The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter XVI
Hendricksen made the flight to Amsterdam with thirty minutes to spare, the imprecations of his spurned dinner companion still ringing in his ears. As anticipated, she had not understood the reason for his sudden departure. Then again, he did not completely understand it himself. He had no particular obligation to the American named Louis, beyond the fact that Louis had helped put an end to the man who was probably responsible for his colleague Yvette Visser’s murder in England. Visser’s body had still not been found, and was unlikely ever to be discovered now that her killer was dead. It was not even as though Louis had set out to uncover the truth behind her disappearance, or achieve some measure of justice for her. The culprit’s death had merely been incidental to a larger investigation.
But sometimes, Hendricksen thought, we encounter individuals who are beyond the norm, persons who inspire a loyalty and respect that can be neither analyzed nor quantified. If they ask a favor, they do so in the knowledge that another can, and should, be asked in return, and will not be refused. Hendricksen wasn’t sure that he would ever require the kind of favor Louis was capable of reciprocating. He certainly hoped he wouldn’t, because he suspected it would involve violent death, and Hendricksen was generally reluctant to involve himself in troubles of such magnitude.
He retrieved his car from the external parking facility at the airport Hyatt Hotel, dumped his bags at his apartment, and removed the Glock 17 from the safe in his closet. The Netherlands had some of the strictest gun laws in the world, with civilian ownership restricted to law enforcement, hunters, or those, like Hendricksen, who were members of gun clubs. Even taking one’s pistol to a shooting club required that it first be disassembled before being placed in a secure case. Open or concealed carry was forbidden. Hendricksen was a member of a club in Floradorp, but rarely visited the range. He disliked firearms. They held bad memories for him. Unfortunately, in his line of work he occasionally encountered men and women, but mostly men, who demonstrated no small disregard for the Netherlands’ gun laws – any laws, come to think of it. The Vuksans undoubtedly fell into this category, and therefore a weapon was advisable. Finally, Hendricksen took a small bag from the base of the closet and placed it in his backpack.
He drove to the Herengracht, parked two blocks from the address of the safe house, and walked the rest of the way, pulling on his gloves as he went. He made two passes of the property, the first from the opposite side of the canal to check for any obvious surveillance or activity in the vicinity, and the second by the house itself in an effort to spot lights or other signs of occupancy. No one appeared to be watching, no lamps burned inside, and the shutters were drawn on the upstairs and downstairs windows.
Hendricksen paused by the front door. He could see no bell. Knocking seemed mildly foolish, but less foolish than breaking in, which he hoped to avoid. He knocked twice, but received no reply. Option Two it was, then.
This stretch of the Herengracht was quiet, even for a Sunday evening in early winter. The sensible approach would have been to inform mutual friends in the Korps that some concerns had arisen for the well-being of Mijnheer De Jaager and his family, but this would have necessitated revealing the location of the safe house. Should De Jaager have decided to take a break in the country or in another European city, perhaps with Paulus and Anouk in tow, he would be most unhappy to return and find the location and nature of this redoubt were now familiar to the authorities. In such an eventuality, Hendricksen’s already fraught relations with the old fixer would likely suffer a terminal decline.
Hendricksen’s eye was caught by a mark on the otherwise pristine paintwork of the doorframe. He used his pocket Maglite to reveal it: a dark oval against the cream, fading to nothing, like a red flare passing over snow. It looked, to Hendricksen, very much like blood. Someone, it seemed, had been careless.
He checked the area one last time for police and found no trace of them. Across the canal, a man and woman were walking arm in arm. From the opposite direction, a small group of young people emerged from a basement bar. Hendricksen waited in the shadows until all had gone their separate ways before reaching into his pack and removing a snap gun and tension wrench. Picking locks was a craft, one that Hendricksen had never had the urge or patience to master. A snap gun did the job faster, although it was much noisier than a lockpick and tended to permanently damage the mechanism, which meant it was useless if one wished to enter someone else’s property without leaving proof of intrusion. But then Hendricksen was also carrying a concealed Glock, and so would have larger problems to occupy him if confronted by men and women in uniform.
He took a final look around, inserted the steel needle of the gun into the lock, positioned the tension wrench, and squeezed the trigger. The gun cocked, and Hendricksen increased the trigger pressure, causing the needle to snap into action. It made a sound like nails and concrete being mixed in a blender, but the lock didn’t open. Hendricksen adjusted the thumb wheel on the gun, jacking up the impact of the needle, and fired again. A light flicked on in an upstairs window of one of the houses to his right, casting a rhombus of illumination on the cobblestones nearby, but by then the steel rod had driven the lock pins into the cylinder. Hendricksen applied the tension wrench and felt the lock plug turn.
The front door opened, revealing a dark, undecorated hallway. A door to his right was closed, as was another straight ahead, to one side of the stairs. Hendricksen dropped the snap gun and wrench on the hall floor to reach for his Glock, easing the door shut behind him to prevent himself from being silhouetted against it: an easy target. If anyone remained in the house, the noise of the lock being broken would have brought them running, but no one emerged to investigate. Hendricksen smelled blood, and beneath it an odor ranker and more desperate, the involuntary purging of creatures at the end of their suffering.
The house felt empty. Still, he crouched and listened for five seconds, ten, twenty, just to be sure, before he stood tall again. He flipped on the flashlight for a second time. A thick trail of blood stained the stairs, with more blood on the floor of the hallway, where a body – perhaps more than one – had been dragged across the boards. From the pattern of the smearing, Hendricksen guessed that the remains had been brought down rather than up, and deposited behind the closed door to his right.
He stepped around the stain, being careful not to disturb it, and put his back to the wall. He reached across the door with his left hand, found the brass knob, and opened it with a single quick motion before pulling his hand back, his body tensed for the sound of shots. None came, only a stronger stench. Hendricksen tightened his grip on the Glock. He offered up a single short prayer and went in low, the gun in his right hand, the flashlight held beneath it in his left. Gun and light traversed the room together, but found no life.
Only death.