6:25 am Central European Daylight Time
Van Nelle Factory Building
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
“It’s flat as a pancake around here,” Troy said.
It was still dark. They were sitting in an unmarked blue sedan. They had driven out here from The Hague, maybe 40 minutes. There was barely a hill or an undulation of the earth the entire way.
Traffic was just beginning to pick up. There was the ambient sound of activity rising around them now. They had stopped for coffee at some all-night joint on the way here, and that was a small blessing. Troy was starting to feel human again.
The building in front of them was long and narrow, maybe eight stories high. It was entirely white, with the words VAN NELLE in white stenciled lettering standing on top of it. A handful of lights were on inside the building. There was a parking lot in the back with a few cars already there, and a black, narrow canal ran along the far edge of the lot.
“It’s the Netherlands,” Dubois said. She shrugged, as if that explained it.
Troy nodded. “You’re very talkative.”
She gestured at the building with her chin. “I think it’s best to focus on the job.”
“And what is the job?” Troy said. “We can’t arrest anyone. We have no weapons.”
“Do you feel vulnerable without your weapons?” she said.
Now Troy smiled. He shook his head. “Lady, you don’t know me very well.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “They sent you here from New York because you’re some kind of tough guy, yes? They want to track down every lead, no matter how tenuous, and rather than go through normal police protocols, they’re hoping you will frighten the subjects, or perhaps beat some information out of them.”
“There was a terrorist attack in New York City two days ago,” he said.
“Yes, I’m familiar.”
“People are concerned.”
She nodded. “I share their concern.”
Troy looked out the window at the darkness. He sipped his coffee. He had bought two. He had pounded the first one down. This was the second one. It was lukewarm and going cold.
“So what is your plan?” he said.
“We go in and interview the subjects, the three men who are the founders and principals of SymAero.”
“That’s it? Interview them?”
She nodded. “Of course. We have no evidence of wrongdoing. All we have is hearsay from a Russian criminal living in New York, and we suspect his testimony was given under duress.”
Troy took a deep breath. It was a mistake to come here. Or maybe coming here wasn’t the mistake. Connecting with the Europeans was the mistake. He and that guy Alex should have just come here themselves. They could have quietly worked these guys over, like they did with the Russians, then took another rung up the ladder.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s a big building. They’re just three guys, so you say. How will we know when they arrive?”
She shrugged. “They’re already here. We posted an agent in the parking lot all night. They arrived about an hour ago.”
Now she smiled. “Everyone was very skeptical of your information, you know. We did go through the motions and research this company. Everything seemed to check out fine. Computer science and engineering graduates from excellent schools, offering cutting edge aerospace tools to industry. It’s a new company, and they did nearly two million euros in sales last year. Nothing to see here. No reason to believe they would risk everything - their business, their reputations, their freedom, possibly their lives - selling drones to dangerous people. But then they panicked. Odd to arrive so early, just hours after a terror attack.”
Troy felt his heart skip a beat. “If they’re already here, what are we doing?”
She spoke slowly, as if to a child. A thug like Troy probably couldn’t understand the nuances of police work. “We are allowing them to incriminate themselves.”
Troy pointed at the building. He felt like screaming at her, but he tamped his voice down. “They’re in there destroying evidence. Emails. Schematics. Web histories. Entire hard drives. Whatever.”
She shook her head. “No, they’re not. They’re not destroying anything. It’s too late for that. They’re simply digging a hole.”
Troy opened his door. “I don’t understand. Let’s go.”
“You met Jan, yes? The big boy you thought of as your partner? He’s had the name SymAero since yesterday evening. He’s spent the past 12 hours, when we were in France, on the plane, and here at Europol, hacking their systems. He has broken their encryptions and taken copies of their servers and their cloud storage. All of their information. It’s too much to sift through at this moment, especially for one man, but we can put a team of analysts on it. Whatever SymAero is deleting, we already have. Later, we can compare what we have with what they deleted and ask them why they did that.”
Troy stopped. He was standing in the parking lot now, leaning back into the car. “Paperwork? He couldn’t possibly access their paperwork. They could be shredding…”
She shrugged. Then she smiled.
Bingo! It was the first time. She had a nice smile.
“If you were selling drones on the dark web to terrorists, would you keep paper copies of the billing details in your office?”
Okay. Okay. She had a point. “Listen. Agent Dubois. Can we please go talk to these guys? It makes me nervous to have them in there doing whatever they want. I don’t want to lose them. I came a long way.”
