opened the door.
The manager had been correct—it was not cold enough outside for the way Abdul Hassan had dressed. He guessed the temperature to be only slightly below freezing, and the wind was light. Still, it chilled his face and hands as he stepped outside. His footsteps echoed hollowly along the bricks of the narrow alleyway, and he could see the light from the open door to the hotel reflecting off the walls to both his sides. It illuminated his path, and for that he was grateful.
He glanced behind him and saw that, as promised, the hotel manager was still watching him.
He walked casually along the pavement. He would take a roundabout route through the downtown area of Marken, doing his best to appear to be nothing more than his cover story claimed he was—an exporter of Holland’s wooden shoes to the Middle East. He was in town on business and bored in his hotel room.
The real reason for his walk, however, was to look for a tail. He had begun his relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency nearly three years before, which was a long time for such a relationship. He was only human, and he knew he had made many mistakes in the past that could have given him away to the more fundamentalist Muslims who had infiltrated Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. What was even more frightening was the fact that he knew he had to have made countless other mistakes of which he was not even aware.
Perhaps it was time to get out. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he could do that. He felt a tremendous responsibility to stop the terrorism his misguided fellow Arabs perpetrated. It gave everyone with the sharp features and dark skin of the Middle East a bad name, and made men and women suspicious of everyone who fit the profile.
Hassan didn’t even glance into the shoe-shop window as he passed. If someone was following him, he didn’t want the man remembering him as having any interest in the shoe shop at all. Tomorrow, he would leave through the same door to the alley by which he’d exited the hotel tonight, then follow a labyrinth of other alleys to another back door into the shoe shop.
There, he knew, he was to meet two new men.
The snow began to lighten as Abdul Hassan walked on, stopping occasionally to window-shop at businesses that had nothing to do with his work, and glancing casually behind him. He did the same at street corners as he waited for traffic lights to change, and turned randomly right and left whenever the mood struck him, or when he thought he’d seen a familiar figure behind him more than once. Each time, the men or women who had caught his attention eventually disappeared. Which meant that he was left wondering if he had simply imagined them following him, or if they might have turned the surveillance over to another agent.
Yes, Abdul Hassan nodded to himself as he finally turned back toward his hotel. Paranoia was definitely beginning to get the better of him.
But by the time he was within two blocks of his hotel, his mistrust had all but evaporated. He had seen no one on the way back that he had seen before, and he felt a sudden relaxation come over him. Either no one was interested in him, or they were so good at what they did that he would never spot them. If the latter was the case, there was nothing he could do about it. They would eventually kill him, and that would be that. Strangely, this realization brought on a certain calmness. He had done everything he could do.
Hassan slowed his pace, actually enjoying the walk now that he had given up his own counter-surveillance and warmed up. He stuffed his hands deeper into his coat pockets and felt the hilt of the pesh kabz dagger. The T-shaped blade was always reassuring to him. Even though it was of Persian and Northern India origin and he was not, he had chosen it because its original role had been to penetrate chain mail.
He assumed it would work just as well in penetrating the thick clothing worn against the Netherlands cold. He always carried the dagger unsheathed, letting the heavy wool of his coat and the other layers of clothing beneath the garment protect him from both the point and edges.
Hassan wrapped his fingers around the grip of the dagger as he walked on. There were two reasons he had left Syria for the Netherlands. The first was to escape the influence of the fundamentalist Muslims who insisted on restricting behavior to that more befitting the twelfth century than the twenty-first. The second reason was the heat. What he sometimes questioned, however, was why he had allowed himself to be recruited by Jim Campbell, who had been the CIA chief of station in Amsterdam when he’d first arrived. What was even more puzzling was why he’d stayed on after Campbell had been transferred and he’d been turned over to the ambitious man’s lackluster replacement, Felix Young.
Hassan thought of the man who had taken Campbell’s place. He rarely left his office, wherever that was—Hassan had to assume it was at the American Embassy after the fashion of all intelligence services the world over. The bottom line was that Hassan had done more work, accomplished far more, during the six months he’d worked for Campbell than in the two and a half years since his recruiter had been replaced.
The light turned and Abdul Hassan walked on. He could see the sign above his hotel ahead. Soon he would be inside and warm. He would get a good night’s rest, then meet with two new men from some other agency to which the CIA was turning him over. He hoped they would be more ambitious than Young, and that he would actually do some good in changing the way the world looked at Islam and Arabs at this point in history. As his heels clicked against the concrete, he thought of his own feelings of religion. He was hardly a man without sin, and he had always been especially susceptible to one sin in particular. His was a major sin for which he not only felt guilty but for which he might fall victim to death just as fast as he would if the terrorist faction in the Netherlands ever found out he was an informant for the Americans.
This thought not only sent guilt coursing through Hassan’s veins, but also it brought fear. And it was right in the middle of this fear that an arm suddenly reached out from a darkened doorway fifty feet from his hotel and jerked him off the sidewalk into the darkness.
Hassan smelled the strong odor of curry on his assailant’s breath. “Die, you bastard!” he heard a gruff voice say in Arabic.
A split second after that, something pushed hard against the side of his coat. Then it felt as if a pin or needle had pricked the bare skin beneath his garments.
Instinctively, Hassan drew the dagger from his coat pocket in a reverse grip. He could feel something still tangled in his overcoat as he reached up and wrapped his left arm around the back of his attacker’s neck. The Persian dagger rose high over his head, then came down with all of the force he could muster from his arm and shoulder, penetrating the other man’s clothing, skin, and burying itself deep within his heart.
Fear, anger and adrenaline now mixed in Abdul Hassan’s soul as he withdrew the dagger. He brought it up into the air once more, then thrust it down again as close to the same spot as he could. The man who had tried to kill him went limp in his arms, then slumped to the ground inside the doorway.
Hassan knelt, grabbed a sleeve of the man’s coat and used it to wipe the splattered blood from his face. His heart still beating like a kettle drum inside his chest, Hassan stood back up. He knew his coat would be soaked in blood so he would use the same side entrance to the hotel, secure in the fact that since the manager had already swept there it would be vacant now. He peered out from the doorway, looking quickly up and down the sidewalk.
There was no one else in sight.
Pulling a small penlight from the inside breast pocket of his overcoat, Hassan shone the tiny beam onto the dead features of the man he had just killed. The man’s eyes were open, staring lifelessly back at him.
But Hassan didn’t recognize the face. So he had no idea whether the attempted murder had come from his association with the CIA or from his
