Janssen.



Now, there was a subject heading, she thought, noticing the message was from a free e-mail account she didn’t recognize. She opened it up and took in the neatly typed words in a single glance, then read them over more slowly. Twice.



Special Agent Spencer,

You must hurry.

Nick Janssen is in ‘s-Hertogenbosch near the entrance of the Binnendieze boat tour. If necessary I can keep him there for another hour or so. But please hurry if you want him.

Sincerely,

A friend



Maggie read through the e-mail a fourth time.

A joke. It had to be.

Nick Janssen was an American fugitive with the rare distinction of being on the “most wanted” lists of both the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service. He’d fled the country a year ago to avoid prosecution for tax evasion. That was enough to put him in hot water with the FBI and the marshals, but he wasn’t considered violent. Then he tried to extort a presidential pardon, a disaster that had left three marshals wounded and three of his own men dead. That the whole mess had come to a climax in the backyard of the Tennessee boyhood home of the President of the United States didn’t help matters.

As if that weren’t plenty, Janssen’s antics also exposed him as the violent, amoral mastermind of a lucrative criminal network of buyers and sellers of illegal arms, drugs and commodities.

Charlene Brooker, an American army captain, was the first person to suspect he was more than a simple tax evader. Janssen had ordered her killed last fall while she was in Amsterdam.

He was in Amsterdam himself during the pardon debacle in May and had managed to disappear shortly after it all blew apart.

Everyone wanted his hide.

Since arriving in the Netherlands, Maggie had worked with various American and Dutch investigators on the Janssen case, but she couldn’t think of a single “friend” who would know Nicholas Janssen’s whereabouts and alert her by an anonymous e-mail.

’S-Hertogenbosch was a small city in the southern Dutch province of Noord-Brabant.

She didn’t know what in blazes the Binnendieze was. The name of a canal? A boat tour company?

You must hurry.

It was almost four o’clock.

Maggie abandoned her peanut butter crackers and got up to go find her boss.



Libby Smith welcomed the breeze that seemed to float up from the Binnendieze, the shallow waterway that encircled most of the old city of ’s-Hertogenbosch. “What happened to your dogs?”

“What?” Nick Janssen seemed confused, but it was obvious he hadn’t liked anything about their meeting from the moment she’d joined him on his bench. It was, he’d said rather pathetically, his favorite spot nowadays. “How did you know about my dogs?”

“Rhodesian ridgebacks, weren’t they?”

He’d dyed his distinctive silver hair a stupid-looking black. As notorious as he was, it was unlikely that anyone in the sleepy southern Dutch city would recognize him, even if he hadn’t colored his hair.

Tourists—most of them Dutch themselves—stood in line for the boat tour of the Binnendieze.

Libby was bored out of her mind. She’d put on a frumpy denim skirt, a cheap tank top and ergonomic sandals and carried a canvas bag over her shoulder loaded with all the usual tourist paraphernalia. Her .22-caliber Beretta was tucked inside her foldable, packable, squishable traveler’s rain jacket.

If necessary, she could get to the Beretta, shoot Nick Janssen and be gone before anyone realized what had happened. If people didn’t expect him to be an international fugitive, they didn’t expect her to be an accomplished killer.

But she hoped violence wouldn’t be necessary. She had very big plans for her new relationship with her fellow American.

“I had to give the dogs away,” he said.

She’d almost forgotten she’d asked about them. “That’s too bad. Still, it wouldn’t be easy to be on the lam with two dogs, never mind ones as large as they were.”

“Samkevich shouldn’t have sent you here,” Janssen said tightly. “We should have met somewhere else.”

“That would have had its own risks.”

Vlad Samkevich, a Russian who lived in London, was a well-known arms dealer who also had an international warrant out for his arrest. But he wasn’t as rich or as desperate as Janssen, and Libby needed someone who was both.

Janssen stared at the tourists talking loudly to one another in Dutch. “Samkevich says you’ve done work for him. You look like a child. How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“You look younger.”

It wasn’t a compliment. She was small and wiry, and although her very short hair was prematurely gray, it still hadn’t added years to her appearance. It was her size and her cute face that made people think she was younger—always too young.

“I can do the job, Mr. Janssen,” she said. “Just give me your list.”

“I’ll need you to prove yourself.”

She was prepared. “I already have.”

He glanced sideways at her. “How?”

“I killed Vladimir Samkevich before I left London two days ago.”

No reaction from Janssen. Not shock, not respect, not anger.

Libby responded in kind and kept her mix of satisfaction and fear to herself. What if she’d guessed wrong? But she knew she hadn’t. The man next to her had no more feeling for the Russian than she did. “Samkevich wasn’t your friend. The authorities don’t have solid evidence on you. You were as much a victim in May as anyone else. You didn’t shoot the two marshals in Central Park or have the Dunnemores kidnapped in Amsterdam. Your guy had his own agenda.”

Janssen made a little noise at her mention of Stuart and Betsy Dunnemore, parents of one of the wounded marshals, friends of John Wesley Poe, the current U.S. president. Libby wasn’t sure she should have brought them up. Janssen had fancied himself in love with Betsy, his former college classmate, and tried to manipulate her into interceding on his behalf with Poe.

He’d thought Betsy would dump her elderly diplomat husband and marry him.

But Libby understood what it was to have unrealistic dreams, dreams everyone else thought were insane—not that most people gave a damn about anyone else’s hopes and dreams. Nick Janssen didn’t. He’d wanted a presidential pardon and let it be known he’d pay for one. He didn’t care who got hurt in the process. His blindness to the aspirations of others had backfired on him as well.

When he didn’t speak, she went on. “You had a guy use you in May for his own ends. The two men you sent to the States to clean up after him could have been a problem, too, but they’re dead. They can’t testify against you. They were two of your most trusted bodyguards, but who’s to say they wouldn’t have turned on you?”

“What does any of that have to do with Samkevich?”

“He could testify against you. The authorities were closing in on him. He knew it. He’d have cut a deal in a heartbeat, given them you in exchange for a lighter sentence.”

Janssen thought a moment. “You’re right, of course.”

She hid her relief. “I don’t want payment for him.”

“His body—”

“He won’t be discovered for a few more days.”

“You’re a very cold woman, Miss Smith.”

She tried not to bristle, but she wasn’t cold. Not at all. “I’m good at what I do.”

“This is a nice town,” he said absently. “I could have stayed here for a long time. I was on an island off the coast of Scotland for two months. Did you know that?”

“No,” she lied.

He seemed to like that, having one over her. “The food was terrible. Here…” He gave a wistful sigh. “I have other safe houses.”

“Of course.”

“I want to see my mother’s grave.” His words were soft and yet toneless, as if he’d said them so many times they’d lost their meaning, become an unattainable fantasy. “It’s within walking distance of where I grew up in northern Virginia. She died last winter.”

Libby squirmed. She’d gone to her father’s grave once, just so she could spit on it. “I’m sorry. Do you have your list?”

He looked at her again. “Yes. You really are very cold.” But he fished a white index card out of his shirt pocket and passed it to her. “Ten names. A hundred thousand dollars for each.”

She tucked the card into her canvas bag. “Excellent.”

“You didn’t look at any of the names.”

“There’s time for that. I’ll need a deposit of a hundred thousand dollars wired into my account.”

He nodded. “I’ll take care of it. Should I be arrested—”

“I’ll work faster and expect a bonus. Double.”

“That’s two million dollars.”

“You rich tycoons.” Libby smiled, hoisting her canvas bag higher onto her shoulder. “Always so good at math.”

She slid smoothly to her feet, noticing that Janssen didn’t so much as glance at her breasts straining against her tank top. Wrapped up in his own problems, she supposed.

She glanced at her watch. Four-fifteen. What to do with herself the rest of the day?

“I want this all to be over,” he said quietly.

“It will be. Patience.”

“The bonus?”

She’d started to move away from the bench, but his words—his cool tone—forced her to turn back.

“Any bonus would be paid only upon my release.” His eyes, a frosty blue, held her in place. “I wouldn’t want you to get any ideas.”

“Of course. I understand.”

She did, too.

She understood that one or two million—whichever amount Janssen ended up paying her—was a miniscule amount to him. And it wouldn’t satisfy her. She was finished being a bit player, a hired gun, an anonymous force in a larger game.

She wanted it all, and Nick Janssen was her vehicle for getting it.

You have no fellow feeling, do you?

The words came out of nowhere. The jolt of memory. Philip Spencer might have been perched on the branch of a nearby linden tree, speaking to her from the dead.

Her heart pounded, and she actually glanced around her, just to make sure he hadn’t somehow materialized in her shadow.

He’d tried to save her from herself.

Leaving Janssen on the bench, Libby hurried away. Glancing around, she noticed a balding man in a rumpled suit break off from the boat tour queue and walk down the street.

A prickly sensation crawled up her back.

Something’s wrong.

She walked into a small café and sat at a table inside, with her back to the wall so that she could see out the open front.

The balding man had disappeared.

She had good instincts. She was a superior shooter. But she wasn’t trained at surveillance, countersurveillance, any of those tricks of the trade. Mostly, she got along by guts and a willingness to take risks—and the unexpectedness of being a petite woman in her midthirties who killed people for pay.

It was possible she was wrong.

She bit into the small cookie that came with her coffee.

Five minutes later, Nick Janssen got up from the bench and stretched.

He walked to a fence overlooking the narrow waterway.

Ten minutes kicked by. He seemed transfixed. Libby drank her coffee. Something isn’t right.

Janssen turned and started toward the street. The Dutch police pounced.

An Arrestatieteam, their version of a SWAT team. They moved fast, intercepting their target, giving him orders in English, getting handcuffs on him.

