The Double Eagle (27 page)
Authors: James Twining
9:37
P.M.
A
s soon as the door had closed and the echo of Tom’s footsteps had faded into silence, Jennifer slipped a black sweater over her silk top, swapped her heels for some sneakers, grabbed the room key and flew down the stairs and out onto the street.
She looked first one way and then the other, peering into the darkness, but the street was silent and empty. She was too late. Only a retreating bicycle light flickered in the distance like a buoy.
And then she saw him—a dark figure momentarily silhouetted against the red brickwork as a car turned the corner in the distance. It was Tom.
Jennifer held back, hugging the side of the street, catching a glimpse of the back of his head and shoulders every so often as he walked under a streetlight or past the blue glare of a TV in someone’s front room. She followed him over the bridge, past the serrated brickwork of the Waag on Nieuwmarkt Square and the dancing lights of the open-air restaurants dotted around it, until the unmistakable glow from the approaching shop fronts confirmed where he was headed. De Wallen. The red-light district.
A few hundred yards later, Tom knelt as if to tie his shoelaces, and then suddenly darted into a side alley. Jennifer broke into a run. She knew that if she lost him in these labyrinthine side streets she would never find him again. Her heart was pounding, her mind bubbling over with questions. Where was he going? Why now? And why couldn’t he tell her?
As the alley loomed closer she slowed to walking pace, flattened her back to the wall and edged her head around the corner.
About five feet in, the alley widened into a small square, with another alley on the opposite side leading out onto a street running parallel to the one Jennifer was now on. Three identical glass-fronted shops, their lights staining the cobblestones outside them a dark red, dominated the left side of the square. Opposite them, a dark concrete wall loomed up into the darkness of the night sky like a church steeple, the faded and peeling remains of an abstract mural dedicated to a long-forgotten World AIDS Day the only relief from its grimy blankness.
Tom was standing outside the middle shop, talking through its open door to its current occupant, a pretty young girl with sky-high cheekbones, tent-pole waist, and freshly minted silicone breasts. Her short blond hair bobbed playfully around her face as she talked, lips painted Chinese red, her bright blue bra, panties, stockings, and garters smoldering against her milky-white skin.
Tom bent toward the girl, who had stepped forward and was now leaning seductively against the door frame and whispered in her ear. She laughed, her voice pealing up the alley like a glass bell, her head thrown back so that her hair kissed the tops of her shoulders. As she laughed, Tom handed her what looked like several hundred Euro, discreetly folded so that she could quickly close her delicate hand around the clean, crisp notes. More than enough, in these streets, for sex.
Still giggling, the girl stepped aside and Tom brushed gently against her as he entered the shop. She followed him inside, closed the door and pulled the thick red curtains shut. A thin ribbon of light danced tauntingly around the window’s edge.
9:56
P.M.
J
ennifer walked unsteadily back onto the street.
“You bastard.” She mouthed the words, closed her eyes, pushed the back of her head against the wall, her stomach churning. She knew that really she had no right to be upset or even surprised. Tom was, after all, a thief. Why should she have expected him to behave any differently from all the other sleazebags she’d come across over the years?
And yet, she did feel upset. Upset with him because the little she had found out about him had made her hope for better. Upset with herself that, much as she hated to admit it, her instinctive response on seeing him go inside had been jealousy, not anger. She dismissed it immediately. But the feeling nevertheless remained, an uncomfortable ache in her stomach that she couldn’t quite get rid of.
“Hashish? Ecstasy? Co-ca-ine?” Jennifer looked up in surprise at the dreadlocked Rastafarian. In the darkness, she could only make out his wide, staring eyes and the fragrant smell of the joint that hung down from the corner of his mouth.
“No, thank you.”
“It’s good sheeeet.” He stretched the word, flexing it playfully between his teeth. And then, as if to prove his point, he took a long drag on the joint, his eyes rolling back in his head as he held the smoke in his lungs before gently exhaling through his nose, a dizzy smile on his face.
“No, thank you,” she whispered firmly.
Muttering and shrugging his shoulders, the man shuffled off down the street, the reflective heels of his white sneakers winking in the streetlights every time he lifted his feet.
Shaking her head, Jennifer peered round the corner again and gasped. The curtains of the shop that Tom had disappeared into only moments before had been drawn back. The blond girl, her blue underwear dyed purple by the red lights, had lit a cigarette and was sitting on a steel-and-leather stool in the middle of the front room. Ready, it seemed, for her next customer. What the hell had just happened?
Jennifer turned down the alley and walked slowly into the square. As she drew level with the middle shop, the girl smiled at her lazily, the smoke coiling around her coquettish head. Beyond her, in the rear room, the carefully folded white sheets lay undisturbed at the foot of the bed. The room was empty.
Jennifer sprinted across the rest of the square and down the opposite alleyway, emerging onto the street that it gave onto. There was no sign of Tom. He certainly hadn’t come back the other way past her. How had she missed him?
She retreated across the square past the blond girl, who was already in the middle of a negotiation with another potential client, back up the alley and onto the main street. What now?, she asked herself. In the end, she knew that she only had one option: head back to the hotel and confront him there when he returned. If he returned.
