The Wrong Girl (6 page)

He was turning the gun on them before he even realized.

The phone in Vos’s jacket pocket rang. Just past the Melkweg. He cursed and paused, out-of-breath, glanced at the screen.

Van der Berg. Not a man who wasted time or words.

‘What?’

‘There’s something wrong here. I think I just saw a kid snatched. Pink jacket like they were talking about.’

‘Where?’

‘Off the square. A black van. It went back into the centre. I’d have got a number if it wasn’t for all these damned spooks driving around like idiots.’ A pause. ‘Where are you? Where’s Laura?’

Keeping up with the AIVD men. Out of sight.

‘We’ll be back in a minute. I think they’ve got the man.’

‘What man?’ Van der Berg yelled. ‘I saw him here. Putting the kid in a van.’ That gap again and they were both thinking the same thing. ‘There’s more than one of them, isn’t there?’

‘Sounds like it . . .’

The ducks and coots rose from the canal, filling the air with the sound of their wings and anxious, high-pitched cries. Then a staccato rattle of gunfire.

Saskia.

A pink jacket. A tall figure holding a young girl’s hand. Renata ran and ran, down the long lane, past the Melkweg, out to the canal by Marnixstraat.

In the distance the grey modern building that was the police station. Fat use they’d been. It was Henk who’d found her. Bad Henk. Thoughtless Henk.

He’d throw that at her. She knew it. But right at that moment she didn’t care.

She ran, bent down, held her daughter, hugged her. Looked at her pale, puzzled face and didn’t dare to ask the obvious question . . .
Where the hell have you been?

‘She’s fine,’ Henk said in a flat, bored voice. ‘She got lost. That’s all. Let’s go home.’

He ruffled Saskia’s blonde hair.

‘I’ll buy ice cream. Whatever . . .’

A scream from somewhere. A sound like gunfire.

Three things then, simultaneous, no more than a few steps apart, separate yet connected.

Laura Bakker reached the blind alley where the AIVD team had raced in pursuit of Black Pete. A bloodied body lay bent on the floor. Next to it a hard-faced woman in a business suit chanting into a radio.

A wall of men formed ahead as soon as Bakker showed up. Her ID card meant nothing. They’d got machine pistols. Body armour. Balaclavas and riot gear. Pushed her back until she could see no more and left her fuming, cursing in the street. Stamping her big boots on the cobbles, all to no avail.

As the Kuypers placed their arms around their daughter like a shield a tall blonde-haired woman raced up to them, yelling something in a foreign tongue. Bent down, stared at the girl. Shook her head. Furious. Lost.

You tried to steal my phone.

A random thought. Unwanted in the circumstances. Renata barely noticed her husband slide away, turning his back, muttering he had to call someone. Then vanishing across the bridge.

Pieter Vos saw some of this, as did Laura Bakker retreating from the bloody scene in the alley, and Dirk Van der Berg walking from the square. Antennae tuned for trouble, the three detectives homed in on the odd little group.

There, by the side of the girl, her mother, the distraught woman, Bakker looked at Vos and said, still struggling to believe this herself, ‘They shot him. Just like that.’

‘Where’s my girl?’ Hanna Bublik yelled in broken Dutch as she clutched at the child in the pink jacket until Renata Kuyper snatched Saskia from her clawing fingers.

Van der Berg glanced at Vos. A nod. He seemed to know.

A sound. High-pitched. A jaunty childish tune, the kind set for a specific caller. Renata Kuyper took her phone from her pocket, checked the screen, turned to her daughter and asked, ‘Saskia . . . ?’

The girl stayed silent, eyes on the canal and the returning wildfowl.

‘It’s from your phone,’ said Renata.

Vos retrieved the handset from the mother’s cold fingers. ‘It’s a video call,’ he said, and tapped the screen.

There was a face on the little screen. Dark with make-up. Scarlet lips. White teeth.

‘It’s the mother I wish to talk to,’ this new Black Pete said.

‘My name’s Pieter Vos. I’m a brigadier with the Amsterdam police.’

The face laughed then, the teeth perfect and even.

‘Then you’ll do.’

An ambulance tore round the corner, siren shrieking, down to the street where the men with guns were gathered.

‘My brother Mujahied’s a martyr, isn’t he? We listen to your radios. We know your schemes. You murdered him.’

The speaker was turned to full so they could all hear and see. The voice was foreign. The accent hard to place.

