Low Flight of Angels in the Benelux Read online

  They took an unusual route and stopped a couple of times. Preston was waiting to see if she saw any more familiar faces.

  Chapter 25

  He opened the door to their apartment slowly.

  The small, thin transparent plastic chip he always placed on top of the door when they left fell exactly where it should have. Unless someone was looking for such a thing, they would never see it. They closed the door. Virtually all exterior doors in the Netherlands lock automatically. They could be opened from the inside, but only with a key from the outside. They had also installed a deadbolt, and Preston locked this, too.

  After checking the sparely furnished apartment and seeing nothing out of place, they dared to breathe a sigh of relief.

  Preston smiled and took her in his arms. “Here’s hoping it was nothing, just someone you had seen before somewhere. A strange coincidence, maybe.”

  She said nothing for awhile as she snuggled against him. Looking up at him she said, “It really bothers me why I can’t place her, because I’m normally pretty clear on such things.”

  “Yes, you are. But there is nothing we can do. Maybe I should give you some of the lessons my supervisor taught me back when I worked over at the storage site. He had a long tour in Korea and earned his first level black belt in Taekwondo.”

  She pulled back and looked up at him. “I thought you didn’t like violence.”

  “I don’t. But just because I try to avoid it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it. Had our Israeli man gotten out of that car, I might not have beaten him, but it would not have been easy for him without a weapon.”

  “That’s good to know. I’d rather rely on my running ability.”

  She pulled away and headed to the little office. “I’m going to take a look at our photos from Valkenburg first. I need to see if I can recognize her face.”

  “And I’m going to make myself remember that not even dessert in a ritzy hotel should separate us,” he said with a strained chuckle.

  Angie did manage to recognize the face of the woman they thought tried to sabotage the SUV up in Margraten, but it was not the woman at the buffet. After several hours of this, she decided her mind was too tired and strained and had lost any hope of recognizing much of anything.

  Preston had been working beside her most of the time, processing the photos they had taken that morning on their tour of Brunssum and Schinnen. He was viewing some touristy websites when she turned to face away from the computer.

  Rubbing her eyes, Angie said, “No luck. I give up.”

  He turned toward her and spun her chair around to face him. Taking both her hands, he reassured her. “There is only so much we can do. The one thing of which we can be certain is our angels were warning us not to break the rules again.”

  She smiled and nodded.

  He continued. “How about some kayaking? We can catch a train over to Maastricht, Liege, Namur and change to Dinant. There’s a place to lock the bikes there, then we ride the train up La Lesse to the launch point. It takes half the day if we start right after breakfast.”

  She was suddenly excited. “Oh, I’d love that!”

  “Good,” he said. “Let me check with our boss.”

  Angie watched with some interest as he logged into their email account. Preston posted a message about images from the day’s ride in the dropbox, then asked if there was any reason they couldn’t go kayaking in Dinant.

  They had a quiet dinner, then went back to check the email again.

  Good shots. No reason to avoid Dinant, but not now. Get ready for Roermond. Check the dropbox.

  The script spat out a PDF and then a text file. The latter was sort of a cover letter that said at the top, “Read the study first.”

  So they read it, this time in English. They weren’t surprised the topic was human trafficking, their primary mission. The study explained it as a business, which happened to be illegal. Mostly it was background on what sort of factors affected the trade. Over the past decade, they had gone from coaxing kids to travel alone or in twos and threes to some destination where they were “broken” and made compliant. This was often the same place they first worked, but someone with a good business sense was trying to make things more efficient. So they began corralling the kids close to where they were found, then confining them in large groups and moving them all at once.

  This was what they had witnessed with the bus. Holding them in the bus out in the woods near Aachen, the kids were sold off, but still had to be broken and it wasn’t easy convincing them without some force to leave with a pimp. They had tried using tents for the breaking action, but there were too many risks. So the crooks had begun reaching out to other criminal businesses, looking to find better facilities.

  The study went on at length, and when they were finished, Angie and Preston discussed how this helped to explain better what they had been doing. Major crime bosses were often spies, too. Spying had gotten expensive and the heroin and weapons trade of days past just didn’t pay enough any more, so human trafficking was a new profitable sideline.

  Finally, they went back to the cover letter. In essence, it explained that a couple major shipments of kids had come down the Rhine River on barges. Roermond was a city that had long suffered a rather high crime rate, and corruption in the city and district officials didn’t help matters. However, the barges would normally have to travel as far north as Nijmegen, then up the Maas canals (south) to Roermond. Whatever the flaws of the very left-wing government in Nijmegen, child welfare was something they pursued with ferocity. After catching a shipment of kids, the officials had made sure barges were checked pretty well. It was quite certain the kids weren’t going through there any more. Yet, they were ending up in Roermond at a large rural manor near the city where they were broken in large batches.

