Some emotionless corner of my brain was keeping track of time. 12:30-ish, after midnight, and Milan would no longer be in a boat. He would – assuming always that he was still free and on-schedule – have carried the package half a block from the last boat to a rented hatchback and driven it across town to a rental from an AirBnB competitor. He wouldn’t use that Wi-Fi, but would leach off the Wi-Fi from a different apartment across the street. I’d allowed for him to spend two broadcasts at this new location, after all, the man had to eat and take a pee at some point.
At three a.m., with just three hours left till my cut-off, Milan would carry the package up onto the roof of yet another canal house, which would give him line of sight to our final rental and its Wi-Fi. There was some risk in this, running the final three broadcasts through a single Wi-Fi – it would mean leaving the package untended for three hours. But it was more important that Milan get well away: better to lose it all than have Milan picked up. It wouldn’t take Sarip five minutes to get Milan to name me. This way he could walk from that final location, reunite with Madalena at the Amrath, then trot over to Centraal and catch the 6:15 to Brussels. Their train would be pulling away just as the final broadcast ended.
All of which would hopefully work as planned. But I had more immediate problems: VW Polos float better than one might expect, and I was now drifting along the canal at a speed only a snail would envy. Drifting right toward a bridge, indeed racing the white panel van to the bridge. The van won easily. Out they piled, Hangwoman and Hangbrother and the big shotgun in her hands. I flashed on our first encounter when she’d tried to lynch me from the bridge. Now she was aiming to blow my head off from a similar bridge.
The Polo was skewing sideways, spinning slowly, which complicated Hangwoman’s aim. She leaned over the railing of the bridge and fired from not twenty feet away.
In movies bullets don’t always penetrate sheet metal, but this was real life and the first blast blew buckshot right through the windshield, shredded the dashboard, broke the steering wheel. Nothing hit me. Then I was under the bridge, but not for long because when I drifted out the far side I’d be a sitting duck.
So with water rising in the foot well and the canal water within sloshing distance of my windows I tried to push open the door and get out, but the water pressure kept the door tightly shut. So I started climbing out through the window but already I was coming into view on the opposite side of the bridge. Hanging halfway out was going to be bad.
Out the other side and blam went the shotgun again, a hurried shot that left an uneven field of holes in the hood. Then I got lucky. The car rolled onto its side, a solid wall of water rushed in, and the Polo sank.
Down went the Polo. The front, the engine, where all the weight was, plunged straight down, the rear end went straight up, and the Polo dived down and down as freezing water filled the cabin. Down and down through black water, falling a good, oh, six feet or so until the front bumper hit canal debris and stopped. I was completely submerged. The Polo was not. What I needed to do was get out through the window and swim as far as I could underwater. Which would have been a good plan had the suddenness of the plunge not caught me unawares and with empty lungs.
Fortunately the back window of the hatchback was intact and back (up?) there was an air bubble. So I crawled and kicked my way over the seats, rose up into the air bubble and sucked air. Through wet, starred glass I saw Hangwoman reloading.
She saw me looking at her, so I gave her the finger and before she could cock and aim, I submerged. I got tangled in a floating shoulder belt but freed myself and shot through the window. There was no light, no detail, no way even to be sure what direction I was pointed in. I had to risk a quick glance if I wasn’t to swim right into a wall of concrete or bricks. The water stung my eyes but I pried one open enough to differentiate the slightly brighter direction that should be ‘up’. I pivoted and kicked and my foot went through something that scraped and when I tried to kick free, I just managed to entangle my leg further.
The Dutch pull something like 12,000 bikes out of the canal each year and I had just stuck my foot through the spokes of one. It did not want to let me go. My trousers were well and truly snagged.
So, with lungs burning, I did what I had to do. Then I swam as far as I could underwater, surfaced just long enough for a gulp of air, submerged and swam on, and when I surfaced next I looked back and saw the bridge had become a sort of art installation of flashing blue lights.
Had the cops arrested the Hangsiblings? I couldn’t tell. But cold, scared, shivering from both cold and fear, trouserless and shoeless, I was hoping for a shootout in which the Dutch cops would kill both the crazy Nazi bastards.