Requiem for an Assassin

done. If he wasn’t in good shape, or if there was pursuit, having a car waiting with the engine running could make all the difference.
    “All right,” I said. “You drive, and I go in.”
    “Deal. How about the rest?”
    “Hilger wants to do the call at sixteen hundred local time. That gives me the rest of the morning and early afternoon to pick up the other equipment I need, get a feel for the layout of the yacht club with Google Earth, reconnoiter the perimeter, and go in.”
    “You sure he’ll make the call from the boat?”
    I paused, seeing a disconnect between us that I’d missed until just now. “Yeah, I’m sure. The purpose of the call is proof of life. He’s got to be able to put Dox on, assuming Dox is even still alive, and there’s no way they’re going to move Dox off the boat. So the boat is where the call happens. But the call isn’t when I want to go in. I want Hilger off the boat, not on it.”
    “I don’t get it. How…”
    “Hilger is secondary. If I hit the boat early, maybe he won’t be there. It’s one less person shooting back at me, and Hilger is a damn good shot. If I wait until the call, their numbers likely go up, and my odds of getting Dox out go down.”
    Not that I hadn’t been tempted to go for the “two birds with one stone” scenario. Certainly, the iceman wanted to do Hilger badly enough to wait until he was sure to be on the boat. But if Dox got killed because of my lust to kill Hilger, I wouldn’t be able to live with it. We could always pick him up later. One thing at a time.
    Kanezaki almost said something, didn’t, then almost said it again.
    “What?” I said.
    “If you’re not going to do Hilger, help me with something else.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I told you in the bulletin board message, this is bigger than just Hilger. The kind of thing I was hoping to prevent by taking him out, I think it’s already under way.”
    I said nothing, and he went on. “Hilger used to be military, and after that, the Agency. You know what the difference is now?”
    I shook my head.
    “There’s no oversight now, and he’s running a for-profit outfit. Translation: He can do anything, for anybody. Look what he was mixed up with in Macau—radiological-tipped missiles with that arms merchant, Belghazi. Then in Hong Kong, nuclear matériel to the terrorist, Al-Jib. Do you see a pattern here?”
    “I suppose so, but…”
    “So what do you think it means that he’s found a way to put his own agent temporarily in charge of Rotterdam port security?”
    “I don’t know.” I might have added that I didn’t care, but there was no advantage in provoking him.
    “It means he can bring anything he wants into the port.”
    “So…”
    “Rotterdam is the largest container port in Europe, and every one of the world’s leading oil and chemical companies is active there. You’ve got four world-class oil refineries and more than forty chemical and petrochemical companies. We’re talking jet fuel, gasoline, everything. It’s a major terrorist target.”
    “Because…”
    “Because if something shuts down the refineries, the price of refined petrochemical products skyrockets. Driving, flying, heating oil, you name it. Shortages of everything, and the world economy drops to its knees.”
    “You think that’s what Hilger’s up to?”
    “I think that’s what he’s being paid to do, although I don’t know by whom. But here’s the way I see it. Accinelli’s company sells chemicals, right?”
    “I know.”
    “Including radioactive materials like cesium 137, which is used in oil drilling, atomic clocks, certain medical applications…and dirty bombs.”
    I was quiet, waiting for him to go on.
    “Hilger and Accinelli went way back, all the way to the first Gulf War. I think they were friends, as you suggested. I think Accinelli introduced Demeere and Boezeman at that security conference in New York, and I think Accinelli procured cesium, or something like it, for Hilger, maybe under false pretenses. I think the reason Hilger had Accinelli killed was because he knew too much, he’d be able to connect Rotterdam to Hilger if something happened there.”
    “That’s a lot of speculation.”
    “There’s more. Remember the British Petroleum Prudhoe Bay shutdown? Because the pipes were rusty? That was Hilger.”
    “Hilger put rust in the pipes?”
    “There was no rust. Hilger has information on everyone, he blackmailed the people who make those