Peccadillo - A Katla Novel (Amsterdam Assassin Series Book 2) (3 page)

Nicky slowed down as he spotted a couple of motorcycle cops on BMW F motorcycles. Not that he was afraid that he couldn’t outrun them, but he couldn’t outrun their radios, so Nicky limited his urban enduro escapades to avoid attracting too much attention.

His dashboard clock told him he had ten minutes before he had to meet Lau at the restaurant. He rode the KTM in the direction of Centraal Station, unable to suppress his inner hooligan as he took the bicycle path across the Singel, turned left and sidled past the waiting cars, hooked a right onto the Prins Hendrikkade and raced between cars to get to the front of the queues at the traffic lights. A few minutes later Nicky parked his KTM in front of Prins Heerlijk Snacks, next to the Ducati Monster from the blonde behind the counter. He waved at the counter girl as he strode onto the Zeedijk, knowing she’d keep an eye on his prized possession until he returned. To make sure the police cameras didn’t get a straight shot of his face, Nicky pulled a ball cap down low over his eyes and moved like a shadow down the Zeedijk. He entered the restaurant and walked all the way to the back where a table was reserved for the Red Poles. As he sat down, a waitress asked him if he wanted tea. Nicky told her to bring tea when Lau joined him. From where he sat with his back against the wall next to the stairwell that led up to Zhang’s office, Nicky could survey the whole restaurant in a single glance.

Nicky disliked having to report in, running the risk of being filmed by the police cameras, when most of the times the orders he received could just as well be relayed through burner phones. Lau didn’t like to use cell phones, though, and being the senior Red Pole, he could pretty much do as he wanted.

Lau appeared in the stairwell, and Nicky rose from his seat to give his senior the corner seat. Before he sat back down the waitress came running and placed a pot of tea on the table. Nicky served Lau first before he poured himself a cup.

Lau was the first to break the silence. “You checked out the crane,
Sai-Lo
?”

In Triad hierarchy, even among equals in rank, there is always the
Dai-Lo
, Elder Brother, and
Sai-Lo
, Younger Brother, relationship.

“Yes, Elder Brother. The controls are in a different order, but that’s not a problem.”

“You will be responsible for the perimeter, Nicky. I’ll take Chen and Wu into the office with the accountant.”

“Can Chen help me arrange the funnel?”

Lau lit a cigarette, drawing some irritated glances from customers nearby, but they didn’t dare meet his gaze. “Chen has to be on quay when Sieltjes arrives. I want him to escort her inside. Until then you can do as you see fit.”

Nicky rose from the table. “See you later, Elder Brother.”

He pulled his ball cap down low over his eyes and left the restaurant.
 

Katla checked to make sure Heiboer was unconscious, withdrew the tube from his throat and unzipped the side of the latex vacuum bed. Air rushed audibly between the latex sheets and she could smell urine. Nothing unusual—drunks often lose control over their bladder as they pass out. Katla removed the jaw clamp from his mouth, plucked the tubes from his nostrils and drew the latex sheet away from his face. The skin of his face was blotchy, probably from crying.

She dragged his slack body from the latex sheets onto a stretcher parked next to the circle bed and dressed him again—Heiboer hadn’t been undressed all the way, she had only removed his belt and shoes and put soft mittens around his hands so his nails couldn’t damage the latex vacuum bed. She looked at the circle bed and smiled to herself—one person’s dream, another person’s nightmare.

Latex vacuum beds are considered the pinnacle of restraints with the bondage and discipline crowd. No matter how harshly applied, normal restrains like chains, handcuffs, ty-raps, rope, and leather harnesses always allow the bound person some room to wriggle, but the vacuum bed restricts all movement. And they were easy to use. A person is placed between two latex sheets, the top sheet featuring a tube in the facial area for breathing, and the sheets are zipped together. Then the air between the sheets is sucked out, often with an ordinary vacuum cleaner, until the latex sheets mould themselves against the body of the subject like a second skin. With the sheets attached to a sturdy frame the subject will find it impossible to move. Ideal for restraining without leaving marks on the body.
 

