Low Flight of Angels in the Benelux Read online

  She rose to her feet and took a step toward them. “I’d also like to braid that lovely red hair, Angie. It will make it easier to hide under a hat. Preston looks nothing like the man who wandered the area around The Hague, but we’ll get you both hats and sunglasses just the same. There’s no sense taking unnecessary risks with either of you being identified by anyone, regardless how harmless they may seem. Preston, do your best to stay in character as a Dutchman.”

  Their adventurous natures chafed at skipping the most exciting attractions as they wandered Valkenburg each morning. It was more important to take pictures of other people doing those things, all kinds of things, and then spending the afternoons testing their skills at matching faces with various social websites. Angie picked up on it quickly.

  Preston got up the make them tea. As he was brining the cups to the table, she had a clearly puzzled look on her face. Before he even sat down, she said, “The software has keyed on someone off to one side here. We have him in two frames but why does he get a blue square? I thought it framed our subjects in red.”

  Preston froze for a moment. “That’s a different function. It’s someone we’ve tracked before but never identified.” He pulled the laptop closer and began mousing and typing. His heart stopped when it pulled up the image that had gotten them into so much trouble. It was the face of the Israeli spy.

  Preston had never seen his hosts so busy once he showed them their unexpected discovery. No one had to tell them to stay inside their apartment for awhile. They had not asked, and had no way to guess how many of the orchard employees here were in on the “hobby,” but two or three different ones popped in once or twice for confirmation of something. Twice they were asked for various enhancements of this or that image, having passed the entire collection to their hosts as soon as they made the discovery.

  It was late that evening, and who could sleep? They tried to compare notes and make as much sense as possible without bothering anyone else. There was a gentle knock on the door, but it still startled them, since no one had come by in the past few hours.

  Their hostess came in all business, yet somehow elegantly relaxed. “Our boy isn’t alone, but we are sincerely puzzled why they would send him when he was already ID’d. We’ve decided it can’t be a matter of bait trying to flush us out. The trail for them must have gone cold in town, but we can only surmise he’s been promoted from basic thug to some kind of supervisory role, at least for their current operation. It may even be a form of discipline to make him clean up his own mess.”

  Preston wondered out loud, “We were hardly the only people using a camera in a tourist trap like Valkenburg. At the same time, anyone who knows photography can spot another photographer in a crowd of yokels with cameras. Real photographers take a lot more time and far fewer candid snapshots, but shoot a lot more frames of the same subject from only slightly different positions.”

  Their hostess shook her head sagely. “No doubt they were shooting both still and video cameras trying to pick out that very thing.”

  Angie remarked she had noticed another couple had been doing something similar at two or three places in town over the past three days.

  The hostess paused for a moment. “Do you like camping?”

  Angie and Preston looked at each other with faint grins, almost synchronized in saying, “Of course we do.”

  The older lady smiled. “I’m sure we can find some equipment around her you might find useful for exploring. My husband and I tried it, but we are just too old for that sort of thing. Still, we kept the gear.”

  Stepping slowly toward the door, their hostess went on. “The two things any self-respecting Dutch village has in these parts are a bakery and a bicycle shop. It’s a short drive to Margraten, which is just such a village. I want you to buy good mountain bikes to fit your bodies. Pack your bags before you go; we’ll have someone drive you down and park off a ways. Once you have the bikes, grab you bags and take a tour of the Ardennes. You’ll love the scenery in the Belgian hedge lands and the high moors. I recommend you ride through Banholt, then stick to the small paths over the border to someplace like Sint Martens. You should know how to recognize the GR markers, but we’ll get you a map just in case. From there, use your imagination, but stay well east of the Maas Valley. We don’t have any friends in that area right now.”

  Chapter 10

  It should have been an ideal way to avoid trouble, but it was not to be.

  The morning dawned with heavy cloud cover and a hint of mist, but the weather was the least of their problems. The SUV was outside their door, but when they came out with their backpacks, the found the driver crouched by the right rear tire, cursing softly in Dutch.

