Fifteen

  Michael woke the next morning to a fuzzy head and a dull, rainy day. He took his medication without thinking about it, and only realised what he’d done afterwards. He sat on the edge of the bed staring at the rain-streaked window and supposed that at some point he would have to skip the pills to see if Jo’s friend was right, but he wasn’t ready to do that. He still didn’t know what to think about the whole thing. Granted, he’d never experienced any sense that the meds were actually doing anything, but he’d supposed that was the whole point; they weren’t meant to make him feel superhuman. He still couldn’t work out why the hospital would send him out into the world with a pocket full of sugar pills, unless, as Jo said, it was to keep him coming back. And why would they do that? He’d more or less assumed that regular checkups were in his future.

  Downstairs was a faint air of siege. People sat around the lounge looking miserably out at the pouring rain. Kids were running around, expending energy that they would have been using up on the beach, and every now and again little groups wearing flimsy transparent plastic ponchos over their holiday clothes went out to waiting taxis, presumably on their way to some indoor sightseeing. After breakfast, he went upstairs to the café for another cup of coffee and sat near the window. The beach was empty, apart from some hardy dogwalkers, and the sea was choppy and whitecapped. Down on the seafront, the kiosks had opened, but it was probably more out of hope than anything else. Maybe the weather would ease off, although looking at the dark sky and racing clouds it seemed unlikely.

  Going back down the curving stairs to the ground floor, he saw Brossard coming through the front door, wearing a long black coat with the collar turned up. The Frenchman went straight across the lobby to the front desk, spoke briefly to one of the receptionists, and then disappeared down the corridor leading to the lifts.

  Michael found a seat in a quiet corner with a good view of the entrance, but Brossard didn’t seem to have brought any contractors with him; the only people who came through the doors after him were a drenched-looking couple with two small children wearing brightly coloured wellingtons and carrying buckets and spades, who tracked sandy footprints on the marble floor all the way across the lobby. Of course, that didn’t mean Brossard had come here without backup. There could be dozens of large, professionally violent men waiting in guesthouses in town for the opportunity for another abduction to present itself.

  He didn’t see anyone he knew; no Jo, no Thijs, not even Piet or Arno. Wim was probably still at his hotel struggling with a hangover. Some faces among the other guests were beginning to look familiar, and he recognised others as having been introduced to him as essenceheads, but he found that he felt rather lost and isolated. He couldn’t really have a conversation with any of these people. It was as if he was experiencing a sort of low-level nightmare in which he had become a game token for solving everyone else’s problems while his own were entirely ignored.

  Back upstairs, he lay on the bed and flicked through the television channels. CNN was doing another incomprehensible economic briefing. He settled on the BBC, but the news items about home seemed as far away and irrelevant as the one about nomadic horse herders in Central Asia. The Zandvoort Event seemed to have dropped off the news agenda. He assumed that it had become a matter of civil engineering now, which was not particularly sexy; the Special Correspondents had flown in at the beginning, discovered that there were no bodies to point at and no weeping refugees to interview, and flown off again without realising they’d missed the story of a lifetime. The most significant thing to happen in Europe for decades – if you believed the essenceheads – and it was too dull for the disaster tourists.

  Conscious of the possibility of bumping into Brossard downstairs, he ordered a room service burger and chips for lunch. The burger, of course, was a four-inch wad of meat and salad crammed between the inadequate halves of a toasted brioche bun and held together by a bamboo skewer, but the chips were good.

  He dozed for a while, and when he opened his eyes the room was dark, even though by his watch it was still only midafternoon. He got up and pulled back the net curtains and looked out on a scene of black cloud and driving rain, the trees outside whipping back and forth in strong gusts of wind. The hotel opposite was lit up like an ocean liner.

  He had another shower and brushed his teeth and put on the last of his clean clothes, and he was just consulting the instructions for the hotel’s laundry services when there was a knock at the door and Jo was standing outside.

  “You’re up,” she said.

  The conference room hired by the essenceheads was at the end of a corridor on the first floor, and Michael found himself getting nervous as he approached it, although he couldn’t explain why. This wasn’t a board of inquiry or a Treasury committee, or even a performance review. These people could do nothing to hurt him, and he was coming to the conclusion that they couldn’t do anything to help him either. They were people who believed in a crazy thing, cosplaying as a Star Chamber. They were perfectly harmless.

  He knocked on the door and opened it and found himself in a room a little larger than his. There was a rectangular table in the middle, with comfortable chairs for about a dozen people, all but one of them occupied, a roomful of expectant faces turned towards him. But he hardly noticed them because seated at the head of the table was Theo van Hoebeek.

  Michael’s mind went so completely blank for a moment that he forgot where he was and what he was doing there.

  “Mister Brookes,” Theo said. “Please, sit down.” He gestured to the other end of the table, where there was an empty chair.

  Michael sat, and felt the world start to click into place around him again. Of course Theo was chairing the meeting; he was the Dutch essenceheads’ sugar daddy, the man who had come up with the money to rent the camera, the man who was paying for the hotel. It made perfect sense. It did not explain why Claes the Economy Killer was sitting in the chair to Theo’s right, so completely unassuming that he was barely in the room at all.

