Kitabı oku: «Floodgate», sayfa 2
‘It hardly needs spelling out, does it, sir? We have an infiltrator here, an informant. The enemy has a spy in our camp.’ Again he carried out the same slow survey of the room. ‘I do wonder who it can be.’
‘In this room?’ De Jong looked both disbelieving and unhappy at the same time.
‘I don’t have to repeat the obvious, do I?’
De Jong looked down at his hands which were now tightly clasped on the table. ‘No. No. Of course not. But, surely, well, we can find out. You can find out.’
‘The usual rigorous enquiries, is that it? Trace the movements of every person in this room after the Fokker crashed? Find out if anyone had access to the phone or, indeed, used a phone? Sure, we can do that, pursue the rigorous enquiries. We’ll find nothing.’
‘You’ll find nothing?’ De Jong looked perplexed. ‘How can you be so sure, so sure in advance?’
‘Because,’ de Graaf said, ‘the Lieutenant has a policeman’s mind. Not a bunch to be underestimated, are they, Peter?’
‘They’re clever.’
De Jong looked from de Graaf to van Effen then back to de Graaf. ‘If someone would kindly explain…’
‘Simple, really,’ de Graaf said. ‘It hasn’t occurred to you that the FFF didn’t have to let us know that they knew of the deaths. Gratuitous information, if you like. They would know that we would know this. They would know, as the Lieutenant has just pointed out, that we would know that someone had informed them and that someone would have to be one of us. They would be certain that we would check on the possibility of someone here having made a phone call, so they made certain that no one here made a phone call. He passed the word on to an accomplice who is not in this room: the accomplice made the call. I’m afraid, Jon, that you have another mole burrowing away inside here. Maybe even more. You are aware, of course, that every word of our conversation will be reported back to the FFF, whoever they may be. We will, naturally, go through the motions and make the necessary routine enquiries. As van Effen says, we will, of course, draw a blank.’
‘But—but it all seems so pointless,’ de Jong said. ‘Why should they be so devious so as to achieve nothing?’
‘They’re not really devious and they do achieve something. A degree of demoralization, for one thing. More important, they are saying that they are a force to be reckoned with, that they can infiltrate and penetrate security when they so choose. They are giving the message that they are a highly organized group, one that is capable of carrying out any threats that it chooses to make and one that is to be ignored at our peril.
‘Speaking of threats and perils, let’s return to the FFF’s latest phone call. They go on to say: “We are sure that the Dutch people are well aware that, in the face of an attacker determined to bring it to its knees, it is the most defenceless nation in the world. The sea is not your enemy. We are, and the sea is our ally.
‘“You will not need reminding that the Netherlands has about 1300 kilometres of sea dykes. A certain Cornelius Rijpma, president of the Sea Polder board in Leeuwarden, in Friesland, is on record as saying some months ago that the dykes in his area consist of nothing more than layers of sand and that if a big storm comes they are certain to break. By a ‘big storm’, one would assume that it would have to be a storm of the order of the one that breached the delta defences in 1953 and took 1,850 lives. Our information, supplied to us by the Rijkswaterstaat, is that—’”
‘What! What!’ Van der Kuur, red-faced and almost incoherent with anger, was on his feet. ‘Are those devils daring to suggest that they got information from us? Dastardly! Impossible!’
‘Let me finish, Mr van der Kuur. Can’t you see that they’re using the same technique again, trying to undermine confidence and demoralize? Just because we know that they have contacts with one or more of Mr de Jong’s staff is no proof that they have any with your people. Anyway, there’s worse to come. They go on: “Our information is that a storm of not more than 70% of the power of the 1953 one would be sufficient to breach the dykes. Mr Rijpma was talking about vulnerable dykes. Of the Netherlands’ 1300 kilometres of dykes, almost exactly three hundred have deteriorated to a critical condition. By the best estimates, no repairs will be carried out to the threatened dykes for another twelve years, that is to say, 1995. All we propose to do is to accelerate the advent of the inevitable.”’
De Graaf paused and looked around. A chilled hush seemed to have fallen over the canteen. Only two people were looking at him: the others were either gazing at the floor or into the far distance; in both cases it was not difficult to guess that they didn’t like what they saw.
