Adrenaline (14 page)

A slow, awful fire burned in Mila’s voice.

“Lucy and your child are your holy grail, Sam. I know you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Of course I do. You are all about fighting the evil, Sam. You joined the Company for revenge. A revenge you can’t ever get.”

I froze. Mila raised an eyebrow at me.

“The desire for revenge drove you to the Company, and now revenge can drive you to find the man who tore apart your family. Oh, what a shrink could make of you.”

“I just want Lucy and the baby back,” I said. “I don’t want revenge.”

“Don’t believe revenge isn’t fantastic,” Mila said, “until you’ve actually exacted it.” She shrugged. “I find revenge absolutely thrilling and satisfying.”

I reached for the Glenfiddich, refilled our glasses.

Mila sipped the whisky. It was a nice big, comradely gulp. “If you come to work for me, you will have a free hand to look for her. I am best boss ever.”

I didn’t say anything for a long minute.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“This could be a Company trap. A test to see if I’m willing to sell my services. I don’t know who you are and I don’t care. I cannot help you. I am practical.”

She made a face at the word. “Practical is what Soviet architecture was. Practical is not always the answer. The offer expires in one minute.”

“And if I say no?”

“I’ll get you to Holland. But then we part ways and you never saw or met me, and be certain you will be back in prison within days. With no hope of ever finding your family.”

“And if I say yes?”

Mila tasted the Scotch. “Find Yasmin. Bring her back
to me, and you may exact whatever revenge you like on the scarred man. If he knows where your wife and child are, it’s your concern. But Yasmin is saved first.”

“She’s killed people.”

“No. You can see it in her face—she has been drugged or broken. Break this group of kidnappers for me, and I will give you every resource to find your wife.”

“And then what? The Company will be after me.”

“Not if you produce evidence of your innocence. The scarred man might have information that clears the name.”

“Who are you?” I said, so quietly I wasn’t sure that she heard me.

Mila set down the glass. “I work for a group that prefers to remain anonymous. You have no reason to trust me, but via this group I am bringing you the best hope you have of finding your wife. I am giving you freedom and resources. Do you care so much for little questions that have little answers?”

She had a bizarre way of talking but I saw her point. It didn’t matter who these people were; all that mattered was Lucy and my son. Daniel. I wondered if she’d been able to give him that name, if they were still alive.

I decided. “And if I get caught?”

“You’re on your own. We can’t acknowledge you, we can’t help you.”

I waited in silence for her thin smile to fade. She wanted a response. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“I dislike seeing your talent wasted. You should be put to good use.” Mila lit a cigarette; she was not the kind of person to ask if I minded in the close quarters of the cabin. “Not just good use. Extraordinary use.”

I picked up the photo from the train station. Stared hard at the man’s scar.

“How many seconds left in that minute?” I asked.

“Ten.”

“Yes,” I said.

W
HATEVER BRIBES MILA TOSSED AMONG
the ship worked: the crew left us alone. I was surprised, as I had nearly shot one of them.

I had decided Mila was part of some group within the government, unleashed to do dirty work without the boundaries of law, and, since I was damaged goods, I was a perfect recruit. They had limited access to Company information like my file, but the Company didn’t know about
them
.

I didn’t care who they were as long as they helped me get Lucy back.

So. I exercised in my room, lifting myself on a bar, running in place, thinking, clearing my head. I endured a self-imposed captivity for three days, then I couldn’t do it anymore; not after the long weeks in the Polish prison. So I went up to the deck and I ran among the containers in the bright open sunshine. The crew watched me. I waved. They didn’t wave back.

I thought about the best ways to try and find the scarred man. I had to assume he knew my face. This was going to be the most dangerous job I’d ever undertaken, and I was doing it with an unproven ally in Mila.

When I turned past one stack of containers Captain Switchblade was there, helping to clean the deck.

“Hello,” I said.

He stared at me in surprise.

“You okay?” I asked.

After a moment, he nodded.

“Good.” I wasn’t going to say sorry, since he’d pulled the knife on me, but I didn’t want more trouble with this guy. We were still days away from the Netherlands.

I went past him and kept jogging. I didn’t look behind me and no knife landed in my back. I wondered how much his forgiveness had cost Mila and why she’d bothered to pay it.

I was lying on the cot in my cabin when Mila knocked and came in.

