The Wrong Girl by David Hewson Read Free Book Online

hundred metres ahead the fugitive figure dashed down a side street, black shapes closing in pursuit. Bakker was moving so quickly she was reducing the gap between them. Too far away for Vos to shout at her now. Even if it might work. Koeman was wheezing behind him.
    The AIVD men turned the corner, Bakker close on their heels.
    Back in Leidseplein Dirk Van der Berg waited, listening to the radio, watching the lines of people file patiently out of the square. He was forty-seven, unfit, liked his beer. He’d seen plenty of incidents in nearly thirty years with the Amsterdam police and something here didn’t make sense.
    Looking round at the odd Sinterklaas crowd he realized what it was.
    Terrorists wouldn’t lob flash grenades into an event like this. It wasn’t their style. They were either cowards or heroes. Planted devices covertly, set them on a timer, then fled to safety. Or carried them proudly on their person. Explosive vests or weapons held out for all to see, waiting for the martyrdom they expected.
    ‘This stinks,’ he muttered and cast his eyes around the square.
    The Kuyper woman was gone. So was her husband. He guessed they’d found their little girl. Why else would they leave the assembly point?
    A gap emerged in the crowds. Van der Berg peered through it. Lots of kids in festive clothes. Grown-ups too.
    There was a black delivery van parked in Leidsestraat, the street that led back to the centre, next to the Eichholtz delicatessen. Right on the tramlines, unused for once that day since all the public transport had been halted to make way for Sinterklaas.
    As he watched a Black Pete came up to the back doors. The man was dressed in green. He held the hand of a young girl with blonde hair. And a pink jacket. Held it very tightly, then opened the back doors and half-pushed her inside.
    People wanted to get their kids out of the way. That was understandable. Van der Berg thought. But civilian traffic was supposed to be barred from the city. He didn’t see how anyone could get through easily.
    Then the kid turned and he saw. She wasn’t with this man, she was being taken away against her will.
    The street was clear beyond the van. They could be gone in seconds.
    A quick and random fear, the kind a police officer had sometimes as all the many unwanted possibilities began to run through his head.
    Maybe this wasn’t much about harmless fireworks tossed into a crowd. Not directly anyway. It was about spreading fear and confusion, seizing a young girl amid the chaos, knowing the scores of people who witnessed the deed would fail to see it for what it was.
    He started to run, to yell. One of the grey secure people carriers the AIVD people used careered in front of him, windows covered in security screens, glass dark and opaque to the outside world. Two more followed.
    Van der Berg leapt back, cursing.
    By the time the way ahead was clear the black van had vanished.
    It was a long journey from the back streets of Lancashire, growing up in poverty with a mother who barely had time for him, through crime, through jail, through the discovery of a kind of home in a foreign faith. He was christened Martin Bowers. The radical preacher in the mosque back home gave him a new name: Mujahied Bouali. Twenty-four years old, fleeing down a narrow canal in Amsterdam, sweat running through the black make-up on his face.
    They’d never said what to do if you thought you might be caught. That was odd. The men who briefed him the day before, showed him the grenades he’d pick up later with the guns, told him everything else. What to do. How to do it. Where to run.
    To a safe house back in the red-light district. But that was a long way from here. Too far.
    He was on hard, rough cobbles now, struggling, money tumbling from his pockets as he fled. No time to look back. They were following. He tried to catch his breath, to run harder, faster.
    But the booze and the fags back when he was Martin Bowers had taken their toll.
    There was a