Libby joined the onlookers at the outdoor tables.

There was no sign of the balding man. Was he a police officer?

Had he seen her on the bench with Janssen?

Janssen went quietly. He wasn’t a fighter. He relied on others to do his fighting for him.

And his killing.

Libby paid for her coffee, wondering if he’d blame her for his arrest.

There was very little she could do if he did.

In the meantime, she had a job to do.

Ten names to memorize. Ten people to kill.




Two


Equal light, level sight.

Falling back on the basics, Rob Dunnemore aimed his .40-caliber Glock and emptied it into the silhouette twenty-five yards away.

Four months ago, he’d been the target. Alive, not a paper silhouette.

Even with ear protection, he could hear the shots echo across the indoor range. He didn’t flinch. He was soaked with sweat under his Kevlar vest. He’d popped off a couple of boxes of ammo and felt the burn in his shoulders and back, another reminder that he was out of practice.

He racked back, then made sure he’d counted his shots right and hadn’t left a round in the chamber. He didn’t want to ruin his practice by putting a bullet in his foot. Shooting was a perishable skill, and he was rusty—he hadn’t done this much in one outing since he’d taken a round to his gut in Central Park almost four months ago.

He’d almost bled to death. He’d lost his spleen. Lying in his hospital bed, helpless, he’d nearly lost his family.

Those hadn’t been good days.

Shrugging off his goggles and ear protection, he could smell the smoke from the powder and the spent ammunition. His hold on his Glock was tighter than it needed to be. A death grip, like a damn rookie’s.

He made sure his gun was clear and safe, then set it on the wood counter in front of him and reeled in his target.

Thirteen in center mass, one a clear miss.

Not bad. Just a hair off a hundred percent.

The rest was a mind game that had nothing to do with technical proficiency.

The door behind him creaked open. “Don’t shoot,” Juliet Longstreet said in her usual cheeky manner. “It’s just me.”

But Rob could tell from her expression that something was up with his fellow deputy U.S. Marshal, and he unclipped his target, loosened his vest. “Hey, Longstreet.”

She nodded to his target. “How’d you do?”

He showed her.

She whistled. “You’ll be back on the street in no time, taking down bad guys.”

Her heart wasn’t in her words. Something had definitely happened. “Juliet—”

“Nick Janssen’s been arrested,” she said quickly.

“Where?”

“Some town in Holland. A Dutch SWAT team picked him up on a tip to our embassy there.”

“When?”

“A couple hours ago.”

Rob pushed back an image of a young Nick Janssen in his mother’s college yearbook and studied Longstreet. They’d been an item for a while, splitting up well before the shooting in May. Juliet had her own demons from those difficult days—she’d nearly become one of Janssen’s victims herself.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. It brings it all back, that’s all. About time we got the bastard.”

“Any word on extradition?”

“Legal eagles are already on it. The Dutch say they have enough to charge him with Char Brooker’s murder. If we can’t do better than that—” She shrugged, then gave a dry smile. “It’s not as if he succeeded in killing any of us over here.”

“Not for lack of trying.”

Juliet’s eyes seemed to flatten. “Yeah, well. The two goons he sent over here to find out what was going on are dead.”

And she and a former Special Forces officer—dead army captain Charlene Brooker’s husband—had found the bodies. A lunatic out of the Dunnemore past had believed he could use his knowledge of their relationship with President Poe to extract a pardon for Nick Janssen and earn millions for his efforts.

The story, with all its complexities and intricacies, had been fodder for the media for weeks.

“News of the arrest public yet?” Rob asked, keeping his own emotions in check.

Juliet shook her head. “You and I are getting a heads-up before reporters get the bit in their teeth and start calling.”

“For what? To ask us how we feel now that Nick Janssen’s in custody?”

“Pretty much.”

“I’m not talking to any reporters.”

“Me, neither.”

The shooting range was curiously quiet. Rob still could smell the smoke from his practice. He shoved a full magazine into his Glock, aware of Juliet watching him. “Want to shoot a few rounds?” he asked her.

“I’m a better shot than you.”

“Always the ambitious one.”

She smiled, not taking offense where she would have six months ago. “Just stating the facts, Dunnemore. Let me get some ear protection and goggles. It’s too goddamn hot to wear a vest—”

“Wear a vest, Juliet.”

She waved a hand. “Yeah, I guess I’d better, given my luck these days.”

“I suppose we should be relieved now that Janssen’s in custody.”

“I suppose. So why do I feel like another damn shoe’s about to drop? I’m not that paranoid.”

Rob had no answer.

Whether it was instinct or post-trauma stress at work he just knew he shared her sense of dread.



By the time Maggie dragged herself back up to her small apartment it was after midnight. Without hesitation, Dutch police had followed up on her anonymous tip and arrested Nick Janssen without incident. They had no idea who her “friend” was. Neither did she. She was hungry again and heated up leftover Indonesian fried rice, which she ate standing up, pacing, too wired and uneasy yet to settle down.

Her gaze landed on a picture of her father on a sailboat in south Florida. Smiling. She remembered how his eyes would crinkle when he smiled. He’d worked as a consultant for small businesses, mostly in eastern Europe and Russia—supposedly. Maggie had had her doubts, more so since his death. Little things didn’t add up. She suspected he’d played some kind of role in the multifaceted world of intelligence—one that he couldn’t talk about even to his DS-agent daughter. As the sharp edges of her grief had worn down, her questions had become more focused, but answers weren’t any easier to come by. She hated the idea that she might have to learn to live with her questions.

But her father had always been a fairly remote figure to her. Even when she was growing up, he was never around. Her mother finally couldn’t take his long absences anymore, and they’d divorced when Maggie was in high school. He hadn’t changed his ways. He couldn’t. She understood that part. She had that same sense of wanderlust.

“Well, Pop,” she said, dipping her wooden spoon into her pan of spicy vegetables and rice, “we got the bad guy today.”

She didn’t know if he’d ever really approved of her career in diplomatic security. He’d seemed okay with her political science degree in college, then her first job at the State Department. She’d hoped her decision to become a DS officer and the prospect of a foreign service career might have intrigued him, but he’d remained outside her life, not disinterested but not a part of it.

The DS special agent in charge of her field office had given her the news of her father’s death himself.

Philip Spencer had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Except Maggie hadn’t believed it. Still didn’t. Czech authorities, U.S. authorities—she wasn’t getting the whole story. She’d pushed and bucked and bitten off heads, and everywhere, from everyone, she got the same line.

Shot by bank robbers who then got away.

Bullshit.

There were no witnesses. Newspapers, even in Prague, barely covered the story. And the reaction she got from investigators—American and Czech—amounted to stonewalling. But she’d finally backed off. What was the point in sticking her neck out for a man she’d seen maybe a half-dozen times in the five years before his death?

Maggie dumped out the rest of her fried rice and ran cold water into the pan, leaving it until morning.

No one—not the Dutch authorities, not anyone at the American embassy—was celebrating Nick Janssen’s arrest. As pleased as they were with having him in custody, they all knew his tentacles were far-reaching. There was a lot of work yet to be done.

The media were all over the story. The embassy’s public affairs officers as well as the FBI and USMS people back in Washington were fielding questions. Janssen’s attorneys had descended, screaming and hollering. News of Maggie’s anonymous tip was out.

On her way to bed, she noticed that her solitary plant, an orchid she’d bought in deference to the collective Dutch green thumb, looked dead. It was supposed to be a hardy variety that she’d have a difficult time killing, but she’d killed it in less than three weeks.

She took it to the sink, doused it with water and left it next to her soaking leftovers pan. Maybe it’d revive by morning.

She rolled her eyes. Who was she kidding? The thing was dead. To hope otherwise wasn’t optimism—it was refusing to face reality.

And if nothing else, Maggie thought, she was a woman determined to face reality.



Libby Smith left her window open in her room at her small hotel around the corner from where Dutch police had picked up Nick Janssen. It was brazen of her. A risk. But there was no reason for authorities to investigate hotel guests. Even if they did, they’d never suspect her of being anything but what she was: an American antiques dealer, a woman looking for off-the-beaten-track bargains.

What if they had him under surveillance and saw you on the bench with him?

If they caught up with her and asked about it, she’d say she’d stopped to rest her feet and they’d chatted for a few minutes about the sights.

She couldn’t seem to get cool.

She lay naked atop the cotton duvet and noticed the sheen of her sweat in the light from the street. She could hear the traffic, the sound of music playing somewhere not too far off, the voices of people under her window, out enjoying the warm summer night.

The hundred-thousand deposit had been wired into her account. Janssen must have prearranged the transfer.

Libby had never made such money.

And it was just the beginning.

She’d memorized Janssen’s list of targets and burned it, flushing the ashes down her toilet.

Knowing his enemies—and eliminating them—would help her to understand his network and, in time, replace him.

His arrest was inevitable, just a bit earlier than she’d hoped for. Some Dutch Goody Two-shoes must have recognized him and called the police.

The balding man—who was he? Closing her eyes, Libby breathed deeply and tried not to feel as if she were suffocating, told herself the balding man didn’t matter. Only her plan did, her next target. The thrill of her work had satisfied her in the beginning. Now she wanted more.

Money.

Power.

She smiled to herself, relaxing, feeling in control at last.




Three


Nate Winter came home to find secret service agents crawling all over his house, a reminder of just how much his life had changed in the past four months.

His fiancée, Sarah Dunnemore, was on the back porch having peach cobbler with President John Wesley Poe, who regarded her as the daughter he’d never had. Being together brought out their Southern accents.

Nate had a feeling he knew why Poe was there.

Nick Janssen.

The rich, murdering bastard was finally in custody.

