When he woke at 5 a.m., his head thumped as though he had spent the night drinking on an empty stomach. Van den Bergen wondered briefly if he was about to suffer a fatal embolism brought on by the stress of George being gone. Reaching out, he felt her side of the bed. Nothing but cool white sheets and a pillow that hadn’t been slept on. She was supposed to be here by his side. But though the bed was dishevelled, it was merely as a result of him tossing and turning, spending hour after sleepless hour worrying about the woman he loved being lost in the murder capital of the world. The thought that he might never see her again caused tears to well.
‘Get a grip of yourself, you old fool,’ he said, blinking the tears away. But merely willing the sorrow away was ineffectual against the wracking sobs that assailed him with determination, taking his hard-won stoic poise prisoner and supplanting it with crippling pangs of grief and a distillation of pure fear. For twenty minutes, he hugged the pillow George was meant to be sleeping on and stifled his noise with it, lest the Canadian tourists in the neighbouring room overhear him.
As he hiccupped and the sobbing started to abate, leaving only exhaustion in its wake, the image that lingered in his mind’s eye was not one of George slipping through the crowds of Cancun airport but of the shack in the cartel’s jungle compound where prisoners were being kept. Might George have been kidnapped by now and cuffed to the wall in some stinking hovel to be used for sex?
‘Enough!’ he said.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, staring blankly at the brightly coloured décor. Tiled floor. Bright yellow walls, orange and blue curtains. If his headache didn’t kill him, the clashing colours might. Filling his glass on the nightstand with water from the minibar, he pressed several tablets out of their blister packs, swallowed them one by one and then picked up his phone. He switched it on to no avail.
‘Shit. No juice in your bloody phone, Van den Bergen. You irresponsible old fart.’
He removed the plug-in mosquito repellent and plugged in his charger.
The phone sprang to life, buzzing with a sudden influx of new messages. The first was a text from Marie.
Nothing more. They had had an email exchange about InterChem GmbH and Chembedrijf before he had gone to sleep. She had mentioned Elvis then, too. And now, this …
The second text was from Tamara.
A video clip had been attached, showing his granddaughter in her sleepsuit taking wobbly steps with bowed unpractised legs, arms outstretched, from his son-in-law, Numb Nuts, to Tamara, who had clearly been holding the camera. Van den Bergen watched the delight and triumph in the little girl’s dribbly face. He felt bittersweet longing curdle with his early-morning tablets.
Next, he opened a text from Maarten Minks, demanding an update. Van den Bergen considered telling his boss about the sophisticated meth lab they had discovered in the jungle but decided to hold the information back until Gonzales’ technicians had analysed the samples of crystal meth found there.
Finally, an email he had not been anticipating but had long hoped for.
Hello you. It’s me. Don’t worry. I’m safe. Can only check phone intermittently. Have been travelling north to Palenque with some women, so won’t be far from you soon. It’s possible Dad was kidnapped and brought to Chiapas in Mexico to work for a cartel. Nikolay Bebchuck is apparently there! Will text more when I can. If I die, know that I loved you with all of my heart and soul, old man. You are The One. I knew it from the moment we met. George. xxx PS: I’ll try not to die.
Van den Bergen read and reread the message, noticing that it had been sent three days earlier but had only just reached him. Clasping the phone over his battered, scarred sternum beneath which his heart now beat strong and steadily, he looked up at the rotating fan, thanking whatever god might be watching over his lover for her at least having made it thus far on her father’s trail in one piece.
Shaking his head, he allowed himself a smile, though tears started to fall anew. Started to thumb out a reply.
If you die, I refuse to speak to you ever again. This message has taken days to get here. Do not face Nikolay alone! Send me your position so I can get you out of there safely and get him arrested. Your father wouldn’t want you to risk your life like this. You’re an idiot but you’re my idiot. Love always. Paul. X
Ten minutes later, the cop in Van den Bergen had started to win out over the lover.