‘“The dykes cannot be repaired because there is no money to repair them. All the money available, or likely to be available in the future, is being sunk or will be sunk into the construction of the East Scheldt storm-surge barrier, the last link in the so-called Delta plan designed to keep the North Sea at bay. The costs are staggering. Due to gross original underestimates, cost over-runs and inflation, the likely bill will probably be in excess of nine billion guilders—and this massive sum for a project that some engineering experts say will not work anyway. The project consists of 63 lock-gates fitted between enormous, 18,000 tonne, free-standing concrete pillars. The dissident experts fear that heavy seas could shift the pillars, jam the locks and render the barrier inoperable. A shift of two centimetres would be enough. Ask Mr van der Kuur of the Rijkswaterstaat.”’
De Graaf paused and looked up. Van der Kuur was on his feet again, every bit as apoplectic as on the previous occasion: the thought was inevitable that van der Kuur’s normal air of pipe-puffing imperturbability was a very thin veneer indeed.
‘Lies!’ he shouted. ‘Rubbish! Balderdash! Defamation! Calumny! Lies, I tell you, lies!’
‘You’re the engineer in charge. You should know. So, really, there’s no need to get so worked up about it.’ De Graaf’s tone was mild, conciliatory. ‘The dissidents the FFF speak about—they have no hydraulic engineering qualifications?’
‘The dissidents! A handful. Qualifications? Of course. Paper qualifications! Not one of them has any practical experience as far as this matter is concerned.’
Van Effen said: ‘Does anybody have on this project? Practical experience, I mean. I understood that the East Scheldt involved completely untested engineering techniques and that you are, in effect, moving into the realms of the unknown.’ He raised a hand as van der Kuur was about to rise again. ‘Sorry. This is all really irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is a mind or minds among the FFF that is not only highly intelligent but has a clear understanding about the application of practical psychology. First, they introduce the elements of doubt, dismay, dissension and the erosion of confidence into Schiphol. Then they apply the same techniques to the Rijkswaterstaat. And now, through the medium of every paper in the land, this evening or tomorrow morning, and doubtless, through television and radio, they will introduce those same elements into the nation at large. If you ask me, they have—or will have—achieved a very great deal in a very short space of time. A remarkable feat. They are to be respected as strategists if not as human beings. I trust that the traitor in our midst will report that back to them.’
‘Indeed,’ de Graaf said. ‘And I trust the same traitor will understand if we don’t discuss the steps we plan to undertake to combat this menace. Well, ladies and gentlemen, to the final paragraph of their message and incidentally, no doubt, to introduce some more of what the Lieutenant referred to as doubt, dismay, dissension, erosion of confidence or whatever. They go on to say: “In order to demonstrate your helplessness and our ability to strike at will wherever and whenever we choose, we would advise you that a breach will be made in the Texel sea dyke at 4.30 p.m. this afternoon.”’
‘What!’ The word came simultaneously from at least half a dozen people.
‘Shook me a bit, too,’ de Graaf said. ‘That’s what they say. I don’t for a moment doubt them. Brinkman’—this to a uniformed young police officer—‘contact the office. No urgency, probably, but check that people on the island know what’s coming to them. Mr van der Kuur, I’m sure I can leave it to you to have the necessary men and equipment to stand by.’ He consulted the sheet again. ‘Not a big operation, they say. “We are sure that damage will be minimal but it might behove the citizens of Oosterend and De Waal to stand by their boats or take to their attics shortly after 4.30. Very shortly.” Damned arrogance. They end up by saying: “We know that those names will give you a fairly accurate idea as to where the charges have been placed. We defy you to find them.”’
‘And that’s all?’ van der Kuur said.
‘That’s all.’
‘No reasons, no explanations for those damned outrages? No demands? Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I still say we’re up against a bunch of raving maniacs.’
‘And I say that we’re up against clever and very calculating criminals who are more than content to let us stew in our own juice for the time being. I wouldn’t worry about the demands, if I were you. These will come in due time—their time. Well, nothing more we can achieve here—not, on reflection, that we have achieved anything. I bid you good day, Mr de Jong, and hope that you’ll be back in operational services some time tomorrow. It’ll take days, I suppose, to replace the machinery ruined in your basements.’
On their way out, van Effen made a gesture to de Graaf to hold back. He looked casually around to make sure that no one was within earshot and said: ‘I’d like to put tails on a couple of gentlemen who were in that room.’
‘Well, you don’t waste time, I will say. You have, of course, your reasons.’