It was hot even on the shaded porch, but the two Tennesseans didn’t seem to mind. While looking for a home of their own in northern Virginia, Nate and Sarah were living in a corner of an 1850s historic house she was researching and getting ready to open to the public. Supposedly it was haunted by both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Poe liked to joke that he wished he could ask both men for advice. But Sarah, a historical archaeologist, was serious about her ghosts.

Before they’d met, Nate had been a senior deputy U.S. Marshal dedicated to catching fugitives and not much else.

He was still a marshal, he was still dedicated to his work—but now he could come home to Sarah, ghosts, peach cobbler and the occasional presidential visit.

“Mr. President,” Nate said, “it’s good to see you.”

Poe, already on his feet, put out his hand, and the two men shook. “It’s good to see you, too, Nate. Sarah’s ruining my diet with her peach cobbler.”

Nate had helped her pick the peaches from one of the trees in the old house’s sprawling yard, knowing she expected to make jam one evening. The cobbler meant she was upset, because otherwise she’d still be up to her elbows in the hundred-year-old dump she’d found out back and was in the process of excavating. When she was upset, she dug out family recipes, usually ones involving a lot of butter.

Her gray eyes connected with Nate’s for a split second, enough to tell him that Poe’s visit hadn’t been her idea. She had on cropped jeans and a tank top, barefoot even for peach cobbler with the president.

As welcome as it was, Janssen’s arrest had brought back the trauma of her ordeal last spring. Her twin brother badly injured in a sniper-style attack in Central Park, a killer on the loose in Night’s Landing, the Dunnemore family’s Tennessee home, their refuge. John Wesley Poe happened to have grown up next door.

Sarah was fair-haired and beautiful, and Nate—tall, lean, impatient—hated for those dark days to prey on her again. But he’d learned that Sarah Dunnemore wasn’t an ivory tower intellectual who wanted to remain aloof from life. She dove in, sometimes without looking.

“I stopped by to see how Sarah had taken the news of the Janssen arrest,” Poe said. “And Rob. I wondered how he was doing.”

“I haven’t talked to him yet,” Sarah said. “I called my parents a little while ago—they’re fine.”

“I tried to reach Rob on his cell phone earlier,” Nate said. “He didn’t answer. I left a message.”

“How is he recuperating from his injuries?” Poe asked.

Sarah dabbed at the ice cream melting onto her cobbler. “He’s doing well, but he’s frustrated because his recovery took longer than he expected. At least he’s back to his triathlon training.”

Swimming, running, biking. From all accounts, Rob was as fit now as he’d been before the shooting. But he’d endured a weeks-long media barrage. Now the whole world knew that he’d graduated from Georgetown and spoke seven languages, that he and his twin sister were like the son and daughter President Poe had never had. Rob often came off in media reports as a silver-spoon, Southern frat boy, but nothing about him was that simple.

“Is he back on the street?” Poe asked.

Nate shook his head. “Not yet.”

The president sighed heavily. “I worry about him.”

Which, Nate knew, Rob would hate. Sarah knew it, too, but she nodded with understanding. “It’s hard not to worry.”

“Janssen’s arrest will fire up the media again. I hate to see him go through that. They’ll rehash everything that happened in May.” Poe winced. “They’ll be calling you, too, Sarah. And your parents.”

“The marshals have sent someone to Night’s Landing in case it gets crazy. If any reporters show up here, I can handle them.” She smiled and licked her spoon. “I’ll have Bobby Lee or Abe talk to them.”

Nate could see Poe forcing himself to relax. “I never know when you’re serious—”

“Every resident of this house since 1875 swears the two of them are haunting the place. I take that seriously.” She rose, calmer now herself, and grabbed her bowl. “Are you going to eat your cobbler, Wes? Because if not, I’ll take it into the house before the flies get to it. There’s no wasting fresh peach cobbler around here.”

That elicited a real smile. “Can I take it with me?”

She beamed. A Ph.D. with academic credits up and down both arms, and she loved getting compliments for her cooking. “I’ll go wrap it up.”

When he heard the screen door shut, Wes breathed out, any hint of a smile gone. “Nate—I hope you’ll tell Rob he can call me anytime. I’ll make sure he’s put through right away.”

“He knows that, Mr. President.”

The older man nodded. “I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that now that our families’ relationship is common knowledge—” He seemed to fight for the right words. “That it won’t ruin his life.”

Nate had no idea what to say.

A secret service agent stood on the bottom step of the porch.

Time for Poe to leave.

He glanced at the screen door. “You and Sarah are good for each other. After you’re married—” He shook his head. “Well, never mind.”

Nate thought he understood what Poe was getting at. “We’ll want you to be a part of our lives, Mr. President. Both of us.”

He sighed. “Thank you.”

“Rob—”

“Rob’s a different story. He always has been.”

After Poe left with his entourage of secret service and staffers—and his peach cobbler—Nate found Sarah in the kitchen, flipping through her grandmother’s recipes. Given the array of ingredients on the table, she was looking for something that involved both cream of mushroom soup and mayonnaise. He slipped his arms around her. “I don’t think my arteries can take whatever it is you’re about to whip up.”

She shoved the cans aside. “I’m missing an ingredient, anyway.”

“Dare I ask what?”

“Water chestnuts.”

He let his hands move up her midriff toward her breasts. “Do you think Abe and Bobby Lee would object if we made love this early in the evening?”

“If I think about them watching us—”

“I don’t know, it could be fun. A foursome—”

She elbowed him in the gut, registering her disapproval, and he laughed, sweeping her up off her feet, getting her away from her cans and her kitchen. He figured he could ease her stress in other ways.



Rob rolled out of bed at six in his first-floor Brooklyn apartment, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and headed out for his morning paper. He’d ignored all messages from reporters on his voice mail when he got home last night.

A woman in biking shorts was on his doorstep. “Deputy Dunnemore? My name’s Patty. I’d like to talk to you about the arrest of Nicholas Janssen yesterday in the Netherlands.”

No last name, no credentials. A freelancer. She looked young enough to be a journalism student. She was sweating and panting, indicating she’d pedaled a ways to get to him, which at least meant she didn’t live nearby.

Rob picked up his paper and noticed Janssen’s arrest had made the front page. No surprise.

Patty frowned when he didn’t respond. “Have you and President Poe talked about the arrest?”

Her eyes fell to where his scar was under his shirt. The whole damned world knew the details of his injury. There’d been diagrams of the path of the bullet on TV. Doctors had discussed his prognosis, his recovery, how people could live normal lives without a spleen.

“It’s a nice morning for a bike ride,” he said. “See you, Patty.”

He didn’t like shutting the door in her face, but his other options—for example, talking to her—were even less appealing. When he got back up to his apartment, he looked out his living room door and caught her giving him the finger from her bike.

A pro.

No way would he get a bike ride in himself. Or a run. Or even a swim at the Y. There’d be more reporters to deal with. He’d been shot and his family nearly destroyed because of their connection to the president. For months the media had hounded him.

Now Janssen was in Dutch custody.

Due to an anonymous tip to a diplomatic security agent three weeks on the job.

Something about it didn’t sit right with Rob. He took a shower, got dressed and headed for work, contemplating the unlikelihood of what had gone down across the Atlantic.

He managed to sneak past a throng of reporters outside the federal building where the Southeastern District Office of the U.S. Marshals Service was located. When he got to his desk, a stack of messages, all from reporters, was waiting for him.

Reporters and a day of desk work. He swore to himself and dumped all the messages in the trash.

Mike Rivera stood in his office doorway and jerked a thumb at Rob to join him. Rob doubted it was because the chief deputy wanted to put him back on the street. A heavyset man in his early fifties with bulldog features that his wife seemed to adore, Rivera was well respected but not a soft touch. He wouldn’t like having reporters crawling all over his office and harassing one of his deputies.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Who’ve you heard from?”

Rob sat in a spongy plastic chair. “A lot of reporters. I haven’t talked to any of them. There’s not much to say.”

“We can issue a statement. It probably won’t do much good while the feeding frenzy’s on, but we can try. Do you want to be available for interviews, issue a statement yourself or anything?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“I want to do my damn job.”

Rivera’s eyes flashed. “Yeah, well, you’re going to need to lie low for a couple of days until the dust settles on this Janssen arrest.”

“I’ve been laying low since May.”

“You’ve been recovering from a goddamn bullet wound that nearly killed you—”

“It didn’t kill me.” Rob kept his voice calm. “I’m fit for duty. I don’t want anyone coddling me.”

“Who the hell’s coddling you? You don’t want to move too fast, get in over your head—”

“What, with a computer?”

“With another asshole with a gun.”

Rob didn’t respond. He hadn’t had a chance in May. He’d dragged Nate down to Central Park to see the tulips—they’d never live that one down—and gotten shot. No warning, no way to fight back. They’d walked into the park and come out on stretchers.

Rivera sat forward, his chair squeaking loudly. “Why do you look so thin?” he asked, making it sound like an accusation.

“I’m back into my triathlon training. I can pass any test you want to throw at me—”

“Yeah, okay. Don’t drop and do push-ups here in my office. You nailed your fitness for duty assessment. I know that. It’s your head I worry about.”

“I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to do, all the desensitizing and reprogramming or whatever it’s called. Time for you all to stop walking on eggshells around me.”

Rivera grunted. “Today isn’t a good day to tell me you’re just a regular deputy trying to do his job.”

His chair squeaked again when he leaned back, bugging the hell out of Rob. Not a good sign, probably, that a noisy chair irritated him. “I want to get out of here, at least for a few days. Let the dust settle.”

“Will you go down to Tennessee?”

“The Hague.”

Rivera stood and turned to his grime-encrusted window. “Christ, Dunnemore. You don’t make my life easy, do you?”

