Claimed by the Secret Agent by Lyn Stone

only.”
    “I know. I’ve been here before, but it’s been a long time. My dad was stationed in Germany, and Holland was one of our favorite vacation spots.”
    “You mentioned before that you were a military brat. That must have been interesting.” She had another piece of the Grant Tyndal puzzle. He hadn’t shared much about himself at all since they’d met, and she was curious. “It’s not fair that you know almost everything about me from my file and I know hardly anything about you.”
    “Not much to know,” he replied, “and none of it secret except what I do for a living. You already know that.”
    None of it secret, huh? Well, that was one thing they didn’t have in common, and she wasn’t inclined to share any of her own Kodak moments. The personal Q&A should end right here. He might have the facts in her file but nothing she hadn’t been willing to reveal.
    “So what do we do now?” she asked.
    “Find a place to stay, I guess, since there’s nothing else we can do for the moment. We’ll have to wait for the commissioner to return my call. He promised to get an address here for a phone number.”
    Marie resented his keeping things from her. “What phone number?”
    He sighed, pulled up on the sidewalk in front of a three-story building and parked. “He was thinking of a number he had to call. So far, that’s all I know. With any luck Onders is headed here, too, if he isn’t the one who took her.”
    “They’re with the Hofstad Group, you think?”
    “Maybe, maybe not. This…well, it feels like its motivated more by greed than a zealous political or religious act. At least where this perpetrator is concerned.”
    “Vibes again, huh?” she asked, realizing only after the words were out that she sounded condescending.
    He shot her a look of exasperation. “Look, I get that you think I’m making this up as we go, but spare me the sarcasm, will you?”
    “Sorry,” she said, ducking her head a little and wincing. “It’s just strange, that’s all. You have been on the money so far—I’ll give you that much. Maybe if you explained it more, if it can be explained, it wouldn’t seem quite so hocus-pocus.”
    He looked her straight in the eye. “I touch objects and through residual energy I collect their history, initially their most immediate history.”
    “For instance?”
    He thought for a minute, his hands still resting on the steering wheel. “Say I’m holding a very old clay pot. The energy would have, like, layers. First, I’d get the person who evaluated its age, then the archaeologist who discovered it, the ancient who used it and finally the one who created it. I’d get what they felt at the moment, general emotions or impressions. Now and then, words, if they thought in words. People don’t always. And sometimes they think in a language I don’t understand.”
    “What about the people who owned it in between?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “Only if they spent a lot of energy on it or a lot of time handling it. I have to concentrate, then stop at the level that reveals what I need. It’s taken years of experimenting and training to control it. Well, usually I control it. As I told you, my success rate is only around 80 percent.”
    “So, that sponge you found. The kidnapper had it last and invested a little time doctoring it up.”
    “Then tossed it as useless,” Grant said. “It belonged to Cynthia. He found it in her bathroom. That’s where he waited for her.”
    She still didn’t believe it, but she believed he believed. “What about touching people? They’d have a purer energy, right? Why can’t you read minds?”
    He smiled and placed a palm on the side of her face. “Right now you’re humoring me. You think I’m a pretty good guesser. The list we found was in Dutch, so Amsterdam was a fair bet. You can’t explain Gouda, but they make great cheese here so you decided to come along for the ride.”
    Marie brushed his hand away and scoffed. “I