‘I was watching them when you broke the news of the proposed Texel breach. It hit them. Most of them just stared away into space and those who didn’t were studying the floor. All of them, I assume, were considering the awful implications. Two did neither. They just kept on looking at you. Maybe they didn’t react because it didn’t come as any news to them.’
‘Straws. You’re just clutching at straws.’
‘Isn’t that what a drowning man is supposed to do?’
‘With all the water that’s around, present and promised, you might have picked a less painful metaphor. Who?’
‘Alfred van Rees.’
‘Ah. The Rijkswaterstaat’s Locks, Weirs and Sluices man. Preposterous. Friend of mine. Honest as the day’s long.’
‘Maybe the Mr Hyde in him doesn’t come out until after sunset. And Fred Klassen.’
‘Klassen! Schiphol’s security chief. Preposterous.’
‘That’s twice. Or is he a friend of yours, too?’
‘Impossible. Twenty years’ unblemished service. The security chief?’
‘If you were a criminal and were given the choice of subverting any one man in a big organization, who would you go for?’
De Graaf looked at him for a long moment, then walked on in silence.
TWO
Bakkeren and Dekker were the names of the two boat-owners who had been involuntarily deprived of their vessels during the previous night. As it turned out, they were brothers-in-law. Bakkeren was phlegmatic about the borrowing of his boat and not particularly concerned by the fact that he had not yet been allowed to examine his boat to see what damage, if any, had been done to it. Dekker, by contrast and understandably, was seething with rage: he had, as he had informed de Graaf and van Effen within twenty seconds of their arrival at his suburban home, been rather roughly handled during the previous evening.
‘Is no man safe in this godforsaken city?’ He didn’t speak the words, he shouted them, but it was reasonable to assume that this was not his normal conversational custom. ‘Police, you say you are, police! Ha! Police! A fine job you do of guarding the honest citizens of Amsterdam. There I was, sitting in my own boat and minding my own business when those four gangsters—’
‘Moment,’ van Effen said. ‘Were they wearing gloves?’
‘Gloves!’ Dekker, a small dark, intense man, stared at him in outraged disbelief. ‘Gloves! Here am I, the victim of a savage assault, and all you can think of—’
‘Gloves.’
Something in van Effen’s tone had reached through the man’s anger, one could almost see his blood pressure easing a few points. ‘Gloves, eh? Funny, that. Yes, they were. All of them.’
Van Effen turned to a uniformed sergeant. ‘Bernhard.’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell the finger-print men to go home.’
‘Sorry, Mr Dekker. Tell it your way. If there was anything that struck you as unusual or odd, let us know.’
‘It was all bloody odd,’ Dekker said morosely. He had been, as he had said, minding his own business in his little cabin, when he had been hailed from the bank. He’d gone on deck and a tall man—it was almost dark and his features had been indistinguishable—had asked him if he could hire the boat for the night. He said he was from a film company and wanted to shoot some night scenes and offered a thousand guilders. Dekker had thought it extremely odd that an offer of that nature should have been made at such short notice and with night falling: he had refused. Next thing he knew, three other men had appeared on the scene, he’d been dragged from the boat, bundled into a car and driven to his home.
Van Effen said: ‘Did you direct them?’
‘Are you mad?’ Looking at the fiery little man it was impossible to believe that he would volunteer information to anyone.
‘So they’ve been watching your movements for some time. You weren’t aware that you were under surveillance at any time?’
‘Under what?’
‘Being watched, followed, seeing the same stranger an unusual number of times?’
‘Who’d watch and follow a fishmonger? Well, who would think they would? So they hauled me into the house—’
‘Didn’t you try to escape at any time?’
‘Would you listen to the man?’ Dekker was justifiably bitter. ‘How far would you get with your wrists handcuffed behind your back?’
‘Handcuffs?’
‘I suppose you thought that only police used those things. So they dragged me into the bathroom, tied my feet with a clothes line and taped my mouth with Elastoplast. Then they locked the door from the outside.’
‘You were completely helpless?’
‘Completely.’ The little man’s face darkened at the recollection. ‘I managed to get to my feet and a hell of a lot of good that did me. There’s no window in the bathroom. If there had been I don’t know of any way I could have broken it and even if I had there was no way I could shout for help, was there? Not with God knows how many strips of plaster over my mouth.
‘Three or four hours later—I’m not sure how long it was—they came back and freed me. The tall man told me they’d left fifteen hundred guilders on the kitchen table—a thousand for the hire of the boat and five hundred for incidental expenses.’