  Almost to himself, he said out loud in heavily accented English, “I really should have had that flat fixed last week but this is the spare, and now it’s flat, too.” He walked off to the garage. Returning a few minutes later he had a can of foam flat fixer.

  “This stuff is really messy but it can’t be helped. I’ll get it all fixed after you two get on your way.” He connected the nozzle and began filling the tire with the foam and compressed air. After a few minutes it was up enough to drive safely. The driver tossed the can in the floor behind his seat.

  Preston had Angie take shotgun while he sat behind her. The driver told them to make sure they put on their hats, but that wearing sunglasses would be out of place. “I’m just a friend taking you to get new bikes for your honeymoon.”

  He drove past the bike shop on the main street through town, pointing at it with his hand below the window level, and then circled around on the streets behind it. He pulled into a tiny brick surfaced parking lot in front of some shops. They got out and walked down around the corner back to the bicycle vendor with currency the driver handed them when he shut the motor off.

  At the shop in Margraten, Preston found a dandy bike on sale, but they had nothing other than the standard single-speed commuter model to fit Angie. There was no way she could keep up on that. He rode slowly while she walked alongside back to the little parking lot, joking about the reversal of roles. The driver suggested they drive on to Banholt where there was another small bike shop. With Preston’s bike strapped down on the roof, off they went.

  The driver followed N278 for a ways, then slowed. As they waited to turn left off the main drag, something nibbled at the edge of Angie’s mind. She turned her head and saw a vaguely familiar face on a bicycle waiting in the bicycle path for them to turn in front of her. She had the right of way, but sat with one foot on the ground, waiting. As they headed down the narrow lane south, she turned to say something to Preston but was interrupted by an odd clicking sound coming from the right rear wheel.

  The driver slowed, glancing in the outside mirror. “Don’t tell me it’s already gone flat again...” Then his eyes bulged and he gunned to motor, racing down the narrow lane.

  While keeping his eyes forward, he turned just a bit toward Angie. “There’s a dart or something sticking in the tire. Apparently the foam prevented it from losing pressure right away but it means they are right behind us somewhere.”

  After whizzing across open fields about a kilometer, the road curved right and followed a tree line on the left. Suddenly it made a sharp left into the trees and downslope. Almost immediately the driver swung back to the right up a very narrow farm road. “Get ready to bail out. Take the path to the left behind the trees while I lead them off. You’re on your own.” He handed Angie a wad of currency, then slammed on the brakes. “Now!”

  On a whim, Preston leaned over and grabbed the half-used can of flat fixing foam from the floor. He slid out of the seat while the SUV slowed to a walking pace. Grabbing Angie’s hand, he broke into a run, leading her around behind the vehicle. As the driver gunned the engine and flew off up the main path toward the Margraten Cemetery, they sprinted down the dirt track, screened from the road by trees. A few meters down they turned into the trees and crouched in the underbrush. A car came blitzing along a few
seconds later behind the SUV.

  They waited a long time, unsure what to do. The terrain was a bit hilly with lots of trees and shrubs. Like most places in the Netherlands, the paths were sunk well below the level of the fields. It seemed a good bet they could probably avoid being seen, but it was critical they get moving and keep moving. He pulled out the map, and then shrugged into his backpack.

  Angie gave a brave smile and said, “Adventure!”

  He studied the map as they hustled down the sandy path. He didn’t like how their current path was bending back straight west. It was a popular bike route to Maastricht and the wrong direction. He would have cut across the fields on the left and grabbed another path back west and south, but the narrow lane was blocked by a large wagon moving very slowly, pulled by some vehicle obscured on the other side of it.

  This meant moving along a paved farm road just a few meters before diving back into the countryside. They both were watching as they approached the road, hesitating just a moment, and then running along the road. They never made it to the second path.