Rob smiled. “Not my job, Chief. Less chance of anyone getting misquoted or harassed if I’m out of the country.”

“So go to Ireland.”

“Nick Janssen’s not in custody in Ireland. The DS agent who got tipped off about where to find him isn’t in Ireland.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Still in his plastic chair, Rob shrugged. “Sure, why not? I can check with our people in the Netherlands, see where things stand now that the Dutch have Janssen. A Dutch judge is considering our request to interview him. We don’t want anything slipping through the cracks.”

Rivera shifted from the window and held up a hand. “I get your point. What says a Dunnemore showing up in Holland won’t fire up reporters there?”

“Nothing. Janssen’s arrest is a public reminder of my family’s connections to President Poe. There’s not much I can do about that. But the media will be looking for me in New York, not The Hague.”

“You want to do this thing?”

“I can be on a flight out of Kennedy tonight.”

“Listen, Rob, if this is personal—”

“Of course it’s personal.” Rob stood, feeling the August heat even in the air-conditioned room. “Janssen put out word that he’d pay for a presidential pardon. He tried to get under my mother’s skin. Ultimately, he’s the one responsible for everything that happened in May—”

“It was a bad time.”

“Then there’s Charlene Brooker. The Dutch are charging Janssen with ordering her murder in Amsterdam last year. We’re all still scrambling to unravel his network.”

“None of that is why you’re going to Holland.”

Rob shrugged. “Maybe not.”

“You want to know who gave that DS agent the tip.”

“Don’t you?”

Rivera pulled out his chair and plopped down with a loud, obnoxious groan of metal. “Hell.” He looked up at Rob. “Bring me back some Dutch gin.”

“Mike—”

“Just a little bottle. I don’t drink as much as I used to.”

Rob knew he’d won. There was nothing to do now except figure out which flight to take, dig out his passport and pack.




Four


Maggie stared at her boss in disbelief. “Why me?”

George Bremmerton regarded her with a reasonable measure of sympathy from the other side of her desk, but she knew he wasn’t about to change his mind. “Because he requested you.”

“Why would Rob Dunnemore request me?”

“Because you made the Janssen arrest happen.”

“I got an e-mail tip and made a phone call. That was the extent of it.” She sat back in her chair. “I can’t get out of this?”

“Not unless you find a way to get run over by a bus.”

“Great,” Maggie said without enthusiasm. “You know Dunnemore’s a rich frat-boy type playing marshal until he decides to start living off his trust fund, don’t you?”

Bremmerton almost smiled. He was in his late forties and one of the most respected regional security officers ever, a very serious-minded man who was nonetheless getting a kick out of her predicament. “I met his parents last winter. They’re not rich.”

“Rich people never think they’re rich. And they’re friends with President Poe. They don’t need to be rich.”

“Are you whining, Spencer?”

She groaned. “Yes, I’m whining. How long is Dunnemore staying?”

“Not my problem.”

Which meant it was her problem. Maggie had seen pictures of Rob Dunnemore. He was fair and very good-looking, more rugged than she’d expected—or particularly wanted to admit at the moment, since she preferred to think of him in terms of stereotypes.

People said he had gray eyes, but she hadn’t really noticed.

“When’s he getting here?” she asked.

“Half an hour.”

“I like the big warning I get.”

Bremmerton shrugged. “I just found out myself.”

“You have his flight information?”

He handed her a printout. “Don’t treat him like a VIP. He’s a federal agent. He’s here on business.”

“Marshal business? Or President Poe business?”

“Don’t go there, Maggie. Dunnemore’s main reason for being here is to see you. He’s not even being very subtle about it.”

Since Bremmerton had more than two decades of foreign assignments behind him and she had three weeks, Maggie trusted his instincts. She was fortunate to be working with him. He’d gone to Nairobi in the aftermath of the American embassy bombing that had killed scores there. From all accounts, he’d been a steady presence amid tragedy and fear. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone who knew him or his reputation. No task within the realm of diplomatic security was too big or too small for him to tackle, which, along with his mix of competence and genuine decency, had earned him widespread respect and admiration. He also managed to have a relatively normal family life, with his speech-therapist wife with him in The Hague and two kids in college in the Midwest.

Maggie had worked hard to gain George Bremmerton’s confidence in her three weeks at the embassy and didn’t take it for granted.

If he wanted her to baby-sit President Poe’s marshal pal, that was what she’d do.

“I guess I should get going,” she said.

“His twin sister’s getting married in a few weeks to the marshal who got shot with him in Central Park.” Bremmerton shrugged at his own non sequitur. “It’ll give you something to talk about. She’s an archaeologist. Sarah.”

“He’s going to want to talk about Nick Janssen.”



Given the small size of the Netherlands, Schiphol was almost exclusively an international airport—a very busy one—but Maggie had no trouble finding Rob Dunnemore. She recognized him from all the pictures she’d seen of him since the Central Park attack.

He was even more good-looking in person. Tall, very fit. Lightly tanned. He had on a dark suit that had come through the long flight virtually without wrinkles.

His eyes were, indeed, gray.

She introduced herself. “Can I carry something?”

“No, thank you, I’ve got everything.”

She’d expected more of a Southern accent. He had a small carry-on suitcase that she hoped meant he didn’t plan a long stay.

But as he observed her, she sensed an air of danger about him that took her aback. She quickly told herself she’d imagined it. It was just something she’d assumed because she knew he’d nearly been killed in the line of duty four months ago.

“Decent flight?” she asked, leading him out to her car.

“Uneventful.”

“That’s the way I like it. I always feel as if I’ve come out of the dryer after a long flight. Did you sleep?”

“I’m fine, Agent Spencer.”

But cranky, she thought. “Please, call me Maggie.”

He didn’t seem too excited about riding in her red Mini. She unlocked the passenger door. “SUVs don’t work that well in Holland with all the narrow streets and teeny-tiny parking spaces.”

“The Mini’s no problem. It’s yours?”

For the first time, she detected his Southern accent. She nodded. “It’s cute, isn’t it?”

She thought he might have smiled.

“Jet lag’s a killer,” she said when she got in behind the wheel. “My father used to swear by drinking a gallon of water on the plane and not eating a bite. I thought he was exaggerating, but he meant it. A whole gallon of water.”

“I ate everything that was offered.”

Maggie smiled. “That’s what I do.”

Dunnemore stared out his window most of the drive back to The Hague. She didn’t bug him. It was still before dawn his time. His body wanted to be in bed, asleep.

“I’ll drop you off at your hotel,” she said. “You can get settled, and I’ll come fetch you when you want—”

“I can make it to the embassy on my own.”

So it was going to be that way. He wanted control. No suggestions from her. She shrugged. “Fine by me.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound surly. Thank you for trekking me around.”

“You asked for me. My boss gave the order.”

“I asked if I could talk with you. I didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t matter.” She smiled over at him. “You’ve got me for the duration of your visit, Deputy.”

When they arrived at his hotel, he turned down her offer to make sure his room was ready. He’d see to it. He was definitely independent. Self-sufficient. Not one who played well with others. Maggie hoped it wouldn’t become a problem. She didn’t want to bump heads with Rob Dunnemore, friend of the president.

Thomas Kopac intercepted her when she got back to the embassy. “Rumor has it you’re escorting President Poe’s—”

“You shouldn’t be listening to rumors.”

“Rob Dunnemore. He’s here?”

“He’s freshening up at his hotel. He’s a marshal. We’re not supposed to think of him as Poe’s surrogate son.”

Kopac grinned. “Says who?”

“Says me. Anything I can do for you? Or do I get to do a little work before Dunnemore gets here?”

“Nothing you can do for me, Special Agent Spencer.” He leaned in toward her, adding in an amused conspiratorial whisper, “I’ll be in my office if you need a place to scream. It’s in the bowels of the building. No one’ll hear you.”

“Very funny.”

He laughed. “I thought so.”

When she got back to her desk, Maggie checked her e-mail, hoping for another tip, something that would force Bremmerton to find someone else to stick Rob Dunnemore with. The guy put her nerve endings on edge. It wasn’t the Poe connection, she decided. It was the gray eyes.

But there was nothing.

Her mobile phone rang, almost as if it knew she was looking for distractions.

A private number.

“Maggie Spencer—”

“St. John’s Cathedral is the finest example of Gothic architecture in the Netherlands.”

The voice was male, the accent East Coast American, and the words had her sitting up straight. St. John’s was in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the same city where Dutch police had picked up Nick Janssen yesterday.

“Who is this?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon. It’s important that we talk.”

“I understand, but I need more information—”

“Just trust your instincts.”

“My instincts tell me this is a crank call.”

She thought she heard the start of a laugh. “I doubt that. Do people still call you Magster? Your father did when you were small, didn’t he?”

Magster.

Her stomach flip-flopped, but she warned herself that using her childhood name could just be a good guess, a way to manipulate her. It didn’t mean he knew anything about her father’s death. She couldn’t let herself think it was anything more.

“Who are you? I need a name.”

It was as if she hadn’t spoken. “Come alone. If you don’t, I’ll disappear, and you’ll have missed an important opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what?”

But he was gone, the connection dead.

A meeting. Was the guy out of his mind?

He must have prepared every word in advance. Of course her father called her Magster. What father with a daughter named Maggie didn’t?

Some days she couldn’t believe it’d been eighteen months since his murder; other days, it was as if her father was more a dream than anything else, lost in a fog of memories and lost possibilities.

Had the caller known him?

Maggie felt a sudden rush of tears that she immediately fought back, impatient with herself.

But Rob Dunnemore materialized behind her, startling her with his good looks. The ends of his fair hair were still damp from his shower. He hadn’t wasted any time in getting cleaned up and settled in.