“
Hoeveel?
”
“What?” asked Jennifer, startled by the large man who had suddenly appeared out of the darkness in front of her.
“How much?” he asked in accented English this time, lowering his face to hers so that his warm breath, laden with beer, washed over her face.
“What do you mean?” Jennifer took a step back.
“For a suck and a fuck. How much?” He gave her a toothy smile.
“No,” she said through clenched jaws. “You want to try down there.” She jerked her head back toward the alley just behind her.
“You know what they say. You’re not a man till you’ve had some tan!” He gave a wide laugh and grabbed her around the waist, lifting her a few inches off the ground.
Jennifer knew that a punch with the heel of her right hand against the man’s exposed throat would bring him down as if he’d been shot. But she didn’t hit him. Something she’d seen over the man’s right shoulder stopped her. A figure had emerged at the top of the steps of a house about fifteen feet away from her, the light from the hallway swirling out onto the street.
It was Tom.
Her brain clicked. The hooker’s shop must have had a connecting door at the rear that led to this house, presumably allowing people to enter or exit unobserved. But why had Tom used it? What was he doing there?
“Three hundred Euro,” Jennifer said to the man. He dropped her as if he had been bitten, his broad shoulders concealing Jennifer from Tom’s eyes as he looked up and down the street and set off.
“How much?” he asked faintly.
“Three hundred. Or back there, fifty.” The important thing was to stay out of sight until she could see where Tom was going. In front of her, the man was rocking uncertainly on his heels, his eyes darting from Jennifer, to the alley, back to Jennifer. With a sheepish nod he stumbled past her toward the alley and the girl in the blue underwear.
Tom was already fifty yards in front of her now. He seemed to be heading back toward the hotel. She could see that he had changed and was now dressed in black, with a large backpack slung across one of his shoulders that he hadn’t had before.
It was only then, when Tom veered off to the left, that she noticed him. A shape slipping between the shadows ahead of her. A shape that was following Tom.
10:16
P.M.
T
ypically, he would have spent several months planning a job like this. Getting to know the layout of the rooms, what systems were in place, where they were housed, how they were controlled and maintained. And also the guards—their names, their routines, their quirks, their weaknesses.
Tonight he did not have that luxury. At any other time this would have been an unacceptable risk. But this was different. Five years ago he’d spent two months in Amsterdam planning a job at the same place he was going to hit tonight. That time, his target had been a small Dürer sketch. He’d planned out the whole job, covered every angle, every eventuality. But then Archie had called it off. Apparently, the buyer had been murdered by pirates while sailing up the Amazon.
Tom had never known how Archie did what he did. How he seemed able to come up with blueprints and technical drawings and specifications for alarm systems. But he always did. In fact, Tom had never known Archie to be wrong when it came to a job. That was why Tom was willing to take the risk now. Archie said that the systems had not been changed since Tom had planned the job five years ago. He said that although the guards had changed, their routine hadn’t.
Besides, what he had seen that evening when he had quickly dropped in just before closing time had confirmed Archie’s view. Apart from the refurbished ticketing area and the installation of an extra set of fire doors on the second floor, everything looked the same.
It was more of a private collection than a museum, really, housed within four slender eighteenth-century houses that had been knocked together behind their picture book facade to create several large lateral galleries. Collected over the last fifty years by Maximillian Schenck, the sole heir of the largest retailing family in the Netherlands, it was an eclectic but immensely valuable collection of Impressionist and Old Master paintings, modern sculpture, antique furniture, and objets d’art.
And one of the highlights was unquestionably the Fabergé egg that Tom was going to steal that night.
10:27
P.M.
T
he man was definitely following Tom.
For a few minutes, Jennifer had thought that she might be imagining it, that he was just walking the same way. But as he darted between cars and behind trees, his head low, turning where Tom turned, stopping when Tom stopped, that possibility rapidly evaporated.
So Jennifer held back, careful to stay fifty yards or so behind as she tracked the two men in front of her, watching where she stepped, controlling her breathing, tacking from shadow to shadow like a small boat racing upwind. The instructors back at Quantico had taught her well.
They walked on, past cars that lined each side of the canal like a multicolored metal wall. And everywhere bikes, so many bikes, chained to trees and railings and lampposts and street signs. Even to each other. Every so often they would step past a bar or a basement peepshow and the barrel-chested bouncer standing outside would ask them if they wanted to come in as they each walked past, first Tom, then the man, and finally Jennifer, as if they were all part of some bizarre extended conga.
As they walked deeper into the city, the dull bass of the live bands playing in the depths of innumerable sweaty bars and the laughter of gap-year students staggering from coffee shops gradually faded into the distance. Instead Jennifer’s constant companion was the canal, flowing thickly alongside her, its surface dark and coagulated by the night.
Ahead of her, first Tom, then the man, turned right. Jennifer made her way slowly to the end of the street, wary of Tom turning back on himself, or running into the back of the man who might have stopped ahead of her. She edged to the street corner and looked cautiously around it.
But both men had disappeared.