If you get close to Nikolay, see if you can get something with his prints on or an object we can profile for DNA. And still don’t die. Px
They had less than twelve hours before their flight home departed, whether they were on it or not. He was alive. George was probably, possibly, hopefully alive. Their quarry was potentially just within reach. He had to devise some way of tightening the net around this bastard without jeopardising the case, involving possibly corrupt Mexican officials and getting them all killed.
After an exceedingly early breakfast, where he had deliberately asked to be seated on the opposite side of the dining room to the overly energetic and garrulous Baldini, Van den Bergen was ferried to the sticky office in the Cancun police station for a debriefing. There was a lightness to his step now that he had finally heard from George, but he kept his buoyant mood to himself.
Mexican police officers queued in the overstuffed room to pour themselves coffee from the percolator machine at the back. Large floor-mounted fans uselessly blew warm air around. Still no sign of the air-con engineer. Grappling with handouts, the men gathered around Gonzales, who had wedged his fleshy bottom on the corner of a desk like a small king presiding over his fiefdom. Van den Bergen was the last in line for the coffee pot. He grimaced at the strong brew that sat treacle-like in the bottom of the jug, remembering coffee was supposed to be acidic and therefore bad for his reflux. Turned around to find Gonzales waiting for him to pay attention like a disapproving teacher. Not quite so friendly and amiable after all.
The debrief was delivered first in Spanish.
Yawning, Van den Bergen squatted against the wall at the back and reread the email that had reached him in the small hours from the workaholic, Marie – only two hours after the discovery of the clandestine cartel jungle complex and before he had hit the sack.
Hello boss.
InterChem GmbH seems to be a shell holding-company with Nikolay Bebchuck listed as the director! There are no company accounts on file but there’s an address registered to Stuttgart. When I looked it up on Google maps, it’s just a barber’s shop. I’ve done some digging into Chembedrijf. They’re a huge multinational with the head office in Groningen’s Energy Valley. There is a smaller office in Amsterdam. Company accounts show that they have a turnover of over €1 billion per year, with a fat corporate finger in all sorts of pies, from pharmaceutical research and development to drugs manufacture to cornering the market in household name toiletries and cleaning products. They trade frequently with China, buying chemicals cheaply, sometimes selling them on to dodgy regimes, from what I can tell. I had a scan through the list of employees. Only one name flagged up as being of interest among the thousands on the payroll: Adrianus Karelse. He’s working as a junior project manager.
Elvis is missing.
Regards
Marie
Van den Bergen chewed over the two pieces of news that glowed from his phone’s screen. Elvis was ‘missing’. This was clearly really bothering Marie. Could he not simply be at the hospital because his mother had taken a turn for the worse and he hadn’t managed to call in? Yes. That seemed most likely. But Adrianus Karelse. Ad. George’s first serious boyfriend and Van den Bergen’s love rival for some three long years or more.
‘Jesus,’ he said aloud, sighing.
Two of the Mexican uniforms turned to look at him, perplexed.
‘Not you,’ Van den Bergen said, treating them to a judgemental glare.
Would Karelse work for Van den Bergen as an informant, doing a little below-the-radar snooping into whatever shenanigans were going on in Chembedrijf? He knew the spineless little prick wouldn’t piss on the man who had stolen his girl if he was on fire. But George … George, he would almost certainly still move heaven and earth for. ‘For old times’ sake’ would be a cynical card to play, but he was prepared to play it – and he knew George would be too – if it meant the hedonistic, drug-taking little idiots on Amsterdam’s club scene stopped being poisoned with this Mexican shit.
