Carla Neggers - The Rapids

“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.