“Fourteen years,” admitted Quinn as they shook hands, and he introduced Sam. He made no mention of her FBI status. She had no jurisdiction in the kingdom of the Netherlands, and they were there unofficially. Papa De Groot ordered coffee-it was still shortly after breakfast-and asked what brought them to his town.
“I’m looking for a man,” said Quinn. “I believe he may be living in Holland.”
“An old friend, perhaps? Someone from the old days?”
“No, I’ve never met him.”
The beam in De Groot’s twinkling eyes did not falter, but he stirred his coffee a little more slowly.
“I heard you had retired from Lloyd’s,” he said.
“True,” said Quinn. “My friend and I are just trying to do a favor for some friends.”
“Tracing missing people?” queried De Groot. “A new departure for you. Well, what’s his name and where does he live?”
De Groot owed him a favor. In May 1977, a group of South Moluccan fanatics, seeking to reestablish their old homeland in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, had sought to publicize their cause by hijacking a train and a school at nearby Assen. There were fifty-four passengers on the train and a hundred children in the school. This sort of thing was new to Holland; they had no trained hostage-recovery teams in those days.
Quinn had been in his first year with the Lloyd’s firm that specialized in such things. He was sent to advise, along with two soft-spoken sergeants from the British SAS, London’s official contribution. Assen being in next-door Drente Province, De Groot had commanded the local police; the SAS men liaised with the Dutch Army.
De Groot had listened to the lean American who seemed to understand the men of violence inside the train and the school. He suggested what would probably happen when the troops went in and the terrorists opened fire. De Groot ordered his men to do as the American suggested, and two stayed alive because of that. Both the train and the school were eventually stormed; six terrorists died, and two train passengers in the crossfire. No soldiers or policemen were killed.
“His name is Pretorius, Janni Pretorius,” said Quinn. De Groot pursed his lips.
“A common enough name, Pretorius,” he said. “You know which town or village he lives in?”
“No. But he is not Dutch. He’s South African by birth and I suspect may never have naturalized.”
“Then you have a problem,” said De Groot. “We do not have a central list of all foreign nationals living in Holland. Civil rights, you see.”
“He’s a former Congo mercenary. I’d have thought a background like that, plus being from a country Holland hardly approves of, would give him a card in some index somewhere.”
De Groot shook his head.
“Not necessarily. If he is here illegally, then he will not be on file, or we’d have expelled him for illegal entry. If he’s here legally, there’d be a card for him when he came in, but after that, if he committed no offenses against Dutch law, he could move freely around without checks. Part of our civil rights.”
Quinn nodded. He knew about Holland’s obsession with civil rights. Though benign to the law-abiding citizen, it also made life a rose garden for the vicious and squalid. Which was why lovely old Amsterdam had become Europe’s capital for drug dealers, terrorists, and child-porn filmmakers.
“How would a man like that get entry and residence permits in Holland?” he asked.
“Well, if he married a Dutch girl he’d get it. That would even give him the right to naturalization. Then he could just disappear.”
“Social security, income tax, Immigration?”
“They wouldn’t tell you,” said De Groot. “The man would have the right to privacy. Even to tell me, I’d have to present a criminal case against the man to justify my inquiry. Believe me, I just can’t do that.”
“No way at all you could help me?” asked Quinn.
De Groot stared out of the window.
“I have a nephew with the BVD,” he said. “It would have to be unofficial… Your man might be listed with them.”
“Please ask him,” said Quinn. “I’d be very grateful.”
While Quinn and Sam strolled up the Oosterstraat looking for a place to lunch, De Groot called his nephew in The Hague. Young Koos De Groot was a junior officer with the Binnenlandse Veiligheids Dienst, Holland’s small Internal Security Service. Though he had great affection for the bearlike uncle who used to slip him ten-guilder notes when he was a boy, he needed a deal of persuading. Tapping into the BVD computer was not the sort of thing a Community cop from Groningen called for every day of the week.
Papa De Groot called Quinn the next morning and they met an hour later at the police station.
“He’s some fellow, your Pretorius,” said De Groot, studying his notes. “It seems our BVD were interested enough when he arrived in Holland ten years ago to file his details, just in case. Some of them come from him-the flattering bits. Others come from newspaper cuttings. Jan Pieter Pretorius, born Bloemfontein 1942-that makes him forty-nine now. Gives his profession as sign painter.”
Quinn nodded. Someone had repainted the Ford Transit, put the BARLOW’S ORCHARD PRODUCE sign on the side, and painted apple crates on the inside of the rear windows. He surmised Pretorius was also the bomb man whose device had torched the Transit in the barn. He knew it could not be Zack. In the Babbidge warehouse Zack had sniffed marzipan and thought it might be Semtex. Semtex is odorless.
“He returned to South Africa in 1968 after leaving Ruanda, then worked for a while as a security guard on a De Beers diamond mine in Sierra Leone.”
Yes, the man who could tell diamonds from paste, and knew about cubic zirconia.
“He had wandered as far as Paris twelve years ago; met a Dutch girl working for a French family, married her. That gave him access to Holland. His father-in-law installed him as barman-apparently the father-in-law owns two bars. The couple divorced five years ago, but Pretorius had saved enough to buy his own bar. He runs it and lives above it.”
“Where?” asked Quinn.
“A town called Den Bosch. You know it?”
Quinn shook his head. “And the bar?”
“De Gouden Leeuw-the Golden Lion,” said De Groot.
Quinn and Sam thanked him profusely and left. When they had gone, De Groot looked down from the window and watched them cross the Rade Markt and head back to their hotel. He liked Quinn, but he was worried by the inquiry. Perhaps it was all legitimate, no need to worry. But he would not want Quinn on a manhunt coming into his town to face a South African mercenary… He sighed and reached for the phone.
“Find it?” asked Quinn as he drove south out of Groningen. Sam was studying the road map.
“Yep. Way down south, near the Belgian border. Join Quinn and see the Low Countries,” she said.
“We’re lucky,” said Quinn. “If Pretorius was the second kidnapper in Zack’s gang, we could have been heading for Bloemfontein.”
The E.35 motorway ran straight as an arrow south-southeast to Z wolle, where Quinn turned onto the A. 50 highroad due south for Apeldoorn, Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Den Bosch. At Apeldoorn, Sam took the wheel. Quinn put the backrest of the passenger seat almost horizontal and fell asleep. He was still asleep, and it was his seatbelt that saved his life, in the crash.
Just north of Arnhem and west of the highway is the gliding club of Terlet. Despite the time of year it was a bright sunny day, rare enough in Holland in November to have brought out the enthusiasts. The driver of the truck thundering along in the opposite lane was so busy gazing at the glider, which wing-tilted right over the highway in front of him as it lined up to land, that he failed to notice he was drifting over to the oncoming lane.
Sam was sandwiched between the timber stakes running along the edge of the sandy moorland to her right and the bulk of the swerving juggernaut to her left. She tried to brake and almost made it. The last three feet of the swaying trailer clipped the front left fender of the Sierra and flicked it off the road, as a finger and thumb will flick a fly off a blotter. The truck driver never even noticed and drove on.