She smiled quickly, hoping there was no sign of even one damn tear in her eyes. “Have a seat, Deputy. We can get started.”

“Bad day?”

“What? Oh.” She made herself smile. “No, not yet.”

He didn’t seem to believe her. “That’s good.”

Maggie wished she’d indulged in chocolate sprinkles that morning, because it was going to be a very long day.

Magster.

She’d figure out what to do about her anonymous caller when she didn’t have Deputy Dunnemore’s gray eyes on her.



Wide awake despite his overnight flight and long day, Rob sat on a wooden chair at a small table in his room on the top floor of his hotel, a renovated eighteenth-century building. It had low, slanted ceilings and no air-conditioning, but it wasn’t a hot night, at least by middle Tennessee standards.

He heard laughter through his open window and looked down four floors at a young couple standing under a linden tree, its branches carefully trained.

Rob turned away from the scene.

His eyes were heavy, scratchy, from fatigue and jet lag.

Maggie Spencer had walked with him back to his hotel, turning down a quick after-work drink.

A woman with things on her mind, Special Agent Spencer.

He’d gone into the dark, quiet bar by himself, but in a few minutes another man joined him, introducing himself as Tom Kopac, an embassy employee. Maggie’s friend.

They’d had a beer together. It was clear word had gotten out that the wounded marshal from the Janssen mess in May—the marshal who was friends with the president—was in town and Maggie was stuck with him.

Kopac had decided to check him out.

Their conversation was cordial but superficial. Rob had smiled at the older man. “Maggie’s a DS agent. She protects you. You don’t protect her.”

“She’s also a friend.”

After Kopac left, Rob had a spicy, meat-filled kroket with mustard, then went up to his room.

Why the hell was Kopac suspicious of him when Spencer was the one who had received the damn anonymous tip about Janssen? Not even an hour afterward, he was under arrest. Tips like that didn’t happen often, even with minor nonviolent fugitives, never mind with violent fugitives with international warrants out on them.

Was it someone wanting to collect the reward for information leading to Janssen’s arrest?

No one had come forward.

Rob put aside his questions and picked up the phone, dialing his future brother-in-law’s office in Arlington.

“What do we know about the DS agent who got the Janssen tip? Maggie Spencer.” Rob didn’t mention her rich red hair, her turquoise eyes, her creamy skin, and chastised himself for his gut-punched reaction to her. “She’s gritting her teeth, but she’s not complaining about getting saddled with me. At least not to my face.”

“Her name’s familiar,” Nate said.

“Because she’s the one who got the Janssen tip—”

“No, it’s something else.”

“You want to see what you can find out?”

“Sure.”

“She’s fetching me up in the morning and carting me to the town where Janssen was picked up.”

“Her idea?”

“She’s finding things to do with me.”

The alternative meanings of what he said struck him like a junior high student. Jet lag.

“I’m not touching that,” Nate said with a chuckle. “I’ll check her out, let you know if I find out anything. Has she given you any idea of who she thinks gave her the tip?”

“She’s not a talker—she’s not easy to read.”

“All right. I’ll see what I can do. Isn’t it midnight there?”

“Just about.”

“Go to bed. Take a sleeping pill.”

“I don’t want to oversleep and miss my field trip.”

Then again, Spencer was probably the type to throw a brick through his window to wake him up.

“I’ll tell Sarah you called,” Nate said.

“And the president?”

Silence.

“He wanted to know how I reacted to Janssen’s arrest, didn’t he?”

“It’s not that simple—”

“It never is with Wes. Yeah. Say hi to Sarah for me.”

When he hung up, Rob glanced down at the street and saw that the laughing couple was gone. The street seemed empty, almost too quiet. He lay atop his bed in his shorts. No shirt, no shoes. He’d visited his parents in Holland in April, when Nick Janssen was just wanted for failing to appear in court to face tax evasion charges. He’d made a move on Rob’s mother, and Rob hadn’t even known it.

So much had happened since then.

But his parents were back in Night’s Landing, permanently, and his father, in his late seventies, was finally easing up on his schedule. His mother seemed more at peace than she had in many weeks. Neither had wanted Rob to go back to work after the shooting—they hadn’t wanted him to become a marshal in the first place.

“Should have called them before you left New York,” he said to the ceiling. But he hadn’t talked to them at all since Janssen’s arrest.

He let his eyes close, pushing back an image of Night’s Landing and the old log house his grandfather had built, thinking instead about Maggie Spencer and Tom Kopac and what it was about the diplomatic security agent that bothered him.




Five


Maggie pulled up to Rob’s hotel in her Mini at eight. She didn’t know what else to do except drag him to ’s-Hertogenbosch with her.

He greeted her with a charming smile and two espressos and folded himself into her small car without complaint, handing her one of the espressos. “What is it, about two hours to ’s-Hertogenbosch?”

He pronounced the full name of the southern city the same way her Dutch friends did—flawlessly. It translated as “the duke’s forest” and was typically shortened to Den Bosch, which Maggie could pronounce easily enough. “Should be,” she said, pulling out onto the street.

As he sipped his espresso, Rob dug out a pocket map and checked their route. “Den Bosch was founded in the twelfth century by Hendrik I of Brabant.”

“Ah.”

“Biggest attraction there is Sint Jan’s Kathedraal.”

Maggie didn’t let herself react to his use of the Dutch name for St. John’s Cathedral, where she was supposed to meet her anonymous caller, her ulterior motive for going to Den Bosch on a warm Saturday morning. “You’ve been reading tourist brochures, I see.”

“We might need something to do after we look at the spot where the Dutch police picked up Janssen. Do you know the address of his safe house?”

She nodded. “We could go there, too.”

“Maybe it has window boxes.”

His sarcasm was barely detectable, which, Maggie decided, only made him more dangerous. She’d underestimated him. Dismissed him as not serious, indulged in stereotypes because she hadn’t wanted to deal with him—she’d had better things to do than take care of a deputy marshal who counted among his friends the U.S. president. But Deputy Dunnemore was proving himself to be a much more complicated case than she’d anticipated.

She got onto the motorway, the traffic relatively light on a Saturday morning. “If you don’t want to go to Den Bosch, I can drop you off somewhere else.”

“I’m into the idea now. Have you seen many sights since you’ve been here?”

She reached for her espresso and took too big a sip, nearly burning her mouth, then shook her head, putting the coffee back in the cup holder. “I’ve only been here three weeks. I haven’t had much time. I vary my run just so I can see more of the streets in The Hague.” She made herself smile through her tension. She didn’t like hiding her real purpose for going to Den Bosch from him. “I could get into castles.”

“All work, no play,” Rob said, looking up from his map. “Does that describe you, Maggie?”

“I don’t know. I’m not that introspective.”

“Interesting, since you’re the new kid, that you should be the one to get the tip on where to find our guy Janssen.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“Where were you before here?”

“Chicago.”

“And you grew up in…”

“South Florida, for the most part. We moved around a lot before my parents were divorced.”

“They still live there?”

“My mother does.” She left it at that.

But Rob persisted. “Your father?”

“He died a year and a half ago.”

“I’m sorry.” No hesitation, no awkwardness. He had the social graces down pat, when he wanted to use them. “Any theory why Janssen was in Den Bosch?”

She shook her head, reminding herself that Rob’s family had nearly all been killed because of Nick Janssen and she should cut him some slack. But he wasn’t going to change the subject, obviously. He’d keep grilling her about Janssen and Den Bosch and the tip until she put a stop to it. She didn’t know if he was suspicious of her because of the tip or just tenacious—or both.

“Why do you think the marshals sent you here?” she asked casually. “Given your personal connection to Janssen—”

“No one sent me. I asked to come here.”

It wasn’t the answer she’d expected. “They let you?”

Janssen’s arrest stirred up the media. “I had a lot of reporters on my tail. This way I’m out of sight, out of mind.”

“Or out of sight and they’ll all want to know why and show up here next?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Have you had many reporters contact you?”

“Not directly. A few have contacted Public Affairs.”

“I guess it’s not nearly as interesting to have an international fugitive arrested as a presidential connection exposed.”

She tried more of the espresso. Rob had done fine yesterday at the embassy. He was good at small talk, at ease with people. His connection to President Poe made people eager to meet him and be on their best behavior, but in the end, Maggie thought, it hadn’t made that big a difference. The guy was likable. The mistake, she suspected, was to assume that translated into being a soft touch.

He again consulted his map. “Janssen was picked up on a canal?”

“The Binnendieze. I wasn’t sure of what it was, either. It’s a shallow river, but it looks and feels like a canal. Den Bosch is located in a triangle where the Aa and the Dommel join to form the Dieze River, which eventually runs into the Maas.”

“Ah. So I see on the map.”

“Water’s a big deal in the Netherlands. About a third of the country’s below sea level. We tend to think in terms of the North Sea, but river flooding is a concern, too.”

“Binnendieze—does that mean ‘little Dieze’?”

“Aren’t you the one who speaks all the languages?”

He finished his espresso without answering.

“I heard it was seven,” Maggie persisted.

“Well, one of them isn’t Dutch.”

She laughed. “Binnen means inner, or inside. It’s the section of the Dieze that runs within Den Bosch’s original city walls—it’s sort of a natural moat. They’ve cleaned it up and run boat tours on it these days.”

“Bet it used to be the town sewer.”

“That’s what I understand. The tour’s unusual because it takes you under the city, actually under people’s houses. For safety reasons, centuries ago, people could only build inside the city walls. When they ran out of room, they started building over the waterway.”

“Very clever.”

“It sounds like a fascinating tour, doesn’t it?”

“Better than the cathedral, if you ask me.”