  He said, “I don’t understand,” and he saw Claes smile faintly.

  “Before we start,” Theo said, “I’d like to thank you, on behalf of us all, for agreeing to give us your perspective on this sorry matter.”

  Michael blinked. “You’re welcome,” he said. “But I wasn’t given a lot of choice.”

  “Yes,” Theo said heavily. “I apologise for that.”

  The concept of Theo van Hoebeek apologising to anyone for anything was so absurd that Michael was struck dumb. He looked around the table, and none of the people here presented as particularly crazy. Apart from Claes, they were all middle-aged or older; some were wearing suits, others were in casual clothing. Even Maxi Zimmermann, seated halfway along the table, was dressed down in a long-sleeved black teeshirt and jeans. Apart from her, he was fairly certain he had not seen any of these people in the hotel until right now.

  “In a spirit of disclosure,” Theo addressed the room, “Mister Brookes was in Amsterdam for a meeting with myself and my team on a commercially sensitive matter. Until today, that was the only time we had met.” Clearly, Theo’s connection with Dutch Intelligence wasn’t common knowledge, and he didn’t want to advertise prior meetings with Michael. “I understand he was actually on his way back to his hotel after the meeting when the incident took place. I’m prepared to recuse myself, of course, if anyone thinks this means I can’t chair this meeting without prejudice.”

  Some people around the table looked annoyed, but most shook their heads. “This is the second time you’ve offered to recuse yourself,” a big brown-haired man in slacks and a grey shirt joked. “Are you sure your heart’s in this?”

  “Stop being so fucking noble, Theo,” Maxi said, and Michael had to clench his jaw to stop his mouth dropping open at anyone speaking to Theo van Hoebeek like that. “Let’s get on with this.” She looked down the table and smiled. “I can’t wait to hear Mister Brookes’s side.”

  “You can’t wait to hear about Franc being beaten up,” said a woman in a black business suit.

  “Oh Christ, yeah,” Maxi said. “That’s never going to get boring.”

  Theo raised a hand before the meeting became unruly. “All right,” he said. “Well, if everyone’s in agreement, perhaps Mister Brookes could tell us his name and profession.”

  “Is my profession relevant?” Michael asked.

  “In English, please,” the business-suited woman said. “Not all of us speak Dutch.”

  Michael hadn’t even realised he’d spoken in Dutch. “Sorry,” he said in English. “I was wondering what my job has to do with this.”

  Theo gave him a stern look. “We don’t know yet. Please?”

  Michael sighed and looked around the table. “My name’s Michael Brookes, and I’m an economist. I work for the Treasury in London.”

  “You have my sympathies,” said the grey-shirted man, and there were some smiles and chuckles around the table.

  Theo raised his hand again. “Can we keep our minds on the matter at hand?” he asked. When everyone had calmed down again he said to Michael, “Perhaps you could start by telling us what happened to you after you left our meeting.”

  “Franc Brossard tried to have me kidnapped.”

  Theo clasped his hands on the table in front of him. “Mister Brookes,” he said, “you’re not a stupid person, and neither are we. What did you do after you left our meeting?”

  So Michael described his journey from Amsterdam-Zuid to the bar beside the canal. He edited out seeing Archie being stolen. He managed to get as far as the arrival of the French contractors before anyone interrupted.

  “Why did you go to a bar instead of going back to your hotel?” asked a woman with long grey hair and a Spanish accent.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was a nice day, I didn’t have to be at the airport for several hours. I just felt like a walk, then I decided to have a coffee and something to eat.”

  “Why that bar in particular?” asked the man in the grey shirt.

  “No reason. I just happened to be walking past when I felt peckish.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone you would be there?”

  Michael shook his head. “It was a spur of the moment thing.”

  “How did you know you were about to be kidnapped?” asked a tall old man wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater.

  “I’m sorry?”

  The old man had been industriously writing in a little notebook. He moistened a fingertip and turned back a couple of pages and checked what he had written. “You said you saw two cars pull up and a number of security contractors get out.” He looked at Michael. “How did you know they were security contractors?”

  It was a reasonable question. “They looked like security contractors,” he said.

  The old man looked at him with interest. “Really? Is there a recognisable type?”

  “Large muscular men with shaved heads, all wearing the same clothes.”

  “That could equally describe a rugby team.”

  “It wasn’t a rugby team.”

  The old man nodded and consulted his notes again. “What made you think they were there for you?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t know what was going on. They pulled up outside and started to come into the bar, then Jo was there telling me I had to get out.”

  “And Jo told you they were there to kidnap you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you don’t know for certain who they were and why they were there. All you saw was some people getting out of a couple of cars.”

  Michael looked at the faces round the table. “Is Brossard denying it? Is that it? He’s saying he didn’t try to have me abducted in Amsterdam?”

