“I don’t believe it!”
“What?”
Jennifer, amazed, looked up at him.
“Apparently there’s a video of the whole thing.”
“A video? What do you mean, a video? A videotape?” It was Tom’s turn to look surprised. Jennifer nodded.
“Seems a couple of tourists caught the whole thing on camera. There should be a copy here somewhere.” Jennifer rummaged in the envelope until she triumphantly produced a cassette, a hastily scrawled label on the top side identifying it as Steiner — Video Footage in red ink.
Tom snatched it out of her hand and prodded the TV into action, its sleek black shape strangely out of place amidst the stained and ripped floral wallpaper and the laminate furniture, painted many years before in various shades of dark green. The built-in video player hungrily swallowed the tape with a low mechanical moan.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The hotel room was dingy and dirty. Stained green curtains clinging onto the rail by a few loose threads hung over a grimy window that had been nailed shut. The floor and the walls were lined in the same brown corduroy-effect material, no doubt the height of fashion when it had been laid in the 1970s, but now balding and flecked with the offal of its many occupants over the years.
The bed sagged in the middle like an abandoned trampoline, its bruised white headboard and pockmarked melamine side cabinets screwed to the wall. A Gideon Bible in the left-hand drawer had several pages torn out, the few black crumbs trapped between the Gospels of Mark and Luke and the heady smell of the remaining pages suggesting that they had been smoked one night out of desperation for a cigarette paper.
The ceiling had ripened to a watery yellow color, its sickly appearance hardly helped by the blotchy glow that emerged from the ripped and torn paper shade that engulfed the single forty-watt bulb in the middle of the ceiling.
But it served its purpose. People came and went without any questions being asked. Rooms were rented by the hour, by the day, by the week even — cash up front. It was easy to be anonymous there, to blend into the shadows, to slip in and out unobtrusively, unobserved. So he fitted in fine.
But he’d been there seven days now and was packed and ready to leave. He’d smoked himself silly, fucked four hookers, all of whom had reminded him in a strange way of his sister, and woken up each morning hugging an empty bottle of Jack and nursing a hangover. He’d almost proved to himself that you could have too much of a good thing. The mutilated Bible still bothered him, though. That was not right. That was not respectful.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out, flipped the cover open and pressed it to his face, the warm plastic nestling against his straggly blond beard.
“This is Foster.” His voice hinted at azaleas and whispering pines draped in Spanish moss, of long suffocating nights and alligator-infested swamps.
“Are you still in Amsterdam?” The voice was clipped, to the point. As always.
“Sure am.”
“Good. Stay put. There’s another little job I’d like you to do. Usual fee. I’ll call you in an hour.”
The line went dead.
Sighing, the man tossed the phone down onto the bed. The loose sheets swallowed it whole. He popped the catches of his suitcase and threw it open, lifting out neatly folded shirts and trousers from the lower half and placing them on the bed.
He reached into the case again, his hands pausing over the silky fabric that lined the inside of the plastic shell, before pulling it toward him. The Velcro holding the lining in place gave way with a reluctant rip and he folded it back, exposing the foam-filled compartment it had concealed within the lid.
The black Teflon sheen of his dismembered Remington M24 sniper rifle gazed silently back at him.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The screen glowed into life, darkness fading to light, the image jerking from the unsteady camera work.
A beatific sun smiled down through diaphanous clouds. The soothing hum of the tour guide’s harmless chatter and the swish of the water against the boat echoed in the background. The sights and sounds of the city, its bridges and canals and long narrow houses, drifted lazily in front of them.
Abruptly the mood changed. The sun disappeared, blotted out behind a tall building. The boat was plunged into shadow, the picture cold, the sky angry and portentous. And then, initially on the right-hand side but his face soon occupying the whole screen in terrifying detail, Tom and Jennifer saw Steiner. Saw his murder.
It was so quick. A man in a phone booth, two men silently approaching, the phone tumbling from his hand, swinging gracefully down and clashing against the phone’s metal base, the molded plastic shattering. Then the telltale flash of steel, a body lying crumpled on the pavement. In the background, the guide obliviously chanted her singsong commentary. A few seconds later and the tape ended. The screen was dark once again. A life extinguished.
They swapped a guilty glance, Tom shifting awkwardly on the edge of the bed, Jennifer swallowing nervously. He had been transfixed by the images, unable to look away as the knife dropped, as Steiner’s heart had stopped beating, as his life had spilled out onto the street. He could tell she had felt the same. That voyeuristic compulsion now hung over them like some terrible secret, a shared fetish that they were at once repulsed by and attracted to.
“Shall we have another look?” Tom was almost reluctant to suggest it, but it seemed unavoidable. Jennifer nodded silently.
He rewound the tape, pressed play and sat back down on the edge of the bed, trying to focus more objectively on what he was seeing. Steiner was easily recognizable from the mug shots and photo composites in his file. However, there was no way of identifying the murderers. The camera was never on the right side of them and by the time it was, they had both gone. Equally, it was impossible to see if the two men had removed anything from Steiner. At the crucial moment, when they had both been crouching over the body, the boat had passed under a bridge.
What was clear was that Steiner had recognized the threat as soon as they appeared. With good reason. They had murdered him in cold blood and in broad daylight in full view of a boat packed with tourists. It was a miracle no one else had seen them. In fact, if anything, it was almost as if they’d wanted to be seen. Either that, or they had been unwilling to risk missing him. They just took Steiner down at the first opportunity, whatever the consequences. These were desperate, dedicated men. Dangerous men.
Tom played the tape again, moving closer to the screen as if he was going to climb into the picture and walk right up to them all. A thought suddenly occurred to him. He stood up and rewound the tape again, pausing it just before Steiner had looked up and noticed the two men. Tom tilted his head, first one way and then the other, as if he were trying to see around the side of the image.
“What are you doing, Karl?” he asked slowly, more to himself than to Jennifer.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look at him.” He walked right up to the screen and pointed at Steiner’s back. “Just before he notices the two guys. He’s facing the back of the phone booth, away from us. He’s bent slightly forward, his left arm leaning against the back wall, the phone jammed between his head and his left shoulder. What’s he doing?”
“Yeah, I see.” Jennifer got up and moved next to Tom. “It’s like he’s reading something. Or maybe leaning on the top of the phone with his right hand. Hey, I wonder if they found a pen on him?”