Requiem for an Assassin

address. We were there in less than an hour—not the city of Rotterdam, which I’d heard was pretty, nor even the port itself, but instead the refinery complex, a sprawling network of waterways plied by freighters and garbage scows; thousands of miles of pipes twisting in all directions, carrying who knows what to God knows where; squat oil tanks and rotating power turbines and towers belching smoke into a sky the color of lead.
    I called Boezeman again. He answered immediately.
    “I’m here,” I said. “Near your office at the refinery.” I gave him the address of a gas station we had just passed, and he said he was coming.
    “Told you,” I said to Boaz, and he smiled.
    We drove a little ways off and parked on a rise with a view of the gas station parking lot. Like his apartment, Boezeman himself was a Hilger nexus, and we had to be careful.
    Five minutes later, a blue Fiat pulled into the corner of the gas station lot, eschewing the pumps. We waited a minute, watching through the binoculars, and saw no cars following.
    Naftali drove us in. Boaz and I had the USPs out and ready. As we pulled into the gas station, we saw Boezeman, sitting alone in the car.
    I rolled down my window. “Let me see your hands, Mister Boezeman,” I said. He complied, and we crept closer. I could see the backseat now. It was empty. Okay.
    “Watch my back,” I said to Boaz. Never a phrase that made me particularly comfortable. But if it was good enough for Dox with Boaz, it would have to be good enough for me.
    “We’ve got you,” Boaz said, and I stepped out of the car. Boezeman got out, too.
    We stood there in the rain, looking at each other, Boezeman’s expression plainly afraid. “What kind of trouble am I in?” he said to me, and I thought, Thank God this guy’s just a civilian and not a hard case.
    “I’m going to give you some information,” I said, “and then you’re going to give me information in return. Fair enough?”
    Boezeman nodded, looking nervously at Boaz and Naftali.
    “The man you know as James Hillman also goes by Jim Hilger. He’s working for radical Islamic interests. He’s smuggled a radiological device into Rotterdam. A dirty bomb.”
    The color fled Boezeman’s face. “Oh, my God.”
    “I can tell by your reaction that you didn’t know what you were mixed up in,” I said. I expected that in his distressed state, he would pick up the possibility of exculpation and run with it.
    He did. “I never knew. Never. They never told me, but I thought…”
    “Drugs?” I offered.
    “Yes, only drugs. Oh, my God.” His face had gone from white to green. It looked like he might puke.
    “Mister Boezeman. This is important. You met with Hilger today, didn’t you?”
    He nodded. I waved to Boaz and he got out of the car.
    “Did you give him access to the refinery facilities?” I said.
    “He…had to retrieve something from a container. I had the container brought from the port and stored on the refinery grounds.”
    “Why?”
    “I have more access at the refinery. And Hillman—Hilger—he told me to do it that way.”
    “Did you ever take a look at what’s inside in the container?”
    “I tried once. There were cases, but both were locked.”
    “All right. Did you let Hilger into the container?”
    His frozen expression was all the answer we needed.
    Boaz said, “The bomb is armed.”
    Boezeman turned away, doubled over, and vomited.
    I looked at Boaz. “Can you disarm it?”
    He shrugged. “I can disarm anything. With proper tools. And enough time. And with access, of course.”
    “Well, you’re only going to get one out of three,” I said. “If we’re lucky.” I turned to Boezeman. “Listen,” I said. “You have to pull yourself together. We can still rectify this if we hurry. But we need more information. Where is Hilger now?”
    “I…I don’t know.”
    I wasn’t asking the questions right. Boezeman was so agitated, he was getting the mental equivalent of tunnel vision. He was responding too narrowly, I could feel it.
    “But did he give you any indication?” I said. “Did he say he was leaving town, or that he would meet you later, anything like that?”
    “He has to come back tomorrow,” Boezeman said. “He told me…he couldn’t move everything all at once. He had a big duffel bag, and it was full when he left.”
    “Probably with newspaper,” I said. “They shipped it over with the bomb so you would think he was carrying something important out of the