  Coming at them from the south was the car they had seen shortly before chasing the SUV. They dodge up against the fence as the car slowed, and then swerved and nearly hit them. It halted, the right side tire sliding in the grass. The person in the passenger seat had the window rolled down, grinning broadly at them.

  Their Israeli spy was a pretty large fellow.

  Before he could think, Preston aimed the can of foam and covered the large face. The man bellowed in pain, slapping his hands into the yellow goo. Preston crouched just a bit and aimed at the driver, who turned out to be a woman. Her eyes went wide, then she stomped the accelerator and nearly took Preston’s arm off as she pulled away.

  She promptly drove the little car up under the front axle of a very large farm tractor that had just entered the road from the left side. It came off a downward sloping path screened tightly on both sides by trees. The operator was dodging tree limbs as he turned out onto the road and hadn’t seen the car.

  Preston was hoping the tractor driver hadn’t seen him and Angie either, as they fled up their intended path. Glancing back, he doubted either of the occupants could possibly get out of the car any time soon, even if they were alive.

  Chapter 11

  Preston set a blistering pace but Angie managed to keep.

  At one point it seemed he was unsure of the route, because he turned toward the west again. At the next trail junction he stopped, yanked the camera out of the cargo pocket on his hiking shorts and fiddled with it a bit. Angie was too much out of breath to ask what he was doing. Almost as suddenly he stuffed it back into the pocket and turned, nearly doubling back the way they had come.

  The Dutch-Belgian border in that area generally follows the lip of highlands. Preston’s breakneck pace continued down the steep slope, but in Sint Martens he finally slowed down. They stopped at a friture for dinner. Preston pulled out a sturdy plastic fork. “I hate those little picks they give you with fries.”

  They passed under the arched viaduct bearing the rail line through the village, and then decided against camping. After checking to find several hostels and hotels full, they found one opening. The map had indicated it was a bed and breakfast and the price for staying was cheap enough.

  Preston sat down on the side of the bed. Slowly he reached into his cargo pocket again. He pulled out the camera and held it up as if it were evidence of a crime. Angie asked, “Did we break it?”

  He sighed. “If we had it might have prevented some of our excitement today.” He woke it from sleep mode and began stroking the screen menus. “After thinking about it on our meandering way here today, I finally realized why they found us so easily after all we went through to avoid them. I was thinking about how you followed me for several weeks.”

  On the screen was a submenu for GPS settings. One of the items said, “Tracking.” He tapped with his finger to show it could be changed to “Active mode.” He tapped it again and changed it back to “Passive mode.”

  Preston explained, “It was set by default to active mode and I changed it when we stopped back up on the ridge. It’s supposed to be an anti-theft feature. On cheaper cameras like this, there aren’t many options for controlling how it works.”

  He took a deep breath. “I said it shared a lot of technology with cellphones. This one reports a unique identifying code to any cell tower. Most carriers ignore it until you report it stolen and pay a small fee to activate the tracking. Then they report the location to the local police as stolen property. The range is nothing like regular cellphones, so while we were at the orchard, it probably didn’t reach any towers consistently. When we climbed that tree, it probably sent one blip to the cell tower at Valkenburg because it was in line of sight. The next nearest tower I saw was near Margraten, so I doubt our hosts were compromised because of the lack of triangulation. Our boy was Israeli, and Israeli companies have a near monopoly on the technology that runs most telephone carriers. Their software often has backdoors, too. They wouldn’t even have to pay a fee to identify what towers reported the camera’s location, but thin coverage out here made it tough on them.”

  He lay back on the bed. “However, for the price of a decent meal at any gasthaus, you can purchase a scanner that picks up the same reporting signal. All someone has to do is match the unique ID this thing transmits with the data that was imprinted in every frame of that video I gave Mr. Venkman. He was being a little subtle when he warned me about the GPS and it falling into their hands.”

  Angie gasped, putting her hand over her mouth.

  Then they both burst out laughing helplessly, and she collapsed on the bed beside him.

