“Serbian mercenaries? You’re harshing my groove, man. I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”

Separating Korte Prinsengracht from the Westerdok, where largely abandoned warehouses stood, was the man-made island on which the Centraal Station was built. But that was not where the giant and his friends were headed. They would be heading toward the vast maintenance buildings to the south of the station, which were sheltered from casual observation. At night, heroin addicts went there to score and shoot up; during the day, however, it was almost entirely abandoned.

“Keep going, straight!” Janson yelled, jerking to full attention.

“I thought you said Centraal Station … .”

“There’s a maintenance building to the right, five hundred yards away. Overlooking the wharves of Oosterdok. Now floor it.”

The limo powered past the parking lot of the train station and bounded down the broken pavement of the derelict yards where, years ago, the business of the wharves had been conducted. Most of the commercial harbors had relocated to North Amsterdam; what remained were phantoms of brick and concrete and corrugated steel.

A gated Cyclone fence suddenly loomed before them. Cooper stopped the car, and Janson got out. The fence was old, the links frosted with oxide. But the knob set, set into a large rectangular metal plate, was bright and shiny, obviously new.

From a distance, he heard shouts.

Frantically, Janson withdrew a small bump key from his pocket and set to work. He positioned the very end of it into the keyway and then, in a sudden, plunging movement, thrust the rest of it into the lock and twisted it in a single continuous motion. The speed of that motion was crucial: the key had to be turned before the lock’s spring pressed the top pin down.

His fingers could feel that the top pin had bounced high enough to fly beyond the shear line, that his twist had taken advantage of the split second in which the pin columns had bounced out of alignment. The gate was open.

He waved Cooper through and gestured for him to park the car about a hundred yards away, behind a rusting, abandoned train car.

Janson himself raced over to the side of a huge steel shed and, flattening himself against it, edged swiftly toward the shouts he had heard.

Finally, he could see through the dim light into the vast interior, and what he made out sickened him.

The woman from Consular Operations was roped to a cement pillar with a thick hawser, her clothes crudely torn off her.

“This shit is getting old fast,” she growled, but the fear beneath the bravado was all too evident.

Before her, the giant with the glossy, puckered scar loomed. He belted her with his hand, and her head snapped back against the concrete. He pulled out a knife and sliced off her undergarments.

“Don’t you touch me, you son of a bitch!” she yelled.