  Several people started talking at once, but Theo rapped his knuckles on the table and when it was quiet again he said, “All we want to know is what you saw. There seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding what happened in the bar, and we’d like to clear that up, if possible.”

  Michael sat back in his chair and crossed his arms and didn’t say anything.

  Theo sighed. “You’re under no obligation to be here,” he said patiently. “You can get up and walk out and leave the hotel and go wherever you want. Nobody will try to stop you. But as representatives of our community, we have a duty to maintain the peace, and in order to do that we have to hear everyone’s story. All we want is to hear what you saw and heard.”

  Michael scowled. He said, “I have no idea why any of this is happening. I came to Amsterdam to have a meeting with you and I was supposed to go home the same day and now my life has been completely upended. I’ve been chased around the Netherlands and driven halfway across Europe. That’s my story.”

  There was a silence around the table. The old man in the turtleneck said, “So you don’t know what happened in the bar. You just know what people told you.”

  “Yes,” Michael said tightly. “That’s right.”

  There was another silence. Theo said, “Did you get the impression that someone else in the bar might have been involved in the situation?”

  “A young couple came into the bar just after me,” Michael said. “And an older man came in behind them. When we were trying to leave, the young couple seemed to get in our way and the older man stopped them. That’s what it looked like to me, but everything was very confused.”

  “And you hadn’t seen any of them before?”

  Michael shook his head.

  Theo looked at him for a long moment. “All right,” he said. “Let’s move on to your encounter with Colonel Stilwell, shall we? Your first encounter, I should say.” He glanced around the table. “I hope nobody’s going to quibble about whether this was an abduction or not?” Nobody said anything. “I gather you were drugged and taken to Eindhoven airport.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why Eindhoven airport?” asked someone near the other end of the table.

  “Stilwell’s organisation is renting a suite of offices there,” said someone else. “You’d have to ask them why.”

  “I presume the Colonel questioned you,” Theo said.

  Michael nodded. “He wanted to know why Brossard was so interested in me.”

  “Which you were unable to tell him.”

  “Which I was unable to tell him, because I didn’t know. I still don’t know, not really.”

  “You managed to get away from them,” Claes said with a dreamy little smile. “How did you do that?”

  Michael looked at him. Seated among the seniors, he looked like a vaguely malevolent work experience boy. “They were inattentive,” he said deadpan.

  Claes raised an eyebrow. “That must have been quite some inattention.”

  “I saw an opportunity and I took it,” Michael told him without breaking eye contact. “I got away from them and I called Jo and she came to get me.”

  “Why?” asked the Spanish woman.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you call Ms Charnley and not the police?” There were murmurs of agreement from some of the others. “You’d been spirited out of the bar in Amsterdam, moved from house to house, drugged and taken to Eindhoven, and you’d finally managed to escape. If that was me, I’d have found a policeman as soon as possible.”

  “In fact,” said the old man in the turtleneck, “as far as we can see you’ve had a number of opportunities, and not once have you tried to contact the authorities or your Embassy or anyone at all.”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said tiredly. He thought about it. “I honestly don’t know. Sorry.”

  There was another silence in the room. Theo said, “Would you like to take a break?”

  Michael shook his head. “I just want to get this over with.”

  Theo nodded. “All right. So, you evade the Americans and return to the fold, so to speak. Whose idea was it to kidnap Mister Brossard?”

  “Mine.”

  “Because it probably won’t surprise you to hear that both Jo and Wim have taken credit for it.”

  Michael shook his head. “It was my idea. I wanted to know what was going on, and he didn’t seem inclined to explain things willingly.”

  “It seems a bit… extreme,” said the burly man in the grey shirt.

  “I was also very angry.”

  “Evidently,” the man in the turtleneck said, making a note.

  “Did you really put a taser in Franc’s mouth?” Maxi asked.

  “I threatened to.” He added, “I’m not especially proud of myself.”

  She beamed at him. “I’m proud of you.”

  “He was tasered, though,” said the Spanish woman.

  “He brought a taser with him to the meeting,” Michael told her. “Along with a number of people from the local rugby club.” He saw the man in the turtleneck smile thinly as he made another note. “Presumably he was planning to have another go at snatching me.”

  “While at the same time you were planning to snatch him,” the woman in the business suit said.

  “All right,” Michael said wearily. “We’re as untrustworthy and reprehensible as each other, I agree.”

  “You can’t just tie people to chairs and threaten them,” she told him. “It’s against the law.”

  “He was going to do it to me,” he said.

  “But he didn’t, did he,” she said, pointing her pen at him. “He never actually did anything. All you saw was a group of people getting out of their cars outside a bar.”

  Michael sighed.

  “Did you at least get the information you wanted?” Claes asked.

  “That’s my business.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Theo.

  Michael considered not replying – this was not after all, a court of law – but in all honesty, where would that get him? “He said he has a source who told him I was coming to Amsterdam and that I had information about some kind of change in the Essence.”

  “And do you?” said Claes.

  “Of course not. Two weeks ago I’d never even heard of the Essence.”