Maggie got off the A2 motorway and drove toward the city center, Rob pointing out a stunning fountain featuring a gold dragon in the middle of a roundabout. Remembering directions she’d gotten from a Dutch police inspector, who hadn’t questioned her reasons for asking, she found her way to the boat-tour entrance and parked nearby.

It was a pleasantly warm morning under a clear Dutch-blue sky, a perfect day to play tourist—except that wasn’t why she and Rob were there, Maggie reminded herself as they walked along a shaded street. The narrow, shallow waterway flowed next to them, below street level. Steps lead down to a small dock for the boats, a crowd gathering for the next tour.

“Janssen had two dogs,” Rob said, stopping along the open black-iron fence above the waterway. “Rhodesian ridgebacks.”

“Big dogs.”

“Do we know what happened to them?”

“They weren’t with him when he was arrested. I doubt he had them with him when he took off in May.”

“How long do we think he was in Den Bosch before you got the tip?”

From his tone, Maggie knew he didn’t expect her to have an answer. “Not long, but that’s not a guess at this point. Den Bosch strikes me as an unlikely place for the leader of an international criminal network to turn up. It’s possible he—”

She stopped. Who was that? A man in front of a café just down the street…balding, rumpled.

Tom Kopac?

Rob was instantly alert. “What is it?”

“I think I recognize someone. Hold on.”

Maggie started toward the café, but Tom had disappeared. She pushed past the outdoor tables, where a few tourists were enjoying coffee, and checked inside, her eyes quickly adjusting after being in the bright sun.

Nothing.

Had she mistaken someone else for Tom?

No. She was positive it’d been him.

He must have continued past the café or cut down another street.

She headed back outside and scanned the scene.

Rob stood behind her. “What’s going on?”

“A colleague at the embassy is here. Maybe he’s like us, just checking out where Janssen was picked up.”

“Did he work the case?”

She shook her head. “No. But he’s a good guy. A friend.”

“What’s his name?”

“Kopac. Tom Kopac. He works in economic relations.”

Rob frowned at her. “He came by my hotel last night.”

“Tom did? Why?”

“Checking me out. Are you two—”

“No.”

She thought she detected a flicker of amusement at her forceful answer. “You DS agents are the expert drivers. Could he have followed us out here?”

“It’s not like I’m on a secret mission or driving around the secretary of state. I wasn’t paying that close attention, but I doubt—” She realized she sounded very serious and deliberately lightened up. “I’m sure he didn’t follow us.”

“Did he see you just now?”

“You mean, was he running away from me? I don’t know.”

At the same time, they noticed a change in the crowd at the entrance to the boat tour. A sudden tension, gasps.

Screams.

Maggie and Rob charged back down the street, heading for a half-dozen people who were standing at the open fence, pointing into the water. A woman was screaming.

“Een man…”

A man.

Maggie picked out another word. Gevallen… Fallen. Fell.

“A man’s fallen into the river,” Rob said tightly.

There were more screams, excited words in Dutch that all ran together to Maggie’s untrained ear.

Rob obviously spoke enough languages that he was able to make out the basics. “They think he’s dead.”

“Not Tom—”

She didn’t know why she said his name.

When they got to the fence and looked down at the river, they could see the body of a man floating facedown in the shallow water, drifting downstream.

The balding head, the stocky build, the rumpled clothes.

“Hell,” Rob breathed. “It’s him. Kopac.”

Maggie turned away and took in a breath, pushing back a rush of emotion, then forced herself to look again at Tom’s body.

Blood.

His head…

The images she was seeing came together, registered. He’d been shot at the base of his neck, the bullet going upward into his brain.

Tom. My God.

There was almost no hope he was alive.

Rob pounded down the stairs to the waterway, and Maggie jumped after him, a man yelling to them in Dutch. From the tone of his voice, she knew he was worried about them.

She understood his fear. “A shooter. Rob, if there’s a shooter—”

But another look at Tom confirmed, at least in Maggie’s mind, it hadn’t been a sniper attack. There was no one hiding on a rooftop—or in the bushes, as the gunman who’d shot Rob had done in Central Park four months ago.

From what she could see, Tom had been shot up close and personal. She felt a sense of revulsion, anger and grief, even as she forced herself to pull back from her emotions and focus on the problem at hand.

Rob pushed out to the edge of the dock. “Someone will have called the police by now.”

As he spoke, Maggie heard sirens. Neither she nor Rob had authority as law enforcement officers in the Netherlands. Given the circumstances, they weren’t even armed.

But they had to make sure there was nothing they could do for Tom.

Rob knelt down and grabbed Tom’s arm. His body was snagged on a support post, and Maggie helped, taking hold of Tom’s belt. His skin was warm, water pouring off his clothes as they managed to get him up onto the platform.

He was dead. He’d probably died instantly.

“I just saw him,” Maggie said. “It wasn’t, what, even five minutes ago? The killer can’t have gotten far. Someone must have seen something, someone—”

Rob glanced up at the frightened and horrified people along the fence. “At least we know one of us didn’t kill him.”

Maggie nodded. At least they knew that much, if not a damn thing else. Like why Tom was here. If he’d spotted her, heard her. If he’d taken off because he didn’t want to talk to her.

If he’d known his killer.

And if his killer had anything to do with the American fugitive who’d been picked up in Den Bosch two days ago.

“Come on,” Rob said. “The Den Bosch police are going to want to talk to us.”

A dead American in their small city?

The local police most certainly would want to talk to the two U.S. federal agents who’d pulled him out of the river.

“He was the kind of guy who got homesick for Krispy Kreme doughnuts,” Maggie said, realizing her front was soaked with river water.

“A nice guy,” Rob said.

“A very nice guy.”



It was four o’clock before Rob and his DS escort left the police station, their clothes finally dry, every question asked of them answered. Maggie pushed ahead on the narrow, sunny street. “I need to walk,” she said.

Rob didn’t object. It was a hot, still afternoon. The city seemed quiet, almost as if it were mourning the violence that had taken place there a few hours ago.

An exhaustive search hadn’t produced a single lead on Thomas Kopac’s killer so far.

No one saw anything. No one heard anything.

Except for Maggie Spencer.

Rob said nothing as he walked alongside her. She seemed preoccupied. Not, he thought, that she was an easy woman to read.

Various Dutch and American authorities had swarmed the Den Bosch police station, including the FBI and Regional Security Officer George Bremmerton, Maggie’s immediate boss. All of them grilled both her and Rob about what they’d seen that morning, what Maggie had talked about with Kopac in recent days, why he’d shown up at Rob’s hotel last night.

Although she knew Tom Kopac well enough to consider him her first real friend since she’d arrived in the country, Maggie had been straightforward and professional with her answers. She’d also had her own questions, namely, if there was anything about Tom Kopac that she hadn’t been told.

Rob had that same question himself.

Den Bosch police were trying to locate people who’d been in the vicinity of the boat tour that morning, interviewing the café’s wait staff and manager—anyone who might have seen the American who’d turned up in the Binnendieze. Maggie’s sighting of Kopac and the subsequent commotion along the river pinpointed the approximate time he’d been killed.

Apparently someone had walked up to him, shot him and disappeared.

Not an easy feat to pull off.

The brutal, calculated murder of an American diplomat had taken Dutch and U.S. authorities by complete surprise. They had Nick Janssen in custody. The killing was supposed to stop.

“Another American in trouble on Dutch soil,” Maggie said as she and Rob walked across the street to Den Bosch’s market square, crowded with booths and shoppers. She was obviously spent, taken aback by Kopac’s death, the loss of a friend. “The second American murdered in less than a year.”

“Nick Janssen ordered Charlene Brooker’s murder,” Rob said unnecessarily.

“No one had a clue that she was on to him. He was still a fairly low-priority tax evader then.”

“Has there been any sign of Ethan Brooker since Janssen’s arrest?” Rob asked.

After his wife’s death, Ethan, an army Special Forces officer, had made finding her killer his personal mission. It’d taken him to Tennessee, where he’d posed as the Dunnemores’ property manager. After helping Sarah Dunnemore, Nate Winter and Juliet Longstreet stop their Central Park shooter—a loose cannon with a crazy scheme of his own—Brooker had simply disappeared.

When things exploded in Night’s Landing, Rob was still recovering from his gunshot wound in his New York hospital.

“It’s not as if Brooker’s kept the embassy informed of his whereabouts,” Maggie said.

“Could he have given you the tip on where to find Janssen?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. But nothing suggests he’s anything but one of the good guys—he couldn’t have killed Tom.” Her voice cracked, and she turned away, fixed her gaze on a nearby food booth. “Damn.”

“Are you going to be all right?” Rob asked.

She nodded. “I’d like to offer up a prayer.”

A prayer? “Okay.”

She lifted her chin, squinting against the late afternoon sun. “It’ll only take twenty minutes or so. Do you mind?”

“No, of course not.”

She smiled faintly. “You can try the fresh herring. It’s a Dutch favorite.”

“It’s raw.”

“Yes, but it’s good. You salt it, then more or less drop it down your throat as if you were a seal. I like it. The tradition is to chase it with a shot of genever. Dutch gin.”

“I’ll take the gin without the herring.”

Her turquoise eyes went distant again. “Twenty minutes.”

Rob nodded. “I’ll be here.”

He saw her relief, as if she’d expected she’d have to fight him for a few minutes on her own. She started through the square, the strong afternoon sun lightening her deep red hair.

Normally he was good at reading people, a combination of training, experience and instinct. But Maggie wasn’t easy to read.

Still, as he winced at the lineup of raw herring on ice, all his alarm bells were going off.

Special Agent Spencer had something up her sleeve.

“Prayer, my ass,” he said under his breath, deciding he’d try raw herring another day.