She nodded. “Of course. But remember, we’re not here to make arrests. We have no evidence against them. And we have no arresting powers anyway. We’re just here to gather information. Maybe they will choose to share that information voluntarily.”
Now Troy nearly smiled but didn’t. “Yeah. Maybe they will.”
They crossed the lot. There was an entryway nearby and an exterior glass stairway that climbed the outside of the building. To their left, the building arced in a near semicircle. To their right, it extended out in a long straight line.
“The building is nearly a hundred years old,” Dubois said. “At one time, it was considered a breakthrough, the very height of modernity. Like your Google or Apple campuses are now.”
“Are they mine?” he said.
She shook her head and pulled the heavy door. It opened easily.
“High tech,” Troy said. “They don’t even lock the door. I’ll bet the tenants…”
“Jan,” she said. “He hacked it and opened it remotely before we came. When he looked at it this morning, he said the lock was very simple. Yes, no. Yes for engaged, no for disengaged. He told it no.”
They walked a long hallway, with three-story ceilings and a bank of floor to ceiling windows along one side. They moved quietly. The lighting was dim. Troy would have expected her shoes to clack on this flooring, but then he remembered she was wearing sneakers.
They came to a black spiral staircase.
“Up one floor,” she said. “Then down another hall maybe 30 meters.” She began to ascend, then looked down at him. “Are you ready? Things sometimes happen quickly.”
He stared at her. “Uh… yeah. I think I’m ready.”
“Just an interview,” she said.
He smiled. “Of course. After you.”
At the top of the stairs there was a new hallway, half the width of the one downstairs, sharing the same high ceiling, only two stories above them now. They moved down the hall and reached the SymAero door in seconds.
Troy felt that same feeling he always got. It wasn’t butterflies. You could even call it a lack of feeling. There was no sensation in his gut at all. There were no thoughts in his mind. He was here. Everything that had come before had brought him here. He was in the right place.
The door was solid wood, with clear glass panes, floor to ceiling again, next to it. There were lights on inside. The words SymAero were simple, with a stylized SA logo next to them. Beneath that was some slogan or motto in another language; Troy imagined Dutch.
We bring good things to life, maybe.
Be all you can be.
This door was locked. The lock wasn’t digital. It was a lock in the knob mechanism, with a metal plate affixed to the door, and a deadbolt that went into the wall. No way to hack that thing remotely.
Troy felt it with his hand. Not the kind of door you could kick in easily. If they had a couple of real cops here with them, and a battering ram, it was the kind of door that might be demolished with some repeated brute force.
Dubois knocked on it. In a few seconds a young male face, with floppy blonde hair, appeared in the window next to the door. Dubois pressed her Interpol identification against the window.
The kid nodded.
“There’s nowhere for them to go,” she said. “There’s no back exit from this office. They must answer.”
“Fire escape?” Troy said.
She made a tiny head shake. “No need. There are sprinklers. Extensive, throughout the building. And the whole place was remodeled in the past decade with modern fireproof materials.”
The door opened and the kid was standing there. He was sort of tall, but young and thin. Another somewhat identical kid was standing behind him. The Netherlands was a nation of clones. They clustered together. The cops were clones. These guys were clones, but of each other, not the cops. Though come to think of it, there was some resemblance.
“Yes?” the kid said.
“I’m Agent Dubois of Interpol. This is Agent Stark of the New York City Police Department. We’d like to have a small chat, if we may.”
The kid shook his head. “No, I’m afraid now is not a good time.”
He moved as if to shut the door, but Troy had already slid his boot between the door and the frame. The kid slammed the door against Troy’s foot. He pulled it open just a bit and went to slam it again.
Troy put his hands against the door and shoved it open, pushing the kid backwards.
“Now is a perfect time,” he said.
He stepped inside. The kid’s eyes were wide, as were the eyes of the kid behind him. The New York City part. That must have gotten them.
Behind the door, about a dozen boxes were piled. There were three tall black servers on wheels next to the boxes. None of it was plugged in. They were getting ready to move stuff out. Their office was a long open space, with a high ceiling and just a few desks. At the far side of the office, the lights were not on. It was dark down there.
“Going somewhere, guys?” Troy said. “Seems a little early to leave when you’re growing such a nice business here.”
“We are… uh… moving the office to Amsterdam.”
Stark looked at the guy but didn’t say a word.
“It’s a better city. More beautiful than Rotterdam.”
Dubois was looking at some photographs she had pulled up on her phone. “Are you Peter? Van Gent?”
The guy nodded. “Yes. And you are?”
