Look-Alike. Meredith Fletcher

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      Keeping his face forward, Joachim performed a walk-by near Satyr Dreams. Darkness filled the houseboat’s deck. His senses tingled with alertness the way they had since he was a boy and had first learned to break and enter back in Leipzig. Back then, stealing had been a way of survival. Forced entry was merely one of the skills he employed in his current vocation.

      The houseboat was spacious but looked old. The fabricated metal exterior held pockmarks from hail and other abuse. Rocking on the waves from passing vessels, Satyr Dreams slapped against the side of the canal with quiet, hollow thuds.

      He felt confident he could get inside.

      At twelve he had started breaking into the homes of affluent people on the outer edges of the old neighborhood. That had been the year his father had been killed while trying to commit an armored car robbery. The Berlin Wall had fallen only a few years previously and West Germany was still working out the details of absorbing East Germany. The difference between the two countries’ economies had been like night and day. For a time, West German business had taken advantage of the East German labor pool, paying them only slightly more than they had already been getting paid. It wasn’t a good introduction to Western ways.

      But crime had been good. Joachim’s father hadn’t been a bad man, just one who liked living easy and grew attracted to the danger of taking what he wanted. But he’d always been kind and gentle and soft-spoken. Until his father’s death, Joachim and his mother and sister hadn’t known his father had been a criminal.

      Joachim’s mother had worked, but she hadn’t been able to make enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed them after her husband’s death. Joachim had tried to find a job, but no one wanted to hire a twelve-year-old boy and pay him enough to make up the difference his mother fell short on every month. In the end, he’d become a thief.

      At first, Joachim had taken only food and small things he could trade for more food. Later, he had worked with a few partners and started stealing from corporate warehouses, targeting electronics and vehicles, moving into higher risk theft for a chance at a higher paycheck.

      One night, one of his friends had been shot while they’d stolen a car. The boy had bled to death in the seat beside Joachim. The man Joachim had sold the stolen Mercedes to had docked the price for the blood on the seats. Joachim had been forced to dump his friend’s body in an alley as if it were common trash. He hadn’t been able to speak to his friend’s mother ever again.

      Joachim knew the world wasn’t fair, and he’d quickly gotten harder to match it.

      Since the age of fifteen, Joachim had been involved in organized crime. His mother had turned a blind eye to the money he’d brought into the house, and his sister had never known what he did. By the time he’d gotten old enough to get a legitimate job, he was too entangled to get out.

      The people he did business with wouldn’t let him step out of their circle without paying a heavy price. They feared snitches.

      Joachim had started as a numbers runner for Günter Stahlmann. At eighteen, Joachim had proven he could survive on the streets, and Günter promoted him to enforcer. For the next five years, Joachim had collected from habitual criminals who owed Günter money for sports bets and had tracked down those who had stolen from Günter. Joachim had been shot and stabbed on several occasions.

      The last two years, though, he had graduated to a position of specialty assignments. The current assignment to Amsterdam came under that heading. Lately, Günter had managed a working arrangement with the mysterious woman who was currently calling the shots on the mission to capture Tuenis Meijer. Joachim didn’t know the nature of that arrangement, but he was paying careful attention.

      Getting sent after Meijer couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Joachim was close to getting away from Günter for good. During the last year, pursuant to the agreement he’d made with the German police, Joachim had been steadily betraying his employer, easing out of the shackles of crime that had bound him for all these years. It hadn’t been an easy trick to accomplish. His life was currently several layers of lies deep.

      But he desperately wanted out. Enough so to risk everything he had in the attempt.

      Joachim stepped into the dark shadows that draped the houseboat. With a lithe coil of muscles, he leaped onto the rear deck. He tried the door, because he’d learned while collecting for Günter that doors weren’t always locked.

      This one was.

      It was also armed with an alarm.

      Kneeling, Joachim pulled on a pair of thin surgical gloves and took out an electronic lock-pick kit from his pocket. Working quickly, he held a small pen-flash in his mouth for light and then cut into the alarm wiring. He bypassed the secondary alarm, then popped the plastic cover on the main alarm and connected the lock-pick’s alligator clips to the circuitry leading to the operating system. A quick tap on the electronic lock-pick device sent the digital readout scurrying to chase out the alarm code.

      Less than a minute later, the readout flashed the eight-digit code. He pressed the activation button and the lock opened with a quiet snik.

      Pocketing the electronic lock-pick, Joachim opened the door and went inside.

      The boathouse smelled like the inside of a gym locker. Joachim breathed СКАЧАТЬ