  Preston and Angie were supposed to see if they could figure out how the kids were moved, possibly from Düsseldorf straight west. It was a rather short drive by autobahn to Roermond. The previous use of buses was now too risky, so it had to be some other means. Closing down the breaking house would prove exceptionally tough, but if they could expose who and how they were getting there, it would starve the business for awhile.

  Preston sighed. “I doubt we can do any serious kayaking on the Maas canal.”

  Chapter 26

  They packed that evening and left before dawn the next morning.

  Their hosts at the orchard insisted on Preston and Angie take the camping equipment with them. They spoke unconvincingly of letting them return the gear later. Preston had already found a mountain bike for Angie to match the one he picked up in Margraten. Then he had the mountain bikes fitted with quick-release racks for carrying the baggage. It made them ride differently, but where they were headed it would not be an issue.

  Leaving the old city center, they rode across the tracks and wound northward to catch the main route directly into Brunssum. There, it was just a short zigzag to catch the N274 past Schinveld and over the Selfkant. While there had been a good bit of traffic in the morning rush hour, the Selfkant was nearly deserted. The bike path was wide enough for them to ride abreast.

  In the quiet, Preston said, “Your childhood sorrows are a very expensive but useful asset for me in all this. How much of your experience do you suppose overlaps what these kids are going through?”

  Angie reached over and gently grabbed Preston’s handlebars, slowing them both down. Preston applied the brakes, sensing something very important here. They stopped on the path, still straddling the loaded bikes.

  “Preston, there is something you don’t seem to understand. You still have a very strong emotional reaction to this which is distinctly American. Despite what is published, the Dutch as a whole do not consider child-adult sex a really big deal. Right now, a person above 16 can do anything they like, even make pornography. Between 12 and 16, they can give consent to sex with anybody, and only a parent could possibly complain. Most parents do not. Some of this changed after I became
adult, but this is how we do things here.”

  She looked into his eyes to see his reaction, which amounted to a single raised eyebrow. “You know kids in your country do things the same way, but there is only a social pretense that it is wrong and laws very unevenly applied. Here, the pretense is much thinner and thinning more, thanks to stuff like the Martijn Party. But I did not consent to the sex I had as a child. Had the bishop been a loving man, it would have been rather different, but he was cold to us. I seriously doubt our boss and his associates are concerned with molestation itself, but with the use of force. It’s like kidnapping and slavery. We have very powerful laws about consent, but the sex itself is another issue entirely.”

  Angie thought for a moment. “I believe the social welfare system in Eastern European countries is quite different than here. It never occurred to us orphan girls to actually run away and stay gone. Even without the sexual abuse, the nuns might be rough with us at times, but the situation as a whole saw very few children fighting the system or running away. These children we are investigating are kidnapped, threatened by people with guns and beaten, maybe starved and even drugged. Whatever spirit of resistance they have dies rather quickly, and the longer the control lasts, it dies more completely. I know from relief work that they often decide they belong to this life in just a few weeks. With drugs, it’s just a few days.”

  Preston breathed deeply. “Yeah, the whole concept of teenager seems to have been invented in America. I have to wonder what kind of market there is for child prostitutes who are drugged. Genuine pedophiles fantasize about a semi-adult relationship, a child being childish except about this one thing. They believe they can fall in love, and maybe they do. The Dutroux Affair was more like simple prostitution, with torture and snuff films being rather a grotesque extremity. But even then, it would require the kids spend at least part of their days in more or less normal circumstances, maybe leading a double life for the ones not snuffed. I read the testimony of the most vocal victim. For her, sex had to be a game even though she didn’t like being forced to play. It’s a more voluntary game for adults. Yes, Europeans are more frank and open about sex than Americans, who are socially schizophrenic. I think I get that. But these trafficked kids are all in on this; there’s no playing for them. So I rather doubt they are being used in the same market. It would almost require a psychopathic personality to use these kids.”

  Angie nodded. “Perhaps you can ask our boss sometime during this assignment. The study we read said nothing about who the customers are.”

  They resumed their journey. Once they left the Brunssum area, there were virtually no changes in elevation. Most of the interior Netherlands was flat. Except where a field had been cultivated for a long time, the soil was mostly sand. This was the primary reason for choosing mountain bikes on this trip. There were frequent patches of trees, almost invariably along roads and even minor paths. A significant amount of the forestation was pine, so the sandy soil was packed with needles. The Selfkant felt like a very wide, slight hump in the terrain. Once across it, the ground remained almost entirely flat. The bike paths and field lanes used for bicycles were everywhere, in all directions.

  For a time, the highway ran right along the border through villages like Konigsbosch and Echterbosch. Then they entered a tract of forest. Preston decided to cut across country on some of those lanes straight north to Saint Odelienberg. Aside from a friture hardly open that early, they didn’t see a single cafe or restaurant, so they stopped a short while on the north side of town and ate some of their packed food.