‘What expenses?’
‘How should I know?’ Dekker sounded weary. ‘They didn’t explain. They just left.’
‘Did you see them go? Type of car, number, anything like that?’
‘I did not see them go. I did not see their car, far less its number.’ Dekker spoke with the air of a man who is exercising massive restraint. ‘When I say they freed me, I meant that they had unlocked and removed the handcuffs. Took me a couple of minutes to remove the strips of Elastoplast and damnably painful it was, too. Took quite a bit of skin amd my moustache with it too. Then I hopped through to the kitchen and got the bread knife to the ropes round my ankles. The money was there, all right and I’d be glad if you’d put it in your police fund because I won’t touch their filthy money. Almost certainly stolen anyway. They and their car, of course, were to hell and gone by that time.’
Van Effen was diplomatically sympathetic. ‘Considering what you’ve been through, Mr Dekker, I think you’re being very calm and restrained. Could you describe them?’
‘Ordinary clothes. Rain-coats. That’s all.’
‘Their faces?’
‘It was dark on the canal bank, dark in the car and by the time we reached here they were all wearing hoods. Well, three of them. One stayed on the boat.’
‘Slits in the hoods, of course.’ Van Effen wasn’t disappointed, he’d expected nothing else.
‘Round holes, more like.’
‘Did they talk among themselves?’
‘Not a word. Only the leader spoke.’
‘How do you know he was the leader?’
‘Leaders give orders, don’t they?’
‘I suppose. Would you recognize the voice again?’
Dekker hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Well, yes, I think I would.’
‘Ah. Something unusual about his voice?’
‘Yes. Well. He talked funny Dutch.’
‘Funny?’
‘It wasn’t—what shall I say—Dutch Dutch.’
‘Poor Dutch, is that it?’
‘No. The other way around. It was very good. Too good. Like the news-readers on TV and radio.’
‘Too precise, yes? Book Dutch. A foreigner, perhaps?’
‘That’s what I would guess.’
‘Would you have any idea where he might have come from?’
‘There you have me, Lieutenant. I’ve never been out of the country. I hear often enough that many people in the city speak English or German or both. Not me. I speak neither. Foreign tourists don’t come to a fishmonger’s shop. I sell my fish in Dutch.’
‘Thanks, anyway. Could be a help. Anything else about this leader—if that’s what he was?’
‘He was tall, very tall.’ He tried his first half-smile of the afternoon. ‘You don’t have to be tall to be taller than I am but I didn’t even reach up to his shoulders. Ten, maybe twelve centimetres taller than you are. And thin, very very thin: he was wearing a long rain-coat, blue it was, that came way below his knees and it fell from his shoulders like a coat hanging from a coat-hanger.’
‘The hoods had holes, you say, not slits. You could see this tall man’s eyes?’
‘Not even that. This fellow was wearing dark eye-glasses.’
‘Sun-glasses? I did ask you to tell me if there was anything odd about those people. Didn’t you think it odd that a person should be wearing a pair of sun-glasses at night?’
‘Odd? Why should it be odd? Look, Lieutenant, a bachelor like me spends a lot of time watching movies and TV. The villains always wear dark glasses. That’s how you can tell they’re villains.’
‘True, true.’ Van Effen turned to Dekker’s brother-in-law. ‘I understand, Mr Bakkeren, that you were lucky enough to escape the attentions of those gentlemen.’
‘Wife’s birthday. In town for a dinner and show. Anyway, they could have stolen my boat any time and I would have known nothing about it. If they were watching Maks here, they would have been watching me and they’d know that I only go near my boat on weekends.’
Van Effen turned to de Graaf. ‘Would you like to see the boats, sir?’
‘Do you think we’ll find anything?’
‘No. Well, might find out what they’ve been doing. I’ll bet they haven’t left one clue for hardworking policemen to find.’
‘Might as well waste some more time.’
The brothers-in-law went in their own car, the two policemen in van Effen’s, an ancient and battered Peugeot with a far from ancient engine. It bore no police distinguishing marks whatsoever and even the radio telephone was concealed. De Graaf lowered himself gingerly into the creaking and virtually springless seat.
‘I refrain from groaning and complaining, Peter. I know there must be a couple of hundred similar wrecks rattling about the streets of Amsterdam and I appreciate your passion for anonymity, but would it kill you to replace or re-upholster the passenger seat?’
