as long as I came back in an hour or so from a different direction.
There was the odd shop, and yet another pharmacy. I went in for more aspirin but also discovered something else I was after. Pure alcohol. Well, 95 per cent pure. It wasn’t for drinking, but the sort old people use as an antiseptic. I bought two 500ml plastic bottles of the stuff and crossed it off my mental shopping list.
Eventually, I turned left onto Westerstraat. It seemed out of place somehow, an eighty-metre-wide boulevard among the lanes. There was even a central reservation big enough for two cars to park nose to nose.
A lot of the expensive-looking seventies and eighties apartment blocks boasted shops on their ground floor. They were independents rather than chains: a bike shop, a couple of small supermarkets, an Internet cafe next to a mattress store, a newsagent.
118 was down at the end of the street, as Bradley had promised. I saw a sign for an Internet cafe that turned out to be more of a 7/11. There were four or five banks of screens. You paid in a slot machine and could order food and drink, even buy music CDs.
I logged on with five euros for thirty minutes, then hit Google Earth and Street View for my virtual tour of the target. I could see the striped canopy that ran outside the cafe. The target house’s pitched roof was immediately to its left. It was narrower than those on either side of it. It backed onto a square, with four similarly proportioned terraces lining each side. I clicked the arrows anti-clockwise along each of them, looking for a gap between the buildings. I finally found an archway. I could imagine a coach and horses rattling through to the stables after dumping the good burghers of Noordermarkt outside their front doors. The whole area had now been segmented, with fences and walls bordering private parking spaces and places to store industrial-sized wheelie bins.
I soaked up the imagery. This was the only known location for the target, and not a bad one. At least it wasn’t exposed to the real world, unlike the cafe next door. Whatever went on inside was kept inside. For a while, anyway.
I wanted to get into 118 later today, to work out the best access route when I came back later to finish the job. I needed to check out the alarm system, and might even be able to adjust a window or door lock to make re-entry a whole lot easier. Once I’d sorted the competition, I’d have bought myself the time to get everything in place to hit the silo. My number-one priority was still the girls, whatever Tresillian had in mind.
I Googled Anne Frank’s house and a couple of galleries to mix the session up a bit, then deleted my history and closed down, making sure the log-off really did log off.
20
The white cafe with striped canopies and a blue door was open for business on the junction ahead. The canal was less than a hundred metres further on. White plastic sheeting protected a run of stalls in a small, brick-paved square between the two. There were no green Passats in sight.
I crossed the road opposite 118 so I had the clearest possible view of its front elevation. A small glass porthole protected by a metal grid was set into the solid wood front door. The windows on all three floors were wooden-framed and double-glazed. I couldn’t see lights or movement behind any of them.
I spotted two keyholes: Union cylinders, probably with night latches. They wouldn’t normally be a problem to defeat; I could just buy a couple of other Unions and doctor the keys. But the road was constantly busy, and I didn’t fancy fucking around with them in front of an audience: people were having a beer and a pizza just a couple of metres away. With any luck they’d have the same kit on the back door as well.
The entry point into the square was about a hundred metres up Noordermarkt. The street was much narrower, with houses and shops on both sides. Most of them seemed to be selling candles, linen and anything else that was white. The good burghers’ coaches would have been rolling in and out of here pretty much all the time back in the eighteenth century, but these days they were a bit more reluctant to welcome uninvited visitors. A pair of wrought-iron gates now stood guard