  When they mounted up to ride on, they caught the N293 and promptly crossed the Roer River. It was more of a wide creek, navigable only with small boats. A short time later they passed some industrial properties and ran along the eastern edge of Melick. Where the highway bent around to the northeast, Preston began watching for an exit to the left. This was a new highway that took several hard turns around established suburbs on the southern edge of Roermond. Preston said he wanted to avoid riding the extra distance, and then mentioned he wanted to see the single route into the woods they were allowed to use for the old firing range. He found the new highway had closed off their old route, so he stood looking across the terrain.

  On an impulse, he pulled out the fancy cellphone and looked at it. He had yet to try the mapping application. To his surprise, there was a text message from Gary waiting for him. It was the word “camping” followed by GPS coordinates. Preston had been planning to try several camps listed for the area, so he clicked on the coordinates in the message. The map opened and showed an address not listed in the camping guide. Instead, the map showed a very old rural manor with a moat half way around it.

  He had learned not to question Gary’s messages. Cryptic, obscure and often entirely too terse, they were never wrong. Using the map displayed, he plotted a route to the place. He decided to follow a series of lanes and brick paths provided parallel to the ring road on the eastern side of the city, the A73. Where this highway began turning back west, Preston stopped to double check the maps. They were approaching the new N280 that had been built up above the surrounding terrain and could not be crossed casually. The sides were rough and fenced, with guardrails most of the way. Eventually he decided to continue a ways north to find one of the few underpasses.

  This was followed by a fairly long run back down the other side of that highway. Eventually it turned left and struck out across the countryside, leaving the highway behind. About a half kilometer on, the lane ran under the cover of some trees, the promptly came to a T-crossing. Turning left, they were suddenly in front of the ancient manor. Preston double-checked the coordinates and they were right on top of them. The entrance was another hundred meters down the road, but they got a full view of some very well preserved property. On the right were four mailboxes, so they knew it was more than one single household.

  By sheer luck they happened on a woman walking their direction from what looked like a barn in the background. As they moved closer to her, the trees parted enough for them to see another farmhouse with at least two different entrances.

  Angie approached the woman and asked in Dutch if she knew anything about an arrangement for camping on the property. She asked their names. Upon mention of Forttensie, she smiled and explained how to head toward the back of the enclosure through a covered passage between two buildings. Pointing with her hands, Preston understood she referred to a place behind a tractor barn, on the backside of the building to their left.

  Once she was sure Angie understood, she smiled, turned and greeted Preston as “Meneer Forttensie” and walked into the largest house on their left across the small moat. They mounted their bikes and rode slowly through the stone archway where the woman indicated. To their left behind the last structure was a nice mowed grassy spot. There was a small door set in the build standing open. Preston spotted a primitive toilet inside. He stopped and took a peek in the shadowy room – a toilet and large sink typically used for washing clothes. This was better than some of the accommodations they’d seen elsewhere. Best of all, it was very private and well within riding distance of the entire city.

  With lots of bike paths and other recreational features, they would be hard to pick out in a crowd.

  Chapter 27

  They didn’t yet know where the breaking house was, and finding it wouldn’t be simple.

  Asking questions would likely cause the mission to abort and utterly fail to identify the carriers. They needed to catch the traffic bringing the kids into the area. Some part of them wasn’t too eager to know right away. It would have been too painful to think about what was going on inside and too tempting to act rashly and to no good purpose. First, they needed to survey the situation in terms of traffic flow.

  They had already seen the main highway running east of there across Germany all the way to Düsseldorf. It would have been less than hour’s drive in light traffic. This highway ran along the north side of the old RAF Brüggen, now Javelin Barracks, w
here the old Dutch guard had told Preston was some portion of the MPs and civilian administrators that had been at Schinnen. From dim memories, Preston recalled there were small NATO installations all over that part of Germany, over a dozen within a short distance either side of that corridor.

  Military traffic must be still exceedingly common in that area. He would be surprised if a significant portion of the personnel at Javelin didn’t live right here on this side of the border.

  They got their gear set up and made themselves comfortable. The initial ride out from Heerlen was only about thirty kilometers on rather flat terrain, though with a significant load. Preston always carried the lion’s share, but Angie insisted on doing her part. Once the bikes were unloaded, they removed all but the main rear racks. They would need to go shopping at a minimum, and put light saddlebags on each bike. It was time to get a first feel for this ancient city.

  But the ancient city had seen a lot of new construction. Preston noticed the standard online mapping services weren’t always up to date. As they headed west from the manor, they discovered the new north-south highway had cut off several ancient paths running east and west. They agreed this was different from what they had seen in most of Europe, where new construction accommodated existing routes, even old walking and hiking paths. Here, they were simply cut in two.

  On the other hand, once they went around north to a major route that did cross the new highway, they found a brand new and very large shopping center. Even with the longer routing, this was much closer than running all the way into the ancient city center where the other stores were.

  Still, they had wanted to do a bit of investigative sightseeing, especially some of the barge havens. They started on the northern edge of what they took to be Roermond’s sphere of influence, taking pictures rather frequently.