He opened the door to their apartment slowly.
The small, thin transparent plastic chip he always placed on top of the door when they left fell exactly where it should have. Unless someone was looking for such a thing, they would never see it. They closed the door. Virtually all exterior doors in the Netherlands lock automatically. They could be opened from the inside, but only with a key from the outside. They had also installed a deadbolt, and Preston locked this, too.
After checking the sparely furnished apartment and seeing nothing out of place, they dared to breathe a sigh of relief.
Preston smiled and took her in his arms. “Here’s hoping it was nothing, just someone you had seen before somewhere. A strange coincidence, maybe.”
She said nothing for awhile as she snuggled against him. Looking up at him she said, “It really bothers me why I can’t place her, because I’m normally pretty clear on such things.”
“Yes, you are. But there is nothing we can do. Maybe I should give you some of the lessons my supervisor taught me back when I worked over at the storage site. He had a long tour in Korea and earned his first level black belt in Taekwondo.”
She pulled back and looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t like violence.”
“I don’t. But just because I try to avoid it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it. Had our Israeli man gotten out of that car, I might not have beaten him, but it would not have been easy for him without a weapon.”
“That’s good to know. I’d rather rely on my running ability.”
She pulled away and headed to the little office. “I’m going to take a look at our photos from Valkenburg first. I need to see if I can recognize her face.”
“And I’m going to make myself remember that not even dessert in a ritzy hotel should separate us,” he said with a strained chuckle.
Angie did manage to recognize the face of the woman they thought tried to sabotage the SUV up in Margraten, but it was not the woman at the buffet. After several hours of this, she decided her mind was too tired and strained and had lost any hope of recognizing much of anything.
Preston had been working beside her most of the time, processing the photos they had taken that morning on their tour of Brunssum and Schinnen. He was viewing some touristy websites when she turned to face away from the computer.
Rubbing her eyes, Angie said, “No luck. I give up.”
He turned toward her and spun her chair around to face him. Taking both her hands, he reassured her. “There is only so much we can do. The one thing of which we can be certain is our angels were warning us not to break the rules again.”
She smiled and nodded.
He continued. “How about some kayaking? We can catch a train over to Maastricht, Liege, Namur and change to Dinant. There’s a place to lock the bikes there, then we ride the train up La Lesse to the launch point. It takes half the day if we start right after breakfast.”
She was suddenly excited. “Oh, I’d love that!”
“Good,” he said. “Let me check with our boss.”
Angie watched with some interest as he logged into their email account. Preston posted a message about images from the day’s ride in the dropbox, then asked if there was any reason they couldn’t go kayaking in Dinant.
They had a quiet dinner, then went back to check the email again.
Good shots. No reason to avoid Dinant, but not now. Get ready for Roermond. Check the dropbox.
The script spat out a PDF and then a text file. The latter was sort of a cover letter that said at the top, “Read the study first.”
So they read it, this time in English. They weren’t surprised the topic was human trafficking, their primary mission. The study explained it as a business, which happened to be illegal. Mostly it was background on what sort of factors affected the trade. Over the past decade, they had gone from coaxing kids to travel alone or in twos and threes to some destination where they were “broken” and made compliant. This was often the same place they first worked, but someone with a good business sense was trying to make things more efficient. So they began corralling the kids close to where they were found, then confining them in large groups and moving them all at once.
This was what they had witnessed with the bus. Holding them in the bus out in the woods near Aachen, the kids were sold off, but still had to be broken and it wasn’t easy convincing them without some force to leave with a pimp. They had tried using tents for the breaking action, but there were too many risks. So the crooks had begun reaching out to other criminal businesses, looking to find better facilities.
The study went on at length, and when they were finished, Angie and Preston discussed how this helped to explain better what they had been doing. Major crime bosses were often spies, too. Spying had gotten expensive and the heroin and weapons trade of days past just didn’t pay enough any more, so human trafficking was a new profitable sideline.
Finally, they went back to the cover letter. In essence, it explained that a couple major shipments of kids had come down the Rhein River on barges. Roermond was a city that had long suffered a rather high crime rate, and corruption in the city and district officials didn’t help matters. However, the barges would normally have to travel as far north as Nijmegen, then up the Maas canals (south) to Roermond. Whatever the flaws of the very left-wing government in Nijmegen, child welfare was something they pursued with ferocity. After catching a shipment of kids, the officials had made sure barges were checked pretty well. It was quite certain the kids weren’t going through there any more. Yet, they were ending up in Roermond at a large rural manor near the city where they were broken in large batches.
Preston and Angie were supposed to see if they could figure out how the kids were moved, possibly from Düsseldorf straight west. It was a rather short drive by autobahn to Roermond. The previous use of buses was now too risky, so it had to be some other means. Closing down the breaking house would prove exceptionally tough, but if they could expose who and how they were getting there, it would starve the business for awhile.
Preston sighed. “I doubt we can do any serious kayaking on the Maas canal.”