Six


St. John’s Cathedral was cool and dark, a sharp contrast to the afternoon heat and sunlight on the streets outside. Its massive interior seemed quiet for a summer Saturday. Maggie suspected word of the brutal murder of an American had prompted at least some tourists to change their plans.

Tom…I’m so sorry.

Why didn’t you answer me when I called you?

She wanted to believe he hadn’t heard her, but, as she’d told the Dutch and American investigators, she didn’t know for sure one way or the other.

She tried not to think of his easy manner, his smile. With physical effort, she pushed back the personal regrets—the grief—she had for the death of a new friend and focused on the job she had to do.

Could Tom have been the caller who wanted to meet with her? Had he disguised his voice and played on her father’s death to lure her to Den Bosch?

Why?

But that made no sense.

She hadn’t mentioned the call to anyone. It was a long shot that the lead was legitimate, and there was no reason to believe it had anything to do with Tom’s death. The Dutch police would probably be irritated with her for withholding any information, but Maggie had no evidence it had been anything but a crank call.

She hadn’t told her boss or the FBI about the strange call, either, or, certainly, Rob Dunnemore.

If it’d been Tom, there’d be no meeting.

If it was a nut, either there’d be no meeting or he’d show up and she’d find out that he was crazy soon enough.

If it was a legitimate informant, she’d get what she could out of him and proceed from there.

She felt the uneven stone flooring under her feet. And if it’s whoever shot Tom in the back of the head?

Then, Maggie thought, she’d kick herself for not having opened her mouth.

And she’d deal with it.

Bringing Rob along for extra security wouldn’t have worked. If her caller was still at the cathedral, he’d realize she wasn’t alone—and Dunnemore would have quickly figured out she wasn’t there just to pray.

Maggie made her way along the outer aisle of the huge cathedral, aware of shadows and the silence. People were buried here. For eight hundred years, people had worshiped in this place. Its thirteenth-century tower and some of its interior were Romanesque in style, but its more ornate Gothic features from later expansion and rebuilding dominated.

Brochure in hand, Maggie pretended she was a tourist, peeking at the baptistery and the Passion altar, checking out the seven chapels that ringed the cavernous interior, staring up at the medieval figures of saints and the religious reliefs depicting the life of Christ and John the Baptist. There were enormous flying buttresses, and beautiful stained-glass windows let in just a thin filter of light.

She could feel the weight of the centuries, the inevitable flow of history, and thought about how much the world outside the cathedral’s thick walls had changed.

She pictured Tom’s body in the Binnendieze and wondered how many deaths its waters had seen. Conquerors had come and gone. Liberators, wars, floods, people. Maggie was aware of her own impermanence. Perhaps that was part of the purpose of such a place, part of why it endured.

A few people here and there were kneeling in silent prayer, as if to remind her the cathedral was a house of worship.

Most of the pews in the center nave were empty. Maggie made her way into one near the outermost aisle, with a good view of the major entrance and exit. When she sat down, she felt chilled, suddenly isolated and very tired. Tom.

A white-haired man worked his way into the pew and sat next to her.

Five aisles, dozens of pews. He picked hers.

She could smell the stale cigarette smoke that clung to him. Glancing out of the corner of her eye, she saw his yellow-tipped fingernails and the blue veins bulging in the skinny hand on his thigh.

He didn’t kneel or pull out rosary beads.

Hell. It’s him, Maggie thought

“Where’s your marshal friend?” he asked.

His East Coast prep school accent didn’t fit with his down-and-out appearance. “I don’t have a lot of time,” she said, not giving him a direct answer. “I need to know who you are. Your name. Why you sought me out. Why Den Bosch. Start now.”

She spoke in a whisper, but her urgent tone—and her skepticism—didn’t seem to bother him. “My name is William Raleigh,” he said. “I was in the foreign service once.”

Oh, God. A nutcase. Some threadbare old guy who thought he was a spy or a diplomat. “For the U.S.?”

“Yes. Then I went out on my own. My specialty is economics.” He smiled. “As much as it’s anyone’s specialty.”

Although he sounded lucid, Maggie knew he could just be playing the part, trying to persuade her that he was the real thing. “I was never any good at economics.”

“No one is, even the experts. It’s just that the experts know it and the rest of us hope it’s not true.”

There was a hint of humor and irony in his whispered words, but Maggie wasn’t willing to bet yet whether he was legit or a mentally ill drifter determined to reel her in to his delusions. “Mr. Raleigh, I need to know what this is all about.”

He faced the front of the cathedral, not looking at her. “I’ve had an interesting life. I’m an economist. I’ve traveled all over the world, doing what I could to bring fairness and prosperity to others, first in my work as a foreign service officer, then as an economic consultant. That sounds lofty, but I don’t mean it to. I did what I could. I think that’s what we all do, don’t you?”

“No.”

He smiled. “So young to be a cynic.”

“It hasn’t been a good day.”

“No, it hasn’t. I’m sorry about your friend.”

Then he knew about Tom. Of course, Den Bosch was a small city, and news traveled quickly.

“I’ve met everyone from small-time warlords to the last five U.S. presidents,” the man next to her said. “Not the current one yet. Poe.”

Yet. Maggie wondered if Raleigh had brought up Poe’s name deliberately, if he knew the marshal with her was Rob Dunnemore. Was Rob’s connection to President Poe, ultimately, what this meeting was all about?

She shifted in the pew, studying Raleigh. He wasn’t much taller than she was, and he was thin, dressed in a blue madras shirt that must have seen him through at least one of his decades of supposed travels. She noticed that he’d let the hem out of his khaki pants, as if they’d shrunk in the dryer.

Maggie checked for drool and dried fried egg or something on his shirt, and hated herself for doing it.

His belt wasn’t pulled too tight or hanging too loose.

His fly was zipped.

He had on sports sandals, a definite surprise. No socks.

He smiled faintly at her. “Do I look dotty?”

“Let’s just say you don’t look like a retired economist. How old are you?”

“Not as old as I look.”

“What kind of economist are you, the kind for or against tax cuts?”

He gave a small laugh. “That’s a very American question.”

“I’m a very American diplomatic security agent. Come on, Mr. Raleigh. Who are you, really?”

His eyes, a pale grayish blue, focused on her a moment, emanating a warmth and affection—a familiarity—that made Maggie edge away from him.

“My father…”

She didn’t know if she’d spoken aloud.

“What about your father, Maggie?”

Her chest tightened, and she turned abruptly from him and stared up toward the pulpit. She had to stay focused, on task. She couldn’t lose control.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

“I can’t say I knew him well. We ran into each other in Prague a few weeks before his death. He told me about his DS agent daughter. He was so proud of you. He called you his Magster.” Raleigh’s tone was formal and very correct, almost without emotion, incongruent with his tattered appearance. “I believe it’s fate that our paths crossed.”

“Fate or bullshit.”

He didn’t respond.

“Thomas Kopac—”

“I had nothing to do with his death. It’s a terrible shame. I know he befriended you.”

Maggie noticed red veins in Raleigh’s eyes, bulging veins in his nose. A drinker. “That wouldn’t be hard for you to find out. It’s not as if we kept our friendship a secret.”

“No doubt.” Raleigh went very still next to Maggie, staring down at the bony hand on his thigh. “So many of the people I’ve met in my day were forgettable. Shallow, venal, selfish, arrogant—I don’t want to remember them in my retirement. Others weren’t. They were the best. They had honor and integrity. Not all of them went on to live to an old age the way I undoubtedly will, if only because I’m destined to be the one to remember what they were.” He didn’t raise his voice or ramble. “I’m often haunted by the good people I couldn’t save.”

Jesus.

“Who are you talking about? Why am I here?”

He inhaled through his nose. “I can feel the presence of the dead here, can’t you? Eighteen months. It doesn’t seem that long ago—”

“If you’re using my father’s death to try to manipulate me, it won’t work. If you were responsible in some way for what happened to him—”

“He wouldn’t have wanted me to put you in danger.”

“I have a job to do. I intend to do it to the best of my abilities. That’s not up to you.”

“It wasn’t up to him, either.” Raleigh’s tone lost its moroseness, became firmer, more serious. “He knew you were like him. You’re capable of breaking a few dishes, Maggie.”

“I’m a professional—”

“You’re a self-starter, an independent thinker. And, yes, a professional. You won’t cross the line. But you’ll put a toe over it.” His tone had lightened, but only momentarily. “You can’t tell anyone about me, Maggie. No one. That’s very important for your own safety. You have good instincts. Trust them.”

“I didn’t know Tom Kopac was about to be killed this morning.”

“I didn’t say you were clairvoyant.”

“If you have any information, I can take you to the American embassy and we can talk there.” Unless he was already familiar to everyone there—good old Bill Raleigh, yeah, that head case.

But he was very convincing. “That won’t be necessary.”

Maggie knew she’d lost him, that he was wrapping up, but she persisted. “I need more to go on.”

His movements unhurried, he carefully, deliberately, stood. She noticed he had a walking stick with him, the retractable kind that hikers use. He turned to her. “There’s an inn in Ravenkill, New York. The Old Stone Hollow. I don’t know if it’s of any significance. Perhaps it’s just a pretty country inn.”

“An inn? What—”

“It’s good to meet you in person, Agent Spencer,” Raleigh said, easing out of the pew. “Your marshal friend is here. He’s not one to underestimate, is he? I’ll be in touch if I have anything else for you.”

Maggie whipped around in the pew, but she didn’t see Rob.

A trick. Damn.

She jumped up, but Raleigh—or whoever he was—had darted into the outer aisle, moving faster than she’d thought him capable of. He kicked over a kneeler and it landed on her ankle, slowing her down as she went after him. Every fiber of her being told him that he was someone she could trust, but her common sense—her training and experience—warned her not to let herself get sucked into his story all the way.