  The next morning Preston got out his laptop. Since he ran Linux on it, he showed Angie how to use the basic features, and then he had her watch him change the MAC address on the wifi. “We may need to do this pretty regularly. I also need to pick up a couple of different types of USB wifi adapters to switch out now and then. For the time being, we’ll be very careful and do this one thing. And maybe we can talk our sponsors into getting us a better camera.”

  Their hosts had given them an account on a service Preston had not heard about before. It amounted to a dropbox for encrypted files. It was an FTP folder; at random intervals the files stored there came and went, or were simply renamed. The time stamps were constantly changed. They were all encrypted, but what mattered was the key used. Preston wrote up a brief report of what they had experienced, encrypted with the key that their hosts had given them physically. He had struggled to memorize the long passphrase, but eventually got it. Angie had it almost immediately. All they knew about the service was that someone checked the contents of the folder frequently and would find his message. If he was expecting a message, he simply grabbed the contents of the folder, entered the passphrase into a script they gave him and it checked them all. When the script closed, it deleted all the files. This time there was nothing, so they decided to continue their exploration of the Ardennes.

  A couple of days later they were in a campground in the German-speaking part of Eupen, preparing to enter the high moors and visit the lake east of the city. Preston found he could get a clear wifi signal if he crossed the little stream and climbed part way up the wooded hillside. He and Angie sat in a small clearing just off the trail. When he checked the FTP account, this time his script spat out a decrypted message.

  No survivors. Tracking device in the car confirms your suspicions. We can get you a better camera later. For now, vacation is over. Train to Raeren; hike over the border into Roetgen for bikes. Speak English; call yourselves Daphne and Edward Forttensie. More later.

  There was an address at the bottom for a bike shop. He placed the computer in her lap. “Memorize that, Miss Perfect Memory.”

  She grinned. “I suppose you aren’t Daphne,” she suggested, patting his knee. They both chuckled.

  When she handed it back to him, he said, “Babe, are you ready to give our riding legs and
guardian angels another workout?”

  She kissed him. With a big grin, she affirmed, “I’m with you all the way, schatje.”

  Part 2 – Of Wheels and Angels

  Chapter 12

  “Belgian Rail sucks.”

  Preston gazed upward through the clear plastic roof over the bench where they sat. The light mist was collecting and dripping off the edges. Several people stood on the long platform with umbrellas and various other means of shedding the cool morning damp.

  They had come early because they had no idea of the schedule. But apparently the schedule didn’t matter that much today, because the train was late. At least by coming early they got one of the few seats on the covered benches. Yet there was little competition for them, as they shared their bench with only one older man who chuckled at Preston’s comment.

  Angie and Preston sat with their packs on the ground beside their feet. He considered himself quite fortunate their hosts had such nice camping equipment to loan them. It was all very light and easy to use, and the packs were quite comfortable.

  Angie hummed some tune Preston didn’t recognize, but it didn’t matter. She had fine voice and it was soothing to hear. He reached up from behind and stroked her neck under the braided red hair. She tilted her head back just a bit and smiled, eyes closed. Yes, it was worth it all he reminded himself for the hundredth time in – had it only been ten days? The summer was still ahead of them and it appeared his dream marriage was matched with a dream job that suited them both. Even if it all came apart, having been here for just awhile was better than he deserved.

  She leaned back and snuggled against him, but only for a few seconds as the sound and vibration in the ground signaled the approach of the train. Suffering the quirky service of the Belgian rail system was a small price to pay for things.

  It wasn’t a long ride from Eupen to Raeren, just a few kilometers. As they stepped off the train, they noticed parts of the station appeared rather dilapidated, while other parts were quite new. Preston studied the map for a minute. On the far side of the rails was a narrow strip of asphalt. Looking back up the track, he pointed to the left side of the rails. “That’s supposed to be a part of the Venn Bahn, a decommissioned cargo line now used for recreation. Nice and flat but if we took it now, that would be about three or four times the distance.”