‘I thought it lent a nice touch of authenticity. But it shall be done. Pick up anything back in the house there?’
‘Nothing that you didn’t. Interesting that the tall thin man should be accompanied by a couple of mutes. It has occurred to you that if the leader, as Dekker calls him, is a foreigner then his henchmen are also probably foreigners and may very well be unable to speak a word of Dutch?’
‘It had occurred and it is possible. Dekker said that the leader gave orders which would give one to understand that they spoke, or at least understood, Dutch. Doesn’t necessarily follow, of course. The orders may have been meaningless and given only to convince the listener that the others were Dutch. Pity that Dekker has never ventured beyond the frontiers of his own homeland. He might—I say just might—have been able to identify the country of origin of the owner of that voice. I speak two or three languages, Peter, you even more. Do you think, if we’d heard this person speaking, we’d have been able to tell his country?’
‘There’s a chance. I wouldn’t put it higher than that. I know what you’re thinking, sir. The tape-recording that this newspaper sub-editor made of the phone call they received. Chances there would be much poorer—you know how a phone call can distort a voice. And they don’t strike me as people who would make such a fairly obvious mistake. Besides, even if we did succeed in guessing at the country of origin, how the hell would that help us in tracking them down?’
De Graaf lit up a very black cheroot. Van Effen wound down his window. De Graaf paid no attention. He said: ‘You’re a great comforter. Give us a few more facts—or let’s dig up a few more—and it might be of great help to us. Apart from the fact, not yet established, that he may be a foreigner, all we know about this lad is that he’s very tall, built along the lines of an emaciated garden rake and has something wrong with his eyes.’
‘Wrong? The eyes, I mean, sir? All we know for certain is that he wears sun-glasses at night-time. Could mean anything or nothing. Could be a fad. Maybe he fancies himself in them. Maybe, as Dekker suggested, he thinks sun-glasses are de rigueur for the better class villain. Maybe, like the American President’s Secret Service body-guards, he wears them because any potential malefactor in a crowd can never know whether the agent’s eyes are fixed on him or not, thereby inhibiting him from action. Or he might be just suffering from nyctalopia.’
‘I see. Nyctalopia. Every schoolboy knows, of course. I am sure, Peter, that you will enlighten me at your leisure.’
‘Funny old word to describe a funny old condition. I am told it’s the only English language word with two precisely opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means night-blindness, the recurrent loss of vision after sunset, the causes of which are only vaguely understood. On the other hand, it can be taken to mean day-blindness, the inability to see clearly except by night, and here the causes are equally obscure. A rare disease, whatever meaning you take, but its existence has been well attested to. The sun-glasses, as we think of them, may well be fitted with special correctional lenses.’
‘It would appear to me that a criminal suffering from either manifestation of this disease would be labouring under a severe occupational handicap. Both a house-breaker, who operates by daylight, and a burglar, who operates by night, would be a bit restricted in their movements if they were afflicted, respectively, by day or night blindness. Just a little bit too far-fetched for me, Peter. I prefer the old-fashioned reasons. Badly scarred about the eyes. Cross-eyed. Maybe he’s got a squint. Maybe an eye whose iris is streaked or particoloured. Maybe wall-eyed, where the iris is so light that you can hardly distinguish it from the white or where the pupils are of two different colours. Maybe a sufferer from exophthalmic goitre, which results in very protuberant eyes. Maybe he’s only got one eye. In any event, I’d guess he’s suffering from some physical abnormality by which he would be immediately identifiable without the help of those dark glasses.’
‘So now all we’ve got to do is to ask Interpol for a list, world-wide, of all known criminals with eye defects. There must be tens of thousands of them. Even if there were only ten on the list, it still wouldn’t help us worth a damn. Chances are good, of course, that he hasn’t even got a criminal record.’ Van Effen pondered briefly. ‘Or maybe they could give us a list of all albino criminals on their books. They need glasses to hide their eyes.’
‘The Lieutenant is pleased to be facetious,’ de Graaf said morosely. He puffed on his cheroot, then said, almost wonderingly: ‘By Jove, Peter. You could be right.’
Ahead, Dekker had slowed to a stop and now van Effen did also. Two boats were moored alongside a canal bank, both about eleven or twelve metres in length, with two cabins and an open poop deck. The two policemen joined Dekker aboard his boat: Bakkeren boarded his own which lay immediately ahead. Dekker said: ‘Well, gentlemen, what do you want to check first?’