She wouldn’t be the first law enforcement officer to get taken in by a delusional alcoholic.

“Mr. Raleigh,” she whispered, “please wait. Rob’s not here. You have to give me more. This inn—”

Ignoring her, he picked up his pace. Maggie didn’t know what she was supposed to do if she caught up with him. Tackle him and drag him to the Den Bosch police? Shove him in her Mini and drive him to the American embassy? She wasn’t armed. She had no arrest authority in the Netherlands.

She heard someone mumbling a prayer in a nearby chapel, then the far-off moan of a door, the echo of footsteps. Her hands were clammy, her fingers stiff as if they’d been in the cold.

“Raleigh!”

She let her voice go above a whisper.

A woman spun around in a pew and glared at her.

He wasn’t stopping.

If she tried to tackle him, Maggie figured he’d whack her with his walking stick. He’d make a scene. He’d play the crazy old drunk being attacked by a religious zealot. He’d scream for help, scaring the hell out of the few stragglers in the cathedral, and run.

Trust your instincts.

He disappeared, hiding in one of the thousand nooks and crannies of the massive cathedral, stealing out an exit.

Maybe he’d just gone up in smoke.

Maybe she’d imagined him.

Ravenkill, New York.

Maggie had never heard of it or the Old Stone Hollow Inn.

“Little unsteady on your feet there, Agent Spencer?”

Dunnemore. He didn’t bother to speak in a whisper. Maggie recognized his Southern accent even before she swung around and saw him coming through a pew from another aisle.

Obviously he’d been in the cathedral long enough to have seen her trip on the kneeler.

That meant he’d also seen her chase William Raleigh.

“Just a little,” she said with an edge of sarcasm. “Have I been longer than twenty minutes?”

“I don’t know. I gave you a two-minute head start before I came after you.” He stood very close to her, not much charming about his manner right now. “The raw herring wasn’t that appealing.”

She flexed her ankle, easing out any stiffness. “I should have remembered you track people for a living.”

“Probably should have. Who was the old man?”

“William the Conqueror.”

He held his suit jacket over his shoulder with one finger, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He hadn’t had a particularly good day, either. Maggie felt herself softening as he looked her up and down. “You hurt?” he asked.

She shook her head, wondering if he might be exaggerating his accent just to throw her off balance. “How did you find me?”

“You said you were off to pray. This is the biggest church in the whole damn country. I figured it was a good place to start.”

“You shouldn’t swear in here.”

“You’re right. We can go outside, and I’ll swear out there.” His eyes—they were a dark gray in the dim light of the cathedral—fixed on her. “And you can tell me about the old guy in the madras shirt.”



They found a table in the shade at an uncrowded café near the market square. “Get two of whatever you’re ordering,” Maggie said. “I’m not picky. I don’t even know if I can eat.”

Rob ordered two bowls of the soup of the day, which seemed to involve chicken, and coffee for himself, a Heineken for Maggie. He’d do the driving back to The Hague.

Their waiter brought the drinks first. Maggie touched a finger to the foam of her beer. She’d had a miserable day, and she looked more shaken than she’d want to admit, worse now that she’d finished with the investigators and the questions—and now that whatever her mission at the cathedral had been was over.

“The old guy looked like he planned to take you out with that walking stick,” Rob said.

“For all I know, he thought it was tipped with ricin.”

“Is that a joke?”

She sighed. “An attempt at a joke.”

Rob lifted his small coffee cup. “I’d say cheers, but it wouldn’t sound right today.”

“I suppose not.” She picked up her beer, hesitating, as if pushing back an intrusive thought, before taking a sip. “It’s been a long week. Nothing about it’s been normal.”

Including having him thrust upon her, Rob thought, drinking some of his coffee. It was very strong, but he figured a jolt of caffeine wouldn’t hurt. He was hot from chasing after Maggie, negotiating the narrow, unfamiliar city streets in the late August heat. “Your rendezvous with the old guy at St. John’s. That’s why we’re in Den Bosch today?”

Maggie stared at the disappearing foam on her beer. “I shouldn’t drink—”

“Go ahead. I’m sticking to coffee. I’ll drive.” He smiled, trying to take some of the edge off her mood and maybe his own. “It’s okay. I can handle a Mini.”

She raised her eyes from her drink. “I know what it must have looked like back there. Just forget about it, okay?”

“Not okay. The old guy’s an informant?”

“A wanna-be, I think.”

“Any relation to Kopac?”

“I don’t know that much about him.”

Rob sat back in his chair. “That’s an evasive answer.”

“Maybe it’s a polite way to tell you—” She stopped herself. “Never mind. It’s been a lousy day for you, too.”

But she obviously wanted to tell him what happened in St. John’s was none of his damned business. “Better to evade than to lie outright. Okay. I get that. You don’t know anything about me except that I’m a marshal, I was shot four months ago and my family knows the president.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

“It’s not a question of trust.”

Then what else was it? But he didn’t ask. “This guy’s contacted you before?”

“First time.”

“What’d he do, call, e-mail, send a carrier pigeon? Come on. Throw me a bone. Let me think you’re starting to trust me a little.”

She didn’t smile. “He called.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“So, after I got here.”

Their soup arrived in heavy bowls. Cream of chicken and fresh vegetables. It was steaming and substantial, which, despite the heat, Rob welcomed.

Maggie shifted around in her chair. “I wouldn’t make too much of this. The timing’s bad, I know, but I’m not all that sure he’s playing with a full deck.” She picked up her beer with such force, some of it splashed out onto her hand. “It’s quiet, don’t you think? Especially for such a beautiful afternoon. People must be worried after this morning. I guess I don’t blame them.”

“They’ll decide it’s an American thing and go on with their lives. In Central Park in the spring, people decided it was a marshals thing. It helped them get past the idea of a sniper on the loose. Someone wasn’t picking off people at random.”

Maggie took a drink of her beer, then set down the glass and blew out a sigh. “Tom’s family must know by now what happened to him. It’s an awful experience to go through, having someone come to your house and tell you—well, you know what I mean.”

“I called my sister from Central Park so she wouldn’t have to find out that way or, worse, see me on television.”

“Did you know you were in bad shape?”

“I don’t remember what I knew.”

She looked away. “You didn’t need what happened today.”

“Maggie, I didn’t come to the Netherlands to run away from anything. I can do my job.”

“You’re not back on the street,” she said.

“That’s not my decision to make. Look—”

She faced him again, her creamy skin less pale. “You should be. You didn’t hesitate today. The shooter, Tom. You did fine.”

He acknowledged her words with a nod. “I still want to know about this Scarlet Pimpernel character of yours.”

This time, she smiled. “You marshals. Hound dogs on a scent.”

Rob tried the soup, relished the normalcy of it. “Maybe I can help.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, but there’s nothing for you to do.”

Clever. It wasn’t as if he could order her to come clean. He could badger her for answers, but he’d already seen her help pull a dead man out of a river, deal with the Dutch police and a nervous embassy and chase a white-haired old man. She’d hold her own against anything he threw at her and tell him exactly what she wanted him to know and not one word more.

This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he’d told Mike Rivera he wanted to go to the Netherlands.

“You saw the man with me at St. John’s. My wanna-be informant. Did he look mentally stable to you?”

Rob shrugged. “Down on his luck, maybe. Lost his retirement, got a little daft. Could just be on a tight budget.”

“I suppose.” She picked up her spoon, held it in midair and sighed. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I just ended up putting you on high alert, got you into tracking mode.”

“Kopac’s murder did that.”

Her eyes shone, but she covered her emotion by dipping her spoon into her soup.

“This guy,” Rob said. “Does he have a name? Besides William the Conqueror.”

“That was snotty of me. I apologize.” She left it at that. “How long were you in the cathedral?”

“Obviously not long enough.”

“Did you see anyone else, anyone who could have been with my guy?”

Rob remembered the scene when he’d walked into the cathedral, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, his sensibilities to the atmosphere. It was quiet, removed from the murder investigation outside its doors. When he spotted Maggie in a pew, at first he thought, guiltily, that she had, indeed, come there to pray.

Then he’d noticed the white-haired man sitting too close to her. In the next second, she was chasing after him.

“I should have followed your guy,” Rob said. “But I didn’t see anyone who might have been with him. Think he tipped you off about Janssen?”

“No. I’m sure he didn’t. That message came by a free e-mail account. I doubt—” She topped herself. “I shouldn’t make assumptions. He just didn’t strike me as someone who would know the whereabouts of an international fugitive.”

“But he chose to meet you in Den Bosch, where Janssen was picked up.”

“Probably for dramatic effect. He could have read about the arrest in the paper and decided to give me a call. You must know how it is with sources. I’m sympathetic to mental illness—I mean it. But it’s not always that easy to sort out the cranks from the legitimate sources.” She sighed. “I didn’t expect that part of this work, did you?”

Rob didn’t answer right away. He’d dealt with his share of delusional would-be informants, from poor, illiterate drug addicts to highly educated society matrons. Getting sucked into one of their wild fantasies and acting on it was the nightmare of every law enforcement officer he knew. “Maggie—”

“I’ve told you what I can.”

He could feel her tension and reached across the table, skimming his fingertips across the top of her hand. Her skin was cooler than it should have been on such a warm day. She didn’t pull away, but touching her was an instinctive gesture on his part and took them both by surprise.

She took a breath, looking down at her soup. “It’s been a weird day. Surreal, almost.”

“I’m not the prosecution or your boss.” Rob tried to sound reassuring, not patronizing or irritated by her unwillingness to talk. Still, he could feel his own tension and fatigue clawing at him, and the caffeine had his mind going in a dozen different directions. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”





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