The car park had been abandoned to the gulls. Gabriel hurried up the footpath to the beach and saw a darkened Bavaria 27 Sport motor yacht about thirty meters from shore. He rushed down to the sea and with his phone illuminated the hard, flat sand along the tideline. There were footprints everywhere. Three men in street shoes, a woman whose feet were bare. The impressions were recent. They had just missed her.
He ran back to the car park and climbed into the Audi.
“Anything?” asked Lavon.
Gabriel told him.
“They couldn’t have arrived more than a few minutes ago.”
“They didn’t.”
“You don’t think she was in that car, do you?”
“Yeah,” said Gabriel as he slammed the Audi into reverse. “I think she was.”
They crossed a narrow land bridge, with a great inland bay on the right and the sea to the left. The juxtaposition told Sarah they were headed north. Eventually, a road sign appeared in the darkness. The name of the town, Ouddorp, meant nothing to her.
The car rounded a traffic circle and then sped across an expanse of tabletop-flat farmland. The narrow track into which they finally turned was unmarked. It led to a collection of clapboard holiday bungalows hidden away in a range of grass-covered dunes. One was surrounded by tall hedges and had a separate garage with old-fashioned swinging doors. Nikolai locked the Volvo inside before leading Sarah to the bungalow.
It was white as a wedding cake, with a red tile roof. Plexiglass barriers shielded the veranda from the wind. A woman waited there alone, like a specimen in a jar. She wore an oilskin coat and stretch jeans. Her eyes were unusually blue—and tired-looking, thought Sarah. The night had been unkind to the woman’s appearance.
A stray forelock had fallen over one of her eyes. The woman pushed it aside and studied Sarah carefully. Something about the gesture was familiar. The face was familiar, too. All at once Sarah realized where she had seen it before.
A news conference at the Grand Presidential Palace in Moscow...
The woman on the veranda was Rebecca Manning.
75
Rotterdam
The car had been a Volvo, late model, dark in color. On that point, Gabriel and Eli Lavon were in complete agreement. Both had caught a clear glimpse of the front grille and had noted the circular ornament and distinctive diagonal line sloping left to right. Gabriel was certain it had been a sedan. Lavon, however, was convinced it was an estate car.
There was no dispute over the direction it had been heading, which was north. Gabriel and Lavon concentrated on the little villages along the coast while Mikhail and Keller worked the larger towns inland. Between them, they spotted one hundred and twelve Volvos. In none did they find Sarah.
Admittedly, it was an impossible task—“a needle in a Dutch haystack,” as Lavon put it—but they kept at it until seven fifteen, when they all four gathered at a coffee shop in an industrial quarter of south Rotterdam. They were the first customers of the morning. There was a petrol station next door and a couple of car dealerships across the road. One, of course, sold Volvos.
An environmentally friendly Dutch police cruiser rolled past in the street, slowly.
“What’s his problem?” asked Mikhail.
It was Lavon who answered. “Maybe he’s looking for the idiots who’ve been racing around the countryside all night. Or the genius who ran a Bavaria 27 aground near Renesse.”
“Think they’ve found it?”
“The yacht?” Lavon nodded. “It’s rather hard to miss, especially now that it’s light.”
“What happens next?”
“The Dutch police find out who owns the boat and where it came from. And before long, every officer in Holland will be looking for a Russian assassin and a pretty American woman named Sarah Bancroft.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” said Mikhail.
“Unless Rebecca and her friend Nikolai decide to cut their losses and kill her.”
“Maybe they already have.” Mikhail looked at Gabriel. “You’re sure they were a woman’s footprints?”
“I’m sure, Mikhail.”