“The Company has sent your face to every passport point of entry in Europe and Asia. They’re telling people your passport may have been taken and be in use by a fugitive.”

“If they’re looking for me, they might consider that I’d use an earlier legend.” Legends are cover identities used by field operatives. I’d played the part of a Canadian smuggler, a German money launderer, an American mercenary who wanted to make quick money guarding blood diamonds. The people who could have said
He wasn’t really any of those guys
were all dead or in prison. The legends could still be counted as clean. I had no documentation in those names—passports, or credit cards—but I could get that from Mila. Those names were known in the criminal underworld. But the risk of using one to infiltrate the scarred man’s ring posed serious consequences. The Company could have burned all my old names, told any
contact or informant that I was not to be trusted. Worse, they could be listening, watching for me to try to step into my old shoes.

The only sure way to know if the legends were still good was to try and use them.

I gave Mila the background on my old names and we went into her cabin where she broke out a kit full of diplomatic paper, cameras, a small but powerful printer and a laptop. A forger’s paradise.

“So what’s the first step when we arrive?”

“We meet Yasmin’s father in Amsterdam.”

“Her father?”

“Mr. Zaid can tell you more about Yasmin and her kidnapping.”

Mr. Zaid? Was he Mila’s boss? “
You
tell me.”

“I’d rather you hear details from him.”

“What does he know about me?”

“Just that you can help him get his daughter back. That’s all he needs to know.”

“Where will we meet him?”

“At a bar.”

“You sure like bars,” I said.

“Yes,” Mila said. “I sure do. Now. I want to be sure you are not rusty. The rest of the day, we only speak Russian. And how is your Dutch?”

“Poor.”

“I will expect it to improve quickly.” She rolled her eyes. “I hope you won’t embarrass me with poor verb choices.”

I
WATCHED MILA BUILD
the new versions of me. I was like Frankenstein’s monster crafted out of watermarked paper and credit histories and life histories. She made me a Canadian, an American, a German, and a New Zealander. All under different names. I watched her use backdoor entries into what should have been ironclad government databases in Washington, Berlin, Ottawa, and Christchurch to insert the codes for the passports into the appropriate government databases, making me a legitimate traveler. She slid with ease into banks, issuing credit cards to me in my various old identities.

“The Company could be looking for my old names, too,” I said.

“They could. A risk we must take.”

I wondered again—who was this woman? Mila whistled a Bananarama tune as she worked.

Rotterdam. The port accommodated around four hundred ships a day, both ocean-bound and for inland waterways, and a labyrinth of rail and road. The port itself was like a city, loading cranes the jagged skyscrapers, vast avenues of water the streets. This was a critical artery between the
hundreds of millions of people in North America and the hundreds of millions of people in Europe and beyond.

I rode out in the same container I rode in on. Mila was unwilling to risk that passport control at the port hadn’t received the alert on my passport. And she was worried about the crew talking. She spent the morning of our arrival greasing more palms. Silence cost money.

I waited for the container to settle and for her to come and open the door.

When she did, a uniformed man, a port inspector, stood with her.

“Everything is fine,” she said to me in Russian. The inspector stepped inside and displayed great interest in the Vermonter soap. Mila spoke rapidly to the inspector in Dutch; he nodded, didn’t look at us.

Mila and I walked out into the gray cloudy day.

“You are very handy with the bribes,” I said to her, as we hurried across the busy docking area.

“I am beloved and popular,” Mila said. “I have friends in every corner of the world.”

And we vanished into the flood of goods and people coming into Europe.

W
E TOOK THE TRAIN TO AMSTERDAM
, fifty-six kilometers away, and I watched the flatland of Holland unpeel before my gaze. I was back in Europe, where I had been happiest with Lucy, and imprisoned by the Company. I thought of the dead intruder and his own ticket to Amsterdam.

I leaned back against the train seat. I’d traded one chain, from Howell, to another from Mila. I watched the brief stretch of Holland pan out in silence. I’d had months to sit and think about what I’d do if I got the chance to find Lucy, and here it was, and my skin felt like lit matches lay under it. The possible truths—that Lucy and our baby were dead, or that Lucy had betrayed me—loomed large, the monsters I didn’t want to see and yet had to see.

Fine. I was going to find the man with the scar, force him to tell me where my wife and child were. Then I was going to be the last thing he ever saw on this earth.