The frame of Katla’s latex vacuum bed was attached to a hospital circle bed formerly used in paraplegic wards to turn recuperating patients without touching them. Normally, the two vertical circles featured two mattresses in a V-shape, but now there was just the single frame with the latex vacuum bed, allowing her rotate the vacuum bed from horizontal to vertical and every position in between. Technology had moved on. Paraplegic care no longer used circle beds, so the bed had cost her next to nothing.

After she wheeled the stretcher to the Porsche Cayenne, Katla strapped Heiboer into the passenger seat. She opened the large sliding doors of her garage, backed the Cayenne into the muddy snow-covered track of the desolate industrial area, closed and locked the sliding doors carefully and climbed into the driver seat. Heiboer was slightly taller than she was, but the added room would be most welcome later. Besides, she didn’t have to drive that far.

-o-

Katla halted the Porsche Cayenne next to her primer-spotted Citroën van, still parked unmolested under the A2 motorway viaduct. Heiboer was unconscious, but she took the keys anyway as she went to her van to fetch her gear. She undressed, down to her long thermal underwear, and slipped on her dry-suit. After she put in her ear filters Katla pulled the hood of the dry suit over her head, donned a full-face rally helmet, grabbed her closed-circuit re-breather and cave-diving mask, and got back into the Cayenne. Heiboer was still out, as expected. He was in for a rude awakening. She put her gear behind the passenger seat within easy reach and started the car.

Her faint smile hidden behind the chin bar of the rally helmet, Katla crossed the bridge to the other side and drove the Cayenne faster along the slippery embankment road until she came to the sharp bend just beyond the bridge. Her speed was too high to take the bend under ordinary conditions, but with the snow on the road the bend would be impossible to take. Katla stomped on the gas and felt the Cayenne’s powerful four point eight liter engine roar as the wheels lost all contact with the road. The SUV ploughed through the soggy snow-covered marsh and crashed into the frozen river.

-o-

A loud bang woke Ronald Heiboer as a tremendous shock threw him forward against his seat belt and shook him out of his stupor. With ringing ears he tried to take stock, his bleary eyes seeing nothing but bright whiteness. It took him almost a minute to realise he was enveloped by an exploded airbag. Then the cold hit his ankles and Ronald looked down. Freezing water covered his shoes and lapped against his ankles, rising quickly. He pushed himself back and noticed he was pushing against the dashboard, not against the steering wheel. The door was to his right. The view through the window was odd. A diagonal white jagged stripe ran from the top left corner to the lower right corner. The view through the windshield in front of him was dark green and murky in the lights of the head lamps.

Ronald looked to his left. The person in the driver seat had an oddly shaped head. No, not a head, a helmet. The person removed the helmet. A woman with a tight balaclava-like hood around her head, smiling at him, wearing a matte-grey overall. She calmly unbuckled her seat belt and turned in her seat. The cold water reached his knees and started flooding his seat, soaking his crotch. He gasped and felt for the release button to undo his seat belt, but his fingers, numbed by the freezing water, scrabbled around without finding what he was looking for. Then he realised he was in the passenger seat and the seat belt release would be on his left hand side. As he reached for the release with his left hand the woman grabbed his elbow and pushed his arm across his body. He struggled, tried to put his weight behind it, but her hand seemed immovable. She reached behind his seat with her right hand. A moment later, she wore a diving mask and a blinding light shone in his eyes. The cold water rose to his chest. His left arm was numb with the cold, but the woman kept it firmly against his body.
 

He had to get away. Get away from her.

With cold numb fingers he scrabbled for the door handle with his free right hand. He pulled the lever and pushed with his shoulder against the door, but the door didn’t budge. He reached with his right hand across his chest to push away the woman’s hand so he could free himself, but she grabbed his right wrist with her free hand and pulled his arm towards her. She pushed his left arm up against his right arm, crossing them at the elbows and pulled down his right arm to lock his arms together.

The water reached his neck and he was cold, so cold. Ronald closed his eyes against the bright light from the woman’s diving mask. He had to get out, but every twitch of his body was subdued by the woman, who used the leverage on his crossed arms to keep him in the seat. The water reached his mouth and he bucked against the seat, his panic overcoming the numbness of his body.

