‘When are you coming home, Dad?’ Tamara said.
Swallowing hard, Van den Bergen drank in the sight of his daughter on screen, committing her maturing face to memory. Then, his focus turned to his granddaughter, Eva, who was sitting on her mother’s knee, pulling chunks out of Tamara’s hair. Half of Numb-Nuts’ DNA but still the most adorable child in the world. His muscles still held the memory of what the chubby, tiny girl felt like in his arms and the baby smell of her skin. ‘I’m just about to start packing,’ he said, altering his laptop’s screen when he realised the camera was only filming the top of his head. ‘My flight leaves tonight. I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘I hope George has been looking after you,’ she said.
Eva made a gurgling noise, lunging forwards and covering the screen in dribbly handprints.
Van den Bergen reached out and touched the screen, thankful for the miracle of Skype and his girls, if nothing else in this godforsaken world was worth an iota of gratitude. ‘I’m fine. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call when I land at Schiphol, tomorrow. Give my little princess a kiss from her gramps.’
He killed the connection before the pain became too acute. Wondered if he’d ever make it back in one piece to his little family. Prayed that the woman he loved would make it back in one piece to him.
‘Where the hell are you, Georgina McKenzie?’ he said, staring at the string of texts from her on his phone, dating back months and months. Van den Bergen liked to keep every single exchange between them as a memento of what he still couldn’t believe he had, though he had been loath to agree to it for years.
His finger hovered over the call button, but he realised that dialling George’s number was out of the question. If her phone rang and whoever she was with discovered she was speaking to a Dutch cop who was in cahoots with the local Federales, he could get her killed. If she wasn’t dead already. Without knowing if his words would ever reach her, he had texted her with that prick Ad Karelse’s details, including an explanatory note that Nikolay Bebchuck’s holding company, InterChem GmbH, was a client of Karelse’s employer. He had been careful to point out that Karelse was working in IT at Chembedrijf, potentially with access to the company’s intranet, accounting systems and employees’ email accounts. If George had received the text, she would have known immediately what the subtext of his message was: Van den Bergen wanted her to shelve whatever life-threatening activity she was currently preoccupied by in order to contact her ex-boyfriend and engage him in acts of industrial espionage. It was a simple ask, wasn’t it?
He sipped his cranberry juice and water, gazing sullenly at the turquoise Caribbean Sea and the cobalt-blue sky that hung above it like a doting lover. His fingers trailed absently in the fine white sand, already warmed by the mid-morning sun. A tropical idyll, trimmed by well-tended royal palms, and here he was, sitting on a sunbed by the sea, on an almost-week-long trip that had been paid for by Maarten Minks, who was practically ejaculating with excitement about the developments. But without George safe and sound at his side, Van den Bergen may as well have been trudging through the torrential rain on the Hoek van Holland dockside, being shat upon by giant seagulls who didn’t like the look of lanky, misanthropic, ageing detectives.
Checking his watch, he realised it was time to get on with it. His suitcase wouldn’t pack itself.
He was just about to close his laptop and put it into its bag when he noticed that a new email had appeared in his inbox. Sent from an email address he didn’t recognise – info@silentcrocodile.com. It was marked as urgent.
‘Let me guess. A phishing scam or some middle-class mummypreneur trying to sell me overpriced toys for Eva made from organic Himalayan yak shit.’
Growling with derision, loud enough that the hotel employee who was raking the beach paused in his task to check him out, Van den Bergen moved to redirect the email straight to junk. Thought better of it and clicked it open.
There was a message, written in English.
I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S …
The cryptic message was accompanied by a photo of Elvis, strapped to a chair in what appeared to be a loading bay in some sort of warehouse. Elvis’ mouth had been gaffer-taped. His battered, bloodied head lolled forwards onto his blood-stained chest. It was impossible to tell if he was dead or alive. But the Sig Sauer handgun that was pressed to his temple by a man who was just out of shot told Van den Bergen that if death hadn’t already paid Elvis a visit, it would take very little to entice him over to that loading bay.
‘S,’ Van den Bergen said, feeling his fingertips start to prickle cold. Light-headed now, his pulse had gone into overdrive. The beach was beginning to spin and fragment, as though his life was nothing more than somebody else’s view through a kaleidoscope.
‘Pull it together, Paul,’ he said, trying to regulate his breathing. Focusing his attention away from the gruesome photograph and back onto the details of the message.
He reread the email address of the sender. Silent crocodile. I spy … S for Silencer. With a shaky click on his mouse, he revisited the bookmarked Wikipedia page that Gonzales had sent him, giving the unofficial history of the infamous Coba cartel that operated in the Yucatan peninsula and Chiapas regions – almost certainly the originators of the bad meth. Almost certainly the guys they were hunting. And there in amongst the sensationalist reportage was a detail that caused a ball of burning stomach acid to explode back up Van den Bergen’s throat like a plume of magma.
A notorious Coba cartel boss is reputed to be the enigmatic el cocodrilo, named after his pet crocodiles, whom he allegedly feeds his enemies to. The Mexican Federal Police has no record of el cocodrilo or idea of his true identity or the whereabouts of the ranch where the crocodiles are kept. It could be that he is nothing more than an urban myth.
But Van den Bergen could guess exactly who the ‘silent crocodile’ was. His men had either killed or taken Elvis as a hostage on one continent. But there was a strong possibility that if she hadn’t already, if she was still alive, George was heading right into his jaws on another.