been left behind a cardboard display of books that were on sale. Police speculated it was not left in the open area of the station because there was no place to easily dump a backpack without it being spotted.
Next up were pictures of the devastation and I’d looked at them for five seconds before realizing: no way these came from a news website. These were crime-scene photos, the kind simply not made available for public viewing, taken by the police.
They were gruesome. People buying their papers, their magazines, chocolate candy for a snack or a bad-for-you breakfast. One cashier, just doing a simple, honorable job. All dead. Their shredded bodies lay among the torn and burned remains of the shop. Blood splattered the walls. Limbs torn from the corpses.
It brought back the most horrible memories of the Holborn bombing.
How did Nic have these photos?
There was a police analysis of the bomb, stamped as classified.
What had he said last night at the urinal? I got the goods. The cops don’t know. I thought he’d meant smuggling goods, but I was wrong. The smug bastard had hacked into the police database. He was following the investigation.
A chill touched my skin. Nic was far, far more than he seemed. I had badly underestimated him.
I examined the details of the bomb. A small amount of Semtex explosive, believed to have come from an inventory stolen in the Czech Republic six months earlier. Simple.
But. But.
There was nothing in the report about how the bomb was detonated. I paged through the rest of it. There should be a timer, or a cell phone to trigger the blast with a call. None was present. Even a devastating blast should have left forensic evidence of how the bomb was activated and blown.
The next page was labeled unidentified electronics. I glanced through it; there was gear in the knapsack that had been annihilated in the blast but left enough fragments to indicate that it wasn’t from a cell phone. The police were still piecing it together. Maybe that was the detonator. But if it wasn’t obviously a cell phone or a timer, what was it? I could see a half-melted grid, no bigger than a hand—it looked like a honeycomb, forged from metal. I had never seen its like before. Apparently it had blown through the paperback display and into the intestines of one of the victims, preserving it from the worst of the blast.
The police did not yet know what this gear was, and that troubled me.
Next door the snoring rose again, and then stopped. I could hear movement in the bed. I stopped typing. The rustling stopped, but the snoring didn’t resume. I glanced out the window. It was a straight drop four stories down to the café’s awning.
I waited. No movement. Maybe she was awake and staring at the ceiling. I checked the portable drive; halfway done. Maybe Mom was used to the soft insistent click of the keys; she might just assume that Nic was home.
I looked at the files on the people who had died in the blast. The four Dutch citizens were the cashier and three customers, including a nineteen-year-old girl, a forty-five-year-old man, a fifty-year-old woman, and a twenty-seven-year-old man. They were wives and husbands, fathers and daughters, friends. Each had in their electronic dossier a photo from either a driver’s license or a passport.
The file on the Russian was blank except for an autopsy report. No name. No age listed, no passport number listed. No photo.
Weird. The Amsterdam police, among the best in the world, didn’t have a read on who the fifth victim was. That astonished me.
I looked through the rest of the files that Nic had stolen from the police databases. Found a video labeled toezicht and dated the day of the blast. Toezicht meant “surveillance.” I activated it.
The security camera feed had gone into a central security station; if the tape had been only at the store, it likely would not have survived the blast. I had five minutes of the feed that Nic had managed to filch off the police servers.
I watched the last moments of the lives of innocent people.
The young cashier at her station, giving change with a slightly bored frown. She kept scratching her ear. Customers coming and going, most not lingering long. I did not see Yasmin, which meant she must have dropped off the bomb before this section of the feed started. Dozens of people, leaving and arriving and leaving again. The