As Gonzales rattled on to his men in indecipherable Spanish, Van den Bergen Googled Ad. The prick’s Facebook account had maximum privacy settings. All that was visible was a generic man’s silhouette in white and blue. Did he want to add Karelse as a friend? No he certainly did not! Casting his mind back to conversations with George about her failed long-distance romance with the turd, he remembered Karelse had previously been in a serious relationship with a girl called Astrid. Just a hunch. Van den Bergen searched for Astrid Karelse and there she was – a pink-faced milkmaid of a woman with a completely open profile. He clicked on her ‘about’ section. Allowed himself a satisfied smile. Astrid Karelse was, of course, married to Ad Karelse. The well-scrubbed, loved-up Mr and Mrs Karelse were parents to blond-haired toddlers of about four and two years old. Well, well, well. How likely then did that make it that Karelse might help George if asked? Would he be missing his little walk on the wild side? Van den Bergen studied Astrid’s neat blonde hair, cut into an unsightly short style that was every new mother’s dream of easy-to-maintain and every man’s sexual anti-fantasy. Yes, Ad would be missing George McKenzie all right. Probably. Then, there was a company profile, showing that Karelse was, in fact, an IT project manager, which might be perfect for gaining access to computerised records of the firm’s business transactions. He noted with a derisory snort that Mr Pretty Boy’s previously lustrous dark hair was starting to recede in earnest. Ran his hand through his own luxuriant white thatch, just to check it was still present and correct. Instantly felt like a vain arsehole when he noticed the absence of a finger on Karelse’s hand and remembered how the boy had come to lose it.
‘Chief Inspector Van den Bergen!’ Gonzales shouted across the packed office.
Clearly his host had been calling his name for some time. ‘Sorry. I was following up …’
Gonzales folded his arms and raised an eyebrow, expectantly. ‘What do you think of that, then?’
‘Oh.’ He was meant to say something in response to some remark that everybody but him had clearly heard. How long had Gonzales been talking to him exactly, while he had been mentally bitching about some poor fingerless kid in Groningen? ‘Yes.’ Gonzales was grinning, so there was obviously something to be happy about. ‘Absolutely … the thing.’ He nodded, trying to arrange his features into something resembling earnestness.
‘Good,’ Gonzales said, beaming at his captive audience. ‘So, now we know we’ve got a match between the traces of meth we found in the jungle lab last night and the chemical composition of the meth that killed the victims in Amsterdam and NYC. We know we’re looking for the right guys. The plan is, we stake out the lab – and it’s not going to be easy to keep an eye on this camp without them spotting us. But I’m stationing a team of men nearby who can pile in as backup if things turn nasty.’
Baldini made a fist and thumped the palm of his left hand. ‘I say we take them out right now! Get them in for questioning and hammer the information out of those sons of bitches before they’ve even finished their churros and coffee.’
Sitting only a metre or so away from Baldini, Van den Bergen could almost smell the testosterone coming out of the American’s pores. His enthusiasm was exhausting to watch.
‘We can’t afford to let them slip through our fingers,’ Baldini continued, abruptly rising from his chair as if to prove his point further. Shifting from foot to foot. ‘That camp was fresh and they were planning on coming back. If they get wind they’re being watched, it’ll be adios amigos!’
Van den Bergen shook his head. Cleared his throat so that he had everybody’s attention. ‘No, come on, Baldini!’ he said, tempted to stand but realising only a dick would use his height to his advantage in an argument such as this. ‘I’ve worked big drugs cases before. We all have, right? If you let the bottom-feeders know you’re onto them now, the big fish will swim away. These sorts never buckle easily. They’ve got too much to lose. Their lives are worth nothing. Their families’ lives are worth even less.’
He locked eyes with Gonzales and saw appreciation there. Nikolay or whatever moniker he might use in Mexico was the prize. They both knew it.
‘Maybe we wait,’ Gonzales said. ‘We stake out the camp as best we can. Track their movements. See what we can find out. If there’s no sign of a boss after forty-eight hours, we pull them all in.’
‘My flight leaves tonight,’ Van den Bergen said.
Gonzales shrugged. ‘Compromise, then, I guess. We’ll watch their movements today and raid the place at sundown. Maybe you’ll go home a hero.’ He smiled.
‘Or maybe you’ll go home in a wooden casket,’ Baldini said.