Night's Landing by Carla Neggers

about him?
    “Stay away from me,” Betsy whispered tightly. “Stay away from my family.”
    With a spurt of energy, she jumped up, almost turning over a chair as she made her way back out to the narrow cobblestone street, then quickly disappeared past a cheese-and-bread shop. She was smartly dressed, but she wore shoes that could handle Amsterdam’s many brick and cobblestone walks and streets, reminding him that she wasn’t eighteen anymore.
    A large group of American tourists started rearranging tables, calling loudly, cheerfully, to each other about who would sit where.
    A street musician fired up his accordion and moved in, playing a cheerful tune. The tourists laughed, loving it.
    Janssen paid for his coffee and walked down the street to a small Mercedes that awaited him. The back door opened, and he slid onto the cool leather seat next to Claude Rousseau, his most experienced bodyguard.
    “She won’t say anything,” Nicholas said. “She hasn’t told anyone that we’ve met. She’s not going to now that her son’s been shot. It would only complicate the situation for everyone—her, her husband, her son. The president.”
    “Is she afraid?”
    “Terrified.”
    He sighed, his pulse quickening. Yes, terrified. And yet all beautiful Betsy Quinlan Dunnemore knew was that her old
acquaintance
from college was a convicted tax evader.
    “Did she believe you?” Rousseau asked.
    “About her son? I don’t know.” That troubled him, because he’d told her the truth. He’d had nothing to do with the shooting. “Have you heard from our man in New York? Does he have any idea what the hell’s going on there?”
    Rousseau shook his head. He was dark haired, angular, good-looking and lethal. Thrown out of the French army. A mercenary, plain and simple. “Nothing.”
    “Be prepared. You might have to go to there.”
    Claude smiled. “All of my passports are in order.”
    Janssen knew not to ask how many passports, how many identities, Rousseau—if that was his real name—had at his disposal. Even if Claude would tell him, which he wouldn’t, there was always, for Nicholas, the question of plausible deniability. Some things he was better off not knowing. His people knew it and sometimes didn’t trouble him with details.
    Could his man in New York have taken it upon himself to try to kill Rob Dunnemore?
    If so, he should have finished the job—done it right and killed both marshals. Now it could look like a botched job, which, if his friends or enemies thought he was behind it, would only make Nicholas appear weak.
    The Mercedes pulled out into Amsterdam’s tangle of impossibly narrow streets, many indistinguishable from the sidewalks and ubiquitous bike paths. Janssen settled back in his seat and shut his eyes, picturing himself bike riding in the hills of northern Virginia as a boy, picking wild strawberries on a warm spring day, driving north into Pennsylvania with his father and walking up Little Round Top as his father regaled him with details of the Battle of Gettysburg. It had all sounded so romantic. To Father, the soldiers on both sides exemplified duty, honor, integrity and courage. They were men who’d never given up.
    Nicholas imagined the federal agents hunting him were much the same. He had no illusions they’d forgotten about him. “Failure to appear” was not a good thing. If convicted of the tax charges, he faced a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison—what would taking off to Switzerland before his trial tack onto his sentence?
    Going to trial wasn’t an option.
    Prison wasn’t an option.
    But he could never go home.
    That was what he hadn’t realized, on a soul-deep level, when he’d fled.
    He did now.
    He opened his eyes, saw a Dutch couple riding bicycles with their blond toddlers in little seats on the handlebars. Everything seemed so foreign to him. He felt the familiar lump in his throat. He was, he thought, so far from home.
     
     
     

Chapter