‘I don’t know what happened. We’re police. There’s a girl . . .’ Vos began.

‘You’re all the same. Dogs and criminals.’

‘What do you want?’

‘We have the Kuyper child,’ Black Pete said. ‘Granddaughter to your bloody soldier . . .’

‘No,’ Vos cut in.

The white eyes grew large with fury.

‘Don’t argue with me! Two decades on from Srebrenica, eight thousand dead there. So many more in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you think we can’t count? This murderer’s offspring is with us now.’

Vos looked at the little girl, clutched to her mother’s legs by caring arms. Then at the other woman. Foreign. A mark of desperate poverty about her.

Pink jackets.

‘Saskia Kuyper’s here with me. Safe with her mother. You’ve got the wrong kid. It’s the same clothes but . . .’

Hanna Bublik seized the phone from him, glared at the face on the screen.

‘She’s eight years old. From Georgia. No father. No money. No . . .’

A wagging finger, a bossy hand, waved her into silence.

‘I speak to the man now,’ Black Pete said. ‘Him only.’

One more time she tried and got the same. Vos looked at her, nodded, and she gave him back the phone.

‘What she says is the truth,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve got the wrong girl. Let her go. Do this now. Make yourself scarce before we find you . . .’

The black face was laughing again. Then the picture changed. A brief view of what looked like a small room. Wooden walls. Something familiar about it for Vos.

Finally a shape in the corner.

Perhaps it was an easy mistake. She looked a little like the Kuyper kid. Prettier if anything, with long straight blonde hair and bright, anxious eyes.

There was red tape round her mouth, rope round her slender wrists, drawing them together on her lap. The pink jacket looked grubby and stained.

Hanna was snatching at the phone again, screaming like a banshee.

‘Hurt her and I will kill you. I swear . . .’

A sudden move on the screen. A hand grabbed the little girl, dragged her to the camera, ripped the tape from her mouth.

When she cried it seemed more with fury than pain. Tough kid. Tough mother. But the woman was silent now.

‘Name!’ the Black Pete bellowed.

Nothing.

‘Name!’

‘Natalya Bublik,’ the girl said in a firm, defiant voice.

Vos was looking at the walls. The timber planking. Not her. Trying to imagine where this place might be. Not far away. There wasn’t time for that.

Black Pete stripped fresh tape around her mouth, pushed her back into the corner. Cushions there. Perhaps a makeshift bed.

‘She’s an innocent kid,’ Vos pleaded. ‘Let her go.’

‘There were innocent children in Srebrenica. In Iraq. Afghanistan. Somalia. Men and women too. Do you beg for them, policeman?’

‘What . . . do . . . you . . . want?’

‘I want my brother Ismail freed and flown to a country that won’t kill him.’ A shrug. A glance in the corner. ‘And some money too. I’d have preferred to hold your murderer Kuyper’s offspring to ransom for his freedom. But a child’s a child.’

The dark face peered into the camera and smiled.

‘I’ll keep this girl instead.’ He laughed. ‘Why test the mettle of a bastard like Kuyper? When I can try the conscience of you good and ordinary people?’

‘Let her go now,’ Vos begged. ‘There’s no justice in kidnapping a child . . .’

‘Justice is what we make it. This kid will do. Tomorrow I return with instructions. This phone. No other.’

Gone then. Hanna Bublik cursed. The Kuyper girl held on to her mother’s legs and closed her eyes.

The ducks and coots were returning to the water, bickering as if nothing had happened. Vos looked at Laura Bakker and Dirk Van der Berg.

‘She’s on a boat,’ he said.

Four hours later in Marnixstraat Mirjam Fransen briefed them on Ismail Alamy, the Moroccan whose fate was now linked to that of Natalya Bublik. Fifty-one years old, an active recruiting agent for terrorist causes over the Internet. Resident in the Netherlands for six years. Suspected by AIVD of connections with a number of outlawed groups in the Horn of Africa, Al-Shabaab among them. Trained in Afghanistan, wanted in three Middle Eastern countries to face criminal charges for conspiracy, bomb plots and attempted murder.