Oh, please, God. I don’t want to die. Please, please, please.

Ronald tried to keep his nose above the foul-smelling water, straining against the seat belt and the merciless hands clamping his arms painfully crossed. He took a snort of stale air before the freezing water flooded his nose.

His ears were still ringing from the airbag, but now they were underwater as he arched his head back to clear his nose of the water and take a last desperate snort of air, but he timed it wrong and inhaled cold water. Ronald coughed out his last air. By reflex he inhaled more water into his lungs. The pain was unbelievable, his lungs burning in his chest.

Air! Air, please! Please! Oh God, oh God, please, please—

-o-

The struggling body grew slack in her grasp. Katla checked the luminous display of her dive computer in the light of the integrated lamp of her cave-diving mask. Her dive computer gave her a water temperature reading of barely three degrees Celsius. Without her dry suit to keep her body temperature stable, she’d be exhausted and maybe even unconsciousness from hypothermic in about ten to fifteen minutes. She waited three minutes to make sure Heiboer was dead before she released his arms.
 

The Cayenne was now fully submerged and pressure against the outside of the doors was the same as the pressure inside the car, so she could easily open the driver side door. She stepped out of the car onto the muddy bottom of the river. Grit swirled up and into the car as she stirred the mud. Leaving the door open, she reached inside and unlocked Heiboer’s seat belt. She had expected Heiboer to go into shock from being submerged in the cold water, but he had held out long enough to actually drown. Despite his obvious lack of fitness, his heart had not given out. Katla transferred his slack lifeless body to the driver seat and put the seat belt on, then swam back a few meters and played the beam of her lamp over the scene.
 

Didn’t look exactly right—he wouldn’t have had his belt on and the door open…
 

She undid the seat belt again and let the corpse float up and out of the car. The seat belt didn’t retract and Heiboer’s left shoe hooked in the belt. He would’ve panicked and kicked at the belt. Katla wrapped the belt once around the ankle of the corpse and checked the scene again.

Drunk driver crashes into frozen river, manages to undo his seat belt and open his door, only to snag his foot on the belt, panic and drown.

Katla hooked her rally helmet to her diving belt, took another minute to observe the scene in the beam from her helmet, then reached up and switched off her light. The nose of the Cayenne was buried in the muddy bottom, obscuring the still burning headlights, but the rear lights glowed red in the greenish water. The interior light hadn’t survived the crash, or it had shorted when submerged, and Heiboer’s floating corpse was almost invisible against the dark hulk of the car.
 

Katla switched her headlamp back on and swam away under the ice. She used the compass on her dive computer to swim to the bridge and angled to the shore where her van was parked. The ice was stronger where the water was shallow, but she could stand on the muddy bottom and push up until a large piece of the ice broke off. She turned off her head lamp and stuck only the top of her head through the hole in the ice, carefully scanning her surroundings. The area was remote, but you could never know.

Both embankments were deserted. She crawled out of the water. Under the bridge the embankment was paved, so she wouldn’t leave any footprints. And the ice under the bridge wasn’t covered with snow. She carefully replaced the broken piece of ice so it fit with the hole and looked to the other side of the river. The gently falling snow was already covering the tracks the Cayenne had ploughed in the frozen marsh bank. The jagged hole where the car had crashed into the river was dark against the snow-covered ice. In another couple of hours, the hole might not even be visible anymore.

Katla stepped into her Citroën van, where dry clothes and a thermos of hot coffee waited.

Up in Katla’s loft, the old Sony Discman played a homemade compact disc, a sober twelve bar blues piece—brushes moving over a snare drum, a syncopating floor tom weaving around a growling bass—while Bram Merleyn leant against the wall, his fingers leaping over the valves, a waterfall of sixteenth notes pouring from the flared bell of his saxophone. He liked the loft, converted by Katla into her gym. His blindness made the view unimportant, but his ears appreciated the acoustics and his nose enjoyed her scent, nowhere as evident as in the place where she exercised.
 

The blues loop stopped with a drum roll and the taped murmurs of the musicians were drowned by the patter of hail stones against the window.