She was about to speak, but Troy interrupted. “You know who she is. She’s from Interpol. She already told you that.”
The kid grinned, maybe regaining his composure just a little. Maybe he knew that a visit from Interpol was like a visit from your mean aunt. A little nerve wracking, but her bark was worse than her bite. In fact, she had no teeth and forgot her dentures at home. Whatever the grin meant, Troy didn’t like it.
Instantly.
“Well, I have a great deal happening today; as you can see we are very busy, and it seems it has already slipped my…”
BAM!
Troy punched the kid in the face. It was a sharp right hook, and it came without warning. In fact, it happened before Troy even knew he was going to do it.
The right was Troy’s power hand. The kid’s head snapped back, and he took two stutter-steps backward. The back of his skull connected with the office wall. The sound was like a low THUD. Then the kid oozed down the wall to the floor and sat there.
The other guy gasped.
“Stark!” Dubois shouted. “You can’t…”
Troy crouched down by the kid. He raised the kid’s chin with one hand. “What were you saying? I don’t think I heard you. You have something else to do?”
“Agent Stark! This is inappropriate!”
Troy raised the other hand to her. “Shhhh. Shut up a minute. Let him speak.”
“Stark!”
“I will retain a lawyer,” the kid said.
“Where you gonna do that from, the hospital?”
The kid nodded. “Yes, and I will have your job.”
Troy smiled. He loved it when people said things like that. His job? What job? His career in the Navy, which was about to end? His fake job at the NYPD, which was paid for out of a budget that didn’t exist? Or his actual job, the one he was hired to do, where his boss had expressed no qualms at all about him killing people?
“If that’s the case, I might as well beat you up a little more, huh? Since I’m gonna be out of a job anyway?”
“Stark, you can’t…”
“Shhhhh. Honey, relax.”
Now Dubois gasped. “Honey!”
That was the way this was going to go. If Troy did this the way Dubois wanted it to go, they’d be back in the office in a couple of hours, with no answers, and no closer to finding the terrorists. These guys, right here, had very likely built and sold the drones used in the attack. If so, they were going to tell Troy about it. They weren’t going to hem and haw and talk about how busy they were.
That probably meant Troy and Dubois were not going to be friends. They weren’t even going to be partners. Troy was fine with it.
“Don’t you move! Don’t you dare hit him again!”
A man appeared to Troy’s right, behind the second kid, who had been standing there ineffectually. There had been nobody there a moment ago; now there was. The guy just emerged from the darkness at the far end of the room. He had been hanging back and remaining silent.
It was stupid on Troy’s part. He was tired, yes. But he should have asked these guys who else was here. The third man had nearly killed him in Brooklyn just yesterday. And now this guy. Troy was off his feed.
The guy came closer. He was the only one of these three who was slightly different. He was older than the other two, short and stocky, strong looking, with auburn hair that was starting to thin. If the other two were in their mid- to late-twenties, this guy might have been in his late-thirties.
He had a gun in his hand.
“You cannot do this!” he shouted. “You cannot!”
“Gun,” Troy said. He sighed. This was supposed to be an unarmed society; he and Dubois were certainly unarmed, and now here was a guy with a gun.
“We are leaving,” the man said. “Raise your hands and step away from him. This is police brutality.”
“Buddy,” Troy said. The gun was pointed directly at his head. He was in a squat position, close to the floor. He had no friends here, and a gun just a few feet from blowing a hole in his skull. But there might be something he could do. If he got lucky, he might be able to…
“Let the record show that you came here and behaved in a manner…”
Behind Troy, a blur streaked by. Dubois.
He caught a glimpse of her, fluid, like a ballerina. She zipped through the air and launched a front kick. Her foot hit the guy’s hand, and the gun flew away, back and over his head.
In almost the same movement, she landed and delivered a punch to his throat.
The man grabbed that spot with both hands, his eyes wide.
“GLUH…”
Then she swept a leg behind his two legs, and pushed him hard in the chest, using her whole body and the momentum from her jump.
The guy fell over backwards onto the floor.
Troy popped up from the squat. Now two of these guys were down. He looked at the last guy. This was probably the youngest of the bunch. His eyes said he wanted no part of any fighting.
Troy went over and picked up the gun. It was a Luger pistol, an antique, Troy guessed World War II vintage. It was a beautiful gun, and it seemed like it was in decent shape. He pocketed it in his jacket, then turned and looked at Dubois.
He smiled. “There’s my girl. That’s what I like to see. A little enthusiasm.”
She didn’t smile at all. Her face was cold as ice.
“I’m not your girl,” she said.