Alamy was one of the few recognized members of an elusive terrorist cell led by a figure known as Il Barbone. Saudi by birth, but based in Italy for years. The nickname came from there, and the rumour he had a heavy beard. Fransen didn’t want to talk about that much. Classified, she said. All they needed to know was that Barbone was behind something quite unlike the standard Islamist terrorist grouping: noisy, visible, relatively easy to track. Instead it was a well-organized operational unit dedicated to planning and funding, one that worked silently, often through conventional channels, to move money, people and intelligence around western Europe. Terrorism as a business process, everyday, difficult to detect.

For the last twenty-four months Alamy had been fighting a protracted battle against extradition. At that moment he was in a solitary secure cell in the detention centre at Schiphol airport awaiting one final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The moment that was lost – days away – Fransen predicted he’d be placed on a military plane and shipped out of the country to face trial in a friendly Middle Eastern nation.

‘You can’t do that until we’ve found the girl,’ Vos said.

Bakker had joined them in De Groot’s office. Fransen brought along her deputy, a taciturn, hefty man called Thom Geerts, grey raincoat and a crew-cut bullet head. Marnixstraat had almost sixty detectives working on the case already, going through CCTV and phone records, interviewing potential witnesses. The call to Saskia’s phone was made through a Net connection. Untraceable. The black van had been found abandoned near Centraal station. They’d used a counterfeit security pass to allow them to take it close to Leidseplein.

These men were prepared.

‘We don’t base government policy on the actions of criminals,’ Geerts said with no emotion.

‘You’ve been trying to ship this man out of the country for years,’ De Groot told the pair from AIVD. ‘A few more days won’t hurt. He’s not going anywhere. We need the time.’

Geerts was about to argue when Fransen put a hand to his arm, smiled without much warmth and said, ‘That’s fine. We can wait. A few days anyway.’

Laura Bakker sat silently fuming throughout the briefing. Fransen had admitted at the outset they’d received some prior warning of a possible attack during the Sinterklaas parade. Not details. Only chatter. She said it was insufficient to brief the police. They should have been aware the threat level was raised that morning. Standard practice in such circumstances.

‘If we’d known . . .’ Bakker said a second time.

Mirjam Fransen shrugged.

‘What would you have done? We had teams of officers in place. That was enough. We couldn’t cancel Sinterklaas.’ A brief smile. ‘Could we?’

Commissaris de Groot glared at her.

‘I should have been better informed. We won’t pursue that now.’

‘No you won’t.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I need to go back to the office. I want you to handle the practical matters. Deal with the family. This Georgian prostitute . . . does she have the right papers?’

Hanna Bublik was being interviewed downstairs by Dirk Van der Berg and a female officer. She didn’t seem to have much to say.

‘Her legal status isn’t one of my priorities right now,’ Vos said. ‘The room where the girl was being held. It looked like a boat.’

Fransen frowned.

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘I live on a boat. You get to know what they’re like. Low walls. Timber planking . . .’

‘There are a lot of boats in Amsterdam,’ she said. ‘Good luck . . .’

‘Why did you shoot that man?’ Bakker asked.

Fransen shrugged.

‘You wouldn’t have asked that if you were there.’ She stared the young policewoman in the face. ‘Bouali had a handgun. He looked ready to use it. We gave the standard warning.’

‘I didn’t hear any warning,’ Bakker pointed out.

Mirjam Fransen waited a moment then asked, ‘Do you think I’m lying?’

‘I’m saying I didn’t hear it.’

‘And I’m telling you it was given. Bouali had a weapon. The idiot was turning it on us. I wanted him alive as much as you. Maybe he had things he could tell us.’

The dead man was a Briton by birth, had changed his name when he fell in with a radical preacher in the north of England. Vos’s team had already talked to some of the people in the grubby tenement in the red-light district where he had a tiny room. His housemates were mainly foreign restaurant workers. He was a stranger, there for only a few days, had spent most of his time elsewhere and didn’t talk much.

The AIVD woman turned to Vos and held out a hand.

‘I need that phone now. We’ll deal with the calls.’

He did nothing.

‘The phone,’ she repeated.

Frank de Groot got up and sat on the edge of his desk.

‘Whoever this man is he insisted he’d only talk to Vos.’

‘They don’t make the conditions,’ Geerts said.

‘When they’re holding an eight-year-old girl hostage they do,’ De Groot replied. ‘We keep the phone. Vos does the talking. We’ll let you know what happens, naturally.’ A pause. ‘It would be nice if we got the same in return.’

Mirjam Fransen glared at him.

‘Do you really want me to take this to the ministry?’