De Graaf said: ‘How long have you had this boat?’
‘Six years.’
‘In that case, I don’t think Lieutenant van Effen or I will bother to check anything. After six years, you must know every corner, every nook and cranny on this boat. So we’d be grateful if you’d do the checking. Just tell us if there is anything here, even the tiniest thing, that shouldn’t be here: or anything that’s missing that should be here. You might, first, be so good as to ask your brother-in-law to do the same aboard his boat.’
Some twenty minutes later the brothers-in-law were able to state definitely that nothing had been left behind and that, in both cases, only two things had been taken: beer from the fridges and diesel from the tanks. Neither Dekker nor Bakkeren could say definitely how many cans of beer had been taken, they didn’t count such things: but both were adamant that each fuel tank was down by at least twenty litres.
‘Twenty litres each?’ van Effen said. ‘Well, they wouldn’t have used two litres to get from here to the airport canal bank and back. So they used the engine for some other purpose. Can you open the engine hatch and let me have a torch?’
Van Effen’s check of the engine-room battery was cursory, seconds only, but sufficient. He said: ‘Do either of you two gentlemen ever use crocodile clips when using or charging your batteries—you know, those spring-loaded grips with the serrated teeth? No? Well, someone was using them last night. You can see the indentations on the terminals. They had the batteries in your two boats connected up, in parallel or series, it wouldn’t have mattered, they’d have been using a transformer, and ran your engines to keep the batteries charged. Hence the missing forty litres.’
‘I suppose,’ Dekker said, ‘that was what that gangster meant by incidental costs.’
‘I suppose it was.’
De Graaf lowered himself, not protesting too much, into the springless, creaking passenger seat of the ancient Peugeot just as the radio telephone rang. Van Effen answered then passed the phone across to de Graaf who spoke briefly then returned the phone to its concealed position.
‘I feared this,’ de Graaf said. He sounded weary. ‘My minister wants me to fly up with him to Texel. Taking half the cabinet with him, I understand.’
‘Good God! Those rubber-necking clowns. What on earth do they hope to achieve by being up there? They’ll only get in everyone’s way, gum up the works and achieve nothing: but, then, they’re very practised in that sort of thing.’
‘I would remind you, Lieutenant van Effen, that you are talking about elected Ministers of the Crown.’ If the words were intended as a reprimand, de Graaf’s heart wasn’t in it.
‘A useless and incompetent bunch. Make them look important, perhaps get their name in the papers, might even be worth a vote or two among the more backward of the electorate. Still, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, sir.’
De Graaf glowered at him then said hopefully: ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to come, Peter?’
‘You don’t suppose quite correctly, sir. Besides, I have things to do.’
‘Do you think I don’t?’ De Graaf looked and sounded very gloomy.
‘Ah! But I’m only a cop. You have to be a cop and a diplomat. I’ll drop you off at the office.’
‘Join me for lunch?’
‘Like to, sir, but I’m having lunch at an establishment, shall we say, where Amsterdam’s Chief of Police wouldn’t be seen dead. La Caracha it’s called. Your wife and daughters wouldn’t approve, sir.’
‘Business, of course?’
‘Of course. A little talk with a couple of our friends in the Krakers. You asked me a couple of months ago to keep a discreet, apart from an official, eye on them. They report occasionally, usually at La Caracha.’
‘Ah! The Krakers. Haven’t had much time to think of them in the past two months. And how are our disenchanted youth, the anti-everything students, the flower men, the hippies, the squatters?’
‘And the drug-pushers and gun-runners? Keeping a suspiciously low profile, these days. I must say I feel happier, no that’s not the word, less worried when they’re heaving iron bars and bricks at our uniformed police and overturning and burning the odd car, because then we know where we are: with this unusual peace and quiet and uncharacteristic inactivity, I feel there’s trouble brewing somewhere.’
‘You’re not actually looking for trouble, Peter?’
‘I’ve got the nasty feeling I’m going to find it anyway. Looking will be quite unnecessary. Yesterday afternoon, when that call came from the FFF, I sent two of our best people into the area. They might come across something. An off-chance. But the crime in Amsterdam is becoming more and more centralized in the Kraker area. The FFF would you say qualify as criminals?’
‘Birds of a feather? Well, maybe. But the FFF seem like pretty smart boys, maybe too smart to associate with the Krakers, who could hardly be called the intellectual Titans of crime.’
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