intent would have been to slit your NOC’s wrists as he’d done with the Pakistani asset to create a convincing suicide. A razor in the neck is not. He would have been waiting in the apartment for when he came back. Either he made a mistake or the NOC knew he was there, because they fought. Kooi had no choice but to stab him in the neck. But that wasn’t his plan.’
‘The Yemeni police report mentioned nothing about signs of struggle in Charters’ apartment.’
‘Then they’re lying.’
‘Or Kooi covered his tracks.’
‘Possible, but unlikely. Unless the NOC lived in a soundproof apartment neighbours would have heard the commotion. Kooi wouldn’t have had time to clean up and set the scene. Easier to bribe or threaten the investigator.’
Muir frowned and withdrew her phone. ‘I’ve got to pass this on. Give me a minute, please?’
Victor nodded and stepped away to give Muir a little privacy while she made a call and explained to whoever was on the other end of the line what had just been discussed. She hung up.
‘Thank you for accommodating me.’
‘No problem.’
They walked on for a minute in silence. Then Victor said, ‘Why was I sent to kill Kooi? Why not pick him up and find out who hired him to assassinate your man?’
‘If only it were that simple. Kooi was a citizen of the Netherlands with no criminal record. He ran a small charity that required him to travel all over the world as an alibi. There was no evidence against him that would stand up in court or would convince the Dutch authorities to extradite him. And we couldn’t just lift him from the middle of Amsterdam and smuggle him out of the country without risking stirring up a hornet’s nest. More importantly, however, we didn’t need to sweat him for intel. The Pakistani asset who turned up crying at the embassy gave us everything we needed to track the client down. He’s now rotting in a prison that doesn’t exist, wishing he was dead, and spilling his guts of everything he knows in the hopes he’ll be let out one day. He won’t, of course. We think we’ve identified about sixty per cent of the plutonium smuggling network so far. It’s only a matter of time until we get the rest. We didn’t need Kooi and we like old school justice at the agency when it comes to our own. We had the opportunity to deal out a little karma that wouldn’t lead back to us, so we took it.’
‘In other words: you had me.’
‘Yes,’ Muir admitted. ‘And I’d like to thank you for that. Charters was a good guy. We worked together some time ago.’
‘You didn’t just work though, did you?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean you’ve lost fifteen pounds. Recently, because your clothes don’t fit and you haven’t had the time to go shopping for ones that do, except for that leather jacket.’
‘Stan and I had a thing while on an op together a couple of years ago. It hurt when he died. It still hurts. So what? I’m still objective here.’
‘I didn’t say you weren’t. But you said you’d be honest with me.’
‘It was personal information. It’s got nothing to do with this conversation.’
Victor finished off the last hotdog and used a napkin to clean his fingers. Muir said, ‘For a guy who works out so much I’m surprised you’re not more careful about what you put inside you.’
‘I’m not without my vices.’ He dropped the napkin and the greaseproof paper from the hotdogs into a bin. ‘Perhaps it’s about time you told me what I have to do with this sequence of events, aside from Kooi’s death.’
Muir watched him, then took a breath and said, ‘A few weeks ago the client informed us that he hadn’t hired Kooi directly. He’d used a broker. After Kooi was dead we had some of our people go searching for proof through his personal laptop and phone, but they were clean. We hadn’t expected to find anything, but it doesn’t hurt to be thorough, right?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘But they didn’t find a link to any broker to support the client’s claims, and we dismissed it as hot air to try and shift some of the blame.’
‘Until you checked out Kooi’s charity.’
‘Correct. It was more than just a front so he could jet all over the place without drawing suspicion. It was how he handled his business too.’
‘Let me guess: Kooi had erased anything that might link to a previous job.